I had the same exact thought. There were some sorta interesting villain groups but it's basically every superhero cliché you could think of... at least the ones that wouldn't get them sued. And some that would:P
Considering that's Venekor in Cazic-Thule, one of the launch zones, I'd say either your memory is a bit rusty or they have the graphics quality turned down:P
What is the best title for the preceding post?
a. Re:won't RTFA
b. Wooden Food
c. Fighting Fires with Books
d. Fahrenheit 824291
e. The Cowboy Neal Code
Yes and no. Language constitutes ambiguity all by itself which some mathematicians and philosophers tried to patch up in the past fairly unsuccessfully. I mean, theoretically a lot of the systems we work with on a day to day basis could be inconsistent, but most of us aren't working in foundational problems trying to formulate alternatives. Not many mathematicians take the time to really worry about what axiomatic framework they're working in, as opposed to leaving the nitpicking to the logicians, who have even invented fields like reverse mathematics that essentially go back and figure these kinds of questions out.
Working in mathematics oftentimes requires the ability to interpret correctly or make an intuitive choice about which problem would be more reasonable. I have read two published papers in the last couple weeks alone that have had serious errors involving either typos or misplaced words. It fell to me to look at the papers, try to guess at what the deceased author was trying to do, and patch up his proofs to my satisfaction.
Looking at the question from the Chinese test and applying some basic reasoning, it'd be ridiculous if they embedded that monstrosity into hyperbolic space, and on top of that hyperbolic space is not translation invariant, so you'd need a lot more facts about how it's embedded in particular. They acknowledge in one of the questions that the two lines they're asking you to find the angles of are not coplanar, so it's not like it's a trick question where they're looking for you to catch onto that. The only logical conclusion for me is that they want you to use the one definition of angle between two lines in Euclidean space that works for every pair of lines and doesn't require any extra information.
College kids already pay a bit for their own connection, it's typically a mandatory fee tacked on their with the cable bill (which is also typically mandatory) for the dorms. Like the student recreation fee that goes to support the intramurals I don't play in, the student athletic fee that goes to support the teams I don't really care about, the residential fee that goes to support the stupid reslife programs, the campus computing fee that pays for the campus computers I might use for ten minutes once a month, etc.
Of course they're working in Euclidean space, where there is always a well-defined notion of an angle between arbitrary lines by translating them both to the origin. If you want to be pedantic about it we can mod out the space of lines in R^3 (a base point in R^3 and two angles) by the action of translations to get a quotient space that is topologically isomorphic to RP^2, and then we define the angle between two lines as the angle between the two representatives of their equivalence classes that pass through the origin. We take the smaller of the two possible angles by convention, but we can even orient the lines to get rid of that ambiguity if it tickles you. It remains as an exercise to show that this agrees with the angle between the two original lines if they do happen to intersect.
Basically what I'm saying is it's pretty obvious what is meant here and I'd hope people with a high school degree, let alone a bachelor's in mathematics, could figure out what is intended without straying into the realm of nitpicks:P
Secret of Evermore was actually a really cool idea, and I didn't appreciate it so much at the time but I think it had a ton of potential. They could definitely make an awesome game in the same spirit, if not as a continuation.
Proofs are the good stuff, proofs are what you want, and by proving facts is how a/the science advances. Having benchmarks demonstrate an inability to prove/formulate claims, or indicate that you are actually studying something else than computing science. Also benchmarks have the old problem of being easy to tweak to indicate a more favourable result than might be expected.
This indicates to me that you should give up this "computer science" thing already and just call yourself mathematicians. It's less confusing:P
Yes, the climate is ostensibly generated using some static algorithm that runs the universe with a bit of input from humans en masse, whereas major league sports rests on the shoulders of relatively few individuals, their whims, and their day-to-day fortunes.
Two hour intro to philosophy class, the man read off slides that I could only speculate had come straight from some sort of package the book included for lazy teachers. Two hours of this man's monotone reading of basic psychology definitions. He started handing out the printout of his powerpoint slides (from where his multiple choice "tests" were taken), but unfortunately it was impossible to enter the class, take them, and leave undetected. I think I ended up paying some guy to drop off photocopied versions into my mailbox hehe.
Comp Sci I and II, my prof literally would walk in with the text book and painstakingly copy pages of C++ code onto the board. And this was an 8:00 AM class. I think I attended three times total after the first week to take the tests. That's when I decided I was no longer going to be in the comp sci program at my university:P
Eh, I would've given NWN2 a positive score and I'm certainly not a shill. Negative complaints filling up four times faster than positive comments? Welcome to the internets.
I guess this is you and me going back and forth about our fictional majorities, but I think the fact that experienced MMO producers keep pushing out buggy product indicates that you're wrong. These are people whose job is tracking player habits and figuring out how to make money. They have stats on who sticks around, who leaves, what their playing habits are, etc. Some bean counter in a back room figures it'd be more profitable for them to launch earlier than stall three months, and they're holding all the information.
I don't think most of the money comes from people that stick with the game. After their first MMO, most people I've observed flip back and forth every couple months. I know a lot of people that have accounts in multiple games. A lot of people will come back to a game for a month or three, then flip over to the next one. Once you've put down that initial $50 for the box, reactivating your account a couple months down the line to check out the changes seems a lot more palatable, and the devs will try to sucker you back in with free week trials and such when they think they've reached some milestone in bug fixing or content.
I'm not saying pushing an unplayable steaming pile of crap out the door is a good idea. There needs to be good progress on the major problems within the first couple of weeks, which indicates a positive trend in patching to the players and helps secure their future business. The sibling reply mentioned Anarchy Online, which was literally completely unplayable at launch (it still has lots of other problems and some of the expansions actually drove my friends that still played the game away, but I don't really want to debate the merits of a game I don't play hehe). It launched about the same time as WW2Online, which was similarly unplayable. Turbine's release of DDO was pretty terrible. AC2 and Horizons were just unappealing games with bland worlds to most players. SWG is the archetypical example. Years after launch they decided that the problems with their system were unfixable and revamped the game entirely. Now they're reintroducing the things they took out and calling it new content.
Ship a buggy MMO on time and you get an instant cash influx, a good amount of people that will pay for a few months regardless, and a large majority of people who will still resubscribe or buy the game once it becomes more stable. You basically get people paying to beta and it doesn't lose you many players.
The top schools have the resources to feed the of the ultra-motivated, but if you're just getting around to thinking about it now, odds are you're not one of those people. Grades and clubs are not by themselves enough to get you admitted into one of the most prestigious schools, but what they will get you are scholarships and grants.
My suggestion to you would be to find a school, even a public university, with an emphasis on undergrad research and enough of a pocketbook to offer you a significant chunk of tuition. While you're there, if you're serious about your field, network with professors, do undergrad research, attend undergrad conferences, and get into summer research programs and semester-long study programs. Everyone that's competent will come out of a four-year undergrad knowing the basics of their field -- what sets people apart is the research that they've done and the contacts that they've made.
If money is not an issue then sure, go for it. Personally, I was accepted into Carnegie Mellon and the financial aid package they gave me would've had me up to my ears in the typical undergrad debt for years. Instead I took a full ride to a less prestigious liberal arts school that still had a great faculty for what I wanted to do, and I augmented their shortcomings with summer REUs and semesters abroad. I can say without a doubt it was the better decision, and also that when it comes down to grad schools the research experience and the people I met mattered far more than the undergraduate institution. In industry from what I've heard the degree can matter more initially, but if you're going for the kind of job that wants ivy credentials, generally you're gonna want a masters at least.
This isn't answering your question though. If your heart is set on one of those schools, to improve your chances of admittance the best thing you could do is to get in contact with them. Having a letter of recommendation from a professor on their faculty is huge, especially if they have a grant and they're willing to kick in partial tuition or something. Unfortunately, unless you've done some killer research, any last-minute attempt to suck up to a professor will come off as what it is, a last-ditch effort to shmooze your way into the school.
The draw of Vanguard is that they built a compelling fantasy world first and then put a game around it. In EQ2 or WoW (and I'm guessing GW) every area is crafted to maximize gameplay, which leads to some very artificial feeling areas. Vanguard also has some of the deepest dungeons I've seen in any MMO liberally scattered across the countryside and a lot of things for you to find just exploring. If you don't care about this sort of thing then Vanguard doesn't really have much more to offer you than any of the other things unless you like its gameplay or its "challenge" (length of grind, which is more of an e-peen thing).
Uhh there's a difference between teaching your kids to admire people because of the color of their skin and giving them positive role models of the same skin color. Black is more than just a skin color in this country because there is a shared cultural experience that arose from their mistreatment for over 150 years. It is not racist to acknowledge this shared cultural experience that still exists to a lesser degree.
It is, on the other hand, another form of dickery to turn around one or two generations out from the civil rights act and call those who want to see more successful black people "no better than Klan members." I guess what I mean to ask is are you seriously that ignorant or are you just trolling for fun?
There are still a lot of people alive now that grew up coming off the heels of Brown v. Board of Ed and the Civil Rights Act. They did not choose a racial division, it was thrust upon them. To say that now, one generation later, it's racist to say that it's positive for their kids to see successful black people, that's just stupid. In an ideal and completely rational world I agree with you, but we have to deal with reality as it stands.
I dunno if I remember any MMO that launched with a free trial. People that buy the collector's edition do get ten buddy keys to distribute to friends for week-long trials or something like that (I think that's similar to the deal WoW launched with, IIRC). The only way I'd say SoE has "ruined" anything is if they were the motivation behind limiting to eight character slots across all servers. Otherwise their amount of control has been nearly imperceptible.
Bottom line is Vanguard had a lot of development time with experienced guys at the helm and wasn't ready in time to meet several of their launch goals, including this one, but they need to launch now since they're bleeding money. It's still a decent enough game that I'm willing to play it, but I'm recommending that my friends who aren't dead set on it hold off for at least a month to see what happens.
As I don't think any of the current-generation MMOs even support 50-person raids and there are games out there like EQ2 where the longest raid zones cap off around two or three hours before you've fully mastered it, I'd say your knowledge of raiding is a little outdated.
The question is if the work is becoming more skilled in some way or if the work is menial repetition. There's a difference between having better coordination, situational reflexes, and strategic sense... and performing menial tasks for your MMO Skinner box and getting a virtual treat.
Not really, this is an idea that's been around from lazy developers for a while in games but only really crystalized to its fullest in MMOs. What are you supposed to be "earning" by playing the game? The goal is to "earn" fun. There is no reason that you should have to earn your way to the fun by playing through a shitload of stuff that's not fun. Unfortunately it is much easier to just stamp another game in the mold created by all the previous MMOs than thinking up a new convention.
we'd still be debating whether or not to go into Afghanistan.
The problem with most of these scientists is they haven't figured out how to lie to the American public as effectively as the politicians. When politicians figure out a hundred different ways to take away our essential liberties with patriotic sounding names, emploring us to think about the children and defend our families from The Terrorists (TM), that's A-OK -- and please don't think I'm dividing this down party lines, there's politicians from all parties that are happy to cement their power base. When the scientific community suggests that we really ought to do something about the shit we're pumping into the atmosphere, suddenly everyone's flashing their Junior Climatologist merit badge and telling them why it ain't so.
News flash: real scientists don't deal in absolutes. They provide estimated probabilities and sensible suggestions. Becoming more eco-friendly is not going to turn us into a pinko communo-socialist hippy state any more than, say, allowing the president to expand the scope of government is going to turn us into a dictatorship. We're ostensibly on the same team here.
Slashdot Mirror
I loved CMI. I don't even think I finished Escape. Nothin beats the original though :P
I had the same exact thought. There were some sorta interesting villain groups but it's basically every superhero cliché you could think of... at least the ones that wouldn't get them sued. And some that would :P
Considering that's Venekor in Cazic-Thule, one of the launch zones, I'd say either your memory is a bit rusty or they have the graphics quality turned down :P
What is the best title for the preceding post?
a. Re:won't RTFA
b. Wooden Food
c. Fighting Fires with Books
d. Fahrenheit 824291
e. The Cowboy Neal Code
Yes and no. Language constitutes ambiguity all by itself which some mathematicians and philosophers tried to patch up in the past fairly unsuccessfully. I mean, theoretically a lot of the systems we work with on a day to day basis could be inconsistent, but most of us aren't working in foundational problems trying to formulate alternatives. Not many mathematicians take the time to really worry about what axiomatic framework they're working in, as opposed to leaving the nitpicking to the logicians, who have even invented fields like reverse mathematics that essentially go back and figure these kinds of questions out.
Working in mathematics oftentimes requires the ability to interpret correctly or make an intuitive choice about which problem would be more reasonable. I have read two published papers in the last couple weeks alone that have had serious errors involving either typos or misplaced words. It fell to me to look at the papers, try to guess at what the deceased author was trying to do, and patch up his proofs to my satisfaction.
Looking at the question from the Chinese test and applying some basic reasoning, it'd be ridiculous if they embedded that monstrosity into hyperbolic space, and on top of that hyperbolic space is not translation invariant, so you'd need a lot more facts about how it's embedded in particular. They acknowledge in one of the questions that the two lines they're asking you to find the angles of are not coplanar, so it's not like it's a trick question where they're looking for you to catch onto that. The only logical conclusion for me is that they want you to use the one definition of angle between two lines in Euclidean space that works for every pair of lines and doesn't require any extra information.
College kids already pay a bit for their own connection, it's typically a mandatory fee tacked on their with the cable bill (which is also typically mandatory) for the dorms. Like the student recreation fee that goes to support the intramurals I don't play in, the student athletic fee that goes to support the teams I don't really care about, the residential fee that goes to support the stupid reslife programs, the campus computing fee that pays for the campus computers I might use for ten minutes once a month, etc.
Of course they're working in Euclidean space, where there is always a well-defined notion of an angle between arbitrary lines by translating them both to the origin. If you want to be pedantic about it we can mod out the space of lines in R^3 (a base point in R^3 and two angles) by the action of translations to get a quotient space that is topologically isomorphic to RP^2, and then we define the angle between two lines as the angle between the two representatives of their equivalence classes that pass through the origin. We take the smaller of the two possible angles by convention, but we can even orient the lines to get rid of that ambiguity if it tickles you. It remains as an exercise to show that this agrees with the angle between the two original lines if they do happen to intersect.
:P
Basically what I'm saying is it's pretty obvious what is meant here and I'd hope people with a high school degree, let alone a bachelor's in mathematics, could figure out what is intended without straying into the realm of nitpicks
Yes you can, it's just a special case of a Riemannian manifold embedded into space-time :P
Secret of Evermore was actually a really cool idea, and I didn't appreciate it so much at the time but I think it had a ton of potential. They could definitely make an awesome game in the same spirit, if not as a continuation.
Proofs are the good stuff, proofs are what you want, and by proving facts is how a/the science advances. Having benchmarks demonstrate an inability to prove/formulate claims, or indicate that you are actually studying something else than computing science. Also benchmarks have the old problem of being easy to tweak to indicate a more favourable result than might be expected.
:P
This indicates to me that you should give up this "computer science" thing already and just call yourself mathematicians. It's less confusing
Yes, the climate is ostensibly generated using some static algorithm that runs the universe with a bit of input from humans en masse, whereas major league sports rests on the shoulders of relatively few individuals, their whims, and their day-to-day fortunes.
Two hour intro to philosophy class, the man read off slides that I could only speculate had come straight from some sort of package the book included for lazy teachers. Two hours of this man's monotone reading of basic psychology definitions. He started handing out the printout of his powerpoint slides (from where his multiple choice "tests" were taken), but unfortunately it was impossible to enter the class, take them, and leave undetected. I think I ended up paying some guy to drop off photocopied versions into my mailbox hehe.
Comp Sci I and II, my prof literally would walk in with the text book and painstakingly copy pages of C++ code onto the board. And this was an 8:00 AM class. I think I attended three times total after the first week to take the tests. That's when I decided I was no longer going to be in the comp sci program at my university :P
Eh, I would've given NWN2 a positive score and I'm certainly not a shill. Negative complaints filling up four times faster than positive comments? Welcome to the internets.
I guess this is you and me going back and forth about our fictional majorities, but I think the fact that experienced MMO producers keep pushing out buggy product indicates that you're wrong. These are people whose job is tracking player habits and figuring out how to make money. They have stats on who sticks around, who leaves, what their playing habits are, etc. Some bean counter in a back room figures it'd be more profitable for them to launch earlier than stall three months, and they're holding all the information.
I don't think most of the money comes from people that stick with the game. After their first MMO, most people I've observed flip back and forth every couple months. I know a lot of people that have accounts in multiple games. A lot of people will come back to a game for a month or three, then flip over to the next one. Once you've put down that initial $50 for the box, reactivating your account a couple months down the line to check out the changes seems a lot more palatable, and the devs will try to sucker you back in with free week trials and such when they think they've reached some milestone in bug fixing or content.
I'm not saying pushing an unplayable steaming pile of crap out the door is a good idea. There needs to be good progress on the major problems within the first couple of weeks, which indicates a positive trend in patching to the players and helps secure their future business. The sibling reply mentioned Anarchy Online, which was literally completely unplayable at launch (it still has lots of other problems and some of the expansions actually drove my friends that still played the game away, but I don't really want to debate the merits of a game I don't play hehe). It launched about the same time as WW2Online, which was similarly unplayable. Turbine's release of DDO was pretty terrible. AC2 and Horizons were just unappealing games with bland worlds to most players. SWG is the archetypical example. Years after launch they decided that the problems with their system were unfixable and revamped the game entirely. Now they're reintroducing the things they took out and calling it new content.
Ship a buggy MMO on time and you get an instant cash influx, a good amount of people that will pay for a few months regardless, and a large majority of people who will still resubscribe or buy the game once it becomes more stable. You basically get people paying to beta and it doesn't lose you many players.
The top schools have the resources to feed the of the ultra-motivated, but if you're just getting around to thinking about it now, odds are you're not one of those people. Grades and clubs are not by themselves enough to get you admitted into one of the most prestigious schools, but what they will get you are scholarships and grants.
My suggestion to you would be to find a school, even a public university, with an emphasis on undergrad research and enough of a pocketbook to offer you a significant chunk of tuition. While you're there, if you're serious about your field, network with professors, do undergrad research, attend undergrad conferences, and get into summer research programs and semester-long study programs. Everyone that's competent will come out of a four-year undergrad knowing the basics of their field -- what sets people apart is the research that they've done and the contacts that they've made.
If money is not an issue then sure, go for it. Personally, I was accepted into Carnegie Mellon and the financial aid package they gave me would've had me up to my ears in the typical undergrad debt for years. Instead I took a full ride to a less prestigious liberal arts school that still had a great faculty for what I wanted to do, and I augmented their shortcomings with summer REUs and semesters abroad. I can say without a doubt it was the better decision, and also that when it comes down to grad schools the research experience and the people I met mattered far more than the undergraduate institution. In industry from what I've heard the degree can matter more initially, but if you're going for the kind of job that wants ivy credentials, generally you're gonna want a masters at least.
This isn't answering your question though. If your heart is set on one of those schools, to improve your chances of admittance the best thing you could do is to get in contact with them. Having a letter of recommendation from a professor on their faculty is huge, especially if they have a grant and they're willing to kick in partial tuition or something. Unfortunately, unless you've done some killer research, any last-minute attempt to suck up to a professor will come off as what it is, a last-ditch effort to shmooze your way into the school.
The draw of Vanguard is that they built a compelling fantasy world first and then put a game around it. In EQ2 or WoW (and I'm guessing GW) every area is crafted to maximize gameplay, which leads to some very artificial feeling areas. Vanguard also has some of the deepest dungeons I've seen in any MMO liberally scattered across the countryside and a lot of things for you to find just exploring. If you don't care about this sort of thing then Vanguard doesn't really have much more to offer you than any of the other things unless you like its gameplay or its "challenge" (length of grind, which is more of an e-peen thing).
Uhh there's a difference between teaching your kids to admire people because of the color of their skin and giving them positive role models of the same skin color. Black is more than just a skin color in this country because there is a shared cultural experience that arose from their mistreatment for over 150 years. It is not racist to acknowledge this shared cultural experience that still exists to a lesser degree.
It is, on the other hand, another form of dickery to turn around one or two generations out from the civil rights act and call those who want to see more successful black people "no better than Klan members." I guess what I mean to ask is are you seriously that ignorant or are you just trolling for fun?
There are still a lot of people alive now that grew up coming off the heels of Brown v. Board of Ed and the Civil Rights Act. They did not choose a racial division, it was thrust upon them. To say that now, one generation later, it's racist to say that it's positive for their kids to see successful black people, that's just stupid. In an ideal and completely rational world I agree with you, but we have to deal with reality as it stands.
I dunno if I remember any MMO that launched with a free trial. People that buy the collector's edition do get ten buddy keys to distribute to friends for week-long trials or something like that (I think that's similar to the deal WoW launched with, IIRC). The only way I'd say SoE has "ruined" anything is if they were the motivation behind limiting to eight character slots across all servers. Otherwise their amount of control has been nearly imperceptible.
Bottom line is Vanguard had a lot of development time with experienced guys at the helm and wasn't ready in time to meet several of their launch goals, including this one, but they need to launch now since they're bleeding money. It's still a decent enough game that I'm willing to play it, but I'm recommending that my friends who aren't dead set on it hold off for at least a month to see what happens.
As I don't think any of the current-generation MMOs even support 50-person raids and there are games out there like EQ2 where the longest raid zones cap off around two or three hours before you've fully mastered it, I'd say your knowledge of raiding is a little outdated.
The question is if the work is becoming more skilled in some way or if the work is menial repetition. There's a difference between having better coordination, situational reflexes, and strategic sense... and performing menial tasks for your MMO Skinner box and getting a virtual treat.
Not really, this is an idea that's been around from lazy developers for a while in games but only really crystalized to its fullest in MMOs. What are you supposed to be "earning" by playing the game? The goal is to "earn" fun. There is no reason that you should have to earn your way to the fun by playing through a shitload of stuff that's not fun. Unfortunately it is much easier to just stamp another game in the mold created by all the previous MMOs than thinking up a new convention.
we'd still be debating whether or not to go into Afghanistan.
The problem with most of these scientists is they haven't figured out how to lie to the American public as effectively as the politicians. When politicians figure out a hundred different ways to take away our essential liberties with patriotic sounding names, emploring us to think about the children and defend our families from The Terrorists (TM), that's A-OK -- and please don't think I'm dividing this down party lines, there's politicians from all parties that are happy to cement their power base. When the scientific community suggests that we really ought to do something about the shit we're pumping into the atmosphere, suddenly everyone's flashing their Junior Climatologist merit badge and telling them why it ain't so.
News flash: real scientists don't deal in absolutes. They provide estimated probabilities and sensible suggestions. Becoming more eco-friendly is not going to turn us into a pinko communo-socialist hippy state any more than, say, allowing the president to expand the scope of government is going to turn us into a dictatorship. We're ostensibly on the same team here.