The term usually considered "correct" is "Der Afro-Deutsche" (Which is simply "African-German"). Will get you some weird looks still, because most younger people don't care about skin colour, ethnic group, religion, etc. too much (At least not in university cities, where there are way to many people from all parts of the world for that:-P) and most older people don't understand or appreciate political correctness (Which is often overdone, IMHO).
And this company uses strange technology to deliver that music? AFAIK the german equivalents are delivered on standard redbook CDs, which seems a whole lot more sensible:-)
It's not as if the link actually explains that, though... Instead it's a good example of why "designer" should not necessarily be the most important part of a webdesigners work.
So, for us unenlightened people: Is Muzak a company, a general term for "elevator music", a specific electronic application or any of the above combined?
Just because I think people should reply doesn't mean I have to answer to their replies or even take them seriously, does it?
In case you didn't notice: The "Come over here" part was an ironic nudge towards the typical "redneck" style, no wonder it's what you'd expect one of them to say...
Concerning the term "redneck" itself, I wasn't aware it was only applicable to one ethnic group ("whites" presumably?), I've always considered it a general derogative for a regional culture instead.
Landmass, Population, Economically.
Military and Helium Production I don't know, but at least the latter I would assume to be on that list, too.
[RANT]
This whole discussion shows a few very good examples of why the US should not be the one in charge. The arrogance evident in some posts (not the parent, btw, he's just emotional, misguided-patriotic at worst) is a clear indicator of what would happen if the US ever saw a benefit in hurting other countries net-access (I'm talking about those that can't really afford to run their own root-servers).
Hint: If there is so much fear of the UN controlling the root-servers, why shouldn't everyone but the US fear the country with the highest number of unprovoked first-strike wars in its history have it? And don't hide behind "ICANN is an international business", ok? You know as well as I do, that they're not free to actively work against a government decision of whatever country their physical property is in...
But then again I believe in democracy, equality and all that crap, not one so-called democratic state who honestly pretends to bring civilization in form of bombs and uranium bullets...
[/RANT]
PS: I won't answer to redneck replies to this, there's no use. You want to punch me in the face? Come over here and try to, ok?
15 However, if you do not obey the LORD your God and do not carefully follow all his commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come upon you and overtake you:
16 You will be cursed in the city and cursed in the country.
17 Your basket and your kneading trough will be cursed.
18 The fruit of your womb will be cursed, and the crops of your land, and the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks.
19 You will be cursed when you come in and cursed when you go out.
20 The LORD will send on you curses, confusion and rebuke in everything you put your hand to, until you are destroyed and come to sudden ruin because of the evil you have done in forsaking him. [a] 21 The LORD will plague you with diseases until he has destroyed you from the land you are entering to possess. 22 The LORD will strike you with wasting disease, with fever and inflammation, with scorching heat and drought, with blight and mildew, which will plague you until you perish. 23 The sky over your head will be bronze, the ground beneath you iron. 24 The LORD will turn the rain of your country into dust and powder; it will come down from the skies until you are destroyed.
25 The LORD will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You will come at them from one direction but flee from them in seven, and you will become a thing of horror to all the kingdoms on earth. 26 Your carcasses will be food for all the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth, and there will be no one to frighten them away. 27 The LORD will afflict you with the boils of Egypt and with tumors, festering sores and the itch, from which you cannot be cured. 28 The LORD will afflict you with madness, blindness and confusion of mind. 29 At midday you will grope about like a blind man in the dark. You will be unsuccessful in everything you do; day after day you will be oppressed and robbed, with no one to rescue you.
30 You will be pledged to be married to a woman, but another will take her and ravish her. You will build a house, but you will not live in it. You will plant a vineyard, but you will not even begin to enjoy its fruit. 31 Your ox will be slaughtered before your eyes, but you will eat none of it. Your donkey will be forcibly taken from you and will not be returned. Your sheep will be given to your enemies, and no one will rescue them. 32 Your sons and daughters will be given to another nation, and you will wear out your eyes watching for them day after day, powerless to lift a hand. 33 A people that you do not know will eat what your land and labor produce, and you will have nothing but cruel oppression all your days. 34 The sights you see will drive you mad. 35 The LORD will afflict your knees and legs with painful boils that cannot be cured, spreading from the soles of your feet to the top of your head.
36 The LORD will drive you and the king you set over you to a nation unknown to you or your fathers. There you will worship other gods, gods of wood and stone. 37 You will become a thing of horror and an object of scorn and ridicule to all the nations where the LORD will drive you.
38 You will sow much seed in the field but you will harvest little, because locusts will devour it. 39 You will plant vineyards and cultiv
Well, I understood "10x as safe" as "It takes 10x as long for something to happen, statistically". But I'm not a native speaker, so maybe there's no way to understand it that way, really...
That's the crux with "random chance" and statistics, you can't make accurate statements before that fact:-) It's not as if those astronauts sitting on flight 570, looking back to their successful 569 predecessors would have to fear anymore that them, because their chance of failure wouldn't actually be any different...
If the last system had one fatal failure in 57 flights, then the new one is supposed to have one in ~570 flights. If you want to convert that to percentages you'll end up with an exponential curve requiring an endless number of flights before a fatal failure, which is not achieveable. That's not exactly rocket science:-)
Apology accepted, please accept mine for getting angry as well.
During the last days, feelings are running high concerning games vs. publishers, so tensions are to be expected, I guess...
I think the game sucks major ass from a usability standpoint. You disagree, fine, but stay polite please.
The unit are programs... It's the most logical thing to do. To terminate them is to hit Control+C just like you would in a Unix terminal. Oh my... A game that actually acts like a real world computer system.
That'd be a wonderful idea. If it worked. On my system, at least, the real taskmanager pops up, I change out of the game, ok? Is that hard to understand? I probably wouldn't if I closed all other apps before playing, but it's bad from a UI standpoint still.
I bet you don't use mouse gestures in other programs either. Like... Um... Firefox extensions? They are wonder things if you dig them. If you don't well... Go play WC3.
I dig Opera and gestures, thank you. That doesn't mean that having to hold ALT, drawing left-clicking into a rather small drawing area, releasing ALT, Moving to a "starting area", left clicking to actually create the unit and left clicking again to start moving it to where I was is a good use of them. It wastes time. Make me hold-right-click, draw on the entire screen and have to unit deployed exactly at screen center, then we talk again...
I don't know. It's seemed so intuitive to me from playing all sorts of FPS games for the past 5 years that I never bothered looking to customize the game.
Sorry, maybe I'm too old for that, but I still configure my FPSs to use the cursor keys and I expect any game to allow reconfiguration of the controls. As I said, it's not hard.
Arrrgh... It's supposed to look like that. You know... Are you too young to remember Tron? Or maybe the first Lawnmower man movie? If I wanted something that didn't look like a throw back to a 1980's movie I would have bought Doom3 or something, but no... I found this very fun and "artsy" and actually did buy the full version.
OK, so the crap look is on purpose. TRON didn't look much better, because they couldn't do it. That's not to say that I'd expect gorgeous graphics, but at least Dune2000 would've been nice...
You bought the full version, fine, but that doesn't make me recommend the game anymore, especially since you did nothing but insult me...
*hits head on desk* Obviously if you played the game all the way through (which you need to buy the full version) you'd would have noticed the really cool plot line of the evolution of the Dawinians and all the screens sometimes I sort of said to myself "I hope they hurry up with the cut scene story so I don't miss anything so I can hit pause and use the bathroom!" because it was that interesting on occasion.
Maybe a little more teaser would've helped my impression? It looks extremely shallow on the site description and the demo doesn't enhance it one bit. Oh, and, you can't hit Pause during the cut-scene? That'd be another "don't touch" reason on my list...
I just don't know... Maybe the game is too deep for some people. Thats why I guess we seen copies of the same damn game every year by the same people with no innovation whatsoever. By chance do you like reality TV?
No, prick, I don't. I love the Myst series of games, thought HL2 had a bareable story (while Doom3 was as boring as they get) and generally like browsing gamedev.net, adventuregamestudio.co.uk and the like to get games that don't suck mainstream ass. But know what? Darwinia has some extremely stupid UI decisions and doesn't look like it has any story whatsoever. I gave it a try, I thought it was crap, it goes in the dumpster. That doesn't keep you from liking it, though, so please accept that I'm entitled to my opinion and to posting it here, as well as you are to yours, ok?
While I deeply appreciate their try to run on different platforms and have to admit I dislike anything remotely like RTS, I have a few points to note, stupid decisions, ultimately leading to me not suggesting someone give Darwinia a try, let alone pay 20 bucks for it.
Stupid decisions:
ALT+TAB to switch between units. How braindead can a developer be? Under WinXP, of course that brings up the real taskmanager... I have to say I'd have been really frightened if it didn't. So you have to click on the unit itself, because you cannot "tab" between them and clicking on their goddamn icon in the game menu (ALT) gives an error message.
Mouse Gestures only to create units. It's slow and thus counterproductive, RTS-nuts will hate it and I have to ask "why?".
Navigation. WASD only + mouselook and up+down via QE or mousewheel, which works the wrong way around for me. Does the full version allow me to customze that? It's not hard to implement, you know?
Graphics, or lack thereof. I could easily accept the bad graphics and models from a freeware game, but honestly, it looks butt-ugly. The Darwinians are sprites! Why exactly does this game require a 3D-Card?
The highly praised story. Er, excuse me? Story? The original Duke Nukem, Commander Keen and even Doom had more "story", their's usually filled more than one screen... Yeesh, if similar games usually have even less of it...
Summary: A game that'd be nice as result of one of the indy game dev contests, but as commercial product it simply makes so many mistakes that cannot be excused by "art", "indy" or the one I'm expecting to creep up here soon, "Innovation". Sorry, try harder next time and try innovating on the side of story, genre and actual gameplay, not controls, please...
The parent is right, there are a few moronic mistakes left... Do it right, ok? And, though I like XHTML personally, I'd agree HTML 4.01 is probably the better choice for legacy support (sadly).
They should've randomized all, or at least some, non-disclosed pixels every few changes, optimally every frame. Would've killed that approach right away. *sigh*
You get that wrong. It's a special form of respect by the editors. Cyans demise is worth a dupe in salute! (This is tongue-in-cheek, ok?)
As a side note: Cyans games are very dear to a lot ("best selling game of all times, before 'The Sims'", remember?) of people (not "players"), including me, so I'm indeed glad to see/. take their demise seriously. Many people have chosen their education to, one day, work at Cyan, because their games, or better, virtual environments, were so utterly stunning and beautiful. It has shown me a lot of people I know from the Myst-community are slashdotters as well (not the other way around, of course), something I suspected for a long time.
Judging from the article I'm a casual gamer (Despite the fact that I can and have played through HL 2 and Doom 3 as soon as the came out. Without cheating. I have also played a lot of very cerebral games. Rarely using a hint guide.).
I think it's good that most games allow me to save before important fights. I think end bosses are a stupid idea in the first place (Just like I laugh at any Pen&Paper GM who places them at the lowest level of the dungeon. Ridiculous.). I don't think the player needs to be punished when he makes a mstake, rewarding him when he does right is better. etc.
Well, I thought, he does sound like a very bitter gamer, who knows he's right and can't believe someone might disagree, but I don't think he should be left without games he likes. So maybe I'd suggest again the idea of having difficulty settings for allowing to save. Or hope that more publishers would carry what he called "old-school" games. A sensible compromise, based on the demographic, can surely be reached. Then, I read this:
"There has to be some kind of compromise that we can reach. We certainly need those casual gamers to add to the mix of the gaming community, but we can't let them dominate the kinds of games that are released."
Any you know what?
I think he's an asshole, because he thinks the overwhelming majority of players shouldn't be deciding what games get made in the majority? Don't tell me he believes there are more hardcore players than casual ones either, that would really screw the meaning of hardcore, y'know?
So, I conclude, choice is good and people like to play their games differently, so there ought to be more of each type + new and experimental ones, but having the hardcore gamers as target audience near exclusively, as he suggests, is dumb (Because it doesn't pay), arrogant (because he is right and the majority would get it wrong, because they like it wrong) and, foremost, insulting.
Don't confuse communism and totalitarian systems as those created by Lenin, Stalin & Co. that were called "communism".
Marx original comunism idea specifically called for industry workers that overthrow their governing regime on their own, not purely agricutural societies forced to change by some so-called intellectuals. Real communism never called for a one-party system, nor a quasi-dictatoric board of directors in it. Instead it relies solely on self-organizational principles and true equality (In the libertarian + social security sense, everyone paid according to his needs).
Every "communist" system so far has utterly failed to even attempt employing these principles, which lead to oppression (via the "we know better" and "not with us is against us" approaches) and inequality ("Some are more equal than others", because they bear the burden of ruling...). Followed directly by restrictions, that were only necessary, because people didn't decide to become communist in the first place and didn't want to stay communist, because their infrastructure wasn't up to it (the reason Marx wanted industry workers under all circumstances!)
In short: Communism has not failed, because it has never been tried. Systems hiding under that name have failed though. Wrong names for systems is pretty common though, consider democracy, which means "ruling by the people". Nowhere does this call for parliaments!
You point out the problem yourself: Normal users don't think about the format they save in.
The "Massachusetts government" is not one entity, but a lot of pretty normal users. Why should these be capable of thinking to save "right", when millions of exactly as normal users can't?
MS could add an option to set the preferred format, so that admins could take care of the problem beforehand, but that's the point where simply switching software becomes effective anyway, from an administration (not necessarily admin) point of view...
We're not not going to reach even a basic agreement here. From my perspective you're as wrong as one can be, and from yours I'm the same. Both positions have been discussed by actual experts on philosophy before. Mine is probably newer, which you apparently consider bad, while yours is older, which I consider conservative/outdated *shrugs*
We've both made out points, the story is long gone from the main page, so new input is not to be expected, let's drop it (/. discussions tend to get ugly at this point and tonight I really don't feel like it) and leave it for actual philosophy students to dissect:-)
Nonono, you tried to translate "post" into german, forgetting that it isn't even a proper english word in this context ("Pfosten" is literally the "post" from a fence, for example), but a shortening of "posting", which would be most adequately translated as "Buchung", thus "erste Buchung", though that is not in spirit with the "first post", because "posting" only refers to fora since the internet-age (you could have gone for "erste Plakatierung" as with wanted-posters, bulletin-boards (called "black boards" in german... This is where it get's confusing:-P ), etc.), and german hasn't undergone the same choice here. Most indeed prefer the english capitalized and gender-neutral "erstes Posting", or, for german-only audiences "erste Nachricht" -> "first message".
Thanks for your time:-P
Slashdot Mirror
The term usually considered "correct" is "Der Afro-Deutsche" (Which is simply "African-German"). Will get you some weird looks still, because most younger people don't care about skin colour, ethnic group, religion, etc. too much (At least not in university cities, where there are way to many people from all parts of the world for that :-P) and most older people don't understand or appreciate political correctness (Which is often overdone, IMHO).
And this company uses strange technology to deliver that music? AFAIK the german equivalents are delivered on standard redbook CDs, which seems a whole lot more sensible :-)
It's not as if the link actually explains that, though... Instead it's a good example of why "designer" should not necessarily be the most important part of a webdesigners work.
So, for us unenlightened people: Is Muzak a company, a general term for "elevator music", a specific electronic application or any of the above combined?
Just because I think people should reply doesn't mean I have to answer to their replies or even take them seriously, does it?
In case you didn't notice: The "Come over here" part was an ironic nudge towards the typical "redneck" style, no wonder it's what you'd expect one of them to say...
Concerning the term "redneck" itself, I wasn't aware it was only applicable to one ethnic group ("whites" presumably?), I've always considered it a general derogative for a regional culture instead.
Probably one of the most sensible posts in this entire discussion.
TCP/IP is a protocol that runs on copper wires. Your point?
Landmass, Population, Economically.
Military and Helium Production I don't know, but at least the latter I would assume to be on that list, too.
[RANT]
This whole discussion shows a few very good examples of why the US should not be the one in charge. The arrogance evident in some posts (not the parent, btw, he's just emotional, misguided-patriotic at worst) is a clear indicator of what would happen if the US ever saw a benefit in hurting other countries net-access (I'm talking about those that can't really afford to run their own root-servers).
Hint: If there is so much fear of the UN controlling the root-servers, why shouldn't everyone but the US fear the country with the highest number of unprovoked first-strike wars in its history have it? And don't hide behind "ICANN is an international business", ok? You know as well as I do, that they're not free to actively work against a government decision of whatever country their physical property is in...
But then again I believe in democracy, equality and all that crap, not one so-called democratic state who honestly pretends to bring civilization in form of bombs and uranium bullets...
[/RANT]
PS: I won't answer to redneck replies to this, there's no use. You want to punch me in the face? Come over here and try to, ok?
Please enjoy this meaty passage (my favourite, especially the last sentence, somehow the BDSM enthusiast in me rejoices :-P ) I took it from the "New International Version" on http://biblegateway.com/, see this link, too: http://bible.gospelcom.net/passage/?search=Deutero nomy%2028,%2015-68;&version=31;
15 However, if you do not obey the LORD your God and do not carefully follow all his commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come upon you and overtake you:
16 You will be cursed in the city and cursed in the country.
17 Your basket and your kneading trough will be cursed.
18 The fruit of your womb will be cursed, and the crops of your land, and the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks.
19 You will be cursed when you come in and cursed when you go out.
20 The LORD will send on you curses, confusion and rebuke in everything you put your hand to, until you are destroyed and come to sudden ruin because of the evil you have done in forsaking him. [a] 21 The LORD will plague you with diseases until he has destroyed you from the land you are entering to possess. 22 The LORD will strike you with wasting disease, with fever and inflammation, with scorching heat and drought, with blight and mildew, which will plague you until you perish. 23 The sky over your head will be bronze, the ground beneath you iron. 24 The LORD will turn the rain of your country into dust and powder; it will come down from the skies until you are destroyed.
25 The LORD will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You will come at them from one direction but flee from them in seven, and you will become a thing of horror to all the kingdoms on earth. 26 Your carcasses will be food for all the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth, and there will be no one to frighten them away. 27 The LORD will afflict you with the boils of Egypt and with tumors, festering sores and the itch, from which you cannot be cured. 28 The LORD will afflict you with madness, blindness and confusion of mind. 29 At midday you will grope about like a blind man in the dark. You will be unsuccessful in everything you do; day after day you will be oppressed and robbed, with no one to rescue you.
30 You will be pledged to be married to a woman, but another will take her and ravish her. You will build a house, but you will not live in it. You will plant a vineyard, but you will not even begin to enjoy its fruit. 31 Your ox will be slaughtered before your eyes, but you will eat none of it. Your donkey will be forcibly taken from you and will not be returned. Your sheep will be given to your enemies, and no one will rescue them. 32 Your sons and daughters will be given to another nation, and you will wear out your eyes watching for them day after day, powerless to lift a hand. 33 A people that you do not know will eat what your land and labor produce, and you will have nothing but cruel oppression all your days. 34 The sights you see will drive you mad. 35 The LORD will afflict your knees and legs with painful boils that cannot be cured, spreading from the soles of your feet to the top of your head.
36 The LORD will drive you and the king you set over you to a nation unknown to you or your fathers. There you will worship other gods, gods of wood and stone. 37 You will become a thing of horror and an object of scorn and ridicule to all the nations where the LORD will drive you.
38 You will sow much seed in the field but you will harvest little, because locusts will devour it. 39 You will plant vineyards and cultiv
Well, I understood "10x as safe" as "It takes 10x as long for something to happen, statistically". But I'm not a native speaker, so maybe there's no way to understand it that way, really...
That's the crux with "random chance" and statistics, you can't make accurate statements before that fact :-) It's not as if those astronauts sitting on flight 570, looking back to their successful 569 predecessors would have to fear anymore that them, because their chance of failure wouldn't actually be any different...
If the last system had one fatal failure in 57 flights, then the new one is supposed to have one in ~570 flights. If you want to convert that to percentages you'll end up with an exponential curve requiring an endless number of flights before a fatal failure, which is not achieveable. That's not exactly rocket science :-)
Apology accepted, please accept mine for getting angry as well.
During the last days, feelings are running high concerning games vs. publishers, so tensions are to be expected, I guess...
I think the game sucks major ass from a usability standpoint. You disagree, fine, but stay polite please.
The unit are programs... It's the most logical thing to do. To terminate them is to hit Control+C just like you would in a Unix terminal. Oh my... A game that actually acts like a real world computer system.
That'd be a wonderful idea. If it worked. On my system, at least, the real taskmanager pops up, I change out of the game, ok? Is that hard to understand? I probably wouldn't if I closed all other apps before playing, but it's bad from a UI standpoint still.
I bet you don't use mouse gestures in other programs either. Like... Um... Firefox extensions? They are wonder things if you dig them. If you don't well... Go play WC3.
I dig Opera and gestures, thank you. That doesn't mean that having to hold ALT, drawing left-clicking into a rather small drawing area, releasing ALT, Moving to a "starting area", left clicking to actually create the unit and left clicking again to start moving it to where I was is a good use of them. It wastes time. Make me hold-right-click, draw on the entire screen and have to unit deployed exactly at screen center, then we talk again...
I don't know. It's seemed so intuitive to me from playing all sorts of FPS games for the past 5 years that I never bothered looking to customize the game.
Sorry, maybe I'm too old for that, but I still configure my FPSs to use the cursor keys and I expect any game to allow reconfiguration of the controls. As I said, it's not hard.
Arrrgh... It's supposed to look like that. You know... Are you too young to remember Tron? Or maybe the first Lawnmower man movie? If I wanted something that didn't look like a throw back to a 1980's movie I would have bought Doom3 or something, but no... I found this very fun and "artsy" and actually did buy the full version.
OK, so the crap look is on purpose. TRON didn't look much better, because they couldn't do it. That's not to say that I'd expect gorgeous graphics, but at least Dune2000 would've been nice...
You bought the full version, fine, but that doesn't make me recommend the game anymore, especially since you did nothing but insult me...
*hits head on desk* Obviously if you played the game all the way through (which you need to buy the full version) you'd would have noticed the really cool plot line of the evolution of the Dawinians and all the screens sometimes I sort of said to myself "I hope they hurry up with the cut scene story so I don't miss anything so I can hit pause and use the bathroom!" because it was that interesting on occasion.
Maybe a little more teaser would've helped my impression? It looks extremely shallow on the site description and the demo doesn't enhance it one bit. Oh, and, you can't hit Pause during the cut-scene? That'd be another "don't touch" reason on my list...
I just don't know... Maybe the game is too deep for some people. Thats why I guess we seen copies of the same damn game every year by the same people with no innovation whatsoever. By chance do you like reality TV?
No, prick, I don't. I love the Myst series of games, thought HL2 had a bareable story (while Doom3 was as boring as they get) and generally like browsing gamedev.net, adventuregamestudio.co.uk and the like to get games that don't suck mainstream ass. But know what? Darwinia has some extremely stupid UI decisions and doesn't look like it has any story whatsoever. I gave it a try, I thought it was crap, it goes in the dumpster. That doesn't keep you from liking it, though, so please accept that I'm entitled to my opinion and to posting it here, as well as you are to yours, ok?
Stupid decisions:
Summary: A game that'd be nice as result of one of the indy game dev contests, but as commercial product it simply makes so many mistakes that cannot be excused by "art", "indy" or the one I'm expecting to creep up here soon, "Innovation". Sorry, try harder next time and try innovating on the side of story, genre and actual gameplay, not controls, please...
The parent is right, there are a few moronic mistakes left... Do it right, ok? And, though I like XHTML personally, I'd agree HTML 4.01 is probably the better choice for legacy support (sadly).
They should've randomized all, or at least some, non-disclosed pixels every few changes, optimally every frame. Would've killed that approach right away. *sigh*
Question: What is your point? I can't make any sense out of that...
For a proper salute we need three more dupes.
:-P
You don't think that'd be too hard to achieve, do you?
You get that wrong. It's a special form of respect by the editors. Cyans demise is worth a dupe in salute! (This is tongue-in-cheek, ok?)
/. take their demise seriously. Many people have chosen their education to, one day, work at Cyan, because their games, or better, virtual environments, were so utterly stunning and beautiful.
As a side note: Cyans games are very dear to a lot ("best selling game of all times, before 'The Sims'", remember?) of people (not "players"), including me, so I'm indeed glad to see
It has shown me a lot of people I know from the Myst-community are slashdotters as well (not the other way around, of course), something I suspected for a long time.
Robert_Kosten
Guild of Greeters
KI: 474650
Judging from the article I'm a casual gamer (Despite the fact that I can and have played through HL 2 and Doom 3 as soon as the came out. Without cheating. I have also played a lot of very cerebral games. Rarely using a hint guide.).
I think it's good that most games allow me to save before important fights. I think end bosses are a stupid idea in the first place (Just like I laugh at any Pen&Paper GM who places them at the lowest level of the dungeon. Ridiculous.). I don't think the player needs to be punished when he makes a mstake, rewarding him when he does right is better. etc.
Well, I thought, he does sound like a very bitter gamer, who knows he's right and can't believe someone might disagree, but I don't think he should be left without games he likes. So maybe I'd suggest again the idea of having difficulty settings for allowing to save. Or hope that more publishers would carry what he called "old-school" games. A sensible compromise, based on the demographic, can surely be reached. Then, I read this:
"There has to be some kind of compromise that we can reach. We certainly need those casual gamers to add to the mix of the gaming community, but we can't let them dominate the kinds of games that are released."
Any you know what?
I think he's an asshole, because he thinks the overwhelming majority of players shouldn't be deciding what games get made in the majority? Don't tell me he believes there are more hardcore players than casual ones either, that would really screw the meaning of hardcore, y'know?
So, I conclude, choice is good and people like to play their games differently, so there ought to be more of each type + new and experimental ones, but having the hardcore gamers as target audience near exclusively, as he suggests, is dumb (Because it doesn't pay), arrogant (because he is right and the majority would get it wrong, because they like it wrong) and, foremost, insulting.
I already have, and enjoyed them greatly :-)
Don't confuse communism and totalitarian systems as those created by Lenin, Stalin & Co. that were called "communism".
Marx original comunism idea specifically called for industry workers that overthrow their governing regime on their own, not purely agricutural societies forced to change by some so-called intellectuals. Real communism never called for a one-party system, nor a quasi-dictatoric board of directors in it. Instead it relies solely on self-organizational principles and true equality (In the libertarian + social security sense, everyone paid according to his needs).
Every "communist" system so far has utterly failed to even attempt employing these principles, which lead to oppression (via the "we know better" and "not with us is against us" approaches) and inequality ("Some are more equal than others", because they bear the burden of ruling...). Followed directly by restrictions, that were only necessary, because people didn't decide to become communist in the first place and didn't want to stay communist, because their infrastructure wasn't up to it (the reason Marx wanted industry workers under all circumstances!)
In short: Communism has not failed, because it has never been tried. Systems hiding under that name have failed though. Wrong names for systems is pretty common though, consider democracy, which means "ruling by the people". Nowhere does this call for parliaments!
You point out the problem yourself: Normal users don't think about the format they save in.
The "Massachusetts government" is not one entity, but a lot of pretty normal users. Why should these be capable of thinking to save "right", when millions of exactly as normal users can't?
MS could add an option to set the preferred format, so that admins could take care of the problem beforehand, but that's the point where simply switching software becomes effective anyway, from an administration (not necessarily admin) point of view...
We're not not going to reach even a basic agreement here. From my perspective you're as wrong as one can be, and from yours I'm the same. Both positions have been discussed by actual experts on philosophy before. Mine is probably newer, which you apparently consider bad, while yours is older, which I consider conservative/outdated *shrugs* :-)
We've both made out points, the story is long gone from the main page, so new input is not to be expected, let's drop it (/. discussions tend to get ugly at this point and tonight I really don't feel like it) and leave it for actual philosophy students to dissect
Nonono, you tried to translate "post" into german, forgetting that it isn't even a proper english word in this context ("Pfosten" is literally the "post" from a fence, for example), but a shortening of "posting", which would be most adequately translated as "Buchung", thus "erste Buchung", though that is not in spirit with the "first post", because "posting" only refers to fora since the internet-age (you could have gone for "erste Plakatierung" as with wanted-posters, bulletin-boards (called "black boards" in german... This is where it get's confusing :-P ), etc.), and german hasn't undergone the same choice here. Most indeed prefer the english capitalized and gender-neutral "erstes Posting", or, for german-only audiences "erste Nachricht" -> "first message". :-P
Thanks for your time