Maybe. But even then, I trust you choose them for those elements, not purely by the criterion that it has to be bug-free.
A lot of the OCPD handwaving in this thread seems to be, well, what OCPD does best. Pretending that one single variable matters, and it has to be exactly at the maximum or minimum point, and everything else doesn't even matter. In this particular case I'm told my choice should be based on which game has the least bugs, and ignore everything else. Like, you know, gameplay, story, etc.
And basically that's what I disagree with. Sure, the bugs are factored in, but ultimately between (A) a game whose gameplay I like and has bugs, and (B) a game whose gameplay I dislike, and has no bugs, I'll "vote" for A every single time. Otherwise, I'd be playing Minesweeper, because by now it has less bugs than any new game.
That ultimately there are no guarantees, it's pretty much a given. But a lot of the bugs in New Vegas aren't that arcane at all. We're not talking about running against one particular wall for 5 days to trigger some unique overflow.
E.g., the slowdown in populated areas happens for pretty much any modern graphics card, because it's about how they do face animations. Since you _have_ to go through Freeside repeatedly to finish the game, I find it hard to believe that no tester ever found it. You don't even need more combinations than following the main quest at least to half.
E.g., the scripting issues for doing things in the wrong order, are very much hardware-independent. "All combinations" there just means: you just need to test all possible ways to finish a quest. I don't think it's that unreasonable to expect that to be tested.
Dunno, do you have any better ideas? The stuff that needed programmers to think about should already be in automated test cases. It seems to me like the tester's job is to catch the rest.
Heh. Well, modding Fallout 3 at first WAS about hex editing. Bethesda only released the GECK (modding kit) after what seemed like half an eternity, so, yeah, even applying a different texture on a rifle involved a hex editor. Granted, it got better after NifSkope was changed to deal with the Fallout 3 meshes, because then you could set the textures there and do a much simpler hex-hack to get around the first-person textures.
Actually, you don't need to be technical to test a game. (Or a web site, or anything else.) You just need to try every combination and write a bug report for everything that doesn't work.
Of course, you also need to enforce a culture where those bugs are taken seriously. From my experience with testers, well, they're humans too, basically. If you treat them badly for doing their job (and there is no shortage of people taking them for the enemy), they start doing a more half-arsed job, and if you tell them to not worry about some bug, they tend to do just that. Basically you'll have to see to it that if someone reports that clicking on the third seashell on the northern beach causes screwed up textures, they should never see an answer boiling down to "who the FUCK cares about such things? How many people go around clicking on non-highlightable objects?" Because then you stop getting that kind of bugs, which may actually be just symptoms for some issue (e.g., memory corruption) that'll be a lot more spectacular on someone's computer out there.
Also, basically, you need to stop making excuses for why it's ok to not even try to fix some bugs. The point is, a bug is just a manifestation of something. Of something you don't know. Even something like a minor graphics glitch, it could be just a spurious bad coordinate in a mesh, which will never get worse than that on any hardware, or it could be a loose pointer that can (and on someone's machine WILL) cause a crash or a corrupt saved game. The moment you start just "knowing" that some things aren't bad enough to be worth fixing, you'll let some far worse ones slip through too.
Anyway, TBH, I actually prefer non-technical people for testing. They shouldn't be coders, and shouldn't think like a coder. They should represent Joe Average and Jane Housewife, who just want to play the game, not to know the difference between a memory leak and a graphics slowdown.
Well, I consider it more of a question of being able to think in more than one dimension. It's not like the bugs are the only things to consider about a game.
Yes, the game is buggy.
On the other hand, even with the crashes and slowdowns, it's _still_ more fun to play than <insert brainless shooter du jour> or <insert brainless RTS where you just need to click X times on 'build zerg' and rush> (presumably named that way because there is no actual strategy involved, and the troops can't even follow basic tactics, much less strategy.) It's just that simple.
And then comes such icing on the cake as that it's superbly modable.
Even as voting with my money goes, between Fallout 3 with the bugs and the average brainless click-fest without bugs, I'll vote for the former every single time.
he most common of the bugs is the Nvidia slowdown issue. This is annoying, particularly because my PC is massively ahead of the recommended specs, and because it often seems to occur at random, rather than just at "busy" times (though a few particular busy scenes will consistently cause slowdown). However, it's not going to stop you from completing the game and only had a minor impact on my enjoyment.
Except if you look at the complaints, ATI cards are hit too and hit worse. In fact the unofficial dx9 patch has been called an ATI fix.
The game plain old has problems with the facial animations, and craps on any hardware when you enter a zone with lots of human NPCs. E.g., the outer Freeside that you mention.
And I really mean on any hardware. I actually have a GTX 480, which is the top end graphics card you can buy at the moment, short of going SLI. I'm not saying that to brag, but just to say even on that I've seen plenty of times when the game turns into a slideshow. (Not that it'll stop some fanboy out there from going, "OMG, buy a real computer. If you don't have quad-SLI, you shouldn't play games.")
That said, heh, I'm probably one of the most guilty of supporting that buggy release, seein' as I've been making weapons and suits for it since launch on the Nexus. I guess it's just more fun to mod than to play:p
1. If you think your data in the USA would only be given to the pizzerias, and not to the USA government... heh. It's funny. You do know they subpoenad such stuff from Google and others already, right?
2. Oooh, scary Euro-fascists, 'cause you can dig up something from 65 years ago. Heh. Ah, the joys of semi-literate trolls who never heard of anything after WW2 because it's not in the Hollywood movies they mistake for education... Besides, I guess it saves the home-schooled right from acknowledging that the rest of the world has actually moved out of the 40's.
3. But if you want to compare fascists, let's compare fascists.
The USA moved a minority to concentration camps for, pretty much, fearing that their political sympathies may not be the proper ones... when? Oh wait, it was during the WW2 too.
The USA had the idiotic McCarthy scare... when? Until the late 50's? Shouldn't you remember that too, if for Europe the 1936-1945 era counts as recent enough?
The USA imprisoned and tortured people for mere suspicions, and skipping all human rights or safeguards of the rule of law... when? Oh, wait, that was in the 21'th century. I guess the 1945 is scarier because it's more recent than that, huh? Oh wait, it isn't.
The USA datamined not just phone records, but even grocery lists, to try to find out who's a muslim... when? Oh, wait, that's 21'st century too.
So, remind me, which of the two should you fear more? The ones who actually tortured people for the mere suspicion of supporting the wrong gang 2-3 years ago, or those who did it 65 years ago?
Yes, they did mandate keeping the logs for a given time, but then they have to be deleted, and specified who has the right to get them. I.e., it takes a subpoena.
But, as opposed to... what? Just trusting that the companies will automatically delete those logs, and will never use them for marketing or whatnot? Just look at the Facebook for an example of how much better _that_ went than, you know, ooooh, scary inconsistent nanny-state Europe.
Well, it probably just says more about the stock market than anything else.
It's not that hard to find (usually temporary) situations where it acts... strangely. E.g., back when it was a subsidiary of 3Com, at one point Palm was valued so high that the shares 3Com owned in it were worth more than the total worth of 3Com. With the obvious paradox that then the rest of 3Com was essentially worth a negative number, although they were turning up a tidy profit and all. With the also (not so) paradoxical situation that a bunch of "pundits" and shareholders were actually wanting 3Com to get rid of those other divisions, although, again, they were actually turning a tidy profit.
Maybe. It's not like I'm calling it a theory or using it to prove anything. But when making a joke in answer to a message (in fact two messages in response to each other) about someone turning off the simulation, you kinda have limited room to wiggle.
But at any rate, that God post was a joke post. (And in response to a joke post.) Maybe not the best of jokes by a wide margin, but still not serious stuff. You kinda have to play fast and loose with the science there, because just going on about the jitter in laser beams that was observed and the quantity of information in the hologram kinda tends to not make many people laugh. And probably would make 90% of people just go cross eyed. Most people's understanding of Schrödinger's Cat stops at "cat". Complex calculation showing a digital-like jitter with an inaccuracy greater than a Planck length? Oooer. I think you'd have to be a genius to fit a punchline that passes Occam's Razor to that one even if you're talking to the LHC physicists.
So, anyway, it was a joke. It wasn't supposed to be a valid logic chain. In fact, by the incongruity and resolution theory of fun, you kinda can't have it fully logical _and_ funny.
So if it fails to be a valid chain of logic and causality? _Good_. That's what I was aiming for. That's the kind of jokes I know how to make.
And just to make it clear, it wasn't some kind of sneaking in God as a link either. Or really not the kind your average church would teach you about. You know, in case those parts about transform and lighting and God being gay didn't already make that clear. It's just my taking-the-piss character that I sneak into jokes about religion.
The whole hypothesis is that the universe is a _digital_ hologram. As in, literally, the information is encoded in _pixels_. And there is a rather serious possible implication that the universe might be a digital simulation.
I dunno. It kinda seems natural that if someone wrote a digital simulation, they would be a programmer, and running whatever machine does it would make them an admin. I mean, really, the setup doesn't exactly leave many other options available even if I wanted to take the piss in a different way.
How do you know it'll be shut down. I mean I can also imagine the scenario that involves a booming voice going,
"Ah-ha, motherfuckers. That's the moment I've been waiting for. You're finally smart enough to understand what I'm gonna say more than that goat-fucker.. err.. herder I caught hanging around a burning hemp bush some 3000 of your years ago. Moses, I think he was called. Like that I didn't go 'let there be light' like that stoner wrote. What I told him was that I coded transform and lighting first. And of course the Earth was without form and void, because everything was: I had a 4 triangle tetrahedron as the only object to test that transform and lighting shit on. But judging by what's on your instruments right now, you've just figured out what I'm saying. Smart lads.
"But I think you have a bunch of questions first, we'll get to the cosmology later...
"What? Original sin? Well, when those two did it, it may have been original for your world, 'cause there was nobody to do it before them, but in the meantime it's kinda copycat sin if you get my drift. And which of them do you mean? Those two had quite the kinky ideas... Oh, apple? Nah, let's just say they got kicked out for more like bug abuse and duping items, and let's leave it at that. Next question...
"If I really hate women? What kind of retarded question is that? I wouldn't have made them if I hated them. Or I could have taken them out in a patch. Mind you, I might have dropped that Moses guy a hint that I'm not really into women, but the rest is his own confabulation.
"Which brings me to the next point, actually. I totally didn't tell him to kill gays. I mean, I just told you I'm not into women. You figure it out.";)
"There is a theory which states that if ever for any reason anyone discovers what exactly the Universe is for and why it is here it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another that states that this has already happened." -- Douglas Adams
Sorta, but not exactly. Sure, it eventually trickles and creates that Keynesian multiplier.
But, and here's the important part, so would spending that money on something more useful like schools or water pumps. The money spent on those would create just as many jobs, you know, and you'd also have some schools or clean water instead of a national penis size symbol.
Think of it this way. If you spend X dollars, a Keynesian multiplier of Y says effectively you've put X*Y dollars into the economy. But if you invested that original X into something pointless, effectively you now only have X*(Y-1) that actually goes into anything the country actually needs. Unless Y is at least in the hundreds, you'll still see a difference.
And actually a more reasonable multiplier to expect is somewhere around 1.25 to 1.5. The highest ever multiplier recorded for a government investment was 1.73.
So basically even if you're uber-lucky, a million invested in useless crap will also bring 730,000 that trickles into more useful stuff. Whereas if you invested that million into something useful, well, now you'd have 1.73 million worth of useful stuff.
Basically that multiplier isn't a blank check to do any stupidity whatsoever with the public money. It doesn't mean you can just blow it on any crap and let the multiplier distribute it for you. At the end of the day, a million wasted is still a million wasted.
But it gets even better, actually. The multiplier itself is different for different things you do with the money. A million invested in something could have a multiplier as low as 0.23 (actual historical case too: yes, it's possible for such an investment to actually be a loss) or as high as 1.73. Like any investment, basically, you get a different ROI. It doesn't mean just blow the money or anything and expect it to trickle just the same.
Or in less complicated terms, think of it like this: a country has a certain amount of resources, including manpower. Tying up X thousand people into one project (including making those bricks and supplying the factory and whatnot) means X thousand you won't have for something else. Even if it creates Y thousand other jobs somewhere else too, that original X thousand is still tied up in activity A instead of activity B. If A is less needed than B, that's not a good use of manpower.
Also, I'd say that one should look at the actual conditions in a country before cheering for a waste. The exact multiplier and number of jobs created depend a lot on the local conditions. The way it works in a western post-scarcity economy, where really at worst you just diverted some people from marketing jobs and services and other ultimately just ways to do something when you don't need them in actual production, may not be the same for a country which still has a scarcity economy.
That you get to listen to expert witnesses is AFAIK standard procedure in all of the western world. It still didn't prevent jury nullification because the jury thought the prosecutor must be full of it if they don't have some techno-magic CSI-style analysis to go with all the witnesses, or conversely convicted based on misunderstanding how reliable some piece of techno-babble really is. I doubt that the UK or any other country is immune to that, and judging by your examples, you're basically saying the same thing.
This is not the same DNA as you are made of. It doesn't behave the same way.
Really? What other kinds of DNA are there? And shouldn't that raise more questions that for normal DNA we already know the answers, but which a new technology would have still unclear?
This is not evidence all on its own, it's used to further investigation.
That's exactly what some of us hope, but I'd say it's not a given. Really, look just in this thread how many people take it for some kind of magical marker that can't possibly be wrong.
And I don't just mean taking for granted that it's unique, but also such issues as that nobody else will use their bottle for some malicious mischief, or that you won't end up with a nightmare when millions of marked PCs get sold without removing the markers, etc. It's assumptions which aren't even scientific or technical, but plain old suspending skepticism completely.
Will the same apply when the first jury has to judge such a case? That's the big question.
Actually I'd expect it to be even worse, thanks to the CSI effect. Basically the same blind belief that if it's some hi-tech shit, then it's more infallible than the Pope and those scientists 100% thought of and prevented every possible problem or false positive, that you can see in the GP post.
Someone _will_ get sent to jail by some idiot jury because the real burglar -- who, for example, is an employee and didn't even need to synthetise anything: he just nicked the bottle that the PHB cleverly hid in his desk drawer -- sprayed them with it.
That's actually the important part: often when it looks like there's some impossible hurdle like synthetising DNA, there are often _much_ simpler ways to plant it, _and_ you can rely on some idiots still thinking that only the really complicated way exists. E.g., people have already planted DNA at a crime scene by just taking a cigarette butt from a bus station and dropping it there. Here you don't even have to do that.
Or as an even more trivial example, if a co-worker you really don't like leaves his coat behind and his wallet in it, spray the coat and banknotes in the wallet, steal the same amount from the cash register, tip someone off that you saw them stealing again. Double profit. You got the money, and got rid of that guy or gal you don't like.
Yeah, they'll end up having to convince a jury that those scientists and their hi-tech solution are fallible after all. Good luck with that in a world being told the opposite by PR. And where they saw on TV every week that you can take a hair you found on a carpet and know exactly that it belongs to the killer (and not, say, to one of the guests the victim had two days before that, or some guy in the bus leaving hair on her coat) and run a DNA analysis to tell you exactly what the killer looks like. Or that you can take a two by two pixel image of the back of someone's head from a security camera, enhance it to a clear 1600x1200 image and, with a couple more mouse clicks, turn it around to see the culprit's face.
Seriously, we're already at the point where some juries acquit because you didn't do that, or conversely people who spent time on the death row because some pseudo-science mumbo-jumbo must be 100% correct and accurate like on CSI.
Just as I was reading that story, I was thinking, "WTF, why McDonald?" I mean in retail the majority of thefts are by employees, not some guy charging in to snatch a plastic cup and run.
So now you just need to figure how to trip the spray on some lone guy who came for a burger at 2 AM, pocket a thousand and claim he robbed you. Or you can get even more creative if the miracle bottle that the PHB marks everything with is easily accessible by just, say, opening his desk drawer.
Thanks to idiot juries who, thanks to what now is called the "CSI effect" will blindly convict if there's some high-tech shit they don't understand as evidence -- and just as sadly occasionally won't convict even with six witnesses if you don't also some techno-magic involved to finger the culprit -- you're almost guaranteed to have the scheme work unless you overdo it and become the store that's robbed at 2AM every night.
A small correction, they did know a year have 365 days, the 360 days calendar actually had 365 days: 18 months of 20 days each + 5 days that didn't belong to any month. Those 5 days were at the end of the year and were considered "doomed" so no one would leave their homes those days.
Actually, I've touched that later in that message: nope, that's a different calendar. The Haab' calendar has those 5 days. The Long Count calendar is strictly 360 days.
You're under the mistaken impression the Earth has always required 365.25 days to rotate the Sun
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that that would make the Mayan calendar less stupid.
Yes, Earth rotation slows down, so days get longer... by about 0.002 seconds per century. But:
A) that's slowing down, not accelerating. A year in the _very_ distant past had _more_ days, not less. Basically, sorry, you can't justify the Long Count 360 day year that way, much less the 260 day Tzolkin year.
B) That's at the scale of millions of years, not thousands. Sorry. In the 200,000 years that humanity even existed at all, that would make a difference of about 4 seconds a day out of 86400, or about 0.0046%. Even at that monumental scale, we're talking roughly years that were longer by, oh, just about enough to make every century leap instead of 3 out of 4. That tiny a difference. It still doesn't add up to a whole 5 day correction needed by the Long Count calendar.
But again, the correction is in the wrong direction. The more you go in the past, the more wrong the Long Count calendar gets.
The only point where the Long Count will be correct... notice that "will" there? Right. It's many millions years in the _future_. (And why would they make a calendar for then, if the world ends now, anyway?)
C) More importantly, we don't even need to speculate. We know that the calendar was close enough to 365 day years since at least 3000 BC, because the Egyptians figured that out. The interval when the Mayans created their bad calendar is squarely in times when we already know from the Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, and ultimately Romans that the year did _not_ have 360 days. While the former is just rough estimates and maths, this point is historical fact. We already know that it was wrong for the age when they started using it.
1. Basically it has no reason to. They counted base 20, and everything else about their number system is base 20. Assuming that only for this one it would have a special rule that the digit can't go above 13 is stupid. It's like saying that for Christians the century digit can't go above 7. Why?
2. And at any rate, the burden of proof is on those who claim that such a rule exists, not on those who don't. "[i]There's little to no reason to believe that the calendar wouldn't end on the solstice.[/i]" is exactly back-ass-wards. Not having any evidence of such a prophecy is not a reason to default to assuming that not only one exists, but also what it is about.
Basically, you also don't have any reason to not believe that there's a miniature giant space hamster ruling the world, but presumably you wouldn't take it as the default assumption until proven wrong.
3. Look at the digit we currently have there 13. Including zero, that would mean that their centuries digit goes in cycles of 14, which is nonsense for that culture. The numbers 13 and 20 were sacred numbers. The number 14 wasn't.
Aand again, anyone claiming to know of such a rule of 14, has the burden of proof to support it.
4. Actually I've left the best reason for last, although I already mentioned it. There are dates on some of those monuments with about a dozen digits for the year. Get that? They're not running out of digits. Whatever date there might be when the long count runs out of digits, it's by _far_ not at baktun or piktun.
That already isn't even a case of Occam's Razor or most reasonable assumption. It's a case of already _knowing_ that their calendar doesn't run out of digits now. Because we've already seen dates of theirs with more digits.
5. Actually, it's not as much the Rapture that annoys me, as the whole counterfactual bullshit surrounding this Mayan date. The whole fabricating a bullshit prophecy based on _not_ knowing that there isn't one, basically. Yes, I'm somewhat worked up. Because such a display of stupidity and believing unsupported bullshit just because of wanting to believe some bullshit, is already disheartening.
Actually they didn't. There is _no_ mayan prophecy for the end of the Baktun. None whatsoever. On the contrary, on their monuments you find dates up to trillions of year into the future. Dunno what was supposed to happen then, but it would make no sense to prophecise it if the world is supposed to end now.
_All_ that happens in 2012 (ok, 2013) is the end of a baktun.
Let's start from the start. The Mayans didn't count in base 10, but in base 20, presumably because they could count on their toes too. (No, really, look at their digits.) Thank goodness they didn't come up with a male-only maths, eh?
So they started with a year based on 260 day years, the so called Tzolkin calendar. If now you went "wait, that can't be right, it would skip through the actual year like crazy", congrats, you'd be smarter than the Mayans.
Then came the Long Count calendar, which was 360 days long, or 18 months of 20 days each. (Told you they were big on 20.) This is actually the calendar used in the 2012 (non)prophecy.
Yes, that's right. Those poor idiots are actually trusting a civilization to tell them about galactic alignments... who isn't even advanced enough to figure out the length of the year. Nor had the smarts to reset it to some equinoxe or such each year, like the lunisolar calendars used around here by even the most primitive ancient cultures. Yeah, that's the guy to trust with galactic calculations, right?;)
To make it more stupid, even the Mayans eventually got a better calendar than that, the Haab calendar. Which finally padded the year to 365 days long, putting them finally on par with what the Egyptians had had, oh, only a couple of millennia before them. But anyway, a doomsday calculation based on the Long Count is already based on a calendar which is obsolete and crap even by Mayan standards.
So, anyway, a Long Count year was 18 months of 20 days each.
From there it went kinda like for us with decades, centuries and milenia, except in base 20.
So for us a decade is 10 years, for them a katun is 20 years.
For us a century is 10x10 years, for them a baktun is 20x20 years.
For us a millennium is 10x10x10 years, for them a piktun is 20x20x20 years.
All that happens in 2012 or 2013 is the end of a baktun. Yes, it's not even millennialism. The piktun (base-20 millenium) won't end for another 4000 years or so.
That scare isn't even like Y2K, it's more like being scared of the rollover from 699 AD to 700 AD. I mean, WTF, it's not even running out of digits or anything.
And again that's _all_ there is to it, because there is no actual Mayan prophecy for that date.
But I guess that won't stop the doomsday idiots from waiting for their Rapture on that day. What else is new?
As you yourself said, then they're still idiots. Triggering a bot program by hot keys instead of alt-tabbing is just as trivial as, well, triggering any other trainer that way.
Actually, the effectiveness of that is not beside the point at all. If it doesn't even actually solve a problem, it's taking away basic functionality without offering anything. Plus, you can gauge people's (or companies) competence by the solution they come up with: seeing someone come up with a pencils-up-the-nose pants-on-head retarded solution is actually a bad sign.
First of all, it's an idiotic solution anyway. I've seen, used and in ye olde DOS days even _made_ trainers for games, and none ever needed switching to the trainer to activate. The way you do it, is you hook on certain key combinations that the user can press while in game. E.g., numeric 1 = add a million cash, numeric 2 = infinite health, etc. The game never sees a task switch at all.
Second, if you're really determined, even that is old hat, and you run the game in a virtual machine instead. Glider did basically that to get around WoW's checks. Again it's not stuff that'll need a task switch, or the game to notice one.
Third, and even more important, it was defeated already by making it run windowed. So it's a thoroughly incompetent solution even for the stated problem.
Fourth, and the most important, anything important should be checked by the server, and you shouldn't trust the client for more than movement and animation. It's not possible to memory-hack WoW and give yourself more money or duplicate items, because the server doesn't trust the client with that. That Square-Enix even needed something like that, is reason to worry. If the client is trusted enough to worry about client-side cheating tools, that's a crap MMO implementation and reason to expect a deluge of duped gold or duped items or whatever down the line.
That's the real important part. Crap implementations aren't beside the point, and aren't just academic discussions in how competently the game is implemented. A crap implementation can set the stage for bigger problems down the line. And that they even need to try to disable ALT+TAB is not a good sign.
Fifth, MMOs are inherently social setups and in more than one way. It's not just a SP game plus an in-game chat. A lot (most?) players also use guild web sites, some have an IRC channel too, check or update sites for advice with quests and whatnot, have at the very least as Ventrilo or TeamSpeak running, many use some form of IM to keep in touch with other players or just friends, etc. Restricting access to those is seriously crippling something which is by now pretty standard MMO gameplay. Needing to basically close the game every single time you even do basic stuff like post something to the guild site or checking some guild schedule or to post a screenshot of your char or to IM a guild mate, isn't just a pain in the butt, it's crippling the experience of playing the damned game as a MMO.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe. But even then, I trust you choose them for those elements, not purely by the criterion that it has to be bug-free.
A lot of the OCPD handwaving in this thread seems to be, well, what OCPD does best. Pretending that one single variable matters, and it has to be exactly at the maximum or minimum point, and everything else doesn't even matter. In this particular case I'm told my choice should be based on which game has the least bugs, and ignore everything else. Like, you know, gameplay, story, etc.
And basically that's what I disagree with. Sure, the bugs are factored in, but ultimately between (A) a game whose gameplay I like and has bugs, and (B) a game whose gameplay I dislike, and has no bugs, I'll "vote" for A every single time. Otherwise, I'd be playing Minesweeper, because by now it has less bugs than any new game.
That ultimately there are no guarantees, it's pretty much a given. But a lot of the bugs in New Vegas aren't that arcane at all. We're not talking about running against one particular wall for 5 days to trigger some unique overflow.
E.g., the slowdown in populated areas happens for pretty much any modern graphics card, because it's about how they do face animations. Since you _have_ to go through Freeside repeatedly to finish the game, I find it hard to believe that no tester ever found it. You don't even need more combinations than following the main quest at least to half.
E.g., the scripting issues for doing things in the wrong order, are very much hardware-independent. "All combinations" there just means: you just need to test all possible ways to finish a quest. I don't think it's that unreasonable to expect that to be tested.
Dunno, do you have any better ideas? The stuff that needed programmers to think about should already be in automated test cases. It seems to me like the tester's job is to catch the rest.
Heh. Well, modding Fallout 3 at first WAS about hex editing. Bethesda only released the GECK (modding kit) after what seemed like half an eternity, so, yeah, even applying a different texture on a rifle involved a hex editor. Granted, it got better after NifSkope was changed to deal with the Fallout 3 meshes, because then you could set the textures there and do a much simpler hex-hack to get around the first-person textures.
Ahh, those were the days ;)
Actually, you don't need to be technical to test a game. (Or a web site, or anything else.) You just need to try every combination and write a bug report for everything that doesn't work.
Of course, you also need to enforce a culture where those bugs are taken seriously. From my experience with testers, well, they're humans too, basically. If you treat them badly for doing their job (and there is no shortage of people taking them for the enemy), they start doing a more half-arsed job, and if you tell them to not worry about some bug, they tend to do just that. Basically you'll have to see to it that if someone reports that clicking on the third seashell on the northern beach causes screwed up textures, they should never see an answer boiling down to "who the FUCK cares about such things? How many people go around clicking on non-highlightable objects?" Because then you stop getting that kind of bugs, which may actually be just symptoms for some issue (e.g., memory corruption) that'll be a lot more spectacular on someone's computer out there.
Also, basically, you need to stop making excuses for why it's ok to not even try to fix some bugs. The point is, a bug is just a manifestation of something. Of something you don't know. Even something like a minor graphics glitch, it could be just a spurious bad coordinate in a mesh, which will never get worse than that on any hardware, or it could be a loose pointer that can (and on someone's machine WILL) cause a crash or a corrupt saved game. The moment you start just "knowing" that some things aren't bad enough to be worth fixing, you'll let some far worse ones slip through too.
Anyway, TBH, I actually prefer non-technical people for testing. They shouldn't be coders, and shouldn't think like a coder. They should represent Joe Average and Jane Housewife, who just want to play the game, not to know the difference between a memory leak and a graphics slowdown.
Well, I consider it more of a question of being able to think in more than one dimension. It's not like the bugs are the only things to consider about a game.
Yes, the game is buggy.
On the other hand, even with the crashes and slowdowns, it's _still_ more fun to play than <insert brainless shooter du jour> or <insert brainless RTS where you just need to click X times on 'build zerg' and rush> (presumably named that way because there is no actual strategy involved, and the troops can't even follow basic tactics, much less strategy.) It's just that simple.
And then comes such icing on the cake as that it's superbly modable.
Even as voting with my money goes, between Fallout 3 with the bugs and the average brainless click-fest without bugs, I'll vote for the former every single time.
Except if you look at the complaints, ATI cards are hit too and hit worse. In fact the unofficial dx9 patch has been called an ATI fix.
The game plain old has problems with the facial animations, and craps on any hardware when you enter a zone with lots of human NPCs. E.g., the outer Freeside that you mention.
And I really mean on any hardware. I actually have a GTX 480, which is the top end graphics card you can buy at the moment, short of going SLI. I'm not saying that to brag, but just to say even on that I've seen plenty of times when the game turns into a slideshow. (Not that it'll stop some fanboy out there from going, "OMG, buy a real computer. If you don't have quad-SLI, you shouldn't play games.")
That said, heh, I'm probably one of the most guilty of supporting that buggy release, seein' as I've been making weapons and suits for it since launch on the Nexus. I guess it's just more fun to mod than to play :p
1. If you think your data in the USA would only be given to the pizzerias, and not to the USA government... heh. It's funny. You do know they subpoenad such stuff from Google and others already, right?
2. Oooh, scary Euro-fascists, 'cause you can dig up something from 65 years ago. Heh. Ah, the joys of semi-literate trolls who never heard of anything after WW2 because it's not in the Hollywood movies they mistake for education... Besides, I guess it saves the home-schooled right from acknowledging that the rest of the world has actually moved out of the 40's.
3. But if you want to compare fascists, let's compare fascists.
The USA moved a minority to concentration camps for, pretty much, fearing that their political sympathies may not be the proper ones... when? Oh wait, it was during the WW2 too.
The USA had the idiotic McCarthy scare... when? Until the late 50's? Shouldn't you remember that too, if for Europe the 1936-1945 era counts as recent enough?
The USA imprisoned and tortured people for mere suspicions, and skipping all human rights or safeguards of the rule of law... when? Oh, wait, that was in the 21'th century. I guess the 1945 is scarier because it's more recent than that, huh? Oh wait, it isn't.
The USA datamined not just phone records, but even grocery lists, to try to find out who's a muslim... when? Oh, wait, that's 21'st century too.
So, remind me, which of the two should you fear more? The ones who actually tortured people for the mere suspicion of supporting the wrong gang 2-3 years ago, or those who did it 65 years ago?
Yes, they did mandate keeping the logs for a given time, but then they have to be deleted, and specified who has the right to get them. I.e., it takes a subpoena.
But, as opposed to... what? Just trusting that the companies will automatically delete those logs, and will never use them for marketing or whatnot? Just look at the Facebook for an example of how much better _that_ went than, you know, ooooh, scary inconsistent nanny-state Europe.
Well, it probably just says more about the stock market than anything else.
It's not that hard to find (usually temporary) situations where it acts... strangely. E.g., back when it was a subsidiary of 3Com, at one point Palm was valued so high that the shares 3Com owned in it were worth more than the total worth of 3Com. With the obvious paradox that then the rest of 3Com was essentially worth a negative number, although they were turning up a tidy profit and all. With the also (not so) paradoxical situation that a bunch of "pundits" and shareholders were actually wanting 3Com to get rid of those other divisions, although, again, they were actually turning a tidy profit.
Maybe. It's not like I'm calling it a theory or using it to prove anything. But when making a joke in answer to a message (in fact two messages in response to each other) about someone turning off the simulation, you kinda have limited room to wiggle.
But at any rate, that God post was a joke post. (And in response to a joke post.) Maybe not the best of jokes by a wide margin, but still not serious stuff. You kinda have to play fast and loose with the science there, because just going on about the jitter in laser beams that was observed and the quantity of information in the hologram kinda tends to not make many people laugh. And probably would make 90% of people just go cross eyed. Most people's understanding of Schrödinger's Cat stops at "cat". Complex calculation showing a digital-like jitter with an inaccuracy greater than a Planck length? Oooer. I think you'd have to be a genius to fit a punchline that passes Occam's Razor to that one even if you're talking to the LHC physicists.
So, anyway, it was a joke. It wasn't supposed to be a valid logic chain. In fact, by the incongruity and resolution theory of fun, you kinda can't have it fully logical _and_ funny.
So if it fails to be a valid chain of logic and causality? _Good_. That's what I was aiming for. That's the kind of jokes I know how to make.
And just to make it clear, it wasn't some kind of sneaking in God as a link either. Or really not the kind your average church would teach you about. You know, in case those parts about transform and lighting and God being gay didn't already make that clear. It's just my taking-the-piss character that I sneak into jokes about religion.
The whole hypothesis is that the universe is a _digital_ hologram. As in, literally, the information is encoded in _pixels_. And there is a rather serious possible implication that the universe might be a digital simulation.
I dunno. It kinda seems natural that if someone wrote a digital simulation, they would be a programmer, and running whatever machine does it would make them an admin. I mean, really, the setup doesn't exactly leave many other options available even if I wanted to take the piss in a different way.
How do you know it'll be shut down. I mean I can also imagine the scenario that involves a booming voice going,
"Ah-ha, motherfuckers. That's the moment I've been waiting for. You're finally smart enough to understand what I'm gonna say more than that goat-fucker.. err.. herder I caught hanging around a burning hemp bush some 3000 of your years ago. Moses, I think he was called. Like that I didn't go 'let there be light' like that stoner wrote. What I told him was that I coded transform and lighting first. And of course the Earth was without form and void, because everything was: I had a 4 triangle tetrahedron as the only object to test that transform and lighting shit on. But judging by what's on your instruments right now, you've just figured out what I'm saying. Smart lads.
"But I think you have a bunch of questions first, we'll get to the cosmology later...
"What? Original sin? Well, when those two did it, it may have been original for your world, 'cause there was nobody to do it before them, but in the meantime it's kinda copycat sin if you get my drift. And which of them do you mean? Those two had quite the kinky ideas... Oh, apple? Nah, let's just say they got kicked out for more like bug abuse and duping items, and let's leave it at that. Next question...
"If I really hate women? What kind of retarded question is that? I wouldn't have made them if I hated them. Or I could have taken them out in a patch. Mind you, I might have dropped that Moses guy a hint that I'm not really into women, but the rest is his own confabulation.
"Which brings me to the next point, actually. I totally didn't tell him to kill gays. I mean, I just told you I'm not into women. You figure it out." ;)
"There is a theory which states that if ever for any reason anyone discovers what exactly the Universe is for and why it is here it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another that states that this has already happened." -- Douglas Adams
Sorta, but not exactly. Sure, it eventually trickles and creates that Keynesian multiplier.
But, and here's the important part, so would spending that money on something more useful like schools or water pumps. The money spent on those would create just as many jobs, you know, and you'd also have some schools or clean water instead of a national penis size symbol.
Think of it this way. If you spend X dollars, a Keynesian multiplier of Y says effectively you've put X*Y dollars into the economy. But if you invested that original X into something pointless, effectively you now only have X*(Y-1) that actually goes into anything the country actually needs. Unless Y is at least in the hundreds, you'll still see a difference.
And actually a more reasonable multiplier to expect is somewhere around 1.25 to 1.5. The highest ever multiplier recorded for a government investment was 1.73.
So basically even if you're uber-lucky, a million invested in useless crap will also bring 730,000 that trickles into more useful stuff. Whereas if you invested that million into something useful, well, now you'd have 1.73 million worth of useful stuff.
Basically that multiplier isn't a blank check to do any stupidity whatsoever with the public money. It doesn't mean you can just blow it on any crap and let the multiplier distribute it for you. At the end of the day, a million wasted is still a million wasted.
But it gets even better, actually. The multiplier itself is different for different things you do with the money. A million invested in something could have a multiplier as low as 0.23 (actual historical case too: yes, it's possible for such an investment to actually be a loss) or as high as 1.73. Like any investment, basically, you get a different ROI. It doesn't mean just blow the money or anything and expect it to trickle just the same.
Or in less complicated terms, think of it like this: a country has a certain amount of resources, including manpower. Tying up X thousand people into one project (including making those bricks and supplying the factory and whatnot) means X thousand you won't have for something else. Even if it creates Y thousand other jobs somewhere else too, that original X thousand is still tied up in activity A instead of activity B. If A is less needed than B, that's not a good use of manpower.
Also, I'd say that one should look at the actual conditions in a country before cheering for a waste. The exact multiplier and number of jobs created depend a lot on the local conditions. The way it works in a western post-scarcity economy, where really at worst you just diverted some people from marketing jobs and services and other ultimately just ways to do something when you don't need them in actual production, may not be the same for a country which still has a scarcity economy.
That you get to listen to expert witnesses is AFAIK standard procedure in all of the western world. It still didn't prevent jury nullification because the jury thought the prosecutor must be full of it if they don't have some techno-magic CSI-style analysis to go with all the witnesses, or conversely convicted based on misunderstanding how reliable some piece of techno-babble really is. I doubt that the UK or any other country is immune to that, and judging by your examples, you're basically saying the same thing.
Really? What other kinds of DNA are there? And shouldn't that raise more questions that for normal DNA we already know the answers, but which a new technology would have still unclear?
That's exactly what some of us hope, but I'd say it's not a given. Really, look just in this thread how many people take it for some kind of magical marker that can't possibly be wrong.
And I don't just mean taking for granted that it's unique, but also such issues as that nobody else will use their bottle for some malicious mischief, or that you won't end up with a nightmare when millions of marked PCs get sold without removing the markers, etc. It's assumptions which aren't even scientific or technical, but plain old suspending skepticism completely.
Will the same apply when the first jury has to judge such a case? That's the big question.
Actually I'd expect it to be even worse, thanks to the CSI effect. Basically the same blind belief that if it's some hi-tech shit, then it's more infallible than the Pope and those scientists 100% thought of and prevented every possible problem or false positive, that you can see in the GP post.
Someone _will_ get sent to jail by some idiot jury because the real burglar -- who, for example, is an employee and didn't even need to synthetise anything: he just nicked the bottle that the PHB cleverly hid in his desk drawer -- sprayed them with it.
That's actually the important part: often when it looks like there's some impossible hurdle like synthetising DNA, there are often _much_ simpler ways to plant it, _and_ you can rely on some idiots still thinking that only the really complicated way exists. E.g., people have already planted DNA at a crime scene by just taking a cigarette butt from a bus station and dropping it there. Here you don't even have to do that.
Or as an even more trivial example, if a co-worker you really don't like leaves his coat behind and his wallet in it, spray the coat and banknotes in the wallet, steal the same amount from the cash register, tip someone off that you saw them stealing again. Double profit. You got the money, and got rid of that guy or gal you don't like.
Yeah, they'll end up having to convince a jury that those scientists and their hi-tech solution are fallible after all. Good luck with that in a world being told the opposite by PR. And where they saw on TV every week that you can take a hair you found on a carpet and know exactly that it belongs to the killer (and not, say, to one of the guests the victim had two days before that, or some guy in the bus leaving hair on her coat) and run a DNA analysis to tell you exactly what the killer looks like. Or that you can take a two by two pixel image of the back of someone's head from a security camera, enhance it to a clear 1600x1200 image and, with a couple more mouse clicks, turn it around to see the culprit's face.
Seriously, we're already at the point where some juries acquit because you didn't do that, or conversely people who spent time on the death row because some pseudo-science mumbo-jumbo must be 100% correct and accurate like on CSI.
So it's even better?
Just as I was reading that story, I was thinking, "WTF, why McDonald?" I mean in retail the majority of thefts are by employees, not some guy charging in to snatch a plastic cup and run.
So now you just need to figure how to trip the spray on some lone guy who came for a burger at 2 AM, pocket a thousand and claim he robbed you. Or you can get even more creative if the miracle bottle that the PHB marks everything with is easily accessible by just, say, opening his desk drawer.
Thanks to idiot juries who, thanks to what now is called the "CSI effect" will blindly convict if there's some high-tech shit they don't understand as evidence -- and just as sadly occasionally won't convict even with six witnesses if you don't also some techno-magic involved to finger the culprit -- you're almost guaranteed to have the scheme work unless you overdo it and become the store that's robbed at 2AM every night.
Actually, I've touched that later in that message: nope, that's a different calendar. The Haab' calendar has those 5 days. The Long Count calendar is strictly 360 days.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that that would make the Mayan calendar less stupid.
Yes, Earth rotation slows down, so days get longer... by about 0.002 seconds per century. But:
A) that's slowing down, not accelerating. A year in the _very_ distant past had _more_ days, not less. Basically, sorry, you can't justify the Long Count 360 day year that way, much less the 260 day Tzolkin year.
B) That's at the scale of millions of years, not thousands. Sorry. In the 200,000 years that humanity even existed at all, that would make a difference of about 4 seconds a day out of 86400, or about 0.0046%. Even at that monumental scale, we're talking roughly years that were longer by, oh, just about enough to make every century leap instead of 3 out of 4. That tiny a difference. It still doesn't add up to a whole 5 day correction needed by the Long Count calendar.
But again, the correction is in the wrong direction. The more you go in the past, the more wrong the Long Count calendar gets.
The only point where the Long Count will be correct... notice that "will" there? Right. It's many millions years in the _future_. (And why would they make a calendar for then, if the world ends now, anyway?)
C) More importantly, we don't even need to speculate. We know that the calendar was close enough to 365 day years since at least 3000 BC, because the Egyptians figured that out. The interval when the Mayans created their bad calendar is squarely in times when we already know from the Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, and ultimately Romans that the year did _not_ have 360 days. While the former is just rough estimates and maths, this point is historical fact. We already know that it was wrong for the age when they started using it.
Actually, there is.
1. Basically it has no reason to. They counted base 20, and everything else about their number system is base 20. Assuming that only for this one it would have a special rule that the digit can't go above 13 is stupid. It's like saying that for Christians the century digit can't go above 7. Why?
2. And at any rate, the burden of proof is on those who claim that such a rule exists, not on those who don't. "[i]There's little to no reason to believe that the calendar wouldn't end on the solstice.[/i]" is exactly back-ass-wards. Not having any evidence of such a prophecy is not a reason to default to assuming that not only one exists, but also what it is about.
Basically, you also don't have any reason to not believe that there's a miniature giant space hamster ruling the world, but presumably you wouldn't take it as the default assumption until proven wrong.
3. Look at the digit we currently have there 13. Including zero, that would mean that their centuries digit goes in cycles of 14, which is nonsense for that culture. The numbers 13 and 20 were sacred numbers. The number 14 wasn't.
Aand again, anyone claiming to know of such a rule of 14, has the burden of proof to support it.
4. Actually I've left the best reason for last, although I already mentioned it. There are dates on some of those monuments with about a dozen digits for the year. Get that? They're not running out of digits. Whatever date there might be when the long count runs out of digits, it's by _far_ not at baktun or piktun.
That already isn't even a case of Occam's Razor or most reasonable assumption. It's a case of already _knowing_ that their calendar doesn't run out of digits now. Because we've already seen dates of theirs with more digits.
5. Actually, it's not as much the Rapture that annoys me, as the whole counterfactual bullshit surrounding this Mayan date. The whole fabricating a bullshit prophecy based on _not_ knowing that there isn't one, basically. Yes, I'm somewhat worked up. Because such a display of stupidity and believing unsupported bullshit just because of wanting to believe some bullshit, is already disheartening.
Actually they didn't. There is _no_ mayan prophecy for the end of the Baktun. None whatsoever. On the contrary, on their monuments you find dates up to trillions of year into the future. Dunno what was supposed to happen then, but it would make no sense to prophecise it if the world is supposed to end now.
_All_ that happens in 2012 (ok, 2013) is the end of a baktun.
Let's start from the start. The Mayans didn't count in base 10, but in base 20, presumably because they could count on their toes too. (No, really, look at their digits.) Thank goodness they didn't come up with a male-only maths, eh?
So they started with a year based on 260 day years, the so called Tzolkin calendar. If now you went "wait, that can't be right, it would skip through the actual year like crazy", congrats, you'd be smarter than the Mayans.
Then came the Long Count calendar, which was 360 days long, or 18 months of 20 days each. (Told you they were big on 20.) This is actually the calendar used in the 2012 (non)prophecy.
Yes, that's right. Those poor idiots are actually trusting a civilization to tell them about galactic alignments... who isn't even advanced enough to figure out the length of the year. Nor had the smarts to reset it to some equinoxe or such each year, like the lunisolar calendars used around here by even the most primitive ancient cultures. Yeah, that's the guy to trust with galactic calculations, right? ;)
To make it more stupid, even the Mayans eventually got a better calendar than that, the Haab calendar. Which finally padded the year to 365 days long, putting them finally on par with what the Egyptians had had, oh, only a couple of millennia before them. But anyway, a doomsday calculation based on the Long Count is already based on a calendar which is obsolete and crap even by Mayan standards.
So, anyway, a Long Count year was 18 months of 20 days each.
From there it went kinda like for us with decades, centuries and milenia, except in base 20.
So for us a decade is 10 years, for them a katun is 20 years.
For us a century is 10x10 years, for them a baktun is 20x20 years.
For us a millennium is 10x10x10 years, for them a piktun is 20x20x20 years.
All that happens in 2012 or 2013 is the end of a baktun. Yes, it's not even millennialism. The piktun (base-20 millenium) won't end for another 4000 years or so.
That scare isn't even like Y2K, it's more like being scared of the rollover from 699 AD to 700 AD. I mean, WTF, it's not even running out of digits or anything.
And again that's _all_ there is to it, because there is no actual Mayan prophecy for that date.
But I guess that won't stop the doomsday idiots from waiting for their Rapture on that day. What else is new?
As you yourself said, then they're still idiots. Triggering a bot program by hot keys instead of alt-tabbing is just as trivial as, well, triggering any other trainer that way.
Actually, the effectiveness of that is not beside the point at all. If it doesn't even actually solve a problem, it's taking away basic functionality without offering anything. Plus, you can gauge people's (or companies) competence by the solution they come up with: seeing someone come up with a pencils-up-the-nose pants-on-head retarded solution is actually a bad sign.
First of all, it's an idiotic solution anyway. I've seen, used and in ye olde DOS days even _made_ trainers for games, and none ever needed switching to the trainer to activate. The way you do it, is you hook on certain key combinations that the user can press while in game. E.g., numeric 1 = add a million cash, numeric 2 = infinite health, etc. The game never sees a task switch at all.
Second, if you're really determined, even that is old hat, and you run the game in a virtual machine instead. Glider did basically that to get around WoW's checks. Again it's not stuff that'll need a task switch, or the game to notice one.
Third, and even more important, it was defeated already by making it run windowed. So it's a thoroughly incompetent solution even for the stated problem.
Fourth, and the most important, anything important should be checked by the server, and you shouldn't trust the client for more than movement and animation. It's not possible to memory-hack WoW and give yourself more money or duplicate items, because the server doesn't trust the client with that. That Square-Enix even needed something like that, is reason to worry. If the client is trusted enough to worry about client-side cheating tools, that's a crap MMO implementation and reason to expect a deluge of duped gold or duped items or whatever down the line.
That's the real important part. Crap implementations aren't beside the point, and aren't just academic discussions in how competently the game is implemented. A crap implementation can set the stage for bigger problems down the line. And that they even need to try to disable ALT+TAB is not a good sign.
Fifth, MMOs are inherently social setups and in more than one way. It's not just a SP game plus an in-game chat. A lot (most?) players also use guild web sites, some have an IRC channel too, check or update sites for advice with quests and whatnot, have at the very least as Ventrilo or TeamSpeak running, many use some form of IM to keep in touch with other players or just friends, etc. Restricting access to those is seriously crippling something which is by now pretty standard MMO gameplay. Needing to basically close the game every single time you even do basic stuff like post something to the guild site or checking some guild schedule or to post a screenshot of your char or to IM a guild mate, isn't just a pain in the butt, it's crippling the experience of playing the damned game as a MMO.