I've bought two System76 laptops, both Serval Professionals (models serp3 and serp6). I've been fairly pleased with both and I've also been very happy with the company's support the few times I needed it. I plan on ordering two more laptops from them in the coming months.
Director M. Night Shyamalan stopped by a McDonalds and offered 30 patrons an advance screening of his next film but the popular response seemed to be "Just tell me what happens."
The Social Network 2: Zuckerberg Silences the Lambs
I believe he's a sociopath. He's killing under the guise of it being some kind of humanitarian act because it's socially acceptable for CEOs to spend their free time killing, like the Go Daddy CEO who announced that hunting elephants is the most rewarding thing he's ever done. It's rewarding to them because murder is the only thing that gets their dopamine production going.
These people just have an irresistible urge to snuff out life. Zuckerberg tried to screw people in business when he thought nobody could prove anything. He called people dumb fucks for trusting him with their personal information. The only time he's sorry about anything is when he gets caught. And now he's slitting animal throats, [sarcasm]what an awesome guy.[/sarcasm]
I wouldn't be surprised if there are prostitutes in the woods somewhere with his fingerprints on them; having to revert back to things that can't beg isn't going to satisfy him for long.
To all the CEOs who think that killing things is your best possible contribution to society, do us all a huge fucking favor and don't bother getting out of bed in the morning.
I've fished, crabbed, and slaughtered chickens on my grandmother's farm. In the end it's just nourishment to me, I don't derive any sense of fulfillment from being personally involved in the killing.
People have the same philosophy about every aspect of life. Stitch your own clothes, make your own soap, build your own house, grow your own weed, program your own operating system... of course there's value in experiencing everything in life, but I don't find it to be more true of one thing than another.
I think the philosophy of kill it yourself comes from the passive guilt associated with meat consumption without the emotional baggage imparted by the physical act of slaughter. I don't have any problem at all letting other people kill and prepare my food for me. Most of my life is designed to take advantage of the distribution of labor in society.
I really prefer the Industrialist approach; more money means more automation, to the end of eventually never needing to think about tasks related to basic biological maintenance.
I am 100% opposed to it, because it's not practical to build an a la carte menu of faults. If we're going to put a price tag on being fat or being a smoker then we need to put a price tag on a thousand other things. Even talking about this kind of thing marginalizes the involved groups. It's fucking pathetic that humans are so petty. Everyone is deathly afraid that they might arrive at the pearly gates and find out they split the bill and paid $0.01 more than their fair share.
It's a fucked up world. People will pay hundreds of dollars for tickets to a sporting event, but won't pay $10 to save someone's life because they made bad choices. There's nothing humans hate more than other humans.
It's a low hanging fruit. Many states burned through their tobacco winnings extremely fast by re-purposing the money (and never actually creating the resources and support programs to help people quit like they claimed they needed the money for).
In all fairness, the people who are now upset weren't even in office when the state got the settlements. It's not fair that they should have to deal with barren coffers when the smoking problem affects them too. Should they lose out just because their predecessors spent it all? And what about the next governor? Is he supposed to make do with no money?
Well, until the states get a second bite at the tobacco apple, bullying smokers and fat people who are obviously too weak-willed to defend themselves anyway, is probably the most lucrative option. If they were smart they'd go after Linux users next. Those assholes don't even pay sales tax when they get their operating system, it's time to wake them up from their "everything is free" fairy tale.
I know the FSF's mission is an ideal or a puritanical vision, but there are real important and pragmatic issues they address. I really have to agree with this idea of a "Javascript Trap". We've gotten very comfortable with free and open web services that it's easy to forget, the code that handles your sensitive data isn't open to review.
It's simple really, in the spirit of free and open software, code hiding in any form should ALWAYS be a red flag. There just shouldn't be a point where people say "...and, for the rest of the application, trust us, it just works somehow."
'We're seeing the scientific method playing out in real time.'
What the hell is that supposed to mean? In what other time frame does the scientific method normally play out? Dealing with computers, we watch the scientific method play out in real time right before our eyes every day. We can watch the scientific method play out every time someone buys a remote control and goes through the process of setting it up. Hypothesis of which brand/model and entry code match up, test the hypothesis, record the results and form a new hypothesis based on the conclusion.
I dunno why, that sentence just bugged me. it makes it seem like discovering an error while presenting the results is somehow a rare event.
I think of our supercomputing systems as primitive in an analogous way as cavemen wouldn't end up with a rocket thruster if they just throw enough logs on a fire.
Without more advanced software designs and some type of revolutionary system architecture, more cores ends up only being slightly better than linear progression. They're primitive in that our supercomputers are seldom more than the sum of their parts.
It's not just CNN. Almost every company wants a Myspace page, twitter, facebook, blog, texting service, user accounts and registration, among other tech toys. The problem is that these tools were clearly intended to empower individuals to connect with other individuals. The companies using these things usually don't have any concerted reason to do so.
Corporations might be legal individuals, but they're not people, and they gain little to no benefit (perhaps even detriment) from attempting to employ socialisation. If you look at corporations as sociopathic, narcissistic, and single-mindedly self-interested individuals, it's clear they see these things as just another manipulation mechanism. They're not socialising; the conversation is unidirectional. They don't absorb, process, and react on the information, they gather and retransmit with absolutely no transformation. They're not talking WITH us, they're just talking AT us.
CNN doesn't do anything with the tweets. It's as useful as going to a Starbucks and having the employees stare blankly at you and repeat to you, verbatim, something a previous customer said while standing in line. "Welcome to Starbucks, Shelly said: I'll have a cafe mocha, damn I shouldn't have stopped in here, I'm gonna be late for work."
The people running companies need to realize that their company isn't one of our pals. They can't talk to us in our social circles, they can't hang out with us at a pub, and they can't sit in on our D&D sessions. They're product and service providers, nothing more. The fact that they desperately try to extend themselves into our social space borders on triggering the uncanny valley feeling.
Too many people think of their vehicle in too personal a way. It's not a freedom chamber or mobilized entertainment center. It's a method of conveyance. More people should worry about using their car to get from Point A to Point B instead of worrying about all the things they don't want to be interrupted doing during travel time. In the U.S. alone, 100+ people will die TODAY primarily because people don't regard driving as a serious responsibility.
Why is it not enough that the miracle of modern locomotion enables us to shoot across a city in a matter of minutes? People worry about not being entertained or out of touch for the duration of the trip. The only thing that should concern us as drivers of lethal travel machines is getting to our destination safely. If you die, or kill someone, en-route, who called/texted you or which one of your favorite songs was playing will be the least of your concerns.
Before you even take a job, get clear on how often you'll be expected to work overtime and exactly how you're going to be compensated. If I need to have an "always on" mentality, the company needs to have an "always paying" mentality.
I realize that crunch time is the thing to do in the IT industry, but get clear up front so that kind of work cycle is something you understand when you accept the company's offer. If I need to put in an extra 10 hours every week or be on-call, I'm going to factor that into my salary negotiations. Once the deal is brokered, I'm left with a sense of satisfaction because I have the peace of mind in knowing I'm not being taken advantage of, I'm doing exactly what I signed up for.
Frankly, Oracle makes me nervous too as a programmer who has focused on Java for the last few years. Oracle isn't providing anyone any assurances, so everything just feels like it's up in the air right now. Sure, OpenJDK feels like a decent safety net but the waters haven't really been tested without Sun, so if Oracle/Sun withdraws the whole thing could crumble overnight.
When the company you're with gets bought out, their reluctance to paint a concrete picture as to the future of your project speaks louder than any half-hearted assurances they might give you.
LOL!
In 1998 I was looking for a job as a web developer. I had about 2 years experience, and I saw ads for 10+ years HTML experience. I explained to an interviewer it wasn't even possible for anyone to have 10 years of HTML experience, that the language didn't exist 10 years ago and anyone who tells you they have 10+ years experience is lying. I explained that even Tim Berners Lee doesn't have 10 years experience. The interviewer just shrugged and said "Well, that's one of the job requirements. We're not looking for anyone with less than 10 years experience."
I think more often than not, the requirement of needing a specific application is eclipsed by a technical knowledge gap. From my experience with computer users, most people don't really need a specific application, they've just learned a brand name like Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop. Those users can't name a single function that they perform in their branded application that isn't just as easily done in an alternative application.
I hear many people say "I need Application X for my job and it's not available on Linux." If I recommend Application Y that fills exactly the same role, they're just not comfortable because they don't know what they need Application X for, they just know that it's not on Linux. I've also encountered numerous situations where Application X is available for Linux, but they assume that it must somehow work differently or be less functional than the Windows/OSX version.
It pains me to see millions of people fork over a couple hundred dollars for Microsoft Office and in the entire lifetime of running the application the most advanced document they create has some bold, italics, tables, and clipart, but they think just by virtue of using a $200 application to do it their document will be inherently better than when you create bold characters in a free application. Besides, a more reasonable behavior would be to use a free, open solution until we have a specific need that's not being met and then look for other solutions, instead of forking over hundreds of dollars up front just in case it does something special.
I'm not saying proprietary solutions don't have additional functions that are unavailable in open source solutions, but the number of users who stretch the limits of their applications are so few and far between there's maybe a handful of people in the whole world who ever reach those boundaries, and those people are technically knowledgeable enough that they know what to look for in a program.
I had heard of it, but almost 3-4 years before its release; so long ago I had just bought a Voodoo5 when I first heard about the game. I knew there was no way they could keep the hype at a fevered pitch for so long. They originally had problems nailing down a publisher before finally securing a deal with Ubisoft. I was excited by the concept and they put a lot of work into the mythology of the game, but I was really disappointed by the execution.
The class/race/character design system was needlessly complex because it all broke down to be just as mechanical as any of its rivals (Horizons, Dark Age of Camelot, EQ, etc.) All the effort they put into developing a complete mythology of the world seemed wasted by having such a simplistic game behind it. It's like reading an 800 page novel and finding out it's describing the iterations of a tic-tac-toe game. No matter how exciting the description is, it's not likely to make the game itself any more attractive.
Even after it was offered for free, I played it for perhaps two hours and lost interest completely as I found myself sitting in another wasteland of global messaging, grief players, and grind. For me, a game must be deeper than an IRC room stacked upon a random number generator and an animation demo.
I like what they set out to do and the lesson I hope to take away from this is that content and context are important but meaningless in the face of lack-luster delivery.
The people studying animal behavior have tunnel vision as a result of their observations. Simple behavior such as building a cache of rocks to throw I probably would have assumed primates were capable of. A lot of people severely underestimate animals. I think in terms of research we become so focused on defining animal behavior in terms of absolutes (either can or can't perform x specific action) that it somehow seems astounding when an animal does something we hadn't specifically documented.
I just naturally assume that apes not only plan for the future, but I think they probably daydream about things that aren't even possible too. Instead of narrowly defining what we have observed animals doing, we should make rather broad assumptions about their abilities until we're proven wrong.
As a counterpoint, everything we see in movies is altered to make things appear more real, not necessarily ideal. Video of real moments tend to look unrealistic because the camera lens doesn't capture contextual clues that you would get if you were really in the moment. The way we setup a movie set is an attempt to compensate for the disconnection of watching a series of events happen in a scenario you can't touch, smell, or taste, and your field of vision is restricted to about 90 degrees. You can't turn your head to take in the subtle details of the surroundings.
I dunno where a whole lot of people get the idea that I want a combat system with all the variety of real life. Things can be simplified for a game without being repetitive. Currently, MMOs pretty much have a correct action to take at any given moment. There's an optimal order to use skills in and battles against the same type of creature will require the player to use the same skills in the same order. Thinking in terms of a tabletop RPG, there usually isn't a clear-cut correct choice, there's some give and take. You don't know exactly how a given creature is going to act so you can't fire off the same list of skills. In MMOs you don't make choices at all. It's classic game theory, there's a dominant choice and so everyone is going to always make that choice.
Deep Blue was not a bot, it was a supercomputer and massive storage system with special-purpose hardware designed specifically to play chess. Chessmaster isn't a bot, it's a chess application.
Bot - a computer program that automates a task, esp. one that works within the parameters of an existing application. (note: this probably does not include supercomputers or complete applications.)
I said "bot", I didn't say "computing grids can't play chess."
Actually, I'm just gonna give up. There's not really any point in discussing things with someone who actually thinks Deep Blue was a bot.
"So basically you have _one_ aspect of the game which can be botted, the combat system. That's all. For most of us it's even the least interesting part of the game..."
That's some circular logic. It's the least interesting part of the game because it's so repetitive that bots can do it for you. If it weren't repetitive, it wouldn't be the least interesting part of the game.
I didn't reject WoW because "the least important part can be botted". I reject it, and most other MMOs, because they lack mental and emotional depth. The worlds are very broad, but all the diversity in the game is completely shallow. The games is as deep as the interface that lies on top of the random number generators. Any interaction between player and game is purely superficial, you don't ever actually change the game world. You can't be "the hero" or "the person who slew the lich", you're one of 3 million people who did exactly the same thing. It's like Meatwad getting to be the Moon Master and being the only one to beat all the levels. Him and everyone else that has a copy of the game.
I reject it because all accomplishments in the game are inevitable, you don't need to get more skilled. It's not possible to ever lose at the game, at worst you can only experience temporal setbacks. If you can't lose, similarly, you can't win. Anything you do in the game is a function of the time spent playing. You don't have to get better, you need to play more. If you play the most, you'll be the best, practically guaranteed.
Maybe this is a step in the right direction but I'm severely underwhelmed by what qualifies for "innovative" when it comes to games. I don't find WoW to be significantly more advanced than EQ1. Better graphics, sound, and animation but the gameplay is just as hollow and repetitive as any other MMO (all of them being a GUI on top of a landscape of random number generators). There's a lot of complaints about bots, but any game a bot can play is mind-numbingly simple, bots can't even play age-old board games like Go, Backgammon, or Chess very effectively. If a designer has done an even halfway decent job of designing an interactive 3D world, a bot shouldn't stand a chance at success. Anything in 3 dimensions should be far more complex than Go, because a 3d world itself can contain the complex board games. I think the designers forget about things like spatial awareness or presenting players with non-trivial decisions that require an understanding of morality, metaphor, or abstraction. Instead, every task in these damn MMOs is supremely suited to perfect repetition (e.g. use these skills in a certain order, on a certain number of creatures, repeat) and repetition is about the only thing computers/bots excel at.
Anyway, I just don't think this DC game is going to be as "innovative" as people believe. I'll be surprised if it's even 1% more advanced than WoW. I understand they're trying to do an action MMO thing, commendable, but I know somewhere down the line they're going to cave in and make the thing like DDO, all the drawbacks of a physics system combined with all the drawbacks of a dice-rolling system, none of the benefits of either.
I regret that he apparently wasn't more successful in convincing us to burn our web apps. I'd hazard a guess that 80% of my computer-related headaches is a result of web apps, which I have now almost completely swore off if there's any way I can avoid them.
Crap like Google Maps I find insulting. We had map software 15 years ago. The only thing we needed was periodic udpates, but web apps go to a completely opposite extreme, every single data request is serviced live, nobody finds it acceptable to risk that data might be hours or days old. If I'm actually using my connection to retrieve data (files, audio, video, etc.) all those web-apps slow to a crawl.
With web apps, even with the fastest modern computers we're working at speeds closer to what we had back in 1995. We don't need all data to be streamed from the source, I would much prefer most of the applications reside on a local computer and function at native speeds instead of everything being bottle-necked by my ISP. I don't even mind using a thin-client running applications through terminal services, but having all basic desktop applications running from a web server is just ridiculous.
Like so many Open Source projects, it's not easy to get involved. It's telling about the complexity of a project that only a handful of people in the world bother to tip-toe through the minefield. Open source projects don't want people who can write code, they want people who can setup build environments and navigate a complex political environment.
At a job I wouldn't need to spend so much time setting up a build environment, there would already be a dozen people who have already figured out even the most intricate details of it. The person whose project it is should have fairly detailed information on setting up a build environment for their project. Open source projects tend to go with a "figure it out yourself" philosophy bragging that it's a rite of passage, but then they wonder why nobody is contributing.
Maybe I'd contribute to OpenOffice.org, but I've already got a mental block realizing that figuring out how to get involved would be at least a week long process. As luck would have it, I also have a week's worth of sleep debt and I already know how to fix that problem.
Agreed, but the modern languages we're working with, like JavaScript and all C-style languages are working at a vastly higher level of abstraction than were available to work with for NES games. This should allow programmers to create far more complex systems with a lot less manpower to manage the complexity.
I'm just shocked at how little it seems like we've advanced. With modern resources we should be able to pump out SNES/Gensis quality games with roughly the same difficulty it took to produce an Atari 2600 game. That was supposed to be the draw of high-level abstractions. Admittedly, people are building general-purpose applications, business applications, and user interfaces with far greater effectiveness and complexity than those systems would have been capable of, but the bit-twiddling capability and real-time performance that games require seems to have lagged decades behind the rest of the functionality that JavaScript and ActionScript provide.
As an analogy, it seems like inventing a Go-Cart with a top speed of 10mph, going through 30 years of advancement and having cars with all the modern capabilities, climate control, raw horsepower, seating capacity, cargo capacity, anti-lock brakes, power steering, remote car starters and alarms... but the top speed still being 10mph.
Even the most barebones code, creating a simple pong game in JavaScript, the logic loop still runs at about the same speed as it did on an Atari 2600 but with much lower reliability with unpredictable and uncontrollable pauses. This is on a system literally thousands of times (if not tens of thousands) more powerful than an Atari 2600 was.
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I've bought two System76 laptops, both Serval Professionals (models serp3 and serp6). I've been fairly pleased with both and I've also been very happy with the company's support the few times I needed it. I plan on ordering two more laptops from them in the coming months.
Director M. Night Shyamalan stopped by a McDonalds and offered 30 patrons an advance screening of his next film but the popular response seemed to be "Just tell me what happens."
The Social Network 2: Zuckerberg Silences the Lambs
I believe he's a sociopath. He's killing under the guise of it being some kind of humanitarian act because it's socially acceptable for CEOs to spend their free time killing, like the Go Daddy CEO who announced that hunting elephants is the most rewarding thing he's ever done. It's rewarding to them because murder is the only thing that gets their dopamine production going.
These people just have an irresistible urge to snuff out life. Zuckerberg tried to screw people in business when he thought nobody could prove anything. He called people dumb fucks for trusting him with their personal information. The only time he's sorry about anything is when he gets caught. And now he's slitting animal throats, [sarcasm]what an awesome guy.[/sarcasm]
I wouldn't be surprised if there are prostitutes in the woods somewhere with his fingerprints on them; having to revert back to things that can't beg isn't going to satisfy him for long.
To all the CEOs who think that killing things is your best possible contribution to society, do us all a huge fucking favor and don't bother getting out of bed in the morning.
I've fished, crabbed, and slaughtered chickens on my grandmother's farm. In the end it's just nourishment to me, I don't derive any sense of fulfillment from being personally involved in the killing.
People have the same philosophy about every aspect of life. Stitch your own clothes, make your own soap, build your own house, grow your own weed, program your own operating system... of course there's value in experiencing everything in life, but I don't find it to be more true of one thing than another.
I think the philosophy of kill it yourself comes from the passive guilt associated with meat consumption without the emotional baggage imparted by the physical act of slaughter. I don't have any problem at all letting other people kill and prepare my food for me. Most of my life is designed to take advantage of the distribution of labor in society.
I really prefer the Industrialist approach; more money means more automation, to the end of eventually never needing to think about tasks related to basic biological maintenance.
I am 100% opposed to it, because it's not practical to build an a la carte menu of faults. If we're going to put a price tag on being fat or being a smoker then we need to put a price tag on a thousand other things. Even talking about this kind of thing marginalizes the involved groups. It's fucking pathetic that humans are so petty. Everyone is deathly afraid that they might arrive at the pearly gates and find out they split the bill and paid $0.01 more than their fair share.
It's a fucked up world. People will pay hundreds of dollars for tickets to a sporting event, but won't pay $10 to save someone's life because they made bad choices. There's nothing humans hate more than other humans.
It's a low hanging fruit. Many states burned through their tobacco winnings extremely fast by re-purposing the money (and never actually creating the resources and support programs to help people quit like they claimed they needed the money for).
In all fairness, the people who are now upset weren't even in office when the state got the settlements. It's not fair that they should have to deal with barren coffers when the smoking problem affects them too. Should they lose out just because their predecessors spent it all? And what about the next governor? Is he supposed to make do with no money?
Well, until the states get a second bite at the tobacco apple, bullying smokers and fat people who are obviously too weak-willed to defend themselves anyway, is probably the most lucrative option. If they were smart they'd go after Linux users next. Those assholes don't even pay sales tax when they get their operating system, it's time to wake them up from their "everything is free" fairy tale.
I know the FSF's mission is an ideal or a puritanical vision, but there are real important and pragmatic issues they address. I really have to agree with this idea of a "Javascript Trap". We've gotten very comfortable with free and open web services that it's easy to forget, the code that handles your sensitive data isn't open to review.
It's simple really, in the spirit of free and open software, code hiding in any form should ALWAYS be a red flag. There just shouldn't be a point where people say "...and, for the rest of the application, trust us, it just works somehow."
'We're seeing the scientific method playing out in real time.'
What the hell is that supposed to mean? In what other time frame does the scientific method normally play out? Dealing with computers, we watch the scientific method play out in real time right before our eyes every day. We can watch the scientific method play out every time someone buys a remote control and goes through the process of setting it up. Hypothesis of which brand/model and entry code match up, test the hypothesis, record the results and form a new hypothesis based on the conclusion.
I dunno why, that sentence just bugged me. it makes it seem like discovering an error while presenting the results is somehow a rare event.
I think of our supercomputing systems as primitive in an analogous way as cavemen wouldn't end up with a rocket thruster if they just throw enough logs on a fire.
Without more advanced software designs and some type of revolutionary system architecture, more cores ends up only being slightly better than linear progression. They're primitive in that our supercomputers are seldom more than the sum of their parts.
It's not just CNN. Almost every company wants a Myspace page, twitter, facebook, blog, texting service, user accounts and registration, among other tech toys. The problem is that these tools were clearly intended to empower individuals to connect with other individuals. The companies using these things usually don't have any concerted reason to do so.
Corporations might be legal individuals, but they're not people, and they gain little to no benefit (perhaps even detriment) from attempting to employ socialisation. If you look at corporations as sociopathic, narcissistic, and single-mindedly self-interested individuals, it's clear they see these things as just another manipulation mechanism. They're not socialising; the conversation is unidirectional. They don't absorb, process, and react on the information, they gather and retransmit with absolutely no transformation. They're not talking WITH us, they're just talking AT us.
CNN doesn't do anything with the tweets. It's as useful as going to a Starbucks and having the employees stare blankly at you and repeat to you, verbatim, something a previous customer said while standing in line. "Welcome to Starbucks, Shelly said: I'll have a cafe mocha, damn I shouldn't have stopped in here, I'm gonna be late for work."
The people running companies need to realize that their company isn't one of our pals. They can't talk to us in our social circles, they can't hang out with us at a pub, and they can't sit in on our D&D sessions. They're product and service providers, nothing more. The fact that they desperately try to extend themselves into our social space borders on triggering the uncanny valley feeling.
Too many people think of their vehicle in too personal a way. It's not a freedom chamber or mobilized entertainment center. It's a method of conveyance. More people should worry about using their car to get from Point A to Point B instead of worrying about all the things they don't want to be interrupted doing during travel time. In the U.S. alone, 100+ people will die TODAY primarily because people don't regard driving as a serious responsibility. Why is it not enough that the miracle of modern locomotion enables us to shoot across a city in a matter of minutes? People worry about not being entertained or out of touch for the duration of the trip. The only thing that should concern us as drivers of lethal travel machines is getting to our destination safely. If you die, or kill someone, en-route, who called/texted you or which one of your favorite songs was playing will be the least of your concerns.
Before you even take a job, get clear on how often you'll be expected to work overtime and exactly how you're going to be compensated. If I need to have an "always on" mentality, the company needs to have an "always paying" mentality.
I realize that crunch time is the thing to do in the IT industry, but get clear up front so that kind of work cycle is something you understand when you accept the company's offer. If I need to put in an extra 10 hours every week or be on-call, I'm going to factor that into my salary negotiations. Once the deal is brokered, I'm left with a sense of satisfaction because I have the peace of mind in knowing I'm not being taken advantage of, I'm doing exactly what I signed up for.
Frankly, Oracle makes me nervous too as a programmer who has focused on Java for the last few years. Oracle isn't providing anyone any assurances, so everything just feels like it's up in the air right now. Sure, OpenJDK feels like a decent safety net but the waters haven't really been tested without Sun, so if Oracle/Sun withdraws the whole thing could crumble overnight.
When the company you're with gets bought out, their reluctance to paint a concrete picture as to the future of your project speaks louder than any half-hearted assurances they might give you.
LOL! In 1998 I was looking for a job as a web developer. I had about 2 years experience, and I saw ads for 10+ years HTML experience. I explained to an interviewer it wasn't even possible for anyone to have 10 years of HTML experience, that the language didn't exist 10 years ago and anyone who tells you they have 10+ years experience is lying. I explained that even Tim Berners Lee doesn't have 10 years experience. The interviewer just shrugged and said "Well, that's one of the job requirements. We're not looking for anyone with less than 10 years experience."
I think more often than not, the requirement of needing a specific application is eclipsed by a technical knowledge gap. From my experience with computer users, most people don't really need a specific application, they've just learned a brand name like Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop. Those users can't name a single function that they perform in their branded application that isn't just as easily done in an alternative application.
I hear many people say "I need Application X for my job and it's not available on Linux." If I recommend Application Y that fills exactly the same role, they're just not comfortable because they don't know what they need Application X for, they just know that it's not on Linux. I've also encountered numerous situations where Application X is available for Linux, but they assume that it must somehow work differently or be less functional than the Windows/OSX version.
It pains me to see millions of people fork over a couple hundred dollars for Microsoft Office and in the entire lifetime of running the application the most advanced document they create has some bold, italics, tables, and clipart, but they think just by virtue of using a $200 application to do it their document will be inherently better than when you create bold characters in a free application. Besides, a more reasonable behavior would be to use a free, open solution until we have a specific need that's not being met and then look for other solutions, instead of forking over hundreds of dollars up front just in case it does something special.
I'm not saying proprietary solutions don't have additional functions that are unavailable in open source solutions, but the number of users who stretch the limits of their applications are so few and far between there's maybe a handful of people in the whole world who ever reach those boundaries, and those people are technically knowledgeable enough that they know what to look for in a program.
I had heard of it, but almost 3-4 years before its release; so long ago I had just bought a Voodoo5 when I first heard about the game. I knew there was no way they could keep the hype at a fevered pitch for so long. They originally had problems nailing down a publisher before finally securing a deal with Ubisoft. I was excited by the concept and they put a lot of work into the mythology of the game, but I was really disappointed by the execution.
The class/race/character design system was needlessly complex because it all broke down to be just as mechanical as any of its rivals (Horizons, Dark Age of Camelot, EQ, etc.) All the effort they put into developing a complete mythology of the world seemed wasted by having such a simplistic game behind it. It's like reading an 800 page novel and finding out it's describing the iterations of a tic-tac-toe game. No matter how exciting the description is, it's not likely to make the game itself any more attractive.
Even after it was offered for free, I played it for perhaps two hours and lost interest completely as I found myself sitting in another wasteland of global messaging, grief players, and grind. For me, a game must be deeper than an IRC room stacked upon a random number generator and an animation demo.
I like what they set out to do and the lesson I hope to take away from this is that content and context are important but meaningless in the face of lack-luster delivery.
The people studying animal behavior have tunnel vision as a result of their observations. Simple behavior such as building a cache of rocks to throw I probably would have assumed primates were capable of. A lot of people severely underestimate animals. I think in terms of research we become so focused on defining animal behavior in terms of absolutes (either can or can't perform x specific action) that it somehow seems astounding when an animal does something we hadn't specifically documented.
I just naturally assume that apes not only plan for the future, but I think they probably daydream about things that aren't even possible too. Instead of narrowly defining what we have observed animals doing, we should make rather broad assumptions about their abilities until we're proven wrong.
As a counterpoint, everything we see in movies is altered to make things appear more real, not necessarily ideal. Video of real moments tend to look unrealistic because the camera lens doesn't capture contextual clues that you would get if you were really in the moment. The way we setup a movie set is an attempt to compensate for the disconnection of watching a series of events happen in a scenario you can't touch, smell, or taste, and your field of vision is restricted to about 90 degrees. You can't turn your head to take in the subtle details of the surroundings.
I dunno where a whole lot of people get the idea that I want a combat system with all the variety of real life. Things can be simplified for a game without being repetitive. Currently, MMOs pretty much have a correct action to take at any given moment. There's an optimal order to use skills in and battles against the same type of creature will require the player to use the same skills in the same order. Thinking in terms of a tabletop RPG, there usually isn't a clear-cut correct choice, there's some give and take. You don't know exactly how a given creature is going to act so you can't fire off the same list of skills. In MMOs you don't make choices at all. It's classic game theory, there's a dominant choice and so everyone is going to always make that choice.
Deep Blue was not a bot, it was a supercomputer and massive storage system with special-purpose hardware designed specifically to play chess. Chessmaster isn't a bot, it's a chess application.
Bot - a computer program that automates a task, esp. one that works within the parameters of an existing application. (note: this probably does not include supercomputers or complete applications.)
I said "bot", I didn't say "computing grids can't play chess."
Actually, I'm just gonna give up. There's not really any point in discussing things with someone who actually thinks Deep Blue was a bot.
"So basically you have _one_ aspect of the game which can be botted, the combat system. That's all. For most of us it's even the least interesting part of the game..." That's some circular logic. It's the least interesting part of the game because it's so repetitive that bots can do it for you. If it weren't repetitive, it wouldn't be the least interesting part of the game. I didn't reject WoW because "the least important part can be botted". I reject it, and most other MMOs, because they lack mental and emotional depth. The worlds are very broad, but all the diversity in the game is completely shallow. The games is as deep as the interface that lies on top of the random number generators. Any interaction between player and game is purely superficial, you don't ever actually change the game world. You can't be "the hero" or "the person who slew the lich", you're one of 3 million people who did exactly the same thing. It's like Meatwad getting to be the Moon Master and being the only one to beat all the levels. Him and everyone else that has a copy of the game. I reject it because all accomplishments in the game are inevitable, you don't need to get more skilled. It's not possible to ever lose at the game, at worst you can only experience temporal setbacks. If you can't lose, similarly, you can't win. Anything you do in the game is a function of the time spent playing. You don't have to get better, you need to play more. If you play the most, you'll be the best, practically guaranteed.
Maybe this is a step in the right direction but I'm severely underwhelmed by what qualifies for "innovative" when it comes to games. I don't find WoW to be significantly more advanced than EQ1. Better graphics, sound, and animation but the gameplay is just as hollow and repetitive as any other MMO (all of them being a GUI on top of a landscape of random number generators). There's a lot of complaints about bots, but any game a bot can play is mind-numbingly simple, bots can't even play age-old board games like Go, Backgammon, or Chess very effectively. If a designer has done an even halfway decent job of designing an interactive 3D world, a bot shouldn't stand a chance at success. Anything in 3 dimensions should be far more complex than Go, because a 3d world itself can contain the complex board games. I think the designers forget about things like spatial awareness or presenting players with non-trivial decisions that require an understanding of morality, metaphor, or abstraction. Instead, every task in these damn MMOs is supremely suited to perfect repetition (e.g. use these skills in a certain order, on a certain number of creatures, repeat) and repetition is about the only thing computers/bots excel at.
Anyway, I just don't think this DC game is going to be as "innovative" as people believe. I'll be surprised if it's even 1% more advanced than WoW. I understand they're trying to do an action MMO thing, commendable, but I know somewhere down the line they're going to cave in and make the thing like DDO, all the drawbacks of a physics system combined with all the drawbacks of a dice-rolling system, none of the benefits of either.
I regret that he apparently wasn't more successful in convincing us to burn our web apps. I'd hazard a guess that 80% of my computer-related headaches is a result of web apps, which I have now almost completely swore off if there's any way I can avoid them.
Crap like Google Maps I find insulting. We had map software 15 years ago. The only thing we needed was periodic udpates, but web apps go to a completely opposite extreme, every single data request is serviced live, nobody finds it acceptable to risk that data might be hours or days old. If I'm actually using my connection to retrieve data (files, audio, video, etc.) all those web-apps slow to a crawl.
With web apps, even with the fastest modern computers we're working at speeds closer to what we had back in 1995. We don't need all data to be streamed from the source, I would much prefer most of the applications reside on a local computer and function at native speeds instead of everything being bottle-necked by my ISP. I don't even mind using a thin-client running applications through terminal services, but having all basic desktop applications running from a web server is just ridiculous.
Like so many Open Source projects, it's not easy to get involved. It's telling about the complexity of a project that only a handful of people in the world bother to tip-toe through the minefield. Open source projects don't want people who can write code, they want people who can setup build environments and navigate a complex political environment.
At a job I wouldn't need to spend so much time setting up a build environment, there would already be a dozen people who have already figured out even the most intricate details of it. The person whose project it is should have fairly detailed information on setting up a build environment for their project. Open source projects tend to go with a "figure it out yourself" philosophy bragging that it's a rite of passage, but then they wonder why nobody is contributing.
Maybe I'd contribute to OpenOffice.org, but I've already got a mental block realizing that figuring out how to get involved would be at least a week long process. As luck would have it, I also have a week's worth of sleep debt and I already know how to fix that problem.
Agreed, but the modern languages we're working with, like JavaScript and all C-style languages are working at a vastly higher level of abstraction than were available to work with for NES games. This should allow programmers to create far more complex systems with a lot less manpower to manage the complexity.
I'm just shocked at how little it seems like we've advanced. With modern resources we should be able to pump out SNES/Gensis quality games with roughly the same difficulty it took to produce an Atari 2600 game. That was supposed to be the draw of high-level abstractions. Admittedly, people are building general-purpose applications, business applications, and user interfaces with far greater effectiveness and complexity than those systems would have been capable of, but the bit-twiddling capability and real-time performance that games require seems to have lagged decades behind the rest of the functionality that JavaScript and ActionScript provide.
As an analogy, it seems like inventing a Go-Cart with a top speed of 10mph, going through 30 years of advancement and having cars with all the modern capabilities, climate control, raw horsepower, seating capacity, cargo capacity, anti-lock brakes, power steering, remote car starters and alarms... but the top speed still being 10mph.
Even the most barebones code, creating a simple pong game in JavaScript, the logic loop still runs at about the same speed as it did on an Atari 2600 but with much lower reliability with unpredictable and uncontrollable pauses. This is on a system literally thousands of times (if not tens of thousands) more powerful than an Atari 2600 was.