If you've ever seen someone mis-punch a number into a calculator and blithely accept the result you know why you still need to be able to multiply. Have some idea of what's a reasonable answer without just blindly accepting what comes out of a machine is a critical part of being educated.
My wife told me about how, many years ago, her son's 2nd grade teacher got upset because her son was actually doing multiplication to figure out problems. Apparently they were supposed to guess, so he was "doing it wrong". I'm hoping that educational philosophy has changed.
A lot of school can be pretty mind-numbingly boring, but the alternative of hoping that kids somehow fumble their way to knowing something useful seems like it's throwing about about 100,000 years of human progress.
There are plenty of people who would jump at a chance to take a trip to Mars, but how many of those people would crack when faced with the reality of isolation in the most barren, forbidding wasteland mankind has ever encountered?
The whole idea of sending people on a one way trip is ridiculous. Does anyone really think it would take less fuel to send enough stuff for people to live the rest of their lives on Mars than it would to simply refuel and fly back to earth?
The problem is exactly that C++ uses the word "reference" to mean "pointer". That's my "point"... C++ is a noble attempt to put an object oriented face on C, but it fails because of the underlying C nature of the language. As far as the issue with references to containers, the problem I ran into was in code written by a VERY experienced C++ developer. And it's a problem that simply wouldn't occur if C++ hadn't come up with "references" which are actually "pointers".
I'll toss out another example: operator overloading. Something that seems like a cool idea, but you have to use it VERY sparingly because we all have associations with what particular operators mean. Stroustrup's original book actually points this out in section 8.2.3 when he is talking about using << and >> for i/o operators and says "The operators < and > were tried, but the meanings 'less than' and 'greater than' were so firmly implanted in people's minds that the new I/O statements were for all practical purposes unreadable". In other words, he had to take an operator that, although known to most developers, is rarely used (assuming you aren't, say, writing encryption algorithms). The problem with operator overloading is that for most operators, the meaning IS "firmly implanted" in our minds, so aside from doing obvious extensions like defining arithmetic operators for new numeric types, it causes lots of confusion.
C++ was a valiant and interesting attempt to graft an object oriented language on top of C. Unfortunately, it replaced a few problems that C had (null pointer references, buffer overflows) with an almost infinite series of problems due to the complexity of the language. For example, the default of assignment by bit-copying objects makes it trivial to generate memory trashing problems.
Yes, it's possible to write C++ in such a way that avoids memory problems. It's also quite possible and relatively easy to write C code that avoids such problems. I should know, I programmed in C for years and almost never had problems with null pointer references or buffer overflows. Just recently I had the joy of adding one element to a vector and hitting a memory fault because some chunk of code was holding a "reference" to elements of the vector, and when the vector was reallocated, the reference became invalid. Which brings up the point that C++ doesn't have "references", it has pointers with some syntactic sugar on them. If it really had references, the references wouldn't get invalidated by underlying memory operations.
Now I'm sure C++ gurus will deride people who get caught by the default bit-copy operator, "references" to invalid memory, and the many other traps that C++ has. And it's true, if you program correctly, you won't hit these. But that's true of ANY language. If you program in assembler correctly, you won't have trouble there either. C++ just seems to be overly laden with traps and problems. Just read thru Scott Meyers Effective C++, which I found very clear and useful, and count the number of entries that are navigating around language traps if you don't believe me.
Explain to me why I should pay 15 bucks a month to play a solo game... snip... I'm all for games offering some sort of solo activity, so you can remain busy and active even when your friends aren't around or your class is currently not in demand,
You answered your own question. I played Everquest for years, and it was excruciating to solo, so you sat around for extended periods of time begging for a group. WoW gives you the option to play the way YOU want to play... in a group to taking on tougher encounters, or solo if you can't find a group, or just don't feel like being social.
One of the many strengths of WoW is that it does NOT "force" you to play any particular way. You love to explore on your own? No problem. Like to pvp? Check. Want to run thru a dungeon for an hour or two? Yep. Really want the bigger raid encounters that require a team to learn how to work together? Got that too.
And it's all done really, really, really well. Blizzard doesn't do stuff that isn't thought out completely. THAT is why they have the 12 million players. It's not like they started out with some huge advantage. They earned a huge base by doing the hard work.
Isn't that supposed to be the main argument for "Free" (as in source code available / modifiable) source? That you don't have to trust the vendor to tell you what's going on, you can see for yourself? Why is it that when MS releases something, everyone darkly talks about hidden backdoors, but when an open source vendor releases someone, people complain that the vendor wasn't completely forthcoming in the release notes?
Yeah, and then when there's a mistake and you accidently grab the staff of uberness drop that you can't use, and you want a GM to swap it to the rightful player who should have gotten it, you are SOL.
You want Blizzard to log. In fact, you want Blizzard GMs to be able to simply replay an event as it happened, so that when someone complains about something, the GM doesn't have to take anyone's word, they can see for themselves. In the real world, you can't do that. In an MMO, you could.
And please do not tell me about your "right to privacy" when you sign online to an MMO.
If you ignore a written threat and a plane goes down, do YOU want to be the one who explains the deaths to the families?
And without investigating, remind me how you knew the age of the person making the threat?
By the way, we're not talking about an 8 year old kid pressing 911 to see the shiny fire truck show up, the guy was 18. Old enough to work, old enough to join the army and kill people, certainly old enough to know better.
Emailing a letter to a newspaper is EXACTLY the same effort as typing in WoW. And who cares how much effort it is? If someone makes a specific threat against a specific airplane and the plane goes down, do YOU want to be the one who explains why you just were too lazy to check it out?
First of all, when you see chat in WoW, you have no idea how old the player is. 10? 15? 25? 55? And remember, this wasn't some "I be ubrz I'm going to kill all you elves" chatter, this was a specific threat against a specific airline flight. If this was mailed in to a newspaper as a threat, you can be damned sure the cops would investigate it, so why should online posts be held to a lower standard?
You sound like you have very low expectations, if when you do work, you're happy to get whatever you can, or even have people take your work without paying you. I wish you a lot of luck, you're going to need it. But at least you're happy, right?
The problem is, if the game is available for free, not too many people are going to pay for it. So unless the first person is willing to pay the full development cost for the game (say $40,000,000), the game doesn't get produced. (Kinda obvious, isn't it?)
Is there any more 'meaning' in it when you go to the beach with your friends than when you go kill a dragon with your friends?
When you do something in the real world, you experience far more than you do in any computer game or simulation. When you communicate in person with a friend, the experience is far more "real" than hearing a disembodied voice coming thru a speaker.
For example, you're with a friend and somebody starts ranting about Internet addiction. You might catch your friend's eye, glance over at the ranter, and roll your eyes. It happens all the time, and it is far more expressive than anything you can type or say when you are having a "virtual" experience.
I've done a fair amount of games where some form of "crafting" was part of the game. Load up components, click a button. Maybe you have to click at just the right time or in just the right pattern to "create" something. Well, recently I've been taking a pottery class, learning to hand build and throw pottery on the wheel. Getting the tactile feeling of the thickness, the moisture content, and the texture of the clay. Seeing how the parts of pottery are joined and smoothed together. The experience is infinitely richer than anything that can be had by sitting behind a screen. If you truly think that the virtual dragon kill is as "meaningful" as really hiking up a mountain, you are going out of your way to delude yourself.
This doesn't mean that games are bad or evil, they can be a fun way to pass some time. But if they are the centerpiece of your life, if your life consists of sitting at keyboard, you are experiencing a pale shadow of the real world, and I feel sorry for you.
If you read the paper on what he actually did, he was essentially doing an exploit to kill the opposing players by porting them next to guard NPCs. And the sign that it's an exploit is that he didn't get any credit for "killing" an opposing player that way, and the opposing player didn't get any penality. It basically was a hole in the gameplay that players had agreed not to exploit, and this guy decided to be a dick and go ahead and use it. It's like someone who drags NPCs out of a dungeon to a zone line and uses them to kill incoming players. The game may not forbid it, but it's the action of an asshole, and of course it pisses people off.
The executive summary of his paper is "people don't like assholes".
Given that the vendors of textbooks are completely dependent on schools to require specific textbooks, the schools absolutely can "force" a product to exist. Whatever requirements they put on textbooks in order to use them, those are the requirements that publishers will meet. They're already forcing a sort of product to exist as it is.
Except if the requirements are such that no vendor can afford to meet them... for example, if the requirement is that the vendor provide a free, open source product. You may get volunteers to create such a product, but companies generally can't, unless there's some way for them to make money in some other way. Or to put it another way, you can say that you want a Ferrari for free, but no one is obligated to provide it to you.
I would call you someone who doesn't have any empathy. You apparently can't conceive that someone might want to "play" in way that is different from the way you like to play. Some people like to play full out and backcountry ski down mountains, risking their lives every second. Others want to relax with a bit of solitaire or bejeweled. The level of challenge that you want in your "play" is by definition something personal. I've "played" by running marathons, so I know something about challenging myself, but I don't consider you to be apathetic if you haven't run a marathon.
Winning by cheating just isn't the same as winning 'for real'.
True, but sometimes it's necessary to bypass some ridiculously hard part of a game. For example, in one WWII game (Medal of Honor?) I was stuck at this one point where I was in a town with a sniper. I tried everything I could to get the guy and he just kept nailing me. After hours of game time spread over a few weeks of realtime, I finally activated a god mode code and went outside and looked for him where a walkthru said he would be. Even with all that, he was hard to see. Once I nailed him, I switched off the cheat and enjoyed the rest of the game. If I hadn't done that, I would have simply given up.
I recently have had an experienece in a game where I was really frustrated by the final battle. I looked it up and it turned out I simply wasn't strafing around that much, I was trying to use cover, which didn't work. That was cheating too, to get the strategy, but it's the same thing... I gave it a good try of many, many attempts and finally gave in and looked up a cheat.
Ultimately, looking up a strategy or using a code isn't as satisfying as doing it on your own, but sometimes you just want to move on and see the rest of the game.
That paragraph scares me, because you suggest that there are workplaces where you're *not* supposed to look at anyone else's code. That would be a really stupid system.
It is scary, because there are some programmers who are so "brilliant" that they don't want anyone examining / modifying their "perfect" code. Fortunately the company I worked for tended to weed out such geniuses.
I'm basing the term "weak code ownership" on article I read a few years back where the author outlined a couple of models, stretching from strong code ownership ("it's my code, no one else touch it") down to group code ownership ("we all own the code"). I personally have found the weak code ownership model the most productive and satisfying... you always have someone who is ultimately responsible for the state of the code, but you also have multiple developers modifying / examining code as necessary.
I don't disagree at all. But my experience is that pretty much everything depends on the attitude of the overall organization. I worked at a company where we developed individually, with some consulting back and forth. We'd pull people in to try to diagnose problems, but generally not what you would call pair programming or code reviews. The product was solid... not 100% bug free, but certainly a quality product that was enhanced over many years. That was the result of an organizational attitude that we were going to ship a quality product.
Eventually we got bought out by a "we are hot java programmers, unit testing rah rah rah" company, and they shipped utter crap. They always had the attitude that "hey it has to ship, we'll just stay up late and jam all nite and ship the disk, and by the time they load the disk, we'll have a fix version". I was actually on a call where people were laughing about how the contract said we had to ship a disk by a particular date, but didn't say it had to work. No technique on the planet could have saved their product.
Slashdot Mirror
If you've ever seen someone mis-punch a number into a calculator and blithely accept the result you know why you still need to be able to multiply. Have some idea of what's a reasonable answer without just blindly accepting what comes out of a machine is a critical part of being educated.
My wife told me about how, many years ago, her son's 2nd grade teacher got upset because her son was actually doing multiplication to figure out problems. Apparently they were supposed to guess, so he was "doing it wrong". I'm hoping that educational philosophy has changed.
A lot of school can be pretty mind-numbingly boring, but the alternative of hoping that kids somehow fumble their way to knowing something useful seems like it's throwing about about 100,000 years of human progress.
There are plenty of people who would jump at a chance to take a trip to Mars, but how many of those people would crack when faced with the reality of isolation in the most barren, forbidding wasteland mankind has ever encountered?
The whole idea of sending people on a one way trip is ridiculous. Does anyone really think it would take less fuel to send enough stuff for people to live the rest of their lives on Mars than it would to simply refuel and fly back to earth?
You're not supposed to inject reality into the "omg killer asteroids are coming" discussion.
The problem is exactly that C++ uses the word "reference" to mean "pointer". That's my "point"... C++ is a noble attempt to put an object oriented face on C, but it fails because of the underlying C nature of the language. As far as the issue with references to containers, the problem I ran into was in code written by a VERY experienced C++ developer. And it's a problem that simply wouldn't occur if C++ hadn't come up with "references" which are actually "pointers".
I'll toss out another example: operator overloading. Something that seems like a cool idea, but you have to use it VERY sparingly because we all have associations with what particular operators mean. Stroustrup's original book actually points this out in section 8.2.3 when he is talking about using << and >> for i/o operators and says "The operators < and > were tried, but the meanings 'less than' and 'greater than' were so firmly implanted in people's minds that the new I/O statements were for all practical purposes unreadable". In other words, he had to take an operator that, although known to most developers, is rarely used (assuming you aren't, say, writing encryption algorithms). The problem with operator overloading is that for most operators, the meaning IS "firmly implanted" in our minds, so aside from doing obvious extensions like defining arithmetic operators for new numeric types, it causes lots of confusion.
C++ was a valiant and interesting attempt to graft an object oriented language on top of C. Unfortunately, it replaced a few problems that C had (null pointer references, buffer overflows) with an almost infinite series of problems due to the complexity of the language. For example, the default of assignment by bit-copying objects makes it trivial to generate memory trashing problems.
Yes, it's possible to write C++ in such a way that avoids memory problems. It's also quite possible and relatively easy to write C code that avoids such problems. I should know, I programmed in C for years and almost never had problems with null pointer references or buffer overflows. Just recently I had the joy of adding one element to a vector and hitting a memory fault because some chunk of code was holding a "reference" to elements of the vector, and when the vector was reallocated, the reference became invalid. Which brings up the point that C++ doesn't have "references", it has pointers with some syntactic sugar on them. If it really had references, the references wouldn't get invalidated by underlying memory operations.
Now I'm sure C++ gurus will deride people who get caught by the default bit-copy operator, "references" to invalid memory, and the many other traps that C++ has. And it's true, if you program correctly, you won't hit these. But that's true of ANY language. If you program in assembler correctly, you won't have trouble there either. C++ just seems to be overly laden with traps and problems. Just read thru Scott Meyers Effective C++, which I found very clear and useful, and count the number of entries that are navigating around language traps if you don't believe me.
Explain to me why I should pay 15 bucks a month to play a solo game... snip... I'm all for games offering some sort of solo activity, so you can remain busy and active even when your friends aren't around or your class is currently not in demand,
You answered your own question. I played Everquest for years, and it was excruciating to solo, so you sat around for extended periods of time begging for a group. WoW gives you the option to play the way YOU want to play... in a group to taking on tougher encounters, or solo if you can't find a group, or just don't feel like being social.
One of the many strengths of WoW is that it does NOT "force" you to play any particular way. You love to explore on your own? No problem. Like to pvp? Check. Want to run thru a dungeon for an hour or two? Yep. Really want the bigger raid encounters that require a team to learn how to work together? Got that too.
And it's all done really, really, really well. Blizzard doesn't do stuff that isn't thought out completely. THAT is why they have the 12 million players. It's not like they started out with some huge advantage. They earned a huge base by doing the hard work.
Well, yeah... but that contradicts the whole "it's open source, you don't need to trust the vendor" argument.
Isn't that supposed to be the main argument for "Free" (as in source code available / modifiable) source? That you don't have to trust the vendor to tell you what's going on, you can see for yourself? Why is it that when MS releases something, everyone darkly talks about hidden backdoors, but when an open source vendor releases someone, people complain that the vendor wasn't completely forthcoming in the release notes?
Pete Rose needs to understand that ever since gamblers fixed the World Series gamblers have been persona non grata in baseball.
Fixed that for you
There'll probably be a lawsuit for this sort of discrimination one day
Really? There's going to be a lawsuit for not localizing games? Somehow, I don't think so. Or yeah, there could be, but it's not going to go anywhere.
For Christ Sake, its a firkkin game!
EXACTLY my point! How the hell can you be complaining that someone actually read your chat that you broadcast in a game?
Oh, wait, you don't work do you... You play a game in your parents basement.
heh... bet I've been in the workforce longer than you've been alive
Yeah, and then when there's a mistake and you accidently grab the staff of uberness drop that you can't use, and you want a GM to swap it to the rightful player who should have gotten it, you are SOL.
You want Blizzard to log. In fact, you want Blizzard GMs to be able to simply replay an event as it happened, so that when someone complains about something, the GM doesn't have to take anyone's word, they can see for themselves. In the real world, you can't do that. In an MMO, you could.
And please do not tell me about your "right to privacy" when you sign online to an MMO.
If you ignore a written threat and a plane goes down, do YOU want to be the one who explains the deaths to the families?
And without investigating, remind me how you knew the age of the person making the threat?
By the way, we're not talking about an 8 year old kid pressing 911 to see the shiny fire truck show up, the guy was 18. Old enough to work, old enough to join the army and kill people, certainly old enough to know better.
Emailing a letter to a newspaper is EXACTLY the same effort as typing in WoW. And who cares how much effort it is? If someone makes a specific threat against a specific airplane and the plane goes down, do YOU want to be the one who explains why you just were too lazy to check it out?
First of all, when you see chat in WoW, you have no idea how old the player is. 10? 15? 25? 55? And remember, this wasn't some "I be ubrz I'm going to kill all you elves" chatter, this was a specific threat against a specific airline flight. If this was mailed in to a newspaper as a threat, you can be damned sure the cops would investigate it, so why should online posts be held to a lower standard?
You sound like you have very low expectations, if when you do work, you're happy to get whatever you can, or even have people take your work without paying you. I wish you a lot of luck, you're going to need it. But at least you're happy, right?
The problem is, if the game is available for free, not too many people are going to pay for it. So unless the first person is willing to pay the full development cost for the game (say $40,000,000), the game doesn't get produced. (Kinda obvious, isn't it?)
Is there any more 'meaning' in it when you go to the beach with your friends than when you go kill a dragon with your friends?
When you do something in the real world, you experience far more than you do in any computer game or simulation. When you communicate in person with a friend, the experience is far more "real" than hearing a disembodied voice coming thru a speaker.
For example, you're with a friend and somebody starts ranting about Internet addiction. You might catch your friend's eye, glance over at the ranter, and roll your eyes. It happens all the time, and it is far more expressive than anything you can type or say when you are having a "virtual" experience.
I've done a fair amount of games where some form of "crafting" was part of the game. Load up components, click a button. Maybe you have to click at just the right time or in just the right pattern to "create" something. Well, recently I've been taking a pottery class, learning to hand build and throw pottery on the wheel. Getting the tactile feeling of the thickness, the moisture content, and the texture of the clay. Seeing how the parts of pottery are joined and smoothed together. The experience is infinitely richer than anything that can be had by sitting behind a screen. If you truly think that the virtual dragon kill is as "meaningful" as really hiking up a mountain, you are going out of your way to delude yourself.
This doesn't mean that games are bad or evil, they can be a fun way to pass some time. But if they are the centerpiece of your life, if your life consists of sitting at keyboard, you are experiencing a pale shadow of the real world, and I feel sorry for you.
If you read the paper on what he actually did, he was essentially doing an exploit to kill the opposing players by porting them next to guard NPCs. And the sign that it's an exploit is that he didn't get any credit for "killing" an opposing player that way, and the opposing player didn't get any penality. It basically was a hole in the gameplay that players had agreed not to exploit, and this guy decided to be a dick and go ahead and use it. It's like someone who drags NPCs out of a dungeon to a zone line and uses them to kill incoming players. The game may not forbid it, but it's the action of an asshole, and of course it pisses people off.
The executive summary of his paper is "people don't like assholes".
Given that the vendors of textbooks are completely dependent on schools to require specific textbooks, the schools absolutely can "force" a product to exist. Whatever requirements they put on textbooks in order to use them, those are the requirements that publishers will meet. They're already forcing a sort of product to exist as it is.
Except if the requirements are such that no vendor can afford to meet them... for example, if the requirement is that the vendor provide a free, open source product. You may get volunteers to create such a product, but companies generally can't, unless there's some way for them to make money in some other way. Or to put it another way, you can say that you want a Ferrari for free, but no one is obligated to provide it to you.
Yeah, we would have been much, much better off having a(nother) civil war rather than using the rule of law to decide who got to be president next.
I would call you someone who doesn't have any empathy. You apparently can't conceive that someone might want to "play" in way that is different from the way you like to play. Some people like to play full out and backcountry ski down mountains, risking their lives every second. Others want to relax with a bit of solitaire or bejeweled. The level of challenge that you want in your "play" is by definition something personal. I've "played" by running marathons, so I know something about challenging myself, but I don't consider you to be apathetic if you haven't run a marathon.
Winning by cheating just isn't the same as winning 'for real'.
True, but sometimes it's necessary to bypass some ridiculously hard part of a game. For example, in one WWII game (Medal of Honor?) I was stuck at this one point where I was in a town with a sniper. I tried everything I could to get the guy and he just kept nailing me. After hours of game time spread over a few weeks of realtime, I finally activated a god mode code and went outside and looked for him where a walkthru said he would be. Even with all that, he was hard to see. Once I nailed him, I switched off the cheat and enjoyed the rest of the game. If I hadn't done that, I would have simply given up.
I recently have had an experienece in a game where I was really frustrated by the final battle. I looked it up and it turned out I simply wasn't strafing around that much, I was trying to use cover, which didn't work. That was cheating too, to get the strategy, but it's the same thing... I gave it a good try of many, many attempts and finally gave in and looked up a cheat.
Ultimately, looking up a strategy or using a code isn't as satisfying as doing it on your own, but sometimes you just want to move on and see the rest of the game.
That paragraph scares me, because you suggest that there are workplaces where you're *not* supposed to look at anyone else's code. That would be a really stupid system.
It is scary, because there are some programmers who are so "brilliant" that they don't want anyone examining / modifying their "perfect" code. Fortunately the company I worked for tended to weed out such geniuses.
I'm basing the term "weak code ownership" on article I read a few years back where the author outlined a couple of models, stretching from strong code ownership ("it's my code, no one else touch it") down to group code ownership ("we all own the code"). I personally have found the weak code ownership model the most productive and satisfying... you always have someone who is ultimately responsible for the state of the code, but you also have multiple developers modifying / examining code as necessary.
I don't disagree at all. But my experience is that pretty much everything depends on the attitude of the overall organization. I worked at a company where we developed individually, with some consulting back and forth. We'd pull people in to try to diagnose problems, but generally not what you would call pair programming or code reviews. The product was solid... not 100% bug free, but certainly a quality product that was enhanced over many years. That was the result of an organizational attitude that we were going to ship a quality product.
Eventually we got bought out by a "we are hot java programmers, unit testing rah rah rah" company, and they shipped utter crap. They always had the attitude that "hey it has to ship, we'll just stay up late and jam all nite and ship the disk, and by the time they load the disk, we'll have a fix version". I was actually on a call where people were laughing about how the contract said we had to ship a disk by a particular date, but didn't say it had to work. No technique on the planet could have saved their product.