All of those companies certainly are violating Allen's patents. The problem is, those patents (completely irrespective of how you feel about software patents in general) should never have been granted -- there's just far too much prior art for each of the four.
I think the implication was that the bag of holding would allow her to sneak ridiculous amounts of food out of the all you can eat buffet for later consumption.
Nonetheless, that's one of the most glorious unnecessary responses to a post I've ever seen. My hat is genuinely off to you, sir.
I can't say for 100% sure without examining their exact problem, but I would bet that your devs aren't very good and are trying to blame the tool rather than the craftsman. At least, I've never had problems solving similar problems with.NET. (Or Java or anything else, for that matter.)
Oh, that's right, Java is licensed under the GPL, so it's inherently better.
To be fair, a decent contingent on slashdot was always saying that Java wasn't open source enough, and in light of the recent Oracle-Google lawsuit, it turns out they were right.
In the context of this particular story, I'm not sure how.NET doesn't look better than Java -- you've got one's parent company saying they won't sue you (even if that's not a great guarantee) and one that's actually suing you right now.
Even for the poor and "uneducated" Chinese, learning Chinese (even Traditional version of it) is not harder nor more time consuming than learning Math.
Even if I accept that as true, while your kids are learning sinographs and math, mine will be learning double the math.
The source article doesn't mention his party, which is odd, but that's a perfectly non-conspiracy-theory explanation for why it's not in the summary if you'd like one.
The question is, if push comes to shove and it becomes a choice between something like a Pinyin and just speaking English, which would win? And which suits the Chinese cultural identity better?
China's doing fine (great, really) now, but it's in a situation in which an awful lot of American schools suck (and I'll be optimistic and say that won't last forever), uptake of English in parts of the rest of the world is in progress but not yet complete, and most jobs in China are for relatively unskilled labor.
At some point, I think, for more of China's population to be competitive in a global market in fields like math and science, they need to spend more of their childhood and brainspace learning those things, and less memorizing sinographs.
So, I present Apple, which is the other golden boy in the eyes of tech investors in this down market. Though it has decades more behind it, there's only about 37 transactions, in comparison with the 77 on the Google list.
To be a little fair, you wouldn't expect Apple to have bought much during the Jobless years in which it was circling the drain.
But yeah, Google's still certainly racked up more acquisitions in less time.
There's nothing wrong with buying things that make sense, but I think we would question the long-term future of a tech company that could ONLY buy things.
Assuming the wikipedia link upthread is accurate, most of the cool things I thought Google actually invented, they bought.
Nope. I'm just saying that even with good tools, you can still do stupid things. In your post you seemed to be saying that the tools were so could you couldn't do stupid things.
I agree with you that Dark Knight is a much better movie than Avatar, and generally we should try to encourage more of the former. (And understand, I am a big Nolan fan and I am not a big Cameron fan.)
I'd still argue that if you saw trailers/previews for both, you'd pretty well know what you were getting into with Avatar. That is to say, you'd be expecting an effects-heavy movie with a relatively cliched story, and that's exactly what you'd get.
With respect to this specific point:
It contains main characters -- the Na'vi -- who choose spectacularly ill-advised actions -- running their army of primitive warriors directly into a highly-advanced human force aided by machines. It also contains a very unlikely outcome of such a poor decision: The Na'vi win.
It's impossible to say for sure without a sequel, but seeing the movie, I always sort of got the impression that (unlike, say, the Ewoks vs. Stormtroopers), the Na'vi were actually the more technologically advanced race, or were at least the product of a more technologically advanced race. At least, I assumed the ubiquitous bio-USB ports on every damn animal were a result of someone's bioengineering and not evolution.
If you don't come to that conclusion I'd agree the ending is kind of stupid.
I use an IDE (Eclipse), and the builds I do always compile, so, like, thanks for the access! What I think you mean is that the day when developers can guarantee the expected results...
He really might not. I've certainly worked in Java shops using Eclipse where developers routinely broke builds. Usually it's the case that the code builds on their machine, but they either neglect to check in a file that would be necessary for their new code to build, or they neglect to rebuild against the latest source in source control before checking in.
Sometimes, of course, people just plain check in code that even on a single file level simply does not compile.
I think this is a pretty good compromise, actually -- some senior subset of developers allowed some kind of access.
That way you have somebody who can diagnose and fix the big unexpected problems (and it's rare to see the level of testing rigor necessary to catch them all) quick without worrying that random new dev X is going to cock up something he doesn't understand.
You're correct, the bonuses don't stack. If you cast magic vestment (+5) on +1 plate mail you end up with (temporarily) +5 plate mail, not +6 plate mail.
But you don't actually need them to:
1) Being able to skip having pluses on weapons/armor frees you up to dedicate resources elsewhere. For example, you're crafting wonderous items instead of magic arms and armor. Instead of being excited that you found +2 full plate you're trying to sell or barter it for just about anything else.
2) Being able to skip having pluses on weapons/armor frees you up to throw other enchantments on them, or makes having those enchantments better. For example, take a +1 flaming (+1 value enchantment) holy (+2 value enchantment) bane vs. undead (+1 value enchantment -- I could be off on all of these, I don't have the book in front of me, but I think the math/values are correct.) Value-wise, that's a +5 sword, in terms of what it would cost to craft, how it stacks up as part of the value of magic treasure you 'should' have according to the DMG (and I think you could make an excellent argument that the DMG wants you to have too much treasure, but that's how the game is designed/balanced), etc. Throw greater magic weapon (+5) on that sword and now it's a +5 flaming holy bane sword -- effectively a +9 weapon by value.
Obviously, you also can stack in non-plus-ish weapon enhancement spells like a Spikes, too. I don't know why anyone thought that spell was a good idea. Along similar lines, align weapon allows the cleric at least the option of skipping something like a holy enchantment on a weapon for the purposes of bypassing good DR on demons etc., although he still probably should want it since it's good in other ways and is short enough that there's value in not having to waste a round casting it.
Armor's kind of the same thing; instead of prizing +5 armor you more want something like +1 heavy fortification.
I agree with you, incidentally, on the way the game is meant to be played -- but once you see it played by the rules by alpha nerds who have figured out the best way to crank everything out, it's really hard (at least, for myself and the people I played with) to back to pretending that fighter, for example, is anywhere near as powerful as a full caster, even within its niche. Something else I should point out about convention play is that typically you're playing with at least some different people for each adventure, so if you build a cleric with the intention of playing a support caster to a serious fighter, you're running a real risk of not having that kind of fighter at your table -- thus the "alpha" players have an extra incentive to figure out a way to contribute a lot to a table without counting on any specific party composition. In a normal game you wouldn't have that.
Probably, these kinds of flaws exist in almost every gaming system, and if you play the hell out of them for most of a decade they become apparent. My friends and I at least as much fun with 3/3.5E D&D than any other edition, but at the same time, once you see where the fault lines are it gets harder and harder to have fun with. (We had almost the same exact fun and then problem with 2E, a decade or so before.)
I don't think 4E is exactly more complicated than 1E. In many ways it's a throwback. It's more that the complexity is in different areas.
For example:
1E fighter is a lot easier to play than 4E fighter, but 4E wizard is a lot simpler to play than 1E magic user.
Look at the 1E hit charts (weapon type vs. AC) and tell me that mechanic isn't ridiculously complicated compared to every other edition. "Okay, I swing at the orc with my whip, and with this roll I can hit AC 10, 8, and 7 but not AC 9 or 6 or lower." (One of my most frequent DMs of the 2E era, incidentally, loved those f'ing charts and insisted on using them for 2E as well.) There's seriously nothing in the whole of 4E that I think is as hard to follow as that.
Another favorite of mine from 1E is the class-based chart that you roll on each week to see if your guy comes down with a cold.
I'm not arguing that you should love 4E (I don't), but I think you have to gloss over some of the rough spots of 1E to make the argument you're making.
I did however enjoy the movie and i guess that's the point. I don't love the movie like everyone else seemed to, but I don't hate it either.
Yeah I'm kind of surprised at how many people here are ragging on it so hard.
The movie isn't the second coming of Citizen Kane, but if you've seen the trailer or commercials for it, you pretty much know what you're getting into if you go see it. If you like that kind of movie, it's at least watchable in the theatre. I put people who went to see Avatar and now have to talk about how it was a giant stinking pile in about the same category as my friend who keeps dating strippers and then complains that his girlfriends are always crazy, materialistic, and cheat on him.
Maybe the problem is that kids these days are spoiled and didn't live through the relative drought of good sci-fi movies that we did. (And don't even get me started on fantasy.) Back in the day we had to walk through snow and razor blades uphill both ways to see even terrible sci-fi movies because that might be all you got in a given year. Also, somebody should get off my lawn.
Okay, you were obviously playing a completely different game. You should have probably dropped your house rules.
Nope. I'm talking about core rule play. Most (but not all) of my 3/3.5E play was WotC-sanctioned convention / organized play -- Living Greyhawk, stuff like that. Because of the WotC involvement, these campaigns are typically constrained very closely to the rules as written -- I've never seen a home game that did not change more of the rules than LG did. Rule changes were limited to things like "This whole book is in play, except for this one feat or one spell we decided is too good.", because WotC likes to sell books.
The main thing that was different is that a LG character will typically have less GP worth of magic items than the guidelines in the DMG.
I'll try to break it all down for you.
Metamagic feats only double the duration of spells, not make them last all day long.
Sure. Unless we're talking about the 3.0 persistent spell feat which does exactly that, but I wasn't.
There are a number of very useful spells that last an hour per level, for example magic vestment and greater magic weapon. Extend spell (feat and paying the level kick, or metamagic rod) can bump that to 2 hours per level. There are 24 hours in a day. Therefore, if your effective caster level is at least 12, an hour per level spell lasts all day long.
There's a number of ways to juice your caster level; I mentioned a few upthread. It's very reasonable for an 8th or 9th level cleric to be able to make those full day spells if they really want to and it's certainly possible lower than that. Honestly, it usually isn't that important -- if a spell lasts even half the day, barring the occasional night watch ambush encounter it's going to last through all of the adventuring you're going to do 'on purpose' that day, and that's pretty good. (Of course, in the case of the two example spells, juicing your caster level up also juices the bonuses you get from those spells.)
Divine Power and Righteous Might last one round per level. Unextended, this might last two fights. Extended, four fights... in both cases, if you're very lucky and the doors between them aren't locked, and you just keep running without searching, looting, or trap checking (just one trap can stymie the overzealous cleric). These will make you a mediocre fighter. Now, you can do this, and cast all the other buffs on yourself, or you can just cast the other buffs on the fighter as he fights--which is a good idea, because they will make him a better fighter than you'll ever be.
The problems with your calculus are:
1) There are too many great buff spells the cleric can only cast on themselves -- the two you mentioned, divine favor, and lots more. Some of these are only rounds/level and should be quickened (quickened divine power's out at level 7 without a level kick via divine metamagic, btw.) and would need to be cast multiple times for multiple fights. Others last a long time.
2) The cleric is short fighter feats, sure. But he matches the fighter's base attack, he almost certainly has more +hit and +damage than the fighter, and his defense (not just AC, but that's the easiest case to make) is much stronger than a fighter's. A cleric is hanging around AC 40 without casting any rounds-duration spells in the midlevels -- a fighter's not really going to manage that unless they have a high int for some reason and want to sacrifice base attack for expertise.
And start with Protection vs. Evil, which makes him immune to mind affecting spells, and renders his poor Will save irrelevant.
There's an awful lot of very crippling will saves that don't have the mind-affecting descriptor. For example, glitterdust or slow.
If you spend five or six rounds buffing yourself (or ten, as you suggest--what, you're buffing all your stats? Why?), most fights will be almost over by that point--and no, when I DM, I don't give players advanc
How about not disgruntling the employee in the first place?
It's a good policy and should be encouraged, because it does solve most problems. However, believing that will solve all your problems rests on the assumption that your employees are basically rational and won't do anything crazy just because. This won't always be true.
Relatively current events counterexample A: Terry Childs.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah.
All of those companies certainly are violating Allen's patents. The problem is, those patents (completely irrespective of how you feel about software patents in general) should never have been granted -- there's just far too much prior art for each of the four.
I think the implication was that the bag of holding would allow her to sneak ridiculous amounts of food out of the all you can eat buffet for later consumption.
Nonetheless, that's one of the most glorious unnecessary responses to a post I've ever seen. My hat is genuinely off to you, sir.
I can't say for 100% sure without examining their exact problem, but I would bet that your devs aren't very good and are trying to blame the tool rather than the craftsman. At least, I've never had problems solving similar problems with .NET. (Or Java or anything else, for that matter.)
Is it correct that C# is comparable to "java, the language" and .Net is comparable to "Java" (or should that be "the Java platform"? or ...?)
You could haggle over details and come up with reasons why that's not true, but for most practical purposes, but I'd say it's about right.
Define "safe".
In this case, "You won't be sued right now, and because of estoppel, we may have trouble suing you later."
Which isn't a very safe value of safe, but it beats the deal you'd get from Oracle.
Probably the article is written for a local audience who knows who he is. Who knows?
Source/citation/example? This is the first I've heard of this and I don't do a small amount of .NET work.
Oh, that's right, Java is licensed under the GPL, so it's inherently better.
To be fair, a decent contingent on slashdot was always saying that Java wasn't open source enough, and in light of the recent Oracle-Google lawsuit, it turns out they were right.
In the context of this particular story, I'm not sure how .NET doesn't look better than Java -- you've got one's parent company saying they won't sue you (even if that's not a great guarantee) and one that's actually suing you right now.
even microsoft doesn't like .net and is moving away from it. why would anyone use something that is about to be deprecated?
Considering a major release of the .NET framework happened in April, I'm going to go ahead and call you misinformed or a huge troll.
.Net doesn't work on Windows operating systems.
What are you basing that on?
Even for the poor and "uneducated" Chinese, learning Chinese (even Traditional version of it) is not harder nor more time consuming than learning Math.
Even if I accept that as true, while your kids are learning sinographs and math, mine will be learning double the math.
The source article doesn't mention his party, which is odd, but that's a perfectly non-conspiracy-theory explanation for why it's not in the summary if you'd like one.
The question is, if push comes to shove and it becomes a choice between something like a Pinyin and just speaking English, which would win? And which suits the Chinese cultural identity better?
China's doing fine (great, really) now, but it's in a situation in which an awful lot of American schools suck (and I'll be optimistic and say that won't last forever), uptake of English in parts of the rest of the world is in progress but not yet complete, and most jobs in China are for relatively unskilled labor.
At some point, I think, for more of China's population to be competitive in a global market in fields like math and science, they need to spend more of their childhood and brainspace learning those things, and less memorizing sinographs.
So, I present Apple, which is the other golden boy in the eyes of tech investors in this down market. Though it has decades more behind it, there's only about 37 transactions, in comparison with the 77 on the Google list.
To be a little fair, you wouldn't expect Apple to have bought much during the Jobless years in which it was circling the drain.
But yeah, Google's still certainly racked up more acquisitions in less time.
There's nothing wrong with buying things that make sense, but I think we would question the long-term future of a tech company that could ONLY buy things.
Assuming the wikipedia link upthread is accurate, most of the cool things I thought Google actually invented, they bought.
The way things have been going, it seems like it'd be more like: until Google buys a better codec.
They've made some cool stuff but I'm fearful that they're turning into a Yahoo! that can largely comes up with cool products by buying them.
Really? Sounds like a carpenter blaming his tools
Nope. I'm just saying that even with good tools, you can still do stupid things. In your post you seemed to be saying that the tools were so could you couldn't do stupid things.
I agree with you that Dark Knight is a much better movie than Avatar, and generally we should try to encourage more of the former. (And understand, I am a big Nolan fan and I am not a big Cameron fan.)
I'd still argue that if you saw trailers/previews for both, you'd pretty well know what you were getting into with Avatar. That is to say, you'd be expecting an effects-heavy movie with a relatively cliched story, and that's exactly what you'd get.
With respect to this specific point:
It contains main characters -- the Na'vi -- who choose spectacularly ill-advised actions -- running their army of primitive warriors directly into a highly-advanced human force aided by machines. It also contains a very unlikely outcome of such a poor decision: The Na'vi win.
It's impossible to say for sure without a sequel, but seeing the movie, I always sort of got the impression that (unlike, say, the Ewoks vs. Stormtroopers), the Na'vi were actually the more technologically advanced race, or were at least the product of a more technologically advanced race. At least, I assumed the ubiquitous bio-USB ports on every damn animal were a result of someone's bioengineering and not evolution.
If you don't come to that conclusion I'd agree the ending is kind of stupid.
I use an IDE (Eclipse), and the builds I do always compile, so, like, thanks for the access! What I think you mean is that the day when developers can guarantee the expected results...
He really might not. I've certainly worked in Java shops using Eclipse where developers routinely broke builds. Usually it's the case that the code builds on their machine, but they either neglect to check in a file that would be necessary for their new code to build, or they neglect to rebuild against the latest source in source control before checking in.
Sometimes, of course, people just plain check in code that even on a single file level simply does not compile.
I think this is a pretty good compromise, actually -- some senior subset of developers allowed some kind of access.
That way you have somebody who can diagnose and fix the big unexpected problems (and it's rare to see the level of testing rigor necessary to catch them all) quick without worrying that random new dev X is going to cock up something he doesn't understand.
You're correct, the bonuses don't stack. If you cast magic vestment (+5) on +1 plate mail you end up with (temporarily) +5 plate mail, not +6 plate mail.
But you don't actually need them to:
1) Being able to skip having pluses on weapons/armor frees you up to dedicate resources elsewhere. For example, you're crafting wonderous items instead of magic arms and armor. Instead of being excited that you found +2 full plate you're trying to sell or barter it for just about anything else.
2) Being able to skip having pluses on weapons/armor frees you up to throw other enchantments on them, or makes having those enchantments better. For example, take a +1 flaming (+1 value enchantment) holy (+2 value enchantment) bane vs. undead (+1 value enchantment -- I could be off on all of these, I don't have the book in front of me, but I think the math/values are correct.) Value-wise, that's a +5 sword, in terms of what it would cost to craft, how it stacks up as part of the value of magic treasure you 'should' have according to the DMG (and I think you could make an excellent argument that the DMG wants you to have too much treasure, but that's how the game is designed/balanced), etc. Throw greater magic weapon (+5) on that sword and now it's a +5 flaming holy bane sword -- effectively a +9 weapon by value.
Obviously, you also can stack in non-plus-ish weapon enhancement spells like a Spikes, too. I don't know why anyone thought that spell was a good idea. Along similar lines, align weapon allows the cleric at least the option of skipping something like a holy enchantment on a weapon for the purposes of bypassing good DR on demons etc., although he still probably should want it since it's good in other ways and is short enough that there's value in not having to waste a round casting it.
Armor's kind of the same thing; instead of prizing +5 armor you more want something like +1 heavy fortification.
I agree with you, incidentally, on the way the game is meant to be played -- but once you see it played by the rules by alpha nerds who have figured out the best way to crank everything out, it's really hard (at least, for myself and the people I played with) to back to pretending that fighter, for example, is anywhere near as powerful as a full caster, even within its niche. Something else I should point out about convention play is that typically you're playing with at least some different people for each adventure, so if you build a cleric with the intention of playing a support caster to a serious fighter, you're running a real risk of not having that kind of fighter at your table -- thus the "alpha" players have an extra incentive to figure out a way to contribute a lot to a table without counting on any specific party composition. In a normal game you wouldn't have that.
Probably, these kinds of flaws exist in almost every gaming system, and if you play the hell out of them for most of a decade they become apparent. My friends and I at least as much fun with 3/3.5E D&D than any other edition, but at the same time, once you see where the fault lines are it gets harder and harder to have fun with. (We had almost the same exact fun and then problem with 2E, a decade or so before.)
I don't think 4E is exactly more complicated than 1E. In many ways it's a throwback. It's more that the complexity is in different areas.
For example:
1E fighter is a lot easier to play than 4E fighter, but 4E wizard is a lot simpler to play than 1E magic user.
Look at the 1E hit charts (weapon type vs. AC) and tell me that mechanic isn't ridiculously complicated compared to every other edition. "Okay, I swing at the orc with my whip, and with this roll I can hit AC 10, 8, and 7 but not AC 9 or 6 or lower." (One of my most frequent DMs of the 2E era, incidentally, loved those f'ing charts and insisted on using them for 2E as well.) There's seriously nothing in the whole of 4E that I think is as hard to follow as that.
Another favorite of mine from 1E is the class-based chart that you roll on each week to see if your guy comes down with a cold.
I'm not arguing that you should love 4E (I don't), but I think you have to gloss over some of the rough spots of 1E to make the argument you're making.
I did however enjoy the movie and i guess that's the point. I don't love the movie like everyone else seemed to, but I don't hate it either.
Yeah I'm kind of surprised at how many people here are ragging on it so hard.
The movie isn't the second coming of Citizen Kane, but if you've seen the trailer or commercials for it, you pretty much know what you're getting into if you go see it. If you like that kind of movie, it's at least watchable in the theatre. I put people who went to see Avatar and now have to talk about how it was a giant stinking pile in about the same category as my friend who keeps dating strippers and then complains that his girlfriends are always crazy, materialistic, and cheat on him.
Maybe the problem is that kids these days are spoiled and didn't live through the relative drought of good sci-fi movies that we did. (And don't even get me started on fantasy.) Back in the day we had to walk through snow and razor blades uphill both ways to see even terrible sci-fi movies because that might be all you got in a given year. Also, somebody should get off my lawn.
Okay, you were obviously playing a completely different game. You should have probably dropped your house rules.
Nope. I'm talking about core rule play. Most (but not all) of my 3/3.5E play was WotC-sanctioned convention / organized play -- Living Greyhawk, stuff like that. Because of the WotC involvement, these campaigns are typically constrained very closely to the rules as written -- I've never seen a home game that did not change more of the rules than LG did. Rule changes were limited to things like "This whole book is in play, except for this one feat or one spell we decided is too good.", because WotC likes to sell books.
The main thing that was different is that a LG character will typically have less GP worth of magic items than the guidelines in the DMG.
I'll try to break it all down for you.
Metamagic feats only double the duration of spells, not make them last all day long.
Sure. Unless we're talking about the 3.0 persistent spell feat which does exactly that, but I wasn't.
There are a number of very useful spells that last an hour per level, for example magic vestment and greater magic weapon. Extend spell (feat and paying the level kick, or metamagic rod) can bump that to 2 hours per level. There are 24 hours in a day. Therefore, if your effective caster level is at least 12, an hour per level spell lasts all day long.
There's a number of ways to juice your caster level; I mentioned a few upthread. It's very reasonable for an 8th or 9th level cleric to be able to make those full day spells if they really want to and it's certainly possible lower than that. Honestly, it usually isn't that important -- if a spell lasts even half the day, barring the occasional night watch ambush encounter it's going to last through all of the adventuring you're going to do 'on purpose' that day, and that's pretty good. (Of course, in the case of the two example spells, juicing your caster level up also juices the bonuses you get from those spells.)
Divine Power and Righteous Might last one round per level. Unextended, this might last two fights. Extended, four fights... in both cases, if you're very lucky and the doors between them aren't locked, and you just keep running without searching, looting, or trap checking (just one trap can stymie the overzealous cleric). These will make you a mediocre fighter. Now, you can do this, and cast all the other buffs on yourself, or you can just cast the other buffs on the fighter as he fights--which is a good idea, because they will make him a better fighter than you'll ever be.
The problems with your calculus are:
1) There are too many great buff spells the cleric can only cast on themselves -- the two you mentioned, divine favor, and lots more. Some of these are only rounds/level and should be quickened (quickened divine power's out at level 7 without a level kick via divine metamagic, btw.) and would need to be cast multiple times for multiple fights. Others last a long time.
2) The cleric is short fighter feats, sure. But he matches the fighter's base attack, he almost certainly has more +hit and +damage than the fighter, and his defense (not just AC, but that's the easiest case to make) is much stronger than a fighter's. A cleric is hanging around AC 40 without casting any rounds-duration spells in the midlevels -- a fighter's not really going to manage that unless they have a high int for some reason and want to sacrifice base attack for expertise.
And start with Protection vs. Evil, which makes him immune to mind affecting spells, and renders his poor Will save irrelevant.
There's an awful lot of very crippling will saves that don't have the mind-affecting descriptor. For example, glitterdust or slow.
If you spend five or six rounds buffing yourself (or ten, as you suggest--what, you're buffing all your stats? Why?), most fights will be almost over by that point--and no, when I DM, I don't give players advanc
How about not disgruntling the employee in the first place?
It's a good policy and should be encouraged, because it does solve most problems. However, believing that will solve all your problems rests on the assumption that your employees are basically rational and won't do anything crazy just because. This won't always be true.
Relatively current events counterexample A: Terry Childs.