First they came for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up,
because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up,
because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.
just s/communists/pirates, s/jews/programmers, s/catholics/powerusers, s/me/users
Actually it wasn't even previous research I had done. What I had been doing was publishing on my site stuff that I found interesting but couldn't really fit into the scope of the original plan of the paper. When I was revising I decided to include another section to elaborate on some of the meterial and ended up simply re-including stuff that I had cut from the original paper and presentation and published back into the paper.
In retrospect perhaps I would have been wise to have removed the parts of the paper I decided to re-include in the paper until after the class was over- but you live you learn I guess.
There is one problem with this...
I remember once a few semesters ago in a class we were assigned to give presentations on some area of computing that we chose. I ended up giving one on Quantum Computing. I was under the impression that everything went well- until I got a letter asking me to be in one of the meeting rooms at school. I showed up and there were a couple of professors and deans and an FA. My first reaction was that my presentation was that good (yeah, I got an ego). Well they told me they had caught me cheating- and I was like "wtf?". Apparently my professor had googled around on the subject and found my website (everything on my site is under a psudoname) and found some of the stuff that I had used in my presentation that I published on my website.
The professor assumed that I had simply ripped off stuff from a site on the net.
I did eventually get it worked out- but it's worth remembering that a lot of people publish work on the web now.
I understand what you are saying, and I thought it was implied in my post but perhaps not.
What I was trying to get at was that- regardless of how technically effective the software is - I wonder if someone will try to use the claim that it is not an "effective protection measure" to either sue a company using the software - or as someone else who replied to my post pointed out, as a marketing tactic to say "Our software is better than open source software- they even claim that it is not effective".
I was looking for something like that too. One of the conserns I had heard about the GPL3 was that it might end up causing a situation where a website that used a database that was covered under the GPL3 would be required to provide the source of the database and the application to the users.
Based on what I've read of this draft (and granted I have a very limited understanding of legalease) it doesn't look like this is the case.
This just kind of popped into my head- but I wonder. If GPG is not considered an "effective protection devise" or whatever the legalease is- could a company who was using GPG to protect customer information or some such be sued for failing to provide "adequate" protection of customer information.
I think you miss the point. I do not think the parent intended to say that if we imagine how to do arithmetic then we will be able to do arithmetic when the times comes- I beleive instead it was that if we do not use our imagination to think creatively we will not be able to come up with creative/imaginitive solutions to problems when we need to do so.
I agree on this point- I've noticed that if I take a break for even a month from certain activities it takes me a while to ease back into them because I've lost some of that spark that allowed me to quickly come up with creative ideas. When I say creative, I do not specifically refer to things like drawing or writing- creativity is used in a lot of things, programming, math, science, all require creativity as well. Writing a program may be a different sort of creativity than painting a landscape, which may itself be different from the creativity of comming up with a mathematical proof- but all required creative thinking.
Re:Where to get decent photo editing done [a bit O
on
Adobe Lightroom Review
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· Score: 2, Informative
Doing simple photo cleanup (e.g. cropping, redeye, hue, saturation, colorbalance, lightness levels, contrast, simple airbrushing, simple compositing) is a pretty mellow learning curve and doesn't take much time to do properly. Because of this most photographers do it themselves since it A: saves money and B: gives them more control over the final look of the image.
There are people who clean up photos professionally, but those tend to be cases where there is extensive editing to be done and the goal is usually not to have a large number of clean photos- but instead to use photographs to create a single high quality image to be framed, or used in an advertisement- something of that nature.
If you do want to pay someone though, you're best bet would be probably to hit up a couple of forums (try deviantart or the fark forums). You might also be able to find some web designers who are handy with photoshop who might do it while business is slow.
If you pay someone to clean up your photos however, you will still need to spend some time. Most professionals will still send back proofs for you to review and expect some communication on the details of what you would like the final image to look like.
<shamless self advertisement>If you're interested- send me an email (miyako at g mail dot com) and I may be able to work out an arrangement with you while business is slow. My website is down right now but I can email you some example work if you'd like.</shameless self advertisement>
If you decide to give it a try yourself, photoshop is still the defacto standard for most photo editing work. If you do not want to fork over the money to buy photoshop then you may consider trying The GIMP, which is not quite up to the level of photoshop but is free and better than most of the "budget" photo editing software out there.
The thing about it is, 2% makes a much larger difference to someone living on $50k/year than to someone living on $x billion.
The thing of it is- you have to look at the cost of living and the cost of the lifestyle people with various incomes have. Sure theoretically everyone's cost of living should be the same- but what people are willing to live with- or perhaps more accurately what they are willing to live without- does vary greatly depending on their income and the lifestyle to which they are accustom.
Given this, the "cost of living" for Bill Gates is higher than that of an average white coller worker- which is certainly higher than that of a 16-year-old flipping burgers for minimum wadge at McDonalds.
The thing of it is though- if we plot the cost of living and upkeep of lifestyle with the income level of the person I would guess that it is certainly not linnear- more likely the curve would appear logarithmic.
That is to say- the difference between the income levels of someone working at McDonalds and Bill Gates is certainly vastly greater than the difference in what it costs them to live what each would relatively define as "well".
Because of this- Bill Gates donating 2% or 10% or mroe of his billions is certainly going to affect (gramar nazis: affect or effect? I usually screw this one up- which is it?) him less than someone making 20k/year donating.5% or 1% of their income.
It's not the writing I think that takes a long time for RPGs, but I do think RPGs tend to take longer to develop.
In a given RPG you have hundreds of enemies to be modeled- with animations. You have NPCs. Most RPGs have a dozen or two towns with each town having a dozen or more simple interiors. Not to mention a couple of dozen dungeons, an overworld (in some RPGs more than one overworld), models for usually a couple of hundred items, weapons, armor, attack and spell animations for characters and enemies.
Granted- most of these things are simpler to model than- say- a realistic looking model of a vehicle. Overall though I would say it's still a lot more than what you would find in a standard FPS.
On top of all the modeling- you also have voice acting in most modern RPGS (whether this is a good or a bad thing is up for debate) which takes time. Then there are the requisite pre-rendered cutscenes (which are becomming less common as game-engines get better).
I'd also argue that it takes longer to balance the gameplay of an RPG than a FPS or a racing game.
Just look at Star Ocean- the game comes on 2 DVDs- and that is with only a couple of short pre-rendered cutscenes taking up space.
It also takes more than 1 good writer to develop an RPG. Most RPGs I've played tend to credit at least a dozen writers in the ending credits. It takes a lot of work to write all of the main dialog, NPC text, develop the storyline, plot twists, main events, etc.
This machine certainly seems like overkill. What would be nice would be if they would make a system like this that uses budget cards. Given that graphics rendering is a task that is easly split between multiple processors (IIRC that's the case anyway), I would think that they could offer something like this with cheaper cards and get better performance than going up to the next generation of cards.
Since a bleeding edge card tends to run around $500, and a card a couple of generations old tends to run about $100, you could get four older generation cards for less than a bleeding edge card, and equivilent if not better performance.
They left off one that I've used a few times when dealing with graphics, which using their naming convention would be something like "Round Toward Mean". You basically take the mean of the surrounding values in an array or matrix and then round up if the value is below the mean, and round down if it's above the mean.
It's useful for smoothing out images if you use this for each color channel (RGB, CMYK, HSV, etc.).
It may be impossible for the various kernels, but I would bet that it's actually easier to patch a lot of things in *nix than in windows because the *nix kernels doesn't throw things like a web browser or a window manager into the kernel.
If there is a security hole with Konquror browsing files on KDE then KDE issues a patch and it should mostly work on all of the various systems it runs on.
I had to use C# for a class last semester. Comming into the class I was very much opposed to the concept, essentially feeling that it was better to go with either C++ or Java instead of something inbetween.
After using C# for a while, I've come to the conclusion that, while still not a favorite language of mine, it has a fair bit of potential. My biggest problem was, as I recally, the aggrevating inconsistancy of the.NET framework (two thirds of.NET seems to work 1 way, but 1/3 of it seems to have been written by a completely different team who never looked at what the other team was doing- neither way seems to be particularly bad, but it just doesn't feel as coherent as, say, Java).
As I primarily program on Linux and Mac at home, and most of my professional development is with PHP I'll probably never use C# enough to grow fond of it, I do have to say that if I ever ended up taking a job coding for a Microsoft platform it's nice to know that C# is at least there and much less asinine than using VC++ with Win32 or MFC (which I've found vastly inferior to Swing, Qt, GTK+ or Cocoa).
This reminds me of those banner ads that have freaked out so many (l)users in my family that bounce around saying "Your Computer Is Broadcasting an IP Address" as though the number is your SSN. I would guess (based on how many people I know who bought the software advertised by those banner ads) that this will probably scare a lot of people into compliance.
Another thing that I've noticed is that a lot of the same people who would be freaked out that a site knows their IP address ALSO tend to not realize that downloading stuff via P2P networks is not exactly legal.
I remember recently (like within the last couple of weeks) my aunt expressed amazment that all of the music downloading they had done was considered piracy. She'd also never heard of iTunes or any other way of buying music legally online.
It might be nice if they at least provided some links to places to legally get music for the people who genuinely don't know. For everyone else the whole thing is pointless anyway.
Re:Thoughts on necessity of rogues in a group.
on
Rogues Get Some Respect
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The #1 rule of being a DM is "Make the game fun".
If the game is not fun, then you have no players to play in your consistant, consequence filled, realistic world. A lot of it comes down to how good of a DM you are. An excellent DM can probably create a quest beforehand that needs very little modification for the players, and a poor DM will refuse to change the quest no matter what. Most DMs fall inbetween however- and admit that they are not perfect and cannot forsee how the players will play- and they therefore admit that at times minor things must be changed to keep the overall game going.
In the grand scheme of things, replacing a trap on a door with a spell that can be broken by the groups cleric because the rogue died in a freak accident earlier on in the game to keep the group going can make things much better for the player and the DM.
that's not actually correct as I understand it. Just because there are infinite possible universes does not mean that every universe exists.
It's sort of like how there are infinite values between 1 and 2 (1.1, 1.11, 1.11, etc), but 7 is not a value between 1 and 2.
I think it is certainly possible for a MMO to handle this. I think it is unlikely that a MMO will implement it in the neat future though- for several reasons. The first is that, while it's possible to chose a dungeon (or even a given room) to match the abilities and play style of the players, it would lead to either much easier or much harder dungeons (either all the obstacles are tilted towards or away from the parties abilities). It could be interesting to create a dungeon that uses abilities that the party has but rarely uses (for example, a wizard who focuses on attack spells and generally ignores buffering spells facing a situation where it may be nessesary to change playstyle)- but then players would complain because the game loses the monotonous aspects that MMO players seem to like.
The other problem is that a lot of dungeons would become really predictable. A lot of people tend to play with the same party- so dungeons would tend toward similarity because they would all be weighed toward the skills of the players.
I guess it could be workable- it just seems like most MMOs are very similar- and I have a hard time seeing a game doing this.
Re:Thoughts on necessity of rogues in a group.
on
Rogues Get Some Respect
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· Score: 4, Interesting
And thus arises one of the main problems of the MMO. When I DM a game, I can alter the dungeon so that it works better with the skills of the players. If I have a group of rogues playing, I can add several traps on doors, and some areas that require quick reflexes- I can do it on the fly and still keep the overall feel of the game. If I want to make it harder on the group I can forego the traps and maybe throw in magical beasts that would be better handled by a magic user.
If I have a dungeon with a lot of traps and the party doesn't happen to include a rogue, then I can quickly alter the dungeon so that traps are replaced with simple puzzles or melee encounters that better play to the skills of the players. If there are no rogues and I want to weaken the party to make an encounter more dramatic, then I can throw in a couple of traps- knowing the party is unlikely to be able to detect or disarm them.
This isn't really possible in MMOGs. While it's theoretically possible to create multiple versions of a dungeon and then use the one most fitting for the given parties makeup- it would double or triple the amount of work that goes into designing the quest- and it would probably be exploited easily too.
Makes sense, if Mohammed is a common name in the general population- then it make sense that the name would also be common in the population of criminals.
Reflecting on it, I think that's true in a lot of cases.
I think a lot of what I was saying (aside from having just woken up and not being able to think very coherently) comes from the fact that when you have a well documented and coherent API looking at the documentation and figuring out how to go about doing what you understand conceptually that you need to do using what's available is second nature to those who've been programming for a while.
I'm really not sure what I was thinking about that- but anyway, your right.
I started out with C++ as my first language, and that may be the reason I never had trouble with pointers, but I think a lot of it comes down to how you learn to think about your programs in the first place. A lot of people aren't tought about the way a program works at the lowest levels, and are instead instructed through abstractions- I was lucky enough to have my first CS teacher really make it a point early on to explain how memory allocation, addresses, variables, all that works at the machine level. It put me in a good position to understand things later on.
I'm not sure about the assembly comment though. I learned assembly because I figgured it was a good thing to know even if I never used it much. I tinkered around with it for a while and wrote a really basic OS and a few of the standard programs ones writes when learning assembly and never really looked at it much since then. I do think it helped me to write better code in higher level languages, but I also know some decent programmers who've never done assembly either.
You'd think I would be used to it, given the abysmal standard of the degree factory I go to and the abysmal knowledge of my fellow students there, but I always have a hard time realizing that just because I've spent a lot of time understanding programming on many levels, reading up on actual CS (I'm a CIS major), doing MIT open courseware, etc. there there are people out there who have taken a couple of java or VB classes and a class on SQL and call themselves programmers.
While I agree with your comments, there is one thing that just sort of popped into my head that I thought I would comment on regarding the "new languages are easy to learn" thing.
I certainly agree that, when one understand the theory behind how to create a program, picking up the syntax of a new language is easy. It's much easier if the language is in the same vein as one you are familiar with (it's laughably easy to go from one C derived language to another, perhaps less so to go from a C derived language to something like COBOL with really weird syntax.) That said though, in my experience, there are no programming jobs where you will just be working with the basic language- which brings up the most time consuming aspect of working with a new language which is familiarizing yourself with the libraries and APIs used with the language. Because of this, I would say that it may be beneficial to become familiar with things that can be used with multiple languages..NET is a good example if you program in windows (as much as I hate microsoft I have to say the.NET framework really does make programming windows applications much easier) or something like Qt (which supports seemingly ever language known to man- and probably a few not). Regular Expressions are also a handy technology to learn, since they are supported in some form in most languages today.
Another thing is, when focusing on the concepts behind programming, I've seen a lot of people who think that means learning OO. I knew a guy who was a pretty decent programmer when it came to object oriented modern languages, but when he was forced to work with C he was woefully underprepared, having always worked with "modern" languages (specifically Java and PHP) he didn't understand things like memory management and pointers (the poor guy spent a week trying to figgure out how to create and use a string before he was let go because he couldn't understand char*).
Anyway, just my thoughts. I'm just a student at a crappy degree factory so take my suggestsions for whatever they're worth.
I have a really low tolerance for alcohol. Generally about one and a half glasses of wine over an hour or two will get me drunk. On the few times that I've went with friends to a bar, or if I'm at someones house and they are making drinks, what I will usually do is start out with a drink made with quarter-shots (1/4 the amount of alcohol they usually use) and follow up with one or two non-alcoholic drinks (usually a Virgin Mary, which is a bloody mary w/o the alcohol but with the spices added to the tomato juice).
If you drink fast you may find that similar techniques could work for you.
Slashdot Mirror
First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.
just s/communists/pirates, s/jews/programmers, s/catholics/powerusers, s/me/users
Actually it wasn't even previous research I had done. What I had been doing was publishing on my site stuff that I found interesting but couldn't really fit into the scope of the original plan of the paper. When I was revising I decided to include another section to elaborate on some of the meterial and ended up simply re-including stuff that I had cut from the original paper and presentation and published back into the paper.
In retrospect perhaps I would have been wise to have removed the parts of the paper I decided to re-include in the paper until after the class was over- but you live you learn I guess.
There is one problem with this...
I remember once a few semesters ago in a class we were assigned to give presentations on some area of computing that we chose. I ended up giving one on Quantum Computing. I was under the impression that everything went well- until I got a letter asking me to be in one of the meeting rooms at school. I showed up and there were a couple of professors and deans and an FA. My first reaction was that my presentation was that good (yeah, I got an ego). Well they told me they had caught me cheating- and I was like "wtf?". Apparently my professor had googled around on the subject and found my website (everything on my site is under a psudoname) and found some of the stuff that I had used in my presentation that I published on my website.
The professor assumed that I had simply ripped off stuff from a site on the net.
I did eventually get it worked out- but it's worth remembering that a lot of people publish work on the web now.
I understand what you are saying, and I thought it was implied in my post but perhaps not.
What I was trying to get at was that- regardless of how technically effective the software is - I wonder if someone will try to use the claim that it is not an "effective protection measure" to either sue a company using the software - or as someone else who replied to my post pointed out, as a marketing tactic to say "Our software is better than open source software- they even claim that it is not effective".
I was looking for something like that too. One of the conserns I had heard about the GPL3 was that it might end up causing a situation where a website that used a database that was covered under the GPL3 would be required to provide the source of the database and the application to the users.
Based on what I've read of this draft (and granted I have a very limited understanding of legalease) it doesn't look like this is the case.
This just kind of popped into my head- but I wonder. If GPG is not considered an "effective protection devise" or whatever the legalease is- could a company who was using GPG to protect customer information or some such be sued for failing to provide "adequate" protection of customer information.
I think you miss the point. I do not think the parent intended to say that if we imagine how to do arithmetic then we will be able to do arithmetic when the times comes- I beleive instead it was that if we do not use our imagination to think creatively we will not be able to come up with creative/imaginitive solutions to problems when we need to do so.
I agree on this point- I've noticed that if I take a break for even a month from certain activities it takes me a while to ease back into them because I've lost some of that spark that allowed me to quickly come up with creative ideas. When I say creative, I do not specifically refer to things like drawing or writing- creativity is used in a lot of things, programming, math, science, all require creativity as well. Writing a program may be a different sort of creativity than painting a landscape, which may itself be different from the creativity of comming up with a mathematical proof- but all required creative thinking.
Doing simple photo cleanup (e.g. cropping, redeye, hue, saturation, colorbalance, lightness levels, contrast, simple airbrushing, simple compositing) is a pretty mellow learning curve and doesn't take much time to do properly. Because of this most photographers do it themselves since it A: saves money and B: gives them more control over the final look of the image.
There are people who clean up photos professionally, but those tend to be cases where there is extensive editing to be done and the goal is usually not to have a large number of clean photos- but instead to use photographs to create a single high quality image to be framed, or used in an advertisement- something of that nature.
If you do want to pay someone though, you're best bet would be probably to hit up a couple of forums (try deviantart or the fark forums). You might also be able to find some web designers who are handy with photoshop who might do it while business is slow.
If you pay someone to clean up your photos however, you will still need to spend some time. Most professionals will still send back proofs for you to review and expect some communication on the details of what you would like the final image to look like.
<shamless self advertisement>If you're interested- send me an email (miyako at g mail dot com) and I may be able to work out an arrangement with you while business is slow. My website is down right now but I can email you some example work if you'd like.</shameless self advertisement>
If you decide to give it a try yourself, photoshop is still the defacto standard for most photo editing work. If you do not want to fork over the money to buy photoshop then you may consider trying The GIMP, which is not quite up to the level of photoshop but is free and better than most of the "budget" photo editing software out there.
The thing about it is, 2% makes a much larger difference to someone living on $50k/year than to someone living on $x billion. .5% or 1% of their income.
The thing of it is- you have to look at the cost of living and the cost of the lifestyle people with various incomes have. Sure theoretically everyone's cost of living should be the same- but what people are willing to live with- or perhaps more accurately what they are willing to live without- does vary greatly depending on their income and the lifestyle to which they are accustom.
Given this, the "cost of living" for Bill Gates is higher than that of an average white coller worker- which is certainly higher than that of a 16-year-old flipping burgers for minimum wadge at McDonalds.
The thing of it is though- if we plot the cost of living and upkeep of lifestyle with the income level of the person I would guess that it is certainly not linnear- more likely the curve would appear logarithmic.
That is to say- the difference between the income levels of someone working at McDonalds and Bill Gates is certainly vastly greater than the difference in what it costs them to live what each would relatively define as "well".
Because of this- Bill Gates donating 2% or 10% or mroe of his billions is certainly going to affect (gramar nazis: affect or effect? I usually screw this one up- which is it?) him less than someone making 20k/year donating
It's not the writing I think that takes a long time for RPGs, but I do think RPGs tend to take longer to develop.
In a given RPG you have hundreds of enemies to be modeled- with animations. You have NPCs. Most RPGs have a dozen or two towns with each town having a dozen or more simple interiors. Not to mention a couple of dozen dungeons, an overworld (in some RPGs more than one overworld), models for usually a couple of hundred items, weapons, armor, attack and spell animations for characters and enemies.
Granted- most of these things are simpler to model than- say- a realistic looking model of a vehicle. Overall though I would say it's still a lot more than what you would find in a standard FPS.
On top of all the modeling- you also have voice acting in most modern RPGS (whether this is a good or a bad thing is up for debate) which takes time. Then there are the requisite pre-rendered cutscenes (which are becomming less common as game-engines get better).
I'd also argue that it takes longer to balance the gameplay of an RPG than a FPS or a racing game.
Just look at Star Ocean- the game comes on 2 DVDs- and that is with only a couple of short pre-rendered cutscenes taking up space.
It also takes more than 1 good writer to develop an RPG. Most RPGs I've played tend to credit at least a dozen writers in the ending credits. It takes a lot of work to write all of the main dialog, NPC text, develop the storyline, plot twists, main events, etc.
I was wondering if I was the only person to see the flames painted on the case and thing "how appropriate".
This machine certainly seems like overkill. What would be nice would be if they would make a system like this that uses budget cards. Given that graphics rendering is a task that is easly split between multiple processors (IIRC that's the case anyway), I would think that they could offer something like this with cheaper cards and get better performance than going up to the next generation of cards.
Since a bleeding edge card tends to run around $500, and a card a couple of generations old tends to run about $100, you could get four older generation cards for less than a bleeding edge card, and equivilent if not better performance.
They left off one that I've used a few times when dealing with graphics, which using their naming convention would be something like "Round Toward Mean". You basically take the mean of the surrounding values in an array or matrix and then round up if the value is below the mean, and round down if it's above the mean.
It's useful for smoothing out images if you use this for each color channel (RGB, CMYK, HSV, etc.).
Hmm, putting a thumbdrive on my keyring might be a great idea. I never misplace my thumbdrive but I couldn't tell you where my keys are right now...
It may be impossible for the various kernels, but I would bet that it's actually easier to patch a lot of things in *nix than in windows because the *nix kernels doesn't throw things like a web browser or a window manager into the kernel.
If there is a security hole with Konquror browsing files on KDE then KDE issues a patch and it should mostly work on all of the various systems it runs on.
I had to use C# for a class last semester. Comming into the class I was very much opposed to the concept, essentially feeling that it was better to go with either C++ or Java instead of something inbetween. .NET framework (two thirds of .NET seems to work 1 way, but 1/3 of it seems to have been written by a completely different team who never looked at what the other team was doing- neither way seems to be particularly bad, but it just doesn't feel as coherent as, say, Java).
After using C# for a while, I've come to the conclusion that, while still not a favorite language of mine, it has a fair bit of potential. My biggest problem was, as I recally, the aggrevating inconsistancy of the
As I primarily program on Linux and Mac at home, and most of my professional development is with PHP I'll probably never use C# enough to grow fond of it, I do have to say that if I ever ended up taking a job coding for a Microsoft platform it's nice to know that C# is at least there and much less asinine than using VC++ with Win32 or MFC (which I've found vastly inferior to Swing, Qt, GTK+ or Cocoa).
This reminds me of those banner ads that have freaked out so many (l)users in my family that bounce around saying "Your Computer Is Broadcasting an IP Address" as though the number is your SSN. I would guess (based on how many people I know who bought the software advertised by those banner ads) that this will probably scare a lot of people into compliance.
Another thing that I've noticed is that a lot of the same people who would be freaked out that a site knows their IP address ALSO tend to not realize that downloading stuff via P2P networks is not exactly legal.
I remember recently (like within the last couple of weeks) my aunt expressed amazment that all of the music downloading they had done was considered piracy. She'd also never heard of iTunes or any other way of buying music legally online.
It might be nice if they at least provided some links to places to legally get music for the people who genuinely don't know. For everyone else the whole thing is pointless anyway.
The #1 rule of being a DM is "Make the game fun".
If the game is not fun, then you have no players to play in your consistant, consequence filled, realistic world. A lot of it comes down to how good of a DM you are. An excellent DM can probably create a quest beforehand that needs very little modification for the players, and a poor DM will refuse to change the quest no matter what. Most DMs fall inbetween however- and admit that they are not perfect and cannot forsee how the players will play- and they therefore admit that at times minor things must be changed to keep the overall game going.
In the grand scheme of things, replacing a trap on a door with a spell that can be broken by the groups cleric because the rogue died in a freak accident earlier on in the game to keep the group going can make things much better for the player and the DM.
that's not actually correct as I understand it. Just because there are infinite possible universes does not mean that every universe exists.
It's sort of like how there are infinite values between 1 and 2 (1.1, 1.11, 1.11, etc), but 7 is not a value between 1 and 2.
I think it is certainly possible for a MMO to handle this. I think it is unlikely that a MMO will implement it in the neat future though- for several reasons. The first is that, while it's possible to chose a dungeon (or even a given room) to match the abilities and play style of the players, it would lead to either much easier or much harder dungeons (either all the obstacles are tilted towards or away from the parties abilities). It could be interesting to create a dungeon that uses abilities that the party has but rarely uses (for example, a wizard who focuses on attack spells and generally ignores buffering spells facing a situation where it may be nessesary to change playstyle)- but then players would complain because the game loses the monotonous aspects that MMO players seem to like.
The other problem is that a lot of dungeons would become really predictable. A lot of people tend to play with the same party- so dungeons would tend toward similarity because they would all be weighed toward the skills of the players.
I guess it could be workable- it just seems like most MMOs are very similar- and I have a hard time seeing a game doing this.
And thus arises one of the main problems of the MMO. When I DM a game, I can alter the dungeon so that it works better with the skills of the players. If I have a group of rogues playing, I can add several traps on doors, and some areas that require quick reflexes- I can do it on the fly and still keep the overall feel of the game. If I want to make it harder on the group I can forego the traps and maybe throw in magical beasts that would be better handled by a magic user.
If I have a dungeon with a lot of traps and the party doesn't happen to include a rogue, then I can quickly alter the dungeon so that traps are replaced with simple puzzles or melee encounters that better play to the skills of the players. If there are no rogues and I want to weaken the party to make an encounter more dramatic, then I can throw in a couple of traps- knowing the party is unlikely to be able to detect or disarm them.
This isn't really possible in MMOGs. While it's theoretically possible to create multiple versions of a dungeon and then use the one most fitting for the given parties makeup- it would double or triple the amount of work that goes into designing the quest- and it would probably be exploited easily too.
Makes sense, if Mohammed is a common name in the general population- then it make sense that the name would also be common in the population of criminals.
Reflecting on it, I think that's true in a lot of cases.
I think a lot of what I was saying (aside from having just woken up and not being able to think very coherently) comes from the fact that when you have a well documented and coherent API looking at the documentation and figuring out how to go about doing what you understand conceptually that you need to do using what's available is second nature to those who've been programming for a while.
I'm really not sure what I was thinking about that- but anyway, your right.
I started out with C++ as my first language, and that may be the reason I never had trouble with pointers, but I think a lot of it comes down to how you learn to think about your programs in the first place. A lot of people aren't tought about the way a program works at the lowest levels, and are instead instructed through abstractions- I was lucky enough to have my first CS teacher really make it a point early on to explain how memory allocation, addresses, variables, all that works at the machine level. It put me in a good position to understand things later on.
I'm not sure about the assembly comment though. I learned assembly because I figgured it was a good thing to know even if I never used it much. I tinkered around with it for a while and wrote a really basic OS and a few of the standard programs ones writes when learning assembly and never really looked at it much since then. I do think it helped me to write better code in higher level languages, but I also know some decent programmers who've never done assembly either.
You'd think I would be used to it, given the abysmal standard of the degree factory I go to and the abysmal knowledge of my fellow students there, but I always have a hard time realizing that just because I've spent a lot of time understanding programming on many levels, reading up on actual CS (I'm a CIS major), doing MIT open courseware, etc. there there are people out there who have taken a couple of java or VB classes and a class on SQL and call themselves programmers.
While I agree with your comments, there is one thing that just sort of popped into my head that I thought I would comment on regarding the "new languages are easy to learn" thing. .NET is a good example if you program in windows (as much as I hate microsoft I have to say the .NET framework really does make programming windows applications much easier) or something like Qt (which supports seemingly ever language known to man- and probably a few not). Regular Expressions are also a handy technology to learn, since they are supported in some form in most languages today.
I certainly agree that, when one understand the theory behind how to create a program, picking up the syntax of a new language is easy. It's much easier if the language is in the same vein as one you are familiar with (it's laughably easy to go from one C derived language to another, perhaps less so to go from a C derived language to something like COBOL with really weird syntax.) That said though, in my experience, there are no programming jobs where you will just be working with the basic language- which brings up the most time consuming aspect of working with a new language which is familiarizing yourself with the libraries and APIs used with the language. Because of this, I would say that it may be beneficial to become familiar with things that can be used with multiple languages.
Another thing is, when focusing on the concepts behind programming, I've seen a lot of people who think that means learning OO. I knew a guy who was a pretty decent programmer when it came to object oriented modern languages, but when he was forced to work with C he was woefully underprepared, having always worked with "modern" languages (specifically Java and PHP) he didn't understand things like memory management and pointers (the poor guy spent a week trying to figgure out how to create and use a string before he was let go because he couldn't understand char*).
Anyway, just my thoughts. I'm just a student at a crappy degree factory so take my suggestsions for whatever they're worth.
I have a really low tolerance for alcohol. Generally about one and a half glasses of wine over an hour or two will get me drunk. On the few times that I've went with friends to a bar, or if I'm at someones house and they are making drinks, what I will usually do is start out with a drink made with quarter-shots (1/4 the amount of alcohol they usually use) and follow up with one or two non-alcoholic drinks (usually a Virgin Mary, which is a bloody mary w/o the alcohol but with the spices added to the tomato juice).
If you drink fast you may find that similar techniques could work for you.