You, like everyone else out there, seem to be making the assumption that I'm a christian, or even religious. I have not idea if god exists or not, I'm an agnostic. I think religion has basically become a destructive and useless vestige of evolution, like man's urge to rape, kill, and war.
But, and this is important, religion is a natural function of humans. Every culture believes in spirits, or magic, or gods - all of which have rituals that require obedience and attention on some level. Atheism has its own dogma and creed that (inadequately) fills that human need.
Atheism lacks a comforting message about the afterlife, but it does make a positive statement about it. Making a positive statement about something we don't understand (and may be incapable of understanding) is an irrational act, and believing it requires an act of faith.
I don't have the active stance of refusing to believe in God more than I have the active stance of refusing to believe in green-bearded nazi unicors thriving on Charon.
Refusing to believe in ridiculous creatures that no one else believes in is one thing, turning your back on something that the vast majority of your society believes in is quite another. The first doesn't require a conscious choice, the second does. Children have fear of god and punishment ground into them early, overcoming that fear to maintain disbelief requires dogma and faith (and quite a few atheists give it up and get a respectable comfort religion once they get old enough to really taste the fear of death amd the personal annihilation that their creed describes).
Cute, but not exactly a logical statement. Religion is not a hobby, appeasing angry spirits and explaining away death, crop failure, the right to rule or whatever by means of gods is the ground state of humanity. The stance of refusing to believe is an active stance, and requires a conscious choice to believe in something you cannot prove (i.e. that there is no afterlife and that god will not get pissed if you eat meat on friday or don't wear your magical underwear). The statement could properly be applied to agnosticism, and maybe apathy.
AMD actually plays the game better than a lot of newer intel dual cores. On my dual core intel I've noticed if I don't launch with or set cpu affinity to 0 that when the engine spawns a lot of scripts at one time that it will peg cpu0 to 100% - but never actually use cpu1, performance suffers predictably. The game comes by default with an executable fixed for dual core AMD.
Also you may have got lucky on your default refresh, vsync has been a big problem for this game, no triple buffering - because the texture size requirements are already massive, a lot of players see a solid improvement simply by enabling triple buffering (if they have a 256 meg card), disabling vsync (if they can stand occasional tearing), or cranking their monitor refresh up as high as it will go. The problem is that there are no ingame options to do any of these things and many of them require 3rd party programs or mucking about in windows.
Many people do just fine performance wise with default everything, the problem is that a ton of very common newish hardware runs terrible out of the box for this game.
The camera is awful, but you get used to it fast enough if you can get over being frustrated with how non-intuitive it is. The AI sucks, an indication of exactly how terrible AI comes from a change being made in the next patch - enemy spellcasters will no longer be able to harm their own team with area spells. That right there says the AI sucks rocks and they don't have the time or resources to fix it.
The toolset is interesting, but seriously lacking in polish. Simple things like previewing music or ambient sound inside the toolset require that you copy hundreds of megs of files around because half the time the game uses the program installation directory and the other half of the time it uses "My Documents". The same can be said for.ini files, initialization from.2da files vs. scripts, and half a dozen other things that just feel unfinished and can be very frustrating. QA was probably stretched *very* think here, because a lot of the toolset bugs and workarounds have been known since pre-release and extensively discussed on the forums, but never actually fixed.
Not if they only use the software inhouse, how are you going to replicate something you can't see?
Thank goodness we have lifetime employment and employees with access to the software will never move to another company in the same industry.
Software patents are a tough problem, the bar is currently far too short as to what constitutes an invention in the realm of software - but I don't think reverting to the bad old days of trade secrets is the answer.
The piece seems to be claiming that good > mediocre > no > bad leader.
That's somewhat true, certain kinds of software and features just won't get done without a leader. That nifty little project doesn't need a leader, it'll get done because personal motivation is enough to get it done and it's small enough that a single person can handle the entire workload. Boring stuff won't get done no matter how grand the end result unless there is a leader to make sure it gets done, no one digs ditches for fun - even if the end result will be the panama canal.
With all due respect to your medical crisis, why the heck didn't you go back and get a hall pass from a teacher?
A couple things I can think of from somewhat similar experiences: first there is some embarrassment and panic about being seriously ill and in pain in public, second there is a measure of disbelief on your part that an authority figure would actually care more about some silly administrative requirement than letting you get medical attention.
My experiences were nowhere near as extreme, as things were different *mumble* years ago when I was in middle school, but I can still understand that getting a hallpass is the last thing on your mind while you are extremely ill.
Re:Context switching, aka, incompetence
on
You Call This Agile?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I've done both jobs, part of being a sysadmin is being a fire-fighter. What you dismiss as programmers being prima donnas is simple division of labor. Here's a hint: if your job requires you to have a beeper then your job is to run around in constant interrupt mode.
"God games" are a limited form of this, and are a fairly limited niche. Actually scripting or coding the game would be even more limited in appeal.
I've never seen an MMO take either approach and can't really imagine it being commercially successful, MMOs cost a lot of money to develop and publishers have come to consider anything that doesn't make WoW numbers to be a failure.
The roguelike games tend to develop a botting meta-game, but they rely on community norms and honor to keep participants honest, qualities that MMO communities are notoriously short on.
I don't know about "deeply flawed", but I will call it an incredible implementation of a bad idea. WoW has sales numbers that are hard to argue with, but a lot of players want a lot more from an MMO and are already bored silly of WoW. I was a serious addict myself, did all the raids, got all my epics, played 40 or more hours a week, and haven't bothered to log in for 3 months. From what I see I'm not alone in hitting a point at which the game seems to just run out of steam.
Contrast that with SWG, a terrible implementation of an incredible idea. SoE shipped a seriously buggy game with no content, and the little content they added was laughably bad, but they still had to practically drive their customers away by treating them like crap, lying to them, and ultimately destroying everything good in the game. If they had actually tried to make a good game they could easily have had a WoW level of success.
I would love to have seen a good company that cared about its products make a game like SWG, user cities, deep crafting, a customizable character system, vehicles, user owned bases, visual customization, and so on. WoW really is gorgeous to look at, with a lot of care and fun put into it, but for all the fun we had doing the lovingly detailed quests as you level up is eventually killed by Yet Another Raid Dungeon and Gear Tier. You can advance your character, but you can never really change your character in any way that is meaningful to the player.
he should just talk to former Sen. Gore, who should know exactly how it works, on account of being its inventor and all.
Har dee har har, you hear that joke on "Hee Haw" or Rush?
But Gore did have an understanding of how the Internet worked, he made it his business to be informed on relevant subjects when he was a congresscritter. He talked to and listened to subject matter experts, and he wrote position papers and popular articles that clearly showed an understanding of the basic concepts.
Re:What this really means to me...
on
DDO Goes Solo
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· Score: 1
It sounds like Guild Wars would be perfect for you.
Guild wars pve is frustratingly bad. The aggro control system is overly simplistic - to the point where I'd say it just sucks. The social interface is bad. The "community" is awful. The equipment and crafting systems are shallow.
Guild Wars made the decision to balance the game on pvp. That is the right choice if you are are going to have pvp and pve use the same ruleset, but they did so at the expense of pve - GW pve is mediocre at its best and godawful at its worst.
There has always been a wide spectrum of political opinion here. In the last couple of years self-righteous, right-wing, mouth breathers have become a dominant voice on slashdot. Sad really, because it turns what was once an interesting technology forum into just another echo chamber of morons chanting slogans and catchphrases at each other. I'm sure some people think it is a change for the better, but I think it has driven a lot of former slashdot readers away or at least reduced the frequency at which they read the site.
quite possibly the buggiest "gold release" I have ever seen.
Anarchy Online will probably hold this title for quite some time, EQ had a very rough launch too - as bad as or worse than SWG.
SWG had so many great ideas, but poor implementation and a duct tape approach to bug fixes overshadowed them. You could write a book about the serious flaws of that game, but the core ideas were nearly good enough to overcome that.
you don't find classics like On the Waterfront or 12 Angry Men in the bargain bin, as they seem to hold their value.
Maybe not at movie specialty stores, but I've bought tons of classic movies on the cheap - like $4-$8 at media play/best buy/target. It is only when they become trendy again or get a special edition release that classic movies have a price at all comparable to a new release.
Games are still based on growing technology and growing knowledge, so there is an actual reason that classic games degrade in value over time. The majority of games may not gain anything more than eye candy, but games can gain the advantage of better ai, better interfaces, better content creation tools, etc. Movies don't really have any growth like that available to them.
Jesus stated many times that the religious legalists had "added to the burden of the law" to increase their own power - that is they had added many of their own commandments to the ritual and dietary requirements of the law. The parable of the good samaritan, the story of proper washing before eating, the (possibly apocryphal) "cast the first stone" story all attack the foundations of the power of the religious legalists.
Jesus was hated by the traditionalists of the rabbinic law because he clearly stated that they were unnecessary and even harmful in many cases.
Even the "Caesar to Caesar" story you mention is an example of preaching rebellion to authority. Defying the authority of the Roman Imperial cult was a serious crime punishable by death - and that is the message of "Caesars things to Caesar (taxes) and God's things to God (worship).
Anyway, way OT here, but if you bother to actually read the bible you would find that many of the teachings of Jesus were in direct opposition to the established powers of the world at that time.
ID says that the *physical* world could not have naturally developed.
Whether the origin of the physical world is pushed into the past of the physical world or into a spirit world doesn't really matter.
Stick to what we do know.
We know a physical world exists, we don't know that a spirit world exists.
The fact is that all versions of the "watchmaker argument" have this weakness, scientific materialism may not have an answer either - but at least it doesn't fall back on mystical knowledge to fill in the blanks.
That the problem though, to my mind even with a LoTR level budget you would have a hard time capturing Discworld. Discworld has a feel that I just don't see translating to live action.
So, what should we have done? Drag the war on for two more years?
We should have shown them the test films and announced our intention to use it if they did not surrender unconditionally within 3 days, or used it on as pure military a target as we could find. I know that would have created problems, so maybe Hiroshima is defensible - maybe. Nagasaki was a war crime.
Ending the war as fast as possible was the best thing for the US and Japan, I just don't accept that using nuclear weapons on cities was the only way to do that.
No sane person likes war, but I agree that there are times you have to fight. The fact that war is sometimes justified does not mean that any action taken in war or any action taken to end a war early are justified. I personally believe that the US with 60 years hindsight would not choose to repeat Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There isn't any context, attribution, or even a direct quote - so it is hard to guess exactly what was really said and under what circumstances. What I gather is that some publishers are upset about the fact that retailers are selling second hand copies right next to the new copies. If that is the case I can see their point - who is gonna pay $60 for generic sports game 2006 when a used copy is available for $30 right next to it, but that is an issue they need to take up with retailers and hardly the responsibility of consumers.
Slashdot Mirror
You, like everyone else out there, seem to be making the assumption that I'm a christian, or even religious. I have not idea if god exists or not, I'm an agnostic. I think religion has basically become a destructive and useless vestige of evolution, like man's urge to rape, kill, and war.
But, and this is important, religion is a natural function of humans. Every culture believes in spirits, or magic, or gods - all of which have rituals that require obedience and attention on some level. Atheism has its own dogma and creed that (inadequately) fills that human need.
Atheism lacks a comforting message about the afterlife, but it does make a positive statement about it. Making a positive statement about something we don't understand (and may be incapable of understanding) is an irrational act, and believing it requires an act of faith.
Excuse me, but do you really not see any sort of connection between this
I'm not saying that it's nice, or good, I'm just saying that's how it is.
I don't have the active stance of refusing to believe in God more than I have the active stance of refusing to believe in green-bearded nazi unicors thriving on Charon.
Refusing to believe in ridiculous creatures that no one else believes in is one thing, turning your back on something that the vast majority of your society believes in is quite another. The first doesn't require a conscious choice, the second does. Children have fear of god and punishment ground into them early, overcoming that fear to maintain disbelief requires dogma and faith (and quite a few atheists give it up and get a respectable comfort religion once they get old enough to really taste the fear of death amd the personal annihilation that their creed describes).
Cute, but not exactly a logical statement. Religion is not a hobby, appeasing angry spirits and explaining away death, crop failure, the right to rule or whatever by means of gods is the ground state of humanity. The stance of refusing to believe is an active stance, and requires a conscious choice to believe in something you cannot prove (i.e. that there is no afterlife and that god will not get pissed if you eat meat on friday or don't wear your magical underwear). The statement could properly be applied to agnosticism, and maybe apathy.
AMD actually plays the game better than a lot of newer intel dual cores. On my dual core intel I've noticed if I don't launch with or set cpu affinity to 0 that when the engine spawns a lot of scripts at one time that it will peg cpu0 to 100% - but never actually use cpu1, performance suffers predictably. The game comes by default with an executable fixed for dual core AMD.
Also you may have got lucky on your default refresh, vsync has been a big problem for this game, no triple buffering - because the texture size requirements are already massive, a lot of players see a solid improvement simply by enabling triple buffering (if they have a 256 meg card), disabling vsync (if they can stand occasional tearing), or cranking their monitor refresh up as high as it will go. The problem is that there are no ingame options to do any of these things and many of them require 3rd party programs or mucking about in windows.
Many people do just fine performance wise with default everything, the problem is that a ton of very common newish hardware runs terrible out of the box for this game.
The camera is awful, but you get used to it fast enough if you can get over being frustrated with how non-intuitive it is. The AI sucks, an indication of exactly how terrible AI comes from a change being made in the next patch - enemy spellcasters will no longer be able to harm their own team with area spells. That right there says the AI sucks rocks and they don't have the time or resources to fix it.
The toolset is interesting, but seriously lacking in polish. Simple things like previewing music or ambient sound inside the toolset require that you copy hundreds of megs of files around because half the time the game uses the program installation directory and the other half of the time it uses "My Documents". The same can be said for .ini files, initialization from .2da files vs. scripts, and half a dozen other things that just feel unfinished and can be very frustrating. QA was probably stretched *very* think here, because a lot of the toolset bugs and workarounds have been known since pre-release and extensively discussed on the forums, but never actually fixed.
Not if they only use the software inhouse, how are you going to replicate something you can't see?
Thank goodness we have lifetime employment and employees with access to the software will never move to another company in the same industry.
Software patents are a tough problem, the bar is currently far too short as to what constitutes an invention in the realm of software - but I don't think reverting to the bad old days of trade secrets is the answer.
The piece seems to be claiming that good > mediocre > no > bad leader.
That's somewhat true, certain kinds of software and features just won't get done without a leader. That nifty little project doesn't need a leader, it'll get done because personal motivation is enough to get it done and it's small enough that a single person can handle the entire workload. Boring stuff won't get done no matter how grand the end result unless there is a leader to make sure it gets done, no one digs ditches for fun - even if the end result will be the panama canal.
With all due respect to your medical crisis, why the heck didn't you go back and get a hall pass from a teacher?
A couple things I can think of from somewhat similar experiences: first there is some embarrassment and panic about being seriously ill and in pain in public, second there is a measure of disbelief on your part that an authority figure would actually care more about some silly administrative requirement than letting you get medical attention.
My experiences were nowhere near as extreme, as things were different *mumble* years ago when I was in middle school, but I can still understand that getting a hallpass is the last thing on your mind while you are extremely ill.
I've done both jobs, part of being a sysadmin is being a fire-fighter. What you dismiss as programmers being prima donnas is simple division of labor. Here's a hint: if your job requires you to have a beeper then your job is to run around in constant interrupt mode.
"God games" are a limited form of this, and are a fairly limited niche. Actually scripting or coding the game would be even more limited in appeal.
I've never seen an MMO take either approach and can't really imagine it being commercially successful, MMOs cost a lot of money to develop and publishers have come to consider anything that doesn't make WoW numbers to be a failure.
The roguelike games tend to develop a botting meta-game, but they rely on community norms and honor to keep participants honest, qualities that MMO communities are notoriously short on.
I don't know about "deeply flawed", but I will call it an incredible implementation of a bad idea. WoW has sales numbers that are hard to argue with, but a lot of players want a lot more from an MMO and are already bored silly of WoW. I was a serious addict myself, did all the raids, got all my epics, played 40 or more hours a week, and haven't bothered to log in for 3 months. From what I see I'm not alone in hitting a point at which the game seems to just run out of steam.
Contrast that with SWG, a terrible implementation of an incredible idea. SoE shipped a seriously buggy game with no content, and the little content they added was laughably bad, but they still had to practically drive their customers away by treating them like crap, lying to them, and ultimately destroying everything good in the game. If they had actually tried to make a good game they could easily have had a WoW level of success.
I would love to have seen a good company that cared about its products make a game like SWG, user cities, deep crafting, a customizable character system, vehicles, user owned bases, visual customization, and so on. WoW really is gorgeous to look at, with a lot of care and fun put into it, but for all the fun we had doing the lovingly detailed quests as you level up is eventually killed by Yet Another Raid Dungeon and Gear Tier. You can advance your character, but you can never really change your character in any way that is meaningful to the player.
This would make variable argument lists a real nightmare, this wouldn't just be a fire and forget change to the compiler.
he should just talk to former Sen. Gore, who should know exactly how it works, on account of being its inventor and all.
Har dee har har, you hear that joke on "Hee Haw" or Rush?
But Gore did have an understanding of how the Internet worked, he made it his business to be informed on relevant subjects when he was a congresscritter. He talked to and listened to subject matter experts, and he wrote position papers and popular articles that clearly showed an understanding of the basic concepts.
Guild wars pve is frustratingly bad. The aggro control system is overly simplistic - to the point where I'd say it just sucks. The social interface is bad. The "community" is awful. The equipment and crafting systems are shallow.
Guild Wars made the decision to balance the game on pvp. That is the right choice if you are are going to have pvp and pve use the same ruleset, but they did so at the expense of pve - GW pve is mediocre at its best and godawful at its worst.
There has always been a wide spectrum of political opinion here. In the last couple of years self-righteous, right-wing, mouth breathers have become a dominant voice on slashdot. Sad really, because it turns what was once an interesting technology forum into just another echo chamber of morons chanting slogans and catchphrases at each other. I'm sure some people think it is a change for the better, but I think it has driven a lot of former slashdot readers away or at least reduced the frequency at which they read the site.
Anarchy Online will probably hold this title for quite some time, EQ had a very rough launch too - as bad as or worse than SWG.
SWG had so many great ideas, but poor implementation and a duct tape approach to bug fixes overshadowed them. You could write a book about the serious flaws of that game, but the core ideas were nearly good enough to overcome that.
If anything the latimes article contains more spin and excuse making from MPAA lawyers and reps than additional factual information.
Maybe not at movie specialty stores, but I've bought tons of classic movies on the cheap - like $4-$8 at media play/best buy/target. It is only when they become trendy again or get a special edition release that classic movies have a price at all comparable to a new release.
Games are still based on growing technology and growing knowledge, so there is an actual reason that classic games degrade in value over time. The majority of games may not gain anything more than eye candy, but games can gain the advantage of better ai, better interfaces, better content creation tools, etc. Movies don't really have any growth like that available to them.
Jesus was hated by the traditionalists of the rabbinic law because he clearly stated that they were unnecessary and even harmful in many cases.
Even the "Caesar to Caesar" story you mention is an example of preaching rebellion to authority. Defying the authority of the Roman Imperial cult was a serious crime punishable by death - and that is the message of "Caesars things to Caesar (taxes) and God's things to God (worship).
Anyway, way OT here, but if you bother to actually read the bible you would find that many of the teachings of Jesus were in direct opposition to the established powers of the world at that time.
Whether the origin of the physical world is pushed into the past of the physical world or into a spirit world doesn't really matter.
Stick to what we do know.
We know a physical world exists, we don't know that a spirit world exists.
The fact is that all versions of the "watchmaker argument" have this weakness, scientific materialism may not have an answer either - but at least it doesn't fall back on mystical knowledge to fill in the blanks.
That the problem though, to my mind even with a LoTR level budget you would have a hard time capturing Discworld. Discworld has a feel that I just don't see translating to live action.
I actually like some anime animation styles - but I don't think it would be right for Discworld.
Agreed that I'd rather have no films than bad ones though, don't bother doing it if you can't be bothered to do it right.
We should have shown them the test films and announced our intention to use it if they did not surrender unconditionally within 3 days, or used it on as pure military a target as we could find. I know that would have created problems, so maybe Hiroshima is defensible - maybe. Nagasaki was a war crime.
Ending the war as fast as possible was the best thing for the US and Japan, I just don't accept that using nuclear weapons on cities was the only way to do that.
No sane person likes war, but I agree that there are times you have to fight. The fact that war is sometimes justified does not mean that any action taken in war or any action taken to end a war early are justified. I personally believe that the US with 60 years hindsight would not choose to repeat Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There isn't any context, attribution, or even a direct quote - so it is hard to guess exactly what was really said and under what circumstances. What I gather is that some publishers are upset about the fact that retailers are selling second hand copies right next to the new copies. If that is the case I can see their point - who is gonna pay $60 for generic sports game 2006 when a used copy is available for $30 right next to it, but that is an issue they need to take up with retailers and hardly the responsibility of consumers.