Are you kidding me? I mean, do you really think that there will be many people who are paid to write for online publications that will say, "yeah, internet is the cause of rapid degradation of writing style" or something like that? Would this news even get published here if the authors concluded that internet sucks for writers?
Internet is bad for the quality of writing. Trying to type this goddamn message before the page gets swamped with other replies is one of many examples why. If you really think that 2-kilobyte blog entry, unedited and hyperliked all the way through is better than (or equal to) a real article, then you simply engage in groupthink.
Internet can be a conductor of good writing, of high-quality articles that rely on words (rather than pictures and hyperlinks) to conduct the meaning. It can be good for writing, but right not it is not. Right now it's mostly a source of fast-food writing where being quick and cheap is much more important than being meaningful and thoughtful.
I'm a gamer, so I offer you gaming media as an excellent example. Take some paper magazine from 10 years ago. Take some popular website now. Compare, see the difference.
I agree. In web development column-oriented storage is a way to go. I even tried to simulate stuff like that with PHP and MySQL, and it worked, but the maintenance of such databases was too difficult. The problem is, whenever you suggest that there might be something wrong with relational databases (for some application areas) there is always some smart-ass who accuses you of "not getting" it and promoting "outdated" hierarchical or network models. "ZOMG, u want to have efficient tree support with variable nodes? U r in teh stone age. We, on the other hand, are firmly rooted in 70s!"
I used to write for GameSpot. When we came across a game like this, we reviewers would tend to "lean" the score higher.... Games like BioShock keep the industry alive. So we would give them a little help.... We need to stop focusing on the [issues].
That is why I don't read GameSpot, IGN, GameSpy, etc. I want to read a magazine, not a goddamn PR paper that is written simply to keep the industry alive.
"Bla, bla, emoticons allow us to express feelings! Accept them, they are okay." What a bunch of crap. First of all, it implies that old-fashioned written language does not allow you to express emotions. That is simply wrong. Second, it assumes that emoticons do allow to express emotions. That is also wrong, albeit not obvious. They don't express anything, they merely describe it. There is a huge difference between sounding angry and saying "I am angry." Third, in its attempt to seem cool and "modern," NY Times forgot to mention that one of the primary reasons people use emoticons is that they allow to fake "feelings" without any effort or consequence. Put a smiley next to an insult and you are likely to get away with it due to ambiguity.
Fanboys are easy to spot nowadays. It's eithers "ZOMG, opinion, opinion, everything is an opinion; look how reasonable I am!" or "ZOMG, shut the hell up and be positive!".
ravenshrike is right; comparing F3 to Oblivion, and pretending the latter was perfect is a lame and blatantly obvious attempt to benefit from all the hype. It adds nothing to the actual content of the news entry. Besides, any competent journalist should know that such comparison will piss off many Fallout fans.
The part that says "Managed and Moderated to the Max" or the part that says "Full monitoring and management of submissions" or perhaps even that part that says "Completed work is just 1st draft to be polished by the pros".
That's called editing.
In other words, fans take something they love, write extensions to it for their own not-for-profit amusement, hand it to FanLib, and proceed to get completely exploited.
Okay, let me get this straight. Fans hand their texts to FanLib. FanLib selects and edits those text. So because someone spends time to read the materials and work with them, rather then just dumping everything on the website and relying on some cheap voting script to sort stuff out, you accuse the site of exploitation of users? Give me a break.
The issue you faced may or may not have been a design flaw, but that does not excuse your behavior.
What people frequently forget is that behavior of the person they reply to does not excuse their own behavior. For some reason that is the fact that various community activists conveniently ignore.
No, just because you're answering some question on a forum does not mean that you can blatantly ignore its content and use it to show off as a l33t helper. It would be rude independently of whether you are paid for help or not, whether you like the person you're helping or not.
Also, if someone acts like a jerk, the best way to go would be to ignore him (her), or ignore his behavior. Instead, some "helpers" often try to get the most out of the situation. They deliberately try to draw everyone's attention to it, thus creating an object of mutual hatred, which would allow them to integrate deeper into the community. Such leechery if far worse than rudeness.
If you are being geniune, you aren't being a troll. You might be an asshat or any number of other things - but not a troll.
It's impossible to tell whether someone genuine on the internet. You don't know the person, you don't see the person, etc. Given your definition, any accusation of trolling is pure slander. Using concept like that as some meaningful description makes no sense - it's essentially an offensive label that is supposed to rally people against the individual being labeled. ("Hey, he/she's evil and he/she's trying to manipulate us!")
Also, how does that relate to the term used in the story? That's another problem: everyone defines "trolling" as he/she wishes.
I'd say that the definition in the grandparent post is more substantial, but I've never seen the term used that way. Also, it does not fit into the context of the story either. The article speaks about people posting some offensive stuff on their own board.
Morale: internet slang sucks. It would be much better if people described things they disliked in plain English.
Sure, even a reasonable discussion criticizing named parties will be viewed by those parties as not just attacking but also trolling. That doesn't make it so.
What does make it so? What he hell is trolling anyway? (Don't give me wikipedia article link, the definition there is volatile at best.) So far I've seen the word used only as a meaningless negative label. Instead of identifying some behavior as bad and explaining why it is bad, people just point fingers and yell some slang word.
Trolling! Flamewar! FUD!
That is kindergarten level of discussion, if you can call it discussion. Unfortunately many websites *ahem* descend to it rather often.
The concept of 'wasted time' is completely dependent on the person who is doing the activity.
This is a common relativist argument that can be (and frequently is) used to justify anything. You just make a claim that all concepts are subjective, and you're done. No logic necessary.
I'm one of those people that likes the build a character from scratch and have them grow as I see fit.
It's not about character development. The point is, games can be meaningful and thought-provoking, but they often are not. Instead, some game designers prefer to pad games with lots of repetitive and essentially meaningless actions. If you're killing endless enemies generated by the game system, that is a waste of your lifetime, regardless of whether you like it or not. It's a waste of time because you could skip all the killing, and nothing, absolutely nothing would change.
If you don't like it, don't read it. As I'm sure you're aware, there are plenty of other ways to spend your free time. Don't try and foist your problems with the article onto me. Your post lacks anything more than anecdotal "I've read it, and it didn't have anything fun".
rank sites according to the preferences of the average user Who the hell is "the average user"? Why should some "average user" decide what search results will _I_ get? Good search engine should return webpages that match my request, not webpages that are deemed worthy by some poll. And that is my biggest issue with Google right now - it relies on PageRank that effectively works as a popularity measurement system.
You can get a roughly comparable Dell Dimension E520 for $850. Or I can go to any online hardware store and build a computer that has everything _I_ need, rather than some "cool" technology I will never use. And yes, it will be cheaper than comparable Mac.
I agree. Also, I find it unfair that more popular websites routinely get top places for a query even if they are not really relevant in terms of content. Wikipedia is the top link for the most of the generic searches. For games, IGN, GameSpot and GameSpy are usually the top 3 websites, no matter what you search for. Heck, it's a web search, not an American Idol show. Personally, I don't care how popular the page is, I just want it to match my query.
And all the people who rave about gmail being as secure as your PC blatantly ignore the fact that IMAP emails are stored _both_ on your PC and the server. And you don't have to watch ads. And you can use a multitude of features of your email client.
Horrible impementation of a good idea. PC games must mutilate their interfaces to support a XBox controller? Widescreen? Get out of here.
IMO, the biggest problem with high-end PC games right now is hardware. When I buy a cutting-edge game, I have no idea how is it going to run on my PC. Also, developers spend a lot of money making games to work on hundreds of different setups. What PC gaming industry really needs is something like W3C. Some organization that will suggest standards for gaming APIs and hardware. And I don't mean stupid "standards" like "XP only, we're too lazy to bundle couple of DLLs for win2k". I mean real standards that actually help to buy stuff, not restrict you choice.
Sorry, but IMO it's impossible. It's simpler to make Ruby easy to install and work with than to rewrite a language designed by a committee. PHP is popular because it's popular, not because it's a good language. Nobody will use the "updated" version, because it will be another language, which is not popular.
Reasons: 1) Publishers control nearly everything in this industry. They decide what games are going to be developed and, ultimately, what games are going to be played. Since publishers are big companies, they can afford to screw up games repeatedly, and it's the original (non-mainstream) games that usually get screwed up. You can't even boycott them, since buying the same game from a different publisher is not an option, and good games are not replaceable.
Solution: dump publishers in favor of internet sales (from developer to gamer). However, this would require some alternative financing model.
2) Consoles are controlled by corporations that produced them. This makes independent game-making nearly impossible, and has other negative consequences (censorship, etc.).
Solution: Create a few sets of open standards for gaming PCs (this should include both software and hardware). This will simplify upgrades and make game development a lot easier. Done right, this might even be good for hardware manufacturers.
Is Intel Good(tm) now? No, they just reached the limits of silicon technology. Increasing performance any further would require eather designing "smarter" (rather than faster) processor or using multiple cores.
Anyway, the trend is good indeed. Finally, people will start thinking about performance on the level of software.
...this "technology" should not spread. It should be rejected at the very beginning, because afterwards it will be next to impossible to stop people from using it. Silently swallowing it, and writing OSS implementation is not the answer.
Any non-mainstream game. Arcanum. Evil Genius. Bloodlines. I bet you will have hard time making those work on Linux. Moreover, games like that have no place on consoles.
It's strange. Modern game industry is obsessed with graphics, yet there is very few books that can teach you how to make a decent 3d engine (at least, I was not able to find one yet). AI, on the other hand, seems to be the most common topic.
Slashdot Mirror
You support gaming on Linux by subscribing to a paid service of a company, which uses proprietary software that emulates Windows API?
Are you kidding me? I mean, do you really think that there will be many people who are paid to write for online publications that will say, "yeah, internet is the cause of rapid degradation of writing style" or something like that? Would this news even get published here if the authors concluded that internet sucks for writers?
Internet is bad for the quality of writing. Trying to type this goddamn message before the page gets swamped with other replies is one of many examples why. If you really think that 2-kilobyte blog entry, unedited and hyperliked all the way through is better than (or equal to) a real article, then you simply engage in groupthink.
Internet can be a conductor of good writing, of high-quality articles that rely on words (rather than pictures and hyperlinks) to conduct the meaning. It can be good for writing, but right not it is not. Right now it's mostly a source of fast-food writing where being quick and cheap is much more important than being meaningful and thoughtful.
I'm a gamer, so I offer you gaming media as an excellent example. Take some paper magazine from 10 years ago. Take some popular website now. Compare, see the difference.
I agree. In web development column-oriented storage is a way to go. I even tried to simulate stuff like that with PHP and MySQL, and it worked, but the maintenance of such databases was too difficult. The problem is, whenever you suggest that there might be something wrong with relational databases (for some application areas) there is always some smart-ass who accuses you of "not getting" it and promoting "outdated" hierarchical or network models. "ZOMG, u want to have efficient tree support with variable nodes? U r in teh stone age. We, on the other hand, are firmly rooted in 70s!"
That is why I don't read GameSpot, IGN, GameSpy, etc. I want to read a magazine, not a goddamn PR paper that is written simply to keep the industry alive.
"Bla, bla, emoticons allow us to express feelings! Accept them, they are okay." What a bunch of crap.
First of all, it implies that old-fashioned written language does not allow you to express emotions. That is simply wrong.
Second, it assumes that emoticons do allow to express emotions. That is also wrong, albeit not obvious. They don't express anything, they merely describe it. There is a huge difference between sounding angry and saying "I am angry."
Third, in its attempt to seem cool and "modern," NY Times forgot to mention that one of the primary reasons people use emoticons is that they allow to fake "feelings" without any effort or consequence. Put a smiley next to an insult and you are likely to get away with it due to ambiguity.
Fanboys are easy to spot nowadays. It's eithers "ZOMG, opinion, opinion, everything is an opinion; look how reasonable I am!" or "ZOMG, shut the hell up and be positive!".
ravenshrike is right; comparing F3 to Oblivion, and pretending the latter was perfect is a lame and blatantly obvious attempt to benefit from all the hype. It adds nothing to the actual content of the news entry. Besides, any competent journalist should know that such comparison will piss off many Fallout fans.
That's called editing.
Okay, let me get this straight. Fans hand their texts to FanLib. FanLib selects and edits those text. So because someone spends time to read the materials and work with them, rather then just dumping everything on the website and relying on some cheap voting script to sort stuff out, you accuse the site of exploitation of users? Give me a break.
What people frequently forget is that behavior of the person they reply to does not excuse their own behavior. For some reason that is the fact that various community activists conveniently ignore.
No, just because you're answering some question on a forum does not mean that you can blatantly ignore its content and use it to show off as a l33t helper. It would be rude independently of whether you are paid for help or not, whether you like the person you're helping or not.
Also, if someone acts like a jerk, the best way to go would be to ignore him (her), or ignore his behavior. Instead, some "helpers" often try to get the most out of the situation. They deliberately try to draw everyone's attention to it, thus creating an object of mutual hatred, which would allow them to integrate deeper into the community. Such leechery if far worse than rudeness.
It's impossible to tell whether someone genuine on the internet. You don't know the person, you don't see the person, etc. Given your definition, any accusation of trolling is pure slander. Using concept like that as some meaningful description makes no sense - it's essentially an offensive label that is supposed to rally people against the individual being labeled. ("Hey, he/she's evil and he/she's trying to manipulate us!")
Also, how does that relate to the term used in the story? That's another problem: everyone defines "trolling" as he/she wishes.
I'd say that the definition in the grandparent post is more substantial, but I've never seen the term used that way. Also, it does not fit into the context of the story either. The article speaks about people posting some offensive stuff on their own board.
Morale: internet slang sucks. It would be much better if people described things they disliked in plain English.
What does make it so? What he hell is trolling anyway? (Don't give me wikipedia article link, the definition there is volatile at best.) So far I've seen the word used only as a meaningless negative label. Instead of identifying some behavior as bad and explaining why it is bad, people just point fingers and yell some slang word.
Trolling!
Flamewar!
FUD!
That is kindergarten level of discussion, if you can call it discussion. Unfortunately many websites *ahem* descend to it rather often.
This is a common relativist argument that can be (and frequently is) used to justify anything. You just make a claim that all concepts are subjective, and you're done. No logic necessary.
It's not about character development. The point is, games can be meaningful and thought-provoking, but they often are not. Instead, some game designers prefer to pad games with lots of repetitive and essentially meaningless actions. If you're killing endless enemies generated by the game system, that is a waste of your lifetime, regardless of whether you like it or not. It's a waste of time because you could skip all the killing, and nothing, absolutely nothing would change.
If you don't like it, don't read it. As I'm sure you're aware, there are plenty of other ways to spend your free time. Don't try and foist your problems with the article onto me. Your post lacks anything more than anecdotal "I've read it, and it didn't have anything fun".
Sounds like ochlocratic search engine to me.
rank sites according to the preferences of the average user
Who the hell is "the average user"? Why should some "average user" decide what search results will _I_ get? Good search engine should return webpages that match my request, not webpages that are deemed worthy by some poll. And that is my biggest issue with Google right now - it relies on PageRank that effectively works as a popularity measurement system.
You can get a roughly comparable Dell Dimension E520 for $850.
Or I can go to any online hardware store and build a computer that has everything _I_ need, rather than some "cool" technology I will never use. And yes, it will be cheaper than comparable Mac.
I agree. Also, I find it unfair that more popular websites routinely get top places for a query even if they are not really relevant in terms of content. Wikipedia is the top link for the most of the generic searches. For games, IGN, GameSpot and GameSpy are usually the top 3 websites, no matter what you search for. Heck, it's a web search, not an American Idol show. Personally, I don't care how popular the page is, I just want it to match my query.
And all the people who rave about gmail being as secure as your PC blatantly ignore the fact that IMAP emails are stored _both_ on your PC and the server. And you don't have to watch ads. And you can use a multitude of features of your email client.
//Whatever happened to, "Do what you do best. Forget the rest"?
Didn't you get the memo, it was scrapped along with web 1.0.
The new one is "Do what people suggest, and remember the REST".
Horrible impementation of a good idea. PC games must mutilate their interfaces to support a XBox controller? Widescreen? Get out of here.
IMO, the biggest problem with high-end PC games right now is hardware. When I buy a cutting-edge game, I have no idea how is it going to run on my PC. Also, developers spend a lot of money making games to work on hundreds of different setups. What PC gaming industry really needs is something like W3C. Some organization that will suggest standards for gaming APIs and hardware. And I don't mean stupid "standards" like "XP only, we're too lazy to bundle couple of DLLs for win2k". I mean real standards that actually help to buy stuff, not restrict you choice.
Sorry, but IMO it's impossible. It's simpler to make Ruby easy to install and work with than to rewrite a language designed by a committee. PHP is popular because it's popular, not because it's a good language. Nobody will use the "updated" version, because it will be another language, which is not popular.
PS: The "genius-is-rare-balme-the-developers" approach is total BS. There ARE small and innovative games out there, you just don't know about them.
Who heard about F.E.A.R.? Everyone?
And now, who heard about Fahrenheit? Nobody?
Reasons:
1) Publishers control nearly everything in this industry. They decide what games are going to be developed and, ultimately, what games are going to be played. Since publishers are big companies, they can afford to screw up games repeatedly, and it's the original (non-mainstream) games that usually get screwed up. You can't even boycott them, since buying the same game from a different publisher is not an option, and good games are not replaceable.
Solution: dump publishers in favor of internet sales (from developer to gamer). However, this would require some alternative financing model.
2) Consoles are controlled by corporations that produced them. This makes independent game-making nearly impossible, and has other negative consequences (censorship, etc.).
Solution: Create a few sets of open standards for gaming PCs (this should include both software and hardware). This will simplify upgrades and make game development a lot easier. Done right, this might even be good for hardware manufacturers.
Is Intel Good(tm) now?
No, they just reached the limits of silicon technology. Increasing performance any further would require eather designing "smarter" (rather than faster) processor or using multiple cores.
Anyway, the trend is good indeed. Finally, people will start thinking about performance on the level of software.
...this "technology" should not spread. It should be rejected at the very beginning, because afterwards it will be next to impossible to stop people from using it. Silently swallowing it, and writing OSS implementation is not the answer.
Any non-mainstream game. Arcanum. Evil Genius. Bloodlines. I bet you will have hard time making those work on Linux. Moreover, games like that have no place on consoles.
It's strange. Modern game industry is obsessed with graphics, yet there is very few books that can teach you how to make a decent 3d engine (at least, I was not able to find one yet). AI, on the other hand, seems to be the most common topic.