I didn't say you had no control over it, but even if you take action to correct the things that are affecting your happiness, they are still external factors. If my job sucks, then I'm probably going to be stressed and in a bad mood more often than not. Yes, finding a new job makes me happier, but at the same time that doesn't mean that I was the cause of my own unhappiness.
In other words, there's a difference between unhappiness being your fault, and being your responsibility. In most cases, my unhappiness wasn't my fault, but it was my responsibility to correct it.
I can think of only two situations in which my unhappiness was my fault. The first I fixed by dropping religion. The second I fixed by learning not to give so much of a crap about sex and dating (and ignore people who told me that they were super important).
Um, you speak as if I haven't taken care of things. In the past, I've changed jobs, cut communications with friends who are poisonous, and moved from areas that negatively affect me. You are projecting some kind of... image on me, that is pretty far off base.
And yes, you do have control over your surroundings, but that's quite different than the old laughable adage that "happiness comes from within." I'm a lot happier when I identify things that are stressing me (which are almost invariably external) and deal with them.
Oh and I think you'd find I'm a pretty good friend. I go pretty damn far out of my way for my friends. I just don't tolerate people treating me like shit and then using the word "friend" as an excuse.
At any rate, you can keep your condescending advice. I, in no way, shape, or form, implied that I had problems with my life or happiness, or that I needed to "get ahead" (I'm doing quite well, thank you). I only stated that a lot of peoples unhappiness does genuinely come from external sources, despite the "common wisdom." You took that as an excuse to look down on me. Try not to jump to conclusions next time.
In chess, you learn something in the context of the game, just like WoW. And I think you completely underestimate the amount of rote memorization involved in chess as well (a lot of players will memorize playbooks). There is a lot of rote memorization in WoW, but you also have to be able to adapt based on the knowledge you build of your skills. Its like chess in that regard.
So, since chess apparently teaches you something "real," what are the real-world practical uses for that chess knowledge?
Yeah, I've pretty much learned to ignore anyone who claims that "happiness comes from within" or that "your problems are internal." I mean, there are some cases where they are, but in most cases they're because of a shitty job, shitty friends, shitty location, or other shittiness.
In short, he's saying that we can't just drop coal and switch over to alternate sources at the drop of the hat, and we can't make other countries do so, so investing in carbon sequestering technologies is necessary. It seems like a perfectly reasonable position. I don't support coal, and greatly support wind, solar, and nuclear (in that order), but I can't reasonably expect our entire power infrastructure to switch over in years, much less decades.
Re:Who gives a shit about twitter?
on
Twitter On Scala
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· Score: 1
What? How can it have been around for 12 years, still be relatively unused and obscure (compare it to C, C++, Java, C#, Python, Perl, and PHP), and yet be one of the fastest growing languages around? Java is close to 14 years old, and is an order of magnitude more used. C# is less than 12 years old, and likewise is far more used. Twitter is the only project that I personally know of that uses it. Am I missing something?
The funny thing is that its nearly impossible to prove the negative of "they just haven't been aware of the infection on their machine!" Your Linux box has a secret virus that only a few people know about, and has managed to hide itself so well you don't even realize you have it! Prove I'm wrong. How are you going to do that? I suppose you could run anti-virus, at which point I could say that your anti-virus just doesn't know about it. You could do checksums, until I say that it uses a weakness in the algorithm to make sure that it has the same checksum as the affected.
To prove a system - any system - virus free involves a massive amount of effort auditing the files, code, and underlying firmware. And pretty much every Linux admin out there does not go through that kind of effort. Their claims of being virus free are due to the fact of very few un-patched exploits, next-to-no in-the-wild viruses, and the fact that no suspicious activity is detected. In much the same way, I can be reasonably sure that my Windows machines aren't infected by viruses, despite not running a virus checker. If I keep my patches up to date, don't run unknown binaries, don't observe any unexpected behavior, and see no unexpected network traffic, I can be reasonably sure that my machine is not infected.
Its not impossible, as I have done it. And yes, this has been tested. Several times. I've had friends and techs come around with bootable virus-check disks just itching to prove me wrong, and walking away empty handed. So, you're wrong. You can be virus free on Windows without a virus checker. It just takes due-diligence.
I don't know. I disagreed with a lot of Paul's policies, but at the very least he seemed to be consistent and honest. And he had the stones to cast a politically unpopular vote if he felt it was the right thing to do. I'm thinking of voting against Rosa Park's medal on the premise that it was not the federal governments job to do that sort of thing, which resulted in him being painted as a racist by some.
I haven't played Killzone 2 or Resistance 2, but they're generally considered to be fun games as well as being pretty. So what makes Nexuiz more fun than either of these games? Because if your game looks half-assed you're going to have to have something in the terms of gameplay to show for it.
Based on the discussion and the website, the game appears to be altogether unimaginative and derivative. So what makes this special?
All things being equal, a games graphics - in both engine features and art direction - will add to its quality. If you offer two identical games, one with poor graphics and one with good, then the vast majority of people will pick the game with the good graphics. I'd be willing to bet that most of them would think that the one with good graphics is more fun. Humans like aesthetically pleasing things: go to any bar or art gallery if you don't believe me. Graphics do add to enjoyment.
On the flip-side, gameplay is far more important than graphics, yes. But the unspoken expectation is that if you have sub-par graphics, then you have to bring something new and interesting to the gameplay table. So what does this game bring? No-one has pointed out any features that could excuse the lackluster graphics. Why should I spend time with it when there are commercial games doing new things gameplay wise and graphic wise? Because its Foss?
The summary bills its "impressive graphics." The graphics aren't impressive. That was the poster's point.
I can't speak to Killzone 2, but I hear its actually fun too, y'know? I know its the trendy thing to pretend that indie/hobby games are these fonts of pure fun and creativity, while commercial games are stagnant wastes of boring-but-pretty snore-fests, but that's actually not really the case. You *can* have a game that's fun and pretty too.
Because you can have a game that is fun and has good graphics too. Some games are more fun because they have better graphics (better atmosphere, more varied enemies, etc). This is a just-released game, so it doesn't get to play the old-game card. Furthermore, the summary throws in a line about its "impressive graphics," of which they are anything but.
Is it fun? Maybe. I haven't played it, but the screenshots sure don't portray it as anything special. But there are plenty of games out there right now that are fun *and* also focus on delivering visual polish along with the gameplay polish. I don't have to compromise, so why should I?
Plus, in my experience, there's a difference between low-tech graphics and unpolished graphics. You can take a graphically inferior engine or game and still put effort into it to make it look polished. Plenty of games on XBox Live manage this. The game in the article doesn't. All things being equal, I find that when a game doesn't put effort into the graphics, that they usually aren't fun either. Having graphics that look thrown-together usually means that the game feels thrown together game-play wise as well.
Anyway, the constant drumming of "Graphics don't matter, only gameplay!" is getting tired. There's tons of games out there vying for my attention, and if they want it then they have to deliver a product thats at least as good as others out there. You can do it with innovative gameplay (Portal), appeals to nostalgia (Mega Man 9), or just a fun and polished experience (Call of Duty 4). Throwing out a graphical turd that has no obvious gameplay innovations, with the sole selling point of being Free software... well that isn't going to cut it.
It should be noted that none of this supports the claims of the OP though, that they could get a comparable box for $200. I'd like to see him piece together something for that price, because I'd drop that money in a second if he really could.
Tall buildings in general kill birds, and cities are particularly bad. There was a push back when I lived in Chicago to turn off lights in buildings to mitigate the impact on migratory bird populations.
Its impossible to live without having an effect on your environment. We should be weighing the costs and benefits of our impact rather than chasing the impossible dream of zero-impact. A few extra birds killed per month is an acceptable trade-off for renewable energy.
I just did a web search for a Dell with an S-Video output and came up with the Dell Inspiron 530s Desktop PC. A lot of laptops come with dongles for s-video. You can also buy pre-built Media PCs. Yes, its not ubiquitous, but its not terribly uncommon either.
There's plenty of cheap graphics cards (including integrated) out there with S-video out. You can also find composite out and HDMI. DVI-to-HDMI + optical audio is available.
Well I guess it could technically be considered from this decade, but only just barely. It doesn't quite reach the level of a PS2 launch title in terms of polish, but its putting out graphics that probably couldn't be done on the PS1. Can't tell much about gameplay from just screenshots, but it looks woefully generic.
Not a game a lot of people would be interested in playing. Let me know if there's any games that can reach current-generation (at least Wii level) polish, or an innovative concept that can excuse a lack thereof.
No, you're not. Speaking as a heavy user, those who use more of the bandwidth should pay more. My grandparents, who only use email, should not have to pay the same price as me, who regularly streams video and download games. The problem is that the caps are too low, and the price for the caps are too high.
From my perspective, they are not designed to fairly charge people for their usage, but rather to stifle that usage altogether, so that you are forced into using their other services. 40 GB is simply not a reasonable cap if you are using the internet for your entertainment. Its reasonable from the company's perpective, because now instead of Netflix, you have to buy their cable package and use their on-demand service. You can't download video games anymore, so I guess you should just watch some good old cable tv, right?
Last I checked, these companies were still making good profit. They could re-invest some of that into infrastructure. They could charge fair caps. But they won't.
If you remember, this was the same damn thing that cause the net-neutrality movement. The same companies were pissed about Skype and YouTube cutting into their phone and cable businesses, and were looking for an excuse to throttle these so that you had to use the services they wanted you to use. This is the same thing, except this time they can frame the argument as "those pirates are screwing you over, so you should be happy about the limits."
How about "cue the Steam users?" Or the Hulu users? Or the PSN/Live users? Or the MSDN users? Or the FOSS users? In case you hadn't noticed, there are a plethora of perfectly legal ways to bust a 40 GB cap in a month. The problem is that a lot of these legal uses compete with the companies' other entertainment options. So they'll cap it so that the legit users can't get their entertainment from the 'tubes, then turn around and tell you that you shouldn't care because all those other guys were filthy pirates anyway.
If they actually gave a damn about your service quality, they'd be upgrading their network.
How about digital delivery? Steam, XBox Live Marketplace, and PSN? You can legally download original XBox and PS1 games through those networks, and plenty of games through Steam can top 5 GB by themselves.
Even 40 gb/month is ridiculous. Back at my old job, I could eat that up in a week using my MSDN subscription to set up a development workstation. Nowadays, I could churn through that in a month easily just playing around with FOSS, Hulu, YouTube, Skype, XBox Live/PSN downloads.
I really hope this doesn't become a trend. If all my ISP options switch to a cap, then my internet usage is going to take a dramatic hit. Of course, I'm sure that's what they want -- they'd rather me buy their cable TV and phone plans, rather than use IPTV and VOIP. And they'd rather have me entertain myself with their offerings rather than my XBox 360 or PS3.
In most of my professional experience, many of my coworkers were 35+. People older than that tended to migrate to management, but there are still some older programmers around. I've mostly worked for large corporations.
I worked on a team that paid Microsoft for support. I actually used it, and had them fix a problem (that I couldn't figure out via google and newsgroups). Of course, my boss commented that it was the first time Microsoft support had actually managed to fix a problem, so YMMV.
We also paid a premium for the privilege. But this was a product that generated enough revenue that the higher-ups paid a huge premium to have a Microsoft engineer come out and sit around while we were deploying certain SQL Server replication changes, just in case something went wrong.
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I didn't say you had no control over it, but even if you take action to correct the things that are affecting your happiness, they are still external factors. If my job sucks, then I'm probably going to be stressed and in a bad mood more often than not. Yes, finding a new job makes me happier, but at the same time that doesn't mean that I was the cause of my own unhappiness.
In other words, there's a difference between unhappiness being your fault, and being your responsibility. In most cases, my unhappiness wasn't my fault, but it was my responsibility to correct it.
I can think of only two situations in which my unhappiness was my fault. The first I fixed by dropping religion. The second I fixed by learning not to give so much of a crap about sex and dating (and ignore people who told me that they were super important).
Um, you speak as if I haven't taken care of things. In the past, I've changed jobs, cut communications with friends who are poisonous, and moved from areas that negatively affect me. You are projecting some kind of... image on me, that is pretty far off base.
And yes, you do have control over your surroundings, but that's quite different than the old laughable adage that "happiness comes from within." I'm a lot happier when I identify things that are stressing me (which are almost invariably external) and deal with them.
Oh and I think you'd find I'm a pretty good friend. I go pretty damn far out of my way for my friends. I just don't tolerate people treating me like shit and then using the word "friend" as an excuse.
At any rate, you can keep your condescending advice. I, in no way, shape, or form, implied that I had problems with my life or happiness, or that I needed to "get ahead" (I'm doing quite well, thank you). I only stated that a lot of peoples unhappiness does genuinely come from external sources, despite the "common wisdom." You took that as an excuse to look down on me. Try not to jump to conclusions next time.
In chess, you learn something in the context of the game, just like WoW. And I think you completely underestimate the amount of rote memorization involved in chess as well (a lot of players will memorize playbooks). There is a lot of rote memorization in WoW, but you also have to be able to adapt based on the knowledge you build of your skills. Its like chess in that regard.
So, since chess apparently teaches you something "real," what are the real-world practical uses for that chess knowledge?
Yeah, I've pretty much learned to ignore anyone who claims that "happiness comes from within" or that "your problems are internal." I mean, there are some cases where they are, but in most cases they're because of a shitty job, shitty friends, shitty location, or other shittiness.
In short, he's saying that we can't just drop coal and switch over to alternate sources at the drop of the hat, and we can't make other countries do so, so investing in carbon sequestering technologies is necessary. It seems like a perfectly reasonable position. I don't support coal, and greatly support wind, solar, and nuclear (in that order), but I can't reasonably expect our entire power infrastructure to switch over in years, much less decades.
What? How can it have been around for 12 years, still be relatively unused and obscure (compare it to C, C++, Java, C#, Python, Perl, and PHP), and yet be one of the fastest growing languages around? Java is close to 14 years old, and is an order of magnitude more used. C# is less than 12 years old, and likewise is far more used. Twitter is the only project that I personally know of that uses it. Am I missing something?
The funny thing is that its nearly impossible to prove the negative of "they just haven't been aware of the infection on their machine!" Your Linux box has a secret virus that only a few people know about, and has managed to hide itself so well you don't even realize you have it! Prove I'm wrong. How are you going to do that? I suppose you could run anti-virus, at which point I could say that your anti-virus just doesn't know about it. You could do checksums, until I say that it uses a weakness in the algorithm to make sure that it has the same checksum as the affected.
To prove a system - any system - virus free involves a massive amount of effort auditing the files, code, and underlying firmware. And pretty much every Linux admin out there does not go through that kind of effort. Their claims of being virus free are due to the fact of very few un-patched exploits, next-to-no in-the-wild viruses, and the fact that no suspicious activity is detected. In much the same way, I can be reasonably sure that my Windows machines aren't infected by viruses, despite not running a virus checker. If I keep my patches up to date, don't run unknown binaries, don't observe any unexpected behavior, and see no unexpected network traffic, I can be reasonably sure that my machine is not infected.
Its not impossible, as I have done it. And yes, this has been tested. Several times. I've had friends and techs come around with bootable virus-check disks just itching to prove me wrong, and walking away empty handed. So, you're wrong. You can be virus free on Windows without a virus checker. It just takes due-diligence.
I don't know. I disagreed with a lot of Paul's policies, but at the very least he seemed to be consistent and honest. And he had the stones to cast a politically unpopular vote if he felt it was the right thing to do. I'm thinking of voting against Rosa Park's medal on the premise that it was not the federal governments job to do that sort of thing, which resulted in him being painted as a racist by some.
God that just never gets old.
I haven't played Killzone 2 or Resistance 2, but they're generally considered to be fun games as well as being pretty. So what makes Nexuiz more fun than either of these games? Because if your game looks half-assed you're going to have to have something in the terms of gameplay to show for it.
Based on the discussion and the website, the game appears to be altogether unimaginative and derivative. So what makes this special?
All things being equal, a games graphics - in both engine features and art direction - will add to its quality. If you offer two identical games, one with poor graphics and one with good, then the vast majority of people will pick the game with the good graphics. I'd be willing to bet that most of them would think that the one with good graphics is more fun. Humans like aesthetically pleasing things: go to any bar or art gallery if you don't believe me. Graphics do add to enjoyment.
On the flip-side, gameplay is far more important than graphics, yes. But the unspoken expectation is that if you have sub-par graphics, then you have to bring something new and interesting to the gameplay table. So what does this game bring? No-one has pointed out any features that could excuse the lackluster graphics. Why should I spend time with it when there are commercial games doing new things gameplay wise and graphic wise? Because its Foss?
Bullshit. You either haven't played any recent *good* commercial games or you have the rose-colored glasses on with regards to indie games.
The summary bills its "impressive graphics." The graphics aren't impressive. That was the poster's point.
I can't speak to Killzone 2, but I hear its actually fun too, y'know? I know its the trendy thing to pretend that indie/hobby games are these fonts of pure fun and creativity, while commercial games are stagnant wastes of boring-but-pretty snore-fests, but that's actually not really the case. You *can* have a game that's fun and pretty too.
Because you can have a game that is fun and has good graphics too. Some games are more fun because they have better graphics (better atmosphere, more varied enemies, etc). This is a just-released game, so it doesn't get to play the old-game card. Furthermore, the summary throws in a line about its "impressive graphics," of which they are anything but.
Is it fun? Maybe. I haven't played it, but the screenshots sure don't portray it as anything special. But there are plenty of games out there right now that are fun *and* also focus on delivering visual polish along with the gameplay polish. I don't have to compromise, so why should I?
Plus, in my experience, there's a difference between low-tech graphics and unpolished graphics. You can take a graphically inferior engine or game and still put effort into it to make it look polished. Plenty of games on XBox Live manage this. The game in the article doesn't. All things being equal, I find that when a game doesn't put effort into the graphics, that they usually aren't fun either. Having graphics that look thrown-together usually means that the game feels thrown together game-play wise as well.
Anyway, the constant drumming of "Graphics don't matter, only gameplay!" is getting tired. There's tons of games out there vying for my attention, and if they want it then they have to deliver a product thats at least as good as others out there. You can do it with innovative gameplay (Portal), appeals to nostalgia (Mega Man 9), or just a fun and polished experience (Call of Duty 4). Throwing out a graphical turd that has no obvious gameplay innovations, with the sole selling point of being Free software... well that isn't going to cut it.
It should be noted that none of this supports the claims of the OP though, that they could get a comparable box for $200. I'd like to see him piece together something for that price, because I'd drop that money in a second if he really could.
I agree.
Tall buildings in general kill birds, and cities are particularly bad. There was a push back when I lived in Chicago to turn off lights in buildings to mitigate the impact on migratory bird populations.
Its impossible to live without having an effect on your environment. We should be weighing the costs and benefits of our impact rather than chasing the impossible dream of zero-impact. A few extra birds killed per month is an acceptable trade-off for renewable energy.
I just did a web search for a Dell with an S-Video output and came up with the Dell Inspiron 530s Desktop PC. A lot of laptops come with dongles for s-video. You can also buy pre-built Media PCs. Yes, its not ubiquitous, but its not terribly uncommon either.
They should name it "Rapture."
There's plenty of cheap graphics cards (including integrated) out there with S-video out. You can also find composite out and HDMI. DVI-to-HDMI + optical audio is available.
Well I guess it could technically be considered from this decade, but only just barely. It doesn't quite reach the level of a PS2 launch title in terms of polish, but its putting out graphics that probably couldn't be done on the PS1. Can't tell much about gameplay from just screenshots, but it looks woefully generic.
Not a game a lot of people would be interested in playing. Let me know if there's any games that can reach current-generation (at least Wii level) polish, or an innovative concept that can excuse a lack thereof.
No, you're not. Speaking as a heavy user, those who use more of the bandwidth should pay more. My grandparents, who only use email, should not have to pay the same price as me, who regularly streams video and download games. The problem is that the caps are too low, and the price for the caps are too high.
From my perspective, they are not designed to fairly charge people for their usage, but rather to stifle that usage altogether, so that you are forced into using their other services. 40 GB is simply not a reasonable cap if you are using the internet for your entertainment. Its reasonable from the company's perpective, because now instead of Netflix, you have to buy their cable package and use their on-demand service. You can't download video games anymore, so I guess you should just watch some good old cable tv, right?
Last I checked, these companies were still making good profit. They could re-invest some of that into infrastructure. They could charge fair caps. But they won't.
If you remember, this was the same damn thing that cause the net-neutrality movement. The same companies were pissed about Skype and YouTube cutting into their phone and cable businesses, and were looking for an excuse to throttle these so that you had to use the services they wanted you to use. This is the same thing, except this time they can frame the argument as "those pirates are screwing you over, so you should be happy about the limits."
How about "cue the Steam users?" Or the Hulu users? Or the PSN/Live users? Or the MSDN users? Or the FOSS users? In case you hadn't noticed, there are a plethora of perfectly legal ways to bust a 40 GB cap in a month. The problem is that a lot of these legal uses compete with the companies' other entertainment options. So they'll cap it so that the legit users can't get their entertainment from the 'tubes, then turn around and tell you that you shouldn't care because all those other guys were filthy pirates anyway.
If they actually gave a damn about your service quality, they'd be upgrading their network.
How about digital delivery? Steam, XBox Live Marketplace, and PSN? You can legally download original XBox and PS1 games through those networks, and plenty of games through Steam can top 5 GB by themselves.
Even 40 gb/month is ridiculous. Back at my old job, I could eat that up in a week using my MSDN subscription to set up a development workstation. Nowadays, I could churn through that in a month easily just playing around with FOSS, Hulu, YouTube, Skype, XBox Live/PSN downloads.
I really hope this doesn't become a trend. If all my ISP options switch to a cap, then my internet usage is going to take a dramatic hit. Of course, I'm sure that's what they want -- they'd rather me buy their cable TV and phone plans, rather than use IPTV and VOIP. And they'd rather have me entertain myself with their offerings rather than my XBox 360 or PS3.
In most of my professional experience, many of my coworkers were 35+. People older than that tended to migrate to management, but there are still some older programmers around. I've mostly worked for large corporations.
I worked on a team that paid Microsoft for support. I actually used it, and had them fix a problem (that I couldn't figure out via google and newsgroups). Of course, my boss commented that it was the first time Microsoft support had actually managed to fix a problem, so YMMV.
We also paid a premium for the privilege. But this was a product that generated enough revenue that the higher-ups paid a huge premium to have a Microsoft engineer come out and sit around while we were deploying certain SQL Server replication changes, just in case something went wrong.