The UI design failure that annoys me the most is media players that the developers obviously have spent a long time getting the user interface to look like a panel for an expensive car stereo or DVD player.
Why tiny little buttons jammed close together that are hard to see and click correctly? Sure, in a car dashboard space is expensive, but when you are looking at a film on your computer screen you are going to use fullscreen and have the controls hidden most of the time, so when the users wants to see them, why not make them big with clear lables?
Especially gratuitous is when a player has new controls that are specific to a DVD player, such as a subtitle/audio selector or a click/draggable progress bar. The developers often don't integrate this with the main controller (cause there is no analogy in a car radio, which appearently makes them confused) but instead the player opens other windows with a totally different look and feel. Or if they DO include it, it is often also tiny, squeezed in between the play button and the usually useless "eject" button for instance. This is especially bad with the progress bar or volume bar where you might want to have fine selection resolution. Why not put these controls along the lower edge of the film screen where they can be stretched out? (I think Quicktime and *yech* Windows Media Player gets this right. Haven't used them in a while though, I might be wrong.)
Xine, mplayer to mention two have this problem of suffering from the Car Stereo look for controllers. Lots of mp3 players the same. Ok, they can be skinned differently... but why such as bad default, and why do all have to have their own format for skins?
(On a related topic, while I'm stil whining, I have yet to find a media player under Linux that allows you to select smoothly with a scrollbar where in the film you want to jump down to seconds. Xine for instance jumps 1 minute back or forth when you use the arrow keys to skip. When you drag the scrollbar it doesn't show where in the film you are, and it has a minimum resolution of something like 30 seconds, so it snaps to the closest 30 second segment start when you let go. I think mplayer is similar.)
Now, all this said, I do appreciate the great work people put in in making open source players that I can enjoy. If you are one of these developers, feel free to flame me for complaining instead of contributing.
Their conclusion? 35 hours per week. Keeps the productivity high, the turn over low, and the company growing at double digit rates nearly every year (or maybe it has been every year).
Something to think about during your next interview cycle.
Something to think about when libertarians/conservatives claim Europe is hopelessly behind in competitiveness. We get the same amount done AND we have much more pleasant lives.
I don't rememember the last time I had to load the Java plugin for a website.
I actually have several websites with banking etc that use applets. The JVM load time is annoying though, I agree with that.
One of Java's cool "features" is that it does not have pointers. I can't tell you how many times I've run a Java program and gotten a traceback which mentions a "null pointer exception".
Yes, that is an unfortunate wording in the JVM. It should say "null reference exception". Everything except primitives are pointers in Java, but unlike C/C++, Java does not allow pointer arithmetic, so they call them references instead.
If you see "null pointer exceptions" often, you must be unfortunate enough to have to be running some pretty amateurish programs though (no offence). Null pointers are not hard to avoid in normal code, and in situations where they might fail from an external source (for instance loaded from file), the programmer should of course wrap that in checks to see that the instance is properly initialized before proceding.
I have not had a pleasant experience with Java.
So I see.... sorry to hear that. My experiences have been much better. Eclipse and Azureus kicks ass. I couldn't do without Java on my mobile phones these days.
I think the Head First books are actually quite good, at least Head First Java. It brings up new topics in exactly the right order (the authors having taught Java to many many people), its fun, it actually sticks!
I wonder how many who are poo-pooing it have actually read it? Some people seem to actually fly into a rage when they see it, judging by some reviews. "Computer Science should be hard to understand. Lots of dense text, no pictures, left side of brain only damnit!"
Intriguing thought, but not that simple. There are other things than number of servers needed that could come into consideration for the "best" solution. For instance:
-How long did it take to develop (assuming you could somehow find programmers with equal level of competence)?
-Is it bugfree? Does it render HTML correctly? (Current Slashdot is defenitely NOT, but the Java programmers would have an advantage as they get a clean start.)
-How easy is it to extend the functionality?
-How easy is it to change server platform? Client? Database?
Ok, I had already spent a modpoint in this topic, but I realized it is better to speak up to defend your position than to stand on the sides and give out points to "your" team.
Article is Slashdotted, so I can't comment on the content, but just to reply to some of the posts that will defenitely come up, because they ALWAYS come up when Java is discussed-
EJB are bloated etc: J2EE is does NOT equal Enterprise Javabeans. J2EE contains classes for lots of things. XML processing, messages, web servers, database connectivity, etc. You don't have to use EJB. Lots of Java developers don't like EJB because they are too cumbersome, and there are plenty of alternatives. Check out for instance O'Reillys recent book Better, Faster, Lighter Java.
Java is slow: Startup time for the JVM is still slow yes. This rarely matters for a web/application server. When it comes to running, it is plenty enough.
It isn't open source: So what. It's close enough.
Ok, that over with, was this darn topic necessary? I like both LAMP and Java. They have their uses, why did the poster and the article have to turn this into a confrontation?
"We can't show pictures or even really talk about these diseases," says parasitologist Eric Ottesen of Emory University. "Society just isn't ready for it."
I hope no one tells him about the internet: Worms Scroll down to see the stuff described in the article if you are curious. NOT for the faint of heart obviously. If you thought it sounded fun to get a huge scrotum, look at that poor guy.
"It's an exercise in futility to get science across in Congress," says Raphael Sagarin, a marine ecologist who just finished his year in D.C. "The side with more power wins, not the side with the best data or the most cogent argument."
Sagarin saw this happen on issues in his field from endangered species to global warming. Despite the din of scientific consensus on the latter, our government continues to ignore the problem. Sagarin's boss, Rep. Hilda Solis (DCA), sought to base legislation on solid science, as did many of her colleagues from across the aisle. But the committees that spawn environmental legislation--Resources, and Energy and Commerce--are chaired by Richard Pombo (RCA) and Billy Tauzin (RLA) respectively. Pombo has announced his wish to "update" the Endangered Species Act. Tauzin seems more interested in helping corporate polluters than in looking at greenhouse gas data.
"It was so bad on this committee that they would not even pass an amendment that would have stated for the record that Congress has concerns about global warming," Sagarin recalls. "It's so highly politicized, the science just doesn't matter." Though he is now embarking on his post-doc, Sagarin feels great relief to be liberated from his government post. "I'm happy," he says, "to come back to science."
You are not correct in that they are quiet. It was only within the last year that Shuttle made some design changes to make them quiet.
Agreed. I was very disappointed with the noise level of my XPC. A lot of reviews claimed that it was silent. Like hell. When the processor is under medium or heavy load, the fan keeps reving up and down. *VRRRRRRrrrrrrrVRRRRRRRrrrrrrr....*
I had intended to use it as a home entertainment system, but it would be too loud for anything but dumb Hollywood movies with lots of explosions. It is even annoying to use it as my workstation unless I'm listening to music.
You have just nailed it. These people seek to exert control of all behavior by controlling access to pain relief and pleasure. All drugs that are really worth anything are strictly controlled. They now wish to control sexuality.
Agreed. In Orwell's 1984, the jackbooted soldier class was described as being controlled and dehumanized by harshly supressing their sexuality, turning them into sadists who confused violence with sex.
A Brave New World took it in the other direction, by having a society were no one could escape sex, it was in the media and public space, all even had to participate in communal orgies. Sex was neutralised by being trivialized and infantilised.
Both great books. Orwell describes a dictatorship, Huxley, it could be argued, describes an exaggeration of the western world.
My best use of Knoppix
on
Knoppix Hacks
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
When I worked as a sysadmin, I used Knoppix several times to errorcheck Windows computers. At home, I have used it to run Linux from Scratch on a clean computer. It's great to have all tools available and no fear of removing or messing up an important partition by mistake. Also you can surf and play games while compiling.
Well you see, it is a male cat. And when the female cat (pussy) comes into season.... oh wait different type of tomcat. Sorry.
Gah. This brings backs bad memories. I was at a company a couple of years ago and was going to download Tomcat. So I took my browser to www.tomcat.com, with lots of other people in the room. Guess what! Porno domain. I try to close it the browser. New popunders come up as quickly as I try to close them (it was the company computer and they used IE, ok?). At any second someone could turn around and see me in front of a screen full of bukkakke dripping pictures. I am sweating, and finally I just panick and turn the computer off.
If I EVER meet the fuckers who did that page, they are going to pay....
I thought the Tom Cruise character in the film Rain Main was loosely based on Dr Oliver Sacks. Turned out I was wrong. However, there are many similar cases of autism described in his great book "The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat".
This is a fascinating and slightly frightening book. One of the cases there WAS made into a film, Awakenings with Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams.
Some of the other cases include the title character; a man who keeps adressing his hat as if it was his wife, a woman who has lost all "sense" of her body and feels as if she is trapped in a tomb of someone elses dead flesh, people who can see only details and not wholes, people who are unable to form new memories (exactly like in Memento), people who seem to have lost "nodes" in the "tree" of knowledge that they use to experience and interpret the world.
Well, use whatever you prefer. For me, the change came when I started using an old laptop as my surf computer (feels better to sit in the living room with family and friends instead of in another room where my stationary computer is). It has 400mhz, 128mb memory. It had Win2K before I got my hands on it, and starting and running IE was quite fast (being integrated with the OS...).
When I installed Mandrake Linux, I was disappointed to find that Mozilla took 5-10 seconds to load. It was also very sluggish to respond, a noticable pause every time I clicked a link. My friend who also uses the laptop called it ususable and asked me to please install Windows again, security be damned.
Konqueror was faster, but I have never been as attached to it as I was to Netscape/Mozilla. So I downloaded Firefox. Takes less space on drive and in memory, starts in one second, very snappy response when loading pages. Both me and friend very happy with computer now.:-)
here are at least two ways that the object and force can coexist happily from a logic viewpoint without playing games with the meanings of the words.
That is intriguing, can you give examples how that can be? In my mind, if you have defined "an immovable object", that means "In this universe, there are no things that can move this." And if you have defined "an irresistable force" you have said that "in this universe, there is nothing that can stand against this force". Therefore, if you have defined one of these things, the other is logically impossible in the same universe.
Therefore, when someone asks the question "What happens when in immovable object meets an irresistable force", the person asking the question is possibly the one playing semantic games, having redefined either "immovable", "irresistable" or "meets" to make the question possible.
>>Set 500 years after EverQuest, EverQuest II is a new and different game experience in a world marred by a series of massive cataclysms. >I wonder how deeply they will be tying the two games together. Wouldn't it be cool if for example some important event that occurs in EQ I alters the timeline for EQ II. Perhaps there could even be some quests in EQ I to prevent the prophesied upcoming cataclysm!
While an intriguing thought, how great do you think the chance is that they would include a quest that could make several man years of already developed content (quests, artwork, maps, stories..) for EQ2 obsolete?
>Alternatively the quests to prevent the cataclysm actually cause it!!
Yah, that would be one way of possibly doing it, a plot "twist" that makes the players think they made a difference, but with the same outcome as if they had failed.
This is sort of the trouble with most MMORPGs, you can't really change the story. Too expensive to implement, or other players would complain. A Tale in the Desert is the only notable exception I know of, check my earlier post about it.
I haven't tried it myself, but it sounds like A Tale In the Desert 2 is what you might be looking for.
It doesn't have combat, it relies on cooperation to get things done. Basically it is about improving yourself and society. Low level "tests" might be learning how to make bricks, straw, constructing simple artworks and so on. Higher level tests often include coordinating lower level players in helping you do something (say, have a dancing cermony celebrating the rising sun and all 20 dancers have to act in character, or have a couple of hundred people help you build a pyramid).
This is a game where you can go and open the door without risking the death of your character. The first one was NOT a never ending story. It had a clear beginning, middle and end, and a few players who were "winners".
Also, players could vote to change an amazing number of things.
I have a friend who worked for Ericsson mobile, and now works for a company that supplies batteries and battery cabinets to Ericsson.
He told me that at Ericsson they boasted (being justifiably proud) that after the Kobe earthquake in Japan, one of the few things still working were some of the Ericsson mobile transmission stations, even a few that were on houses that had collapsed. Since people could still call for help on their mobile and say were they were, that saved many lives.
Now MAYBE I'm just reading too much into something that isn't there, but it sounds like it is a metaphor for an ignorant populace that no longer wants to be helped by ones who can, which could be a metaphor for those who are creative and intelligent. Essentially, scientists and engineers(and the combinations of the two).
Hahaha! I guess you missed the part where the villan is the usual geek/mad-scientist type, and the heroes are born physically superior, and get that way WITHOUT ANY EFFORT.
In public schools, kids who are incredibly intelligent and wish to progress forward in learning are discouraged to do so because it would be "unfair" and what have you. Because of that, they are sent down to the same classes as those who are, to put the bluntly, stupid(or just not as gifted).
No, they are usually given the same education as the others because public schools are very short of money. Spending money on the kid who is ahead means that there is less resources to helping kids who are doing poorly. Of course it is unfortunate that he is not getting more help developing his talents (from that school), but most people find it unfair spending more resources on getting the good kids further ahead. Yes, unfair! The parents of kids who are doing poor are paying taxes too. Most people find spending more money on the kids who are ahead a diminishing return of interest, especially since the kids who are doing well can often find further help developing their talents from, for instance, their families. And I think you will see that many of the kids who are doing poorly are not stupid, they are coming from a less advantaged background.
Some great minds of the world did not do very well (at first) in school. What you see as wasting money on the underserving, I see as an apportunity to increase the basically limitless potentiality of humanity.
They all celebrate mediocrity and everyone being the same. It's a rather socialist point of view, and the Incredibles finally pull themselves out of their stuper and go back to helping mankind.
When people are saying "All are special, they usually do not mean that 'All are the same'. They mean that, for instance, the geek kid who is being bullied by the stronger kids and come to them for comfort, has other qualities which might not be as obviously apparent as those of the popular kids. In other words, they are saying 'all are unique' and all should be respected. The opposite of what you are saying 'all are special' means.
But hey, go back to your Nitzchean fantasies and leftist bashing if that makes you feel better.
What made you think that the villian in the movie was the one to pay attention to for some kind of moral lesson? Pixar had Syndrome say those lines because he's the bad guy and HE'S WRONG. Dash says it because he's young and ignorant. And he later finds out he was WRONG. His entire family has special abilities that make them unique.
Ah yes, but they are all born Supers, aren't they? The villans on the other hand are "normals" who are trying to rise above their station. Oh what the hell, might just as well cut and paste some from the link posted above, it said it much better than I ever could (though I thought in the same lines when I saw it):
"[...]precisely as Nietzsche told us, the only weakness of the strong in The Incredibles comes from their decision to allow themselves to be hemmed in by the artificial constraints created by the weak. Superheroes in this world are ordered to blend in, to hide, to not stand out -- and the movie's message, again in line with Nietzsche, appears to be that this is unambiguously wrong. The strong, the movie suggests, should be allowed to thrive outside the false laws and values of the weak, acting according to their own superior, self-generated code.
Born a superhero? Be a superhero. Not born a superhero? Get out of the way."
Ok, so of the three fastest computers in the world, one is almost exclusively dedicated to environmental climate models, and the other two have it as part of their tasks.
Perhaps this could bury the arguments on Slashdot that there is no hard data or serious research about global warming.
Slashdot Mirror
The UI design failure that annoys me the most is media players that the developers obviously have spent a long time getting the user interface to look like a panel for an expensive car stereo or DVD player.
Why tiny little buttons jammed close together that are hard to see and click correctly? Sure, in a car dashboard space is expensive, but when you are looking at a film on your computer screen you are going to use fullscreen and have the controls hidden most of the time, so when the users wants to see them, why not make them big with clear lables?
Especially gratuitous is when a player has new controls that are specific to a DVD player, such as a subtitle/audio selector or a click/draggable progress bar. The developers often don't integrate this with the main controller (cause there is no analogy in a car radio, which appearently makes them confused) but instead the player opens other windows with a totally different look and feel. Or if they DO include it, it is often also tiny, squeezed in between the play button and the usually useless "eject" button for instance. This is especially bad with the progress bar or volume bar where you might want to have fine selection resolution. Why not put these controls along the lower edge of the film screen where they can be stretched out? (I think Quicktime and *yech* Windows Media Player gets this right. Haven't used them in a while though, I might be wrong.)
Xine, mplayer to mention two have this problem of suffering from the Car Stereo look for controllers. Lots of mp3 players the same. Ok, they can be skinned differently... but why such as bad default, and why do all have to have their own format for skins?
(On a related topic, while I'm stil whining, I have yet to find a media player under Linux that allows you to select smoothly with a scrollbar where in the film you want to jump down to seconds. Xine for instance jumps 1 minute back or forth when you use the arrow keys to skip. When you drag the scrollbar it doesn't show where in the film you are, and it has a minimum resolution of something like 30 seconds, so it snaps to the closest 30 second segment start when you let go. I think mplayer is similar.)
Now, all this said, I do appreciate the great work people put in in making open source players that I can enjoy. If you are one of these developers, feel free to flame me for complaining instead of contributing.
Their conclusion? 35 hours per week. Keeps the productivity high, the turn over low, and the company growing at double digit rates nearly every year (or maybe it has been every year).
Something to think about during your next interview cycle.
Something to think about when libertarians/conservatives claim Europe is hopelessly behind in competitiveness. We get the same amount done AND we have much more pleasant lives.
I don't rememember the last time I had to load the Java plugin for a website.
I actually have several websites with banking etc that use applets. The JVM load time is annoying though, I agree with that.
One of Java's cool "features" is that it does not have pointers. I can't tell you how many times I've run a Java program and gotten a traceback which mentions a "null pointer exception".
Yes, that is an unfortunate wording in the JVM. It should say "null reference exception". Everything except primitives are pointers in Java, but unlike C/C++, Java does not allow pointer arithmetic, so they call them references instead.
If you see "null pointer exceptions" often, you must be unfortunate enough to have to be running some pretty amateurish programs though (no offence). Null pointers are not hard to avoid in normal code, and in situations where they might fail from an external source (for instance loaded from file), the programmer should of course wrap that in checks to see that the instance is properly initialized before proceding.
I have not had a pleasant experience with Java.
So I see.... sorry to hear that. My experiences have been much better. Eclipse and Azureus kicks ass. I couldn't do without Java on my mobile phones these days.
I think the Head First books are actually quite good, at least Head First Java. It brings up new topics in exactly the right order (the authors having taught Java to many many people), its fun, it actually sticks!
I wonder how many who are poo-pooing it have actually read it? Some people seem to actually fly into a rage when they see it, judging by some reviews. "Computer Science should be hard to understand. Lots of dense text, no pictures, left side of brain only damnit!"
Intriguing thought, but not that simple. There are other things than number of servers needed that could come into consideration for the "best" solution. For instance:
-How long did it take to develop (assuming you could somehow find programmers with equal level of competence)?
-Is it bugfree? Does it render HTML correctly? (Current Slashdot is defenitely NOT, but the Java programmers would have an advantage as they get a clean start.)
-How easy is it to extend the functionality?
-How easy is it to change server platform? Client? Database?
Slashdotters help me with this;
Allright then...
and there are no free (as in beer) quality servers
Apache Tomcat.
(..and kinky, every one and their mom developed a framework)
Doesn't mean you have to use them all.
I want a decent middle ware, that is cross platform, fast, and well documented, free as in beer (and preferably as in speech also).
That's Java.
Ok, I had already spent a modpoint in this topic, but I realized it is better to speak up to defend your position than to stand on the sides and give out points to "your" team.
Article is Slashdotted, so I can't comment on the content, but just to reply to some of the posts that will defenitely come up, because they ALWAYS come up when Java is discussed-
EJB are bloated etc:
J2EE is does NOT equal Enterprise Javabeans. J2EE contains classes for lots of things. XML processing, messages, web servers, database connectivity, etc. You don't have to use EJB. Lots of Java developers don't like EJB because they are too cumbersome, and there are plenty of alternatives. Check out for instance O'Reillys recent book Better, Faster, Lighter Java.
Java is slow:
Startup time for the JVM is still slow yes. This rarely matters for a web/application server. When it comes to running, it is plenty enough.
It isn't open source:
So what. It's close enough.
Ok, that over with, was this darn topic necessary? I like both LAMP and Java. They have their uses, why did the poster and the article have to turn this into a confrontation?
"We can't show pictures or even really talk about these diseases," says parasitologist Eric Ottesen of Emory University. "Society just isn't ready for it."
I hope no one tells him about the internet:
Worms
Scroll down to see the stuff described in the article if you are curious. NOT for the faint of heart obviously. If you thought it sounded fun to get a huge scrotum, look at that poor guy.
Global warming expert at Shell
If you had read all the articles, you'd see there is one quite close: Congressional Science Fellow
You are not correct in that they are quiet. It was only within the last year that Shuttle made some design changes to make them quiet.
Agreed. I was very disappointed with the noise level of my XPC. A lot of reviews claimed that it was silent. Like hell. When the processor is under medium or heavy load, the fan keeps reving up and down.
*VRRRRRRrrrrrrrVRRRRRRRrrrrrrr....*
I had intended to use it as a home entertainment system, but it would be too loud for anything but dumb Hollywood movies with lots of explosions. It is even annoying to use it as my workstation unless I'm listening to music.
You have just nailed it. These people seek to exert control of all behavior by controlling access to pain relief and pleasure. All drugs that are really worth anything are strictly controlled. They now wish to control sexuality.
Agreed. In Orwell's 1984, the jackbooted soldier class was described as being controlled and dehumanized by harshly supressing their sexuality, turning them into sadists who confused violence with sex.
A Brave New World took it in the other direction, by having a society were no one could escape sex, it was in the media and public space, all even had to participate in communal orgies. Sex was neutralised by being trivialized and infantilised.
Both great books. Orwell describes a dictatorship, Huxley, it could be argued, describes an exaggeration of the western world.
When I worked as a sysadmin, I used Knoppix several times to errorcheck Windows computers. At home, I have used it to run Linux from Scratch on a clean computer. It's great to have all tools available and no fear of removing or messing up an important partition by mistake. Also you can surf and play games while compiling.
Well you see, it is a male cat. And when the female cat (pussy) comes into season.... oh wait different type of tomcat. Sorry.
Gah. This brings backs bad memories. I was at a company a couple of years ago and was going to download Tomcat. So I took my browser to www.tomcat.com, with lots of other people in the room. Guess what! Porno domain. I try to close it the browser. New popunders come up as quickly as I try to close them (it was the company computer and they used IE, ok?). At any second someone could turn around and see me in front of a screen full of bukkakke dripping pictures. I am sweating, and finally I just panick and turn the computer off.
If I EVER meet the fuckers who did that page, they are going to pay....
Exactly. Strange links too. For instance, how has "Sun's rants" united and focused the Linux community?
The blog linked to is about the Java Desktop System, which at the moment is based on Linux. Are we supposed to feel... what? Outraged? Apprehensive?
I thought the Tom Cruise character in the film Rain Main was loosely based on Dr Oliver Sacks. Turned out I was wrong. However, there are many similar cases of autism described in his great book "The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat".
This is a fascinating and slightly frightening book. One of the cases there WAS made into a film, Awakenings with Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams.
Some of the other cases include the title character; a man who keeps adressing his hat as if it was his wife, a woman who has lost all "sense" of her body and feels as if she is trapped in a tomb of someone elses dead flesh, people who can see only details and not wholes, people who are unable to form new memories (exactly like in Memento), people who seem to have lost "nodes" in the "tree" of knowledge that they use to experience and interpret the world.
Great book, defenitely worth a read.
Well, use whatever you prefer. For me, the change came when I started using an old laptop as my surf computer (feels better to sit in the living room with family and friends instead of in another room where my stationary computer is). It has 400mhz, 128mb memory. It had Win2K before I got my hands on it, and starting and running IE was quite fast (being integrated with the OS...).
:-)
When I installed Mandrake Linux, I was disappointed to find that Mozilla took 5-10 seconds to load. It was also very sluggish to respond, a noticable pause every time I clicked a link. My friend who also uses the laptop called it ususable and asked me to please install Windows again, security be damned.
Konqueror was faster, but I have never been as attached to it as I was to Netscape/Mozilla. So I downloaded Firefox. Takes less space on drive and in memory, starts in one second, very snappy response when loading pages. Both me and friend very happy with computer now.
here are at least two ways that the object and force can coexist happily from a logic viewpoint without playing games with the meanings of the words.
That is intriguing, can you give examples how that can be? In my mind, if you have defined "an immovable object", that means "In this universe, there are no things that can move this." And if you have defined "an irresistable force" you have said that "in this universe, there is nothing that can stand against this force". Therefore, if you have defined one of these things, the other is logically impossible in the same universe.
Therefore, when someone asks the question "What happens when in immovable object meets an irresistable force", the person asking the question is possibly the one playing semantic games, having redefined either "immovable", "irresistable" or "meets" to make the question possible.
>>Set 500 years after EverQuest, EverQuest II is a new and different game experience in a world marred by a series of massive cataclysms.
>I wonder how deeply they will be tying the two games together. Wouldn't it be cool if for example some important event that occurs in EQ I alters the timeline for EQ II. Perhaps there could even be some quests in EQ I to prevent the prophesied upcoming cataclysm!
While an intriguing thought, how great do you think the chance is that they would include a quest that could make several man years of already developed content (quests, artwork, maps, stories..) for EQ2 obsolete?
>Alternatively the quests to prevent the cataclysm actually cause it!!
Yah, that would be one way of possibly doing it, a plot "twist" that makes the players think they made a difference, but with the same outcome as if they had failed.
This is sort of the trouble with most MMORPGs, you can't really change the story. Too expensive to implement, or other players would complain. A Tale in the Desert is the only notable exception I know of, check my earlier post about it.
I haven't tried it myself, but it sounds like A Tale In the Desert 2 is what you might be looking for.
It doesn't have combat, it relies on cooperation to get things done. Basically it is about improving yourself and society. Low level "tests" might be learning how to make bricks, straw, constructing simple artworks and so on. Higher level tests often include coordinating lower level players in helping you do something (say, have a dancing cermony celebrating the rising sun and all 20 dancers have to act in character, or have a couple of hundred people help you build a pyramid).
This is a game where you can go and open the door without risking the death of your character. The first one was NOT a never ending story. It had a clear beginning, middle and end, and a few players who were "winners".
Also, players could vote to change an amazing number of things.
The reviews for the first game were very positive, and the second one looks even better.
And guess what, there are even Linux clients!
This is a game I wish more people had heard of, you can download the demo for Linux or Windows today.
I have a friend who worked for Ericsson mobile, and now works for a company that supplies batteries and battery cabinets to Ericsson.
He told me that at Ericsson they boasted (being justifiably proud) that after the Kobe earthquake in Japan, one of the few things still working were some of the Ericsson mobile transmission stations, even a few that were on houses that had collapsed. Since people could still call for help on their mobile and say were they were, that saved many lives.
Full score for logic. I know these things, I'm an atheist myself. I was making a joke though.
Can God create a rock so big He can't lift it? What happens when an immovable object meets an irresistable force?
We go to happy happy smiley land! That's what!
Now MAYBE I'm just reading too much into something that isn't there, but it sounds like it is a metaphor for an ignorant populace that no longer wants to be helped by ones who can, which could be a metaphor for those who are creative and intelligent. Essentially, scientists and engineers(and the combinations of the two).
Hahaha! I guess you missed the part where the villan is the usual geek/mad-scientist type, and the heroes are born physically superior, and get that way WITHOUT ANY EFFORT.
In public schools, kids who are incredibly intelligent and wish to progress forward in learning are discouraged to do so because it would be "unfair" and what have you. Because of that, they are sent down to the same classes as those who are, to put the bluntly, stupid(or just not as gifted).
No, they are usually given the same education as the others because public schools are very short of money. Spending money on the kid who is ahead means that there is less resources to helping kids who are doing poorly. Of course it is unfortunate that he is not getting more help developing his talents (from that school), but most people find it unfair spending more resources on getting the good kids further ahead. Yes, unfair! The parents of kids who are doing poor are paying taxes too. Most people find spending more money on the kids who are ahead a diminishing return of interest, especially since the kids who are doing well can often find further help developing their talents from, for instance, their families. And I think you will see that many of the kids who are doing poorly are not stupid, they are coming from a less advantaged background.
Some great minds of the world did not do very well (at first) in school. What you see as wasting money on the underserving, I see as an apportunity to increase the basically limitless potentiality of humanity.
They all celebrate mediocrity and everyone being the same. It's a rather socialist point of view, and the Incredibles finally pull themselves out of their stuper and go back to helping mankind.
When people are saying "All are special, they usually do not mean that 'All are the same'. They mean that, for instance, the geek kid who is being bullied by the stronger kids and come to them for comfort, has other qualities which might not be as obviously apparent as those of the popular kids. In other words, they are saying 'all are unique' and all should be respected. The opposite of what you are saying 'all are special' means.
But hey, go back to your Nitzchean fantasies and leftist bashing if that makes you feel better.
What made you think that the villian in the movie was the one to pay attention to for some kind of moral lesson? Pixar had Syndrome say those lines because he's the bad guy and HE'S WRONG. Dash says it because he's young and ignorant. And he later finds out he was WRONG. His entire family has special abilities that make them unique.
Ah yes, but they are all born Supers, aren't they? The villans on the other hand are "normals" who are trying to rise above their station. Oh what the hell, might just as well cut and paste some from the link posted above, it said it much better than I ever could (though I thought in the same lines when I saw it):
"[...]precisely as Nietzsche told us, the only weakness of the strong in The Incredibles comes from their decision to allow themselves to be hemmed in by the artificial constraints created by the weak. Superheroes in this world are ordered to blend in, to hide, to not stand out -- and the movie's message, again in line with Nietzsche, appears to be that this is unambiguously wrong. The strong, the movie suggests, should be allowed to thrive outside the false laws and values of the weak, acting according to their own superior, self-generated code.
Born a superhero? Be a superhero.
Not born a superhero? Get out of the way."
Ok, so of the three fastest computers in the world, one is almost exclusively dedicated to environmental climate models, and the other two have it as part of their tasks.
Perhaps this could bury the arguments on Slashdot that there is no hard data or serious research about global warming.