I think on the whole we're still engaged in memorizing vast swaths of data, but rather than being purely textual data, it's contextual and positional data. Web addicts (like myself) remember what a document is about, the gist of its subject matter and how to find it again, not necessarily the exact wording.
I can't argue it's changing the way my memory works, either. My memory is improving noticeably in its retention of numbers, positional information and what I'd call topic chunking. I less often forget where my keys are and can usually find lone objects in a dark cluttered room without bothering to turn on the lights.
As far as topic chunking goes, I would call this the skill of digesting a piece of subject matter, remembering what it's about, then linking it with other things relevant to it. This helps improve recall and helps shape ideas based on it - you can't use information unless you've internalized it (making it "part of you" as you noted). The people who are good at synthesizing and boiling down to elements any information they read are probably the people getting "smarter" online.
The real problem in my estimation is that the people who are getting "smarter" are doing so in a very 18th century way - instead of becoming specialists in deep topics, they're becoming dabblers in hundreds or thousands of topics. I think there's definitely a place for the jack-of-all-trades but if cut-rate Renaissance Men become the norm for technological countries we're going to have a damned hard time staying technological.
There are people I've met in life who are definitely sharp; fast learners possessing broad body of foundational knowledge and a good deal of specialized knowledge in some field. However, I've met plenty of people like that who define a wall at which they stop thinking at all and don't even bother analyzing. You probably meet these people all the time - the ones who treat computers like magic boxes even though they know how to operate technology that'd take you years to figure out. The people who unravel DNA and yet can't figure out their car's stereo or their DVR.
Intellectual laziness is the simple unwillingness to apply what you've got broadly and constantly. We've all got it, even the most brilliant of us because after a point we stop caring. Sure, we can get lost in Wikipedia or the ACM Portal or JSTOR for hours and hours, but there's always that line we draw that we won't go past.
The real difference between being stupid and intellectually lazy is not knowing when to stop being a lazy shit and applying the brain. The difference between being "dumb" as the article is suggesting and being intellectually lazy is that the people who are "dumb" have either never had or had but have forfeited the ability to think. The intellectually lazy simply won't think because it's easier to Google - and I think we all do that from time to time.
Instead of worrying about retention of specific knowledge, I find myself caring more about how to find information again if I should need it. I've been treating the Internet like an extended memory bank. It certainly adds to my humility and (by extension) my critical thinking skills that it takes only a few seconds with Google to demonstrate the inferiority of my personal knowledge and experience on any issue. Questioning your convictions on any topic often leads to a new way of looking at things.
Dedicating a moment's thought to it, I don't believe the Internet can make a person dumber, but it can contribute to intellectual laziness - being convinced that the answer is out there if you care enough to look for it could conceivably make you less likely to try to figure something out for yourself.
Re:Reverse Zen Notation (TM)
on
Zen Coding
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· Score: 1
I know this is Slashdot, but since when is elitism considered "insight?"
A code is simply a system of rules that you use to translate one form of communication into another form. If that's all you're doing when you're programming, turn in your keyboard now. Writing HTML is coding but it is not programming. Programming is writing a program - a system of instructions which inform the computer how to perform a novel task. HTML is scripting however, even if the script is trivial - it says "Do what this says" to the interpreter.
If you are the sort of guy who tries to impress people by saying you're a "coder" you probably deserve the confusion you get. If you're a software developer, say you're a software developer. If you're a systems programmer, say you're a systems programmer. Don't try to redefine the word "code" to mean "only people who I consider my equals."
Re:You don't "code" HTML
on
Zen Coding
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· Score: 1
Just because something you have written contains logic-related program code does not mean you have imparted logic into it. Even idiots can write code that works, if you've imparted logic into it, it works properly.
I'd argue that an intelligently crafted bit of HTML with elegantly cascading classes in CSS takes as much art as writing a device driver (and I've done both enough to know how to do either right.)
Re:It's not called "coding".
on
Zen Coding
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· Score: 1
A code is a system of rules that translates a body of information from one form to another. Say, for instance, markup to presentation.
I second this wholeheartedly. There's always a market, even among the hardcore gamer, for variety.
I may have bought the whole Half-Life series for its immersive storytelling. I may have bought the GTA games, Mercenaries 2 and Just Cause 2 for their sandbox gameplay. I may have bought Mirror's Edge and Assassin's Creed for their unique movement systems and fluid gameplay. I may have bought Oblivion, Ultima 7, Wasteland and Starflight 2 over the years for their immensely deep replayability, captivating stories and powerfully complicated game mechanics (excepting Oblivion).
But I also bought LittleBigPlanet so I could flop on my couch with friends and build something fun and stupid using springs and motors. I bought PAIN and Flatout for their pick-up minigame-oriented gameplay. I bought Mariokart, Goldeneye and Chu Chu Rocket for the simple competitive gameplay.
Casual gaming is far from mutually exclusive with hardcore gaming, and completionists aren't always different people from the use-once-and-discard arcade crowd either.
The tiniest of microparticles left in a stream behind the ship... Microscopic chaff sparsely spread, producing the attenuation that an atmosphere would provide in terrestrial battle, rendering the laser ineffective at long range. Powering a laser produces heat. Heat is difficult to disperse in space. Produce armor plating or a directable reflector which is capable of surviving a few nanoseconds of laser, a discharge mechanism which dumps out a huge clump of reflective chaff in that time, and then leaves behind a trail of lighter weight chaff and soon you have a situation where it'd do more damage to the attacker to shoot (from the heat from their emitter) than it does to you to catch.
Actually, it'd probably be a pretty novel experience playing a game which realistically simulates space combat... It'd become a matter of relative speeds - you're probably already moving at a ludicrous clip, the trick is to dance in and out of range at the maximum accurate weapon range using braking and thrusting maneuvers.... Forget changing direction rapidly, but you could probably do some minor jinking to avoid long-range damage.
The Lucasarts X-Wing and Tie Fighter games had a mechanic which would blend well with that style of combat - namely shield juggling. Assuming you'd allow enough of a fudge factor in your science to permit some analog of a force field, changing the orientation and concentration of a field to deflect incoming fire from multiple directions is a tricky but engaging mechanic.
Finally, it wouldn't have to be completely soundless - remember electromagnetism - assuming hull sensors which picked up and amplified emp and vibrations caused by passing through magnetic fields from shots or engine wake, you could hear a lot of really odd sounds. And as far as explosions, don't forget the stuff that a ship is made of has to go somewhere if it blows apart, and that somewhere is pretty much everywhere. Anything blowing up behind you (movement-wise) would be eerily silent and anything blowing up along your vector of movement would sound like electromagnetic shockwaves and a nasty hailstorm.
If your company can't offer value added over or at least equal value to "homemade" levels, you're likely in the wrong business.
Furthermore, you can just release high-quality mod tools above and beyond the quality that the public tends to provide and sell those as part of the pack.
Player mods didn't sink Quake or Doom (both of which could play mods in their free shareware version.)
Except this isn't them. This is Uwe Boll and a few other indie filmmakers which would be getting no attention without this lawsuit. RTFS; this is an attempt at suing their way into break-even.
It's not always about the first games, it's sometimes about the games that defined what the genres were to become.
Half-Life was the first FPS to deliver a storyline more sophisticated than the average C-rate late night Skinemax sci-fi flick.
Doom was the first to add the speed, immersion and immediacy to FPS, and was probably the most popular multiplayer video game until Starcraft came around.
World of Warcraft triggers the grumpy reflex in old timers like myself, but you've gotta admit, it's a phenomenon that hasn't been seen since Pac-Mania - the whole developed world knows about it and probably plays it - it's ubiquitous. On food, t-shirts, television, every corner of the internet and stuck all over magazines. A couple of years ago I saw two complete strangers in their forties arguing about druid specs... I haven't played the game since beta and am personally sick to death of hearing about it, but it's got an undeniable place in the annals of video game history.
The Sims may not have been the first tiny people simulator, and it wasn't even the first to have a complicated learning AI (off the top of my head, the Creatures series predated it. What is has, however, is probably the largest sales numbers in history; and it essentializes the nurture/imagine/manipulate instinct to a degree that has not been surpassed.
Also of note, Turrican was released a full three years after Metroid.
I never quite liked those Orc guys outside Yew on GL. They decided to start ranging further afield and attacking miners so a couple of Yew Militia members (myself and another guy) strolled out there to have a word with them. They got uppity and started attacking us. We proceeded to spend the next 2 hours completely tearing apart their guild with just the two of us until they agreed to leave the miners alone and to only attack reds on the road.
To be fair, they were only Orcs and after the "accord" we had no trouble with them. They got some good experience fighting real anti-pks from that brawl, and we turned up a couple of times later to help them out when they were having PK trouble.
I completely agree. I got involved in the Anti-PK side of the wars shortly after you'd have Great Lords who were walking around killing everybody left and right and never seeming to lose karma.
But up until that point (which was caused by Origin trying to "fix" what was "wrong" with UO) I'd enjoyed the experience of actual risk caused by hostile players alongside negligible loss (equipment was take-it-or-leave-it). Boo hoo. Somebody killed you and took all your stuff? Stop by the bank, pick up some random gear you got from killing some unlucky orc, head for the dungeons and get some better gear and gold. Or go back and find the bastard which ganked you and take his.
That ultimately failed when you had grifers and PKs who were Great Lords due to exploits and bot-mediated Karma grinding.
Then the "cops" had to become Dread Lords just to keep out the unwanted griefer elements. I spent quite some time as a Dread Lord for merely defending miners and reagent farmers from griefers. I will agree the title had some clout though, as even some of the tougher PKs would flee upon seeing a Dread Lord show up and kill two of them in a second, even being fully aware that by doing that he'd pretty much shot his wad.
That still didn't produce too significant of a power divide. There were always the asshats with a maxed-out magic resist, but they were usually not that resistant to deadly poison or a crossbow bolt to the face.
I had that too in the Seattle area on Comcast's cable setup. It was nice being able to run down two horsebacked PKs on foot and kill them with your miner, then return to mining.
the only people who really miss pre-trammel UO are the killers
...And the cops... and the people who want something more out of an MMO other than endless grinding and football matches (organized pvp).
There was something to be said for actually entering a world which contained some vague simulation of real danger and some consequence for failure. It's true that pre-Trammel UO was extremely unfriendly at the entrance to the learning curve, but someone who was actually interested in a challenge could thrive in UO either despite or because of the constant predation. It drove the in-game economy for the "sheep" as you put it. It made a niche for those people who kept the griefers under control. It allowed for interesting social constructions like bounties (although the in-game bounty system was useless, far better when dealt with informally by players).
More to the point, it made you value what you had more and be less interested in minmaxing your equipment when it could go away at any time. The things you had were ones you worked hard to get and fought hard to keep. It made the uncontrolled and unguarded (by players or NPC) areas more lively. Contrast the Darkness Falls from Dark Age of Camelot to any other dungeon in the game and you'll see the one with unregulated PVP that you had to fight hard to keep out of the hands of your enemies was more populated.
Finally, there are other forms of griefing than just killing people and not letting them get their stuff. Annoyance tactics and social griefing is far more disruptive than PVP ever was. UO had a rather expedient way of dealing with that - if somebody was really annoying you and the people around you, you cut their head off and sold it at the bank on a vendor.
I played for 2-3 years as a "local militiaman" for the largest player-run city in UO (at the time) during my days off from work (I worked a 14 hour graveyard shift 4 days a week). It was considerably more personally rewarding than any subsequent PVP or PVM-based game I've yet seen.
Slashdot Mirror
So attach a debugger and fix it.
I think on the whole we're still engaged in memorizing vast swaths of data, but rather than being purely textual data, it's contextual and positional data. Web addicts (like myself) remember what a document is about, the gist of its subject matter and how to find it again, not necessarily the exact wording.
I can't argue it's changing the way my memory works, either. My memory is improving noticeably in its retention of numbers, positional information and what I'd call topic chunking. I less often forget where my keys are and can usually find lone objects in a dark cluttered room without bothering to turn on the lights.
As far as topic chunking goes, I would call this the skill of digesting a piece of subject matter, remembering what it's about, then linking it with other things relevant to it. This helps improve recall and helps shape ideas based on it - you can't use information unless you've internalized it (making it "part of you" as you noted). The people who are good at synthesizing and boiling down to elements any information they read are probably the people getting "smarter" online.
The real problem in my estimation is that the people who are getting "smarter" are doing so in a very 18th century way - instead of becoming specialists in deep topics, they're becoming dabblers in hundreds or thousands of topics. I think there's definitely a place for the jack-of-all-trades but if cut-rate Renaissance Men become the norm for technological countries we're going to have a damned hard time staying technological.
There are people I've met in life who are definitely sharp; fast learners possessing broad body of foundational knowledge and a good deal of specialized knowledge in some field. However, I've met plenty of people like that who define a wall at which they stop thinking at all and don't even bother analyzing. You probably meet these people all the time - the ones who treat computers like magic boxes even though they know how to operate technology that'd take you years to figure out. The people who unravel DNA and yet can't figure out their car's stereo or their DVR.
Intellectual laziness is the simple unwillingness to apply what you've got broadly and constantly. We've all got it, even the most brilliant of us because after a point we stop caring. Sure, we can get lost in Wikipedia or the ACM Portal or JSTOR for hours and hours, but there's always that line we draw that we won't go past.
The real difference between being stupid and intellectually lazy is not knowing when to stop being a lazy shit and applying the brain. The difference between being "dumb" as the article is suggesting and being intellectually lazy is that the people who are "dumb" have either never had or had but have forfeited the ability to think. The intellectually lazy simply won't think because it's easier to Google - and I think we all do that from time to time.
It changes the way a person thinks.
Instead of worrying about retention of specific knowledge, I find myself caring more about how to find information again if I should need it. I've been treating the Internet like an extended memory bank. It certainly adds to my humility and (by extension) my critical thinking skills that it takes only a few seconds with Google to demonstrate the inferiority of my personal knowledge and experience on any issue. Questioning your convictions on any topic often leads to a new way of looking at things.
Dedicating a moment's thought to it, I don't believe the Internet can make a person dumber, but it can contribute to intellectual laziness - being convinced that the answer is out there if you care enough to look for it could conceivably make you less likely to try to figure something out for yourself.
it'd be:
a5*ilnoitagivan#lu+ogol.videgap#vid
I know this is Slashdot, but since when is elitism considered "insight?"
A code is simply a system of rules that you use to translate one form of communication into another form. If that's all you're doing when you're programming, turn in your keyboard now. Writing HTML is coding but it is not programming. Programming is writing a program - a system of instructions which inform the computer how to perform a novel task. HTML is scripting however, even if the script is trivial - it says "Do what this says" to the interpreter.
If you are the sort of guy who tries to impress people by saying you're a "coder" you probably deserve the confusion you get. If you're a software developer, say you're a software developer. If you're a systems programmer, say you're a systems programmer. Don't try to redefine the word "code" to mean "only people who I consider my equals."
Just because something you have written contains logic-related program code does not mean you have imparted logic into it. Even idiots can write code that works, if you've imparted logic into it, it works properly.
I'd argue that an intelligently crafted bit of HTML with elegantly cascading classes in CSS takes as much art as writing a device driver (and I've done both enough to know how to do either right.)
A code is a system of rules that translates a body of information from one form to another. Say, for instance, markup to presentation.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Actually, it means almost exactly that.
You're very clever, young man, very clever. But it's boobs all the way down.
Google "windows 7 god mode." You will be well-pleased.
I second this wholeheartedly. There's always a market, even among the hardcore gamer, for variety.
I may have bought the whole Half-Life series for its immersive storytelling. I may have bought the GTA games, Mercenaries 2 and Just Cause 2 for their sandbox gameplay. I may have bought Mirror's Edge and Assassin's Creed for their unique movement systems and fluid gameplay. I may have bought Oblivion, Ultima 7, Wasteland and Starflight 2 over the years for their immensely deep replayability, captivating stories and powerfully complicated game mechanics (excepting Oblivion).
But I also bought LittleBigPlanet so I could flop on my couch with friends and build something fun and stupid using springs and motors. I bought PAIN and Flatout for their pick-up minigame-oriented gameplay. I bought Mariokart, Goldeneye and Chu Chu Rocket for the simple competitive gameplay.
Casual gaming is far from mutually exclusive with hardcore gaming, and completionists aren't always different people from the use-once-and-discard arcade crowd either.
Meth: not even once.
Yes, that would most certainly be bad for your health if you were learning English in a public school in Queens. Well spotted.
The tiniest of microparticles left in a stream behind the ship... Microscopic chaff sparsely spread, producing the attenuation that an atmosphere would provide in terrestrial battle, rendering the laser ineffective at long range. Powering a laser produces heat. Heat is difficult to disperse in space. Produce armor plating or a directable reflector which is capable of surviving a few nanoseconds of laser, a discharge mechanism which dumps out a huge clump of reflective chaff in that time, and then leaves behind a trail of lighter weight chaff and soon you have a situation where it'd do more damage to the attacker to shoot (from the heat from their emitter) than it does to you to catch.
Actually, it'd probably be a pretty novel experience playing a game which realistically simulates space combat... It'd become a matter of relative speeds - you're probably already moving at a ludicrous clip, the trick is to dance in and out of range at the maximum accurate weapon range using braking and thrusting maneuvers.... Forget changing direction rapidly, but you could probably do some minor jinking to avoid long-range damage.
The Lucasarts X-Wing and Tie Fighter games had a mechanic which would blend well with that style of combat - namely shield juggling. Assuming you'd allow enough of a fudge factor in your science to permit some analog of a force field, changing the orientation and concentration of a field to deflect incoming fire from multiple directions is a tricky but engaging mechanic.
Finally, it wouldn't have to be completely soundless - remember electromagnetism - assuming hull sensors which picked up and amplified emp and vibrations caused by passing through magnetic fields from shots or engine wake, you could hear a lot of really odd sounds. And as far as explosions, don't forget the stuff that a ship is made of has to go somewhere if it blows apart, and that somewhere is pretty much everywhere. Anything blowing up behind you (movement-wise) would be eerily silent and anything blowing up along your vector of movement would sound like electromagnetic shockwaves and a nasty hailstorm.
If your company can't offer value added over or at least equal value to "homemade" levels, you're likely in the wrong business.
Furthermore, you can just release high-quality mod tools above and beyond the quality that the public tends to provide and sell those as part of the pack.
Player mods didn't sink Quake or Doom (both of which could play mods in their free shareware version.)
Except this isn't them. This is Uwe Boll and a few other indie filmmakers which would be getting no attention without this lawsuit. RTFS; this is an attempt at suing their way into break-even.
It's not always about the first games, it's sometimes about the games that defined what the genres were to become.
Half-Life was the first FPS to deliver a storyline more sophisticated than the average C-rate late night Skinemax sci-fi flick.
Doom was the first to add the speed, immersion and immediacy to FPS, and was probably the most popular multiplayer video game until Starcraft came around.
World of Warcraft triggers the grumpy reflex in old timers like myself, but you've gotta admit, it's a phenomenon that hasn't been seen since Pac-Mania - the whole developed world knows about it and probably plays it - it's ubiquitous. On food, t-shirts, television, every corner of the internet and stuck all over magazines. A couple of years ago I saw two complete strangers in their forties arguing about druid specs... I haven't played the game since beta and am personally sick to death of hearing about it, but it's got an undeniable place in the annals of video game history.
The Sims may not have been the first tiny people simulator, and it wasn't even the first to have a complicated learning AI (off the top of my head, the Creatures series predated it.
What is has, however, is probably the largest sales numbers in history; and it essentializes the nurture/imagine/manipulate instinct to a degree that has not been surpassed.
Also of note, Turrican was released a full three years after Metroid.
I never quite liked those Orc guys outside Yew on GL. They decided to start ranging further afield and attacking miners so a couple of Yew Militia members (myself and another guy) strolled out there to have a word with them. They got uppity and started attacking us. We proceeded to spend the next 2 hours completely tearing apart their guild with just the two of us until they agreed to leave the miners alone and to only attack reds on the road.
To be fair, they were only Orcs and after the "accord" we had no trouble with them. They got some good experience fighting real anti-pks from that brawl, and we turned up a couple of times later to help them out when they were having PK trouble.
I completely agree. I got involved in the Anti-PK side of the wars shortly after you'd have Great Lords who were walking around killing everybody left and right and never seeming to lose karma. But up until that point (which was caused by Origin trying to "fix" what was "wrong" with UO) I'd enjoyed the experience of actual risk caused by hostile players alongside negligible loss (equipment was take-it-or-leave-it). Boo hoo. Somebody killed you and took all your stuff? Stop by the bank, pick up some random gear you got from killing some unlucky orc, head for the dungeons and get some better gear and gold. Or go back and find the bastard which ganked you and take his.
That ultimately failed when you had grifers and PKs who were Great Lords due to exploits and bot-mediated Karma grinding.
Then the "cops" had to become Dread Lords just to keep out the unwanted griefer elements. I spent quite some time as a Dread Lord for merely defending miners and reagent farmers from griefers. I will agree the title had some clout though, as even some of the tougher PKs would flee upon seeing a Dread Lord show up and kill two of them in a second, even being fully aware that by doing that he'd pretty much shot his wad.
That still didn't produce too significant of a power divide. There were always the asshats with a maxed-out magic resist, but they were usually not that resistant to deadly poison or a crossbow bolt to the face.
I had that too in the Seattle area on Comcast's cable setup. It was nice being able to run down two horsebacked PKs on foot and kill them with your miner, then return to mining.
the only people who really miss pre-trammel UO are the killers
...And the cops... and the people who want something more out of an MMO other than endless grinding and football matches (organized pvp).
There was something to be said for actually entering a world which contained some vague simulation of real danger and some consequence for failure. It's true that pre-Trammel UO was extremely unfriendly at the entrance to the learning curve, but someone who was actually interested in a challenge could thrive in UO either despite or because of the constant predation. It drove the in-game economy for the "sheep" as you put it. It made a niche for those people who kept the griefers under control. It allowed for interesting social constructions like bounties (although the in-game bounty system was useless, far better when dealt with informally by players).
More to the point, it made you value what you had more and be less interested in minmaxing your equipment when it could go away at any time. The things you had were ones you worked hard to get and fought hard to keep. It made the uncontrolled and unguarded (by players or NPC) areas more lively. Contrast the Darkness Falls from Dark Age of Camelot to any other dungeon in the game and you'll see the one with unregulated PVP that you had to fight hard to keep out of the hands of your enemies was more populated.
Finally, there are other forms of griefing than just killing people and not letting them get their stuff. Annoyance tactics and social griefing is far more disruptive than PVP ever was. UO had a rather expedient way of dealing with that - if somebody was really annoying you and the people around you, you cut their head off and sold it at the bank on a vendor.
I played for 2-3 years as a "local militiaman" for the largest player-run city in UO (at the time) during my days off from work (I worked a 14 hour graveyard shift 4 days a week). It was considerably more personally rewarding than any subsequent PVP or PVM-based game I've yet seen.