I actually thought about your dungeon suggestion in the context of Gnomeregan in WoW: a level 80 can wipe every single mob in there at once, but the gnomes still don't take their city back. Would be fun if that could happen... of course, the problem would be that a very specific leveling and gearing point is gone from the game. And Gnomeregan is the only close dungeon in that range for gnomes and dwarves.
That kind of MMO requires two more things: a complete de-emphasis of PvE for leveling, and a de-emphasis of PvE for acquiring required gear to do other content.
Considering that both are the key crack components in WoW, I doubt we'll see that. Unless of course someone wants to make the not-WoW MMO, but I won't hold my breath for that.
The other problem with evolving worlds: endless opportunity for griefing. There's enough griefing in WoW, and it's basically completely locked-down from that perspective.
It is one more reason why the true followers of God look down on all other competing theologies.
I'm not even a Muslim, I'm just explaining this as I see it, from a point of view that's not usually found on Slashdot.
Somewhere in there, there is a cognitive dissonance just waiting to explode. If you want to pretend that you're talking about someone else's religion, make sure to at least avoid words like "true followers" and "God".
Frankly, if some of the sane and smart Christian out there (and I know they're out there) would speak out more often and more loudly against the religious nutjobs who proclaim so vehemently that they are the only true Christians, I would have a lot more respect for Christians in general.
Sounds like what is being said about Muslims. Mmh, I think we found the core of our problem.
When you reply to comments point out your mistake with "On the contrary. It is anything but weak. It is a firmly established correlation. Please see the links I posted above. ", you lose the ability to claim it as an oops moment. Not to mention that it also puts you in the camp of "shoots from the hip first, reads sources later".
What? That is completely contrary to my experience. The example that always cracks me up is driving ability. Take any group - friends, family, driver's ed, random people in line at the grocery store, and you'll get about only about 5% of the people who'll rate themselves below average. Most everybody is an above average driver.
Unless my sarcasm detector is off. Wait... yes, it actually is. Damn. Well done.
Ok, maybe it's too early in the morning and I'm missing my caffeine jolt, but I can't figure what your problem is. Compare these two sentences, which I think are equivalent to yours: this means that there is a 1% chance that results are due to chance if results are normally distributed, it means that there is a 1% chance of seeing that result.
Just stop foolishly engaging in a war with cars that you just can't possibly win. It's statistics and physics. The saddest part is that you might take somebody's else's life along with your own with your piss poor attitude.
The law states that bikes are supposed to be on the road, not the sidewalk. Look up your driver's ed manual. Wait, you don't have that anymore? And you're calling others ignorant?
Safety instructors and cops specifically recommend riding in the middle of the car lane when there's no bike lane. Why? Because of car drivers who have no idea on how to judge distance, and would rather squeeze by a biker than overtake in normal fashion. Paradoxically, it's safer in the middle of the road than on the side.
Your rant sounds like the typical rant of any motorist who has an entitlement complex - anything that gets in my way is bad, and I want it out of my sight. Nevermind any one else's rights, or the law for that matter.
That's a bit easy. What exactly do you disagree with in the listing? Or do you just go by the source, without actually doing an analysis of the presented facts?
The problem is, lawmakers and the public are trying to make photoshops into a crime equivalent to actual child pornography. Yes, that is thought crime, and yes, it is here. Welcome to the brave new world.
No, they're applying laws that were written before copying and distribution of intellectual work became an integral part of our lives. If anything, blame idiotic politicians. Once we have laws that make sense, we can move to blaming judges. I'm not holding my breath.
You know what's great about the metric system? A liter of water EXACTLY weighs 1 kilogram. No approximately, no about, no nothing. Exactly. As for your cups, pints, gallons, pounds, ounces, fluid ounces, pinches, teaspoons, etc, I'll drop them for a nice, even milli-, gram, kilogram, liter. And if you'd have ever cooked, you'd know that the instructions are a pain in the ass to convert: this is one serving, but I have 6 people coming. Or this is done for 4 people, but only 3 are here. Your nice binary system just went out the window, and is replaced by fractions - just like anything else.
Yes, and the Greeks are still using chariots for travel, the French all live in castles, the Germans all wear Lederhosen and sit in a Bierstube all day, the Swiss communicate via yodeling, the British only drink tea with their right pinky in the air, the Russians are all enslaved in Gulags....
Yeah, these are all idiotic stereotypes I've heard from Americans who were surprised when they actually visisted the damn country. I'll file the parent under the same stereotypical ignorant American.
Find one in that pile that was using a single receiving apparatus, who was actually found to be legally obligated to pay ASCAP, and we'll talk.
But that's the point - who has the money to take ASCAP to court? When ASCAP comes calling and makes a claim that I owe them $400, I compare that with the minimum that it is likely to cost me to talk to a lawyer - $2k to $5k. It is disingenuous to argue that there has been no legal test of the ASCAP claims, when no one has the money/time to actually test them.
Should be "+1 Funny cuz its true". I've heard more than 1 HR story where they got rid of people they didn't like by going over their application and checking whether someone left something out.
It's a bit late in the posting, but your comments are so obtuse that I figure it's worth it to reply.
1) Almost 50% of the polled did not state a preference. It is disingenuous to argue that "I refuse to tell you how I'm going to vote" is the same as "This is how I'm going to vote" when tabulating votes.
2) To blindly assume that those who did not state a preference will exhibit the same trends as those who did is to ignore scientific polling requirements. For one, you're left with a smaller sample size, which increases your error. For two, a blind assumption makes no attempts to identify any potential systematic biases in the non-responders.
3) You missed the analysis done in the poll which states that they expect a run-off, not a landslide victory. Either the poll and its analysis is right, or the poll and its analysis is inaccurate. The commentary that the poll predicted the landslide victory is nothing but after-the-fact handwaving that is not supported by the poll itself, which includes its analysis.
4) The poll included questions designed to determine the reformist sentiment. That sentiment seemed to prevail with about a 60/40 split across all respondents. There's your systematic bias for the non-responders.
4b) The general preference for political reforms can be assumed to match political preferences. In other words, those who are happy with the current political system will vote the status quo - Ahmedinejad. Suddenly, we're looking at the possibility that all those who will vote Ahmedinejad have stated that they will, and that the un-stated voters will massively break for the other candidates.
5) Historical trends were completely invalidated. Would you have wondered about voter fraud if San Francisco would have voted with 2/3 preference for McCain over Obama? Or if rural Texas would have broken 2/3 for Obama over McCain? Sure you would. Same in Iran.
6) The results were certified - not just projected, but certified - before the last polls closed abroad, and not even hours after the last polls closed in Iran. You don't do that unless the outcome of the election does not depend on the actual votes.
7) Statistical analysis of the vote results shows that the frequency of numbers does not match expected values. Sometimes with vanishingly small likelihood of random occurrence.
There are 8 points that you managed to ignore or gloss over. All 8 points are either procedural errors or statistical aberrations that all are in favor of Ahmedinejad. There is reasonable doubt, and then there is having blinders on. We are way past the point where the Iranian election results qualify as realistic.
Did you actually read the poll? The numbers are a month old, before significant events in the campaigns took place. The numbers show 34% to 14% with the rest being essentially noncommital. That's a far cry from supporting the vote results.
Yes, we ought to not mistake absence of evidence for implying anything. But that's not really what happened. There's a ton of events which, on their own, do not mean anything. But it's really odd that every event that is suspicious just happened to help Ahmedinejad.
Finally, someone's expertise is difficult to assert in a post.... how about reading the rest of his posts? Or as a shortcut, just look for his resume.
Uhh... the re-install was for the 5 year old laptop from my girlfriend. It was going to her sister. In other words, SP1a was all that was available. The install was from a wiped hard disk, therefore no downloading while installing. Yeah, I could have used my laptop to download the full sp3 install, put it on my thumbdrive and then just move it over that way. But I wanted to use my laptop and its connection for something other than just a retarded windows update. And no, I'm not going to fuck with my routers QoS settings to deal with that situation.
There are other ways to do a full install, no shit. But apparently, you've never dealt with cleaning out the computers of relatives where you're lucky if they have the original OS install disk floating around.
Not really. I did this last week. Install disk was SP 1a. Step one: install SP1a. Oh wait, no network drivers. Hunt for drivers. Wasn't actually too bad, took me about 2 hours to get all drivers. Go to microsoft update, get SP2. Download, Install, Reboot. Go back. Oh, get SP3. Download, Install, Reboot. Configure Windows XP to not redirect everything to Windows crap.
Total elapsed time: about 24 hours. Some of that was spent sleeping, some of that was spent doing other stuff while the Install was waiting for my input. But it was far from trivial, and required knowing how to look for drivers. Not something for people who don't know XP very well.
Ultimately, no amount of metrics is going to save you from idiotic bosses who don't understand what the metrics actually measure, and who try to game the system. Couple of examples: * Number of time customer spends on hold: you take the hit for an understaffed department. * Length of Calls: you will be forced through a script that offloads the actual work to another department. * Duration of time tickets are open: you'll get hit every time a customer leaves a ticket open, which is basically always. * Duration of time that you work on a ticket: you'll be forced to again offload to either a different department, or provide some lack hack that will break in about 2 days. * Customer satisfaction as measured by surveys: damn near nobody replies to them. Not to mention that there's no standard for what is good and excellent. You'll get hit by the prick customer who thinks that debugging his app on the fly is par for the course. * Customer satisfaction as measured by renewal of licenses: you'll be at the mercy of the account managers, and at the mercy of the overall economy.
And on and on. For every single metric that you come up with, I'll show you a real-life example of how it was abused by an incompetent/malicious front-line drone, manager or executive.
Here's the only thing that'll work: settle on a metric. Get everyone - drone, manager, executive to agree on what the shortcomings are and how the metric can be gamed. Then, when it comes to review, make sure that the spreadsheet is accompanied by a discussion on what the data means, how it came about and what the root causes behind it are.
Yes, it's - almost - a pipe dream. But as much as I've seen perfectly valid metrics being ruined, I've seen sucky metrics be used to their full capability in turning a department around.
The take away is that collecting metrics is the easy part. The hard part is what to do with them.
We should also address the major reason for the growing demand for energy. That reason is overpopulation. However, no American politician has the guts to touch that topic. It is too closely tied to illegal immigration. When a faction [nytimes.com] in the Sierra Club tried to address that issue, the members of that faction were accused of being "racist".
The reason charges of racism were thrown around are two-fold: - the faction advocating control of overpopulation was basically a set of very fresh faces with no historic connection to the Sierra Club. They did, however, have a historic connection to nativism and opposition to illegal immigration. - overpopulation,as others have already pointed out, has nothing to do with illegal immigration. Unless, of course, you argue that Americans have more rights to resources than illegal immigrants, or that those illegal immigrants use more natural resources than legal immigrants - which is nonsense, of course.
The reason that this is a touchy issue in the Sierra Club is because the faction against illegal immigration was using fairly strong methods to take over the group. There is no grass roots support in the Sierra Club for that issue, nor has there been any historic connection between the Sierra Club and illegal immigration. The only conclusion left is that a group of people who feel strongly about illegal immigration tried to highjack a fairly weak but generally well regarded organization for their own purposes. Your NYT articles actually hints at all these issues... for a complete picture though,you'd have to have followed the election process in the Sierra Club, or listened to KQED. I can't find anything specific about this in the general news channels.
Tell me something. Do you consider Civ 3 to be casual game? Do you consider SimCity (the original!) a casual game? What about Quake: Arena? Notice how all those games were made on hardware less powerful than the Wii? Especially when it comes to shooters, the only thing that has progressed is polygon count, texture quality and lighting. Everything else is the same. Heck, RE5 had the same sort of light's out sequence Doom already had. Except now I have a flashlight instead of fireballs to illuminate the area!
What it means is that despite many protestations to the contrary, shiny matters. Sadly.
Interesting you bring up attach rates. The top games on the charts are consistently Wii and DS games. To the point where sometimes, I have to get out of the top 10 for a particular market to find a non-Wii or DS game. So what does this mean? Nintendo figured out its market, and manages to make games for it. The others are trying to port their games to the Wii, and find out that the market isn't the same.
Actually, that's an interesting thought. Apparently, there might be a flipside to the argument that the PS3 is too complicated - things like the Wii can be too simple. Both require approaches that are non-standard. In the case of the PS3, because no one has really encountered the restrictions before. In the case of the Wii, people aren't used to the constraints anymore, and have to relearn either forgotten habits, or habits that were never really learned.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually thought about your dungeon suggestion in the context of Gnomeregan in WoW: a level 80 can wipe every single mob in there at once, but the gnomes still don't take their city back. Would be fun if that could happen... of course, the problem would be that a very specific leveling and gearing point is gone from the game. And Gnomeregan is the only close dungeon in that range for gnomes and dwarves.
That kind of MMO requires two more things: a complete de-emphasis of PvE for leveling, and a de-emphasis of PvE for acquiring required gear to do other content.
Considering that both are the key crack components in WoW, I doubt we'll see that. Unless of course someone wants to make the not-WoW MMO, but I won't hold my breath for that.
The other problem with evolving worlds: endless opportunity for griefing. There's enough griefing in WoW, and it's basically completely locked-down from that perspective.
It is one more reason why the true followers of God look down on all other competing theologies.
I'm not even a Muslim, I'm just explaining this as I see it, from a point of view that's not usually found on Slashdot.
Somewhere in there, there is a cognitive dissonance just waiting to explode. If you want to pretend that you're talking about someone else's religion, make sure to at least avoid words like "true followers" and "God".
Frankly, if some of the sane and smart Christian out there (and I know they're out there) would speak out more often and more loudly against the religious nutjobs who proclaim so vehemently that they are the only true Christians, I would have a lot more respect for Christians in general.
Sounds like what is being said about Muslims. Mmh, I think we found the core of our problem.
When you reply to comments point out your mistake with "On the contrary. It is anything but weak. It is a firmly established correlation. Please see the links I posted above. ", you lose the ability to claim it as an oops moment. Not to mention that it also puts you in the camp of "shoots from the hip first, reads sources later".
What? That is completely contrary to my experience. The example that always cracks me up is driving ability. Take any group - friends, family, driver's ed, random people in line at the grocery store, and you'll get about only about 5% of the people who'll rate themselves below average. Most everybody is an above average driver.
Unless my sarcasm detector is off. Wait... yes, it actually is. Damn. Well done.
Ok, maybe it's too early in the morning and I'm missing my caffeine jolt, but I can't figure what your problem is. Compare these two sentences, which I think are equivalent to yours:
this means that there is a 1% chance that results are due to chance
if results are normally distributed, it means that there is a 1% chance of seeing that result.
Yes/No?
Anecdote != Data. You make an interesting point, but without corroborating data points, it's not very useful for the larger population.
Just stop foolishly engaging in a war with cars that you just can't possibly win. It's statistics and physics. The saddest part is that you might take somebody's else's life along with your own with your piss poor attitude.
I thought that's what the 2nd Amendment is for?
And again, girlintraining is loud and wrong.
The law states that bikes are supposed to be on the road, not the sidewalk. Look up your driver's ed manual. Wait, you don't have that anymore? And you're calling others ignorant?
Safety instructors and cops specifically recommend riding in the middle of the car lane when there's no bike lane. Why? Because of car drivers who have no idea on how to judge distance, and would rather squeeze by a biker than overtake in normal fashion. Paradoxically, it's safer in the middle of the road than on the side.
Your rant sounds like the typical rant of any motorist who has an entitlement complex - anything that gets in my way is bad, and I want it out of my sight. Nevermind any one else's rights, or the law for that matter.
That's a bit easy. What exactly do you disagree with in the listing? Or do you just go by the source, without actually doing an analysis of the presented facts?
The problem is, lawmakers and the public are trying to make photoshops into a crime equivalent to actual child pornography. Yes, that is thought crime, and yes, it is here. Welcome to the brave new world.
No, they're applying laws that were written before copying and distribution of intellectual work became an integral part of our lives. If anything, blame idiotic politicians. Once we have laws that make sense, we can move to blaming judges. I'm not holding my breath.
You know what's great about the metric system? A liter of water EXACTLY weighs 1 kilogram. No approximately, no about, no nothing. Exactly. As for your cups, pints, gallons, pounds, ounces, fluid ounces, pinches, teaspoons, etc, I'll drop them for a nice, even milli-, gram, kilogram, liter. And if you'd have ever cooked, you'd know that the instructions are a pain in the ass to convert: this is one serving, but I have 6 people coming. Or this is done for 4 people, but only 3 are here. Your nice binary system just went out the window, and is replaced by fractions - just like anything else.
Yes, and the Greeks are still using chariots for travel, the French all live in castles, the Germans all wear Lederhosen and sit in a Bierstube all day, the Swiss communicate via yodeling, the British only drink tea with their right pinky in the air, the Russians are all enslaved in Gulags....
Yeah, these are all idiotic stereotypes I've heard from Americans who were surprised when they actually visisted the damn country. I'll file the parent under the same stereotypical ignorant American.
Find one in that pile that was using a single receiving apparatus, who was actually found to be legally obligated to pay ASCAP, and we'll talk.
But that's the point - who has the money to take ASCAP to court? When ASCAP comes calling and makes a claim that I owe them $400, I compare that with the minimum that it is likely to cost me to talk to a lawyer - $2k to $5k. It is disingenuous to argue that there has been no legal test of the ASCAP claims, when no one has the money/time to actually test them.
Should be "+1 Funny cuz its true". I've heard more than 1 HR story where they got rid of people they didn't like by going over their application and checking whether someone left something out.
It's a bit late in the posting, but your comments are so obtuse that I figure it's worth it to reply.
1) Almost 50% of the polled did not state a preference. It is disingenuous to argue that "I refuse to tell you how I'm going to vote" is the same as "This is how I'm going to vote" when tabulating votes.
2) To blindly assume that those who did not state a preference will exhibit the same trends as those who did is to ignore scientific polling requirements. For one, you're left with a smaller sample size, which increases your error. For two, a blind assumption makes no attempts to identify any potential systematic biases in the non-responders.
3) You missed the analysis done in the poll which states that they expect a run-off, not a landslide victory. Either the poll and its analysis is right, or the poll and its analysis is inaccurate. The commentary that the poll predicted the landslide victory is nothing but after-the-fact handwaving that is not supported by the poll itself, which includes its analysis.
4) The poll included questions designed to determine the reformist sentiment. That sentiment seemed to prevail with about a 60/40 split across all respondents. There's your systematic bias for the non-responders.
4b) The general preference for political reforms can be assumed to match political preferences. In other words, those who are happy with the current political system will vote the status quo - Ahmedinejad. Suddenly, we're looking at the possibility that all those who will vote Ahmedinejad have stated that they will, and that the un-stated voters will massively break for the other candidates.
5) Historical trends were completely invalidated. Would you have wondered about voter fraud if San Francisco would have voted with 2/3 preference for McCain over Obama? Or if rural Texas would have broken 2/3 for Obama over McCain? Sure you would. Same in Iran.
6) The results were certified - not just projected, but certified - before the last polls closed abroad, and not even hours after the last polls closed in Iran. You don't do that unless the outcome of the election does not depend on the actual votes.
7) Statistical analysis of the vote results shows that the frequency of numbers does not match expected values. Sometimes with vanishingly small likelihood of random occurrence.
There are 8 points that you managed to ignore or gloss over. All 8 points are either procedural errors or statistical aberrations that all are in favor of Ahmedinejad. There is reasonable doubt, and then there is having blinders on. We are way past the point where the Iranian election results qualify as realistic.
Did you actually read the poll? The numbers are a month old, before significant events in the campaigns took place. The numbers show 34% to 14% with the rest being essentially noncommital. That's a far cry from supporting the vote results.
Yes, we ought to not mistake absence of evidence for implying anything. But that's not really what happened. There's a ton of events which, on their own, do not mean anything. But it's really odd that every event that is suspicious just happened to help Ahmedinejad.
Finally, someone's expertise is difficult to assert in a post.... how about reading the rest of his posts? Or as a shortcut, just look for his resume.
Uhh... the re-install was for the 5 year old laptop from my girlfriend. It was going to her sister. In other words, SP1a was all that was available. The install was from a wiped hard disk, therefore no downloading while installing. Yeah, I could have used my laptop to download the full sp3 install, put it on my thumbdrive and then just move it over that way. But I wanted to use my laptop and its connection for something other than just a retarded windows update. And no, I'm not going to fuck with my routers QoS settings to deal with that situation.
There are other ways to do a full install, no shit. But apparently, you've never dealt with cleaning out the computers of relatives where you're lucky if they have the original OS install disk floating around.
Not really. I did this last week. Install disk was SP 1a. Step one: install SP1a. Oh wait, no network drivers. Hunt for drivers. Wasn't actually too bad, took me about 2 hours to get all drivers. Go to microsoft update, get SP2. Download, Install, Reboot. Go back. Oh, get SP3. Download, Install, Reboot. Configure Windows XP to not redirect everything to Windows crap.
Total elapsed time: about 24 hours. Some of that was spent sleeping, some of that was spent doing other stuff while the Install was waiting for my input. But it was far from trivial, and required knowing how to look for drivers. Not something for people who don't know XP very well.
Ultimately, no amount of metrics is going to save you from idiotic bosses who don't understand what the metrics actually measure, and who try to game the system. Couple of examples:
* Number of time customer spends on hold: you take the hit for an understaffed department.
* Length of Calls: you will be forced through a script that offloads the actual work to another department.
* Duration of time tickets are open: you'll get hit every time a customer leaves a ticket open, which is basically always.
* Duration of time that you work on a ticket: you'll be forced to again offload to either a different department, or provide some lack hack that will break in about 2 days.
* Customer satisfaction as measured by surveys: damn near nobody replies to them. Not to mention that there's no standard for what is good and excellent. You'll get hit by the prick customer who thinks that debugging his app on the fly is par for the course.
* Customer satisfaction as measured by renewal of licenses: you'll be at the mercy of the account managers, and at the mercy of the overall economy.
And on and on. For every single metric that you come up with, I'll show you a real-life example of how it was abused by an incompetent/malicious front-line drone, manager or executive.
Here's the only thing that'll work: settle on a metric. Get everyone - drone, manager, executive to agree on what the shortcomings are and how the metric can be gamed. Then, when it comes to review, make sure that the spreadsheet is accompanied by a discussion on what the data means, how it came about and what the root causes behind it are.
Yes, it's - almost - a pipe dream. But as much as I've seen perfectly valid metrics being ruined, I've seen sucky metrics be used to their full capability in turning a department around.
The take away is that collecting metrics is the easy part. The hard part is what to do with them.
The reason charges of racism were thrown around are two-fold:
- the faction advocating control of overpopulation was basically a set of very fresh faces with no historic connection to the Sierra Club. They did, however, have a historic connection to nativism and opposition to illegal immigration.
- overpopulation,as others have already pointed out, has nothing to do with illegal immigration. Unless, of course, you argue that Americans have more rights to resources than illegal immigrants, or that those illegal immigrants use more natural resources than legal immigrants - which is nonsense, of course.
The reason that this is a touchy issue in the Sierra Club is because the faction against illegal immigration was using fairly strong methods to take over the group. There is no grass roots support in the Sierra Club for that issue, nor has there been any historic connection between the Sierra Club and illegal immigration. The only conclusion left is that a group of people who feel strongly about illegal immigration tried to highjack a fairly weak but generally well regarded organization for their own purposes. Your NYT articles actually hints at all these issues... for a complete picture though,you'd have to have followed the election process in the Sierra Club, or listened to KQED. I can't find anything specific about this in the general news channels.
Tell me something. Do you consider Civ 3 to be casual game? Do you consider SimCity (the original!) a casual game? What about Quake: Arena? Notice how all those games were made on hardware less powerful than the Wii? Especially when it comes to shooters, the only thing that has progressed is polygon count, texture quality and lighting. Everything else is the same. Heck, RE5 had the same sort of light's out sequence Doom already had. Except now I have a flashlight instead of fireballs to illuminate the area!
What it means is that despite many protestations to the contrary, shiny matters. Sadly.
Interesting you bring up attach rates. The top games on the charts are consistently Wii and DS games. To the point where sometimes, I have to get out of the top 10 for a particular market to find a non-Wii or DS game. So what does this mean? Nintendo figured out its market, and manages to make games for it. The others are trying to port their games to the Wii, and find out that the market isn't the same.
Actually, that's an interesting thought. Apparently, there might be a flipside to the argument that the PS3 is too complicated - things like the Wii can be too simple. Both require approaches that are non-standard. In the case of the PS3, because no one has really encountered the restrictions before. In the case of the Wii, people aren't used to the constraints anymore, and have to relearn either forgotten habits, or habits that were never really learned.
Both can set back the developer.