Disclaimer: I did CS at UIUC as an undergrad and can't in complete fairness speak to how the grad programs work. It's also been a number of years, so it's possible some things have changed.
Simply: From what you're saying you've seen, going through the computer science program at a school like UIUC is utterly unlike anything you've experienced.
It's a grueling academic endurance trial unlike anything you're probably capable of accurately imagining. I don't mean to be condescending in saying that; it's just the truth as I see it.
Imagine taking classes, as an undergrad, that are over half composed of grad students. Imagine, also, competing with some students who are very experienced or even published in the field, who are really only after a prestigous diploma. Imagine competing with them on a curve where only 40% of the class can get As or Bs -- and anything less puts you in danger of probation or explusion. Imagine sleeping less than 20 hours a week, every week, for a semester at a time, because there simply isn't time to get all of your requisite project work done any other way. Imagine exam prep sessions where your TA in all seriousness tells you, "Guys, I've just read the exam the professor wrote, and honestly -- I absoutely couldn't pass this thing if you gave me a week to work on it. Good luck."
These are a small sample of everyday experiences from my undergrad education. If you'd like, I can also tell horror stories, such as the time dozens of students in a one-hour class I took (not including myself, thankfully) were failed and denied graduation and thus already-accepted jobs. It's not like they were all blowing off the class in senior slump mode either -- most of them were genuinely trying their best to pass it.
(sneaking one thief past the uber baddies to escape the elemental nodes works, but it still feels like cheating)
You can't actually complete the ending of the game in the way that would require assembling the Orb of Golden Death that way though, can you?
All that said, yes, you absolutely do slam into the level cap way ass early in that game, and the more thorough you are about exploring everything rather than cruising on as fast as you can, the worse it gets. If I ever decide to replay ToEE I'm going to build a party completely out of item crafters so there's something to do with all that overflow XP.
It's possible that my memories of the infinity engine are colored by how backassward awful 2nd edition AD&D now seems to me in retrospect. I definitely did enjoy those games at the time.
To add insult to injury, the (five year old?) Infinity engine is superior in every way to the one used in ToEE, except for the number of officially supported screen resolutions (but that's another rant).
I don't know that I would go that far. It depends on what you want out of the game. I haven't been happy with a computer interpretation of the D&D rules since the Gold Box era. It's telling that when someone at Troika was interviewed before ToEE came out, they were asked why they chose to turn D&D into a turn-based game. (The answer being, D&D is a turn-based game.)
That said, while ToEE has a couple different endings and a few different ways you can go at various places and isn't quite as weak as you're suggesting story-wise, it's still pretty bad. I'm looking very forward to the next game made with ToEE's engine, in the hopes that it will have less glaring bugs and have a better story.
It's a damn shame that was only over the holidays. I didn't have the time to play the games or much spare money at the time to spend on a Gamecube for myself. I'd buy one now if I could still get the same deal.
I'm not sure what it would cost to just buy the Collector Disc on E-Bay or something, but I can't imagine it would be all that cheap. Additionally, I'm one of those neurotic people that strongly prefers to buy new whenever possible.
If you're losing to someone in a game and find them to be a one trick pony, doesn't that say more about your ability as a player than theirs? That is, if they can beat you with the same trick again and again, why should they tip their hand and show you any of their other tricks?
Generally, I find "cheap" to be gamerese for "I lost, but I don't want to admit that someone better beat me." Obviously, genuine game bugs are a (rare) exception.
Gaming is a strange and often tough subculture to be a girl in, there's no doubt about that.
One gaming group that a (female) friend of mine brought me into a few years ago ended up disintegrating because the gamemaster had this huge unrequited crush on her. It was uncomfortable for a long time and got pretty ugly before the end.
The atmosphere for women isn't great at gaming conventions either, though I like to think it's getting better. That's debateable, though. Male gamers who don't take women gamers seriously seem to be on the decline, but they tend to be replaced just as quickly by male gamers that follow them around, ogle them endlessly, and/or hit on them in generally creepy ways. (On the other hand, with men like that around, women gamers certainly never need to pay for their own snacks, drinks, or gaming supplies if they don't want to and are of the mind to flirt to get them.)
I wish that crowd would grow up a little so we could get a more normal male/female ratio in the hobby. At least girl gamers on average seem to be marginally better at showering and basic hygiene. Gaming shouldn't be a popularity contest, but no one wants to sit between two guys that smell like fermented ass.
I'd take that a step further, actually.
on
D&D Is 30
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· Score: 1
Its deadliness wasn't especially well-balanced either. Your strength score dramatically reduced damage. You would get even techie and pilot PCs with super-buff strength scores just because they didn't want to have to make a new character after every combat.
Meanwhile, the high strength Wookie or combat droid would be just standing in a firefight absorbing dozens of shots harmlessly, any one of which would kill or mortally wound a normal human. I know they're supposed to be tough, but there are limits.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a closet WEG fan and probably still consider TORG to be one of the best games ever made, but I can't honestly say d20 Star Wars isn't better than the d6 version in a lot of ways.
If there were, say, 3 browsers splitting the market and IE was still one of them you'd... still be doing that.
There's no possible way supporting multiple standards, including one difficult one properly, is easier than supporting just the difficult one. That's not to say we mightn't be all better off if, say, Mozilla was the standard with 98% market share, but there is no way in the foreseeable future you are not going to have to support IE and its quirks.
Well, unless you run a website that caters to the linux community. But as soon as you care about nontechnical people, it's IE fun hour. Which is vastly superior to the IE and Netscape fun hour(s) during all the versions of Netscape that weren't fit to wipe a cat's ass with. Just because Microsoft is evil doesn't mean all of the alternatives are good.:P
1) Drugs can be a physical addiction. Warez sure isn't.
2) You can make an assload of money dealing drugs. I'm suspecting the warez market is somewhat inferior in bringing in cash.
3) There's no legal alternative to obtain many drugs, so no matter what the price, there will always be some buyers. On the other hand, if you try to charge $50 for a pirated copy of a $40 game, no one is buying it. Logically, this means there is a lower limit on what the market will bear, and thus, what costs/risks one will deal with to bring the product to market.
You know, a lot of people here seem to be saying what you said, and to a degree, that's true.
However, if the government keeps sending these groups to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison, that's going to stop or at least trickle off at some point. We're not exactly talking about the Mafia here. If a continual crackdown occurs to the point where if you put pirated software out for distribution you have a high likelyhood of being passed around a cell block to earn cigarettes for someone much bigger than you are, it's going to seem like a much less attractive activity to most sane people.
Right now that's probably not happening, but if there was a real threat of law enforcement getting involved... shit, most geeks are afraid of girls. You don't think they're going to be even more afraid of lonely, burly men?
People cease to have a right to have as many children as they wish when others gain an obligation to help support them. Even if you did away with welfare, tax breaks for dependents, etc. the burden on society would
I mean, I suppose we could go back to an anarchistic system where I could just kill babies and make delicious jerky out of them if there were too many, but I don't think anyone wants that.
Wouldn't a backhanded pimp slap be more appropriate? Pimps stereotypically aren't about small arms so much as going upside your head. Possibly with a pimp cane. That or putting their shoe in your ass.
Quasi-related side note: Regardless of your opinion on his politics, the "Pimp goes to Washington" segment from Michael Moore's old "Awful Truth" show is incredibly funny. Track a copy of that down if at all possible. Basically, the premise is that since all congressmen will do favors for lobbyists, they're essentially prostitutes. They send this genuine pimp, K-Flex, to D.C. to start keeping them in line. Hilarity ensues!
At its heart, this is a Tragedy of the Commons problem. Outsourcing to get cheaper labor is always beneficial to any one company. It's when everyone does it that the center cannot hold and you get one big clusterfuck. By the nature of the problem, it's in the selfish best interest of each company to do it.
The solution really is legislation. This situation is no different than the environment in that respect. Sure, it's in the free market best interest of every production company to have no environmental standards if not required by the government, but if that's allowed, pretty soon nobody can breathe or drink water anymore.
My solution: Make it disadvantageous to outsource/trade with countries who have protectionist policies preventing U.S. workers from competing for their jobs. (This has the added side effect of making the common slashdot refrain that outsourced IT workers should look for jobs in India or China 75% less ludicrous.) Do the same for any country that won't match our labor health and environmental standards. If another country can compete even up with the U.S. in an industry without poisoning the air or forcing children to work in factories, more power to them.
That won't stop all outsourcing, nor should it. But it would be a step in the right direction.
Certainly, I plan to develop my own skills/career along those lines to increase my own resistance to outsourcing in the future.
That said, those aren't entry-level jobs... and America is going to have problems down the road if most of the entry-level tech jobs go away. Good technical project managers aren't born that way -- they need that experience in the entry-level trenches.
Third edition fixes pretty much all of that, along with about a million other rules complaints I could make about 2e.
I'm not going to claim 3e/3.5e is perfect, but it's pretty good. I'd eventually gotten tired of all of the fundamental flaws in 2e and given up on it, and it took friends of mine a while to coax me to give 3e a chance and play it. After that, I couldn't believe we had played 2e for so long -- there are just so many rules changes that not only make the rule much simpler and easier to understand, but also just plain better. I spent the first few times playing 3e saying "Why didn't we ever think of doing it that way?" about a million times.
Give it a try sometime, I don't think you'll be disappointed. Like anything else, I think it's easier to see its strengths and weaknesses in play rather than simply by reading the rulebooks.
I've read in stories about call centers / tech support outsourced to other countries that the employees are often coached on how to pass as Americans.
They work on their accents to appear more American, learn about American sports teams and pop culture in order to be able to make smalltalk about it and appear authentically American, etc.
I'm curious to know the effects this has locally and what the opinions of it are. Do any of the employees have problems with this deceptive practice? Do they feel that it's making some kind of statement about the (theoretical) superiority of American culture that they're forced to learn about it and utilize their knowledge of it instead of that of the culture they grew up with? Are there ever, for example, new baseball fans created by an offshore call center worker's exposure to the sport for his/her job, or is this almost always purely business for them? Does this happen in other industries? Do more traditional members of the local societies object to the poisoning of their children with this American culture?
I think there are a lot of interesting questions to be asked there. It's not involved in any way with the causes or primary effects of outsourcing, but from the perspective of social psychology alone the answers should be fascinating.
I think the parent poster had it right, and if anything you're arguing for their case, not against it.
In case you haven't noticed, much as Windows is the overwhelmingly dominant OS, IE is the overwhelmingly dominant browser. That's not to say that IE is without its flaws, and it's not to say that other browsers do have flaws (although they do). But you're kidding yourself if you don't think the main reason there's more malware for Windows/IE than anything else is because of their popularity. Ease of writing malware for them is a far distant second if that.
I was recently informed by a friend who works at a games store that WotC is raising the 'standard retail price' of the D&D minis to $13 or $14 (I can't remember which) for a box of 8 instead of $10. They're planning on selling out the current boxes with the $10 price printed on them as-is, but the next set of boxes distributed is supposed to have the increased price.
If you're looking to complete a collection or just score up more goblins for your D&D game, now might be the time.
Yup. I've actually done it myself a number of times (yes, over 20 liters in one day) with caffinated diet soda with no apparent adverse affects. Not to set some personal record, but just because I used to drink that damn much.
What can I say? I used to have the closest geek equivalent of a drinking problem.
I doubt this qualifies as the worst software development job ever in anyone's mind, but it's a story nonetheless...
I was working at a dot.com-focused consultancy during that period in which the "New Economy" was going down in flames but no one was really talking about it yet. After completing my development work on one project, I was informed that I, along with a few other developers that had survived the last round of layoffs, was being given an "alternate assignment."
Since our sales department couldn't sell work for shit, we were assigned to work to help them find leads. What that amounted to was the following: we were each given a section of a list of big companies in the area. First, we were to ascertain what kind of web presence they currently had, and propose some ways our company could help them improve it. Wait, that's not the funny part.
Second, we were to obtain direct contact information for their CEOs, CTOs, etc. by whatever means necessary. Now, occasionally you could dig something like this up via the company's literature, possibly with the assistance of a phone book, but usually it wasn't publically available. In this case, we were encouraged to call up the company and tell them whatever we had to for the receptionist or whoever to give us that information.
Picture, if you will, a small handful of mostly socially inept geeks. Picture them cold-calling companies and try to string together various tall tales, misdirections, and outright lies to scam poor employees of said companies out of the direct line phone number, e-mail address, and home address of several of the companies' top executives.
The sad thing about internet culture is that somehow BtB got associated with "worst RPG". From my research of it...it looks kind of interesting, but certainly not an easy game...which is probably what turns people off (people like their easy stuff).
Being both an "old school" console RPGer and someone who has played BtB, I'll comment...
It's a kind of game that was released after its time. It's a *lot* of level grind and there's not much more to it.
There was a time when you could release an RPG with a ton of fairly mindless random-encounter-bashing required to get enough money/experience to get through the next part of the game. That kind of game doesn't really sell in a RPG game anymore -- if anything, that kind of crowd has migrated to the MMORPG genre.
You could say that speaks of a lack of patience or immaturity among today's RPG players, but I don't think that's true. It's more that they've come to (rightly) expect more from a game. Nobody wants to play an RPG anymore that, if you could enter a cheat code to get infinite experience or cash, you could finish in an hour or two because there just isn't that much to it. They expect a game that's long in terms of story and things to do, not level grind.
Slashdot Mirror
Your mileage may vary. That doesn't agree with what even one person I knew as an undergrad was saying, though.
Actually, I don't think I know anyone studying CS there at the same time I was who spent less time on their education than I did.
My experience of N. American education
Disclaimer: I did CS at UIUC as an undergrad and can't in complete fairness speak to how the grad programs work. It's also been a number of years, so it's possible some things have changed.
Simply: From what you're saying you've seen, going through the computer science program at a school like UIUC is utterly unlike anything you've experienced.
It's a grueling academic endurance trial unlike anything you're probably capable of accurately imagining. I don't mean to be condescending in saying that; it's just the truth as I see it.
Imagine taking classes, as an undergrad, that are over half composed of grad students. Imagine, also, competing with some students who are very experienced or even published in the field, who are really only after a prestigous diploma. Imagine competing with them on a curve where only 40% of the class can get As or Bs -- and anything less puts you in danger of probation or explusion. Imagine sleeping less than 20 hours a week, every week, for a semester at a time, because there simply isn't time to get all of your requisite project work done any other way. Imagine exam prep sessions where your TA in all seriousness tells you, "Guys, I've just read the exam the professor wrote, and honestly -- I absoutely couldn't pass this thing if you gave me a week to work on it. Good luck."
These are a small sample of everyday experiences from my undergrad education. If you'd like, I can also tell horror stories, such as the time dozens of students in a one-hour class I took (not including myself, thankfully) were failed and denied graduation and thus already-accepted jobs. It's not like they were all blowing off the class in senior slump mode either -- most of them were genuinely trying their best to pass it.
(sneaking one thief past the uber baddies to escape the elemental nodes works, but it still feels like cheating)
You can't actually complete the ending of the game in the way that would require assembling the Orb of Golden Death that way though, can you?
All that said, yes, you absolutely do slam into the level cap way ass early in that game, and the more thorough you are about exploring everything rather than cruising on as fast as you can, the worse it gets. If I ever decide to replay ToEE I'm going to build a party completely out of item crafters so there's something to do with all that overflow XP.
It's possible that my memories of the infinity engine are colored by how backassward awful 2nd edition AD&D now seems to me in retrospect. I definitely did enjoy those games at the time.
To add insult to injury, the (five year old?) Infinity engine is superior in every way to the one used in ToEE, except for the number of officially supported screen resolutions (but that's another rant).
I don't know that I would go that far. It depends on what you want out of the game. I haven't been happy with a computer interpretation of the D&D rules since the Gold Box era. It's telling that when someone at Troika was interviewed before ToEE came out, they were asked why they chose to turn D&D into a turn-based game. (The answer being, D&D is a turn-based game.)
That said, while ToEE has a couple different endings and a few different ways you can go at various places and isn't quite as weak as you're suggesting story-wise, it's still pretty bad. I'm looking very forward to the next game made with ToEE's engine, in the hopes that it will have less glaring bugs and have a better story.
It's a damn shame that was only over the holidays. I didn't have the time to play the games or much spare money at the time to spend on a Gamecube for myself. I'd buy one now if I could still get the same deal.
I'm not sure what it would cost to just buy the Collector Disc on E-Bay or something, but I can't imagine it would be all that cheap. Additionally, I'm one of those neurotic people that strongly prefers to buy new whenever possible.
If you're losing to someone in a game and find them to be a one trick pony, doesn't that say more about your ability as a player than theirs? That is, if they can beat you with the same trick again and again, why should they tip their hand and show you any of their other tricks?
Generally, I find "cheap" to be gamerese for "I lost, but I don't want to admit that someone better beat me." Obviously, genuine game bugs are a (rare) exception.
Gaming is a strange and often tough subculture to be a girl in, there's no doubt about that.
One gaming group that a (female) friend of mine brought me into a few years ago ended up disintegrating because the gamemaster had this huge unrequited crush on her. It was uncomfortable for a long time and got pretty ugly before the end.
The atmosphere for women isn't great at gaming conventions either, though I like to think it's getting better. That's debateable, though. Male gamers who don't take women gamers seriously seem to be on the decline, but they tend to be replaced just as quickly by male gamers that follow them around, ogle them endlessly, and/or hit on them in generally creepy ways. (On the other hand, with men like that around, women gamers certainly never need to pay for their own snacks, drinks, or gaming supplies if they don't want to and are of the mind to flirt to get them.)
I wish that crowd would grow up a little so we could get a more normal male/female ratio in the hobby. At least girl gamers on average seem to be marginally better at showering and basic hygiene. Gaming shouldn't be a popularity contest, but no one wants to sit between two guys that smell like fermented ass.
Its deadliness wasn't especially well-balanced either. Your strength score dramatically reduced damage. You would get even techie and pilot PCs with super-buff strength scores just because they didn't want to have to make a new character after every combat.
Meanwhile, the high strength Wookie or combat droid would be just standing in a firefight absorbing dozens of shots harmlessly, any one of which would kill or mortally wound a normal human. I know they're supposed to be tough, but there are limits.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a closet WEG fan and probably still consider TORG to be one of the best games ever made, but I can't honestly say d20 Star Wars isn't better than the d6 version in a lot of ways.
If there were, say, 3 browsers splitting the market and IE was still one of them you'd... still be doing that.
:P
There's no possible way supporting multiple standards, including one difficult one properly, is easier than supporting just the difficult one. That's not to say we mightn't be all better off if, say, Mozilla was the standard with 98% market share, but there is no way in the foreseeable future you are not going to have to support IE and its quirks.
Well, unless you run a website that caters to the linux community. But as soon as you care about nontechnical people, it's IE fun hour. Which is vastly superior to the IE and Netscape fun hour(s) during all the versions of Netscape that weren't fit to wipe a cat's ass with. Just because Microsoft is evil doesn't mean all of the alternatives are good.
Difference there is:
1) Drugs can be a physical addiction. Warez sure isn't.
2) You can make an assload of money dealing drugs. I'm suspecting the warez market is somewhat inferior in bringing in cash.
3) There's no legal alternative to obtain many drugs, so no matter what the price, there will always be some buyers. On the other hand, if you try to charge $50 for a pirated copy of a $40 game, no one is buying it. Logically, this means there is a lower limit on what the market will bear, and thus, what costs/risks one will deal with to bring the product to market.
From the perspective of most web content developers, that is nice.
Skipping cross-platform compatability testing and corrections eliminates at least half the time for your typical HTML monkey.
You know, a lot of people here seem to be saying what you said, and to a degree, that's true.
However, if the government keeps sending these groups to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison, that's going to stop or at least trickle off at some point. We're not exactly talking about the Mafia here. If a continual crackdown occurs to the point where if you put pirated software out for distribution you have a high likelyhood of being passed around a cell block to earn cigarettes for someone much bigger than you are, it's going to seem like a much less attractive activity to most sane people.
Right now that's probably not happening, but if there was a real threat of law enforcement getting involved... shit, most geeks are afraid of girls. You don't think they're going to be even more afraid of lonely, burly men?
That's exactly right.
People cease to have a right to have as many children as they wish when others gain an obligation to help support them. Even if you did away with welfare, tax breaks for dependents, etc. the burden on society would
I mean, I suppose we could go back to an anarchistic system where I could just kill babies and make delicious jerky out of them if there were too many, but I don't think anyone wants that.
Wouldn't a backhanded pimp slap be more appropriate? Pimps stereotypically aren't about small arms so much as going upside your head. Possibly with a pimp cane. That or putting their shoe in your ass.
Quasi-related side note: Regardless of your opinion on his politics, the "Pimp goes to Washington" segment from Michael Moore's old "Awful Truth" show is incredibly funny. Track a copy of that down if at all possible. Basically, the premise is that since all congressmen will do favors for lobbyists, they're essentially prostitutes. They send this genuine pimp, K-Flex, to D.C. to start keeping them in line. Hilarity ensues!
At its heart, this is a Tragedy of the Commons problem. Outsourcing to get cheaper labor is always beneficial to any one company. It's when everyone does it that the center cannot hold and you get one big clusterfuck. By the nature of the problem, it's in the selfish best interest of each company to do it.
The solution really is legislation. This situation is no different than the environment in that respect. Sure, it's in the free market best interest of every production company to have no environmental standards if not required by the government, but if that's allowed, pretty soon nobody can breathe or drink water anymore.
My solution: Make it disadvantageous to outsource/trade with countries who have protectionist policies preventing U.S. workers from competing for their jobs. (This has the added side effect of making the common slashdot refrain that outsourced IT workers should look for jobs in India or China 75% less ludicrous.) Do the same for any country that won't match our labor health and environmental standards. If another country can compete even up with the U.S. in an industry without poisoning the air or forcing children to work in factories, more power to them.
That won't stop all outsourcing, nor should it. But it would be a step in the right direction.
Certainly, I plan to develop my own skills/career along those lines to increase my own resistance to outsourcing in the future.
That said, those aren't entry-level jobs... and America is going to have problems down the road if most of the entry-level tech jobs go away. Good technical project managers aren't born that way -- they need that experience in the entry-level trenches.
3rd edition D&D is much simpler to learn than AD&D.
Granted, you might still just prefer GURPS. Some people do and more power to them.
Third edition fixes pretty much all of that, along with about a million other rules complaints I could make about 2e.
I'm not going to claim 3e/3.5e is perfect, but it's pretty good. I'd eventually gotten tired of all of the fundamental flaws in 2e and given up on it, and it took friends of mine a while to coax me to give 3e a chance and play it. After that, I couldn't believe we had played 2e for so long -- there are just so many rules changes that not only make the rule much simpler and easier to understand, but also just plain better. I spent the first few times playing 3e saying "Why didn't we ever think of doing it that way?" about a million times.
Give it a try sometime, I don't think you'll be disappointed. Like anything else, I think it's easier to see its strengths and weaknesses in play rather than simply by reading the rulebooks.
Something I've been curious about...
I've read in stories about call centers / tech support outsourced to other countries that the employees are often coached on how to pass as Americans.
They work on their accents to appear more American, learn about American sports teams and pop culture in order to be able to make smalltalk about it and appear authentically American, etc.
I'm curious to know the effects this has locally and what the opinions of it are. Do any of the employees have problems with this deceptive practice? Do they feel that it's making some kind of statement about the (theoretical) superiority of American culture that they're forced to learn about it and utilize their knowledge of it instead of that of the culture they grew up with? Are there ever, for example, new baseball fans created by an offshore call center worker's exposure to the sport for his/her job, or is this almost always purely business for them? Does this happen in other industries? Do more traditional members of the local societies object to the poisoning of their children with this American culture?
I think there are a lot of interesting questions to be asked there. It's not involved in any way with the causes or primary effects of outsourcing, but from the perspective of social psychology alone the answers should be fascinating.
I think the parent poster had it right, and if anything you're arguing for their case, not against it.
In case you haven't noticed, much as Windows is the overwhelmingly dominant OS, IE is the overwhelmingly dominant browser. That's not to say that IE is without its flaws, and it's not to say that other browsers do have flaws (although they do). But you're kidding yourself if you don't think the main reason there's more malware for Windows/IE than anything else is because of their popularity. Ease of writing malware for them is a far distant second if that.
It turns out that some girls like watching them.
I was recently informed by a friend who works at a games store that WotC is raising the 'standard retail price' of the D&D minis to $13 or $14 (I can't remember which) for a box of 8 instead of $10. They're planning on selling out the current boxes with the $10 price printed on them as-is, but the next set of boxes distributed is supposed to have the increased price.
If you're looking to complete a collection or just score up more goblins for your D&D game, now might be the time.
Yup. I've actually done it myself a number of times (yes, over 20 liters in one day) with caffinated diet soda with no apparent adverse affects. Not to set some personal record, but just because I used to drink that damn much.
What can I say? I used to have the closest geek equivalent of a drinking problem.
I doubt this qualifies as the worst software development job ever in anyone's mind, but it's a story nonetheless...
I was working at a dot.com-focused consultancy during that period in which the "New Economy" was going down in flames but no one was really talking about it yet. After completing my development work on one project, I was informed that I, along with a few other developers that had survived the last round of layoffs, was being given an "alternate assignment."
Since our sales department couldn't sell work for shit, we were assigned to work to help them find leads. What that amounted to was the following: we were each given a section of a list of big companies in the area. First, we were to ascertain what kind of web presence they currently had, and propose some ways our company could help them improve it. Wait, that's not the funny part.
Second, we were to obtain direct contact information for their CEOs, CTOs, etc. by whatever means necessary. Now, occasionally you could dig something like this up via the company's literature, possibly with the assistance of a phone book, but usually it wasn't publically available. In this case, we were encouraged to call up the company and tell them whatever we had to for the receptionist or whoever to give us that information.
Picture, if you will, a small handful of mostly socially inept geeks. Picture them cold-calling companies and try to string together various tall tales, misdirections, and outright lies to scam poor employees of said companies out of the direct line phone number, e-mail address, and home address of several of the companies' top executives.
Hilarity ensues!
The sad thing about internet culture is that somehow BtB got associated with "worst RPG". From my research of it...it looks kind of interesting, but certainly not an easy game...which is probably what turns people off (people like their easy stuff).
Being both an "old school" console RPGer and someone who has played BtB, I'll comment...
It's a kind of game that was released after its time. It's a *lot* of level grind and there's not much more to it.
There was a time when you could release an RPG with a ton of fairly mindless random-encounter-bashing required to get enough money/experience to get through the next part of the game. That kind of game doesn't really sell in a RPG game anymore -- if anything, that kind of crowd has migrated to the MMORPG genre.
You could say that speaks of a lack of patience or immaturity among today's RPG players, but I don't think that's true. It's more that they've come to (rightly) expect more from a game. Nobody wants to play an RPG anymore that, if you could enter a cheat code to get infinite experience or cash, you could finish in an hour or two because there just isn't that much to it. They expect a game that's long in terms of story and things to do, not level grind.