When my generation was growing up, our parents did whatever the hell they felt like doing and the kids came along for the ride. Nowadays parents spend all weekend with their kids.
The thing is, i do whatever the hell I feel like, and it usually involves spending time with my 2-year old. It's a blast to see a little brain in development, and it's a lot of fun for me to play simple games with him. I can't imagine what else I'd prefer to do. Get drunk with friends? Go to a strip club?
My Dad, I seem to recall, was pretty much the same. There were five of us, and he'd come home and play with us, board games, sports, whatever. I don't recall him suffering for it, he looked happy, but what do I know.
I'm sorry you seem to have had such a rotten childhood, and I'm sorry for your kids if you feel like perpetuating the old "kids are a burden" paradigm. It's so much more fun to be with them.
Besides, why would you have kids if you don't want to spend time with them? They're not mandatory, you know.
She's now 4 and a half. She's been upgraded to a 700 Mhz Athlon.
I tried to do that to my 2-year old, even bought a Atglon 64 FX, but I can't find the damn socket. Can you help? He's still running on the legacy biological processor he came with, but I'm afraid it might already be obsolete.
Check out my ID. Ready? I'm 35 and have a two year old kid. The answers in this thread are not just for the OP, they're for a lot of us that are in the same situation and wondering the same thing.
I kinda have to wonder what a "father of three" is doing with the "late-teens to late twenties, male, geeky". Could it be that you have no idea about the REAL demographic composition of Slashdot? Dare I say, maybe you are taking a bit too seriously all of the "hey, he's in Slashdot, he's a virgin" jokes? If so, may I helpfully point out to you that, no matter what else you've read, there are no underpants gnomes, nobody actually builds Beowulf clusters of floppy disks (ok, that one guy, but that's it), and in Soviet Russia corporations do not obey you?.
Now, back to the point; the thing we geeks like over anything else (except maybe sex, except yeah, we don't get any, right?) is to solve problems. You can examine raising a child as a problem (if you don't like that concept, s/problem/project). What do you do? What is your desired output in 18-20 years? What is the most eficient way to get there? I posit that the answer of the Slashdot hivemind to such problem would be waaaay better than reading avice columns from Cosmo or following the mandates of the Church of Oprah.
All those stories have been covered. This one was specially interesting because the Chinese governmente actually had to back down to popular outrage. You don't see that every day.
In other words, your precious Chinese government got pwned. Majorly. Get over it, and take your astroturfing elsewhere, little minion.
I specially want to stab repeatedly in the eyes whoever edited this. The payoff shot from the bridge, with the cars coming down the road, should have been left steady, maybe with some nice music background. Instead, we get a 5-year old's idea of "funny", going back and forth spasmodically and basically squandering the mood.
Also, next time, get someone without ADD to hold the camera inside the car.
I guess it's like open source; a really cool experiment, but lousy, lousy documentation.
1. It's easier for PC games to be pirated, so it's less lucrative an enterprise.
There's this thing called "the chip", available for PS2 and Xbox. Costs around 10 bucks, already installed. Lots and lots of people get it, and afterwards pirating games is even easier than it is for PC. Funnily enough, it IS near to impossible to pirate GameCube games; by your logic, they should outsell PS2 and Xbox games in droves, right?
3. Unlike a console, where you just put in the game and turn on the power, on your PC you first have to troubleshoot hardware lockups and software crashes, download and install drivers, install the game, configure your game controller, configure the game's performance settings, etc...
Rarely. Once your PC works fine, it probably won't develop problems unless you add hardware or do something boneheaded. But trouble is not as general as lots of console players think. Also, most users won't roll their own; they'll buy a Dell, HP or Gateway. And surprise surprise, those tend to not have hardware incompatibilities (there might be some, as there are Xboxes with faulty HDs).
4. Sometimes, despite your best technically-competent troubleshooting efforts (eating up valuable hours of your life), a particular game will just refuse to run on a given PC without locking up or crashing or performing way slower than it should on that hardware. No one can figure out why, and none of the involved companies seem to care about fixing it, even when the problem is being experienced by boatloads of people camped out in online support forums.
I'd love a reference for this. Usually a problem of that scope would be caused by the game itself, and you'd see a patch in days (or hours). I'm sorry, but this whole point sounds like unsupported FUD.
5. Consoles are much cheaper than PCs.
Just like Toyotas are cheaper that Ferraris. And for pretty much the same reasons.
6. PC game controllers are notorious for sucking compared to console game controllers. In my experience the only way to get a good game controller on a PC is to go buy a console controller and a USB converter box from Lik-Sang.
And any console controller sucks huge donkey balls compared to a mouse keyboard combo in any FPS or RTS. In fact, I can't think of any good PC game that would benefit from a controller (other than flight simes, but there are pretty good PC joysticks for those).
7. You can't easily play games on a PC on your big-screen TV while sitting on your couch in the den. Yes, I know it's possible to get a PC to display on a TV, but you have to be pretty technically-competent to do that. And then, it's not a comfortable way to use your PC for other common tasks you'd want to use it for, such as web browsing or typing up Word docs. And who wants to have to lug their PC back and forth all the time between a computer desk and the den?
It's called "single player experience"; no need for a big screen, and some of the best games are for that. If you're thinking about party games, I'd agree that a console beats a PC big time, but we are geeks, we don't like party games, right?
8. PC hardware tends to have a higher failure rate, in my experience, due to the variety of non-integrated components from a variety of different sources, never tested together. Consoles are completely integrated designs, engineered to be a lot more durable.
Never has a PC "failed" on me. Usually, unless you add hardware, they keep on working. And if a component does fail, it's simple to get a replacement. Try that with a console.
9. PCs still have delicate little connectors with lots of pins that have to be carefully inserted the right way. Consoles always have tough connectors that can only fit one way, such that constant abuse by rowdy teens or children doesnt' destroy them.
Exactly what year is your PC? Because now we use these little connectors called USB that are universal and sturdy as hell.
I suspect you are a console player who hasn't tried using a computer un five years and felt like spreading some FUD around. Shame, shame, shame.
Really, I think I'm not the only one who would love a "hard copy" of Wikipedia; not only as insurance against a future disappearance (God forbid) but for use in places with no Net access, or simply for the warm, fuzzy feeling of "owning" a copy. As well as helping distribute the information, it might be a good source of income. Are there any plans? And if not, why not?
I completelt agree that inside Dune there's an amazing film desperately trying to come out. But I submit that Jodorowsky is absolutely the wrong man to do it. I mean, Lynch's version was weird and disconnected... Jodorowsky would have done it even worse.
If anything, you'd need a more conventional director. Bash me if you wish, but I think a Spielberg made Dune would be amazing. Or at the very least an Alex Proyas. (I myself would love to see what Cristopher Nolan would make of it, but that's just me).
I felt in enthusiastic admiration towards Herbert and at the same time in conflict (I think that the same thing occurred to him)... He obstructed me... I did not want him as a technical adviser... I did everything to move him away from the project... I had received a version of Dune and I wanted to transmit it: the Myth was to give up the literary form and to become Image...
In film, the Duke Leto (father of Paul) would be a man castrated in a ritual combat in the arenas during a bullfight (emblem of the Atreides house being a crowned bull...)
Jessica is inseminated by a drop of blood of this sterile man... The camera followed (in script) the red drop through the ovaries of the woman and sees its meeting with the ovule where, by a miraculous explosion, it fertilises it. Paul had been born from a virgin; and not of the sperm of his father but of his blood...
In my version of Dune, the Emperor of the galaxy is insane. He lives on an artificial gold planet, in a gold palace built according to not-laws of antilogical. He lives in symbiosis with a robot identical to him. The resemblance is so perfect that the citizens never know if they are opposite the man or the machine...
At the end of film, the wife of the Count Fenring leaps towards Paul, who has already become Fremen, and she slices his throat. Paul while dying says: "Too late, one cannot kill me... because...
- Because, Jessica with the voice of Paul continues, to kill the Kwisatz Haderach, you would have to also have killed me... "And each Fremen, each Atreides speaks now with the voice of Paul: "I am the collective man. He who shows the way "
Reality changes quickly. Three columns of light spout out of the planet. They mix. Plunge in the sand of planet: "I am the Earth which awaits the seed!" the spice is desiccated. The ground trembles. Water drops form a pillar surrounded by fire.
Silver filaments emerge from spice. Create a rainbow. They form in a water cloud, produce a red "lava". Then vapor. Clouds. Rain. Rivers. Grass. Forests. Dune becomes green. A blue ring surrounds planet now. It is divided. It produces more and more rings. Dune is now a world illuminated, which crosses the galaxy, which leaves it, which gives it light - which is Consciousness - to all the universe.
Man, that REALLY wouldn't have sucked. I mean, really, it's weird and incoherent as hell so it must be good, right? Right?
Not to troll or anything, but while 701 is a nice enough number, a username of "Andy Dodd" is not, shall we say, all that enticing. Had you taken a cool(*) name that was available back then (say, "Frodo Baggins", "Darth Vader" or "Steve Jobs") you probably could be rolling in dough.
Better luck next time.
(*) 'Cool' in this context refers to 'Geek Cool', which is in itself quite uncool.
You bet it's rewarding and totally worth it... but as the proud father of a two-year-old toddler, your sentence made me both smile and shake my head in disbelief.:-) Good luck with that, and be assured by someone who is there: It's stressful as hell, but it's the best invested stress you'll ever had.
I'm actually slightly regretting taking the 20k step up right now given the stress of the environment I'm in now, but hopefully the extra money will let me have kids
You are tolerating stress for now... in order to have kids????
Damn. Just once I decided to flamebait (it's been a slow day at work) and here you come with a perfectly reasonable and lucid response. Where are you when I make good (I hope) point and all I get are trolls?
That's not Jesus, that's St. IGNUcius of the Church of eMacs. I saw that routine in person, and it' hilarious, and clearly intended to be tongue-in-cheek. I'm not an RMS apologist by any means, but I'd submit that maybe those engineers are the ones with a 10 foot pole firmly embedded in their anatomy.
Straw man. Verizon cannot do what they want with the pipes. If they offer me telephone service, take my money and then decide to block my calls because I'm chinese/lesbian/black, you bet your ass they'd be in hot water.
Funny thing is, all your point could have been applied with a straight face to divorce 20 years ago. Hopefully, in 20 years this thing will also be in the past.
Slashdot Mirror
When my generation was growing up, our parents did whatever the hell they felt like doing and the kids came along for the ride. Nowadays parents spend all weekend with their kids.
The thing is, i do whatever the hell I feel like, and it usually involves spending time with my 2-year old. It's a blast to see a little brain in development, and it's a lot of fun for me to play simple games with him. I can't imagine what else I'd prefer to do. Get drunk with friends? Go to a strip club?
My Dad, I seem to recall, was pretty much the same. There were five of us, and he'd come home and play with us, board games, sports, whatever. I don't recall him suffering for it, he looked happy, but what do I know.
I'm sorry you seem to have had such a rotten childhood, and I'm sorry for your kids if you feel like perpetuating the old "kids are a burden" paradigm. It's so much more fun to be with them.
Besides, why would you have kids if you don't want to spend time with them? They're not mandatory, you know.
She's now 4 and a half. She's been upgraded to a 700 Mhz Athlon.
I tried to do that to my 2-year old, even bought a Atglon 64 FX, but I can't find the damn socket. Can you help? He's still running on the legacy biological processor he came with, but I'm afraid it might already be obsolete.
Check out my ID. Ready? I'm 35 and have a two year old kid. The answers in this thread are not just for the OP, they're for a lot of us that are in the same situation and wondering the same thing.
I kinda have to wonder what a "father of three" is doing with the "late-teens to late twenties, male, geeky". Could it be that you have no idea about the REAL demographic composition of Slashdot? Dare I say, maybe you are taking a bit too seriously all of the "hey, he's in Slashdot, he's a virgin" jokes? If so, may I helpfully point out to you that, no matter what else you've read, there are no underpants gnomes, nobody actually builds Beowulf clusters of floppy disks (ok, that one guy, but that's it), and in Soviet Russia corporations do not obey you?.
Now, back to the point; the thing we geeks like over anything else (except maybe sex, except yeah, we don't get any, right?) is to solve problems. You can examine raising a child as a problem (if you don't like that concept, s/problem/project). What do you do? What is your desired output in 18-20 years? What is the most eficient way to get there? I posit that the answer of the Slashdot hivemind to such problem would be waaaay better than reading avice columns from Cosmo or following the mandates of the Church of Oprah.
OTOH, I'd bet everyone wanted to play Street Fighter with you. "Blanka to D2... what the hell just happened!?".
_every_ student carrying several hundred dollars worth of pawnable hardware
You misspelled "pwnable".
All those stories have been covered. This one was specially interesting because the Chinese governmente actually had to back down to popular outrage. You don't see that every day.
In other words, your precious Chinese government got pwned. Majorly. Get over it, and take your astroturfing elsewhere, little minion.
Once.
Remember when I told you it was legal to marry your cat? I was kidding at first, and then it kinda got out of control. Sorry about that.
Good news is, you can stop the alimony payments already.
Cool idea. Nice execution. Awful filmmaking.
I specially want to stab repeatedly in the eyes whoever edited this. The payoff shot from the bridge, with the cars coming down the road, should have been left steady, maybe with some nice music background. Instead, we get a 5-year old's idea of "funny", going back and forth spasmodically and basically squandering the mood.
Also, next time, get someone without ADD to hold the camera inside the car.
I guess it's like open source; a really cool experiment, but lousy, lousy documentation.
Wrong on several counts.
1. It's easier for PC games to be pirated, so it's less lucrative an enterprise.
There's this thing called "the chip", available for PS2 and Xbox. Costs around 10 bucks, already installed. Lots and lots of people get it, and afterwards pirating games is even easier than it is for PC. Funnily enough, it IS near to impossible to pirate GameCube games; by your logic, they should outsell PS2 and Xbox games in droves, right?
3. Unlike a console, where you just put in the game and turn on the power, on your PC you first have to troubleshoot hardware lockups and software crashes, download and install drivers, install the game, configure your game controller, configure the game's performance settings, etc...
Rarely. Once your PC works fine, it probably won't develop problems unless you add hardware or do something boneheaded. But trouble is not as general as lots of console players think.
Also, most users won't roll their own; they'll buy a Dell, HP or Gateway. And surprise surprise, those tend to not have hardware incompatibilities (there might be some, as there are Xboxes with faulty HDs).
4. Sometimes, despite your best technically-competent troubleshooting efforts (eating up valuable hours of your life), a particular game will just refuse to run on a given PC without locking up or crashing or performing way slower than it should on that hardware. No one can figure out why, and none of the involved companies seem to care about fixing it, even when the problem is being experienced by boatloads of people camped out in online support forums.
I'd love a reference for this. Usually a problem of that scope would be caused by the game itself, and you'd see a patch in days (or hours). I'm sorry, but this whole point sounds like unsupported FUD.
5. Consoles are much cheaper than PCs.
Just like Toyotas are cheaper that Ferraris. And for pretty much the same reasons.
6. PC game controllers are notorious for sucking compared to console game controllers. In my experience the only way to get a good game controller on a PC is to go buy a console controller and a USB converter box from Lik-Sang.
And any console controller sucks huge donkey balls compared to a mouse keyboard combo in any FPS or RTS. In fact, I can't think of any good PC game that would benefit from a controller (other than flight simes, but there are pretty good PC joysticks for those).
7. You can't easily play games on a PC on your big-screen TV while sitting on your couch in the den. Yes, I know it's possible to get a PC to display on a TV, but you have to be pretty technically-competent to do that. And then, it's not a comfortable way to use your PC for other common tasks you'd want to use it for, such as web browsing or typing up Word docs. And who wants to have to lug their PC back and forth all the time between a computer desk and the den?
It's called "single player experience"; no need for a big screen, and some of the best games are for that. If you're thinking about party games, I'd agree that a console beats a PC big time, but we are geeks, we don't like party games, right?
8. PC hardware tends to have a higher failure rate, in my experience, due to the variety of non-integrated components from a variety of different sources, never tested together. Consoles are completely integrated designs, engineered to be a lot more durable.
Never has a PC "failed" on me. Usually, unless you add hardware, they keep on working. And if a component does fail, it's simple to get a replacement. Try that with a console.
9. PCs still have delicate little connectors with lots of pins that have to be carefully inserted the right way. Consoles always have tough connectors that can only fit one way, such that constant abuse by rowdy teens or children doesnt' destroy them.
Exactly what year is your PC? Because now we use these little connectors called USB that are universal and sturdy as hell.
I suspect you are a console player who hasn't tried using a computer un five years and felt like spreading some FUD around. Shame, shame, shame.
Really, I think I'm not the only one who would love a "hard copy" of Wikipedia; not only as insurance against a future disappearance (God forbid) but for use in places with no Net access, or simply for the warm, fuzzy feeling of "owning" a copy. As well as helping distribute the information, it might be a good source of income. Are there any plans? And if not, why not?
I completelt agree that inside Dune there's an amazing film desperately trying to come out. But I submit that Jodorowsky is absolutely the wrong man to do it. I mean, Lynch's version was weird and disconnected... Jodorowsky would have done it even worse.
If anything, you'd need a more conventional director. Bash me if you wish, but I think a Spielberg made Dune would be amazing. Or at the very least an Alex Proyas. (I myself would love to see what Cristopher Nolan would make of it, but that's just me).
Well, some excerpts from the article:
... I did everything to move him away from the project... I had received a version of Dune and I wanted to transmit it: the Myth was to give up the literary form and to become Image...
I felt in enthusiastic admiration towards Herbert and at the same time in conflict (I think that the same thing occurred to him)... He obstructed me... I did not want him as a technical adviser
In film, the Duke Leto (father of Paul) would be a man castrated in a ritual combat in the arenas during a bullfight (emblem of the Atreides house being a crowned bull...)
Jessica is inseminated by a drop of blood of this sterile man... The camera followed (in script) the red drop through the ovaries of the woman and sees its meeting with the ovule where, by a miraculous explosion, it fertilises it. Paul had been born from a virgin; and not of the sperm of his father but of his blood...
In my version of Dune, the Emperor of the galaxy is insane. He lives on an artificial gold planet, in a gold palace built according to not-laws of antilogical. He lives in symbiosis with a robot identical to him. The resemblance is so perfect that the citizens never know if they are opposite the man or the machine...
At the end of film, the wife of the Count Fenring leaps towards Paul, who has already become Fremen, and she slices his throat. Paul while dying says: "Too late, one cannot kill me... because...
- Because, Jessica with the voice of Paul continues, to kill the Kwisatz Haderach, you would have to also have killed me... "And each Fremen, each Atreides speaks now with the voice of Paul: "I am the collective man. He who shows the way "
Reality changes quickly. Three columns of light spout out of the planet. They mix. Plunge in the sand of planet: "I am the Earth which awaits the seed!" the spice is desiccated. The ground trembles. Water drops form a pillar surrounded by fire.
Silver filaments emerge from spice. Create a rainbow. They form in a water cloud, produce a red "lava". Then vapor. Clouds. Rain. Rivers. Grass. Forests. Dune becomes green. A blue ring surrounds planet now. It is divided. It produces more and more rings. Dune is now a world illuminated, which crosses the galaxy, which leaves it, which gives it light - which is Consciousness - to all the universe.
Man, that REALLY wouldn't have sucked. I mean, really, it's weird and incoherent as hell so it must be good, right? Right?
Not to troll or anything, but while 701 is a nice enough number, a username of "Andy Dodd" is not, shall we say, all that enticing. Had you taken a cool(*) name that was available back then (say, "Frodo Baggins", "Darth Vader" or "Steve Jobs") you probably could be rolling in dough.
Better luck next time.
(*) 'Cool' in this context refers to 'Geek Cool', which is in itself quite uncool.
You bet it's rewarding and totally worth it... but as the proud father of a two-year-old toddler, your sentence made me both smile and shake my head in disbelief. :-) Good luck with that, and be assured by someone who is there: It's stressful as hell, but it's the best invested stress you'll ever had.
I'm actually slightly regretting taking the 20k step up right now given the stress of the environment I'm in now, but hopefully the extra money will let me have kids
You are tolerating stress for now... in order to have kids????
Boy, are you in for a nasty surprise.
Damn. Just once I decided to flamebait (it's been a slow day at work) and here you come with a perfectly reasonable and lucid response. Where are you when I make good (I hope) point and all I get are trolls?
:-)
Just my luck, I guess
Is "janitor" a dirty word, or something? Because otherwise I don't understand the relevance of your last sentence...
Are you saying bacteria are intelligently designed?
That's not Jesus, that's St. IGNUcius of the Church of eMacs. I saw that routine in person, and it' hilarious, and clearly intended to be tongue-in-cheek. I'm not an RMS apologist by any means, but I'd submit that maybe those engineers are the ones with a 10 foot pole firmly embedded in their anatomy.
Conversely, there is no god given right to protect your works either. Copyright is an entirely legal (and fairly recent) construct.
Conversely, there is no god given right for niggers to vote. Civil rights are an entirely legal (and fairly recent) construct.
Conversely, there is no god given right for children to attend school. Child protection is an entirely legal (and fairly recent) construct.
Conversely, there is no god given right to job benefits. Labor law is an entirely legal (and fairly recent) construct.
See how easy it is kids? I can spew flawed analogies all day!
Worm? Heh, you must be really popular with the ladies... little guy.
Like chicken. Come on, did you really need to ask?
Straw man. Verizon cannot do what they want with the pipes. If they offer me telephone service, take my money and then decide to block my calls because I'm chinese/lesbian/black, you bet your ass they'd be in hot water.
Nice double entendre there. Well done.
Funny thing is, all your point could have been applied with a straight face to divorce 20 years ago. Hopefully, in 20 years this thing will also be in the past.