A more direct approach would be to use meta data to balance PVP.
I.e., if Alliance is winning, then "the powers that be" start lowering damage taken by Horde from Alliance. Start with 1% "handicap" and then increase it by 1% every day until the Alliance stops winning.
"Winning" is probably most simply stated as "death rate comparison" but Wow also has event pvp (capture the flag?) I think- so for those it would be "Event winner".
---
I've been running a custom FRP game since 1976. The same one continuously since 1988. At one point, I spread-sheeted out the damage done by all classes and determined that the base rules were fundamentally broken and set a metric "NPC Foe beats PC in 8 rounds, PC beats NPC in 7 rounds".
Despite all this, I recently realized that PVP was broken. When fighting Player character types who have the same classes as players, it was getting hard for either side to hit each other. The NPC armor classes were different than the PC's so the attack modifiers for the PC's were lower. The NPC attack modifiers were high, so the PC's armor was high.
---
The main way I nerf is to let the players "win" the content they are in, reduce XP slowly to zero and invalidate the "broken" content. Then I handle whatever the broken area was in the new content.
It always seemed to me that a good starting basis for defining evil was the lack of informed consent.
If a person wants another person to stick needles in them for hours, it's okay. If they don't, it's evil.
If a person wants to be tortured, it's okay. If they don't, it's evil.
---
However, there are some edge cases which present problems. If a person wants to be killed, is it okay? Sometimes yes-- sometimes, probably not?
If a person goes to war and is captured-- they don't want to be held captive-- but it's not evil.
---
If a person has all the food and everyone else is going to starve-- is it evil to take their food without their permission? What if taking that food means everyone dies but the one person would have lived otherwise?
--- Then there are the forced consent cases. I have food, you will die without it. I say, "Cut off your hand and you get food".
---
I agree with the person who said artists are evil. They create a lot of ways to torment and destroy people and put them out there for potentially evil people to see and use. People who would have done nothing because they didn't have a way to express themselves. But after seeing, "SAW", now they have a dream.
I can see the car thing-- it's also like buying a house and being required to accept the "standard" tile floors.
The builder will usually let you say, "I don't want you to put in a tile floor" and give you a credit for a few hundred bucks.
But the government doesn't usually get involved and force the builder to do this.
While I would like to see the lenovo get stuck emotionally, I'd say on principle that the best option is to leave them alone and let the market decide by buying from vendors who support blank hardware / alternate O/S options.
Yes yes yes. Just spent 5 hours trying to move some software-- it required a new form to approve the move. The new form didn't have the software on the list. the target group said ' no filled out form - no move '.
You are so dead on about the over/under estimation issue. We have exactly the same problem.
Nah. Much better to push a microsoft tax onto the company via lawsuits. Then they will feel the pain and make refunds a standard policy. Lots and lots of lawsuits even better.
When we used to do them, the first one would take about 3 weeks to set up-- and the rest about 3 hours each.
The costs are doubled (or more) if it is a high availability project- because then the same hardware/software are duplicated at both sites. More if mirroring is required.
Outsourcing to IBM has lead to a 30 to 60 day lead time.
No BS.
To make a change to the software, they need to allocate resources away from all the other companies we are sharing the resources with.
To get new hardware requires 60 days after they get an approved PR. And the cost of setting up that hardware is incredible. $14,000 for a server for example-- more than the cost of the hardware.
Main reasons we do it... Sarbanes Oxley (sp?) and Disaster Recovery. If our corporate office is wiped out, we keep going. If IBM site 1 is knocked down, we keep going. If IBM Site 2 is knocked down- we keep going. Sites 1 & 2 are in very stable, very safe areas of the country.
But our productivity has gone to hell and our costs have skyrocketed.
And YET--- it's cast as a "savings" in the annual reports. Really laughable.
When executives set the rules, they *ALWAYS* make their goals.
It wasn't driven by the police but by the couple or the girlfriend. There was no complaint against the boyfriend tho. They weren't trying to extort money so it just seemed very odd and horrible. Maybe the girl changed her mind later and the boyfriend sided with her. Who knows how it went from party girl to nightmare.
It's always been my impression that if you go out drinking and agree to have sex and don't say "no" at some point during it, then there is no complaint. I'd never heard different until this incident in Louisiana.
And if one of the participants looks 21, is in a bar that serves alchohol, had a legitimate looking id, and is actually 17-- then what?
It's happened recently -- in the news in the last couple months.
The guy was screwed since he was over 19. Statutory rape.
---
Even more horrifically, a bud of mine went to new orleans. Had sex with a girl AND her boyfriend in a three way.
Turns out she had had a drink--- which apparently means she wasn't legally competent to consent in louisiana. Even tho she was probably blowing a.04 or less.
He finally got out of it. After losing his job, spending a lot of money on a lawyer.
I'd have fallen for the same thing- she was pretty and enthusiastic the night it happened apparently.
I will probably never go to New Orleans again in my life. Or I'll bring a breathalyzer.:-)
No, the officers are not the owners. The shareholders are the owners. Often the officers who loot the companies own way less than 1% (way less) of the companies.
Most often, if the money to be recovered 70 years later is significant, the corporation simply goes bankrupt or worse, structures the liabilities to another corporate structure which then goes bankrupt.
But I agree, they do get dinged sometimes.
Small businesses are owned by the person-- if they are owned by investors, then yes- unscrupulous folks do ride them to death and then find more suckers to invest in the next company.
And the problem with corporations lately is that the officers seem to have realized that if they structure their pay so that they get several lifetime's worth of pay, then they are legally protected when the corporation fails and reneges on cleaning up toxic waste/paying pensions/taxes due on incomes, etc.
I suspect that what they are doing is a form of fraud, but they've figured out a way to phrase it so they can't be legally prosecuted for it.
Look at all the "bankrupt" financial firms-- some of whom are paying more in salary than they made in profits.
Copyright was created so people would create items which would enter the public domain.
Not so people who create things would get paid.
Corporations were created so people could safely run a business with limited liability-- so society would benefit by having those types of businesses exist.
Both have been corrupted.
When neither benefit society any more but only small groups of people-- it's time for society to eliminate them and create new rules.
Underlying every law is an attempt to manage hobbe's leviathan-- if you screw enough with people, they will rise up and take your stuff and kill you.
The upper class inevitably loses sight of this fact and eventually overdoes it tho it may take a long time (re: North Korea for example).
the Corporate structure was created to benefit society (just like copyright).
however, they have become extremely adept at hiding their true cost by externalizing costs to the rest of society.
I.e. health care for Walmart, Security for Oil Companies (if they had to pay $3 trillion to defend their oil directly-- how much would oil cost per barrel-- that true cost is hidden in our taxes), etc.
Cloud computing is doing nothing different in this regard.
We pay for the power setup, the roads, the police force-- they pay none of these costs. So whatever cloud computing's true costs are remain hidden.
Never make a deal with management or a corporation that involves cost to you today in return for profit in the future-- they will always renege at that point (be it pensions, promised future taxes or jobs, etc.).
In Openoffice, these options were properly moved to the Format menu option. It was a little jarring for me at first-- but it made sense so I got used to it very quickly. Having the page setup options on the file menu was always kinda goofy and really a historical holdover.
Then microsoft did the ribbon thing and it is *unbelievably* painful-- it's been 7 or 8 months and I still don't have full productivity back and I stumble on certain things that were easy to do before. They changed too much all at the same time. And some of their choices seem goofy (like the insert ribbon lacking some insert actions because they are formatting options-- solution- put them in both places perhaps.).
2) It gives a false sense of security to parents. They warn their kids to stay away from the guy who GOT CAUGHT [streaking, peeing in public, having sex with his girlfriend, having sex at night in a park], when there's probably three other pervs in the area who never have been [and 20 other people who are not pervs but given a little privacy and some booze would get involved with a 17 year old pool boy or friend's daughter].
There are sick people who can only connect with 12 year olds, and then there are normal people who under the right circumstances will get involved with anyone who is interested in them. Lolita is not an entirely fictional trend and since we are wired to want to have babies with 16 year olds, having one come on strong to you when she is fully developed (or whatever the equivalent is for women and 16 year old boys) is a dangerous situation given a few months for it to develop. People get caught *all the time* when they know it is dangerous
Managers are usually not oriented towards your work. They are usually acting as a worker bee for someone way above them.
Also, when I moved from programmer into management, I was amazed at the amount of sausage making that we protect the developers from. Projects that are high priority- yet canceled without ever wasting your time.
Plus a lot of coordination and orchestration.
A good manager frees their developers to get work done and shields them from a lot of inane executive requests.
I let my guys work the schedule they want but hold them to project deliverables and have regular status checkups.
I prefer iterative project management over waterfall methodology.
Left to themselves, programmers will grossly over/under estimate the time it takes for a project. Based on this, over time I build a factor of an individual programmers over/under estimation and apply it to their estimates. It works amazingly well.
Work should be timeboxed too. Produce a working deliverable by time "X". If some feature can't be finished in that time- then it goes to the next timebox. All "risk" features which must work for the project to work must be addressed before easy work is started.
Risks are mostly new technologies that the vendor assures you will work but may not.
And one of the later points not only addressed this slashdot post but also went further with evidence that wealth produces boys and poverty produces girls.
"Ugly" people today are very attractive people who are made up to not be perfect.
As late as the 1950's, a lot of unique looking people were in movies and television.
Now they are all a bit generic.
---
I don't think the theory is unreasonable... but most evolutionary pressures take many generations to take place so this would have to have started back before the 1100's.
---
New laws have been passed that make marrying very hazardous to your financial health. Having children even more so (with a 50/50 shot of seeing your kid 6 days a month and having no real say in their raising).
Against that, three very pretty ladies I knew who were strippers had 4+ children each (and collectively they gave up 5 children for adoption). So pretty/likes to have unprotected sex seems to be a combination. They all loved children and mourned having to give them up for adoption so that sort of fits the theory. It could be a complex of randyness combined with beauty. All three had super high sex drives too.
---
A lot of children tested for paternity are shown to have a different father-- presumably more attractive in more cases than not.
There was an extended period last year where official sites were displaying warnings. I knew the sites were good... It was odd but I guess they failed to update and the certificates expired.
Slashdot Mirror
A more direct approach would be to use meta data to balance PVP.
I.e., if Alliance is winning, then "the powers that be" start lowering damage taken by Horde from Alliance. Start with 1% "handicap" and then increase it by 1% every day until the Alliance stops winning.
"Winning" is probably most simply stated as "death rate comparison" but Wow also has event pvp (capture the flag?) I think- so for those it would be "Event winner".
---
I've been running a custom FRP game since 1976. The same one continuously since 1988. At one point, I spread-sheeted out the damage done by all classes and determined that the base rules were fundamentally broken and set a metric "NPC Foe beats PC in 8 rounds, PC beats NPC in 7 rounds".
Despite all this, I recently realized that PVP was broken. When fighting Player character types who have the same classes as players, it was getting hard for either side to hit each other. The NPC armor classes were different than the PC's so the attack modifiers for the PC's were lower. The NPC attack modifiers were high, so the PC's armor was high.
---
The main way I nerf is to let the players "win" the content they are in, reduce XP slowly to zero and invalidate the "broken" content. Then I handle whatever the broken area was in the new content.
No.
It's the difference between reason and emotion.
Emotionally, I agree with you.
However, logic lead me to the conclusion in my post after my first emotional post.
America was founded on reason and did quite well with it for a long time. Mob Rule would not have done nearly so well.
I agree that the market isn't fair and corporations have probably passed the point where they benefit society however.
It always seemed to me that a good starting basis for defining evil was the lack of informed consent.
If a person wants another person to stick needles in them for hours, it's okay.
If they don't, it's evil.
If a person wants to be tortured, it's okay.
If they don't, it's evil.
---
However, there are some edge cases which present problems.
If a person wants to be killed, is it okay?
Sometimes yes-- sometimes, probably not?
If a person goes to war and is captured-- they don't want to be held captive-- but it's not evil.
---
If a person has all the food and everyone else is going to starve-- is it evil to take their food without their permission?
What if taking that food means everyone dies but the one person would have lived otherwise?
---
Then there are the forced consent cases.
I have food, you will die without it. I say, "Cut off your hand and you get food".
---
I agree with the person who said artists are evil. They create a lot of ways to torment and destroy people and put them out there for potentially evil people to see and use. People who would have done nothing because they didn't have a way to express themselves. But after seeing, "SAW", now they have a dream.
I can see the car thing-- it's also like buying a house and being required to accept the "standard" tile floors.
The builder will usually let you say, "I don't want you to put in a tile floor" and give you a credit for a few hundred bucks.
But the government doesn't usually get involved and force the builder to do this.
While I would like to see the lenovo get stuck emotionally, I'd say on principle that the best option is to leave them alone and let the market decide by buying from vendors who support blank hardware / alternate O/S options.
Do you work at my place?
Sheesh. Sounds sooooo similar.
Yes yes yes. Just spent 5 hours trying to move some software-- it required a new form to approve the move. The new form didn't have the software on the list. the target group said ' no filled out form - no move '.
You are so dead on about the over/under estimation issue. We have exactly the same problem.
Yes-- my point was, $14,000 to set up a $10,000 piece of hardware.
For anything bigger, we don't use PC's. We use unix boxes or as/400's.
Nah.
Much better to push a microsoft tax onto the company via lawsuits.
Then they will feel the pain and make refunds a standard policy.
Lots and lots of lawsuits even better.
The servers are mid-high end stuff-- about $10k.
When we used to do them, the first one would take about 3 weeks to set up-- and the rest about 3 hours each.
The costs are doubled (or more) if it is a high availability project- because then the same hardware/software are duplicated at both sites. More if mirroring is required.
OH.. the number of times our main office was taken out in the 30 years prior to outsourcing to IBM?
None.
But... it's safer if that 1/500 odds mega disaster hits our area.
Outsourcing to IBM has lead to a 30 to 60 day lead time.
No BS.
To make a change to the software, they need to allocate resources away from all the other companies we are sharing the resources with.
To get new hardware requires 60 days after they get an approved PR. And the cost of setting up that hardware is incredible. $14,000 for a server for example-- more than the cost of the hardware.
Main reasons we do it... Sarbanes Oxley (sp?) and Disaster Recovery. If our corporate office is wiped out, we keep going. If IBM site 1 is knocked down, we keep going. If IBM Site 2 is knocked down- we keep going. Sites 1 & 2 are in very stable, very safe areas of the country.
But our productivity has gone to hell and our costs have skyrocketed.
And YET--- it's cast as a "savings" in the annual reports. Really laughable.
When executives set the rules, they *ALWAYS* make their goals.
It wasn't driven by the police but by the couple or the girlfriend. There was no complaint against the boyfriend tho. They weren't trying to extort money so it just seemed very odd and horrible. Maybe the girl changed her mind later and the boyfriend sided with her. Who knows how it went from party girl to nightmare.
It's always been my impression that if you go out drinking and agree to have sex and don't say "no" at some point during it, then there is no complaint. I'd never heard different until this incident in Louisiana.
And if one of the participants looks 21, is in a bar that serves alchohol, had a legitimate looking id, and is actually 17-- then what?
It's happened recently -- in the news in the last couple months.
The guy was screwed since he was over 19. Statutory rape.
---
Even more horrifically, a bud of mine went to new orleans.
Had sex with a girl AND her boyfriend in a three way.
Turns out she had had a drink--- which apparently means she wasn't legally competent to consent in louisiana. Even tho she was probably blowing a .04 or less.
He finally got out of it. After losing his job, spending a lot of money on a lawyer.
I'd have fallen for the same thing- she was pretty and enthusiastic the night it happened apparently.
I will probably never go to New Orleans again in my life. Or I'll bring a breathalyzer. :-)
No, the officers are not the owners.
The shareholders are the owners.
Often the officers who loot the companies own way less than 1% (way less) of the companies.
Most often, if the money to be recovered 70 years later is significant, the corporation simply goes bankrupt or worse, structures the liabilities to another corporate structure which then goes bankrupt.
But I agree, they do get dinged sometimes.
Small businesses are owned by the person-- if they are owned by investors, then yes- unscrupulous folks do ride them to death and then find more suckers to invest in the next company.
And the problem with corporations lately is that the officers seem to have realized that if they structure their pay so that they get several lifetime's worth of pay, then they are legally protected when the corporation fails and reneges on cleaning up toxic waste/paying pensions/taxes due on incomes, etc.
I suspect that what they are doing is a form of fraud, but they've figured out a way to phrase it so they can't be legally prosecuted for it.
Look at all the "bankrupt" financial firms-- some of whom are paying more in salary than they made in profits.
Copyright was created so people would create items which would enter the public domain.
Not so people who create things would get paid.
Corporations were created so people could safely run a business with limited liability-- so society would benefit by having those types of businesses exist.
Both have been corrupted.
When neither benefit society any more but only small groups of people-- it's time for society to eliminate them and create new rules.
Underlying every law is an attempt to manage hobbe's leviathan-- if you screw enough with people, they will rise up and take your stuff and kill you.
The upper class inevitably loses sight of this fact and eventually overdoes it tho it may take a long time (re: North Korea for example).
It's what they do.
the Corporate structure was created to benefit society (just like copyright).
however, they have become extremely adept at hiding their true cost by externalizing costs to the rest of society.
I.e. health care for Walmart, Security for Oil Companies (if they had to pay $3 trillion to defend their oil directly-- how much would oil cost per barrel-- that true cost is hidden in our taxes), etc.
Cloud computing is doing nothing different in this regard.
We pay for the power setup, the roads, the police force-- they pay none of these costs. So whatever cloud computing's true costs are remain hidden.
Never make a deal with management or a corporation that involves cost to you today in return for profit in the future-- they will always renege at that point (be it pensions, promised future taxes or jobs, etc.).
The page setup option (where you format the page size, paper, and margins) was on the same menu tree as the file menu in word 1995, 98, 2000, 2003.
screen shot here-- of a the classic file menu recreated by a new program addon to word 2007.
http://www.technixupdate.com/add-old-word-2003-classic-menu-layout-to-word-2007/
In Openoffice, these options were properly moved to the Format menu option. It was a little jarring for me at first-- but it made sense so I got used to it very quickly. Having the page setup options on the file menu was always kinda goofy and really a historical holdover.
Then microsoft did the ribbon thing and it is *unbelievably* painful-- it's been 7 or 8 months and I still don't have full productivity back and I stumble on certain things that were easy to do before. They changed too much all at the same time. And some of their choices seem goofy (like the insert ribbon lacking some insert actions because they are formatting options-- solution- put them in both places perhaps.).
open source projects which have no assets will be judgement proof.
the code will morph to a different set of supporters.
you do not want to be a wealthy person hacking on the software however.
Openoffice and others put formatting commands under "format" which were under the "File" menu in Word.
A couple years later, we get the ribbon which is meant to group similar commands under one place.
Now, Openoffice is reacting to the ribbon.
2) It gives a false sense of security to parents. They warn their kids to stay away from the guy who GOT CAUGHT [streaking, peeing in public, having sex with his girlfriend, having sex at night in a park], when there's probably three other pervs in the area who never have been [and 20 other people who are not pervs but given a little privacy and some booze would get involved with a 17 year old pool boy or friend's daughter].
There are sick people who can only connect with 12 year olds, and then there are normal people who under the right circumstances will get involved with anyone who is interested in them. Lolita is not an entirely fictional trend and since we are wired to want to have babies with 16 year olds, having one come on strong to you when she is fully developed (or whatever the equivalent is for women and 16 year old boys) is a dangerous situation given a few months for it to develop. People get caught *all the time* when they know it is dangerous
Managers are usually not oriented towards your work.
They are usually acting as a worker bee for someone way above them.
Also, when I moved from programmer into management, I was amazed at the amount of sausage making that we protect the developers from.
Projects that are high priority- yet canceled without ever wasting your time.
Plus a lot of coordination and orchestration.
A good manager frees their developers to get work done and shields them from a lot of inane executive requests.
I schedule meetings for late in the day.
I let my guys work the schedule they want but hold them to project deliverables and have regular status checkups.
I prefer iterative project management over waterfall methodology.
Left to themselves, programmers will grossly over/under estimate the time it takes for a project.
Based on this, over time I build a factor of an individual programmers over/under estimation and apply it to their estimates.
It works amazingly well.
Work should be timeboxed too. Produce a working deliverable by time "X". If some feature can't be finished in that time- then it goes to the next timebox. All "risk" features which must work for the project to work must be addressed before easy work is started.
Risks are mostly new technologies that the vendor assures you will work but may not.
Awesome article.
And one of the later points not only addressed this slashdot post but also went further with evidence that wealth produces boys and poverty produces girls.
Consider movies from the 1930's and movies today.
"Ugly" people today are very attractive people who are made up to not be perfect.
As late as the 1950's, a lot of unique looking people were in movies and television.
Now they are all a bit generic.
---
I don't think the theory is unreasonable... but most evolutionary pressures take many generations to take place so this would have to have started back before the 1100's.
---
New laws have been passed that make marrying very hazardous to your financial health. Having children even more so (with a 50/50 shot of seeing your kid 6 days a month and having no real say in their raising).
Against that, three very pretty ladies I knew who were strippers had 4+ children each (and collectively they gave up 5 children for adoption).
So pretty/likes to have unprotected sex seems to be a combination. They all loved children and mourned having to give them up for adoption so that sort of fits the theory. It could be a complex of randyness combined with beauty. All three had super high sex drives too.
---
A lot of children tested for paternity are shown to have a different father-- presumably more attractive in more cases than not.
There was an extended period last year where official sites were displaying warnings. I knew the sites were good...
It was odd but I guess they failed to update and the certificates expired.