Gee, who would have thought you can't impart a computer science degree's worth of knowledge in a 15 minute board game? The value of something doesn't have to be "all or nothing" to be worthwhile.
This will probably get me modded as flamebait, but whatever.
Everytime there's an article about P2P software being used for illegal distribution of music and other media, the typical response "We use P2P for linux distros and open source code and warcraft patches and blah blah blah. We use it for legal things, therefore it's not evil." However, when it comes down to it, is anyone actually deluded enough to believe that P2P isn't being used for illegal uses. I mean, we all have gigabytes of MP3s that we got from "somewhere", and while I'm sure you got all of yours legally, how about your friends, your co-workers, your classmates and other acquaintences. Why is it that we always try to justify P2P without coming up with any solution to the rampant pirating that we all know is happening? "Music sucks and is expensive" and "Movies suck and are expsive" are not excuses to be pirating it.
The SSN's have to be given to your school if you want to be eligable for loans. However, it seems like the file that was left open related to just academic information like GPA and credit hours and such. What is probably the case is that the university uses student's SSNs as their university ID number, or at least they did at the time. It's fairly common practice at colleges, and only recently have legislative steps been taken to end this practice of flaunting your SSN on all your university documents. In my freshman year of college (2000-01), my student ID was my SSN and my ID card had my SSN printed on it, but during that year New York passed some legislation making it so that universities had to assign independent student ID numbers to students that were not related to SSNs, so for the 01-02 year everbody was given a new ID number and card. So back to this case, the reason the SSNs were leaked was probably that all the student's had their ID number next to their name in the file which was their SSN, and it wasn't necessarily a leak of financial information.
I would gladly accept people not comminucating using the neuances of proper grammer iPh +h3y \/\/0u1d ju$+ $+0P +@1/iNg 1i/3 +hi$.
Re:Old Concept Revisited with more schmaltz
on
Review: Nintendogs
·
· Score: 1
You'd think it would be really easy to make Nintencats. Just change the puppy artwork to kitten artwork. Then change the code so that every input has a 90%/10% chance of being ignored or the cat entering hissy-clawing-furball of doom mode.
Issue 5 for City of Heroes has not gone over well with most of the players. Many people are very critical of the massive nerfing that took place with this issue across all of the archtypes (better known as classes). As well, COH is still lacking in any kind of end game content. Once you get the level 50, the only thing there is to do from there is to roll up a new character and start over. I believe this is the effect of what is probably COH's most unique qualities, no economy. There is no loot huntning in the game, which I think makes the game more enjoyable with no griefing or spawn camping or doing the same quest over and over again because the ending boss has a 2% change of dropping the legendary boots of butt kicking. Your only job is to go out there and bring villians to justice which is great. However, it doesn't provide your character with many incentives to get to level 50 since gameplay just hits a brick wall after that since there's no benefit to being lvl 50 in terms of making your character better. Most of the previous updates have added mainly low and mid level content, but many players are salivating for something like a lvl 50 only zone chock full of high end content, rather than your only option being to become a noob again and go do Lt. Wincott's Hollows missions for the 5th time.
I mean, what's Mario going to do on his 21st birthday? Going to bars is going to be pretty lame compared to his last 20 years of doing shrooms and other "magical plants" that give him various powers.
I think he's refering to the Locomotive Time Machine that Doc Brown made which he used to visit Marty in the last scene of part 3. Marty took the Delorian back to 1985 leaving Doc with nothing to construct another time machine out of, so he must have made a new flux capacitor that could be powered by steam. Or, the alternative is that he used the "Bill & Ted" system of temporal mechanics, where say to yourself that if you had the components to build a time machine, after you built the time machine you'd go the future, buy said components, and come back in time to leave the components for your past self to build the machine.
BS = Bull Shit
MS = More Shit
PhD = Piled Higher and Deeper
But seriously, a PhD is no longer a ticket for the gravy train to tenure town. Tenure track faculty positions are incredibly hard to get, and if you do get one, you still have to bust your ass for a number of years doing research, writing grant proposals, etc. I took a course with a faculty member who was about a year out from getting evalulated for tenure. We had various homework assignments, and they were due at midnight on the due date. I figured that meant we had to slip our assignments under his door before he came in the next morning, but more often then not, he would be in his office at midnight working. So it does take a lot to get tenure, and also consider that a university position probably isn't going to pay as much as a job in industry.
Microsoft is going to make a hack proof product, I totally believe that. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go pick up my new Hummer. The salesman told me they get 40 miles to the gallon now.
Not really a technological answer to what you were looking for, but I think it's worth mentioning. You say that you spend most of your time grading. I don't know how many students you teach, but I'm wondering if it's just a matter of you giving too much busywork to your students that you in turn have to grade. In my high school calculus class, my teacher assigned homework but he never graded it. At the beginning of every class, he make a quick pass around to see who had done it, and mark you off if you hadn't. He would then pass out an answer key for the assignment and go over any questions people had. His policy on homework was that it helps some people, and is just a pain in the butt for others. So the deal was that if your semester average was over 90%, there was no penealty for not doing homework. If your average was between 80 and 90, then you lost 0.5% for each homework not done, and so forth. As such, the only thing he graded for our class were the exams he gave every 3-4 weeks. So I'm just saying that perhaps the answer isn't to find faster ways to grade, but eliminating some of the pointless grunt work for you and for your students.
Probably because those aspects of male characters haven't been fleshed out (pardon my pun). When designing a female character, all of her dimensions have to be thought out ahead of time: chest, cup size, waist, hips, legs, and all of those drool-worthy dimensions, since most often her wardrobe is going to be designed to show off those dimensions. For male characters, a fair number of them are already bare chested, so there's nothing particularly new there. As for their endowment, that aspect of their anatomy is typically hidden. I'd wager the only thought given to the size of of it is by a graphics artist who uses his own judgement when he perhaps draws a characteristic bulge in his crotch. So when it comes time to do a playgirl spread, who decides how well endowed Gordon Freeman is? Is he jewish maybe? Is Duke Nukem taking steriods? Basically, to me it seems like doing a male spread is just adding penises for the sake of wanting to see digital wang, whereas doing a female spread is just showing the additional 10% of what they've already shown 90% of to us.
When it comes to regular everyday typing, I'm dead on. I can do my letters, period, comma, spacebar and numbers with almost no errors (well, no errors which can't be attributed to my own lack of spelling ability). However, what will screw me up most is when I have to use those characters I rarely ever use like curley brackets, semicolon, apostraphe, and so on (maybe if I were a programmer I'd know those cold, but I'm not). What's even worse is when I drop something on my keyboard which ends up hitting num lock or scroll lock. Even with those I end up taking a few second trying to find where that key is. I have a feeling that if I tried using this keyboard, the improvement in my base typing would be balanced by the slowing down I experience with all the semi-used characters and keys.
I don't think that gameplay is any easier today, but what makes modern games "easier" is how you can save in the middle of the game. Back in the olden days, if you wanted to beat a game, you had to do it in one sitting. You only had a limited number of lives, and an equally limited number of continues. Use them all up and it's back to level one for you. The Ninja Gaiden games were probably the biggest offender in this catagory. They were freaking hard, and relatively long. Beating them felt like an epic victory because you were mentally and physically exhausted from playing them. That combined with frustration of the several times before that when you made it all the way to the ending boss but fell just short of beating him. Now, I'm not saying that it's plausable for today's 50 hour games to not employ a save feature, but it sometimes just doesn't feel the same when you're allowed to go one level at a time with as many chances as you want until you accomplish the level, and then you can move on. With the older games, you had to do everything perfectly in a row, mess up one link in the chain and you were done. Beating those games truly felt like victory.
If you don't like something enough to pay the price for it, that's fine, but that doesn't make them overpriced. People have no problem paying $20 for a 90 minute movie DVD. Now consider that a season of TNG has 26 episodes (except season 2). 26 episodes at 40 minutes each makes 1040 minutes of content. When you calculate the price per minute, 90 minutes of trek costs $11.25, which is pretty much your "discounted" movie price. I don't know why you sound so surprised that something which has more content would cost more.
Every game that I've ever loved was always chock full of JAPANEESE names in the credits. Mario, Zelda, Metriod, Mega Man, Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Contra, etc. Programmers and artists can be whatever, but obviously the game designers in Japan really have it going on.
I'm disapointed that Donkey Kong Country didn't make that list. It may not have been "revolutionary" in terms of gameplay or anything, but it was damn fine eye candy, and the gameplay was varied and addictive. There were dozens (hundreds?) of hidden rooms to find for those players who like finding every hidden doo-dad in a game, while more casual players could just play from level to level and still enjoy it. There were so many different kinds of levels, like the mine car levels, the "On/Off" barrel levels, the ice rope levels, underwater levels, moving platform levels, moving platform levels where you had to get fuel barrels, and so on. And there was a wide variety of difficulty in the levels too. I remember a few levels where it took a fair amount of time to practice the platform jumps, and learn where you had to pick up a barrel and how long to hold onto it in order to kill the guy on your next platform, and so forth. And the fake ending, oh man, I still remember the first time I beat the game and how it caught me by surprise. It was so awesome, it had 3 sequels, though I really wished they had kept Donkey Kong in them, he was definately the most fun to play, at least for me.
Am I the only one who's not particularly pissed off at the triforce hunt? I spent more time on random miniquests that got me a peice of heart than I did collecting the triforce (Espically the photograph miniquests).
Trees can survive on their own relatively well, but small plants and shrubs and vines require constant maintainence and watering. Not to mention how they don't survive winters very well.
Slashdot Mirror
Gee, who would have thought you can't impart a computer science degree's worth of knowledge in a 15 minute board game? The value of something doesn't have to be "all or nothing" to be worthwhile.
This will probably get me modded as flamebait, but whatever.
Everytime there's an article about P2P software being used for illegal distribution of music and other media, the typical response "We use P2P for linux distros and open source code and warcraft patches and blah blah blah. We use it for legal things, therefore it's not evil." However, when it comes down to it, is anyone actually deluded enough to believe that P2P isn't being used for illegal uses. I mean, we all have gigabytes of MP3s that we got from "somewhere", and while I'm sure you got all of yours legally, how about your friends, your co-workers, your classmates and other acquaintences. Why is it that we always try to justify P2P without coming up with any solution to the rampant pirating that we all know is happening? "Music sucks and is expensive" and "Movies suck and are expsive" are not excuses to be pirating it.
If geek's "other" one handed activity doesn't do anything for muscle tone, why would this?
The SSN's have to be given to your school if you want to be eligable for loans. However, it seems like the file that was left open related to just academic information like GPA and credit hours and such. What is probably the case is that the university uses student's SSNs as their university ID number, or at least they did at the time. It's fairly common practice at colleges, and only recently have legislative steps been taken to end this practice of flaunting your SSN on all your university documents. In my freshman year of college (2000-01), my student ID was my SSN and my ID card had my SSN printed on it, but during that year New York passed some legislation making it so that universities had to assign independent student ID numbers to students that were not related to SSNs, so for the 01-02 year everbody was given a new ID number and card. So back to this case, the reason the SSNs were leaked was probably that all the student's had their ID number next to their name in the file which was their SSN, and it wasn't necessarily a leak of financial information.
I would gladly accept people not comminucating using the neuances of proper grammer iPh +h3y \/\/0u1d ju$+ $+0P +@1/iNg 1i/3 +hi$.
You'd think it would be really easy to make Nintencats. Just change the puppy artwork to kitten artwork. Then change the code so that every input has a 90%/10% chance of being ignored or the cat entering hissy-clawing-furball of doom mode.
Issue 5 for City of Heroes has not gone over well with most of the players. Many people are very critical of the massive nerfing that took place with this issue across all of the archtypes (better known as classes). As well, COH is still lacking in any kind of end game content. Once you get the level 50, the only thing there is to do from there is to roll up a new character and start over. I believe this is the effect of what is probably COH's most unique qualities, no economy. There is no loot huntning in the game, which I think makes the game more enjoyable with no griefing or spawn camping or doing the same quest over and over again because the ending boss has a 2% change of dropping the legendary boots of butt kicking. Your only job is to go out there and bring villians to justice which is great. However, it doesn't provide your character with many incentives to get to level 50 since gameplay just hits a brick wall after that since there's no benefit to being lvl 50 in terms of making your character better. Most of the previous updates have added mainly low and mid level content, but many players are salivating for something like a lvl 50 only zone chock full of high end content, rather than your only option being to become a noob again and go do Lt. Wincott's Hollows missions for the 5th time.
I mean, what's Mario going to do on his 21st birthday? Going to bars is going to be pretty lame compared to his last 20 years of doing shrooms and other "magical plants" that give him various powers.
The hoverboard is unpowered. They made a specific point about that when Marty tried to use it above water in part 2.
I think he's refering to the Locomotive Time Machine that Doc Brown made which he used to visit Marty in the last scene of part 3. Marty took the Delorian back to 1985 leaving Doc with nothing to construct another time machine out of, so he must have made a new flux capacitor that could be powered by steam. Or, the alternative is that he used the "Bill & Ted" system of temporal mechanics, where say to yourself that if you had the components to build a time machine, after you built the time machine you'd go the future, buy said components, and come back in time to leave the components for your past self to build the machine.
BS = Bull Shit
MS = More Shit
PhD = Piled Higher and Deeper
But seriously, a PhD is no longer a ticket for the gravy train to tenure town. Tenure track faculty positions are incredibly hard to get, and if you do get one, you still have to bust your ass for a number of years doing research, writing grant proposals, etc. I took a course with a faculty member who was about a year out from getting evalulated for tenure. We had various homework assignments, and they were due at midnight on the due date. I figured that meant we had to slip our assignments under his door before he came in the next morning, but more often then not, he would be in his office at midnight working. So it does take a lot to get tenure, and also consider that a university position probably isn't going to pay as much as a job in industry.
Now electricity is being offshored. When's it going to end?
Microsoft is going to make a hack proof product, I totally believe that. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go pick up my new Hummer. The salesman told me they get 40 miles to the gallon now.
Not really a technological answer to what you were looking for, but I think it's worth mentioning. You say that you spend most of your time grading. I don't know how many students you teach, but I'm wondering if it's just a matter of you giving too much busywork to your students that you in turn have to grade. In my high school calculus class, my teacher assigned homework but he never graded it. At the beginning of every class, he make a quick pass around to see who had done it, and mark you off if you hadn't. He would then pass out an answer key for the assignment and go over any questions people had. His policy on homework was that it helps some people, and is just a pain in the butt for others. So the deal was that if your semester average was over 90%, there was no penealty for not doing homework. If your average was between 80 and 90, then you lost 0.5% for each homework not done, and so forth. As such, the only thing he graded for our class were the exams he gave every 3-4 weeks. So I'm just saying that perhaps the answer isn't to find faster ways to grade, but eliminating some of the pointless grunt work for you and for your students.
Probably because those aspects of male characters haven't been fleshed out (pardon my pun). When designing a female character, all of her dimensions have to be thought out ahead of time: chest, cup size, waist, hips, legs, and all of those drool-worthy dimensions, since most often her wardrobe is going to be designed to show off those dimensions. For male characters, a fair number of them are already bare chested, so there's nothing particularly new there. As for their endowment, that aspect of their anatomy is typically hidden. I'd wager the only thought given to the size of of it is by a graphics artist who uses his own judgement when he perhaps draws a characteristic bulge in his crotch. So when it comes time to do a playgirl spread, who decides how well endowed Gordon Freeman is? Is he jewish maybe? Is Duke Nukem taking steriods? Basically, to me it seems like doing a male spread is just adding penises for the sake of wanting to see digital wang, whereas doing a female spread is just showing the additional 10% of what they've already shown 90% of to us.
When it comes to regular everyday typing, I'm dead on. I can do my letters, period, comma, spacebar and numbers with almost no errors (well, no errors which can't be attributed to my own lack of spelling ability). However, what will screw me up most is when I have to use those characters I rarely ever use like curley brackets, semicolon, apostraphe, and so on (maybe if I were a programmer I'd know those cold, but I'm not). What's even worse is when I drop something on my keyboard which ends up hitting num lock or scroll lock. Even with those I end up taking a few second trying to find where that key is. I have a feeling that if I tried using this keyboard, the improvement in my base typing would be balanced by the slowing down I experience with all the semi-used characters and keys.
I don't think that gameplay is any easier today, but what makes modern games "easier" is how you can save in the middle of the game. Back in the olden days, if you wanted to beat a game, you had to do it in one sitting. You only had a limited number of lives, and an equally limited number of continues. Use them all up and it's back to level one for you. The Ninja Gaiden games were probably the biggest offender in this catagory. They were freaking hard, and relatively long. Beating them felt like an epic victory because you were mentally and physically exhausted from playing them. That combined with frustration of the several times before that when you made it all the way to the ending boss but fell just short of beating him. Now, I'm not saying that it's plausable for today's 50 hour games to not employ a save feature, but it sometimes just doesn't feel the same when you're allowed to go one level at a time with as many chances as you want until you accomplish the level, and then you can move on. With the older games, you had to do everything perfectly in a row, mess up one link in the chain and you were done. Beating those games truly felt like victory.
If you don't like something enough to pay the price for it, that's fine, but that doesn't make them overpriced. People have no problem paying $20 for a 90 minute movie DVD. Now consider that a season of TNG has 26 episodes (except season 2). 26 episodes at 40 minutes each makes 1040 minutes of content. When you calculate the price per minute, 90 minutes of trek costs $11.25, which is pretty much your "discounted" movie price. I don't know why you sound so surprised that something which has more content would cost more.
"In a related story, the Spellympics is being sued by the Olympics for the use of the suffix.. lympics." -Kent Brockman
Every game that I've ever loved was always chock full of JAPANEESE names in the credits. Mario, Zelda, Metriod, Mega Man, Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Contra, etc. Programmers and artists can be whatever, but obviously the game designers in Japan really have it going on.
Things are going to get pretty awkward at those stoplights
I'm disapointed that Donkey Kong Country didn't make that list. It may not have been "revolutionary" in terms of gameplay or anything, but it was damn fine eye candy, and the gameplay was varied and addictive. There were dozens (hundreds?) of hidden rooms to find for those players who like finding every hidden doo-dad in a game, while more casual players could just play from level to level and still enjoy it. There were so many different kinds of levels, like the mine car levels, the "On/Off" barrel levels, the ice rope levels, underwater levels, moving platform levels, moving platform levels where you had to get fuel barrels, and so on. And there was a wide variety of difficulty in the levels too. I remember a few levels where it took a fair amount of time to practice the platform jumps, and learn where you had to pick up a barrel and how long to hold onto it in order to kill the guy on your next platform, and so forth. And the fake ending, oh man, I still remember the first time I beat the game and how it caught me by surprise. It was so awesome, it had 3 sequels, though I really wished they had kept Donkey Kong in them, he was definately the most fun to play, at least for me.
Am I the only one who's not particularly pissed off at the triforce hunt? I spent more time on random miniquests that got me a peice of heart than I did collecting the triforce (Espically the photograph miniquests).
"Science! What's science ever done for us? TV off!" [It goes off]
-Moe Szyslak
Trees can survive on their own relatively well, but small plants and shrubs and vines require constant maintainence and watering. Not to mention how they don't survive winters very well.