I hope the memorial succeeds. I believe Gary Gygas deserves one. I also believe Dave Arneson should get one. It is often glossed over that Dave Arneson was the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons. I have read different postings concerning the origins of Dungeons & Dragons, and many of them point to the main idea of it was created by Dave Arneson, and Gary came along and said that it could be made into a product. Then Garry spent a long time categorizing the rules and expanding them. What a great game it was!
(quote) Personally I find it just as distasteful to make insincere public expressions of sorrow over something that actually doesn't affect you at all because "it's what you're supposed to do" (/quote)
Perhaps a lot of people are merely working off pre-programmed social norms, like saying "how are you doing?", but speaking only for myself here; as I have grown older and experienced some tragic moments, I genuinely have empathy for others, who have to go through some of the obstacles and misfortunes of life. I also suspect that there are a lot of other human beings who think this way as well.
I probably should have put... there are probably other theories out there besides those two. And its always important to keep an open mind to other possibilities.
Personally, I tend to favour the water interacting with olivine (serpentization). The two main plumes of methane occur at points in Mars where there are cracks to the interior, and/or have a lot of exposed olivine. Of course, I am not a scientist, so I don't even give my own opinion much weight on the matter. Its possible that the presence of olivine and water is the ingredients that life needs to hang on in the harsh martian environment. It is interesting either way.
"So two theories remain: either the gas is created as a by-product of reactions between volcanic rock and water, or it is a by-product of a lifeform's metabolism."
Or C: There is some, as of yet, unidentified method of methane production.
I got into a discussion last week with an old friend about how World of Warcraft replaced Dungeons and Dragons for him. I, being a curmudgeon, pointed out that MMO's seem wholly lacking in placing the player as the sole hero of the world. And the mechanics of the game, just lead to number crunching, and acquiring loot. Even in those instances where World of Warcraft tries to thrust you into a story mode of defeating some world destroying foe, it is diminished by the fact you can do it over and over again. And millions of other people can do the same heroic world saving. Computers still have a long way to go in making up a story. Bree Yark!
I remember all of the C programming college courses in my area all used Turbo C as the preferred IDE.
I remember that many folks claimed Microsoft sabotaged Borland's product by integrating their Visual Studio with windows in ways that Borland just could not do. This was years before the Netscape lawsuit! I even seem to recall reading that Microsoft was accused of preying on Borland's staff and hiring them away. Perhaps someone with more knowledge than I can provide some more information on those bygone days.
I just want to reinforce Wee's original statement. I am not sure that he was misinformed. When RedHat changed their direction from having a RedHat 9.0 product, to Fedora for the desktop, and RHEL for the server, it left administrators wondering what should they do for a migration path from RedHat 7,8,9 to the new products.
RedHat pushed their RHEL as a paid service. Administrators were left with the impression of "now" they would have to pay $500 a year or so to get updates for the server product. Or to use the less well test Fedora.
CentOS was a risky move. How were we to know what kind of quality CentOS would have? Hell, I did not even hear about CentOS around that time. I recall doing quite a bit of research "at that time" trying to figure out what is the best, most reliable migration path. And my conclusions were that other distributions, that had been around for quite some time, with a proven record, were a better option.
>> I would be curious to hear if this expansion will cause any players that have left to actually rejoin.
Yeah. Because, hopefully, all the old friends I use to hang out with, or at least some of them, will re sign up as well. The fun in the game for me was tackling new challenges with friends.
Now, granted, the game is really geared towards leveling up and acquired virtual items so that you are better than someone else. Eventually, people get bored when they approach a certain level. I imagine though, that the expansion will draw in some of those people as well. There will be new points to gain, new digital icons to acquire.
They had well entrenched websites already that did a lot of what they initially offered.
www.enworld.org though simple, has a plethora of reviews, forums, news, chat
www.paizo.com was able to get interest because they carried more than just wizards of the coasts products.
It's a tough market I would think. People that want to socialize in an alternate setting probably use something like second life. People that want to mindlessly kill stuff and gather equipment and power game probably play warcraft.
Preliminary results showed the soil had a pH between 8 and 9, researchers said. A pH less than 7 means the solution is acidic, while a pH over 7 means it is salty. Phoenix also detected the presence of magnesium, sodium, potassium and chloride in the mixture.
"It's typical of the soil here on Earth minus the organics," Kounaves said during a teleconference from Tucson, Ariz....
The heating experiment, which was designed to look for organics, did not yield conclusive evidence of carbon. Scientists planned to study another soil sample taken from further below the surface.
The Fermi paradox is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations.
Also, from what I have read about the net, you can not copyright rules. With that in mind, some bright fellows have put all the old school rules into a pdf and called is OSRIC. http://www.knights-n-knaves.com/osric/
One of the key points mentioned in this article is when does the hitting game streak occur? They mention that it was much more likely to occur during the early 1900's which is known as the deadball era. The baseball wasn't as springy and they tended to use the same ball during the entire game. During that time it was more efficient to try and knock the ball between the holes in the fielders and get a double or single then to try and hit it out of the park.
I think it would be more impressive to take a subset of the data, and compare from 1930 up until the present. Of course, there have been other major changes to; glove sizes, introduction of the slider for a pitch, steroid use.
Many moons ago, I spent some time trying to write up some tools to generate characters in dungeons and dragons, to generate realistic sounding names. Shameless plug http://www.kirith.com/
I really thought back then that the online community would kind of take over. Have something like a wiki setup for role playing rules.
This actually is a result of a self fulfilling prophecy of sorts. No one, to my knowledge, has ever demonstrated that OO was inherently more understandable than other methodologies. But I do not dispute your point in the context of the other points you bring up, for in a sense, it is true.
The reason...
It appears to me that colleges all bought into OO. And so they churned out a vast number of graduates who all spoke the OO language. And so if you hire people, you are more likely to find someone who does things in OO. Or the majority of books published (like the one in the review) concentrate on OO.
My personal opinion (not to be construed as an attack against your post) is that OO on a basic level is more difficult to understand than a procedural equivalent. I base this on anecdotal evidence of all the programming teams I have worked on over the years. (~20 other coworkers over 10 years) and having to explain the nuances of various systems in OO.
How can you be sure? The entire debate is somewhat nebulous. What does the core of D&D mean in a strict sense? Can you read the mind of the developers?
I recall reading and playing the 1st edition rules, and my recollection of those times is that there were predefined archetypes. But, this is just my opinion, and not a scientifically proven rebuttal to your statement.
I have been a long time player. But it is rare me and the old crew will get together and play. And when we do end up getting together, it is usually a one off thing where we only play the same characters for a short time. I always felt the core books did not really address casual gamers in a way that would enhance the fun factor.
The issue as I see it, relates to choices. I noticed that people like to play mages because there is a perception that magic can do neat an interesting things, and a beginning player can spend time thinking about various choices of spells they can get. Whereas, the other classes seem to be more focused on just increasing a stat such as to hit something, or do more damage in a particular situation.
Well, one of the benefits of role playing is adjusting the rules to suit a particular style. I just wish they incorporated more interesting choices for low levels, or even an optional playing style.
From the few comments and reviews I have read, it appears that they are spending more time incorporating ideas from MMORPG, such as having tanks that draw aggro, and talent points to customize each class. It will be interesting to see how these work to give a player more choices in making a character. I have my doubts. It is not as though MMORPG are a great bastion of role playing. Seems most people just want points, powers, and trinkets.
I want to first state that I value your comment on this board. It is well thought out and provides constructive, informative links. But I do dispute the overall message that PHP manages to do less with more.
I just want to comment on one of the articles you have linked, Experiences of using PHP in Large Websites: "Oversimplification and pandering to less experienced developers hurts the language as a whole."
I do not find any of its examples convincing. Most of the examples are just decisions, PHP could have done it like PERL, or they could have done it like JAVA, or hey... they could do it like PHP does.
For example, quoting from the article about global variables...
The rationale for designing the language in this way was that it would prevent inadvertent changing of global variables. This strikes me as an extremely good example of how designing the language for surface simplicity in fact leads to a great deal of underlying complexity.
This just goes on about something he doesn't like. The reason, it is too complex? Even though it attempts to address a valid issue of inadvertently changing a global variable? PHP can't win!
The list of gotchas that are in the article are just so amazingly simple to understand that only a "noob" programmer would fall into the mistakes.
I would like to posit my own theory about the general complaints levied at PHP. I believe there is a trait that is inherent in programmers where they believe they are brilliant, where they believe they can figure anything out, and that they are superior to most people because they can figure things out. (figure out very difficult to understand things). PHP encroaches upon their holy domain due to its popularity, so they retreat back to their more obscure, more elite language, with its syntactical purity.
I am not writing this with any idea of authority on the subject. Just my thoughts.
From what I have read, the act of measuring a quantum state is when the state of it actually collapses to one of many values, and (in the case of entangled particles) that information travels (per se) to the other particle.
The reason this experiment might work, but yet will not cause causality problems, is the fact that you don't know what the state is until you observe it.
So... an experiment is setup and two beams (that were entangled) are sent out down fiber. The second beam is put through a much longer route.
How do you get results from the shorter beam? If you measure the results of the shorter beam, you have collapsed the many possible values to one, and that information is traversed over to the longer beam into the futre.
If you measure the results of the longer beam, you have already missed your opportunity to measure the results of the shorter beam.
I believe they had a criteria of "How does it hold up to today's games"
One thing I notice about best lists is how there are many younger people now that have not played older games, so ever generation has their memories of what was best. Probably there are older folks who still place Zork as one of the greatest games of all time. Ultima was ground breaking in its day, and so on...
Slashdot Mirror
I hope the memorial succeeds. I believe Gary Gygas deserves one. I also believe Dave Arneson should get one. It is often glossed over that Dave Arneson was the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons. I have read different postings concerning the origins of Dungeons & Dragons, and many of them point to the main idea of it was created by Dave Arneson, and Gary came along and said that it could be made into a product. Then Garry spent a long time categorizing the rules and expanding them. What a great game it was!
(quote) Personally I find it just as distasteful to make insincere public expressions of sorrow over something that actually doesn't affect you at all because "it's what you're supposed to do" (/quote)
Perhaps a lot of people are merely working off pre-programmed social norms, like saying "how are you doing?", but speaking only for myself here; as I have grown older and experienced some tragic moments, I genuinely have empathy for others, who have to go through some of the obstacles and misfortunes of life. I also suspect that there are a lot of other human beings who think this way as well.
I probably should have put...
there are probably other theories out there besides those two. And its always important to keep an open mind to other possibilities.
Personally, I tend to favour the water interacting with olivine (serpentization). The two main plumes of methane occur at points in Mars where there are cracks to the interior, and/or have a lot of exposed olivine. Of course, I am not a scientist, so I don't even give my own opinion much weight on the matter. Its possible that the presence of olivine and water is the ingredients that life needs to hang on in the harsh martian environment. It is interesting either way.
One plume is at Elysium Planitia
One plume is at Memnonia
A similar (vaguely) plume on earth is at Petroleum Seep
"So two theories remain: either the gas is created as a by-product of reactions between volcanic rock and water, or it is a by-product of a lifeform's metabolism."
Or C: There is some, as of yet, unidentified method of methane production.
I got into a discussion last week with an old friend about how World of Warcraft replaced Dungeons and Dragons for him. I, being a curmudgeon, pointed out that MMO's seem wholly lacking in placing the player as the sole hero of the world. And the mechanics of the game, just lead to number crunching, and acquiring loot. Even in those instances where World of Warcraft tries to thrust you into a story mode of defeating some world destroying foe, it is diminished by the fact you can do it over and over again. And millions of other people can do the same heroic world saving. Computers still have a long way to go in making up a story. Bree Yark!
Let us not forget that Borland had a pretty dominate position in the programming C/C++ IDE market way
back in the early 90s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_C%2B%2B
I remember all of the C programming college courses in my area all used Turbo C as the preferred IDE.
I remember that many folks claimed Microsoft sabotaged Borland's product by integrating their Visual Studio with windows in ways that Borland just could not do. This was years before the Netscape lawsuit! I even seem to recall reading that Microsoft was accused of preying on Borland's staff and hiring them away. Perhaps someone with more knowledge than I can provide some more information on those bygone days.
I just want to reinforce Wee's original statement. I am not sure that he was misinformed. When RedHat changed their direction from having a RedHat 9.0 product, to Fedora for the desktop, and RHEL for the server, it left administrators wondering what should they do for a migration path from RedHat 7,8,9 to the new products.
RedHat pushed their RHEL as a paid service. Administrators were left with the impression of "now" they would have to pay $500 a year or so to get updates for the server product. Or to use the less well test Fedora.
CentOS was a risky move. How were we to know what kind of quality CentOS would have? Hell, I did not even hear about CentOS around that time. I recall doing quite a bit of research "at that time" trying to figure out what is the best, most reliable migration path. And my conclusions were that other distributions, that had been around for quite some time, with a proven record, were a better option.
Do not despair. It is not very glamorous.
>> I would be curious to hear if this expansion will cause any players that have left to actually rejoin.
Yeah. Because, hopefully, all the old friends I use to hang out with, or at least some of them, will re sign up as well. The fun in the game for me was tackling new challenges with friends.
Now, granted, the game is really geared towards leveling up and acquired virtual items so that you are better than someone else. Eventually, people get bored when they approach a certain level. I imagine though, that the expansion will draw in some of those people as well. There will be new points to gain, new digital icons to acquire.
They had well entrenched websites already that did a lot of what they initially offered.
www.enworld.org though simple, has a plethora of reviews, forums, news, chat
www.paizo.com was able to get interest because they carried more than just wizards of the coasts products.
It's a tough market I would think. People that want to socialize in an alternate setting probably use something like second life. People that want to mindlessly kill stuff and gather equipment and power game probably play warcraft.
>> It's just that no one has come up with a better language. If no one comes up with a better language, why reinvent the wheel?
The best language does not always gain mindshare.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5j1hvRUNc9W-3lupLU6TLQtR0gdRAD91I04D01
Some quotes...
Preliminary results showed the soil had a pH between 8 and 9, researchers said. A pH less than 7 means the solution is acidic, while a pH over 7 means it is salty. Phoenix also detected the presence of magnesium, sodium, potassium and chloride in the mixture.
"It's typical of the soil here on Earth minus the organics," Kounaves said during a teleconference from Tucson, Ariz. ...
The heating experiment, which was designed to look for organics, did not yield conclusive evidence of carbon. Scientists planned to study another soil sample taken from further below the surface.
Same exact text, but with a picture, from physorg.
http://www.physorg.com/news131712233.html
In a way, he is just restating the Fermi Paradox
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
The Fermi paradox is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations.
Role-playing games seem to be ripe for having all the rules and settings put up in a wiki, under a truly open content license.
Here is a resource for various projects
http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Major_Projects
http://www.kirith.com/shapeshifter/Main_Page
Also, from what I have read about the net, you can not copyright rules. With that in mind, some bright fellows have put all the old school rules into a pdf and called is OSRIC.
http://www.knights-n-knaves.com/osric/
Or.. maybe you just did a search on popular PHP books on amazon, then provided a link using your reseller ID, in hopes of making a quick buck.
One of the key points mentioned in this article is when does the hitting game streak occur? They mention that it was much more likely to occur during the early 1900's which is known as the deadball era. The baseball wasn't as springy and they tended to use the same ball during the entire game. During that time it was more efficient to try and knock the ball between the holes in the fielders and get a double or single then to try and hit it out of the park.
I think it would be more impressive to take a subset of the data, and compare from 1930 up until the present. Of course, there have been other major changes to; glove sizes, introduction of the slider for a pitch, steroid use.
Many moons ago, I spent some time trying to write up some tools to generate characters in dungeons and dragons, to generate realistic sounding names. Shameless plug http://www.kirith.com/
I really thought back then that the online community would kind of take over. Have something like a wiki setup for role playing rules.
You mean like mysqli_stmt_prepare ?
http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.mysqli-stmt-prepare.php
Looks pretty much like PERL's version
http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-3513_11-6139247.html
I just want to comment on
2) understandability
This actually is a result of a self fulfilling prophecy of sorts. No one, to my knowledge, has ever demonstrated that OO was inherently more understandable than other methodologies. But I do not dispute your point in the context of the other points you bring up, for in a sense, it is true.
The reason...
It appears to me that colleges all bought into OO. And so they churned out a vast number of graduates who all spoke the OO language. And so if you hire people, you are more likely to find someone who does things in OO. Or the majority of books published (like the one in the review) concentrate on OO.
My personal opinion (not to be construed as an attack against your post) is that OO on a basic level is more difficult to understand than a procedural equivalent. I base this on anecdotal evidence of all the programming teams I have worked on over the years. (~20 other coworkers over 10 years) and having to explain the nuances of various systems in OO.
How can you be sure?
The entire debate is somewhat nebulous. What does the core of D&D mean in a strict sense? Can you read the mind of the developers?
I recall reading and playing the 1st edition rules, and my recollection of those times is that there were predefined archetypes. But, this is just my opinion, and not a scientifically proven rebuttal to your statement.
I have been a long time player. But it is rare me and the old crew will get together and play. And when we do end up getting together, it is usually a one off thing where we only play the same characters for a short time. I always felt the core books did not really address casual gamers in a way that would enhance the fun factor.
The issue as I see it, relates to choices. I noticed that people like to play mages because there is a perception that magic can do neat an interesting things, and a beginning player can spend time thinking about various choices of spells they can get. Whereas, the other classes seem to be more focused on just increasing a stat such as to hit something, or do more damage in a particular situation.
Well, one of the benefits of role playing is adjusting the rules to suit a particular style. I just wish they incorporated more interesting choices for low levels, or even an optional playing style.
From the few comments and reviews I have read, it appears that they are spending more time incorporating ideas from MMORPG, such as having tanks that draw aggro, and talent points to customize each class. It will be interesting to see how these work to give a player more choices in making a character. I have my doubts. It is not as though MMORPG are a great bastion of role playing. Seems most people just want points, powers, and trinkets.
I want to first state that I value your comment on this board. It is well thought out and provides constructive, informative links. But I do dispute the overall message that PHP manages to do less with more.
I just want to comment on one of the articles you have linked, Experiences of using PHP in Large Websites:
"Oversimplification and pandering to less experienced developers hurts the language as a whole."
I do not find any of its examples convincing. Most of the examples are just decisions, PHP could have done it like PERL, or they could have done it like JAVA, or hey... they could do it like PHP does.
For example, quoting from the article about global variables...
The rationale for designing the language in this way was that it would prevent inadvertent changing of global variables. This strikes me as an extremely good example of how designing the language for surface simplicity in fact leads to a great deal of underlying complexity.
This just goes on about something he doesn't like. The reason, it is too complex? Even though it attempts to address a valid issue of inadvertently changing a global variable? PHP can't win!
The list of gotchas that are in the article are just so amazingly simple to understand that only a "noob" programmer would fall into the mistakes.
I would like to posit my own theory about the general complaints levied at PHP. I believe there is a trait that is inherent in programmers where they believe they are brilliant, where they believe they can figure anything out, and that they are superior to most people because they can figure things out. (figure out very difficult to understand things). PHP encroaches upon their holy domain due to its popularity, so they retreat back to their more obscure, more elite language, with its syntactical purity.
In the end, it is all subjective.
I am not writing this with any idea of authority on the subject. Just my thoughts.
From what I have read, the act of measuring a quantum state is when the state of it actually collapses to one of many values, and (in the case of entangled particles) that information travels (per se) to the other particle.
The reason this experiment might work, but yet will not cause causality problems, is the fact that you don't know what the state is until you observe it.
So... an experiment is setup and two beams (that were entangled) are sent out down fiber. The second beam is put through a much longer route.
How do you get results from the shorter beam? If you measure the results of the shorter beam, you have collapsed the many possible values to one, and that information is traversed over to the longer beam into the futre.
If you measure the results of the longer beam, you have already missed your opportunity to measure the results of the shorter beam.
I believe they had a criteria of "How does it hold up to today's games"
One thing I notice about best lists is how there are many younger people now that have not played older games, so ever generation has their memories of what was best. Probably there are older folks who still place Zork as one of the greatest games of all time. Ultima was ground breaking in its day, and so on...