I've seen a lot of people make comments just like yours and in places other than just D&D gaming. The same is true for any level or gaming. I know people who look back at some game they use to do and know so well, with the rules and "tricks" engraved in the back of their head. Then, when coming back to or trying a new version, they reject it with claims of "it's not the same because 'x','y', and 'z' are impossible to do.".
There's nothing really wrong with that. However, in the context of D&D and those who claim "you can't Roleplay anymore" is about the most illogical statement one can make, particularly when you hear some of the arguments, like "It use to be a 'guide'book and not a 'rule'book". Well... the book will be whatever you make it into. You can use it as a guide or as straight rules. Don't blame the system if you're using more strictly than others did in the past. Certainly, older versions were far more vague on rules. Powers specifically were vague on use making it easier to draw a line from point A to point B in terms of use, however every single one of those things are still possible in any addition you play. The key? Players willing to be creative (including the DM).
You're not going to "roleplay" if your DM won't let you use your 4E magic missle to attack a tree to try and fell it onto a pack of kobolds. But you *could* do it in 4E, even though it's not written in the book. There's no more "rock to mud" spell or vise versa, but you *could* still do it in 4E. Your DM and players just have to be creative enough.
The truth of that matter is, 4E is just as much roleplay as anything else, it's the DM and players who have grown (as you sort of hit on) use to hand-holding from previous versions where everything had a rule and you had to follow the rules strictly. Now, with 4E, they've gone back to "hey, here's the mechanical rules, the rest is up to you."
I'm finding the hardest part of DMing 4E, is breaking the bad habits of my players of NOT roleplaying. From years of being told "no" to everything they try, because it wasn't in the book, to saying 'yes', is no easy task. In actuality, they're growing quite good at adjusting to it and I'm seeing more roleplaying than in the previous 3E campaigns I've run.
What 4E does and does well is it gives you the mechanics for a game, particularly combat, and it leaves everything else in your hands. And people just can't seem to figure this out. 4E is an instruction manual on how to put a toy together. What it doesn't do is tell you how to play with the toy once it's finished. That's up to you and your players imagination and that's what I see as the biggest problem for many people looking in at 4E and bitching about the lack of "roleplay". If they read the book, they'll find it saying this very thing. It's your (plural) job to roleplay the game, not the books.
At least, that's the way I've been seeing it unfold.
MMO's where around a lot longer than the 1990's. I believe they reach back into the 1970's with text based MUD's. You can just look up Richard Bartle's work history. He first worked on MUD1 in 1978, with MUD2 in 1980. And there was a strong case that EQ ripped off DikuMUD which was launched in 1990.
Everything since the 1970's have just been some minor extensions of these concepts. They added some graphics, changed how the server structure worked, etc. But the 'prior art' idea of the whole thing has been around a long time.
Yes they do, by definition. You have to read the definition of censorship and say "did Norton do this?". If 'yes', then they censored something or someone. You can't argue it wasn't censorship simply because it wasn't a government entity or it wasn't as serious as some other (very serious) human rights violations or whatever criteria fits your personal context.
You clearly feel "censorship" must be some sort of terrible global institutionalized fascist thing, which it can be, but it also can simply be deleting some comment on some nobodies Wordpress page that they didn't like.
Perhaps you're thinking of a different, more specific, term that encompasses all these things?
And if it is a businesses right to delete comments they want deleted, as they stated in the terms that all posters agree to, it isn't censorship either. If I go onto a Disney children's forum and post nothing but swear words, and Disney deletes it, is that censorship too?
Yes, it's censorship. Please regard the dicntionary:
To Censor:: to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable [censor the news] ; also : to suppress or delete as objectionable [censor out indecent passages]
It has nothing to do with morals or laws. It's a term with a definition. Societies determine if it's a "good" or a "bad" thing based on the situation.
Yes you can.
It's called gifting. I bought Half Life 2 when it came out, but later bought the Orange Box. It notified me that I had one extra copy of HL2 and I was able to give it as a gift to one of my buddies.
You can gift any game that you've purchased. Just have someone send you paypal, then gift the game to their username.
You can sell your Steam games. By saying otherwise you're just spreading FUD.
"Gifting" is giving someone else a coupon to download a free game on Steam. That's all. When you bought the Orange Box, and already owned Half-Life 2, Valve credited your account with a free coupon for Half-Life 2. Nothing more. It is not selling a game. Once you activate a game on a Steam account, it cannot be transferred to another account. Activated games cannot be "gifts".
At least not yet. Though, it would be cool if it where true.
Really? I was thinking it was from Idiocracy. Though, they were both written and directed by Mike Judge, I don't recall "electrolytes" being used in that film.
In Idiocracy, the future is dumb and they replaced all forms of water (except the toilet) with Gateraid(tm) like product and frequently promote it as better because it has "electrolytes". Including watering plants with it. Which happens to be destroying the crop population and no one can figure out why... except Luke Wilson, smartest man in the world. =P
Happily bought this film for $6 for my show of support. =)
I found watching all the 3 DVD's for the full length got pretty *yawn*. However, If I watched them in a shorter format, they weren't that bad. During the whole DVD run, I was saying to myself "well, that's a Futurama joke, and that's a Futurama joke, but they're just not funny, but it's classic Futurama. Did I just grow up and it's not funny anymore?" hehe
I was not aware that the Niagara paper mill was closing down. But I don't think a data center will employ as much people as a paper mill, nor will it be of the same skill set. While it certainly would create some good paying jobs, Niagara will need more than that to replace the jobs lost.
I'm thinking it might also have to do with licenses for the audio book version. The first thing I thought of is that they're going to try and claim that a text-to-speech device is taking a written book and making it an audio book.
Or more importantly, at what age did they start/stop teaching basic math and English and start teaching astrophysics and warp-field dynamics at the Star Fleet Academy? Is the basic 101-course "Deflector Dish Realignments"? Ah, the one thing I always puzzled at was how smart those young kids where on any of the Star Trek series. "What are they teaching them?" is what I always seemed to ask.
It leads one to ask, are the basics really that necessary? How humanly possible would it be to project a warp speed trajectory for your starship if they did/didn't teach you how to add/subtract or do differential equations? I'm going to go on a limb and say the "basics" become less important when dealing with jobs that require computers to compute astronomical amounts of data astronomically fast, faster than humanly possible. Because no amount of knowledge or skill will help if you simply can't do it fast enough if your "tool" breaks.
However, to know how to understand the numbers, than being able to compute them, for example, is far more important. Which is basically how I perceived the expedited education process of one of our favorite TV series, Star Trek. Of course, Star Trek also taught us there's no replacement for "the arts" such as Picard's Shakespear or whatever old english classics Jane ran on the holodeck. However, when it comes to the "hard" sciences, there might be more room to breath by the reliance on tools.
Unless you're Voyager's crew in the first few seasons. They seemed to be so smart at the basics to create brand new technologies out of thin-air, in a matter of minutes, so long as it kept the script moving forward. Or maybe it was because their tools were just that much better?
I've been using AntiVir for a couple years now. I love it. Primarily because it's free, secondarily because it's free, and finally, it's got a really small footprint.
Given that it does pop-up a "buy now!" ad every time it updates is fine with me. I can deal with that once a day or so. Otherwise, it's not terribly expensive to buy it.
Though, I'd like to try clamav. I hear good things about it.
Honestly, I don't know anyone that takes into consideration how 'green' something is before they purchase it...especially gadgets.
Actually, there are some but the general market research that my company has conducted (as well as many others I'm sure) will show that almost no consumer will pay more for a "green" product but they will likely choose a "green" product over a "non-green" product if all other things are equal. Which comes down to a simple idea of perceived value. In this case, the "green" product will make the consumer feel like they're getting more for their money (as intangible or obscure as it might directly be).
However, there is a very small segmentation of society that will "walk to walk", so to speak, and spend considerably more money on products labeled green. Most will not and most that do buy green products buy them for financial, not environmental, reasons. Meaning, they bought a Hybrid because they figured they'd be saving on gas costs. Or they bought CFL bulbs to save money on the electric bill. Stuff like that.
Very few consumers, if any, will pay more for green products. Simply said, spending money on making your product green, which will increase the price of your product, is not a good business decision. Luckily, most companies are finding out that they can do "green" things and save money. Turning off the lights and computers at the end of the day. Finding ways to reuse/recycle manufacturing waste or even implementing better recycling programs can save a company a lot of money while benefiting the environment.
I'm close enough to these ideas as the Market Research guy sits right across from me and has shown me our report on the "green" topic. I'm also part of my companies "Green Team" for which we've implemented and discussed some of the above examples. Just by implementing a better recycling program, we're cutting down a sizable percentage of waste going to a landfill, which in-turn, means less cost because waste removal is charged by the weight. As well as, once being charged for hauling away recyclables, there are companies who will do it for no cost because they actually make a fair amount on turning in recyclables.
Though, one interesting statistic from the last Executive Leadership Team minutes was that my company has managed to reduce overall electrical consumption by a few percentage points but the total costs more than doubled. Ouch.
Though, the whole "green" push has turned into "green-washing", where companies are overstating or trying to point out excessively small environmental impacts for the sake of PR.
Releasing games is a great strategy. A) The legwork is done. B) You can shine it up. C) Customers who missed it the first time get another crack at it.
This works very well for games that were great for a reason. Chrono Trigger DS is my current fav. game. I never got to play it on the SNES, but the DS version is simply awesome... even if the graphics are pretty old school.
Likewise, Super Mario World DS, while not truly a remake, shows how the old formula can easily work in the modern generation.
I've also enjoyed Final Fantasy games on the DS. Stuff I never got to play on the NES because RPG's never appealed to me then.
Should companies do it? Yeah. For what games? Games that were obviously good for a reason. Final Fantasy 7 comes to mind. They could completely remake the game with higher quality graphics and cut-screens (using the models from the movies) and I'm sure it'd sell like hotcakes on all the systems... if they didn't have a lock-in with Sony.
Needless to say, I've benefited greatly from being able to play timeless classics again, for the first time. =P
In the US, they're generally very fast as well. Not all the time, but usually. The biggest issue I've tend to have is from pre-orders and the supplier pushing back release dates, which isn't Amazon's fault. That being said, I can't remember anything actually arriving in the expected arrival date. It's always been before. So the the grand-parent post who stated they have a slow ship time, they clearly never even bothered to use Amazon.
With that said, I feel Amazon will only continue to gain in holiday sales when people start to realize how much better it is to order a gift online, have it arrive at your door and completely avoid the mad-cap antics of holiday shopping. It'll just require you to plan ahead enough to get it in the mail. So, no, it won't for those last minute shoppers. But I certainly appreciate the convenience.
Has anybody here from the US studied abroad while doing computer science? Was it worthwhile? Or anyone from outside the United States recommend a university program?
I have a BS in CS and I studied abroad for a year in London. However, I didn't take a single class relevant to my degree. When I left for London, I needed 2 CS classes to graduate. Basically, I transferred to another school, took their (awesome) study abroad program. Lived with a host family. Networked with people from all over Europe. Had the best time of my life. And met my French fiancee.
I more than doubled my student debt to do it (it's not cheap) but it was worth it. I didn't care about not having a CS class though I did well in all the classes I did take. I also joined the Rugby (Union) team of my college. Damn, it was a great time. I love Jolly Old London (Twickenham technically).
I'd recommend doing it. Heck, if you even have to ask, then I think you're probably wanting it enough that you should do it.
It has nothing to do with that you learn in the class room and everything about what you experience. Some of the best courses I had where the History courses offered at my England college.
Don't study abroad to take CS courses. Study abroad to experience a different culture and meet new people. Even if it's just an American in London, there's a lot to learn.
Even if it means, basically, taking a semester or year off of your normal course work to do it. Just know that it isn't cheap and that it's really something you want to do. I've seen several people on my study abroad program who did it and clearly didn't want to do it and wasted the entire trip crying in their bedrooms over missing boy/girlfriends.
Bon Chance!
ps. Know what you're looking for when studying abroad. Is it just a location? Or do you really want to integrate into the host country? Many programs out there are nothing but a school of Americans, secluded in an area, and you don't get much integration into the country. If you're reasonable good in a 2nd language consider a country with that a primary language. If you're not, fear not to go to an English speaking school (England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, etc.)
Don't study abroad if you're trying to focus on school work. That's NOT what it's about. Stay in the States and focus on your classes and your grades if that's what matters. You study abroad to experience life in a different place. Take classes that will expand on this experience. You don't want to be stuck in a computer lab for 40 hours a week to finish a programming project, when you can see the Tower de Eiffel from your window, kind of thing.
Yeah, that's my thought. This article needs to be tagged with "deadhorse". I game probably a lot during the week. Except for 30-60mins at night, before bed, It's always on the PC. The one game I play at night? Chrono Trigger DS. A game made how many years ago. I would say Consoles are dead. I have more stock-piles of games to play on a console but can't be draw away from the enjoyment I have playing Left 4 Dead or Warcraft, at the moment. It'll get worse when Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 are released.
HELLSCREAM: Yeah ill have a uh liter of cola
BURGER GUY: What?
HELLSCREAM: A liter of cola!
BURGER GUY: Liter-O-Cola do we make liter-o-cola?
THRALL: Why dont you just order a large, Hellscream?
HELLSCREAM: I don't want a large Hellscream. I want a goddamn liter of cola.
BURGER GUY: I don't know what that is.
HELLSCREAM: Liter is Orcish for give me some fu**in cola before I rip off your fu**in lips!!
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen a lot of people make comments just like yours and in places other than just D&D gaming. The same is true for any level or gaming. I know people who look back at some game they use to do and know so well, with the rules and "tricks" engraved in the back of their head. Then, when coming back to or trying a new version, they reject it with claims of "it's not the same because 'x','y', and 'z' are impossible to do.".
There's nothing really wrong with that. However, in the context of D&D and those who claim "you can't Roleplay anymore" is about the most illogical statement one can make, particularly when you hear some of the arguments, like "It use to be a 'guide'book and not a 'rule'book". Well... the book will be whatever you make it into. You can use it as a guide or as straight rules. Don't blame the system if you're using more strictly than others did in the past. Certainly, older versions were far more vague on rules. Powers specifically were vague on use making it easier to draw a line from point A to point B in terms of use, however every single one of those things are still possible in any addition you play. The key? Players willing to be creative (including the DM).
You're not going to "roleplay" if your DM won't let you use your 4E magic missle to attack a tree to try and fell it onto a pack of kobolds. But you *could* do it in 4E, even though it's not written in the book. There's no more "rock to mud" spell or vise versa, but you *could* still do it in 4E. Your DM and players just have to be creative enough.
The truth of that matter is, 4E is just as much roleplay as anything else, it's the DM and players who have grown (as you sort of hit on) use to hand-holding from previous versions where everything had a rule and you had to follow the rules strictly. Now, with 4E, they've gone back to "hey, here's the mechanical rules, the rest is up to you."
I'm finding the hardest part of DMing 4E, is breaking the bad habits of my players of NOT roleplaying. From years of being told "no" to everything they try, because it wasn't in the book, to saying 'yes', is no easy task. In actuality, they're growing quite good at adjusting to it and I'm seeing more roleplaying than in the previous 3E campaigns I've run.
What 4E does and does well is it gives you the mechanics for a game, particularly combat, and it leaves everything else in your hands. And people just can't seem to figure this out. 4E is an instruction manual on how to put a toy together. What it doesn't do is tell you how to play with the toy once it's finished. That's up to you and your players imagination and that's what I see as the biggest problem for many people looking in at 4E and bitching about the lack of "roleplay". If they read the book, they'll find it saying this very thing. It's your (plural) job to roleplay the game, not the books.
At least, that's the way I've been seeing it unfold.
MMO's where around a lot longer than the 1990's. I believe they reach back into the 1970's with text based MUD's. You can just look up Richard Bartle's work history. He first worked on MUD1 in 1978, with MUD2 in 1980. And there was a strong case that EQ ripped off DikuMUD which was launched in 1990.
Everything since the 1970's have just been some minor extensions of these concepts. They added some graphics, changed how the server structure worked, etc. But the 'prior art' idea of the whole thing has been around a long time.
Norton DOES NOT HAVE THE POWER TO CENSOR
Yes they do, by definition. You have to read the definition of censorship and say "did Norton do this?". If 'yes', then they censored something or someone. You can't argue it wasn't censorship simply because it wasn't a government entity or it wasn't as serious as some other (very serious) human rights violations or whatever criteria fits your personal context.
You clearly feel "censorship" must be some sort of terrible global institutionalized fascist thing, which it can be, but it also can simply be deleting some comment on some nobodies Wordpress page that they didn't like.
Perhaps you're thinking of a different, more specific, term that encompasses all these things?
And if it is a businesses right to delete comments they want deleted, as they stated in the terms that all posters agree to, it isn't censorship either. If I go onto a Disney children's forum and post nothing but swear words, and Disney deletes it, is that censorship too?
Yes, it's censorship. Please regard the dicntionary:
To Censor :: to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable [censor the news] ; also : to suppress or delete as objectionable [censor out indecent passages]
It has nothing to do with morals or laws. It's a term with a definition. Societies determine if it's a "good" or a "bad" thing based on the situation.
Yes you can. It's called gifting. I bought Half Life 2 when it came out, but later bought the Orange Box. It notified me that I had one extra copy of HL2 and I was able to give it as a gift to one of my buddies. You can gift any game that you've purchased. Just have someone send you paypal, then gift the game to their username. You can sell your Steam games. By saying otherwise you're just spreading FUD.
"Gifting" is giving someone else a coupon to download a free game on Steam. That's all. When you bought the Orange Box, and already owned Half-Life 2, Valve credited your account with a free coupon for Half-Life 2. Nothing more. It is not selling a game. Once you activate a game on a Steam account, it cannot be transferred to another account. Activated games cannot be "gifts".
At least not yet. Though, it would be cool if it where true.
Really? I was thinking it was from Idiocracy. Though, they were both written and directed by Mike Judge, I don't recall "electrolytes" being used in that film.
In Idiocracy, the future is dumb and they replaced all forms of water (except the toilet) with Gateraid(tm) like product and frequently promote it as better because it has "electrolytes". Including watering plants with it. Which happens to be destroying the crop population and no one can figure out why... except Luke Wilson, smartest man in the world. =P
Happily bought this film for $6 for my show of support. =)
I'm stocking up on my bennigan's coupons just in case.
I agree with you.
I found watching all the 3 DVD's for the full length got pretty *yawn*. However, If I watched them in a shorter format, they weren't that bad. During the whole DVD run, I was saying to myself "well, that's a Futurama joke, and that's a Futurama joke, but they're just not funny, but it's classic Futurama. Did I just grow up and it's not funny anymore?" hehe
And I think this site is maintained by our /. editor overlords. It has bill 234 listed twice as promises broken.
It's listed twice in "recently rated" section. There's still only 1 broken promise listed on the meter.
I was not aware that the Niagara paper mill was closing down. But I don't think a data center will employ as much people as a paper mill, nor will it be of the same skill set. While it certainly would create some good paying jobs, Niagara will need more than that to replace the jobs lost.
I'm thinking it might also have to do with licenses for the audio book version. The first thing I thought of is that they're going to try and claim that a text-to-speech device is taking a written book and making it an audio book.
doh! Hit the wrong button. Forgot to add the punchline about... unless they're bringing those burgers home. =P
(sorry flipping burgers does not feed a large family)
Do people actually think it does?
Or more importantly, at what age did they start/stop teaching basic math and English and start teaching astrophysics and warp-field dynamics at the Star Fleet Academy? Is the basic 101-course "Deflector Dish Realignments"? Ah, the one thing I always puzzled at was how smart those young kids where on any of the Star Trek series. "What are they teaching them?" is what I always seemed to ask.
It leads one to ask, are the basics really that necessary? How humanly possible would it be to project a warp speed trajectory for your starship if they did/didn't teach you how to add/subtract or do differential equations? I'm going to go on a limb and say the "basics" become less important when dealing with jobs that require computers to compute astronomical amounts of data astronomically fast, faster than humanly possible. Because no amount of knowledge or skill will help if you simply can't do it fast enough if your "tool" breaks.
However, to know how to understand the numbers, than being able to compute them, for example, is far more important. Which is basically how I perceived the expedited education process of one of our favorite TV series, Star Trek. Of course, Star Trek also taught us there's no replacement for "the arts" such as Picard's Shakespear or whatever old english classics Jane ran on the holodeck. However, when it comes to the "hard" sciences, there might be more room to breath by the reliance on tools.
Unless you're Voyager's crew in the first few seasons. They seemed to be so smart at the basics to create brand new technologies out of thin-air, in a matter of minutes, so long as it kept the script moving forward. Or maybe it was because their tools were just that much better?
I've been using AntiVir for a couple years now. I love it. Primarily because it's free, secondarily because it's free, and finally, it's got a really small footprint.
Given that it does pop-up a "buy now!" ad every time it updates is fine with me. I can deal with that once a day or so. Otherwise, it's not terribly expensive to buy it.
Though, I'd like to try clamav. I hear good things about it.
Gotta undo-modding. I hate when fat fingers. =P
Honestly, I don't know anyone that takes into consideration how 'green' something is before they purchase it...especially gadgets.
Actually, there are some but the general market research that my company has conducted (as well as many others I'm sure) will show that almost no consumer will pay more for a "green" product but they will likely choose a "green" product over a "non-green" product if all other things are equal. Which comes down to a simple idea of perceived value. In this case, the "green" product will make the consumer feel like they're getting more for their money (as intangible or obscure as it might directly be).
However, there is a very small segmentation of society that will "walk to walk", so to speak, and spend considerably more money on products labeled green. Most will not and most that do buy green products buy them for financial, not environmental, reasons. Meaning, they bought a Hybrid because they figured they'd be saving on gas costs. Or they bought CFL bulbs to save money on the electric bill. Stuff like that.
Very few consumers, if any, will pay more for green products. Simply said, spending money on making your product green, which will increase the price of your product, is not a good business decision. Luckily, most companies are finding out that they can do "green" things and save money. Turning off the lights and computers at the end of the day. Finding ways to reuse/recycle manufacturing waste or even implementing better recycling programs can save a company a lot of money while benefiting the environment.
I'm close enough to these ideas as the Market Research guy sits right across from me and has shown me our report on the "green" topic. I'm also part of my companies "Green Team" for which we've implemented and discussed some of the above examples. Just by implementing a better recycling program, we're cutting down a sizable percentage of waste going to a landfill, which in-turn, means less cost because waste removal is charged by the weight. As well as, once being charged for hauling away recyclables, there are companies who will do it for no cost because they actually make a fair amount on turning in recyclables.
Though, one interesting statistic from the last Executive Leadership Team minutes was that my company has managed to reduce overall electrical consumption by a few percentage points but the total costs more than doubled. Ouch.
Though, the whole "green" push has turned into "green-washing", where companies are overstating or trying to point out excessively small environmental impacts for the sake of PR.
Releasing games is a great strategy. A) The legwork is done. B) You can shine it up. C) Customers who missed it the first time get another crack at it.
This works very well for games that were great for a reason. Chrono Trigger DS is my current fav. game. I never got to play it on the SNES, but the DS version is simply awesome... even if the graphics are pretty old school.
Likewise, Super Mario World DS, while not truly a remake, shows how the old formula can easily work in the modern generation.
I've also enjoyed Final Fantasy games on the DS. Stuff I never got to play on the NES because RPG's never appealed to me then.
Should companies do it? Yeah. For what games? Games that were obviously good for a reason. Final Fantasy 7 comes to mind. They could completely remake the game with higher quality graphics and cut-screens (using the models from the movies) and I'm sure it'd sell like hotcakes on all the systems... if they didn't have a lock-in with Sony.
Needless to say, I've benefited greatly from being able to play timeless classics again, for the first time. =P
In the US, they're generally very fast as well. Not all the time, but usually. The biggest issue I've tend to have is from pre-orders and the supplier pushing back release dates, which isn't Amazon's fault. That being said, I can't remember anything actually arriving in the expected arrival date. It's always been before. So the the grand-parent post who stated they have a slow ship time, they clearly never even bothered to use Amazon.
With that said, I feel Amazon will only continue to gain in holiday sales when people start to realize how much better it is to order a gift online, have it arrive at your door and completely avoid the mad-cap antics of holiday shopping. It'll just require you to plan ahead enough to get it in the mail. So, no, it won't for those last minute shoppers. But I certainly appreciate the convenience.
Hehe, merci! I've got to get back into using French. My fiancee is nagging on me enough and I've been out of school for too long. =P
Has anybody here from the US studied abroad while doing computer science? Was it worthwhile? Or anyone from outside the United States recommend a university program?
I have a BS in CS and I studied abroad for a year in London. However, I didn't take a single class relevant to my degree. When I left for London, I needed 2 CS classes to graduate. Basically, I transferred to another school, took their (awesome) study abroad program. Lived with a host family. Networked with people from all over Europe. Had the best time of my life. And met my French fiancee.
I more than doubled my student debt to do it (it's not cheap) but it was worth it. I didn't care about not having a CS class though I did well in all the classes I did take. I also joined the Rugby (Union) team of my college. Damn, it was a great time. I love Jolly Old London (Twickenham technically).
I'd recommend doing it. Heck, if you even have to ask, then I think you're probably wanting it enough that you should do it.
It has nothing to do with that you learn in the class room and everything about what you experience. Some of the best courses I had where the History courses offered at my England college.
Don't study abroad to take CS courses. Study abroad to experience a different culture and meet new people. Even if it's just an American in London, there's a lot to learn.
Even if it means, basically, taking a semester or year off of your normal course work to do it. Just know that it isn't cheap and that it's really something you want to do. I've seen several people on my study abroad program who did it and clearly didn't want to do it and wasted the entire trip crying in their bedrooms over missing boy/girlfriends.
Bon Chance!
ps. Know what you're looking for when studying abroad. Is it just a location? Or do you really want to integrate into the host country? Many programs out there are nothing but a school of Americans, secluded in an area, and you don't get much integration into the country. If you're reasonable good in a 2nd language consider a country with that a primary language. If you're not, fear not to go to an English speaking school (England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, etc.)
Don't study abroad if you're trying to focus on school work. That's NOT what it's about. Stay in the States and focus on your classes and your grades if that's what matters. You study abroad to experience life in a different place. Take classes that will expand on this experience. You don't want to be stuck in a computer lab for 40 hours a week to finish a programming project, when you can see the Tower de Eiffel from your window, kind of thing.
Yeah, that's my thought. This article needs to be tagged with "deadhorse". I game probably a lot during the week. Except for 30-60mins at night, before bed, It's always on the PC. The one game I play at night? Chrono Trigger DS. A game made how many years ago. I would say Consoles are dead. I have more stock-piles of games to play on a console but can't be draw away from the enjoyment I have playing Left 4 Dead or Warcraft, at the moment. It'll get worse when Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 are released.
Just put a URL shortcut on their desktop to Kongregate.com, AddictingGames.com, or whatever your favorite "web" game website may be.
HELLSCREAM: Yeah ill have a uh liter of cola
BURGER GUY: What?
HELLSCREAM: A liter of cola!
BURGER GUY: Liter-O-Cola do we make liter-o-cola?
THRALL: Why dont you just order a large, Hellscream?
HELLSCREAM: I don't want a large Hellscream. I want a goddamn liter of cola.
BURGER GUY: I don't know what that is.
HELLSCREAM: Liter is Orcish for give me some fu**in cola before I rip off your fu**in lips!!
Sweet, now they can come out with "Guitar Hero Arcade" for the Wii, PS3, and 360! Oh wait...