Hey, no need to bring out your probably well-practiced defense against people who say you're a bad parent for letting your kids play video games. I agree with everything you said, and if I was talking about kids you'd have a very strong point.
I don't think you're a bad parent because you let 15 year olds and an 8 year old spend a lot of time gaming. Even when you let it interfere with life a little so that it teaches them something. It's completely normal and positive that you play video games with your own kids under your own roof. They're kids. That's what games are for.
If nothing changes in the next 10-15 years though, and your boys are 30, still live with you and don't have careers, still play vide games for five to fifteen hours a day, maybe selling characters and items to support their addiction, then that becomes sick and pathetic.
Libertarian or Republican?
Neither... Both... Sometimes a Democrat or a Green too. My opinions don't come from a list that the group I'm comfortable with gave me. I vote all over the spectrum, and I think for myself when I can.
Not sophistacated, but somewhat balanced. Somewhat unbalanced too. I said I'm a geek; I still spend too much time in front of a computer and sometimes have IM conversations with people in the same room. I have nine-hour marathon sessions in front of a PC too, forsaking sleep, friends, food... But usually at the end of it I have benefitted in some way other than gaining levels and magical items.
I really seem to have touched a nerve with this post. No surprise. Let me just clarify that I think it's completely okay to play video games as an adult, and it's unlikely that it will warp your sense of reality. But if you take it beyond a certain point then you are a sad, pathetic, often unstable person. I've seen it happen and probably everyone here has seen it also. If the place where you happened to see it was reflected in the glare of your monitor at 3am on a Friday night, where you'd been playing since you woke up, and you're not in high school, then I'm sorry if I have offended you by saying you should try doing something productive instead.
But as for kids, and people who spend no more time playing games than the average "normal person" spends watching television, I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about extreme cases, the worst of which we just read about in this article. And if you sell or especially buy virtual items for a game on Ebay then I'm probably talking about you too.
Certainly. I don't argue that adults shouldn't play. I do things purely for my own amusement. It's when it defines your life that it goes too far. 30 year olds who play video games for a few hours a week aren't abnormal or unhealthy based solely on that. But 30 year olds who play video games for a few hours a day and have been doing so for most of their lives... They tend to be abnormal and unhealthy. At least mildly. They lack the maturity and social skills that can only come from doing something besides that. It ain't just video games either. Dumb jocks who make baseball or basketball the whole point of living will inevitably become, well, dumb jocks. And maturity social skills are certainly the hallmarks of every dumb jock I've ever met.
An extreme example of what happens when otherwise intelligent adults can't put away the trappings of childhood.
Psychological maturity is inhibited. You get a baby in an adult body, who has a tantrum over a trivial problem that only a child should have, (except that a very grown-up sum of money was involved) reacting in a manner that rational human beings reserve for only the most severe of situations.
And it wasn't even about the money! This dude wanted his toy sword back and not even a shitload of money was good enough to spare the life of this other sad, stunted individual.
I know that playing video games with every free moment of one's time doesn't inflict this degree of insanity on all gamers, and I know that playing GTA doesn't make kids think it's okay to shoot people and blow shit up, but it happens to some degree at least to a hell of a lot of people. I am a geek. Most of my friends are geeks. Many of them are gamers, and not ONE of them who spends a significant amount of each day devoted to a pointless virtual world would I consider to be a psychologically-complete, well-adjusted adult. Good, smart, valuable people - yes. Socially fucked-up? You betcha. And these are just people who miss work occasionally to play Everquest or stay home all weekend for Ultima Online. These are not the disturbingly growing number of vegetables who are sick enough to sell characters, armor and swords on Ebay. These guys sometimes ignore reality for a game, but many people try to make reality a part of the game. How else is it not cheating when you buy in-game items?
Playing games is a normal part of growing up, and a healthy stage of life. Every mammal I can think of does this when they're young. It builds character. It's essential. Lion cubs and wolf-pups stop doing this once they have to provide for themselves, though. The only animals who play games throughout their lives are domesticated ones. Would your tail-wagging, yapping dog ever be able to take down prey and feed itself on a regular basis if it had to live in the wild? My nine year old cat who still acts the way a cub does in the real world certainly wouldn't.
Slashdot is surely the wrong soundingboard with which to convey these opinions, but I had to vent.
Gamers, think of your dignity. This is how you look to me and a lot of other people.
The thing you're lookin' for is called WASTE and it's a beautfiful thing. Roll your own encrypted P2P network and only let in people you trust. Nullsoft released it under GPL, then didn't.
Might have a look at Mitel (formerly e-smith) SME Server. I've been using it for my file server at home, email, and to host a few domains for a couple of years now. Good stuff, pretty secure, can also be your router/gateway. One ther I haven't looked at, but I intend to check out soon, is BlueQuartz. Not really a distro, but the results of Sun open-sourcing the Sobalt RaQ550 network appliance. There's a binary install kit for a basic Redhat/Fedora setup, source, and many howto's out there...
The difference, at least as far as I can tell, is just in the scrolling. Less give you a vi-ish ":" prompt at the bottom, and you can use the arrows to scroll up and down through all of the text, instead of having it just pause at the end of each screen to before filling it again. It's somewhere between using more and using a text editor to view it.
I'm thinking it's not about ideology so much as budget... "Freeware" is often not Free as in speech, and "Free" is often not free as in beer. I think we're just talking about stuff that doesn't cost anything.
Yes. Get a second cat. One who doesn't like to chew cables, but is encouraged to sleep where the cables are and doesn't like the other cat. Or hates the other cat, or hates Life, the Universe and Everything. This works great for me. I have three cats, a dog who chews everything, and assloads of cables. I don't even know where all of them go anymore. When the dog's in the house my old, huge, pissed-off, lard-ass cat goes on alert and he will cut her the hell up if she goes near his nest of cables. Screw these ideas about putting capstun, pepper sauce, soap, etc. on your cables. Hell, put catnip on them, a pillow, food dish, everything you need to make an old mean-ass cat think that's the most comfortable place in the house. Problem solved. Just watch your feet and don't invade his personal space when you're sitting at his desk.
Doesn't this just reinforce bad behaviour? how does the cat know that its ok to chew on "cat" cables not "your" cables?
I guess you don't have a cat. =) The notion that the cat will learn "right" or "wrong," "good" or "bad" behavior is wishful thinking at best. This idea applies to dogs just fine, since they're more likely to see people as some kind of an authority figure. Cats however will think of you as an equal if you're lucky and worthy, and as a contemptible servant to be rewarded, punished and tolerated as the cat sees fit if you're not lucky. This person's cat will be chewing on cables until chewing on cables ceases to entertain it, and not before. Dogs want to make master happy and will respond to discipline, whereas cats want you to make master happy, and they will be the ones doing the disciplne...
Actually, I once did exactly that. Your efforts will be utterly frivolous and your message will fall on deaf ears. I sent a message to about 60 IP's. About 40-45 of those were Code Red, and the rest were NIMDA. Surprisingly, most of them didn't time out. (Well, I was surprised at first, but consider that the type of user who still had one of those two infections less than a year ago is unlikely to be firewalled or have any services disabled.) Anyway, I'd guess that my message probably showed up on 50 of those screens. My message was far less rude, very obviously not spam, and I even told them specifically which infection they had, that I'd help them clear it up, and even what part of town they lived in. I only got one response for all of my effort. The problem is simply that if you can get one of those messages through, then they've already got 400 other ones above and below yours. I port scanned a few of these to see if there was another way to get through to them about fucking up my bandwidth in addition to their own, and was sad to see that some of the major offenders were servers, probably locked up and forgotten about in a closet with the monitor off.
You said 2G (2nd generation). Would that include the most recent models? I had a 1999, now drive a 2002.
No, we're currently in the fourth generation of the F-body. 1993 and up are 4th, '82-'92 are 3rd, '70-'81 is the 2nd generation, (whose spoilers look like "ducktails") and 1st generation is '67-'69.
I've thought about coming up with a safe way to do that, many times. When I saw the headline for this thread I just knew I'd see the answer to my question here, but so far this is the only post that mentions my idea, and it was accidental. There has got to be a safe way of jolting yourself awake with electricity. I have zapped myself accidentally many times, and I can't remember a single instance in which I wasn't totally, irreversibly awake and alert. It's more effective than a pile of black powder going off in your face. (It is - trust me.) There must be a way. I've searched exhaustively for an alarm clock setup involving electrodes. Obviously no one openly sells such a contraption, but surely I can't be the only person who's thought of this seriously enough to want to try it. 110VAC is obviously too much. You could burn yourself, mess up your heart's rhythm, nerve damage, etc., but maybe something like a small-ish capacitor? One of my more memorable low-voltage jolts came from an "electric fence" rig to keep dogs in one's yard... I wonder if something like that would fit the bill? Think it's safe enough to hit yourself with that every day, possibly several times? And where and how should the electrodes be attached? Obviously they'd need to be comfortable, secure, and not near the head or chest... Any ideas, anyone? I'm completely serious about this. I'm probably going to build this eventually, but I'm nor sure how much voltage/current to use. I'm trying to strike a balance between safety and effectiveness...
That's a pretty messed-up attitude I think.. It's like saying over the years you've bought two Fords, two Hondas, a Toyota and four Nissans, then saying you've learned a lesson about American cars. That all Chyslers and Chevys suck because your Pinto and Festiva did. "White Boxes" can be damn near anything. I can hop online and build a machine so shitty it would put a Packard Bell to shame, or I can build a G5-killer. I could even use the same case for both. Are they both crap because they're "White Boxes?"
Grandparent,
which got modded into oblivion, said that nothing productive comes from Bell Labs. Didn't mean that it was an OS, but it was certainly productive...
"Sure they will; just not during setup. Check in the disk administrator instead once you have the OS up and running."
If this can be done, I'm very surprised and would be curious to know the circumstances. The inability to do exactly what you just decribed is the whole reason I did it the way I did. Actually I tried it that way on both 2k and XP. I'm not calling you a liar, but if you can do this, please tell me exactly how and it will save me some steps in the future.
"Windows 95B and C both used FAT32"
When I said "b" and "c" I was referring to partition types in Linux fdisk- these are hex codes. (ex: 83 is "Linux" and 82 is "Linux Swap," though I may have that backwards) The difference between these two types (b&c) is LBA support.
"It's hardly 'hidden' or 'secretive'."
Didn't say either; just that it's "little known." The way the newly-converted talk about 'NIX filesystems being able to mount partitions as directories leads me to believe they didn't know this could be done in Windows. (DOS too, actually.) It's certainly not hidden, but I don't think it's well-known.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, no need to bring out your probably well-practiced defense against people who say you're a bad parent for letting your kids play video games. I agree with everything you said, and if I was talking about kids you'd have a very strong point.
I don't think you're a bad parent because you let 15 year olds and an 8 year old spend a lot of time gaming. Even when you let it interfere with life a little so that it teaches them something. It's completely normal and positive that you play video games with your own kids under your own roof. They're kids. That's what games are for.
If nothing changes in the next 10-15 years though, and your boys are 30, still live with you and don't have careers, still play vide games for five to fifteen hours a day, maybe selling characters and items to support their addiction, then that becomes sick and pathetic.
Libertarian or Republican?
Neither... Both... Sometimes a Democrat or a Green too. My opinions don't come from a list that the group I'm comfortable with gave me. I vote all over the spectrum, and I think for myself when I can.
Not sophistacated, but somewhat balanced. Somewhat unbalanced too. I said I'm a geek; I still spend too much time in front of a computer and sometimes have IM conversations with people in the same room. I have nine-hour marathon sessions in front of a PC too, forsaking sleep, friends, food... But usually at the end of it I have benefitted in some way other than gaining levels and magical items.
I really seem to have touched a nerve with this post. No surprise. Let me just clarify that I think it's completely okay to play video games as an adult, and it's unlikely that it will warp your sense of reality. But if you take it beyond a certain point then you are a sad, pathetic, often unstable person. I've seen it happen and probably everyone here has seen it also. If the place where you happened to see it was reflected in the glare of your monitor at 3am on a Friday night, where you'd been playing since you woke up, and you're not in high school, then I'm sorry if I have offended you by saying you should try doing something productive instead.
But as for kids, and people who spend no more time playing games than the average "normal person" spends watching television, I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about extreme cases, the worst of which we just read about in this article. And if you sell or especially buy virtual items for a game on Ebay then I'm probably talking about you too.
Heh. Well what good would it do if I flamed gamers on a board where everyone agreed with me?
Certainly. I don't argue that adults shouldn't play. I do things purely for my own amusement. It's when it defines your life that it goes too far. 30 year olds who play video games for a few hours a week aren't abnormal or unhealthy based solely on that. But 30 year olds who play video games for a few hours a day and have been doing so for most of their lives... They tend to be abnormal and unhealthy. At least mildly. They lack the maturity and social skills that can only come from doing something besides that. It ain't just video games either. Dumb jocks who make baseball or basketball the whole point of living will inevitably become, well, dumb jocks. And maturity social skills are certainly the hallmarks of every dumb jock I've ever met.
An extreme example of what happens when otherwise intelligent adults can't put away the trappings of childhood.
Psychological maturity is inhibited. You get a baby in an adult body, who has a tantrum over a trivial problem that only a child should have, (except that a very grown-up sum of money was involved) reacting in a manner that rational human beings reserve for only the most severe of situations.
And it wasn't even about the money! This dude wanted his toy sword back and not even a shitload of money was good enough to spare the life of this other sad, stunted individual.
I know that playing video games with every free moment of one's time doesn't inflict this degree of insanity on all gamers, and I know that playing GTA doesn't make kids think it's okay to shoot people and blow shit up, but it happens to some degree at least to a hell of a lot of people. I am a geek. Most of my friends are geeks. Many of them are gamers, and not ONE of them who spends a significant amount of each day devoted to a pointless virtual world would I consider to be a psychologically-complete, well-adjusted adult. Good, smart, valuable people - yes. Socially fucked-up? You betcha. And these are just people who miss work occasionally to play Everquest or stay home all weekend for Ultima Online. These are not the disturbingly growing number of vegetables who are sick enough to sell characters, armor and swords on Ebay. These guys sometimes ignore reality for a game, but many people try to make reality a part of the game. How else is it not cheating when you buy in-game items?
Playing games is a normal part of growing up, and a healthy stage of life. Every mammal I can think of does this when they're young. It builds character. It's essential. Lion cubs and wolf-pups stop doing this once they have to provide for themselves, though. The only animals who play games throughout their lives are domesticated ones. Would your tail-wagging, yapping dog ever be able to take down prey and feed itself on a regular basis if it had to live in the wild? My nine year old cat who still acts the way a cub does in the real world certainly wouldn't.
Slashdot is surely the wrong soundingboard with which to convey these opinions, but I had to vent.
Gamers, think of your dignity. This is how you look to me and a lot of other people.
The thing you're lookin' for is called WASTE and it's a beautfiful thing. Roll your own encrypted P2P network and only let in people you trust. Nullsoft released it under GPL, then didn't.
Might have a look at Mitel (formerly e-smith) SME Server. I've been using it for my file server at home, email, and to host a few domains for a couple of years now. Good stuff, pretty secure, can also be your router/gateway. One ther I haven't looked at, but I intend to check out soon, is BlueQuartz. Not really a distro, but the results of Sun open-sourcing the Sobalt RaQ550 network appliance. There's a binary install kit for a basic Redhat/Fedora setup, source, and many howto's out there...
The difference, at least as far as I can tell, is just in the scrolling. Less give you a vi-ish ":" prompt at the bottom, and you can use the arrows to scroll up and down through all of the text, instead of having it just pause at the end of each screen to before filling it again. It's somewhere between using more and using a text editor to view it.
I'm thinking it's not about ideology so much as budget... "Freeware" is often not Free as in speech, and "Free" is often not free as in beer. I think we're just talking about stuff that doesn't cost anything.
Nah, stun guns don't paralyze... I used one once. I've never seen my little brother get outta bed so fast in my life.
Yeah, and I was pissed when they teased us about testing that poodle myth and didn't follow through!
Just a bit of should-be-obvious advice to anyone contemplating the oven trick: oven != microwave...
Bah... Tell ya what... Come over and establish dominance with my cat, and I'll give you a ride to the emergency room when he makes you his bitch. =)
Don't know about that "pet repellent" stuff... My cats don't care about it, and my dog drinks it.
Yes. Get a second cat. One who doesn't like to chew cables, but is encouraged to sleep where the cables are and doesn't like the other cat. Or hates the other cat, or hates Life, the Universe and Everything. This works great for me. I have three cats, a dog who chews everything, and assloads of cables. I don't even know where all of them go anymore. When the dog's in the house my old, huge, pissed-off, lard-ass cat goes on alert and he will cut her the hell up if she goes near his nest of cables. Screw these ideas about putting capstun, pepper sauce, soap, etc. on your cables. Hell, put catnip on them, a pillow, food dish, everything you need to make an old mean-ass cat think that's the most comfortable place in the house. Problem solved. Just watch your feet and don't invade his personal space when you're sitting at his desk.
Doesn't this just reinforce bad behaviour? how does the cat know that its ok to chew on "cat" cables not "your" cables?
I guess you don't have a cat. =) The notion that the cat will learn "right" or "wrong," "good" or "bad" behavior is wishful thinking at best. This idea applies to dogs just fine, since they're more likely to see people as some kind of an authority figure. Cats however will think of you as an equal if you're lucky and worthy, and as a contemptible servant to be rewarded, punished and tolerated as the cat sees fit if you're not lucky. This person's cat will be chewing on cables until chewing on cables ceases to entertain it, and not before. Dogs want to make master happy and will respond to discipline, whereas cats want you to make master happy, and they will be the ones doing the disciplne...
Calm down, mods... The mere mention of Gentoo doesn't neccessarily make parent a troll.
...MS should be writing these viruses as soon as a vunerability is discovered.
You mean something like Windows Update?
Actually, I once did exactly that. Your efforts will be utterly frivolous and your message will fall on deaf ears. I sent a message to about 60 IP's. About 40-45 of those were Code Red, and the rest were NIMDA. Surprisingly, most of them didn't time out. (Well, I was surprised at first, but consider that the type of user who still had one of those two infections less than a year ago is unlikely to be firewalled or have any services disabled.) Anyway, I'd guess that my message probably showed up on 50 of those screens. My message was far less rude, very obviously not spam, and I even told them specifically which infection they had, that I'd help them clear it up, and even what part of town they lived in. I only got one response for all of my effort. The problem is simply that if you can get one of those messages through, then they've already got 400 other ones above and below yours. I port scanned a few of these to see if there was another way to get through to them about fucking up my bandwidth in addition to their own, and was sad to see that some of the major offenders were servers, probably locked up and forgotten about in a closet with the monitor off.
You said 2G (2nd generation). Would that include the most recent models? I had a 1999, now drive a 2002.
No, we're currently in the fourth generation of the F-body. 1993 and up are 4th, '82-'92 are 3rd, '70-'81 is the 2nd generation, (whose spoilers look like "ducktails") and 1st generation is '67-'69.
I've thought about coming up with a safe way to do that, many times. When I saw the headline for this thread I just knew I'd see the answer to my question here, but so far this is the only post that mentions my idea, and it was accidental. There has got to be a safe way of jolting yourself awake with electricity. I have zapped myself accidentally many times, and I can't remember a single instance in which I wasn't totally, irreversibly awake and alert. It's more effective than a pile of black powder going off in your face. (It is - trust me.) There must be a way. I've searched exhaustively for an alarm clock setup involving electrodes. Obviously no one openly sells such a contraption, but surely I can't be the only person who's thought of this seriously enough to want to try it. 110VAC is obviously too much. You could burn yourself, mess up your heart's rhythm, nerve damage, etc., but maybe something like a small-ish capacitor? One of my more memorable low-voltage jolts came from an "electric fence" rig to keep dogs in one's yard... I wonder if something like that would fit the bill? Think it's safe enough to hit yourself with that every day, possibly several times? And where and how should the electrodes be attached? Obviously they'd need to be comfortable, secure, and not near the head or chest... Any ideas, anyone? I'm completely serious about this. I'm probably going to build this eventually, but I'm nor sure how much voltage/current to use. I'm trying to strike a balance between safety and effectiveness...
That's a pretty messed-up attitude I think.. It's like saying over the years you've bought two Fords, two Hondas, a Toyota and four Nissans, then saying you've learned a lesson about American cars. That all Chyslers and Chevys suck because your Pinto and Festiva did. "White Boxes" can be damn near anything. I can hop online and build a machine so shitty it would put a Packard Bell to shame, or I can build a G5-killer. I could even use the same case for both. Are they both crap because they're "White Boxes?"
Grandparent, which got modded into oblivion, said that nothing productive comes from Bell Labs. Didn't mean that it was an OS, but it was certainly productive...
What about VNC? That was relatively recent, and definitely a boon for a lot of us. Came from AT&T Cambridge, AKA Bell Labs.
"Sure they will; just not during setup. Check in the disk administrator instead once you have the OS up and running."
If this can be done, I'm very surprised and would be curious to know the circumstances. The inability to do exactly what you just decribed is the whole reason I did it the way I did. Actually I tried it that way on both 2k and XP. I'm not calling you a liar, but if you can do this, please tell me exactly how and it will save me some steps in the future.
"Windows 95B and C both used FAT32"
When I said "b" and "c" I was referring to partition types in Linux fdisk- these are hex codes. (ex: 83 is "Linux" and 82 is "Linux Swap," though I may have that backwards) The difference between these two types (b&c) is LBA support.
"It's hardly 'hidden' or 'secretive'."
Didn't say either; just that it's "little known." The way the newly-converted talk about 'NIX filesystems being able to mount partitions as directories leads me to believe they didn't know this could be done in Windows. (DOS too, actually.) It's certainly not hidden, but I don't think it's well-known.