This is just me venting so don't look for any insights or gems here.
There is a new assistant at the company who at the time of this incident hadn't even made it through her thirty day probation period. She had managed to piss off all three of the other guys in my department by claiming to be a know it all and basically telling them how to do their jobs. Despite that I went into my first encounter with her with a semi-open mind. I was there to deal with some slowness problems that she was having with her computer (she was trying to insert 20 megabyte uncompressed graphic files into her Word document from a file server on the opposite side of a 3mb MPLS circuit.) While I was there diagnosing that problem, she started into me with her, "I need a flat screen." diatribe. I won't bore you with all the details of the multi-week long ordeal, but the conversation involved the lines. "My brother works in IT and he says I need a flat screen. My dad has been developing computers for years." She claimed that she had been working with flat screen monitors for "ten years" at which point I expressed my suprise and shared with her that I had done some market research on flat panels when they were just about to be introduced widely into the market... in 1997. That really flustered her and she mumbled something about how her dad had always been into really advanced computer stuff and that she had been "using computers for fifteen years." Now I'm 29, and she looked younger than me so I was kind of flabergasted and asked, "Wow, that's a long time. How old ARE you?" She got really defensive at that point and told me, "My age doesn't have anything to do with what you are here to fix." to which I replied, "Neither does your "need" for a flat screen monitor."
During the same conversation I was looking at her computer and I realized that she had both anti-spyware software on there and Symantec corporate edition which also does spyware scanning. I uninstalled the anti-spyware program (it was old and should have been uninstalled long ago. The guy who usually handles the workstations had obviously missed that). She of course needed to know why so I explained to her how when multiple programs try to access a file at the same time to scan it, they can often spike the CPU utilization as they fight to get a lock on the file. She then tried to tell me how she doesn't "scan files" and so obviously that wasn't her problem. I had to explain to her how the programs automatically scan the files any time she opens or saves them and her eyes started to glaze over before she retorted, "You don't have to dumb things down for me. I understand how computers work." I wanted to grab the bitch by the shirt and yell at her, "Then why the fuck are you asking me so many god damn innane questions then?!?!" Some how I resisted the urge.
The data shouldn't be stored on the local machines. It should be in a centralized database that supports encryption at least at the table level, if not the specific field level. That database should be accessed by a client workstation that doesn't cache the data locally. Then the backups should be password protected and encrypted. This isn't exactly rocket science here.
I doubt that much could be done for Fixers without doing so
For fixers/Johnsons to work there would have to be a somewhat complex NPC system that worked on reputation and some other factors. The best model is Grand Theft Auto. In GTA you spend the entire game jumping from person to person, following a story line as contacts introduce you to their contacts. Shadowrun has the benefit of having two distinct world, the corporate world with the corporations and the criminal world with the mafia/yakuza and gangs. The theory I like is that fixer type characters could have high etiquette skills and high etiquette skills would give them access to missions from NPCs sooner than other characters, and even in certain instances, give access to missions that other characters can't get. The model that I think of is Fallout. In Fallout there were numerous ways to play the game based on your interactions with NPCs. The other aspect of the system that would need to be coded would be a negotiation system where you could negotiate payment for the mission. That would be combined with the ability to farm missions out. So a fixer could get a "high level" mission that say 50% of the game doesn't have access to either because they haven't been playing long enough to get the "rep", or they happen to be hostile with the faction in question or whatever. The fixer could then negotiate a 10-15% increase over the base reward for the mission and farm it out to a group.
I think you're right that riggers would be the biggest challenge for an MMO. Riggers along with mages just get too stupidly powerful. I imagine that in an MMO, you'd pretty soon just have a world filled with drones running around ganking everything in sight. You would almost have to have Lone Star/corporate security NPCs constantly enforcing anti-drone laws that resulted in them being under almost constant assault.
About a year ago there was a forum setup by a company that tried to pitch the idea of a Shadowrun MMO to Microsoft. They eventually got shot down but it generated a lot of good discussion about the subject. The best idea that I heard for dealing with decking involved having systems open the matrix. Deckers would talk to their decker related NPCs and those NPCs would make them aware of systems. They could then leisurely hack them in their own time. Then when that same NPC had a run that involved the corporation that owned the system, the NPC would put the team in touch with deckers who had already successfully hacked the system. Although it wasn't the perfect strategy, it seemed workable. In a game like Shadowrun, deckers would have their own world. They could just spend their lives in the matrix hacking paydata, getting R&D documents that they sold to other classes that produced the physical goods, and helping with runs. There could even be an angle on it where if deckers were too sloppy, corporate Johnsons might hire bounty hunter players to go after the deckers. That sort of dynamic, where you never know who is gunning for you would make the Shadowrun world so much cooler than WoW where you are limited to horde versus alliance. Of course that would probably also turn a good number of casual players off. I'm sure there is a balance to be had.
The way I envisioned it working would be a Syndicate style 3/4 view with the ability to zoom in until you are right above your toon but not necessarily looking through his eyes like you can in WoW. I think that adding an FPS element to it, a la Planetside would make it too complex. I figure you would have to have some sort of system like they use in WoW, probably to hit. It would have to take terrain into account a lot more than the WoW engine does.
I've never played City of Heroes so I can't really comment on what the game world is like. I figure for something like Shadowrun you would have to instantiate the insides of buildings but have everything else taking place in real time. Unlike WoW instances, I'd imagine that other people would be able to enter into buildings at any time and that it wouldn't be limited to the team that initially went in there.
I can honestly say that I could spent the rest of my life teaching martial arts and project managing a Shadowrun MMO and be completely happy.
You see, I find that most arguments on slashdot about DRM, ODF, Linux v. Windows, etc. just all break down to people not wanting to spend a couple dollars to get something. If you read it with that lens, you will be amazed how little anyone says here is relevant.
That's a little bit of an over simplification. The ODF debate is a very relevant one. I can see both sides of the debate. Word has some pretty nice features in terms of formatting and being able to link to content outside of the document (pictures, graphs from Excel, etc.) How do you make things like that "open"? It's not like Microsoft can make OpenOffice suddenly support all of the methodologies that they use to generate documents with. On the other hand, I don't see why they can't support ODF and allow saving in ODF format with certain restrictions (ie. you are going to lose all of the Excel graphs and other linked content). Yet on the other hand, Microsoft Word 2007 was going to be able to save directly to PDF but Adobe went ballastic over that. So what can you do? You try to support a popular standard and you get taken to task by the people who own it. You support your own standard and you get taken to task for not being open enough.
Shadowrun could own WoW if they come up with a decent game engine that can handle ranged combat. It has all of the elements that would attract huge portions of the gaming world. It has the fantasy of elves and trolls and dragons and vampirse and all of that. It has the high tech angle with the cyberware and bioware and matrix. It has guns and magic. It also has a diverse enough setting to cater to casual and hard core players. It has the kind of enviroment where people can play as fixers or Johnsons or weaponsmiths or whatever.
The big problem that I see is generating a credible world. WoW works because it is a fantasy world and so they can have these huge open spaces and towns that are comprised of a couple of buildings. Shadowrun on the other hand is all about the urban sprawl and dense urban environments. I could be wrong but I don't think that there is game engine out there that can handle all of the NPCs, plus a bunch of players, plus all of the various vehicles operating both on the street and in the air. The WoW model when you are dead and running back to your corpse could be expanded upon to create the seperation between the astral space and the physical world.
What do you guys think? Can a model be created using the current hardware that could accurate recreate an urban game world that would be required for Shadowrun?
The Open source community makes their own standards, then gets pissed when people don't follow them. Use Microsoft's standards- they're just as valid- moreso, even. It's all based on perspective.
You hit the nail right on the head. I'd venture that a large segment of those who are whining about Microsoft can't afford the Microsoft tools. They want similar functionality but they want it for free. I make the same argument that you made all of the time. The tools and examples to make things work the "Microsoft way" are out there in MSDN. People don't want to have to pay for access to MSDN. So instead they whine and bitch and moan about MS not being standard compliant.
To me it just seems like a foolish way to spend a life time. If you want to write an app that only works in Firefox then go ahead and bundle Firefox with your application. If you want to write an app that will "just work" with 90% of the computers in the world, then write to Microsoft's messed up standard and be done with it. At the end of the day it's all code. It's just making a computer perform a stupid task or three. Who cares if the code isn't "compliant". Does it get the job done?
That may be true but you have to pay for it. Last I checked MSDN subscriptions aren't cheap. You aren't going to find many parents of your average intelligent twelve year old who are going to cough up a couple of grand a year so that their kid can have access to documentation.
A tiny vocal minority does not matter, in this case.
It does matter in a country where the large majority of the elegible voters fail to vote. It especially matters when that "tiny minority" is comprised of a large majority of people who haven't voted in the past, or haven't voted in a long time. The number of people who are tired of politics as usual but are supporting Ron Paul is pretty astounding. The fact that the media needs to vilify his supporters in an attempt to stiffle the message goes to show the power of his candidacy. I wear a Ron Paul for President pin on my jacket. Every single person who has bothered to ask me who Ron Paul is has walked away with a favorable impression and committed to vote for him in the primary. Even some Democrats have said that although they aren't going to go Republican to vote in the primary, they do think his platform sounds better than what the Democrats have to offer.
I'm not going to go off the deep end and say that Ron Paul is going to win the nomination until after we see how he does in the early primary states. I think that what is going to happen is that he is going to come in a lot higher than the media is giving him credit for.
A kid spending his day farming isn't going to say, "man, I could really go for a/. break right now."
Really? I suppose he wouldn't be too interested in the Natalie Portman jokes or iPhone banter, but neither most poor people nor most slashdotters are so insular and parochial. The OLPC and the Internet facilitate people talking to people, and is thus an absolute good.
More likely the kid is going to do a Google search on improved irrigation techniques. Or learn something about what crops might be better adapted to the soil. Maybe he will join a forum where he can talk to farmers in the first world about farming techniques. Maybe he can go ahead and find a dealer who will give him more for his crops than he is currently getting. I never ceased to be amazed what real, non-geek people find on the Internet. They find things that actually pertain to what they deal with in real life. I on the other hand have been "online" since 2400 baud, so oddly enough all I find are warez, pr0n and security utilities.
I'm all for Microsoft products and you only have to look at my posting history to see where I stand on most matters Microsoft. However, I think that giving kids a non-MS alternative is the way to go. I am so pro-Microsoft because I have been using Microsoft products since DOS 3.3 and I understand how they function at the core. I learned some x86 Assembler. I cracked some copy protection and messed around with INT13 and various other system calls to make the computer do funny things. I remember when DOS 5.0 came out it came with a "huge" 300+ page manual that detailed all of the components of the OS and how the worked. The Microsoft of today doesn't offer that level of documentation and the ability to really tinker with the computer to make it work. The Microsoft of today obfuscates things and goes about doing things in a very non-standard way. I don't really support Microsoft because I think they do things the "right" way. I support them because I can make the Microsoft stuff do what I need it to do and that is good enough for me. But for my children, for the children of the world... I'm all for them learning Linux. Linux is to computers today what DOS was to computers in the late 1980s when I was getting into them.
Except, of course, that we spend the vast bulk of our time being taught that violence is something that needs to be controlled and/or suppressed.
We do? I think that there are a whole lot of messages out there that tell us violence is okay. Look at the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Look at the way police deal suspects. If anything, we are simply cautioned that violence leads to consiquences. Take a look at the news over the course of any given week. If you were to base your opinion on that, you'd reasonably conclude that violence is common place.
The idea that watching a few hours of fictionalized violence on TV could somehow undo all that social conditioning is, frankly, a bit absurd.
Okay, consider this similar example. You go out to a party with some friends. Assuming you're at least passably social, you spend a good portion of the time talking to other people. When you first get there, it's kind of awkward to get the conversation going. By the end of the night you're at the point where you're the one welcoming people to the party. You go out to a restaurant after the party. At the restaurant, you try talking to the people in the booth next to you and they look at you like you're from another planet. You get the point, your mind clicks back into "public mode" and you stop trying to talk to everyone around you because in the environment you're in, it isn't "acceptable" to do that.
Watching some violence on TV isn't going to completely undo acceptable social conditioning any more than going to a party is going to completely undo your restraint to talk to everyone around you in the library. Yet exposing the mind to extensive amounts of a particular stimulus will incline the mind to continue contemplating that stimulus. If you've ever worked on a problem all day, then gone home and tried to go to sleep only to be kept awake by the problem even though you weren't at work, then it should be pretty obvious how naturally inclined the mind is to hold onto things.
Hell, I would argue that violent competitive sport, among other things, would be a far stronger contributor to anti-social behaviour, in that it actively encourages violent behaviour while providing real, tangible reward for being successful.
I completely agree with you. Just the other week I was watching the Green Bay, Dallas football game. About half way through the second quarter it was obvious to me that Dallas was going to win so I said, "This game is obviously over." The guy on the couch next to me who I'd barely known for fifteen minutes said to me, "When was the last time you got your ass kicked?" In a tone serious enough that the guy who invited him over to the house had to tell him, "Calm down. You don't want to get violent with Dave." Violent sports embellish the message that it is acceptable to be violent to the people on the other team. Hell, just look at war... look at our foreign policy. Violence is an acceptable tool for Americans.
Except, of course, that virtually 100% of the population has been in fights as kids and knows from personal experience it's more than 'a little sore' afterwards.
And following that logic, 100% of battered kids who are abused by their parents wouldn't turn around and beat on other people, or beat on their own children. Yet for some reason, children of abusers are much more likely to end up being abusive themselves.
The point that I'm trying to get across is that unless the mind has intimiate first hand exposure to an experience, it will search through all available data to construct the appropriate what-if scenario. If that library of potential experience includes one bad playground experience when a kid was eight, followed by fifteen years of seeing violence being applied as a means to a "positive" end, then common sense would dictate the mind would go with the overwhelming body of evidence that concludes violence is an acceptable means to an end.
Conditioning isn't logical. It doesn't make sense. It goes into the very base of the mind, the subsconsious. Perfectly "logical" people do stupid things all of the time. It takes a moment or two to think and act rationally. It takes a split second to respond with an instinctive reaction.
Violent video games and television programs allow the mind to create an association with what is going on. Take the example of a romance novel for a second. Women read those things because they can read the words, and in their own mind, associate with the situation to the point where to a certain extent, they are experiencing the described event. They can have physiological responses to the words and the images created by those words. The process of reading about something is rather slow compared to the speed with which the visual mediums can be used to saturate the conscious mind to the point where it gives up trying to follow and everything simply slips into the subsconsious. I'm not saying that the association with violence is being formed at a conscious level in the person playing the games or viewing the media. The association happens at a deeper level to the extent that the viewer is able to empathize with the actor or the situation that the actor is in.
I agree that the mind is smart enough to realize that the game isn't real. I'm of the opinion that the violent behaviors come out in stressful situations where there isn't time to consciously reason out the "appropriate" or acceptable. I think that people are instinctively violent. When a threat is perceived we want to destroy it and make it go away. It is only through the process of becoming civilized that we supress those base emotions, but they are simply supressed, not done away with. My own experience comes from training martial arts. It wasn't until I really started sparring and going head to head with people who have trained to hurt each other that I realized how easy it is to really get hurt and to hurt other people. Until I had that real life experience, I kind of dismissed how dangerous a fist fight really is. I think the same thing goes for games and movies. When you see people getting beat up all the time, although you might consciously realize "There's no way anybody can take as much of a beating as the main character does in an action movie."... you won't be aware of just how quickly you can lose your life or become permanently disabled by going up against someone with a few years of focused training. This point goes back to your statement about simple cause and effect. If the only cause an effect that the mind has been exposed to is, "I see people fight, then I see them being okay and a little sore afterwards.", the brain on a primative, instinctive level will start to believe that is really all that happens. Because of that simple association, it becomes more acceptable to fight because the real reprocussions of doing so aren't represented in a realistic way. And before you say, "Well, I watch UFC and I don't want to fight." UFC isn't even a real fight. Those guys are following rules. They aren't gouging eyes, collapsing wind pipes and all sorts of other brutal stuff that happens in every day street fights.
Language is the perfect example of the brain learning by imitation. This research is common sense. If the brain/mind is exposed to a lot of a particular stimulus, it will associate with that stimulus as being okay and worth mimicing. A lot of it probably has to do with survival. If you see everyone around you drinking water, it probably makes sense to drink water. Conversely if you see everyone around you avoiding poisonous berries, you probably want to avoid the berries too.
I've had this conversation with so many people at this point that I can't even begin to rehash it again here for the umpteenth time. Here is a link to a bunch of people with a lot more prestige than I have who are questioning the validity of the 911 Commission Report. http://www.wanttoknow.info/officialsquestion911commissionreport
The erosion of our freedom concerns me greatly, and I think that is where we really need to put our focus, not so much what we're doing abroad, but what we're doing here.
If the erosion of your freedoms really concerns you then you should be concerned about the fact that the Commission charged with investigating what happened wasn't given the full freedom to investigate it. You should care that more money was spent investigating why the Challenger blew up, or investigating Clinton's blow job than was spent investigating 9/11/01. Our government has been into messy, black ops stuff for a LONG time... from over throwing popularly elected governments and causing coups (Iran), to supporting oppressive military dictators (Pakistan, Iraq under Saddam), to all sorts of nastiness with drugs (Iran Contra, CIA ops). I'm not saying that the government planned and executed 9/11... that's crazy talk. The government has been covering up any sort of investigation into what really took place though. There has been so much crazy shit that our government has been involved with over the last fifty years that is finally coming home to roost that they can't let it get out. bin Laden was a CIA asset. Saddam was an allie of the United States. The fact of the matter is that our government has made some REALLY BAD foreign policy decisions that have alienated and pissed off a huge portion of the population of the world. At this point in the game the government needs to keep up the facade that they can "protect" us from evil terrorists while concealing the fact that the "evil terrorists" want to attack us because of what the government has been doing since before I was even born.
It baffles me that you can say that you care about the erosion of our freedom and liberty here at home, yet at the same time call me into question for questioning what has taken place since 9/11. Everything that is going on with the erosion of our freedoms is BASED ON 9/11. 9/11 is used as the justification for all of the nonsense that is taking place with the PATRIOT Act, suspension of habeus corpus, wiretaps and everything else.
Where'd you draw your conclusion from? All that I said is that the 9/11 Commission Report was flawed. Because of that, trying to use it for any sort of backing to any statement you make is going to put you on a weak footing.
If you seriously think that there is any real difference between the powers at the top of the political pyramid in this country you're even more dellusional than you imply that I am. Do these guys look like they really hold any anamosity toward to each other? http://instapunk.com/images/clinton_bush.jpg
You have to take all of those hearings with a grain of salt. Even the chairman of the committee has gone on the record to say that they didn't get the whole story and that they had problems getting statements from key witnesses. The 9/11 Commission was put together to lend legitimacy to a pre-formed conclusion. Any evidence that failed to fit into the predetermined paragidm was supressed and left out of the "official" record.
I can only speak as a consumer of both Verizon and AT&T in the Los Angeles area but in terms of call quality and signal strength, Verizon blows AT&T out of the water.
I don't. It is for the same reason we don't use $100/hour TV repairmen. It's cheaper to replace it than fix it.
This is very true. The company that I used to work for charged $150-200 an hour. During the height of the spyware nonsense that swept the Windows world, there were many times when we suggested to a client that they simply scrap their old spyware infested P3 box and just buy a new P4 and let us create a disk image of it. Once you factored in the cost of backing up the user profile, paving the box, reinstalling Windows + Office + various apps and patching all of them, it was easily a 3-6 hour job.
I never had a network that I cleaned up get re-infected, but I sure did deal with a whole slew of infected networks from about 2004-2006.
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There is a new assistant at the company who at the time of this incident hadn't even made it through her thirty day probation period. She had managed to piss off all three of the other guys in my department by claiming to be a know it all and basically telling them how to do their jobs. Despite that I went into my first encounter with her with a semi-open mind. I was there to deal with some slowness problems that she was having with her computer (she was trying to insert 20 megabyte uncompressed graphic files into her Word document from a file server on the opposite side of a 3mb MPLS circuit.) While I was there diagnosing that problem, she started into me with her, "I need a flat screen." diatribe. I won't bore you with all the details of the multi-week long ordeal, but the conversation involved the lines. "My brother works in IT and he says I need a flat screen. My dad has been developing computers for years." She claimed that she had been working with flat screen monitors for "ten years" at which point I expressed my suprise and shared with her that I had done some market research on flat panels when they were just about to be introduced widely into the market... in 1997. That really flustered her and she mumbled something about how her dad had always been into really advanced computer stuff and that she had been "using computers for fifteen years." Now I'm 29, and she looked younger than me so I was kind of flabergasted and asked, "Wow, that's a long time. How old ARE you?" She got really defensive at that point and told me, "My age doesn't have anything to do with what you are here to fix." to which I replied, "Neither does your "need" for a flat screen monitor."
During the same conversation I was looking at her computer and I realized that she had both anti-spyware software on there and Symantec corporate edition which also does spyware scanning. I uninstalled the anti-spyware program (it was old and should have been uninstalled long ago. The guy who usually handles the workstations had obviously missed that). She of course needed to know why so I explained to her how when multiple programs try to access a file at the same time to scan it, they can often spike the CPU utilization as they fight to get a lock on the file. She then tried to tell me how she doesn't "scan files" and so obviously that wasn't her problem. I had to explain to her how the programs automatically scan the files any time she opens or saves them and her eyes started to glaze over before she retorted, "You don't have to dumb things down for me. I understand how computers work." I wanted to grab the bitch by the shirt and yell at her, "Then why the fuck are you asking me so many god damn innane questions then?!?!" Some how I resisted the urge.
Teeth chattering because of the cold.
The data shouldn't be stored on the local machines. It should be in a centralized database that supports encryption at least at the table level, if not the specific field level. That database should be accessed by a client workstation that doesn't cache the data locally. Then the backups should be password protected and encrypted. This isn't exactly rocket science here.
For fixers/Johnsons to work there would have to be a somewhat complex NPC system that worked on reputation and some other factors. The best model is Grand Theft Auto. In GTA you spend the entire game jumping from person to person, following a story line as contacts introduce you to their contacts. Shadowrun has the benefit of having two distinct world, the corporate world with the corporations and the criminal world with the mafia/yakuza and gangs. The theory I like is that fixer type characters could have high etiquette skills and high etiquette skills would give them access to missions from NPCs sooner than other characters, and even in certain instances, give access to missions that other characters can't get. The model that I think of is Fallout. In Fallout there were numerous ways to play the game based on your interactions with NPCs. The other aspect of the system that would need to be coded would be a negotiation system where you could negotiate payment for the mission. That would be combined with the ability to farm missions out. So a fixer could get a "high level" mission that say 50% of the game doesn't have access to either because they haven't been playing long enough to get the "rep", or they happen to be hostile with the faction in question or whatever. The fixer could then negotiate a 10-15% increase over the base reward for the mission and farm it out to a group.
I think you're right that riggers would be the biggest challenge for an MMO. Riggers along with mages just get too stupidly powerful. I imagine that in an MMO, you'd pretty soon just have a world filled with drones running around ganking everything in sight. You would almost have to have Lone Star/corporate security NPCs constantly enforcing anti-drone laws that resulted in them being under almost constant assault.
About a year ago there was a forum setup by a company that tried to pitch the idea of a Shadowrun MMO to Microsoft. They eventually got shot down but it generated a lot of good discussion about the subject. The best idea that I heard for dealing with decking involved having systems open the matrix. Deckers would talk to their decker related NPCs and those NPCs would make them aware of systems. They could then leisurely hack them in their own time. Then when that same NPC had a run that involved the corporation that owned the system, the NPC would put the team in touch with deckers who had already successfully hacked the system. Although it wasn't the perfect strategy, it seemed workable. In a game like Shadowrun, deckers would have their own world. They could just spend their lives in the matrix hacking paydata, getting R&D documents that they sold to other classes that produced the physical goods, and helping with runs. There could even be an angle on it where if deckers were too sloppy, corporate Johnsons might hire bounty hunter players to go after the deckers. That sort of dynamic, where you never know who is gunning for you would make the Shadowrun world so much cooler than WoW where you are limited to horde versus alliance. Of course that would probably also turn a good number of casual players off. I'm sure there is a balance to be had.
I've never played City of Heroes so I can't really comment on what the game world is like. I figure for something like Shadowrun you would have to instantiate the insides of buildings but have everything else taking place in real time. Unlike WoW instances, I'd imagine that other people would be able to enter into buildings at any time and that it wouldn't be limited to the team that initially went in there.
I can honestly say that I could spent the rest of my life teaching martial arts and project managing a Shadowrun MMO and be completely happy.
That's a little bit of an over simplification. The ODF debate is a very relevant one. I can see both sides of the debate. Word has some pretty nice features in terms of formatting and being able to link to content outside of the document (pictures, graphs from Excel, etc.) How do you make things like that "open"? It's not like Microsoft can make OpenOffice suddenly support all of the methodologies that they use to generate documents with. On the other hand, I don't see why they can't support ODF and allow saving in ODF format with certain restrictions (ie. you are going to lose all of the Excel graphs and other linked content). Yet on the other hand, Microsoft Word 2007 was going to be able to save directly to PDF but Adobe went ballastic over that. So what can you do? You try to support a popular standard and you get taken to task by the people who own it. You support your own standard and you get taken to task for not being open enough.
The big problem that I see is generating a credible world. WoW works because it is a fantasy world and so they can have these huge open spaces and towns that are comprised of a couple of buildings. Shadowrun on the other hand is all about the urban sprawl and dense urban environments. I could be wrong but I don't think that there is game engine out there that can handle all of the NPCs, plus a bunch of players, plus all of the various vehicles operating both on the street and in the air. The WoW model when you are dead and running back to your corpse could be expanded upon to create the seperation between the astral space and the physical world.
What do you guys think? Can a model be created using the current hardware that could accurate recreate an urban game world that would be required for Shadowrun?
You hit the nail right on the head. I'd venture that a large segment of those who are whining about Microsoft can't afford the Microsoft tools. They want similar functionality but they want it for free. I make the same argument that you made all of the time. The tools and examples to make things work the "Microsoft way" are out there in MSDN. People don't want to have to pay for access to MSDN. So instead they whine and bitch and moan about MS not being standard compliant.
To me it just seems like a foolish way to spend a life time. If you want to write an app that only works in Firefox then go ahead and bundle Firefox with your application. If you want to write an app that will "just work" with 90% of the computers in the world, then write to Microsoft's messed up standard and be done with it. At the end of the day it's all code. It's just making a computer perform a stupid task or three. Who cares if the code isn't "compliant". Does it get the job done?
That may be true but you have to pay for it. Last I checked MSDN subscriptions aren't cheap. You aren't going to find many parents of your average intelligent twelve year old who are going to cough up a couple of grand a year so that their kid can have access to documentation.
It does matter in a country where the large majority of the elegible voters fail to vote. It especially matters when that "tiny minority" is comprised of a large majority of people who haven't voted in the past, or haven't voted in a long time. The number of people who are tired of politics as usual but are supporting Ron Paul is pretty astounding. The fact that the media needs to vilify his supporters in an attempt to stiffle the message goes to show the power of his candidacy. I wear a Ron Paul for President pin on my jacket. Every single person who has bothered to ask me who Ron Paul is has walked away with a favorable impression and committed to vote for him in the primary. Even some Democrats have said that although they aren't going to go Republican to vote in the primary, they do think his platform sounds better than what the Democrats have to offer.
I'm not going to go off the deep end and say that Ron Paul is going to win the nomination until after we see how he does in the early primary states. I think that what is going to happen is that he is going to come in a lot higher than the media is giving him credit for.
Really? I suppose he wouldn't be too interested in the Natalie Portman jokes or iPhone banter, but neither most poor people nor most slashdotters are so insular and parochial. The OLPC and the Internet facilitate people talking to people, and is thus an absolute good.
More likely the kid is going to do a Google search on improved irrigation techniques. Or learn something about what crops might be better adapted to the soil. Maybe he will join a forum where he can talk to farmers in the first world about farming techniques. Maybe he can go ahead and find a dealer who will give him more for his crops than he is currently getting. I never ceased to be amazed what real, non-geek people find on the Internet. They find things that actually pertain to what they deal with in real life. I on the other hand have been "online" since 2400 baud, so oddly enough all I find are warez, pr0n and security utilities.
I'm all for Microsoft products and you only have to look at my posting history to see where I stand on most matters Microsoft. However, I think that giving kids a non-MS alternative is the way to go. I am so pro-Microsoft because I have been using Microsoft products since DOS 3.3 and I understand how they function at the core. I learned some x86 Assembler. I cracked some copy protection and messed around with INT13 and various other system calls to make the computer do funny things. I remember when DOS 5.0 came out it came with a "huge" 300+ page manual that detailed all of the components of the OS and how the worked. The Microsoft of today doesn't offer that level of documentation and the ability to really tinker with the computer to make it work. The Microsoft of today obfuscates things and goes about doing things in a very non-standard way. I don't really support Microsoft because I think they do things the "right" way. I support them because I can make the Microsoft stuff do what I need it to do and that is good enough for me. But for my children, for the children of the world... I'm all for them learning Linux. Linux is to computers today what DOS was to computers in the late 1980s when I was getting into them.
We do? I think that there are a whole lot of messages out there that tell us violence is okay. Look at the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Look at the way police deal suspects. If anything, we are simply cautioned that violence leads to consiquences. Take a look at the news over the course of any given week. If you were to base your opinion on that, you'd reasonably conclude that violence is common place.
The idea that watching a few hours of fictionalized violence on TV could somehow undo all that social conditioning is, frankly, a bit absurd.
Okay, consider this similar example. You go out to a party with some friends. Assuming you're at least passably social, you spend a good portion of the time talking to other people. When you first get there, it's kind of awkward to get the conversation going. By the end of the night you're at the point where you're the one welcoming people to the party. You go out to a restaurant after the party. At the restaurant, you try talking to the people in the booth next to you and they look at you like you're from another planet. You get the point, your mind clicks back into "public mode" and you stop trying to talk to everyone around you because in the environment you're in, it isn't "acceptable" to do that.
Watching some violence on TV isn't going to completely undo acceptable social conditioning any more than going to a party is going to completely undo your restraint to talk to everyone around you in the library. Yet exposing the mind to extensive amounts of a particular stimulus will incline the mind to continue contemplating that stimulus. If you've ever worked on a problem all day, then gone home and tried to go to sleep only to be kept awake by the problem even though you weren't at work, then it should be pretty obvious how naturally inclined the mind is to hold onto things.
Hell, I would argue that violent competitive sport, among other things, would be a far stronger contributor to anti-social behaviour, in that it actively encourages violent behaviour while providing real, tangible reward for being successful.
I completely agree with you. Just the other week I was watching the Green Bay, Dallas football game. About half way through the second quarter it was obvious to me that Dallas was going to win so I said, "This game is obviously over." The guy on the couch next to me who I'd barely known for fifteen minutes said to me, "When was the last time you got your ass kicked?" In a tone serious enough that the guy who invited him over to the house had to tell him, "Calm down. You don't want to get violent with Dave." Violent sports embellish the message that it is acceptable to be violent to the people on the other team. Hell, just look at war... look at our foreign policy. Violence is an acceptable tool for Americans.
And following that logic, 100% of battered kids who are abused by their parents wouldn't turn around and beat on other people, or beat on their own children. Yet for some reason, children of abusers are much more likely to end up being abusive themselves.
The point that I'm trying to get across is that unless the mind has intimiate first hand exposure to an experience, it will search through all available data to construct the appropriate what-if scenario. If that library of potential experience includes one bad playground experience when a kid was eight, followed by fifteen years of seeing violence being applied as a means to a "positive" end, then common sense would dictate the mind would go with the overwhelming body of evidence that concludes violence is an acceptable means to an end.
Conditioning isn't logical. It doesn't make sense. It goes into the very base of the mind, the subsconsious. Perfectly "logical" people do stupid things all of the time. It takes a moment or two to think and act rationally. It takes a split second to respond with an instinctive reaction.
Violent video games and television programs allow the mind to create an association with what is going on. Take the example of a romance novel for a second. Women read those things because they can read the words, and in their own mind, associate with the situation to the point where to a certain extent, they are experiencing the described event. They can have physiological responses to the words and the images created by those words. The process of reading about something is rather slow compared to the speed with which the visual mediums can be used to saturate the conscious mind to the point where it gives up trying to follow and everything simply slips into the subsconsious. I'm not saying that the association with violence is being formed at a conscious level in the person playing the games or viewing the media. The association happens at a deeper level to the extent that the viewer is able to empathize with the actor or the situation that the actor is in.
I agree that the mind is smart enough to realize that the game isn't real. I'm of the opinion that the violent behaviors come out in stressful situations where there isn't time to consciously reason out the "appropriate" or acceptable. I think that people are instinctively violent. When a threat is perceived we want to destroy it and make it go away. It is only through the process of becoming civilized that we supress those base emotions, but they are simply supressed, not done away with. My own experience comes from training martial arts. It wasn't until I really started sparring and going head to head with people who have trained to hurt each other that I realized how easy it is to really get hurt and to hurt other people. Until I had that real life experience, I kind of dismissed how dangerous a fist fight really is. I think the same thing goes for games and movies. When you see people getting beat up all the time, although you might consciously realize "There's no way anybody can take as much of a beating as the main character does in an action movie." ... you won't be aware of just how quickly you can lose your life or become permanently disabled by going up against someone with a few years of focused training. This point goes back to your statement about simple cause and effect. If the only cause an effect that the mind has been exposed to is, "I see people fight, then I see them being okay and a little sore afterwards.", the brain on a primative, instinctive level will start to believe that is really all that happens. Because of that simple association, it becomes more acceptable to fight because the real reprocussions of doing so aren't represented in a realistic way. And before you say, "Well, I watch UFC and I don't want to fight." UFC isn't even a real fight. Those guys are following rules. They aren't gouging eyes, collapsing wind pipes and all sorts of other brutal stuff that happens in every day street fights.
Language is the perfect example of the brain learning by imitation. This research is common sense. If the brain/mind is exposed to a lot of a particular stimulus, it will associate with that stimulus as being okay and worth mimicing. A lot of it probably has to do with survival. If you see everyone around you drinking water, it probably makes sense to drink water. Conversely if you see everyone around you avoiding poisonous berries, you probably want to avoid the berries too.
A lot of playing WoW is all about the social aspect. You can take a laptop over to your friend's house and play together.
The erosion of our freedom concerns me greatly, and I think that is where we really need to put our focus, not so much what we're doing abroad, but what we're doing here.
If the erosion of your freedoms really concerns you then you should be concerned about the fact that the Commission charged with investigating what happened wasn't given the full freedom to investigate it. You should care that more money was spent investigating why the Challenger blew up, or investigating Clinton's blow job than was spent investigating 9/11/01. Our government has been into messy, black ops stuff for a LONG time... from over throwing popularly elected governments and causing coups (Iran), to supporting oppressive military dictators (Pakistan, Iraq under Saddam), to all sorts of nastiness with drugs (Iran Contra, CIA ops). I'm not saying that the government planned and executed 9/11... that's crazy talk. The government has been covering up any sort of investigation into what really took place though. There has been so much crazy shit that our government has been involved with over the last fifty years that is finally coming home to roost that they can't let it get out. bin Laden was a CIA asset. Saddam was an allie of the United States. The fact of the matter is that our government has made some REALLY BAD foreign policy decisions that have alienated and pissed off a huge portion of the population of the world. At this point in the game the government needs to keep up the facade that they can "protect" us from evil terrorists while concealing the fact that the "evil terrorists" want to attack us because of what the government has been doing since before I was even born.
It baffles me that you can say that you care about the erosion of our freedom and liberty here at home, yet at the same time call me into question for questioning what has taken place since 9/11. Everything that is going on with the erosion of our freedoms is BASED ON 9/11. 9/11 is used as the justification for all of the nonsense that is taking place with the PATRIOT Act, suspension of habeus corpus, wiretaps and everything else.
If you seriously think that there is any real difference between the powers at the top of the political pyramid in this country you're even more dellusional than you imply that I am. Do these guys look like they really hold any anamosity toward to each other? http://instapunk.com/images/clinton_bush.jpg
You have to take all of those hearings with a grain of salt. Even the chairman of the committee has gone on the record to say that they didn't get the whole story and that they had problems getting statements from key witnesses. The 9/11 Commission was put together to lend legitimacy to a pre-formed conclusion. Any evidence that failed to fit into the predetermined paragidm was supressed and left out of the "official" record.
Post to undue improper moderation. Ignore this.
...they muted the speaker so the red box wouldn't work anymore.
I can only speak as a consumer of both Verizon and AT&T in the Los Angeles area but in terms of call quality and signal strength, Verizon blows AT&T out of the water.
This is very true. The company that I used to work for charged $150-200 an hour. During the height of the spyware nonsense that swept the Windows world, there were many times when we suggested to a client that they simply scrap their old spyware infested P3 box and just buy a new P4 and let us create a disk image of it. Once you factored in the cost of backing up the user profile, paving the box, reinstalling Windows + Office + various apps and patching all of them, it was easily a 3-6 hour job.
I never had a network that I cleaned up get re-infected, but I sure did deal with a whole slew of infected networks from about 2004-2006.