(b.) Meetings must be limited to information that *everyone* *needs* to know.
I've rarely seen this go well (if ever). Most meetings I have gone to (past tense due to being laid off) have been status meetings. Manager wants to find out what everyone has been doing, and somehow it's good for everyone to know what everyone else is doing. There is perhaps some merit to the latter, but not nearly as much as the manager would like to think. I really don't need to know about the supplier issues that one engineer is experiencing when I'm dealing with FPGA code on a completely different assembly. That engineer doesn't really need to know the trials and tribulations getting the EDA software licenses going. It's not like if either one of us was hit by a bus the other is going to jump right into the cockpit and be able to take off and complete the job -- we have widely varying specialities.
But I sit there and listen to everyone kvetch about what's going wrong with their portion of the project and trundle back to the desk eventually where it takes an hour to overcome the brain numbing.
It wasn't the story that made it great, it was the writing. Without Douglas Adams it can't possibly be the same. It will be to the original what margarine is to butter. I can't imagine a writer with integrity taking the job.
To be honest, the only two that come to mind would be either Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett. I've read Colfer's stuff, and... well it's just not even in the same league. Maybe he's not been playing his "A" game. Colfer isn't a diametrically OPPOSITE choice of writing styles, but he's pretty orthogonal.
Hell, I would have approached Terry Jones (Starship Titanic) before Colfer and ST was pretty terrible in some ways.
This is simply another example of the Bush administration engaging in wishful thinking. We're doing well with broadband because we say it's true. The Iraq War has been a huge success because we say it's true. The economy is strong because we say it's true. Global warming is a myth because we say it's true.
Sadly the country is full of folks who do not think critically for themselves and believe what they've been told is true. Imagine what's going to be "true" tomorrow.
That reminds me- in jr. high, we had a bonus question on a science test: "What will be the first country to land on Mars?" The teacher warned us it was a trick question. The correct answer was, of course "Multiple countries will have to work together."
However, one very special girl answered "Countries can't move." She never lived it down.
I don't know why; it sounds like a perfectly reasonable answer to a very poorly worded question. It sounds like the sort of thing I might have answered to be a smartass.
I'm curious how many got into programming because of Robot Odyssey.
Not programming but electrical engineering, yes. It wasn't the only influence, but it was a major one. It was perfect for learning logic design and getting into the build and debug cycle.
However we knew we'd achieved human-like intelligence when just after declaring "The only way to win is not to play" it then asked for a few more quarters because it ALMOST got to the next stage and it's sure it'll get there next time.
Well, I find I'm in between these two positions. While I am very introverted, I honestly don't mind being on Vent while out running around in WoW. It could be because it's guild only and we have a pretty mature group (20's-40's) and things tend to stick to gameplay. We have women in the guild and I've not heard them get hit on yet, though they do tend to be quieter.
I think the important thing is that being on Vent doesn't require you to actually talk. If you enjoy listening to what people say while you're doing your own thing, you can pretty easily do that. The only trouble I've found is forgetting that I muted the microphone when someone asks me a direct question.
And there's no doubt that for tight group interaction, voice is much faster for most people.
So I think there's room for introverts and extroverts while managing voice chat. I think it depends FAR more on the group make-up and overall maturity levels of those involved.
... and don't do anything drastic with the storyline. I would like to see just X-Com 1 redone with modern technologically appropriate graphics. No FPS. No crazy "one city on earth" business.
I might accept some tinkering to morale with individualized leaders, but that's it. Minor dinking only.
You have to be kidding me. I LOVE the self-checkout. I can get through them faster than it would take me to make eye contact with the human cashier. Beep, Beep, Beep. I do not want to be asked how my day is. I do not want to be asked paper or plastic. I do not want to be asked if I found everything alright. I don't want to watch them sit around waiting for someone to come bag the damn groceries. I don't want to tell them debit or credit. I just want to buy the groceries in as little time as possible and get on with my life. My wife feels the same way. She can checkout a whole cart faster than a regular cashier. The only snag is that the self-checkouts force a few things to go slower and sometimes she goes fast enough to confuse the machine.
Long live self checkout. Saves me time, headache, and irritating personal contact with labor union cashiers.
Agreed. Microprose was a player in the late 80's even, so it would have been appropriate for the author to at least mention in his "I-also-considered-writing-about..." section. Their jet fighter simulations were great at the time.
Although documented heavily in other locales, I would have appreciated a serious mention of Infocom. And for mid-90's companies, I would have liked to have seen mention of the original Bungee. Marathon was a comrade of the first System Shock, and Myth: The Fallen Lords is one of my favorite games ever for online pick-up games. Even though the sequel was much more hackable and extendable, it never quite got the mix just right like the first Myth.
After RTFA, I think the author is missing the point of instant messaging. Strangely enough, it's right there in the name:
Instant: adj.
1. Occurring at once; immediate:
Messaging: tr,
1. To send a message to.
It's not instant video chatting, instant flash advertisements, instant voice communications. They are messages. At this Gaim and Kopete work very well indeed. I don't even use the standard MSN, Yahoo, and AIM clients on my WinXP box. It's Gaim and it does everything at once. As far as aesthetics go, Gaim is about as lovely as anything else. Kopete looks as great as you can make KDE look (which is pretty damn good.) In fact, I occasionally turn on the color cycling plugin on Kopete and get lots of positive comments and folks wish they could do that with their clients (just move to Linux!).
The only spot where I think the author is possibly on-topic is file transfers. More often than not though, this is a function of network firewalls and port forwarding. If there was a mode where Gaim/Kopete could self discover an outside IP address and use UPnP port requests, then I'm sure it'd work phenomenally in our household.
The way KDE does it, nobody is really happy with it. I figure it's "good enough" for a large share of people, and since many of them are ex-windos users and have grown up to live with "good enough" being all they should ever expect - it kinda works.
This is a ridiculous assertion. I personally am really happy with KDE 3.4 and am looking forward to 3.5 and KDE 4. ALL window concept GUI's are pretty much the same, Apple's OSX included. You have a box, there's stuff in it, and there are ways to make the box do things like get bigger, get smaller, and go away. KDE at 3.4 has an awesome amount of control for every little widget on the desktop, icon sizes, fonts, toolbars, taskbars, etc. On top of that, KDE's infrastructure goes way past that with enhancements to file access that cover everything that uses it's libraries for file access making local, ftp, scp, etc nearly transparent. There is a vast chasm between KDE today and "it kinda works". KDE works beautifully, and it really doesn't matter if you're an ex-Windows user, an ex-Gnome user, an ex-Mac user or someone else entirely.
You seem to think there are only two options. It's entirely possible to innovate, and yet be respectful to the rest of the community. So in light of that, yes it is a valid criticism to call them arrogant if they are.
However from another post, it seems as if perhaps they have softened and actually listened to the web development community and that arrogant tone has gone away.
don't homeschool (no parent can possibly become an expert on a multitude of topics, not to mention the social isolation of homeschooling)
This statement is utterly ridiculous for several reasons
There is no social isolation. Homeschooled kids get a huge amount of socialization. They talk to people in REAL LIFE. They talk to family, and friends, and people in the street, people at stores, people online. Frankly, they have more useful social interaction than high schoolers. Face it, once you are out of high school, no one cares what you wear. No one cares if she likes him and he likes her. No one cares about the clothes, the language, the trends, etc. All anyone really cares about is real interaction, being able to carry on an intelligent and respectful discourse, even if it's just 2 minutes at a checkout counter.
There is a falsehood in the assumption that one needs to be expert in a multitude of topics. Given what I do for a living, I can pretty easily say that I've used about 75% of the material I learned during high school at some point. However, I'm reasonably certain that I'm in the minority. In fact, if I'd had the time to CHOOSE what I wanted to study, I am certain that it would be 100%.
It's perfectly okay to not know something. There is only one skill that a person needs. That skill is being able to teach oneself. If someone can do that, then they will seek out the level of information in any topic that they need, or desire. Tragically, the compulsory public school system in the US kills this skill in kids more often than not.
The system is cramming a lot of terrifically useless information down kids throats and completely killing their desire to learn on their own. Great if you want to create working robots in the workforce, completely stupid if you want to create people who are thoughtful, creative, and self-motivated.
I have a M3L and love it. The lack of an on-unit display is a little tedious at times, but then at other times the remote makes things possible that wouldn't normally be possible with an iPod style unit (e.g. I have the unit in my safely velcroed pouch in my satchel, and the remote external and can flip through songs easily without having to have the whole unit available.)
OGG support is great. FLAC support skips a little on the M3L, at least the one time I tried it out. I keep my music self organized, so I don't worry about the album/artist browsing aspect, but if someone just wanted to keep everything in a flat directory structure and get around with meta-tags, this could be a show stopper. works fantastic as a 20 gig HD. I keep my work on it as well to transfer between work and home.
Anyhow, if folks have questions about the M3L, let me know.
This is probably a more radical solution that you'd like, but it seems to me that the problem isn't your son. The problem isn't your game. The problem is school and how you're conditioned into thinking and reasoning about his behavior.
At age five, why the hell are you so concerned about his grades? Kids at this age want to try everything and he's got a brand new interest in a game. There's only so much time in a day, so sure, he's less interested in everything else. Have you yourself never started a new passion and interest in everything else for weeks, perhaps months dropped by the wayside? It works the same way for him.
For what it's worth, relax. Let him play it when he wants. Respect his desires. Get him out of school and into life. He'll be better off in the long run.
The skills they need are "Word Processing", not "MS Word". Teaching to a specific application, or, more accurately, a specific version of a specific application, is short-sighted to say the least.
And even this misses the point. The skill they need is writing. Provide the child with the information he/she needs to learn how to write well and to think well. There's absolutely no need to know how to use a word processor. That just speeds up the process at the finish and makes things look nice.
X-Com: One of the early missions, when squaddies were getting mind blasted, one gal was positioned next to a barn door. Little Sectoid guy comes out, looks around, and she blasts him right through the door at point blank range, leaving alien guts and a smoking door ruin.
Apple Adventure:
> kill dragon With what? Your bare hands?? > yes Congratulations! You just killed a dragon with your bare hands!
Go: Snookering a 6-dan and having him say (mostly jokingly) "I hate you."
Doom: Playing with the lights out the first time on a machine that could run things halfway decent enough and exploring a warehouse that while well lit, was immensely freaky.
Wing Commander: Somewhere in there actually developing a sense of relation with the other pilots... very odd.
And many many more. I didn't even cover some of the seriously atmospheric effects of Thief, Half Life (the original) and System Shock 2. Those seem almost too easy to draw experiences from due to the immersion level.
How can they make something more addictive? In the case of computer games, I just don't see how they can make it addictive, let alone make it more addictive.
I find the game of Go very addictive. Does this mean that 3000-4000 years ago, Chinese philosophers hired fellows from the peasantry who seemed to "just have a good way with people". No. It means that I have a personality that resonates with the game and thus an addictive linkage is formed.
This case is nonsense. I think her son had a personality that was prone to being addicted to virtual realities and gamespaces, and probably many other issues as well.
Slashdot Mirror
It's unfortunate Google didn't come up with this in time to avoid GLaDOS being revived ;-).
(b.) Meetings must be limited to information that *everyone* *needs* to know.
I've rarely seen this go well (if ever). Most meetings I have gone to (past tense due to being laid off) have been status meetings. Manager wants to find out what everyone has been doing, and somehow it's good for everyone to know what everyone else is doing. There is perhaps some merit to the latter, but not nearly as much as the manager would like to think. I really don't need to know about the supplier issues that one engineer is experiencing when I'm dealing with FPGA code on a completely different assembly. That engineer doesn't really need to know the trials and tribulations getting the EDA software licenses going. It's not like if either one of us was hit by a bus the other is going to jump right into the cockpit and be able to take off and complete the job -- we have widely varying specialities.
But I sit there and listen to everyone kvetch about what's going wrong with their portion of the project and trundle back to the desk eventually where it takes an hour to overcome the brain numbing.
To be honest, the only two that come to mind would be either Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett. I've read Colfer's stuff, and ... well it's just not even in the same league. Maybe he's not been playing his "A" game. Colfer isn't a diametrically OPPOSITE choice of writing styles, but he's pretty orthogonal.
Hell, I would have approached Terry Jones (Starship Titanic) before Colfer and ST was pretty terrible in some ways.
I suspect this association is sealed for good for generations to come, solely because that's pretty much their role in World of Warcraft.
Or one that involved beating up a simulation coder with a baseball bat.
This is simply another example of the Bush administration engaging in wishful thinking. We're doing well with broadband because we say it's true. The Iraq War has been a huge success because we say it's true. The economy is strong because we say it's true. Global warming is a myth because we say it's true.
Sadly the country is full of folks who do not think critically for themselves and believe what they've been told is true. Imagine what's going to be "true" tomorrow.
I don't know why; it sounds like a perfectly reasonable answer to a very poorly worded question. It sounds like the sort of thing I might have answered to be a smartass.
I'm curious how many got into programming because of Robot Odyssey.
Not programming but electrical engineering, yes. It wasn't the only influence, but it was a major one. It was perfect for learning logic design and getting into the build and debug cycle.
However we knew we'd achieved human-like intelligence when just after declaring "The only way to win is not to play" it then asked for a few more quarters because it ALMOST got to the next stage and it's sure it'll get there next time.
Well, I find I'm in between these two positions. While I am very introverted, I honestly don't mind being on Vent while out running around in WoW. It could be because it's guild only and we have a pretty mature group (20's-40's) and things tend to stick to gameplay. We have women in the guild and I've not heard them get hit on yet, though they do tend to be quieter.
I think the important thing is that being on Vent doesn't require you to actually talk. If you enjoy listening to what people say while you're doing your own thing, you can pretty easily do that. The only trouble I've found is forgetting that I muted the microphone when someone asks me a direct question.
And there's no doubt that for tight group interaction, voice is much faster for most people.
So I think there's room for introverts and extroverts while managing voice chat. I think it depends FAR more on the group make-up and overall maturity levels of those involved.
... and don't do anything drastic with the storyline. I would like to see just X-Com 1 redone with modern technologically appropriate graphics. No FPS. No crazy "one city on earth" business.
I might accept some tinkering to morale with individualized leaders, but that's it. Minor dinking only.
You have to be kidding me. I LOVE the self-checkout. I can get through them faster than it would take me to make eye contact with the human cashier. Beep, Beep, Beep. I do not want to be asked how my day is. I do not want to be asked paper or plastic. I do not want to be asked if I found everything alright. I don't want to watch them sit around waiting for someone to come bag the damn groceries. I don't want to tell them debit or credit. I just want to buy the groceries in as little time as possible and get on with my life. My wife feels the same way. She can checkout a whole cart faster than a regular cashier. The only snag is that the self-checkouts force a few things to go slower and sometimes she goes fast enough to confuse the machine.
Long live self checkout. Saves me time, headache, and irritating personal contact with labor union cashiers.
Agreed. Microprose was a player in the late 80's even, so it would have been appropriate for the author to at least mention in his "I-also-considered-writing-about..." section. Their jet fighter simulations were great at the time.
Although documented heavily in other locales, I would have appreciated a serious mention of Infocom. And for mid-90's companies, I would have liked to have seen mention of the original Bungee. Marathon was a comrade of the first System Shock, and Myth: The Fallen Lords is one of my favorite games ever for online pick-up games. Even though the sequel was much more hackable and extendable, it never quite got the mix just right like the first Myth.
Yep, exactly like that. Can't wait to see it in action when it hits the stable releases.
After RTFA, I think the author is missing the point of instant messaging. Strangely enough, it's right there in the name:
Instant: adj.
1. Occurring at once; immediate:
Messaging: tr,
1. To send a message to.
It's not instant video chatting, instant flash advertisements, instant voice communications. They are messages. At this Gaim and Kopete work very well indeed. I don't even use the standard MSN, Yahoo, and AIM clients on my WinXP box. It's Gaim and it does everything at once. As far as aesthetics go, Gaim is about as lovely as anything else. Kopete looks as great as you can make KDE look (which is pretty damn good.) In fact, I occasionally turn on the color cycling plugin on Kopete and get lots of positive comments and folks wish they could do that with their clients (just move to Linux!).
The only spot where I think the author is possibly on-topic is file transfers. More often than not though, this is a function of network firewalls and port forwarding. If there was a mode where Gaim/Kopete could self discover an outside IP address and use UPnP port requests, then I'm sure it'd work phenomenally in our household.
This is a ridiculous assertion. I personally am really happy with KDE 3.4 and am looking forward to 3.5 and KDE 4. ALL window concept GUI's are pretty much the same, Apple's OSX included. You have a box, there's stuff in it, and there are ways to make the box do things like get bigger, get smaller, and go away. KDE at 3.4 has an awesome amount of control for every little widget on the desktop, icon sizes, fonts, toolbars, taskbars, etc. On top of that, KDE's infrastructure goes way past that with enhancements to file access that cover everything that uses it's libraries for file access making local, ftp, scp, etc nearly transparent. There is a vast chasm between KDE today and "it kinda works". KDE works beautifully, and it really doesn't matter if you're an ex-Windows user, an ex-Gnome user, an ex-Mac user or someone else entirely.
You seem to think there are only two options. It's entirely possible to innovate, and yet be respectful to the rest of the community. So in light of that, yes it is a valid criticism to call them arrogant if they are.
However from another post, it seems as if perhaps they have softened and actually listened to the web development community and that arrogant tone has gone away.
You're new here, aren't you? ;-)
This statement is utterly ridiculous for several reasons
It's perfectly okay to not know something. There is only one skill that a person needs. That skill is being able to teach oneself. If someone can do that, then they will seek out the level of information in any topic that they need, or desire. Tragically, the compulsory public school system in the US kills this skill in kids more often than not.
The system is cramming a lot of terrifically useless information down kids throats and completely killing their desire to learn on their own. Great if you want to create working robots in the workforce, completely stupid if you want to create people who are thoughtful, creative, and self-motivated.
I have a M3L and love it. The lack of an on-unit display is a little tedious at times, but then at other times the remote makes things possible that wouldn't normally be possible with an iPod style unit (e.g. I have the unit in my safely velcroed pouch in my satchel, and the remote external and can flip through songs easily without having to have the whole unit available.)
OGG support is great. FLAC support skips a little on the M3L, at least the one time I tried it out. I keep my music self organized, so I don't worry about the album/artist browsing aspect, but if someone just wanted to keep everything in a flat directory structure and get around with meta-tags, this could be a show stopper. works fantastic as a 20 gig HD. I keep my work on it as well to transfer between work and home.
Anyhow, if folks have questions about the M3L, let me know.
This is probably a more radical solution that you'd like, but it seems to me that the problem isn't your son. The problem isn't your game. The problem is school and how you're conditioned into thinking and reasoning about his behavior.
At age five, why the hell are you so concerned about his grades? Kids at this age want to try everything and he's got a brand new interest in a game. There's only so much time in a day, so sure, he's less interested in everything else. Have you yourself never started a new passion and interest in everything else for weeks, perhaps months dropped by the wayside? It works the same way for him.
For what it's worth, relax. Let him play it when he wants. Respect his desires. Get him out of school and into life. He'll be better off in the long run.
And even this misses the point. The skill they need is writing. Provide the child with the information he/she needs to learn how to write well and to think well. There's absolutely no need to know how to use a word processor. That just speeds up the process at the finish and makes things look nice.
X-Com: One of the early missions, when squaddies were getting mind blasted, one gal was positioned next to a barn door. Little Sectoid guy comes out, looks around, and she blasts him right through the door at point blank range, leaving alien guts and a smoking door ruin.
Apple Adventure:
Go: Snookering a 6-dan and having him say (mostly jokingly) "I hate you."
Doom: Playing with the lights out the first time on a machine that could run things halfway decent enough and exploring a warehouse that while well lit, was immensely freaky.
Wing Commander: Somewhere in there actually developing a sense of relation with the other pilots... very odd.
And many many more. I didn't even cover some of the seriously atmospheric effects of Thief, Half Life (the original) and System Shock 2. Those seem almost too easy to draw experiences from due to the immersion level.
How can they make something more addictive? In the case of computer games, I just don't see how they can make it addictive, let alone make it more addictive.
I find the game of Go very addictive. Does this mean that 3000-4000 years ago, Chinese philosophers hired fellows from the peasantry who seemed to "just have a good way with people". No. It means that I have a personality that resonates with the game and thus an addictive linkage is formed.
This case is nonsense. I think her son had a personality that was prone to being addicted to virtual realities and gamespaces, and probably many other issues as well.
I!! dig giant robots...
You!! dig giant robots...
We!! dig giant robots...
Just!! dig giant robots...
Nice.....