Is eating chocolate bad? No. Is eating a pound of chocolate a day bad? Yes. What I'm trying to say is that there is nothing wrong with video games, or tv, for that matter, if used in moderation.
I've been playing RPGs for the last 20 years and have had my share of (A)D&D. That was mainly in the beginning years before going over other RPG's like RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, Vampire etc.
In my opinion D&D shows its age. RPGs have developed quite a lot in the last 30 years, and accumulating XPs / micromanagement is not as essential a part of modern-day RPGs. In a way the XP hunt (as the parent post writes) resembles the scores from computer games and MMORPGs take over.
It's become more and more difficult to get young people (early teenagers) into playing the usual face-to-face RPG in the last 10 years. As far as I can see it there are two reasons: computer games and card trading games. Most of the find it more fun to play computer games than traditional RPGs, and while it at first looked as if Magic and other card games might spur the interest of face-to-face RPGs it turned out that many of the card players kept playing cards and never got into RPGs.
Part of the fun from conversational or traditional RPG is that you are playing with people who've had some experience in life (and have thought a bit about what governs peoples actions). And there are differences in experiences, and it can be very difficult for a 15 year old player to roleplay an adult romance, to react to the emotions a parent might feel at the risk of losing a child etc. These things come with age and there is really nothing we can do about it - besides keep introducing RPG to older teenagers.
Currently the best thing for traditional round-the-table RPS (in my opinion) is the popularity of live-action RPG. Except maybe for plastic-sword-fighting scenarios the LRPGs are hugely popular and often have a 50:50 male female ratio (which - I'm certain - makes the games even more popular). While some of the LRPG players would never dream of playing table RPGs, we managed to get relatively many new players by pushing the ordinary games to LRPG players.
I guess that exactly proves the point why we need open source software. With OSS it is at least possible to actually examine what a program does without having to reverse engineer it (or having to monitor actual contents of all the local network traffic).
I seriously wonder what other kind unknown spyware that are used to monitor us? I can even imagine information being collected and stored locally on the computer by various programs and that this information is later picked up and shared through a spyware program. Then spyware programs really only need to submit the information that has already been collected.
I been unfortunate enough to own a copy of the buggy and practically useless WR4 wireless router/switch from Longshine. After have tried everything to get it to work and virtually no support from Longshine, I decided to tear it apart. Inside the black plastic box was a regular unbranded PCMCIA wireless card connected to a small circuit board. Esentially the 802.11b receiver part was simple PCMCIA card with external antennas soldered to the card.
So much for fancy technology... I can understand it makes sense from the producers point of view but it still is a bit surprising when you see it.
I don't have to play computer games for more than 15 minutes before my head and neck starts to hurt. It usually starts right after my wife tries to slap my headphone off while screaming "ARE YOU SITTING THERE AGAIN! HOW COME YOU CAN FIND THE TIME TO..." (I usually stop listening around this point).
So, the benchmarks show maybe a 10-15% difference in favor of Sun's compiler.
Sun's overpriced machines using their overpriced compilers run a bit faster than their overpriced machines using a free compiler.
In my eyes I would rather spend the $2995 on buying a new PC. Hell... if I wait 6 months before I buy it I'll easily get a 10-15% speed increase on all the programs running on the machine (+ have money to spare).
I guess that is true - especially with respect to obesity. I used to do some obesity-realted research and in the mid 90's I attended a conference on obesity research, where I heard about the following study:
A study was undertaken where people having had a physical handicap (e.g., blindness, missing a limb, deafness etc.) for several years were asked what handicap they would choose instead of their current handicap if they had the chance. Almost all of participants said that they would stick with their current handicap (they sort of stick with what they know and gotten used to). However, when the same question was asked to obese individuals ("If you could choose between being obese or being lean but physically handicapped, what would you choose (and what handicap)?") almost all the obese individuals would rather prefer having a handicap than being obesity.
In my eyes this clearly suggests that the way for example obese individuals are percieved by "normal" people has a huge impact on the person, and the "deviance from average" is not necessarily symmetric and can be highly related to social standards.
... I'm pretty sure HURD will take over any day now (and make that GNU/HURD to satisfy everyone).
Joke aside, I for one hope that some kind of simple clustering will be implemented in the new kernel (possibly even with some kind of load balancing). Its doable with the current kernel series but I'm drooling over all the simulations I would able to do in parallel at the University if all computers would join the cluster by default.
--
No bits were harmed during the production of this mail
Back in the day, typing in a program from a book was a pretty common way to get a game "installed" and running. I wasnt especially computer literate when I was 10 years old, but I knew how to type stuff into my 99% spectrum-compatible clone that misteriously failed to load games from tapes all the time.
Ah yes... I remember and look back on those times with a mixture af happy and desperate thoughts. I remember buying one of the many (!) monthly magazines with computer game code listing and spending an afternoon and evening typing a game in on my trusted Commodore VIC20. When the game ran it was wonderful (the VIC20 was after all a pretty impressive computer for the time), but I also remember the times when the code didn't work! Then I had to spend a few extra hours looking for typos because I had no idea what the "complicated" BASIC was doing, so there was only the tedious way of debugging. Those were the days...
That aside I doubt if a lot was learned from those computer games listed in books/magazines that weren't picked up from somewhere else. Mindlessly typing in the games certainly doesn't help with understanding, and only if you approach the problem from an how-does-he-do-this perspective are you really going to get something out of other peoples code.
I still find that the most usefull way of learning some programming is to have an itch that needs scratching. In teaching (games)-programming I would guess that getting beginners to write tic-tac-toe, a worm-game etc. is still a good idea, and there are lots of simple code to be found on the net.
A voluptuous girl from Nepal
got a hacker to help her install
for appreciation the girl
wanted to show him her perl
but he'd rather mail old Larry Wall
Game-based movies are not necessarily bad. The problem is when movie producers stick too firmly to the game instead of just using the world, the general mood and/or possibly the heroes/villains. Sometimes they are forgetting that a movie does not necessarily turn out a big hit just because the game is a hit - they need professional writers to work on the plot, the script and the dialogue to make a good movie.
I could imagine some quite decent movies from, say, the
White Wolf line of RPGs, but I do agree that some games might be difficult if not impossible to convert: I for one hope we'll never see a Duke Nukem movie.
I take it you've never participated in a real war? Not that I have, but I'm quite certain medics don't go around killing their own to revive them with full health.
Slashdot Mirror
Mom - is that you?
In my opinion D&D shows its age. RPGs have developed quite a lot in the last 30 years, and accumulating XPs / micromanagement is not as essential a part of modern-day RPGs. In a way the XP hunt (as the parent post writes) resembles the scores from computer games and MMORPGs take over.
It's become more and more difficult to get young people (early teenagers) into playing the usual face-to-face RPG in the last 10 years. As far as I can see it there are two reasons: computer games and card trading games. Most of the find it more fun to play computer games than traditional RPGs, and while it at first looked as if Magic and other card games might spur the interest of face-to-face RPGs it turned out that many of the card players kept playing cards and never got into RPGs.
Part of the fun from conversational or traditional RPG is that you are playing with people who've had some experience in life (and have thought a bit about what governs peoples actions). And there are differences in experiences, and it can be very difficult for a 15 year old player to roleplay an adult romance, to react to the emotions a parent might feel at the risk of losing a child etc. These things come with age and there is really nothing we can do about it - besides keep introducing RPG to older teenagers.
Currently the best thing for traditional round-the-table RPS (in my opinion) is the popularity of live-action RPG. Except maybe for plastic-sword-fighting scenarios the LRPGs are hugely popular and often have a 50:50 male female ratio (which - I'm certain - makes the games even more popular). While some of the LRPG players would never dream of playing table RPGs, we managed to get relatively many new players by pushing the ordinary games to LRPG players.
Just my $0.02
I seriously wonder what other kind unknown spyware that are used to monitor us? I can even imagine information being collected and stored locally on the computer by various programs and that this information is later picked up and shared through a spyware program. Then spyware programs really only need to submit the information that has already been collected.
Not to be a nitpicker but isn't that four words?
So much for fancy technology... I can understand it makes sense from the producers point of view but it still is a bit surprising when you see it.
Should I see a doctor?
Well worth the read
Sun's overpriced machines using their overpriced compilers run a bit faster than their overpriced machines using a free compiler.
In my eyes I would rather spend the $2995 on buying a new PC. Hell ... if I wait 6 months before I buy it I'll easily get a 10-15% speed increase on all the programs running on the machine (+ have money to spare).
I guess that is true - especially with respect to obesity. I used to do some obesity-realted research and in the mid 90's I attended a conference on obesity research, where I heard about the following study:
A study was undertaken where people having had a physical handicap (e.g., blindness, missing a limb, deafness etc.) for several years were asked what handicap they would choose instead of their current handicap if they had the chance. Almost all of participants said that they would stick with their current handicap (they sort of stick with what they know and gotten used to). However, when the same question was asked to obese individuals ("If you could choose between being obese or being lean but physically handicapped, what would you choose (and what handicap)?") almost all the obese individuals would rather prefer having a handicap than being obesity.
In my eyes this clearly suggests that the way for example obese individuals are percieved by "normal" people has a huge impact on the person, and the "deviance from average" is not necessarily symmetric and can be highly related to social standards.
--
No bits were harmed during the production of this mail
Ah yes... I remember and look back on those times with a mixture af happy and desperate thoughts. I remember buying one of the many (!) monthly magazines with computer game code listing and spending an afternoon and evening typing a game in on my trusted Commodore VIC20. When the game ran it was wonderful (the VIC20 was after all a pretty impressive computer for the time), but I also remember the times when the code didn't work! Then I had to spend a few extra hours looking for typos because I had no idea what the "complicated" BASIC was doing, so there was only the tedious way of debugging. Those were the days...
That aside I doubt if a lot was learned from those computer games listed in books/magazines that weren't picked up from somewhere else. Mindlessly typing in the games certainly doesn't help with understanding, and only if you approach the problem from an how-does-he-do-this perspective are you really going to get something out of other peoples code. I still find that the most usefull way of learning some programming is to have an itch that needs scratching. In teaching (games)-programming I would guess that getting beginners to write tic-tac-toe, a worm-game etc. is still a good idea, and there are lots of simple code to be found on the net.
got a hacker to help her install
for appreciation the girl
wanted to show him her perl
but he'd rather mail old Larry Wall
Oh wait ... wrong contest
I could imagine some quite decent movies from, say, the White Wolf line of RPGs, but I do agree that some games might be difficult if not impossible to convert: I for one hope we'll never see a Duke Nukem movie.
Of course they do. This happens all the time.