If they force the new discussion system in any form I think it would be just enough hassle that I'd find another nerd site to kill my time. I appreciate the idea but I'm used to navigating around Ye Olde Slashdot and I prefer it tremendously. Not to mention the ads which are the icing on the cake. Although if they wanted a shot at those extra ads making significantly more money they'd have to make "classic Slashdot" a premium feature or something, because I can't see anyone using that in its current form over the old style browsing.
Everquest is past its prime in the sense of being trendy in any way. The graphics are not flashy and it has a largely steady playerbase as you've mentioned. It's not getting press coverage so most people only have a vague knowledge of what it actually is, which again takes away from the trendy factor. EQ2 is in a similar position but there is a little fodder for the graphics whores and their ilk, plus it's number two which is automatically better than number one for people in that mode of thought:P
I place paying a premium price for a laptop and laying down a couple hundred dollars to get little knick-knacks that confer no advantages in a similar boat. They both proceed from the desire to have cool looking gear. There are people that have real life gamer friends to impress with their shiny new WoW laptop y'know, and at least that's a physical object instead of a model change that took some dev five minutes hehe
If you're willing to overpay that much for that kind of branding you're going to be playing the trendiest game around and EQ is way past its prime in that sense. In EQ2 even when they released that card game there were some people dropping a couple hundred bills for stuff that basically conferred very little in game advantage but looked pretty.
To mathematicians "degenerate" makes perfect sense there, not just in terms of polygons but in terms of all mathematics. If you have a boundary case it's often called degenerate. As you said, something has "simplified itself" or "degenerated" into a case with fewer vertices. In the context of my current work a "degenerate" convex surface is one contained in the plane -- a doubly covered region that has zero volume. When you're explaining a concept to someone familiar with general mathematics naming conventions, degenerate is suggestive.
One reason that we tend to name everything is that when you're proving things about abstract concepts, you want a handy naming convention. If you spend months writing about "things with properties X, Y, Z, A, B, and C" you're going to want a name that summarizes things with properties X, Y, Z, A, B, and C.
I do agree that mathematics becomes 100% more intuitive and interesting if it's motivated by something else other than learning that bit of abstract math, even if the motivation is being able to do some other abstract math that you're more interested in.
It makes me wonder if it'd be easier or better (or possible?) to teach algebra from the perspective of geometry as a basis. I think you might have to stretch to come up with geometric interpretations of some of the stuff even in basic algebra though. I'm not sure for instance that there's a good picture for the quadratic formula, and purely algebraic manipulation does have its place... although now I wonder if you can come up with a geometric picture for the quadratic formula hehe.
Books can work okay, but you need to be very motivated to get very far. It helps a lot if you have someone enthusiastic about the subject to bounce things off of once a week or so, motivate important concepts, and sketch you a picture or another way of looking at something that can make a confusing concept on paper a lot clearer. It actually helps more to do guided self-study like this than the normal classes as far as I'm concerned, provided you can keep on top of it. For motivation it might actually help to pick up a math history or philosophy book to get yourself in the math zone without jumping straight into the computation. A book like Journey Through Genius has some light mathematical content that relies mostly on basic algebra and geometry, motivated by some pseudo-historical stories and flavor on their initial development.
There are a ton of resources online to help you out -- read through some of these before you start buying things. Wikipedia is almost always a great resource on math topics. Ask Dr. Math has a lot of answers to questions in high school and college math that people wrote in about -- it's a neat place to just browse through to come up with some questions to think about. I don't know any others off the top of my head, but I know I've run across "homework help" forums and things like that where you can ask (respectfully, without the expectation of detailed help) any questions that you have. Wolfram's Mathworld is okay but it tends to be really technical, I would not recommend it for beginning. It's good to have lots of perspectives though.
Personally I think they're waiting for Kunark to make the push. Faydwer brought more AAs, more low level zones, and more polish, but Kunark is really pulling out the stops, changing the design to improve things lots of people didn't like, and giving players that left the game at cap motive to reactivate with the new levels and stuff. Plus it's Kunark, which is even more nostalgic than Faydwer for lots of people. They really only get one more chance to make a marketing push and I think they were waiting until they had everything set. I hope they don't prove me wrong:P
Actually, there's been a lot of movement around EQ2 lately. I've been finding a large population of returning players (as in, from three years ago) in my pickup groups and they are very much enjoying themselves. As one example, a new guild that opened on my server from the FoH boards a couple months ago has 175 active unique accounts (almost all played within last week). The newbie zones have had two instances open during primetime. They're also both $14.99 as far as I can tell, and I'm not sure what you mean by "giving away" the base game (including it with expansions? the deal they handed out for ex-VG players?).
Yeah, WoW is the two million gigaton gorilla. EQ2 is still doing well enough to support the last large expansion and a new one that is even bigger. There has been a solid rationale behind all the decisions they've made besides "WoW did it." On the occasions when WoW did it first and it's a good idea, damn skippy I'm glad they're doing it too. The devteam has seemed like genuinely good people and responded to my private messages on the forums on the three occasions I've tried to communicate with them thus far. In my opinion they've been making one good move after another with only a couple missteps, and Kunark looks to step up their game. People in-game and outside of the game seem genuinely optimistic, aside from the usual rumblings from the 1% hardcore end of the playerbase that has continued playing for three expansions despite themselves. The game is truly not hurting in any way unless your yardstick doesn't measure any smaller than the biggest show in town.
The SoE strategy doesn't seem to be to build a single WoW killer either way, though EQ2 is its competitor for WoW. They're pushing Station Access (which is worth two accounts) and trying to build up a stable of solid, if not best-in-class games. EQ2 and EQ1 are both solid contributors, SWG and Planetside are at least self-sustaining on life support and maybe pushing some people over the line towards a Station pass, and if they can unfuck VG in six months as they'd hoped that might be another source of income as well. The interesting battle isn't EQ2 versus WoW anyway, it's what AoC and Warhammer are going to bring to the table shortly. This card game thing is a nonstory.
I haven't read it, but I think the fundamental premise of the book is sound. One of my little cousins is a bit too advanced for this now, but she's one of the smartest kids I've ever met and also one of the girliest. More role models that demonstrate that the two don't have to be mutually exclusive can only be positive. Kids are more likely to take their cues from celebrities than high school teachers with the media saturation we have these days. It's the attitude that there is a necessary gulf between academics and football, academics and celebrity, or academics and being "girly" that hurts the most. In my high school we had a state championship football team, and the captain was also a lead band member and a good student. It doesn't have to be football players versus nerds... and in fact the way our society is going it might be better to encourage everyone to participate in sports more.
As far as hooking people a little more substantively, I think she hit it on the head in the interview when she mentioned that one of the fascinations that drew her into mathematics was the infinitely large and the infinitely small. I've started off a ton of lengthy conversations introducing basic set theory and stuff to non-mathematicians just by challenging them on things like what is infinity, how do we define infinity, how do we add infinity to other numbers, matching up cardinalities with the natural numbers... The Monty Hall problem is a great one for thinking about probabilities. Kids get fascinated by imaginary numbers just because it's the first "weird" thing everyone emphasizes, so it's easy to get them playing around with some algebra like that. A high schooler taking their first "proofs" geometry can enjoy doing some non-Euclidean stuff, up to the big reveal when you tell them they're working on the surface of a sphere or whatever hehe.
I was watching the Daily Show the other day when they interviewed the astrophysicist hosting Nova, and the guy had an infectious enthusiasm (to lift Jon Stewart's language directly hehe). If you've ever watched the Feynman lectures, it's the same sort of thing, at least for me. The more people out there from all walks of life enthusiastically promoting the accessible parts of math and science, the better.
MMOs typically do not have quests that you "have to" do as any significant portion of the game. At a certain level you might have a choice of four or five different dungeons to go to, each of which has its own little mini questline with items, EXP and gold as rewards. Quests are almost entirely "kill ten X", "go to X location", "find ten random drop X from Y creature", "kill the boss", "find ten stone markers on the ground", etc. Alternately you could just find a corner and grind yourself up in levels without doing much of the quest content. For items you can try to find special creatures (usually called "named" because they have actual names instead of just an_angry_boar_02) that drop items that you might use. People usually gravitate towards the easiest questlines and dungeons with the best rewards.
It's sorta a strange dynamic. People play for all sorts of different and sometimes conflicting reasons. It is true that the best kind of game would be one where advancement comes almost by accident while you're enjoying your game instead of the other way around.
Yep, and PvP is a big part of this. Age of Conan and Warhammer, the two upcoming MMOs getting the most attention atm, both feature PvP heavily. The bottom line is that there are not enough content designers in the world to satiate the MMO appetite for content while keeping it at a high level challenge without grinds and timesinks. If you pit players against each other in fun, balanced combat with some decent goals system on top of it, you'll have a winner. I've played maps in my favorite FPS upwards of 24 hours each. When the content is other players each game evolves differently no matter if you're doing the same thing for the hundredth time. The problem is that PvP in games so far has tended to either be a sideshow or implemented poorly. There aren't many people interested in being rolled over by gank squads ten levels higher. The fun of advancement needs to be balanced with the fun of PvP combat insofar as newbies not being cannon fodder until they manage to grind up levels in seclusion somewhere.
Similarly you mentioned roleplaying. That's another kind of MMO player that needs less from devs. No one's really provided a mass market game for them except on the lowest level... I guess SWG was the closest and they're working on it more. But take something like the SWG engine, make PvP the central part of the gameplay, keep adding in more tools for people to play in their guild towns and stuff, and you got a cheap, low maintenance MMO that will attract a good amount of people.
Suppose someone brought out a game where the primary aim of the game is raping children. Is that acceptable? If not the why not? By your definition the content is not illegal by itself, so it shouldn't be censored right?
Do we need the government to ban all things that are unacceptable? The overwhelming majority of people in the U.S. think that this kind of game would be reprehensible. There would be protests and stores would be likely to lose more business than they gain. People have power but we're slowly ceding it away.
First, you're presupposing a common definition of purpose.
Secondly, you are presupposing a perfect knowledge of what has purpose and what has no purpose. What makes Manhunt 2 purposeless? It has the potential to cause harm, it has the potential to cause good. Someone might die because of it, or it might be an outlet for someone to exorcise a personal demon and save a life. There is no perfect knowledge of what is purposeful, what causes harm, or what doesn't, and no perfect criteria for what harm outweighs what good even if we had perfect knowledge. Thus we regulate that which has massively harmful potential and allow individuals the choice of their personal vices.
Finally, in protecting "the weak" from minor temptations as per your specific guidelines, you are effectively denying them the choice that distinguishes us as humans. Guidance, teaching, yes... becoming a cog in a machine designed to conform absolutely to the vision of "the strong"... not so much.
I am sorta serious though, I'm in my mid-20's and the F-bomb still gets dropped pretty casually. It's just not really a head-turner. It might be a regional thing or some other demographic, but you interact with all kinds of people on the internet. As to why these eleven year olds are using them? They're on the internet, they've probably seen Samuel L. and much, much worse.
Slashdot Mirror
If they force the new discussion system in any form I think it would be just enough hassle that I'd find another nerd site to kill my time. I appreciate the idea but I'm used to navigating around Ye Olde Slashdot and I prefer it tremendously. Not to mention the ads which are the icing on the cake. Although if they wanted a shot at those extra ads making significantly more money they'd have to make "classic Slashdot" a premium feature or something, because I can't see anyone using that in its current form over the old style browsing.
Whoever loses, we win.
You must be new in Soviet Russia.
...shit, I think I messed that up.
Everquest is past its prime in the sense of being trendy in any way. The graphics are not flashy and it has a largely steady playerbase as you've mentioned. It's not getting press coverage so most people only have a vague knowledge of what it actually is, which again takes away from the trendy factor. EQ2 is in a similar position but there is a little fodder for the graphics whores and their ilk, plus it's number two which is automatically better than number one for people in that mode of thought :P
I place paying a premium price for a laptop and laying down a couple hundred dollars to get little knick-knacks that confer no advantages in a similar boat. They both proceed from the desire to have cool looking gear. There are people that have real life gamer friends to impress with their shiny new WoW laptop y'know, and at least that's a physical object instead of a model change that took some dev five minutes hehe
If you're willing to overpay that much for that kind of branding you're going to be playing the trendiest game around and EQ is way past its prime in that sense. In EQ2 even when they released that card game there were some people dropping a couple hundred bills for stuff that basically conferred very little in game advantage but looked pretty.
The Russian Federation isn't big on the making-people-stronger part of the equation.
Hellooooo... Ivan Drago?
I was hoping for Street Fighter III Hyper Turbo Championship Edition.
To mathematicians "degenerate" makes perfect sense there, not just in terms of polygons but in terms of all mathematics. If you have a boundary case it's often called degenerate. As you said, something has "simplified itself" or "degenerated" into a case with fewer vertices. In the context of my current work a "degenerate" convex surface is one contained in the plane -- a doubly covered region that has zero volume. When you're explaining a concept to someone familiar with general mathematics naming conventions, degenerate is suggestive.
One reason that we tend to name everything is that when you're proving things about abstract concepts, you want a handy naming convention. If you spend months writing about "things with properties X, Y, Z, A, B, and C" you're going to want a name that summarizes things with properties X, Y, Z, A, B, and C.
I do agree that mathematics becomes 100% more intuitive and interesting if it's motivated by something else other than learning that bit of abstract math, even if the motivation is being able to do some other abstract math that you're more interested in.
It makes me wonder if it'd be easier or better (or possible?) to teach algebra from the perspective of geometry as a basis. I think you might have to stretch to come up with geometric interpretations of some of the stuff even in basic algebra though. I'm not sure for instance that there's a good picture for the quadratic formula, and purely algebraic manipulation does have its place... although now I wonder if you can come up with a geometric picture for the quadratic formula hehe.
Books can work okay, but you need to be very motivated to get very far. It helps a lot if you have someone enthusiastic about the subject to bounce things off of once a week or so, motivate important concepts, and sketch you a picture or another way of looking at something that can make a confusing concept on paper a lot clearer. It actually helps more to do guided self-study like this than the normal classes as far as I'm concerned, provided you can keep on top of it. For motivation it might actually help to pick up a math history or philosophy book to get yourself in the math zone without jumping straight into the computation. A book like Journey Through Genius has some light mathematical content that relies mostly on basic algebra and geometry, motivated by some pseudo-historical stories and flavor on their initial development.
There are a ton of resources online to help you out -- read through some of these before you start buying things. Wikipedia is almost always a great resource on math topics. Ask Dr. Math has a lot of answers to questions in high school and college math that people wrote in about -- it's a neat place to just browse through to come up with some questions to think about. I don't know any others off the top of my head, but I know I've run across "homework help" forums and things like that where you can ask (respectfully, without the expectation of detailed help) any questions that you have. Wolfram's Mathworld is okay but it tends to be really technical, I would not recommend it for beginning. It's good to have lots of perspectives though.
That actually is a good visual for distribution that I never thought of. I'll have to file that away hehe.
Personally I think they're waiting for Kunark to make the push. Faydwer brought more AAs, more low level zones, and more polish, but Kunark is really pulling out the stops, changing the design to improve things lots of people didn't like, and giving players that left the game at cap motive to reactivate with the new levels and stuff. Plus it's Kunark, which is even more nostalgic than Faydwer for lots of people. They really only get one more chance to make a marketing push and I think they were waiting until they had everything set. I hope they don't prove me wrong :P
Actually, there's been a lot of movement around EQ2 lately. I've been finding a large population of returning players (as in, from three years ago) in my pickup groups and they are very much enjoying themselves. As one example, a new guild that opened on my server from the FoH boards a couple months ago has 175 active unique accounts (almost all played within last week). The newbie zones have had two instances open during primetime. They're also both $14.99 as far as I can tell, and I'm not sure what you mean by "giving away" the base game (including it with expansions? the deal they handed out for ex-VG players?).
Yeah, WoW is the two million gigaton gorilla. EQ2 is still doing well enough to support the last large expansion and a new one that is even bigger. There has been a solid rationale behind all the decisions they've made besides "WoW did it." On the occasions when WoW did it first and it's a good idea, damn skippy I'm glad they're doing it too. The devteam has seemed like genuinely good people and responded to my private messages on the forums on the three occasions I've tried to communicate with them thus far. In my opinion they've been making one good move after another with only a couple missteps, and Kunark looks to step up their game. People in-game and outside of the game seem genuinely optimistic, aside from the usual rumblings from the 1% hardcore end of the playerbase that has continued playing for three expansions despite themselves. The game is truly not hurting in any way unless your yardstick doesn't measure any smaller than the biggest show in town.
The SoE strategy doesn't seem to be to build a single WoW killer either way, though EQ2 is its competitor for WoW. They're pushing Station Access (which is worth two accounts) and trying to build up a stable of solid, if not best-in-class games. EQ2 and EQ1 are both solid contributors, SWG and Planetside are at least self-sustaining on life support and maybe pushing some people over the line towards a Station pass, and if they can unfuck VG in six months as they'd hoped that might be another source of income as well. The interesting battle isn't EQ2 versus WoW anyway, it's what AoC and Warhammer are going to bring to the table shortly. This card game thing is a nonstory.
I think you mean NOVA scienceNOW, and that's Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Yep! Thanks for the clarification, I'm not really up on my science TV hehe.
I haven't read it, but I think the fundamental premise of the book is sound. One of my little cousins is a bit too advanced for this now, but she's one of the smartest kids I've ever met and also one of the girliest. More role models that demonstrate that the two don't have to be mutually exclusive can only be positive. Kids are more likely to take their cues from celebrities than high school teachers with the media saturation we have these days. It's the attitude that there is a necessary gulf between academics and football, academics and celebrity, or academics and being "girly" that hurts the most. In my high school we had a state championship football team, and the captain was also a lead band member and a good student. It doesn't have to be football players versus nerds... and in fact the way our society is going it might be better to encourage everyone to participate in sports more.
As far as hooking people a little more substantively, I think she hit it on the head in the interview when she mentioned that one of the fascinations that drew her into mathematics was the infinitely large and the infinitely small. I've started off a ton of lengthy conversations introducing basic set theory and stuff to non-mathematicians just by challenging them on things like what is infinity, how do we define infinity, how do we add infinity to other numbers, matching up cardinalities with the natural numbers... The Monty Hall problem is a great one for thinking about probabilities. Kids get fascinated by imaginary numbers just because it's the first "weird" thing everyone emphasizes, so it's easy to get them playing around with some algebra like that. A high schooler taking their first "proofs" geometry can enjoy doing some non-Euclidean stuff, up to the big reveal when you tell them they're working on the surface of a sphere or whatever hehe.
I was watching the Daily Show the other day when they interviewed the astrophysicist hosting Nova, and the guy had an infectious enthusiasm (to lift Jon Stewart's language directly hehe). If you've ever watched the Feynman lectures, it's the same sort of thing, at least for me. The more people out there from all walks of life enthusiastically promoting the accessible parts of math and science, the better.
Undead's different. Orc, troll, furry... seen it, done it.
Dunno, this guy makes it sound pretty glamorous :P
In other worlds, liberalism is the first step to pure fascism.
Hold on there big guy, let's wrap your head around political ideologies on this planet before we move onto the intergalactic stuff.
MMOs typically do not have quests that you "have to" do as any significant portion of the game. At a certain level you might have a choice of four or five different dungeons to go to, each of which has its own little mini questline with items, EXP and gold as rewards. Quests are almost entirely "kill ten X", "go to X location", "find ten random drop X from Y creature", "kill the boss", "find ten stone markers on the ground", etc. Alternately you could just find a corner and grind yourself up in levels without doing much of the quest content. For items you can try to find special creatures (usually called "named" because they have actual names instead of just an_angry_boar_02) that drop items that you might use. People usually gravitate towards the easiest questlines and dungeons with the best rewards.
It's sorta a strange dynamic. People play for all sorts of different and sometimes conflicting reasons. It is true that the best kind of game would be one where advancement comes almost by accident while you're enjoying your game instead of the other way around.
Yep, and PvP is a big part of this. Age of Conan and Warhammer, the two upcoming MMOs getting the most attention atm, both feature PvP heavily. The bottom line is that there are not enough content designers in the world to satiate the MMO appetite for content while keeping it at a high level challenge without grinds and timesinks. If you pit players against each other in fun, balanced combat with some decent goals system on top of it, you'll have a winner. I've played maps in my favorite FPS upwards of 24 hours each. When the content is other players each game evolves differently no matter if you're doing the same thing for the hundredth time. The problem is that PvP in games so far has tended to either be a sideshow or implemented poorly. There aren't many people interested in being rolled over by gank squads ten levels higher. The fun of advancement needs to be balanced with the fun of PvP combat insofar as newbies not being cannon fodder until they manage to grind up levels in seclusion somewhere.
Similarly you mentioned roleplaying. That's another kind of MMO player that needs less from devs. No one's really provided a mass market game for them except on the lowest level... I guess SWG was the closest and they're working on it more. But take something like the SWG engine, make PvP the central part of the gameplay, keep adding in more tools for people to play in their guild towns and stuff, and you got a cheap, low maintenance MMO that will attract a good amount of people.
Except it's a game of monopoly where everyone is a winner if they sit at the table for long enough.
Suppose someone brought out a game where the primary aim of the game is raping children. Is that acceptable? If not the why not? By your definition the content is not illegal by itself, so it shouldn't be censored right?
Do we need the government to ban all things that are unacceptable? The overwhelming majority of people in the U.S. think that this kind of game would be reprehensible. There would be protests and stores would be likely to lose more business than they gain. People have power but we're slowly ceding it away.
First, you're presupposing a common definition of purpose.
Secondly, you are presupposing a perfect knowledge of what has purpose and what has no purpose. What makes Manhunt 2 purposeless? It has the potential to cause harm, it has the potential to cause good. Someone might die because of it, or it might be an outlet for someone to exorcise a personal demon and save a life. There is no perfect knowledge of what is purposeful, what causes harm, or what doesn't, and no perfect criteria for what harm outweighs what good even if we had perfect knowledge. Thus we regulate that which has massively harmful potential and allow individuals the choice of their personal vices.
Finally, in protecting "the weak" from minor temptations as per your specific guidelines, you are effectively denying them the choice that distinguishes us as humans. Guidance, teaching, yes... becoming a cog in a machine designed to conform absolutely to the vision of "the strong"... not so much.
You're getting generation gapped maybe? :P
I am sorta serious though, I'm in my mid-20's and the F-bomb still gets dropped pretty casually. It's just not really a head-turner. It might be a regional thing or some other demographic, but you interact with all kinds of people on the internet. As to why these eleven year olds are using them? They're on the internet, they've probably seen Samuel L. and much, much worse.
This might sound crazy... but I am more likely to see a CoH movie if he is involved with it. Everything he touches is comedy gold :P