I've been a player for a year and a half, and the community is actually the most diverse I've ever seen in an online game. Most of the players are between 15 and 35, but there are a fair number of families that play too-- kids as young as 6 years (with parental permission of course) and parents as old as 50.
Because the game is so socially focused, you find that the most socially and politically adept people become the Captains, Kings, and Governors of the game. It's not at all like a traditional MMORPG where your guildmaster is the guy who logs in the most often and has the items with the highest numbers. Teamwork and community are the foundation of the game, so it naturally attracts those people most interested in those things.
I guess I'm a bit confused... Since when was the whole point of Christianity getting into Heaven and avoiding Hell? If your view of religion is just about what happens "after death", then I submit that perhaps you're missing the point. Do you really think God made this whole world just to throw it away in a few thousand years after it starts getting interesting?
Not that there isn't any room for discussions of an afterlife, but my impression of Christianity from the Bible reading I've done seems to imply that Christianity is far more about the present world.
My theory is that most Christians look for God to do stuff in the real world and don't see it, so they assume that's because religion only matters for the afterlife. It's a defense mechanism that avoids admitting, "I must have misunderstood something about what God wants."
With all due respect, the initial question was "How can you believe in God?" and not "Which of the huge litany of Christian, Catholic, and pseudo-Christian ethical laws do you think actually apply, and how do you reconcile the ones that seem to conflict with scientific evidence?"
Larry really was right-- a lot of people's perceptions make the question more complicated than it needs to be.
With all due respect, the argument of "bits were too precious back then" is complete bullshit. Think about this:
Starting from say, 1950, if you only store the last two digits of a year and add 50 to each record, you'll need numbers between 0 and 49 to capture every date before you need more intelligent code anyway (like 1950 + X instead of 19 . 50 + X). You can encode all of these numbers using 6 bits.
How many dates can you store using a mere 8 bits? You have numbers 0 through 255, so you get years 1950 to 1950 + 255, or 2205. 16 bits buys you multiple millenia.
Be honest. You were not rejoicing over saving a whole 2 bits. Now think. How were these dates actually stored? I have yet to see a single database that stored these in 6 bit binary format. I haven't even seem them store it in 8 bit binary, offset from 50 (or 1950). Every single old database I've seen used the two digits in their database field. To encode "1971", they would store "71". As in, 0x37 0x31 in ASCII. So they were using 16 bits anyway!
Don't kid yourselves. It was *not* a smart design decision. It was *not* to save those precious two bits that no one ever saved anyway. It was bad design and bad programming.
Sorry to sound like a typical slashdot troll, but does this come with Linux preloaded? I'm shopping for a laptop, and I *really* don't want to pay the Microsoft Operating System Tax(tm) for an OS I'm not going to use. Any recommendations on laptops with preloaded linux and places to buy them that *WON'T* charge me for Windows?
I think your point is this. Downloading the file off of the internet is *NOT* stealing because it doesn't cause someone else a lack. I'm still undecided about whether or not it's right or wrong, but it's definitly not wrong the same way theft is wrong.
They've hired a real science fiction author to write the story for the game. It's the same guy who did the 7th Guest story, if you remember that old (but excellent) game. I don't remember the guys name off the top of my head though...
One more thing. I agree with the others that suggest looking for a new job. If your management is giving you money to complete the software but then telling you how you should spend it (ie. india), that's a sign they don't really respect your management decisions. If they really empowered you and had trust in you, they would say, "Here is $X. It's your responsibility to get the project done."
It seems like they won't accept any situatuion except one involving India programmers, and that is 99% guaranteed to fail. The failure will be blamed on you, you'll be out of work, and have trouble finding a new job (because of the previous failure which wasn't your fault).
The mere fact that they fired your team when you said you had just enough for the project should let you know they don't really value your opinion. Find a company that respects you. They do exist.
For the love of God, DO NOT DO IT! I've worked with or interviewed for positions at 3 different companies/departments that used off-shore india programmers. It was always a horrible experience. In each situation, after 6 months they said that hiring the offshore team actually hurt progress. That is to say, X programmers on site would have made more progress than X on site and Y offsite.
I'm not sure what all the root issues are, but the time difference is huge. Get used to 9pm phone conference meetings. It was horrible explaining the software needs to the offshore groups. And fiunally, it's much harder to do quality control with people who aren't actually there. It's much harder to get them to fix problems when you don't have an in-person presence. Most programmers by nature get things done in the worst possible long term way. In the offshore situation, you will have almost no power to encourage them to create code that's built to last.
As an extra way of increasing difficulty, I play Thief on Expert with "No Save". Technically this is a bit of a lie-- I save the game a few times per level. The real key is never using the reload button. If you get in an altercation with the guards, tough. You better run your ass off! The game has a lot more depth of gameplay if you can't just charge in for scouting and then reload the game.
In practice, I reload once or twice per mission, and only when I die. It can be done, but it's much harder. Try it sometime.
In a shocking display a humor, a slashdot poster posts a one line comment and is immediately moderated up to 5. A moderater responded, on condition of anonyminity, "It's more important that comedians get the +2 bonus than people who have real thoughts to add. Besides, it's just slashdot. It's not like anyone reads it for the news or comments anyway."
It honestly depends on the game. I can't notice any difference between 0ms and 25ms of ping, but you can feel a little bit between 50ms and 0ms in an online game. I did work with the Unlagged Q3 mod as part of unlagging my own mod, Art of War. It turns out that 50ms of time is about half of a player bounding box in Q3. So lets say a player is moving from left to right and you have a 50ms ping. If you are aimed just a little bit to the left of center, but still lined up with their bounding box, you will miss with 50ms ping and hit with 0ms ping. That's pretty important. With unlagging, I notice a huge improvement in all my hitscan weapons, even in the sub 100 ping range.
That said, Packet Loss is far worse than a high ping, and high pings don't mean as much in slower paced games like RTS games.
People have spent the past twenty plus years designing development tools for synchronous design. There's just a lot less groundwork covered for asychronous design because no one has spent the millions of dollars to create a (mostly) new tool chain.
Even before my wife and I saw the movie, it was worth the price of admission. The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Star Wars trailers all looked excellent, and I'm looking forward to seeing each movie. Watching the trailers side-by-side really pointed out how different these movies are. They aren't competing with each other at all, even if they're all fantasy/sci-fi movies.
Lord of the Rings is quite obviously (attemping to be) an epic fantasy movie. Epic is hard to pull off, but I believe Lord of the Rings will make it. Will it be as good as the books? No. Will there be times you're distracted by the special effects? Probably. But the source material of the movie is the very definition of Epic Fantasy, and if the director (Peter Jackson) has a devotion to stay true to the source, Lord of the Rings can't help but achieve its goal of successfully portraying the epic nature of Tolkien's books. The trailers quite clearly pitch it as a teenager/adult movie.
Harry Potter is another fantasy oriented movie, but it's quite clearly just "Good Fun". This doesn't mean the movie doesn't have depth. In fact, J.K. Rowling gave each actor a complete background story for their characters (which she has in her head, but hasn't been published in any books). It tries to portray a child's wonder at and adventure in the world of magic. It's not striving for epic. It's a movie that could and will be enjoyed by the whole family.
The Star Wars review had dark overtones, but was just shot after shot of breathtaking scenes packed with tension and action. It's a special effects, action movie. The plot might not be Lord of the Rings or even Harry Potter, but it's still ten times the plot of any other action movie. The Star Wars story doesn't have much depth anymore. (Especially since George Lucas tried to rewrite Han Solo as a good character from the start, instead of learning to love things other than himself.) But Star Wars does have a *LOT* of breadth, and that comes across in the movie. Just seeing all the different cultures and planets is still very exciting.
It's unfair to say that if you have a purportedly "strategic game" and people aren't playing it as such, it's just that the players are bad. You need to understand what makes a game strategic.
The amount of strategy in a game is based on the total branching factor of all strategic decisions the player mades in the course of a game. A strategic decision is any decision the player must make where the optimal choice is not known (and by extension, there are at least two optimal choices). In other words, the amount of strategy in a game is based on the total number of viable options presented to the player throughout the entire game.
It's important that these are options "viable". A lot of games give you a ton of options, but they are so poorly designed that one option is just better than the others. A great example is Starcraft. If you are playing the Zerg, you want to Zerg Rush. There is no other viable option you can take. There may be a few minor "choices" you make in there, but they don't provide any real branching to the game tree. If you win your rush, great. Your opponent will almost definitly win the game, but people play it out just to make sure. If you lose, you have *one* strategic choice to make-- how to recover. There are a few options, but you'll probably lose.
In particular, playing Zerg in Starcraft gives you a "strategy count" of roughly 3. Roughly different options presented to you. Is this the fault of the player? Hell no! The designers did give the player choices, but some of those choices were just so much more likely to win the game.
Compare this with chess, where you have 50-100 (even more?) viable starting openings. And that's just for the first 3-7 moves! Or the Go, which has an even higher branching factor.
The key to designing good strategic games is *not* giving the player choices! It's giving the player *viable* choices. Every time the player has an option, there should be sufficient motivation to choose either options, even for experienced players. I haven't really found an RTS game that can pull this off that well. That's why they're not really "Real Time Strategy" games. They are "Real Time Tactical" games, because all of your choices are tiny tactical decisions like how and where to attack. RTS games are 75% tactics and 25% strategy. If you want to have more strategy in the game, you have to have less focused sides. It's pretty clear the Starcraft Zergs were designed as "the early rush team", and that just nullified all strategic choices.
The fact is, EVERY team needs to rush. EVERY team needs to defend. EVERY team needs to have a late assault force. You can't vary the teams by making them good at these different things. You need the teams to approach these challenges in different ways, so players still have the choices of 'rush/defend/assault'.
I learned this lesson the hard way, when designing an RTS/FPS hybrid mod for Quake 3 called "Art of War" (Link in.sig). I tried focusing the factions in this way, but there wasn't any strategic depth to it. Once I rearranged all the unit powers so they could all defend, attack, and support in different ways, the game became immensely strategic (while retaining its tactical core). I don't think most RTS designers have learned this lesson, however.
This link should give you information on the pyramids. I believe they dated the pyramids because of how they were aligned to the night sky when they were created (since the sky slowly shifts over time).
C-14 dating only has "reasonable" error ranges for items dated at 5000 years or less (around 1 century). If you use C-14 to date something older, say, 10000 years (or 10,000,000 years), the percentage of error margin gets significantly larger. The man who designed carbon dating (his name escapes me) explained this in his thesis which won him the Nobel Prize.
The problem with reputation is that it's just so easy to buy! Lets say I go place 20 bids on random crap and my $1 bid wins. Hey, I just got 20 points of reputation for $20! Then I can sell the crap back for maybe $.50 and I have 20 more points worth of reptuation! For literally $10 (and some free time), you can get 40 reputation points from ebay. The whole reputation system is flawed because untrustworthy people are allowed to give out good feedback. Who says that just because someone was honest with a $1 transaction that you can claim they are a "Good trader, very prompt"? What do you know about whether that person is really honest? Yet people give all the feedback to others because they want good feedback in turn.
Listing how much money was spent as part of the feedback doesn't really help either. Just set up a ring of ebay accounts, bid on each other's stuff, and have it sell for higher values. Sure, ebay gets a small cut, but all you're really doing is buy reputation from ebay which you use to screw other people. Suppose I forge $5000 of transactions on ebay and they take 3%. I just bought an enormous amount of reputation (trustworthy for $5000 in transactions) for $167. It shouldn't be that hard for an unethical person to go make $500/scam off of 20+ people.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been a player for a year and a half, and the community is actually the most diverse I've ever seen in an online game. Most of the players are between 15 and 35, but there are a fair number of families that play too-- kids as young as 6 years (with parental permission of course) and parents as old as 50.
Because the game is so socially focused, you find that the most socially and politically adept people become the Captains, Kings, and Governors of the game. It's not at all like a traditional MMORPG where your guildmaster is the guy who logs in the most often and has the items with the highest numbers. Teamwork and community are the foundation of the game, so it naturally attracts those people most interested in those things.
... This post is simultaneously more interesting, insightful, and funny than most of the score 5 posts in this thread.
I guess I'm a bit confused... Since when was the whole point of Christianity getting into Heaven and avoiding Hell? If your view of religion is just about what happens "after death", then I submit that perhaps you're missing the point. Do you really think God made this whole world just to throw it away in a few thousand years after it starts getting interesting?
Not that there isn't any room for discussions of an afterlife, but my impression of Christianity from the Bible reading I've done seems to imply that Christianity is far more about the present world.
My theory is that most Christians look for God to do stuff in the real world and don't see it, so they assume that's because religion only matters for the afterlife. It's a defense mechanism that avoids admitting, "I must have misunderstood something about what God wants."
With all due respect, the initial question was "How can you believe in God?" and not "Which of the huge litany of Christian, Catholic, and pseudo-Christian ethical laws do you think actually apply, and how do you reconcile the ones that seem to conflict with scientific evidence?"
Larry really was right-- a lot of people's perceptions make the question more complicated than it needs to be.
With all due respect, the argument of "bits were too precious back then" is complete bullshit. Think about this:
Starting from say, 1950, if you only store the last two digits of a year and add 50 to each record, you'll need numbers between 0 and 49 to capture every date before you need more intelligent code anyway (like 1950 + X instead of 19 . 50 + X). You can encode all of these numbers using 6 bits.
How many dates can you store using a mere 8 bits? You have numbers 0 through 255, so you get years 1950 to 1950 + 255, or 2205. 16 bits buys you multiple millenia.
Be honest. You were not rejoicing over saving a whole 2 bits. Now think. How were these dates actually stored? I have yet to see a single database that stored these in 6 bit binary format. I haven't even seem them store it in 8 bit binary, offset from 50 (or 1950). Every single old database I've seen used the two digits in their database field. To encode "1971", they would store "71". As in, 0x37 0x31 in ASCII. So they were using 16 bits anyway!
Don't kid yourselves. It was *not* a smart design decision. It was *not* to save those precious two bits that no one ever saved anyway. It was bad design and bad programming.
Sorry to sound like a typical slashdot troll, but does this come with Linux preloaded? I'm shopping for a laptop, and I *really* don't want to pay the Microsoft Operating System Tax(tm) for an OS I'm not going to use. Any recommendations on laptops with preloaded linux and places to buy them that *WON'T* charge me for Windows?
I think your point is this. Downloading the file off of the internet is *NOT* stealing because it doesn't cause someone else a lack. I'm still undecided about whether or not it's right or wrong, but it's definitly not wrong the same way theft is wrong.
And you're getting Karma for your one-line post being labelled +1 Funny. Who's the Karma Whore now, huh? :)
They've hired a real science fiction author to write the story for the game. It's the same guy who did the 7th Guest story, if you remember that old (but excellent) game. I don't remember the guys name off the top of my head though...
One more thing. I agree with the others that suggest looking for a new job. If your management
is giving you money to complete the software but then telling you how you should spend it (ie. india), that's a sign they don't really respect your management decisions. If they really empowered you and had trust in you, they would say, "Here is $X. It's your responsibility to get the project done."
It seems like they won't accept any situatuion except one involving India programmers, and that is 99% guaranteed to fail. The failure will be blamed on you, you'll be out of work, and have trouble finding a new job (because of the previous failure which wasn't your fault).
The mere fact that they fired your team when you said you had just enough for the project should let you know they don't really value your opinion. Find a company that respects you. They do exist.
For the love of God, DO NOT DO IT! I've worked with or interviewed for positions at 3 different companies/departments that used off-shore india programmers. It was always a horrible experience. In each situation, after 6 months they said that hiring the offshore team actually hurt progress. That is to say, X programmers on site would have made more progress than X on site and Y offsite.
I'm not sure what all the root issues are, but the time difference is huge. Get used to 9pm phone conference meetings. It was horrible explaining the software needs to the offshore groups. And fiunally, it's much harder to do quality control with people who aren't actually there. It's much harder to get them to fix problems when you don't have an in-person presence. Most programmers by nature get things done in the worst possible long term way. In the offshore situation, you will have almost no power to encourage them to create code that's built to last.
As an extra way of increasing difficulty, I play Thief on Expert with "No Save". Technically this is a bit of a lie-- I save the game a few times per level. The real key is never using the reload button. If you get in an altercation with the guards, tough. You better run your ass off! The game has a lot more depth of gameplay if you can't just charge in for scouting and then reload the game.
In practice, I reload once or twice per mission, and only when I die. It can be done, but it's much harder. Try it sometime.
-Ted
All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
:)
Who wants to go find some stamps?
Eh, no offense intended. I think I'm just getting jaded.
In a shocking display a humor, a slashdot poster posts a one line comment and is immediately moderated up to 5. A moderater responded, on condition of anonyminity, "It's more important that comedians get the +2 bonus than people who have real thoughts to add. Besides, it's just slashdot. It's not like anyone reads it for the news or comments anyway."
That said, Packet Loss is far worse than a high ping, and high pings don't mean as much in slower paced games like RTS games.
-Ted
I guess they were smart enough to avoid the "Duck and Cover" technique that Pompeii's residents tried...
People have spent the past twenty plus years designing development tools for synchronous design. There's just a lot less groundwork covered for asychronous design because no one has spent the millions of dollars to create a (mostly) new tool chain.
Even before my wife and I saw the movie, it was worth the price of admission. The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Star Wars trailers all looked excellent, and I'm looking forward to seeing each movie. Watching the trailers side-by-side really pointed out how different these movies are. They aren't competing with each other at all, even if they're all fantasy/sci-fi movies.
Lord of the Rings is quite obviously (attemping to be) an epic fantasy movie. Epic is hard to pull off, but I believe Lord of the Rings will make it. Will it be as good as the books? No. Will there be times you're distracted by the special effects? Probably. But the source material of the movie is the very definition of Epic Fantasy, and if the director (Peter Jackson) has a devotion to stay true to the source, Lord of the Rings can't help but achieve its goal of successfully portraying the epic nature of Tolkien's books. The trailers quite clearly pitch it as a teenager/adult movie.
Harry Potter is another fantasy oriented movie, but it's quite clearly just "Good Fun". This doesn't mean the movie doesn't have depth. In fact, J.K. Rowling gave each actor a complete background story for their characters (which she has in her head, but hasn't been published in any books). It tries to portray a child's wonder at and adventure in the world of magic. It's not striving for epic. It's a movie that could and will be enjoyed by the whole family.
The Star Wars review had dark overtones, but was just shot after shot of breathtaking scenes packed with tension and action. It's a special effects, action movie. The plot might not be Lord of the Rings or even Harry Potter, but it's still ten times the plot of any other action movie. The Star Wars story doesn't have much depth anymore. (Especially since George Lucas tried to rewrite Han Solo as a good character from the start, instead of learning to love things other than himself.) But Star Wars does have a *LOT* of breadth, and that comes across in the movie. Just seeing all the different cultures and planets is still very exciting.
-Ted
If you're going to try this seriously, make sure you read all the spoilers and FAQs. There's a ton of good information in there.
-Ted
It's unfair to say that if you have a purportedly "strategic game" and people aren't playing it as such, it's just that the players are bad. You need to understand what makes a game strategic.
.sig). I tried focusing the factions in this way, but there wasn't any strategic depth to it. Once I rearranged all the unit powers so they could all defend, attack, and support in different ways, the game became immensely strategic (while retaining its tactical core). I don't think most RTS designers have learned this lesson, however.
The amount of strategy in a game is based on the total branching factor of all strategic decisions the player mades in the course of a game. A strategic decision is any decision the player must make where the optimal choice is not known (and by extension, there are at least two optimal choices). In other words, the amount of strategy in a game is based on the total number of viable options presented to the player throughout the entire game.
It's important that these are options "viable". A lot of games give you a ton of options, but they are so poorly designed that one option is just better than the others. A great example is Starcraft. If you are playing the Zerg, you want to Zerg Rush. There is no other viable option you can take. There may be a few minor "choices" you make in there, but they don't provide any real branching to the game tree. If you win your rush, great. Your opponent will almost definitly win the game, but people play it out just to make sure. If you lose, you have *one* strategic choice to make-- how to recover. There are a few options, but you'll probably lose.
In particular, playing Zerg in Starcraft gives you a "strategy count" of roughly 3. Roughly different options presented to you. Is this the fault of the player? Hell no! The designers did give the player choices, but some of those choices were just so much more likely to win the game.
Compare this with chess, where you have 50-100 (even more?) viable starting openings. And that's just for the first 3-7 moves! Or the Go, which has an even higher branching factor.
The key to designing good strategic games is *not* giving the player choices! It's giving the player *viable* choices. Every time the player has an option, there should be sufficient motivation to choose either options, even for experienced players. I haven't really found an RTS game that can pull this off that well. That's why they're not really "Real Time Strategy" games. They are "Real Time Tactical" games, because all of your choices are tiny tactical decisions like how and where to attack. RTS games are 75% tactics and 25% strategy. If you want to have more strategy in the game, you have to have less focused sides. It's pretty clear the Starcraft Zergs were designed as "the early rush team", and that just nullified all strategic choices.
The fact is, EVERY team needs to rush. EVERY team needs to defend. EVERY team needs to have a late assault force. You can't vary the teams by making them good at these different things. You need the teams to approach these challenges in different ways, so players still have the choices of 'rush/defend/assault'.
I learned this lesson the hard way, when designing an RTS/FPS hybrid mod for Quake 3 called "Art of War" (Link in
-Ted
This link should give you information on the pyramids. I believe they dated the pyramids because of how they were aligned to the night sky when they were created (since the sky slowly shifts over time).
-Ted
Willard Libby designed C-14 Dating. Apparently the error range is not 5000 years but 60000 years as referenced here.
-Ted
C-14 dating only has "reasonable" error ranges for items dated at 5000 years or less (around 1 century). If you use C-14 to date something older, say, 10000 years (or 10,000,000 years), the percentage of error margin gets significantly larger. The man who designed carbon dating (his name escapes me) explained this in his thesis which won him the Nobel Prize.
-Ted
PS: What cites? You know where to find them
The problem with reputation is that it's just so easy to buy! Lets say I go place 20 bids on random crap and my $1 bid wins. Hey, I just got 20 points of reputation for $20! Then I can sell the crap back for maybe $.50 and I have 20 more points worth of reptuation! For literally $10 (and some free time), you can get 40 reputation points from ebay. The whole reputation system is flawed because untrustworthy people are allowed to give out good feedback. Who says that just because someone was honest with a $1 transaction that you can claim they are a "Good trader, very prompt"? What do you know about whether that person is really honest? Yet people give all the feedback to others because they want good feedback in turn.
Listing how much money was spent as part of the feedback doesn't really help either. Just set up a ring of ebay accounts, bid on each other's stuff, and have it sell for higher values. Sure, ebay gets a small cut, but all you're really doing is buy reputation from ebay which you use to screw other people. Suppose I forge $5000 of transactions on ebay and they take 3%. I just bought an enormous amount of reputation (trustworthy for $5000 in transactions) for $167. It shouldn't be that hard for an unethical person to go make $500/scam off of 20+ people.
Lets face it... Reputation doesn't mean anything.
-Ted