Many professors would like students to explore and experiment in college rather than cram in as much as possible at top speed.
Professors are wrong. Experimentation and exploration is for high school and below. College is expensive and for adults. Adults should be taking charge of their direction, setting goals and achieving them.
While there is some merit to their argument, most of us have no interest in academia. It's just about getting a job, like becoming a patent attorney. Obstacles are thrown in the way of people with specific objectives to keep them in school (general education, matriculation requirements, advanced placement refusals, conflicting course requirements, etc.). While I think this guy probably needs to live a little, he did sucessfully get through those obstacles and beat the professors at their little game. Hooray for our side.
There was a magical moment when you were right, and you could do that, but the bean counters noted a decline in profits. You would be surprised at how many people walk in and pay MSRP, or near it. For items this expensive, I see only ONE way of solving this problem:
Everyone who buys a car mails a copy of their receipt to a central site which puts it in a database, with all relevant information. If you want to buy a car, go to the site, pick the model, and start looking through receipts and figure out what you can get, and refuse to buy for any more. Eventually this will drive car prices to a particular value, and you can skip all the haggling and just buy your car.
What car dealers are relying on is the fact that you don't know what the other guy got, so every vict...customer is a wallet vac candidate.
I don't know about the other stuff, but if you have ever tried to by a car online you could probably understand why auto-ads may be declining regardless of the economy. I first tried this about 7 years ago, and found it to be a very useful experience. I got the car I wanted, with the features I wanted for a fair price, without ever having to leave my house.
I recently decided I need a 4 door, and had to go through this process again. It was...much changed. Every vendor within 50 miles called me up to quote me the MSRP and ask me to come down for a test drive. Long story greatly shortened, I ended up buying a car, after a lot of footwork, by playing one vendor off against another, just like in the good old days. Ultimately I had to drive 50 miles or so outside of austin (because Honda dealers in Austin are universally delusional).
Given this state of affairs, there really is no value of interenet auto business at all. In fact it's hurtful, because you have to give them a real telephone number, something I'd never do with a car dealer until I was good and ready.
Consoles are for games that have been tried out and refined on a PC first. PCs are for anything new and inventive comes out first for a really simple, obvious, reason: there's no financial barrier. Way back in 94 when PCs were dominating, was about the time consoles were in a rut because there wasn't enough innovation, but PCs had some pretty different, entertaining games. 3D graphics were just being demonstrated as viable in real time (although computers had been doing it a while, it really lept forward around then). Unfortunately because PCs have such problems with wide component variance, they are niche, because only a small audience has the ability to make them work.
Ultimately, some of what PCs did well in that era, drove for new console architectures that put them where they are today. Not all genre's made it, and unfortunately we're still lacking in adventure games and straight up RPGs.
I wouldn't expect PC gaming will disappear, except from EB stores. It will likely shift to primarily online sales, and that sure as hell beats camping out best buy.
As a casual player I don't like getting pwnt by kids who play wow from the second they get home from school (3pm) to either until mom makes them sleep, or they pass out (2am).
In my opinion games should be designed around responsible play habits. More than 3 hours per day is bad for adults and kids alike. There are other games than WoW, people can play those when they run out of content. There will certainly be more content coming. Most people I know still have not even seen blackwing lair, and there are 2 raid instances above it. Don't be afraid to let that top 1% quit and play something like Vanguard.
You will soon hunt orc, they will drop flags. Return 20 of them to me. I will give you a sword that makes you strongish. Oh, only one in fifty orc have flags, although they all appear to carry them.
I don't think hatred of the west was quite so ingrained in their culture as it sometimes is in the middle east. Japan mostly had a problem with its aggressive military and their defeat was just acknowledged when entire cities were sent up in flames. Whether nukes were the right answer or not is debated there, I thought the results were at least beneficial to us, which is really all I care about. I'm not sure how good it was for Japan, I suspect they would be in the same spot now either way.
On the other hand, we can go in and destroy any middle east country we take an interest in. Even Iran would be wiped out in a month if we wanted it, without nukes. Everyone knows this, that's why tactics used against us are terrorist. You can't attack a terrorist, cut off his funding, deprive him of needed resources. You can't fight a military war against him period. Nuke his city and he'll firebomb a plane. Nuke his country and ten of his friends will bomb ten of your cities. It's not about leading a people, it's about pure wanton destruction. Terrorists are beholden to no one at all. The only way to stop them is to make them intolerable to their own people, not easily accomplished by blowing everything the fuck up, or sending in soldiers. What we want is to undermine their governments, but more significantly their religious leaders. How much faith was lost when that scandal about altar boys got out? What we lack is enough influence in the area to set that sort of activity in place, and perhaps enough understanding of their culture to ensure we're pushing the correct buttons.
Inciting a riot is a serious criminal offense, I doubt they'd go that far.
Re:Just like there will never be another Doom
on
Can Anyone Beat WoW?
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· Score: 1
Nah, when EQ came out it was such a huge and amazing success that it was considered defining and dominant. Those of us kept playing knew "There's got to be a better way, there's got to be a better MMOG". WoW is probably it. I dropped EQ, I play WoW, and enjoy it, and constantly remind myself of how bad EQ was (yet how much I played the fucking thing), and I still think "This is great, but here's how it could be better". A lot of the time I'm suprised at how Bliz sweeps in to include the things I thought were missing, in that sense they're very dynamic and tough to beat...they DO seem to care. For that reason I sense competition may be somewhat afraid to try to enter the market.
On the other hand, there are still some fundamentals to wow that can't change and are ultimately going to limit it. The growing dichotomy between PvP and Raiding. The need to appeal to the young audiences as well as the older audiences in content and character (twitch vs. strategy, snow white vs. anime, etc.). The level treadmill being short enough to not discourage replayability, but so technically easy that people who don't understand the game or their class can max out and pollute tough end game raids/instances with incompetance. Pretty much across the board it's a game to appeal to all people, and while that gives it the highest population, I think also is going to allow competitors to release more focused games that answer the needs of different people. In addition, WoW is limited by the technology of the time...one day we WILL get a good QoS mechanism for internet transport, and that will redefine online gaming as well.
Once upon a time Quake 2 was the dominant FPS...all others tried to be like it. I don't think many people even remember it. So too will WoW go by the wayside, but it's got many years left in it.
I've never had an employer ask me about my outside relationships in an interview, or projects that did not relate to school or previous jobs. At best they'll ask me if I know how to play softball.
Now quite a few people I work with here play WoW and are raiding BWL/Naxx. It turns out amongst some geeks, it's a pretty social thing to do.
Worse, if you really only want to raid 2 nights a week, it's very, very hard to find a guild and keep it together. You either get people who will leave you for the 5 night/week guild, or people who are so casual that they either don't play correctly or show up very inconsistently.
What's new is people who study such things are coming to realize that most people have not spent a great deal of time thinking about "exploring gender roles" when they pick up their mmog.
I'm not sure what kind of people go and explore gender roles, I hope it works out for them, but if you're gonna play a mmog and group with me, try to focus on the damned game and its objectives.
If I didn't care about money I'd be doing exactly what I'm doing now. But since i do, I actively spend my time trying to do something else that pays better. Yes, it's nice to enjoy what you do, but do you get out of bed in the morning to an alarm clock to have fun, or because you need to pay the bills? If I didn't care about money i'd do exactly what I'm doing now, but I'd do it when I wanted, how I wanted.
It's impossible to blend "fun" and "work" in any consistent/logical decision that necessarily produces happy. I find happy at work equates to any of: a) You are so obsessively driven on a subject that you can tune out status/personal needs for gratification of your other desires, b) You want money/status so badly that you'll do anything you're asked to achieve it, c) You are not driven, but have learned to make the best of what you've got.
Unhappy people have either pursued the inappropriate path above and/or have failed at it.
Not sure but the last patch was really great, and along with that login queues have returned and the server is packed again. I guess I don't see that happening. Uber guilds are breaking up and reforming but mostly because there's a new tier of stuff and the usual race for server firsts.
A paycheck isn't a reward, it's a trade. Given the decrease in employee negotiation power lately, it's usually not even a fair trade. Somewhere, someone decided that the most important thing in life is having large amounts of money, and those that do tend to have unbelievable power over the rest of us...and usually aren't all that bright about it, but are at least organized.
Maybe that end of the year bonus is a reward...usually even with good ratings it's well below what you deserve. I guess I agree, a weekend of raiding and beating some hard boss is usually more rewarding than any amount of office politic endurance.
It'd be my top priority even if I didn't like the game. Imagine, someone telling me what's good for me, and making a law out of it.
It's like the idiots who were trying to criminalize junk food. Without a law to forbid me, I never eat the crap. If someone tried to make it I'd eat two bags of cheetos, smoke 3 packs a day and wash it all down with a few bottles of whiskey. Just for spite.
We need to teach them kids some good old fashioned rebelliousness as part of our outsourcing efforts. Make their government pay for enticing our corporations over.
While I'm not sure about the merits of being peer-pressured into doing something you don't want to do, I think you're definitely off the mark on the push/pull dilemma. If anything we are more constantly bombarded with data we either don't agree with or find outright offensive to our values, a good amount of it is such utter bullshit that I would argue no one would even sat it in a face to face environment. With close friends you have a sort of pre-selected group of people who think alike, they may disagree, but never about anything 'important'. With any given search of something on the internet you're going to get every random opinion that may exist (along with 10% obligatory porn). Gradually, as with anything else, you learn to filter out sources of opinions that bother you, in the end I think it's a wash.
I'm not sure why Americans in particular are shallow and selfish as the internet is catching on comparatively slow here. If the article premise is true, and the internet is tearing apart human social fabrics, then you'd think Koreans or Chinese would be the most shallow and selfish. Not something I've personally experienced
To be slightly polemic (and borrowed slightly from Asimov), if you extropolate technological advancement to the end state, where anything can be had, what would you consider to be utopia? Some people envision the perpetual party state, having fun with friends and living closely with their peers, bound together by social laws and manners. Others might envision complete self-sufficiency, the anti-society, with no undesired external contacts and absolute freedom. I'm not sure that anything is wrong with either end state, we could site pro's and con's to either one, I personally favor the latter.
And if your only other ISP was doing the same because he doesn't want TPB or some such competing with his premium video channel package? Cellular? Dial-Up? Dixie-Cups and string?
Telco's need to be separated from service providers. The telco should you a wire, and a connection to a service provider of your choosing. He needs to offer the same rate to all customers for a given product. The service provider then ought to be able to offer you any kind of service he likes, and you should have complete freedom to choose from any, anywhere in the world. End of Story. It's technologically possible, it's just not shareholder friendly.
That's a lot closer to competition, and I woudln't object to tiering in that situation. I could theoretically always find an ISP that is most friendly to my useage patterns.
Slashdot Mirror
Many professors would like students to explore and experiment in college rather than cram in as much as possible at top speed.
Professors are wrong. Experimentation and exploration is for high school and below. College is expensive and for adults. Adults should be taking charge of their direction, setting goals and achieving them.
While there is some merit to their argument, most of us have no interest in academia. It's just about getting a job, like becoming a patent attorney. Obstacles are thrown in the way of people with specific objectives to keep them in school (general education, matriculation requirements, advanced placement refusals, conflicting course requirements, etc.). While I think this guy probably needs to live a little, he did sucessfully get through those obstacles and beat the professors at their little game. Hooray for our side.
There was a magical moment when you were right, and you could do that, but the bean counters noted a decline in profits. You would be surprised at how many people walk in and pay MSRP, or near it. For items this expensive, I see only ONE way of solving this problem:
Everyone who buys a car mails a copy of their receipt to a central site which puts it in a database, with all relevant information. If you want to buy a car, go to the site, pick the model, and start looking through receipts and figure out what you can get, and refuse to buy for any more. Eventually this will drive car prices to a particular value, and you can skip all the haggling and just buy your car.
What car dealers are relying on is the fact that you don't know what the other guy got, so every vict...customer is a wallet vac candidate.
I don't know about the other stuff, but if you have ever tried to by a car online you could probably understand why auto-ads may be declining regardless of the economy. I first tried this about 7 years ago, and found it to be a very useful experience. I got the car I wanted, with the features I wanted for a fair price, without ever having to leave my house.
I recently decided I need a 4 door, and had to go through this process again. It was...much changed. Every vendor within 50 miles called me up to quote me the MSRP and ask me to come down for a test drive. Long story greatly shortened, I ended up buying a car, after a lot of footwork, by playing one vendor off against another, just like in the good old days. Ultimately I had to drive 50 miles or so outside of austin (because Honda dealers in Austin are universally delusional).
Given this state of affairs, there really is no value of interenet auto business at all. In fact it's hurtful, because you have to give them a real telephone number, something I'd never do with a car dealer until I was good and ready.
Consoles are for games that have been tried out and refined on a PC first. PCs are for anything new and inventive comes out first for a really simple, obvious, reason: there's no financial barrier. Way back in 94 when PCs were dominating, was about the time consoles were in a rut because there wasn't enough innovation, but PCs had some pretty different, entertaining games. 3D graphics were just being demonstrated as viable in real time (although computers had been doing it a while, it really lept forward around then). Unfortunately because PCs have such problems with wide component variance, they are niche, because only a small audience has the ability to make them work.
Ultimately, some of what PCs did well in that era, drove for new console architectures that put them where they are today. Not all genre's made it, and unfortunately we're still lacking in adventure games and straight up RPGs.
I wouldn't expect PC gaming will disappear, except from EB stores. It will likely shift to primarily online sales, and that sure as hell beats camping out best buy.
As a casual player I don't like getting pwnt by kids who play wow from the second they get home from school (3pm) to either until mom makes them sleep, or they pass out (2am).
In my opinion games should be designed around responsible play habits. More than 3 hours per day is bad for adults and kids alike. There are other games than WoW, people can play those when they run out of content. There will certainly be more content coming. Most people I know still have not even seen blackwing lair, and there are 2 raid instances above it. Don't be afraid to let that top 1% quit and play something like Vanguard.
Ah, let the transportation safety board try to stop be from boarding a plane and giving photons mass! JUST LET THEM TRY! MUAHAHAHAHA!
You will soon hunt orc, they will drop flags. Return 20 of them to me. I will give you a sword that makes you strongish. Oh, only one in fifty orc have flags, although they all appear to carry them.
I don't think hatred of the west was quite so ingrained in their culture as it sometimes is in the middle east. Japan mostly had a problem with its aggressive military and their defeat was just acknowledged when entire cities were sent up in flames. Whether nukes were the right answer or not is debated there, I thought the results were at least beneficial to us, which is really all I care about. I'm not sure how good it was for Japan, I suspect they would be in the same spot now either way.
On the other hand, we can go in and destroy any middle east country we take an interest in. Even Iran would be wiped out in a month if we wanted it, without nukes. Everyone knows this, that's why tactics used against us are terrorist. You can't attack a terrorist, cut off his funding, deprive him of needed resources. You can't fight a military war against him period. Nuke his city and he'll firebomb a plane. Nuke his country and ten of his friends will bomb ten of your cities. It's not about leading a people, it's about pure wanton destruction. Terrorists are beholden to no one at all. The only way to stop them is to make them intolerable to their own people, not easily accomplished by blowing everything the fuck up, or sending in soldiers. What we want is to undermine their governments, but more significantly their religious leaders. How much faith was lost when that scandal about altar boys got out? What we lack is enough influence in the area to set that sort of activity in place, and perhaps enough understanding of their culture to ensure we're pushing the correct buttons.
Yes and it is good.
Inciting a riot is a serious criminal offense, I doubt they'd go that far.
Nah, when EQ came out it was such a huge and amazing success that it was considered defining and dominant. Those of us kept playing knew "There's got to be a better way, there's got to be a better MMOG". WoW is probably it. I dropped EQ, I play WoW, and enjoy it, and constantly remind myself of how bad EQ was (yet how much I played the fucking thing), and I still think "This is great, but here's how it could be better". A lot of the time I'm suprised at how Bliz sweeps in to include the things I thought were missing, in that sense they're very dynamic and tough to beat...they DO seem to care. For that reason I sense competition may be somewhat afraid to try to enter the market.
On the other hand, there are still some fundamentals to wow that can't change and are ultimately going to limit it. The growing dichotomy between PvP and Raiding. The need to appeal to the young audiences as well as the older audiences in content and character (twitch vs. strategy, snow white vs. anime, etc.). The level treadmill being short enough to not discourage replayability, but so technically easy that people who don't understand the game or their class can max out and pollute tough end game raids/instances with incompetance. Pretty much across the board it's a game to appeal to all people, and while that gives it the highest population, I think also is going to allow competitors to release more focused games that answer the needs of different people. In addition, WoW is limited by the technology of the time...one day we WILL get a good QoS mechanism for internet transport, and that will redefine online gaming as well.
Once upon a time Quake 2 was the dominant FPS...all others tried to be like it. I don't think many people even remember it. So too will WoW go by the wayside, but it's got many years left in it.
A determined idiot will defeat any training.
And who exactly do you think lives in those buring trees in the Amazon? Pirates.
Wow. If I'm ever on trial for murder, I'm hiring you as my defense attorney.
I've never had an employer ask me about my outside relationships in an interview, or projects that did not relate to school or previous jobs. At best they'll ask me if I know how to play softball.
Now quite a few people I work with here play WoW and are raiding BWL/Naxx. It turns out amongst some geeks, it's a pretty social thing to do.
Worse, if you really only want to raid 2 nights a week, it's very, very hard to find a guild and keep it together. You either get people who will leave you for the 5 night/week guild, or people who are so casual that they either don't play correctly or show up very inconsistently.
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
Not if you're wearing >250 in fire resist. School that girl of yours with crappy games, this is important information!
Bah to interacting with humans!
What's new is people who study such things are coming to realize that most people have not spent a great deal of time thinking about "exploring gender roles" when they pick up their mmog.
I'm not sure what kind of people go and explore gender roles, I hope it works out for them, but if you're gonna play a mmog and group with me, try to focus on the damned game and its objectives.
In other words, when dealt a pair of twos and a lot of junk, the MPAA will go in a few million to try to scare off their opponents.
It's nice to be the richest guy at the table I guess, but you won't stay that way long.
If I didn't care about money I'd be doing exactly what I'm doing now. But since i do, I actively spend my time trying to do something else that pays better. Yes, it's nice to enjoy what you do, but do you get out of bed in the morning to an alarm clock to have fun, or because you need to pay the bills? If I didn't care about money i'd do exactly what I'm doing now, but I'd do it when I wanted, how I wanted.
It's impossible to blend "fun" and "work" in any consistent/logical decision that necessarily produces happy. I find happy at work equates to any of: a) You are so obsessively driven on a subject that you can tune out status/personal needs for gratification of your other desires, b) You want money/status so badly that you'll do anything you're asked to achieve it, c) You are not driven, but have learned to make the best of what you've got.
Unhappy people have either pursued the inappropriate path above and/or have failed at it.
Not sure but the last patch was really great, and along with that login queues have returned and the server is packed again. I guess I don't see that happening. Uber guilds are breaking up and reforming but mostly because there's a new tier of stuff and the usual race for server firsts.
A paycheck isn't a reward, it's a trade. Given the decrease in employee negotiation power lately, it's usually not even a fair trade. Somewhere, someone decided that the most important thing in life is having large amounts of money, and those that do tend to have unbelievable power over the rest of us...and usually aren't all that bright about it, but are at least organized.
Maybe that end of the year bonus is a reward...usually even with good ratings it's well below what you deserve. I guess I agree, a weekend of raiding and beating some hard boss is usually more rewarding than any amount of office politic endurance.
It'd be my top priority even if I didn't like the game. Imagine, someone telling me what's good for me, and making a law out of it.
It's like the idiots who were trying to criminalize junk food. Without a law to forbid me, I never eat the crap. If someone tried to make it I'd eat two bags of cheetos, smoke 3 packs a day and wash it all down with a few bottles of whiskey. Just for spite.
We need to teach them kids some good old fashioned rebelliousness as part of our outsourcing efforts. Make their government pay for enticing our corporations over.
While I'm not sure about the merits of being peer-pressured into doing something you don't want to do, I think you're definitely off the mark on the push/pull dilemma. If anything we are more constantly bombarded with data we either don't agree with or find outright offensive to our values, a good amount of it is such utter bullshit that I would argue no one would even sat it in a face to face environment. With close friends you have a sort of pre-selected group of people who think alike, they may disagree, but never about anything 'important'. With any given search of something on the internet you're going to get every random opinion that may exist (along with 10% obligatory porn). Gradually, as with anything else, you learn to filter out sources of opinions that bother you, in the end I think it's a wash.
I'm not sure why Americans in particular are shallow and selfish as the internet is catching on comparatively slow here. If the article premise is true, and the internet is tearing apart human social fabrics, then you'd think Koreans or Chinese would be the most shallow and selfish. Not something I've personally experienced
To be slightly polemic (and borrowed slightly from Asimov), if you extropolate technological advancement to the end state, where anything can be had, what would you consider to be utopia? Some people envision the perpetual party state, having fun with friends and living closely with their peers, bound together by social laws and manners. Others might envision complete self-sufficiency, the anti-society, with no undesired external contacts and absolute freedom. I'm not sure that anything is wrong with either end state, we could site pro's and con's to either one, I personally favor the latter.
And if your only other ISP was doing the same because he doesn't want TPB or some such competing with his premium video channel package? Cellular? Dial-Up? Dixie-Cups and string?
Telco's need to be separated from service providers. The telco should you a wire, and a connection to a service provider of your choosing. He needs to offer the same rate to all customers for a given product. The service provider then ought to be able to offer you any kind of service he likes, and you should have complete freedom to choose from any, anywhere in the world. End of Story. It's technologically possible, it's just not shareholder friendly.
That's a lot closer to competition, and I woudln't object to tiering in that situation. I could theoretically always find an ISP that is most friendly to my useage patterns.