People who get snobby about resemblances always amuse me. Tolkien himself borrowed heavily from Norse myth cycles, and Moorcock, jesus, borrows from everywhere.
Does that mean it's not good? No. It just means that art is often derivative from other art. Is the whole of Impressionism soiled by the fact that it wasn't all done by one guy?
So what if WoW is derivative? You certainly can't say they didn't do anything original, which is a hell of a lot more than you can say for any of the other multitude of copies out there.
I see where he's coming from...They have a simliar style of oratory. Mind you, a lot of people have that style these days, full of irrational anger, lies, and hysterical denunciations...dire predictions, and "obvious" solutions.
The only real response is rationality, and people respecting the rational over the irrational, so that the people espousing rationality and rational solutions become popular and the people espousing radical irrational crap end up living in refrigerator boxes, eating dog food straight from the can.
Generally this stuff is cyclical, and after a long enough run of hysteria and irrationality, the masses lose patience with it, and things swing the other way. Of course, there is always the possibility thatthe swing will become so absurd something drastic will have to be done to move things back toward the middle. Let's hope not.
Bethesda's views on user mods are just the opposite...They want an active mod community, and they opened up the API hooks to help the mod community make better mods.
Almost all good RPGs are doing this these days, because it drives interest and gets new content for free. Look at Neverwinter Nights...The mod community there is huge, and that game is still popular well past the point where a lot of similar games stalled.
Sure, every now and then you're going to get boobies. It's a hard life. It should be common sense that mods can add to the game and change the rating. Mind I think the game was rated too low, but I think that based on the out-of-the-box content, not the mods.
In my mind, a game like Diablo II is the bottom of the scale. No exploding chunks, mild blood (most of which isn't red), and a sophisticated plot that deals with evil and demons. Oblivion has all that, is easily moddable, and allows more significant closeups.
I think, especially since M is a debased and overused rating already, that, when in doubt, jump to M. Mind you, I think AO should actually be used, but I suppose that's too much to hope for. Maybe as online distribution catches on, we'll see more of that.
Can't be pissed off at Thompson for being a wanker...He was born that way, I doubt he could help it. I guess you could blame his parents for not slapping the stupid out of him...
All that being said, W. T. F. was the ESRB thinking giving that game a goddamn Teen rating? DIABLO II got a goddamn M rating. Any moron would know that a first person game with fricking SWORDS is going to rate an M. Didn't Morrowind rate an M?
Really, does it weight that heavily on the sales if it ends up rated M?
Mac tower cases open up easily. But all of the "all in one" types with the built in monitor are a fricking nightmare. Looking at the new iMacs I don't have the faintest idea how you'd do "easy" maintenance on them. I remember working on the old SE's...It was like that game "Operation" because if your screwdriver slipped it could go right through the damn picture tube. The newer eMacs aren't that bad, but they're still above and beyond most home users.
Calling British journalism biased is missing the point...Of course it's biased. They don't ascribe to the American delusion that journalism can be unbiased.
They wear their bias on their sleeves, which, in my opinion, is a good thing, because you know the type of slant that's on what you're reading, and nobody claims to be "Fair and Balanced" when they're anything but.
Lacking any sort of empirical data behind this one, so take it with a grain of salt...
In our experience with the universe, are there many things that happen only once? Sure, there are variations, but things that are utterly unique? Nearly everything is the outcome of obvious interactions with physical laws. We see the contant refections of math in the world, we see stars forming, and stars failing, planets being born, planets disintigrating. Things grow, things die.
But the universe has a beginning and an end? Why should it be different? Do we have any real evidence that it is different? No. All that being the case, it seems rational to extrapolate out that the universe represents the result of some cylical physical process, rather than some kind of cosmological one-off. Sure we may not understand it, but it is reasonable to proceed in that direction. The only reason to proceed in the other direction is religious in origin.
People actually survive a lot more than you'd think. Here is a good paper about the Stapp G-force tests of the 60's. They basically strapped people to a rocket-propelled railcar, and then decelerated with other rockets.
The record from the tests was 83g's of deceleration experienced by a Captain Beeding. I think he suffered some temporary blindness and shock, but no permanent harm.
This won't make it any better...You'll just have to have so many chips implanted you'll look like a chip hedgehog.
The problem lies with corporations who are too lazy to set up some kind of integrated security...unfortunately microshaft has one of the most friendly setups, with Active Directory, but it doesn't play well with others, and it has all the problems associated with all the other microsoft products.
So you end up with every application having its own security, and then corporate decides that all passwords have to be 25 characters long with at least 5 characters of sanskrit, and they have to be changed every full moon, and you can't reuse a password within the same neptunian orbital period, and if you type the wrong password three times, you have to call an admin to get yourself unlocked because giving a non-admin unlock privledges would be A MASSIVE SECURITY BREACH.
I admin this one system...Everyone who logs into it, who isn't an admin, needs one password. In order for me to log in to change their password, I need three. And while I'm typing in my damn list of obscenely long and complicated passwords, I have some yammering user on the phone complaining about the password policy.
Trust me, we hate it too. It's the name of the game these days, unfortunately. I don't think implanted chips are the answer though...Mainly because they'll be obsolescent so fast, what's the point?
I wouldn't go so far as to call myself a MMO junkie, but I've been playing 'em forever. There is only one reason for them to focus on RPG above all other things: Profit.
Think about it...What other genre rewards you based on time played? Levels, new equipment, new spells, new skills, new crafting abilities. Planetside, in all other respects one of the few games to break from the pack, still had a strong leveling element. Even there, in the expansion content, they added a bunch of timesinks to keep people coming back.
I think in the long run, they'll find that there are other good models, that are also potentially profitable revenue streams, but, at this point, I think they're just doing the mad bandwagon rush. It amusing. You'd think WoW would have taught them something(That it doesn't matter when you jump on the bandwagon, if you jump on it with an excellent product).
They cropped a lot of incidental violence, as part of Lucas's conversion to namby pambyism. Like a lot of people who get shot, actually "fell down" in the original version. He hacked out a few frames around a lot of the shot people, to "lower the impact" of some nameless badguy getting whacked.
Kid killed it for me too. If they cast the same role as a sarcastic 14 year old, it would all have been okay. All the stupid things he says, delivered with withering sarcasm, would have been cool.
And frankly, even a 8 year old, or whatever he's supposed to be, would be hard pressed to deliver lines like "Ooops" and "Yippee!" with anything other than sarcasm in mind.
All future users of this phrase owe me a nickle, and all procedes (above and beyond the amount needed to support my crack & hooker habit) will go to billboards of Ballmer throwing chairs at an assortment of cute and fuzzy baby animals.
Yea, the "don't cheat" lesson was well learned. The best programmer in my year actually got brought up on charges once, because about 10 peoples programs turned out to be "too similar" to his.
The OS design project was 50/50 on design documents and code; deadweight didn't even do well at that.
Yea, where I went it was even worse than that. We only got theory in class. There was zero practical stuff. The thought was, languages come and go, but the theory remains the same.
Then we'd have TA labs where they'd go over programming problems.
The problem arose because of the disconnect between the two. The exams were strictly theory, and the labs were strictly practical. You might get a couple of points deducted for sloppy code, but if it worked with a reasonable level of efficiency you always got an A...Mind you, if you could program it was easy to get an A, because the number of people who couldn't program was pretty high, and the assignment grades were curved.
I was in Operating Systems design and Principles of Programming Languages at the same time...The projects for the classes were due on Thursday and Friday respectively, and you had one project every two weeks. Things were pretty hairy, I'll tell you.
The first week, I had two of my lab partners in OSD offer to give me their code for PPL if I did their share of OSD. I accepted, mainly because OSD was just about that hard, and the PPL project was tedious C. I did my part, and they gave me their code.
I went home that night and tried to get their code to work. No luck. Ended up rewriting it from scratch and turning it in on Tuesday for a 40% reduction in grade, which ticked me off to no end. I got a 58 out of 100. One of my OSD lab partners came up to me after the grades had been passed out and asked me what I got, and I, still at this point falsely assuming that they'd screwed me, said "58" with a certain amount of vindictive scorn.
He then immediately and shamelessly started complaining that I hadn't given him my code for the project because he only got a fricking 5. Me and the other competent guy ended up ditching the other two.
I agree, to a degree, about degrees. I can easily tell the difference between a programmer who has formal training and a programmer who hasn't had formal training. On the other hand, I got my logic and math from the Philosophy program I went through before I got my CS degree, and I did pretty well in the field before the bomb hit and I decided to go get the official degree, so I have a softspot for people who came to CS through non-standard channels.
It was ranked in the top 25 when I was there. My senior project is still in the top ten for longest and most complicated things I've ever coded, and I've been in the field for almost a decade. Four people were on my programming team for the final project. Two of them were in another core class with me, and made every effort to mooch my code for both classes. First project for the second class I got the third highest grade in my section of 250...It was a 58. Class average? 6. 300 level class.
But, by all means, go on believing that it's just an isolated incident, and that nearly all people with a CS BS are top notch programmers. Experience tells me that most people who come out of school are mediocre coders at best, simply because of lack of experience...Apparently in your world, that's not the case...I can only assume you work in HR.
Funny story. Once, at a job interview, I was actually asked if I was "A+ Certified"
My response was, "No, but I don't really think that matters." They asked immediately (and in a snippy tone of voice), "Why not?" I shrugged and said, "I used to teach the course."
If anyone asks for A+ for anything other than a simple benchtech position, they obviously have no idea what they need.
A bachelor degree means 4 years of a wide variety of courses and grades from a variety of professors.
Considering the number of deadweight lab partners I had, who couldn't program their way out of a paper bag, but were quite excellent at reading the book and regurgitating for the test the sort of knowledge that is only useful in the context of the actual application which they were incapable of, I myself have little or no faith in a simple degree. A lot of people graduated higher in their class than I did, but most people didn't do four years in two.
In short, the ability to pass a practical skills test trumps any and all pieces of paper, short of the doctoral level. I'd much rather an excellent programmer with no formal education (not the kind with weird ass logic loops and utterly non-standard syntax...a good one), than someone with a bs BS who can't do anything but wave his diploma around.
That's cool. I didn't know that, though, in retrospect, it does seem like there are always a few Senatorial seats (in races that I notice/care about) up in every election cycle.
Slashdot Mirror
People who get snobby about resemblances always amuse me. Tolkien himself borrowed heavily from Norse myth cycles, and Moorcock, jesus, borrows from everywhere.
Does that mean it's not good? No. It just means that art is often derivative from other art. Is the whole of Impressionism soiled by the fact that it wasn't all done by one guy?
So what if WoW is derivative? You certainly can't say they didn't do anything original, which is a hell of a lot more than you can say for any of the other multitude of copies out there.
I see where he's coming from...They have a simliar style of oratory. Mind you, a lot of people have that style these days, full of irrational anger, lies, and hysterical denunciations...dire predictions, and "obvious" solutions.
The only real response is rationality, and people respecting the rational over the irrational, so that the people espousing rationality and rational solutions become popular and the people espousing radical irrational crap end up living in refrigerator boxes, eating dog food straight from the can.
Generally this stuff is cyclical, and after a long enough run of hysteria and irrationality, the masses lose patience with it, and things swing the other way. Of course, there is always the possibility thatthe swing will become so absurd something drastic will have to be done to move things back toward the middle. Let's hope not.
Bethesda's views on user mods are just the opposite...They want an active mod community, and they opened up the API hooks to help the mod community make better mods.
Almost all good RPGs are doing this these days, because it drives interest and gets new content for free. Look at Neverwinter Nights...The mod community there is huge, and that game is still popular well past the point where a lot of similar games stalled.
Sure, every now and then you're going to get boobies. It's a hard life. It should be common sense that mods can add to the game and change the rating. Mind I think the game was rated too low, but I think that based on the out-of-the-box content, not the mods.
In my mind, a game like Diablo II is the bottom of the scale. No exploding chunks, mild blood (most of which isn't red), and a sophisticated plot that deals with evil and demons. Oblivion has all that, is easily moddable, and allows more significant closeups.
I think, especially since M is a debased and overused rating already, that, when in doubt, jump to M. Mind you, I think AO should actually be used, but I suppose that's too much to hope for. Maybe as online distribution catches on, we'll see more of that.
Can't be pissed off at Thompson for being a wanker...He was born that way, I doubt he could help it. I guess you could blame his parents for not slapping the stupid out of him...
All that being said, W. T. F. was the ESRB thinking giving that game a goddamn Teen rating? DIABLO II got a goddamn M rating. Any moron would know that a first person game with fricking SWORDS is going to rate an M. Didn't Morrowind rate an M?
Really, does it weight that heavily on the sales if it ends up rated M?
What are you talking about? Best Buy has both of the processors on the market, and all three of the motherboards!
Sheesh, some people...
Not really. SELinux is just a different type of security model, it doesn't have anything to do with the kernel architecture.
Huh. I'll check 'em out.
Mac tower cases open up easily. But all of the "all in one" types with the built in monitor are a fricking nightmare. Looking at the new iMacs I don't have the faintest idea how you'd do "easy" maintenance on them. I remember working on the old SE's...It was like that game "Operation" because if your screwdriver slipped it could go right through the damn picture tube. The newer eMacs aren't that bad, but they're still above and beyond most home users.
Unexciting year, imho. Look at the winners, look at the ballots...Meh.
Glad Joss Whedon got something for Serenity.
Calling British journalism biased is missing the point...Of course it's biased. They don't ascribe to the American delusion that journalism can be unbiased.
They wear their bias on their sleeves, which, in my opinion, is a good thing, because you know the type of slant that's on what you're reading, and nobody claims to be "Fair and Balanced" when they're anything but.
Lacking any sort of empirical data behind this one, so take it with a grain of salt...
In our experience with the universe, are there many things that happen only once? Sure, there are variations, but things that are utterly unique? Nearly everything is the outcome of obvious interactions with physical laws. We see the contant refections of math in the world, we see stars forming, and stars failing, planets being born, planets disintigrating. Things grow, things die.
But the universe has a beginning and an end? Why should it be different? Do we have any real evidence that it is different? No. All that being the case, it seems rational to extrapolate out that the universe represents the result of some cylical physical process, rather than some kind of cosmological one-off. Sure we may not understand it, but it is reasonable to proceed in that direction. The only reason to proceed in the other direction is religious in origin.
People actually survive a lot more than you'd think. Here is a good paper about the Stapp G-force tests of the 60's. They basically strapped people to a rocket-propelled railcar, and then decelerated with other rockets.
The record from the tests was 83g's of deceleration experienced by a Captain Beeding. I think he suffered some temporary blindness and shock, but no permanent harm.
Building your own RPMs isn't all that difficult actually.
Official instructions are here, but you can google for every one in the worlds opinion on how it should be done.
This won't make it any better...You'll just have to have so many chips implanted you'll look like a chip hedgehog.
The problem lies with corporations who are too lazy to set up some kind of integrated security...unfortunately microshaft has one of the most friendly setups, with Active Directory, but it doesn't play well with others, and it has all the problems associated with all the other microsoft products.
So you end up with every application having its own security, and then corporate decides that all passwords have to be 25 characters long with at least 5 characters of sanskrit, and they have to be changed every full moon, and you can't reuse a password within the same neptunian orbital period, and if you type the wrong password three times, you have to call an admin to get yourself unlocked because giving a non-admin unlock privledges would be A MASSIVE SECURITY BREACH.
I admin this one system...Everyone who logs into it, who isn't an admin, needs one password. In order for me to log in to change their password, I need three. And while I'm typing in my damn list of obscenely long and complicated passwords, I have some yammering user on the phone complaining about the password policy.
Trust me, we hate it too. It's the name of the game these days, unfortunately. I don't think implanted chips are the answer though...Mainly because they'll be obsolescent so fast, what's the point?
Nope, you're giving them too much credit.
I wouldn't go so far as to call myself a MMO junkie, but I've been playing 'em forever. There is only one reason for them to focus on RPG above all other things: Profit.
Think about it...What other genre rewards you based on time played? Levels, new equipment, new spells, new skills, new crafting abilities. Planetside, in all other respects one of the few games to break from the pack, still had a strong leveling element. Even there, in the expansion content, they added a bunch of timesinks to keep people coming back.
I think in the long run, they'll find that there are other good models, that are also potentially profitable revenue streams, but, at this point, I think they're just doing the mad bandwagon rush. It amusing. You'd think WoW would have taught them something(That it doesn't matter when you jump on the bandwagon, if you jump on it with an excellent product).
They cropped a lot of incidental violence, as part of Lucas's conversion to namby pambyism. Like a lot of people who get shot, actually "fell down" in the original version. He hacked out a few frames around a lot of the shot people, to "lower the impact" of some nameless badguy getting whacked.
Kid killed it for me too. If they cast the same role as a sarcastic 14 year old, it would all have been okay. All the stupid things he says, delivered with withering sarcasm, would have been cool.
And frankly, even a 8 year old, or whatever he's supposed to be, would be hard pressed to deliver lines like "Ooops" and "Yippee!" with anything other than sarcasm in mind.
I just copyrighted the "IP on IE" t-shirt.
All future users of this phrase owe me a nickle, and all procedes (above and beyond the amount needed to support my crack & hooker habit) will go to billboards of Ballmer throwing chairs at an assortment of cute and fuzzy baby animals.
Yea, the "don't cheat" lesson was well learned. The best programmer in my year actually got brought up on charges once, because about 10 peoples programs turned out to be "too similar" to his.
The OS design project was 50/50 on design documents and code; deadweight didn't even do well at that.
=P
Yea, where I went it was even worse than that. We only got theory in class. There was zero practical stuff. The thought was, languages come and go, but the theory remains the same.
Then we'd have TA labs where they'd go over programming problems.
The problem arose because of the disconnect between the two. The exams were strictly theory, and the labs were strictly practical. You might get a couple of points deducted for sloppy code, but if it worked with a reasonable level of efficiency you always got an A...Mind you, if you could program it was easy to get an A, because the number of people who couldn't program was pretty high, and the assignment grades were curved.
I was in Operating Systems design and Principles of Programming Languages at the same time...The projects for the classes were due on Thursday and Friday respectively, and you had one project every two weeks. Things were pretty hairy, I'll tell you.
The first week, I had two of my lab partners in OSD offer to give me their code for PPL if I did their share of OSD. I accepted, mainly because OSD was just about that hard, and the PPL project was tedious C. I did my part, and they gave me their code.
I went home that night and tried to get their code to work. No luck. Ended up rewriting it from scratch and turning it in on Tuesday for a 40% reduction in grade, which ticked me off to no end. I got a 58 out of 100. One of my OSD lab partners came up to me after the grades had been passed out and asked me what I got, and I, still at this point falsely assuming that they'd screwed me, said "58" with a certain amount of vindictive scorn.
He then immediately and shamelessly started complaining that I hadn't given him my code for the project because he only got a fricking 5. Me and the other competent guy ended up ditching the other two.
I agree, to a degree, about degrees. I can easily tell the difference between a programmer who has formal training and a programmer who hasn't had formal training. On the other hand, I got my logic and math from the Philosophy program I went through before I got my CS degree, and I did pretty well in the field before the bomb hit and I decided to go get the official degree, so I have a softspot for people who came to CS through non-standard channels.
It was ranked in the top 25 when I was there. My senior project is still in the top ten for longest and most complicated things I've ever coded, and I've been in the field for almost a decade. Four people were on my programming team for the final project. Two of them were in another core class with me, and made every effort to mooch my code for both classes. First project for the second class I got the third highest grade in my section of 250...It was a 58. Class average? 6. 300 level class.
But, by all means, go on believing that it's just an isolated incident, and that nearly all people with a CS BS are top notch programmers. Experience tells me that most people who come out of school are mediocre coders at best, simply because of lack of experience...Apparently in your world, that's not the case...I can only assume you work in HR.
Funny story. Once, at a job interview, I was actually asked if I was "A+ Certified"
My response was, "No, but I don't really think that matters."
They asked immediately (and in a snippy tone of voice), "Why not?"
I shrugged and said, "I used to teach the course."
If anyone asks for A+ for anything other than a simple benchtech position, they obviously have no idea what they need.
A bachelor degree means 4 years of a wide variety of courses and grades from a variety of professors.
Considering the number of deadweight lab partners I had, who couldn't program their way out of a paper bag, but were quite excellent at reading the book and regurgitating for the test the sort of knowledge that is only useful in the context of the actual application which they were incapable of, I myself have little or no faith in a simple degree. A lot of people graduated higher in their class than I did, but most people didn't do four years in two.
In short, the ability to pass a practical skills test trumps any and all pieces of paper, short of the doctoral level. I'd much rather an excellent programmer with no formal education (not the kind with weird ass logic loops and utterly non-standard syntax...a good one), than someone with a bs BS who can't do anything but wave his diploma around.
That's cool. I didn't know that, though, in retrospect, it does seem like there are always a few Senatorial seats (in races that I notice/care about) up in every election cycle.