There are plenty of other people who refuse to buy EA titles. I'm one of them. In fact, since they burned me something like a decade ago on two successive, absolutely shitty, bug-ridden games, I haven't bought anything from them. Every time a story like this comes up I laugh reading all the comments about bad EA games. I'm surprised that so many people haven't learned the EA lesson yet. I guess their commercials are so awesome that it makes up for the actual games....
There aren't any "properly designed multiplayer games". I've seen plenty which have some sort of ranking system for matching up players. What happens? Very good players get bored playing against very good players, make another account, and spend a month or so working their way back up the ladder crushing new players. They send their gear to their alts, so not only do they have massive skill over new players, they have untouchable gear. I haven't yet seen a game with a "douchebag rating" sort of system either. You're forced to ignore (if you can) every third individual spewing crap out of their mouths.
The problem with multiplayer is you can't play casually.
You can when your friends are visiting you.
No, you can't. There are very few games where that's the case. Most console multiplayer games have gone away from split screens, and "multiplayer" is now "online multiplayer", where you have to be on separate consoles, with separate subscriptions to play online. Sure, there are still a few Mario Cart and "people on a platform" sort of games to play multiplayer. But the bulk of console games now can't be played by 2-4 people in the same room at the same time.
Before you rip into other posters, you might want to take a look at the current state of console gaming. It's changed a ton in the last 5 years or so.
Thanks, but that's not even an option for me. I apparently have to enable some other script to get that one... Yet another site which loses my eyeballs due to its sketchy-ass maze of scripts.
I don't see anything. No video to be found. I allowed most of the scripts on the page, but google-analytics is on my blacklist. Perhaps it needs to be enabled to watch the video? No idea.
So what do I see? I see a site that runs a shitton of sketchy-ass scripts, and doesn't work without them.
This is a kdawson article...there's a reason a huge chunk of us have blocked his posts as an editor. They are largely incorrect, poorly written, steaming piles of shit. I'm out of ways to hide from his crap now that other editors post it for him. Well, other than just quitting slashdot entirely...
Too many of us have blocked his articles, so the pageviews were going down. It was either find another way to get them eyeballs, or fire kdawson. And as we know quite well around here, you can't get fired for incompetence...
I was thinking about this the other day. I wondered if we could use some sort of PGP setup with a public and private key to verify who we were connecting to. It wouldn't help upon first connect, but you could definitely ensure that you were connecting to someone you'd connected to before. Starting from our current DNS, we could build a web of trusted p2p DNS entries, no matter the current or future name. It'd be interesting to redo DNS and drop both http and the TLD. I don't know that either are needed if you're doing a p2p DNS setup.
Um, so once you hit it, you leave it on? I usually turn it off afterwards...
I'm guessing you want "It's an accident, 50.000% of the time".
That said, other than laptops, any keyboard I use regularly has the caps lock key pulled off and tossed into a drawer. I'm a bit more hesitant to do it with laptops, as if I break anything, it's a *lot* harder to replace.
You hit the nail on the head. I just posted above how much more productive I am with no set hours. I have a weekly progress meeting with my boss. I work in my head while surfing the web, on the bus ride home, with my feet up and a beer in hand. I work drunk off my ass, on a sunday night. I get shit done, set the alarm late, and sleep in.
I've had time cards, punch machines, and morning check-ins. I do so much more work with nothing more than a weekly progress meeting. And I love life.
The big key here is that bureaucracy is self-propagating. You make a position, and someone will make sure that they have shit to do. If you make a "make workers more productive" position, they sure as hell aren't going to go, "well, boss, they're about as productive as they can be. No reason for me to have a job." No, they're going to do a survey on internet use, and then use that to justify why you need to pay them. Not that it makes anyone do a better job....
As someone who went back to school after 10 years in the workforce, I really understand how poor this is. I waste time like nobody's business while at "work" now. But you know what? My brain is working the whole time. 2 hours surfing the web, and I might just figure out what's not working in my code. I might go home, and on the bus ride back, figure out what the problem is. I might get home, pour a beer, put my feet up, feel guilty for wasting 4 hours that afternoon, and crank through more work than I would have at work.
I've been on the clock before. I've had a timecard. I've had mandatory, checked-in-upon start times for work. And I think that now, with no set hours, no enforcement of my work, I do better work than ever before. I have one weekly progress meeting with my boss. That's it. The rest is totally up to me.
I slept until 11:30 this morning. Got up and ate some pizza, watched some football, and popped open a terminal to go with the first beer of the day. I got work done while drinking beer and watching football. This evening, I'm closing in on two sheets to the wind, but I think I've figured out a problem that's been ruining things for weeks. I'm going to fix it. Watch some more TV, drink some water so I'm not totally hung over tomorrow, and then I'm going to bed. I'll put the "late alarm" on. Why? Because I need my sleep after this. I'll get to work at some point tomorrow.
Happy, low stressed employees get shit done. I wouldn't trade this for all the high paying jobs I had previously.
I can't get PulseAudio working in any way shape or form. Perfect setup doesn't work, no fresh Ubuntu installs work. I'd guess that it was hardware related, but the hardware is question is an old SB Live (maybe early Audigy) card. It worked fine for years under Gentoo and pre-PA Ubuntu releases. It works fine when I boot into windows for an occasional game. It works fine once I purge PulseAudio and go back to Alsa.
Every new Ubuntu release I try to fight with PA for a couple of days. When it's clear it's not going to work, I purge it, and all is well. (Outside of a few flash issues, of course.)
I understand what PulseAudio is supposed to do - I've had it semi-working at times. It's a great, great idea. It's badly needed for Linux. I just wish it goddamned worked for me! Best I've done so far is have everything work, except sounds queued up in the pipeline, and trickled out tens of seconds to minutes after they were called. Before PA crashed and died. I have to agree with the AC you replied to: "Man, the hours upon hours I've lost on Pulseaudio. Insanity."
Would it really be a "nightmare"? I tend to think not. I've had plenty of pets over the years. And a lot of them died. They were great friends and companions to me, but I haven't been living a "nightmare".
I think that the percentage of time in your life that you're "with" someone/something is pretty much proportional to how attached you get. When young, dead fish and hamsters are traumatic. When you're older, not so much. When the dog that's just passed is one in a line of ten that you've had, you'll be sad, but probably not devastated. When the family dog dies when you're a child, that's traumatic.
Yes, people are different, but if they have the life expectancy of pets to you, why would you mentally treat them differently? Sure, you'll be sad when they go. But just like there's always another puppy to get, so will there be more mortal friends to have.
What if, by some chance of fate, half the world didn't tie their shoelaces that day? That'd be interesting, although each event would definitely not be. So there is some (very minimal) point to the GP's statement that you can't just decide what's interesting, and then go look for it. You might miss something truly interesting and never know it.
Well, are we looking for common sense here or a bit of education? If given the choice of the two, I'll take educated stupidity over uneducated common sense any day. Why? Because if someone has taken the time to become educated, they're likely able to judge facts when presented with them, rather than stick to a position that they came into the argument with.
As a country boy, I do value common sense. But I recognize its limitations - when you add complexity, common sense starts to break down. You need an education and a perspective to make a good decision when faced with a complicated situation.
That ramble done, I'm glad it's not just me that doesn't get the OP's "no old folks" comment either.
IT, HR, PR, Legal and the C*s don't communicate with each other. PR will continue to gripe about "Pirates", regardless of whether or not they exist. The Legal dept will continue to go after targets no matter how responsible they are for things. The C*s will blame everyone except themselves for lower sales, because anything else would be their fault, and they'd get the boot and have to take their golden parachute to the ground, rather than staying in the money making role.
Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
I'll piggyback on that. Best memories for me of Christmas are the cooking, eating, and drinking. Honestly, I don't recall a single gift that I've gotten over the last decade or two. I do recall getting drunk with my sisters while making up girlie drinks in the blender. I do recall my dad taking over christmas dinner to make Yorkshire pudding every year - the smell of them, the taste.... I recall my grandparents driving over each year, older than the last. I recall taking in a couple of Danish exchange students who had nowhere to go for Christmas. Treating them to a night of drinking, a day of cinnamon sticky buns, omelets, hot coffee and christmas music. Generic presents, then a feast of roast beef, lamb, and sides. After dessert, cleaning off the table and playing assorted games. (None made by Milton Bradley or Hasboro)
Sure, my family does Christmas. But 95% of it is the people, food, and drinks. It doesn't matter if you're family or not - the exchange students were good examples of that. We get together, and have an awesome time. Everyone pitches in to help cook, haul wood through the snow for the fire, shovel walks, and keep the party going. Gifts? Meh. We give some, we get some. But they really are just a token attempt to celebrate the "American" way. We could easily do without them, and nobody would really notice. It'd be that much more time and money spent on food and drink, and enjoying our time together.
And my points were that a) there wouldn't be this discussion if there were functional editors, leading to more of the content we're looking for both in the comments and in the summary. b) you aren't helping the signal-to-noise ratio by posting comments complaining. Best you can do is meta-mod.
And when was the last time you found any here? The summaries are generally horrifically written to the point of confusion, basic grammar is lacking, and they're generally wildly inaccurate and point to secondary and tertiary sources rather than the readily available primary sources. The comments are generally more people trying to be funny than informative, as the number of knowledgeable people dwindle. That leaves us with people complaining about stuff like grammar, and people complaining about them. Neither help this site. Both would disappear if we could get some actual editors to do some actual work on stories.
Yep. I can concur with the GP. I'm paying $35 for the same connection he has. Like the GP, that's my price limit. I'd love to be paying $20-$25 US for the connection that you have.
While I'm no fan of the telecos here, I do recognize that my price is subsidizing their expansion into rural areas, where there are only a couple of houses every mile. I lived in one such rural area. Without the regulators making rural broadband a requirement, those houses will never have broadband. And without me subsidizing them at least a little, telecos would go broke trying to make that happen.
While they are money grubbing bastards, the US still has a lot of areas where only a few people live, and where the communications infrastructure is spotty. That alone makes it more expensive for ISPs to operate here.
Tons of people have worked out that this stupid policy is not a solution - why hasn't the government?
Because they believe their purpose is to *do something*. That's why they were elected/appointed. Not doing anything means their position is pointless, and you can't sustain a bureaucracy that way.
Simply put, nobody is going to tell the people responsible for their job that they can't find anything to do. It either makes you look incompetent, or it makes it look your position is redundant and should be eliminated.
Slashdot Mirror
There are plenty of other people who refuse to buy EA titles. I'm one of them. In fact, since they burned me something like a decade ago on two successive, absolutely shitty, bug-ridden games, I haven't bought anything from them. Every time a story like this comes up I laugh reading all the comments about bad EA games. I'm surprised that so many people haven't learned the EA lesson yet. I guess their commercials are so awesome that it makes up for the actual games....
There aren't any "properly designed multiplayer games". I've seen plenty which have some sort of ranking system for matching up players. What happens? Very good players get bored playing against very good players, make another account, and spend a month or so working their way back up the ladder crushing new players. They send their gear to their alts, so not only do they have massive skill over new players, they have untouchable gear. I haven't yet seen a game with a "douchebag rating" sort of system either. You're forced to ignore (if you can) every third individual spewing crap out of their mouths.
The problem with multiplayer is you can't play casually.
You can when your friends are visiting you.
No, you can't. There are very few games where that's the case. Most console multiplayer games have gone away from split screens, and "multiplayer" is now "online multiplayer", where you have to be on separate consoles, with separate subscriptions to play online. Sure, there are still a few Mario Cart and "people on a platform" sort of games to play multiplayer. But the bulk of console games now can't be played by 2-4 people in the same room at the same time.
Before you rip into other posters, you might want to take a look at the current state of console gaming. It's changed a ton in the last 5 years or so.
Thanks, but that's not even an option for me. I apparently have to enable some other script to get that one... Yet another site which loses my eyeballs due to its sketchy-ass maze of scripts.
I don't see anything. No video to be found. I allowed most of the scripts on the page, but google-analytics is on my blacklist. Perhaps it needs to be enabled to watch the video? No idea.
So what do I see? I see a site that runs a shitton of sketchy-ass scripts, and doesn't work without them.
This is a kdawson article...there's a reason a huge chunk of us have blocked his posts as an editor. They are largely incorrect, poorly written, steaming piles of shit. I'm out of ways to hide from his crap now that other editors post it for him. Well, other than just quitting slashdot entirely...
Too many of us have blocked his articles, so the pageviews were going down. It was either find another way to get them eyeballs, or fire kdawson. And as we know quite well around here, you can't get fired for incompetence...
I was thinking about this the other day. I wondered if we could use some sort of PGP setup with a public and private key to verify who we were connecting to. It wouldn't help upon first connect, but you could definitely ensure that you were connecting to someone you'd connected to before. Starting from our current DNS, we could build a web of trusted p2p DNS entries, no matter the current or future name. It'd be interesting to redo DNS and drop both http and the TLD. I don't know that either are needed if you're doing a p2p DNS setup.
Um, so once you hit it, you leave it on? I usually turn it off afterwards...
I'm guessing you want "It's an accident, 50.000% of the time".
That said, other than laptops, any keyboard I use regularly has the caps lock key pulled off and tossed into a drawer. I'm a bit more hesitant to do it with laptops, as if I break anything, it's a *lot* harder to replace.
You hit the nail on the head. I just posted above how much more productive I am with no set hours. I have a weekly progress meeting with my boss. I work in my head while surfing the web, on the bus ride home, with my feet up and a beer in hand. I work drunk off my ass, on a sunday night. I get shit done, set the alarm late, and sleep in.
I've had time cards, punch machines, and morning check-ins. I do so much more work with nothing more than a weekly progress meeting. And I love life.
The big key here is that bureaucracy is self-propagating. You make a position, and someone will make sure that they have shit to do. If you make a "make workers more productive" position, they sure as hell aren't going to go, "well, boss, they're about as productive as they can be. No reason for me to have a job." No, they're going to do a survey on internet use, and then use that to justify why you need to pay them. Not that it makes anyone do a better job....
As someone who went back to school after 10 years in the workforce, I really understand how poor this is. I waste time like nobody's business while at "work" now. But you know what? My brain is working the whole time. 2 hours surfing the web, and I might just figure out what's not working in my code. I might go home, and on the bus ride back, figure out what the problem is. I might get home, pour a beer, put my feet up, feel guilty for wasting 4 hours that afternoon, and crank through more work than I would have at work.
I've been on the clock before. I've had a timecard. I've had mandatory, checked-in-upon start times for work. And I think that now, with no set hours, no enforcement of my work, I do better work than ever before. I have one weekly progress meeting with my boss. That's it. The rest is totally up to me.
I slept until 11:30 this morning. Got up and ate some pizza, watched some football, and popped open a terminal to go with the first beer of the day. I got work done while drinking beer and watching football. This evening, I'm closing in on two sheets to the wind, but I think I've figured out a problem that's been ruining things for weeks. I'm going to fix it. Watch some more TV, drink some water so I'm not totally hung over tomorrow, and then I'm going to bed. I'll put the "late alarm" on. Why? Because I need my sleep after this. I'll get to work at some point tomorrow.
Happy, low stressed employees get shit done. I wouldn't trade this for all the high paying jobs I had previously.
I can't get PulseAudio working in any way shape or form. Perfect setup doesn't work, no fresh Ubuntu installs work. I'd guess that it was hardware related, but the hardware is question is an old SB Live (maybe early Audigy) card. It worked fine for years under Gentoo and pre-PA Ubuntu releases. It works fine when I boot into windows for an occasional game. It works fine once I purge PulseAudio and go back to Alsa.
Every new Ubuntu release I try to fight with PA for a couple of days. When it's clear it's not going to work, I purge it, and all is well. (Outside of a few flash issues, of course.)
I understand what PulseAudio is supposed to do - I've had it semi-working at times. It's a great, great idea. It's badly needed for Linux. I just wish it goddamned worked for me! Best I've done so far is have everything work, except sounds queued up in the pipeline, and trickled out tens of seconds to minutes after they were called. Before PA crashed and died. I have to agree with the AC you replied to: "Man, the hours upon hours I've lost on Pulseaudio. Insanity."
Would it really be a "nightmare"? I tend to think not. I've had plenty of pets over the years. And a lot of them died. They were great friends and companions to me, but I haven't been living a "nightmare".
I think that the percentage of time in your life that you're "with" someone/something is pretty much proportional to how attached you get. When young, dead fish and hamsters are traumatic. When you're older, not so much. When the dog that's just passed is one in a line of ten that you've had, you'll be sad, but probably not devastated. When the family dog dies when you're a child, that's traumatic.
Yes, people are different, but if they have the life expectancy of pets to you, why would you mentally treat them differently? Sure, you'll be sad when they go. But just like there's always another puppy to get, so will there be more mortal friends to have.
What if, by some chance of fate, half the world didn't tie their shoelaces that day? That'd be interesting, although each event would definitely not be. So there is some (very minimal) point to the GP's statement that you can't just decide what's interesting, and then go look for it. You might miss something truly interesting and never know it.
Well, are we looking for common sense here or a bit of education? If given the choice of the two, I'll take educated stupidity over uneducated common sense any day. Why? Because if someone has taken the time to become educated, they're likely able to judge facts when presented with them, rather than stick to a position that they came into the argument with.
As a country boy, I do value common sense. But I recognize its limitations - when you add complexity, common sense starts to break down. You need an education and a perspective to make a good decision when faced with a complicated situation.
That ramble done, I'm glad it's not just me that doesn't get the OP's "no old folks" comment either.
Correct.
IT, HR, PR, Legal and the C*s don't communicate with each other. PR will continue to gripe about "Pirates", regardless of whether or not they exist. The Legal dept will continue to go after targets no matter how responsible they are for things. The C*s will blame everyone except themselves for lower sales, because anything else would be their fault, and they'd get the boot and have to take their golden parachute to the ground, rather than staying in the money making role.
Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
I'll piggyback on that. Best memories for me of Christmas are the cooking, eating, and drinking. Honestly, I don't recall a single gift that I've gotten over the last decade or two. I do recall getting drunk with my sisters while making up girlie drinks in the blender. I do recall my dad taking over christmas dinner to make Yorkshire pudding every year - the smell of them, the taste.... I recall my grandparents driving over each year, older than the last. I recall taking in a couple of Danish exchange students who had nowhere to go for Christmas. Treating them to a night of drinking, a day of cinnamon sticky buns, omelets, hot coffee and christmas music. Generic presents, then a feast of roast beef, lamb, and sides. After dessert, cleaning off the table and playing assorted games. (None made by Milton Bradley or Hasboro)
Sure, my family does Christmas. But 95% of it is the people, food, and drinks. It doesn't matter if you're family or not - the exchange students were good examples of that. We get together, and have an awesome time. Everyone pitches in to help cook, haul wood through the snow for the fire, shovel walks, and keep the party going. Gifts? Meh. We give some, we get some. But they really are just a token attempt to celebrate the "American" way. We could easily do without them, and nobody would really notice. It'd be that much more time and money spent on food and drink, and enjoying our time together.
I'd go with IQ test showing more than 110, and proof that you're over 25 rather than years registered, but I understand the theory.
But why more than 10 years?
Yeah, it's been getting worse and worse lately. Got a solution?
Funny thing is that if MS did stop calling things MS* and Windows*, there would be cries of duplicity and deception.
And my points were that a) there wouldn't be this discussion if there were functional editors, leading to more of the content we're looking for both in the comments and in the summary. b) you aren't helping the signal-to-noise ratio by posting comments complaining. Best you can do is meta-mod.
who comes here only for raw information
And when was the last time you found any here? The summaries are generally horrifically written to the point of confusion, basic grammar is lacking, and they're generally wildly inaccurate and point to secondary and tertiary sources rather than the readily available primary sources. The comments are generally more people trying to be funny than informative, as the number of knowledgeable people dwindle. That leaves us with people complaining about stuff like grammar, and people complaining about them. Neither help this site. Both would disappear if we could get some actual editors to do some actual work on stories.
Yep. I can concur with the GP. I'm paying $35 for the same connection he has. Like the GP, that's my price limit. I'd love to be paying $20-$25 US for the connection that you have.
While I'm no fan of the telecos here, I do recognize that my price is subsidizing their expansion into rural areas, where there are only a couple of houses every mile. I lived in one such rural area. Without the regulators making rural broadband a requirement, those houses will never have broadband. And without me subsidizing them at least a little, telecos would go broke trying to make that happen.
While they are money grubbing bastards, the US still has a lot of areas where only a few people live, and where the communications infrastructure is spotty. That alone makes it more expensive for ISPs to operate here.
Tons of people have worked out that this stupid policy is not a solution - why hasn't the government?
Because they believe their purpose is to *do something*. That's why they were elected/appointed. Not doing anything means their position is pointless, and you can't sustain a bureaucracy that way.
Simply put, nobody is going to tell the people responsible for their job that they can't find anything to do. It either makes you look incompetent, or it makes it look your position is redundant and should be eliminated.
Actually, the moon is pretty much a stealth color - it's as reflective as well-worn pavement. The real issue is that it's just too big to hide.
And nothing new here...