Bah, I have already have enough of online gaming idiocy. Even when you do get the majority of gamers to keep an eye on their peers, you get the exact opposite problem. Pedantic tight asses start running their servers or games like a police state and playing favorites with their cronies. Last time I checked, no one was buying a game called Fascism Tycoon.
All that I ask is that studios give gamers tools to isolate themselves from having to deal with jerks. You are not going to get rid of them and probably the best that you can do is fence them off where they can't cause as much trouble. Otherwise you will spend far too much trouble on an ineffective solution when that time would have been better spent creating a better game.
I wouldn't say that there was really anything wrong with T3. It was a solid game and I really enjoyed playing it. The Shalebridge Cradle level mentioned in the article was a masterful work of Horror.
The only thing that I found lacking was that the city was very one dimensional and lacking in variety. Sure you could do some side exploring, but it was nothing compared the free form experience of the elder scrolls games. You were lucky if there was more than one road to take to get somewhere. The ability to explore and do minor missions in a 'full sized' version of the city would have made the game much better. It seemed like that was what they were going for, but had to abandon that for design reasons.
Microsoft has apparently figured out how to keep them safely within the rules, blogging about the wonders of product renaming and coming features instead of anything that might challenge the party line.
Re:probably on Microsoft's list of next important
on
Apache down, IIS up
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Thankfully, MS can only make so many gains this way. It's not like they can pay large percentages of the industry to switch over. At some point it has to come down to merit, and which server sys admins prefer to use.
Try flipping through a few at you local magazine rack, I'm sure you'll find quite a few that have a lot more than 50% advertising. With a lot of magazines topping 200-300 pages, they aren't doing it by adding lots more content.
I was thinking along the lines of the gas station price war going on in the 90's that seemed to drive all of the independant operators out. End of the Summer in 2000, gas prices started going through the roof. Coincidence, maybe.
I don't disagree that the Rambus has gotten what they deserved. Collusion tactics like that though are pretty harmful, as they ca drive a lot of smaller competitors out of business and possibly reducing competition and raising prices down the road (which those ddr players if I recall the/. articles). I'm not going to straight out say that that strategy should be black and white illegal, but I'm sure that it does more harm then good to the consumer.
Yes, but the summary states that DDR prices were being artificially lowered so that Rambus couldn't compete. So they aren't talking about price fixing in the, 'lets everyone jack up our prices and gouge the customer' sense.
This problem is particularly noticeable with OO.org Calc. On autosave, the entire interface gets locked for the duration of the save, and for a sheet with 100,000 cells or so, it takes 10 or 15 seconds.
It's not the end of the world, but it does become a bit of a nuisance.
I don't see any evidence in what you quote that Pullum is being misleading. What he is criticizing is the advice in Strunk and White against using "they" with singular reference, in favor of using "he". That is indeed the advice in the book, is it not? He didn't make it up.
That is the case in 2 of the 5 examples, yes. The other 3 examples provide alternatives to using 'they' or 'he'.
I don't have responses for your 1st and 2nd points, but for your 3rd point, King's book, has a section on why you should avoid using adverbs (he states that he very rarely lets one slip into his books, I can't verify how accurate that is though). King's reasoning for not using adverbs is that they weaken the focus of sentence (by taking emphasis away from the verb). I would also argue that over-using adverbs (and adjectives) makes your sentences less clear and concise.
On adjectives, page 105 of S&K (Write with nouns and verbs) doesn't say that you should never use adverbs or adjectives, but that your writing should always rely on the nouns and verbs to get the point across. S&K goes on to say that adverbs and adjectives are indispensable parts of language in many cases.
The issue that I have with some of the comments on/. detracting from S&K is that they contain broad generalizations of the content in the book. Pullum seems to quote from the section headings of S&K without refuting the content itself. In Pullum's article that you linked to, he does this by pointing out specific adverbs in S&K as counterexamples to the content in S&K, which is a straw-man argument. Also, as you say, not everyone lives up to the rules that they try to follow. I know that I don't in my writing, but I believe that I'm better off knowing and thinking about the material in S&K. In any case, there is no final word on grammar and style. If you attempt to follow the general rules most of the time, you will probably escape criticism from all but the strictest grammarians.
As for Twain, Conrad, and all, there's a bit of wisdom that you should learn the rules before you break them. Consider the recommendation that you avoid using the passive voice. It's not that you can't ever use it, just that it is often overused. If you do choose to use it, make sure you decide that you like the way it sounds.
"What is good for the master is not always good for the student" is the saying that comes to mind.
Also, with your previous point about date of publication was also something I was going to point out. It's not like S&W can magically make previous literary works conform to a current set of English guidelines.
It's no wonder Strunk's view about a phrase like everyone in the community, whether they are a member of the Association or not was that it should be "corrected" to everyone in the community, whether he is a member of the Association or not: women still didn't have the vote in America, so who would care if this sort of use of he excluded them.
Strunk/White covers the issue of 'he' on the same page, a few paragraphs down. In fact, half of the page is devoted to this problem (89, 4th ed. 2005). If Pullum, isn't quoting from the 4th edition, he probably should be since he is complaining that the book has been republished a 4th time.
The other point that has been proven again and again is that money doesn't buy talented developers or good ideas. Look how many competitors are throwing money and people into making a real Ipod competitor, have any of them had any real success?
All I see coming from this is MS bringing on more people and throwing more money at marketing and FUD, none of which has no guarantee of producing any 'Innovation'.
I don't know about that, but the developers have a good idea of what is included in a game. I don't know if it's the devs not saying or the ESRB not asking (or not looking hard enough). I kind of suspect that the rating change has more to do with the 'skin' than the gore. I'll admit though that some areas of Oblivion are on par with the violence depicted in other M games I own, but it's still not the corpses on meat hooks from Quake 4 or large numbers of body parts lying around in D3.
There are certainly some aspects of the game that aren't suitable for younger audiences, which is the case with a lot of games. What really bothers me is that it wasn't any of the violence that prompted the rating, but something stupid like this. No wonder people don't have much faith in the ratings system.
I double checked it and the following code will run without error in php 4:
It is going far afield for an example though and at least php 5 does a better job with stuff like this.
You're right. I was thinking of php I think. php 5 will run the code with a warning and I don't see any strict flags that you can pass to the interpreter. I have a feeling that php 4 will just create the variable and go on it's marry way, at least that is what it does with undefined class variables. I will have to double check tomorrow.
Code like that is always going to slip through occasionally. At least C has strong type checking, after all in higher level languages like Python the variable geteuid wouldn't have even had to exist for the 1st expression to be valid.
C is a low level language and it's application to system programming is very well understood. High level languages aren't really suited for systems programming since they obscure so much of the underlying processes, even though they may lend themselves to more elegant solutions. Eventually a language like D: http://www.digitalmars.com/d/overview.html/ that tries to take the best of both worlds may take over for C, but that isn't happening any time soon.
In the end, only careful devs, with the help of thorough test coverage and code audits, will consistently produce the most bug-free code
That's true, unfortunately the comment happened to appear to be a lot like a lot of the flames that get posted. It takes a lot of time to mod something properly, so mods jump the gun sometimes.
It helps to have knowledgeable moderators, but posts still have to be moderated to be useful for a general audience. In this case, the post in question doesn't tell you much if you don't happen to be very familiar with different file systems for OSX and the compatibility of OSX software with those file systems.
Is the grandparent post flamebait? maybe not. Without minus_273's though, its probably not useful enought to be modded up either. Whether the moderation system is right or wrong, isn't the point here, but the as the guidlines say http://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml/ in the FAQ, question 5:
What is a Good Comment? A Bad Comment?
* Good Comments are insightful. You read them and are better off having read them. They add new information to a discussion. They are clear, hopefully well written, or maybe amusing. These are the gems we're looking for, and they deserve to be promoted.
* Average Comments might be slightly offtopic, but still might be worth reading. They might be redundant. They might be a 'Me Too' article. They might say something painfully obvious. They don't detract from the discussion, but they don't necessarily significantly add to it. They are the comments that require the most attention from the moderators, and they also represent the bulk of the comments. (Score: 0-1)
* Bad Comments are flamebait. Bad comments have nothing to do with the article they are attached to. They call someone names. They ridicule someone for having a different opinion without backing it up with anything more tangible than strong words. Bad comments are repeats of something said 15 times already making it quite apparent that the writer didn't read the previous comments. They use foul language. They are hard to read or just don't make any sense. They detract from the article they are attached to.
By the above def, the grandparent is no more than an average comment that maybe leans a bit towards flamebait and probably shouldn't have been modded up or down.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe this will provide some legal leverage to go after people who spam blogs and forums with adds for online poker, etc?
He's also a perfect example of why self governance in MPOGs is not such a great idea.
All that I ask is that studios give gamers tools to isolate themselves from having to deal with jerks. You are not going to get rid of them and probably the best that you can do is fence them off where they can't cause as much trouble. Otherwise you will spend far too much trouble on an ineffective solution when that time would have been better spent creating a better game.
The only thing that I found lacking was that the city was very one dimensional and lacking in variety. Sure you could do some side exploring, but it was nothing compared the free form experience of the elder scrolls games. You were lucky if there was more than one road to take to get somewhere. The ability to explore and do minor missions in a 'full sized' version of the city would have made the game much better. It seemed like that was what they were going for, but had to abandon that for design reasons.
They aren't responsible enough to list all of their memebers clearly on their website. This blog has a list of the major players though http://childrensgroup.blogspot.com/2006/04/childre ns-group-resigns-cria.html/
See link to blog, right side middle of the page.
http://www.msdnevents.com/default.aspx?sid=14
http://neopoleon.com/blog/
I especially like this article about the above blogger hitting an attendee at an MSDN event:
And this one about the evils of Excel, which nicely complements the post a while back about spreadsheet errors:http://neopoleon.com/blog/posts/18833.aspx
http://www.neopoleon.com/blog/posts/434.aspx
Thankfully, MS can only make so many gains this way. It's not like they can pay large percentages of the industry to switch over. At some point it has to come down to merit, and which server sys admins prefer to use.
Try flipping through a few at you local magazine rack, I'm sure you'll find quite a few that have a lot more than 50% advertising. With a lot of magazines topping 200-300 pages, they aren't doing it by adding lots more content.
I was thinking along the lines of the gas station price war going on in the 90's that seemed to drive all of the independant operators out. End of the Summer in 2000, gas prices started going through the roof. Coincidence, maybe.
I don't disagree that the Rambus has gotten what they deserved. Collusion tactics like that though are pretty harmful, as they ca drive a lot of smaller competitors out of business and possibly reducing competition and raising prices down the road (which those ddr players if I recall the /. articles). I'm not going to straight out say that that strategy should be black and white illegal, but I'm sure that it does more harm then good to the consumer.
Yes, but the summary states that DDR prices were being artificially lowered so that Rambus couldn't compete. So they aren't talking about price fixing in the, 'lets everyone jack up our prices and gouge the customer' sense.
This problem is particularly noticeable with OO.org Calc. On autosave, the entire interface gets locked for the duration of the save, and for a sheet with 100,000 cells or so, it takes 10 or 15 seconds.
It's not the end of the world, but it does become a bit of a nuisance.
I believe that XUL + JS handles the interface. My understanding is that you can write the back end to the plugin in C/C++, etc.
I don't have responses for your 1st and 2nd points, but for your 3rd point, King's book, has a section on why you should avoid using adverbs (he states that he very rarely lets one slip into his books, I can't verify how accurate that is though). King's reasoning for not using adverbs is that they weaken the focus of sentence (by taking emphasis away from the verb). I would also argue that over-using adverbs (and adjectives) makes your sentences less clear and concise.
On adjectives, page 105 of S&K (Write with nouns and verbs) doesn't say that you should never use adverbs or adjectives, but that your writing should always rely on the nouns and verbs to get the point across. S&K goes on to say that adverbs and adjectives are indispensable parts of language in many cases.The issue that I have with some of the comments on /. detracting from S&K is that they contain broad generalizations of the content in the book. Pullum seems to quote from the section headings of S&K without refuting the content itself. In Pullum's article that you linked to, he does this by pointing out specific adverbs in S&K as counterexamples to the content in S&K, which is a straw-man argument. Also, as you say, not everyone lives up to the rules that they try to follow. I know that I don't in my writing, but I believe that I'm better off knowing and thinking about the material in S&K. In any case, there is no final word on grammar and style. If you attempt to follow the general rules most of the time, you will probably escape criticism from all but the strictest grammarians.
Covered on /. a while back: http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/21/ 1828202/
This is the book that I keep on my desk at work for when ever I need to write a manual, requirements doc, etc.
Also, with your previous point about date of publication was also something I was going to point out. It's not like S&W can magically make previous literary works conform to a current set of English guidelines.
Pullum may also be misleading with his quotes:
Strunk/White covers the issue of 'he' on the same page, a few paragraphs down. In fact, half of the page is devoted to this problem (89, 4th ed. 2005). If Pullum, isn't quoting from the 4th edition, he probably should be since he is complaining that the book has been republished a 4th time.
The other point that has been proven again and again is that money doesn't buy talented developers or good ideas. Look how many competitors are throwing money and people into making a real Ipod competitor, have any of them had any real success?
All I see coming from this is MS bringing on more people and throwing more money at marketing and FUD, none of which has no guarantee of producing any 'Innovation'.
I don't know about that, but the developers have a good idea of what is included in a game. I don't know if it's the devs not saying or the ESRB not asking (or not looking hard enough). I kind of suspect that the rating change has more to do with the 'skin' than the gore. I'll admit though that some areas of Oblivion are on par with the violence depicted in other M games I own, but it's still not the corpses on meat hooks from Quake 4 or large numbers of body parts lying around in D3.
There are certainly some aspects of the game that aren't suitable for younger audiences, which is the case with a lot of games. What really bothers me is that it wasn't any of the violence that prompted the rating, but something stupid like this. No wonder people don't have much faith in the ratings system.
I double checked it and the following code will run without error in php 4: It is going far afield for an example though and at least php 5 does a better job with stuff like this.
You're right. I was thinking of php I think. php 5 will run the code with a warning and I don't see any strict flags that you can pass to the interpreter. I have a feeling that php 4 will just create the variable and go on it's marry way, at least that is what it does with undefined class variables. I will have to double check tomorrow.
Code like that is always going to slip through occasionally. At least C has strong type checking, after all in higher level languages like Python the variable geteuid wouldn't have even had to exist for the 1st expression to be valid.
C is a low level language and it's application to system programming is very well understood. High level languages aren't really suited for systems programming since they obscure so much of the underlying processes, even though they may lend themselves to more elegant solutions. Eventually a language like D: http://www.digitalmars.com/d/overview.html/ that tries to take the best of both worlds may take over for C, but that isn't happening any time soon.
In the end, only careful devs, with the help of thorough test coverage and code audits, will consistently produce the most bug-free code
That's true, unfortunately the comment happened to appear to be a lot like a lot of the flames that get posted. It takes a lot of time to mod something properly, so mods jump the gun sometimes.
It helps to have knowledgeable moderators, but posts still have to be moderated to be useful for a general audience. In this case, the post in question doesn't tell you much if you don't happen to be very familiar with different file systems for OSX and the compatibility of OSX software with those file systems.
Is the grandparent post flamebait? maybe not. Without minus_273's though, its probably not useful enought to be modded up either. Whether the moderation system is right or wrong, isn't the point here, but the as the guidlines say http://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml/ in the FAQ, question 5:
By the above def, the grandparent is no more than an average comment that maybe leans a bit towards flamebait and probably shouldn't have been modded up or down.