Thanks for posting this, most slashdotters don't understand this point. They can't properly empathize with other age groups to see their directions and intent.
Sentient is a loaded word, it doesn't really mean what most people associate to it. By definition any thing that reacts to a given stimulus could be argued to be sentient given that experiencing a "sensation" must happen to cause the reaction. Most people believe sentient includes the concept of self awareness, it doesn't and this is a fine distinction to remember.
"It's not so bad really when you consider that the slow ass systems that geezer put in us folk 6k years ago make you unable to actually live in something approaching a real time. Hell, don't matter if it is all predetermined anyhoo since cain't tell the difference," spoke the stranger. Spitting on the ground he turned and walked away, but not before one last jab, "really it is the turtles that will get you. them damn turtles go all the way down."
I equate the working of drugs for the brain much like our current understanding of gravity.
We know it works. We can reproduce it in exacting detail. We can model other experiments based upon our expectations of the way it works. But when we get down to the tiny details and questions... we have no idea exactly HOW it works.
The modern brain chemical industry is this way. Sure we know it is hitting up the "5HT" receptors but as to why that actually causes some effects in some and differing effects in others... well... uh... yeah.
"Oh you want support for a database product on commodity hardware? Well we have this little MySQL thing you can use.
Oh you want to continue to run Oracle? Well that is now only supported on our new line of SPARC hardware."
Oracle can now (and will) sell you the entire database from sand to sql results at whatever price they deem acceptable to themselves this quarter. You thought license costs were crazy before? Well now they come with official hardware and support contracts for the box.
Winning a roguelike is much like the first time you beat your chess teacher or parents in any game that required a bit of logic or skill. It's something you remember. One of the few digital bits that I make sure survives all of my data migrations from machine to machine is a copy of the output of my first ascension in Nethack.
Date: 1997/06/12 An invisible choir sings, and you are bathed in radiance...--More-- The voice of Odin booms out: "Congratulations, mortal!"--More-- "In return for thy service, I grant thee the gift of Immortality!"--More-- You ascend to the status of Demigoddess...--More--
The scary/awesome part is I still remember more about the last level in that ascension than I do large parts of my childhood schooling.
These days the cpu/memory used by the likes of nethack are somewhat laughable. However when nethack was *the game* to run on college unix workstations it wasn't that far behind emacs in being forbidden on many campuses simply because of the cpu and memory gobbled up. Since each instance was completely separate, a few students playing at the same time could cripple your average sun server (SunOS forever). Nethack compiles were also notorious for taking nearly as long as building your own copy of X.
Zeno Clash is an interesting take on the fighting genre as it is entirely first person and done in the HL2 engine (it appears). There are some weapons but using them is intentionally clunky as to push the fighting control. While the game oozes with style and has an absolutely outstanding new world filled with things you have never seen before... I can't help but feel the game just doesn't work for two reasons.
First) The control with the keyboard sometimes borders on frustrating. All the keys make sense and the placement seems logical but as they game moves quite fast in sections you really feel limited compared to a traditional fighter. Perhaps with a joypad it works more smoothly?
Second) The difficulty ramp is insane. You'll find yourself getting past the first encounter easily enough as it is there to introduce the game to you. However very early on you encounter a battle that is easily 10 times harder... we are talking like 5 minutes later here. You don't get a chance to get really used to the engine and as it is pretty easy to die when fighting multiple foes because of the first person perspective (you can't easily tell where everyone is or damage is coming from) it can just be... frustrating and one must really want to play to get over this hump.
Fortunately each of these issues is fixable and I'd expect a patch or the next iteration to play much better.
One must first understand the story of Noah is based heavily in Sumarian lore. When civilization was first spawning it's first resou...er cities they choose to stick them in places rather convenient for growing large amounts of food and such.
One of these was near Ur and Lagash and such which just happened to be where the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers come together. Oh! By the way did you know that land there, well that land there, is a low land and in the past was prone to massive flooding.
So yes, to early civilization as the stories and tales spread out from the epicenter of humanity, the entire world DID indeed flood.
This isn't just your generation. sadly. This is every generation. There simply are only a small fraction of people who get the core of everything done that requires thought or initiative. The catch is these people are often the same ones who lose interest when a task or project is no longer challenging... which is where the others come in to finish it off.
Crappy system, but it's worked so far for humanity. The problem is, if you have too many highly functional people located together they disagree too frequently to get anything substantial done.
You will probably find during your professional life that you do 2-5x the amount of "work" as your comrades for the same pay. Eventually you'll get over the injustice of it all and learn to use it your advantage. Good luck.
Since leaving WoW quite a bit ago for numerous reasons, most of which they have fixed (still haven't gone back or played the new expansion) I've played nearly every MMO beta/pre-beta/alpha there is out there.
Nearly all of them.
I'm not sure what brought on this bit of self torture as there are more out their then most would think. How many in the last year? Five? Ten? Twenty? Nope. At last count I've played about *forty* different ones in the past year+. While their have been a couple of standouts all of them are going to fail for one reason or the other... which brings us to DarkFall.
Most important reason for failure: Community. You've never, and may probably never ever, have encountered such a bunch of sycophantic whiney idiots this side of an AOL USENET Lover's support group. They can see no wrong in their golden messiah of an MMO. Even worse the mere mention of another game will bring their misguided wrath upon you with more 3 letter acronyms and twelve year old new speak than one may believe possible. While this is a bit funny for a while, it quickly becomes more a cause for murder or suicide, much like realizing you are trapped in an elevator with Carrot Top, while on acid.
Secondly: Graphics. Well okay I get it, some people don't need any sort of graphics to enjoy a game. This too is easy to understand, I've ascended a few characters in NetHack. However the level of graphics must fit the current baseline or at least try to master the best in the genre. DarkFall has terrible graphics for an MMO released in 1995. The world is barren. Character movements are stilted. The art style is like a tribute to the Quake 1 engine. Spell effects are personally quite a stand out to me as they instantly remind one of the beautiful effects from PS1 games. Ahhhh nostalgia in an MMO!
Third: The company creating the game has no idea how manage a community. For all of their ills at least Blizzard somewhat gets it now. I'm sure many will say differently... but if you had played all the swill I've encountered while subjecting myself to this MMO horror fest you would find yourself amazed at just how effing brilliant Blizzard is compared to the others. Most of these companies treat their community like the enemy, have no concept of communication and try to invent new ways to drive players away. DarkFall is no different here, except they get bonuses for trying to mask their failings with "spooky mysterious secrecy".
Fourth: Awww. Fuck it. This is a terrible game, but it does represent a step up for Runescape players
Not that anyone asked but the only game I've played that deserved to be played for the actual story/game/world was Spellborn. But both the developers and their idiotic publishers have doomed this to fail before most people will ever even play it... and Atlantica is a solid game if you can get past their incessant pushing for making you play nearly every day.
That said, a number of the upcoming Chinese MMOs aren't really that bad. Unlike the Korean ones they don't shove the item mall down your throat. Most of them are lacking somewhat in proper stories, translations, lore, but there is some okay gameplay out there. See Perfect World for where the better Chinese MMOs are headed for the English speaking world.
While it's relatively easy if you know what you are doing to have different browsers, with different whatevers... based on WebKit/Safari kit when you are releasing something to the masses (where you want specific kinds of diagnostic feedback) your aim is for a simple process.
Why did you insist on installing this without verifying what it would do first? Why not run a nightly if you want both? If you are evaluating and "developing" then spend the 5 minutes to do it right.
Graphing. CEOs can't understand numbers, they make their brains run out their ears.
Bleh. We are spatial, visual creatures by nature, graphs make complex and even simple representations of data much easier for everyone. Dunno, where exactly this whole mantra of it just being for stupid bosses came from when graphing functions were created for mathematicians.
Expose allows arbitrary switching easily. Combined with spaces (the first Virtual Screen interface since some of the SGI ones actually done right) getting to any app is quite easy.
Even more so there are two ways of "alt-tab" in OSX, one is between any app and the other is between windows of the same application. I contend that if you are working with 30 windows open of numerous apps there is something very wrong in your workflow.
OSX keeps highly used files in a special section of disk as part of its defragmenting. Just because a defrag utility exists doesn't mean it is worth using. Hell you can write a "defrag" for ext2/ext3 in 10 or 15 lines of perl.
You are correct that all filesystems fragment but incorrect in proving the usefulness of such. In fact if you weren't being such a tard I'd point you to docs from Microsoft talking about how a full defrag of an NT partition is quite silly as the drive will go out of service before the benefits outweigh the cpu/drive time cost.
Defragmenting drives in this day and age is simply silly and pathetic. I suppose you use ramdoublers too?
If you are are still doing backups to tape, well, old habits die hard.
Have a solid data validation strategy, test method and process. Migrate any data that must be kept for reasons, be they contractual, governmental, what have you, on the current bulk online storage medium. Currently that is simply hard drives. It's cheaper than tapes. The cost to host the data stays relatively stable, unlike with tapes as your sizes are increasing (more tapes vs larger capacity drives).
Some may say fall back on the old ways of tape as more "standard" or "stable" or "guaranteed" to work. Firstly BS, tape is never a sure thing and if you don't trust the drives to hold the data while not online, why are you trusting them to hold the data while online?
Uh well that is some very valuable information, especially when deciding if you should actually send some information or not.
If you are aware the link has a 99% confidence level that it isn't being snooped on or a 75% confidence level you may greatly alter what information, however encrypted, secure, timely, or whatever its attributes. Some simple historical sampling of trends with some "intelligent" sorting on top would allow you to assign many different confidence levels to individual connections.
(like never using a "JOIN" because it mysql is "faster if you give it small SELECT statements).
This isn't entirely accurate. And surely not what MySQL themselves recommend. I attended their high performance tuning class earlier this year and there was extensive talk of using Joins and Table Views in 4.x+ because it *was* much faster. Both are expected to be even more improved in 5.X so they want developers to start using them now.
You really shouldn't blame MySQL for the hordes of new developers who are just sloppy. It's sort of like this huge array of open source apps created in the last few years that only build on Linux. This isn't the fault of linux, just what we get from having a core group of new developers who weren't schooled or learned in the ways of old. Good enough to ship, is what we are stuck with.
Despite my concerns over all the hoopla DRM I purchased this via Steam. Let's go over a few of the problems:
a) ~15 Gig. Really? Really. b) Needs new versions of at least 2, maybe 3 Microsoft programs to be installed before playing. c) Installs some fucking crap ass community software that was never asked for or mentioned when making the initial purchase over steam. This shiet from Rockstar goes in the system tray and puts up a fricken splash screen at every reboot on your desktop just to play their game. d) The inane pushing of the new Games for Windows stuff. Oh I have to create a local G4W profile even if I never plan on playing online? e) During loading it displays a black screen for 3-4 minutes on my box with 4gig/7200rpm disk. It's a laptop so at least I can feel the disk spinning to make sure it is doing something. f) The resolution change takes SO long I never get to confirm it before it switches back when I am actually in the game. g) The first time I ran it with defaults, no textures loaded until about 30 seconds *after* the opening cinematic was done and my player was sitting in the car. h) Running the benchmark twice within one session causes a crash on my machine. i) It has already crashed multiple times.... since I only boot into windows to play games like this it has basically rendered itself a total fucking disgrace. Valve better be refunding my money or they will lose an up-till-now loyal customer. I've been playing games for like 28 years (GIT AWF MY L4WN) and this is the most buggy piece of shit my eyes have seen since some of the Atari Jaguar games.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for posting this, most slashdotters don't understand this point. They can't properly empathize with other age groups to see their directions and intent.
Way to post without bothering to invest even one moment in the source material.
Sentient is a loaded word, it doesn't really mean what most people associate to it. By definition any thing that reacts to a given stimulus could be argued to be sentient given that experiencing a "sensation" must happen to cause the reaction. Most people believe sentient includes the concept of self awareness, it doesn't and this is a fine distinction to remember.
"It's not so bad really when you consider that the slow ass systems that geezer put in us folk 6k years ago make you unable to actually live in something approaching a real time. Hell, don't matter if it is all predetermined anyhoo since cain't tell the difference," spoke the stranger. Spitting on the ground he turned and walked away, but not before one last jab, "really it is the turtles that will get you. them damn turtles go all the way down."
I equate the working of drugs for the brain much like our current understanding of gravity.
We know it works. We can reproduce it in exacting detail. We can model other experiments based upon our expectations of the way it works. But when we get down to the tiny details and questions... we have no idea exactly HOW it works.
The modern brain chemical industry is this way. Sure we know it is hitting up the "5HT" receptors but as to why that actually causes some effects in some and differing effects in others... well... uh... yeah.
"Oh you want support for a database product on commodity hardware? Well we have this little MySQL thing you can use.
Oh you want to continue to run Oracle? Well that is now only supported on our new line of SPARC hardware."
Oracle can now (and will) sell you the entire database from sand to sql results at whatever price they deem acceptable to themselves this quarter. You thought license costs were crazy before? Well now they come with official hardware and support contracts for the box.
Winning a roguelike is much like the first time you beat your chess teacher or parents in any game that required a bit of logic or skill. It's something you remember. One of the few digital bits that I make sure survives all of my data migrations from machine to machine is a copy of the output of my first ascension in Nethack.
Date: 1997/06/12
An invisible choir sings, and you are bathed in radiance...--More--
The voice of Odin booms out: "Congratulations, mortal!"--More--
"In return for thy service, I grant thee the gift of Immortality!"--More--
You ascend to the status of Demigoddess...--More--
The scary/awesome part is I still remember more about the last level in that ascension than I do large parts of my childhood schooling.
Frees up a lot of resources?
These days the cpu/memory used by the likes of nethack are somewhat laughable. However when nethack was *the game* to run on college unix workstations it wasn't that far behind emacs in being forbidden on many campuses simply because of the cpu and memory gobbled up. Since each instance was completely separate, a few students playing at the same time could cripple your average sun server (SunOS forever). Nethack compiles were also notorious for taking nearly as long as building your own copy of X.
Zeno Clash is an interesting take on the fighting genre as it is entirely first person and done in the HL2 engine (it appears). There are some weapons but using them is intentionally clunky as to push the fighting control. While the game oozes with style and has an absolutely outstanding new world filled with things you have never seen before... I can't help but feel the game just doesn't work for two reasons.
First) The control with the keyboard sometimes borders on frustrating. All the keys make sense and the placement seems logical but as they game moves quite fast in sections you really feel limited compared to a traditional fighter. Perhaps with a joypad it works more smoothly?
Second) The difficulty ramp is insane. You'll find yourself getting past the first encounter easily enough as it is there to introduce the game to you. However very early on you encounter a battle that is easily 10 times harder... we are talking like 5 minutes later here. You don't get a chance to get really used to the engine and as it is pretty easy to die when fighting multiple foes because of the first person perspective (you can't easily tell where everyone is or damage is coming from) it can just be... frustrating and one must really want to play to get over this hump.
Fortunately each of these issues is fixable and I'd expect a patch or the next iteration to play much better.
Pretty sure there is already a porn adaptation of World of Goo... titled, well, you know the title.
... stroke the epeen? Slashdot used to be about sharing kickass tech info you might have missed from other places.
One must first understand the story of Noah is based heavily in Sumarian lore. When civilization was first spawning it's first resou...er cities they choose to stick them in places rather convenient for growing large amounts of food and such.
One of these was near Ur and Lagash and such which just happened to be where the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers come together. Oh! By the way did you know that land there, well that land there, is a low land and in the past was prone to massive flooding.
So yes, to early civilization as the stories and tales spread out from the epicenter of humanity, the entire world DID indeed flood.
Perfect.
This isn't just your generation. sadly. This is every generation. There simply are only a small fraction of people who get the core of everything done that requires thought or initiative. The catch is these people are often the same ones who lose interest when a task or project is no longer challenging... which is where the others come in to finish it off.
Crappy system, but it's worked so far for humanity. The problem is, if you have too many highly functional people located together they disagree too frequently to get anything substantial done.
You will probably find during your professional life that you do 2-5x the amount of "work" as your comrades for the same pay. Eventually you'll get over the injustice of it all and learn to use it your advantage. Good luck.
Since leaving WoW quite a bit ago for numerous reasons, most of which they have fixed (still haven't gone back or played the new expansion) I've played nearly every MMO beta/pre-beta/alpha there is out there.
Nearly all of them.
I'm not sure what brought on this bit of self torture as there are more out their then most would think. How many in the last year? Five? Ten? Twenty? Nope. At last count I've played about *forty* different ones in the past year+. While their have been a couple of standouts all of them are going to fail for one reason or the other... which brings us to DarkFall.
Most important reason for failure: Community. You've never, and may probably never ever, have encountered such a bunch of sycophantic whiney idiots this side of an AOL USENET Lover's support group. They can see no wrong in their golden messiah of an MMO. Even worse the mere mention of another game will bring their misguided wrath upon you with more 3 letter acronyms and twelve year old new speak than one may believe possible. While this is a bit funny for a while, it quickly becomes more a cause for murder or suicide, much like realizing you are trapped in an elevator with Carrot Top, while on acid.
Secondly: Graphics. Well okay I get it, some people don't need any sort of graphics to enjoy a game. This too is easy to understand, I've ascended a few characters in NetHack. However the level of graphics must fit the current baseline or at least try to master the best in the genre. DarkFall has terrible graphics for an MMO released in 1995. The world is barren. Character movements are stilted. The art style is like a tribute to the Quake 1 engine. Spell effects are personally quite a stand out to me as they instantly remind one of the beautiful effects from PS1 games. Ahhhh nostalgia in an MMO!
Third: The company creating the game has no idea how manage a community. For all of their ills at least Blizzard somewhat gets it now. I'm sure many will say differently... but if you had played all the swill I've encountered while subjecting myself to this MMO horror fest you would find yourself amazed at just how effing brilliant Blizzard is compared to the others. Most of these companies treat their community like the enemy, have no concept of communication and try to invent new ways to drive players away. DarkFall is no different here, except they get bonuses for trying to mask their failings with "spooky mysterious secrecy".
Fourth: Awww. Fuck it. This is a terrible game, but it does represent a step up for Runescape players
Not that anyone asked but the only game I've played that deserved to be played for the actual story/game/world was Spellborn. But both the developers and their idiotic publishers have doomed this to fail before most people will ever even play it... and Atlantica is a solid game if you can get past their incessant pushing for making you play nearly every day.
That said, a number of the upcoming Chinese MMOs aren't really that bad. Unlike the Korean ones they don't shove the item mall down your throat. Most of them are lacking somewhat in proper stories, translations, lore, but there is some okay gameplay out there. See Perfect World for where the better Chinese MMOs are headed for the English speaking world.
IIRC This includes a full new version of webkit.
While it's relatively easy if you know what you are doing to have different browsers, with different whatevers... based on WebKit/Safari kit when you are releasing something to the masses (where you want specific kinds of diagnostic feedback) your aim is for a simple process.
Why did you insist on installing this without verifying what it would do first? Why not run a nightly if you want both? If you are evaluating and "developing" then spend the 5 minutes to do it right.
This is your FAIL; not Apple's.
(Although there are many in this release.)
Damn; you got served by a 5UID.
Agreed. The energy and just get it done attitude in a startup is awesome.
Graphing. CEOs can't understand numbers, they make their brains run out their ears.
Bleh. We are spatial, visual creatures by nature, graphs make complex and even simple representations of data much easier for everyone. Dunno, where exactly this whole mantra of it just being for stupid bosses came from when graphing functions were created for mathematicians.
Expose allows arbitrary switching easily. Combined with spaces (the first Virtual Screen interface since some of the SGI ones actually done right) getting to any app is quite easy.
Even more so there are two ways of "alt-tab" in OSX, one is between any app and the other is between windows of the same application. I contend that if you are working with 30 windows open of numerous apps there is something very wrong in your workflow.
OSX keeps highly used files in a special section of disk as part of its defragmenting. Just because a defrag utility exists doesn't mean it is worth using. Hell you can write a "defrag" for ext2/ext3 in 10 or 15 lines of perl.
You are correct that all filesystems fragment but incorrect in proving the usefulness of such. In fact if you weren't being such a tard I'd point you to docs from Microsoft talking about how a full defrag of an NT partition is quite silly as the drive will go out of service before the benefits outweigh the cpu/drive time cost.
Defragmenting drives in this day and age is simply silly and pathetic. I suppose you use ramdoublers too?
If you are are still doing backups to tape, well, old habits die hard.
Have a solid data validation strategy, test method and process. Migrate any data that must be kept for reasons, be they contractual, governmental, what have you, on the current bulk online storage medium. Currently that is simply hard drives. It's cheaper than tapes. The cost to host the data stays relatively stable, unlike with tapes as your sizes are increasing (more tapes vs larger capacity drives).
Some may say fall back on the old ways of tape as more "standard" or "stable" or "guaranteed" to work. Firstly BS, tape is never a sure thing and if you don't trust the drives to hold the data while not online, why are you trusting them to hold the data while online?
Tapes have got to go. Now.
Uh well that is some very valuable information, especially when deciding if you should actually send some information or not.
If you are aware the link has a 99% confidence level that it isn't being snooped on or a 75% confidence level you may greatly alter what information, however encrypted, secure, timely, or whatever its attributes. Some simple historical sampling of trends with some "intelligent" sorting on top would allow you to assign many different confidence levels to individual connections.
(like never using a "JOIN" because it mysql is "faster if you give it small SELECT statements).
This isn't entirely accurate. And surely not what MySQL themselves recommend. I attended their high performance tuning class earlier this year and there was extensive talk of using Joins and Table Views in 4.x+ because it *was* much faster. Both are expected to be even more improved in 5.X so they want developers to start using them now.
You really shouldn't blame MySQL for the hordes of new developers who are just sloppy. It's sort of like this huge array of open source apps created in the last few years that only build on Linux. This isn't the fault of linux, just what we get from having a core group of new developers who weren't schooled or learned in the ways of old. Good enough to ship, is what we are stuck with.
Despite my concerns over all the hoopla DRM I purchased this via Steam. Let's go over a few of the problems:
a) ~15 Gig. Really? Really. ... since I only boot into windows to play games like this it has basically rendered itself a total fucking disgrace. Valve better be refunding my money or they will lose an up-till-now loyal customer. I've been playing games for like 28 years (GIT AWF MY L4WN) and this is the most buggy piece of shit my eyes have seen since some of the Atari Jaguar games.
b) Needs new versions of at least 2, maybe 3 Microsoft programs to be installed before playing.
c) Installs some fucking crap ass community software that was never asked for or mentioned when making the initial purchase over steam. This shiet from Rockstar goes in the system tray and puts up a fricken splash screen at every reboot on your desktop just to play their game.
d) The inane pushing of the new Games for Windows stuff. Oh I have to create a local G4W profile even if I never plan on playing online?
e) During loading it displays a black screen for 3-4 minutes on my box with 4gig/7200rpm disk. It's a laptop so at least I can feel the disk spinning to make sure it is doing something.
f) The resolution change takes SO long I never get to confirm it before it switches back when I am actually in the game.
g) The first time I ran it with defaults, no textures loaded until about 30 seconds *after* the opening cinematic was done and my player was sitting in the car.
h) Running the benchmark twice within one session causes a crash on my machine.
i) It has already crashed multiple times.