I'm not sure exactly what it was called.. but when I was very young I used to play a text based ST game on my Dad's mainframe terminal at home. It was awesome, you could discover planets and mine for dilithium crystals, do experimental things with your engines, and klingons would pop up from time to time to fight? Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
It supports your statement though... It would be a great candidate for a next-gen 'SimEarth' type of free-play exploration game.
I find this a little disturbing in regards to the commercial unix space. It seems like Sun, IBM, and Intel are the only chipset manufacturers left. If sparc goes, your choices are IBM, Intel (Power, Itanium). If another company were to enter the chip market with something competetive, I would think there are enough Unix variants and forks that another one could arise. The software isn't really the problem, IMHO.
I get a a lot of your points. IMHO, most of the mistakes with COH are actually simpler than that. The big problem is you start with a name and a costume. Coming up with a name up front is really tough, since people used up tons of them. It's possible to look cool at level 1, and suck. They should have started everyone with normal names and no costume, and given pieces of both as you level. The appearance factor is a huge carrot.
Write scripts for machines to follow, not people. If they are semi-intelligent, the people can figure it out from the script. If not, they need a new career anyway.
Why is it a bad thing that you aren't allowed to be anonymous? I've never really been sure that having to announce who you are is a violation of privacy. Why is everyone so desperate to remain nameless?
Yeah, also keep in mind that for every one of you that fixed a few things, there was likely another non-IT staffer who managed to make it worse and cause the external guy to spend a lot more time than he would have if the problem had been left alone.
Take an extra effort to clarify the language that you are using. A beginner will have a difficult time differentiating between the mandatory syntax and the other things that are done by convention. This goes for all sorts of programming and even basic computer instruction. Use funny or ridiculous variable names and such so that they can't be confused with the other words or statements that are real. Even basic stuff like the word 'integer' can throw people off if they don't have a good math background, so make sure that everyone grasps the vocabulary you are using. If they only miss one word in a sentence, then they've missed the entire point, right?
Seriously? I doubt that anyone cares that much about how good or bad a person is in math. There's no reason you can't be in decent physical shape, and be socially adept enough to have friends, and still be good at math. I was great at math in school, and I had a lot of friends who were and also a lot that weren't. None of them gave a shit about my math skills. They liked me because I was fun to hang out with and didn't take myself that seriously.
I think you are missing the point. The car fixers won't become scientists anyway. They are just using the resources of the ones who would become engineers, and being cheated out of skills that would do them more good than a B.A. in basket weaving and keg stands.
Ah! Yes that is true, but not what I had in mind. I was actually thinking of full executables that did specific jobs coded in C, coordinated across processes, networks, etc by other non-C pieces... which I guess is essentially the same thing, since we are building upon a base of code that was written in C (network stack, OS, database, etc).
A lot of that code is getting to be very mature, so things that used to be applications are now infrastructure.
I think you are right, but you overlook the trend towards modularization and multi-threading techniques. I've seen quite a few places where chunks of C code do most the of the real work, and a higher level language like Python or Java are used simply to control data flow and provide interfaces. I think this will be more and more popular as an application architecture, as the number of processors increase and the location of your data and interface get more abstract.
I really like this sort of idea, but taken a bit further out. A game like civ, that creates content, for another game, like WOW or another MMORPG/RPG/ or even FPS. With the right kind of infrastructure and reporting / management tools. It's a neverending cycle of content and players that can evolve together. I think some games are drifting towards this, but I don't think anyone has seen the really big picture yet. Couple this with some good competition, prizes, and a serious rendering engine, and you have a reality-based TV show on top of it. It's all technically possible today, there just needs to be a visionary to put it all together in a way that pleases the masses, and caters to different groups of people with different wants. You get something for the hardcore gamer, something for the creative (and/or technical) gamer, and something for the casuals too.
I care some.. If we don't protect the artists rights then we are effectively discouraging people from creating art. Being a musician today is already a dicey proposition at best. Only a very select few manage to make a reasonable living. I'm sure there are many people who would make excellent musicians who simply decided there were better and easier ways to survive. I feel like an artist should retain ownership of their creations until death, plus however many years the law decides after that.
This would be a really neat interface for musical instruments.. just imagine, hook your head to a set of speakers and ROCK OUT! In all seriousness, If this ever becomes a mature and pervasive technology, the applications are limitless.. imagine a wi-fi brain control unit with an open-source API... Control anything with your brain!
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently Google is still my friend...
http://almy.us/sst.html
I'm not sure exactly what it was called.. but when I was very young I used to play a text based ST game on my Dad's mainframe terminal at home. It was awesome, you could discover planets and mine for dilithium crystals, do experimental things with your engines, and klingons would pop up from time to time to fight? Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
It supports your statement though... It would be a great candidate for a next-gen 'SimEarth' type of free-play exploration game.
I find this a little disturbing in regards to the commercial unix space. It seems like Sun, IBM, and Intel are the only chipset manufacturers left. If sparc goes, your choices are IBM, Intel (Power, Itanium). If another company were to enter the chip market with something competetive, I would think there are enough Unix variants and forks that another one could arise. The software isn't really the problem, IMHO.
I get a a lot of your points. IMHO, most of the mistakes with COH are actually simpler than that. The big problem is you start with a name and a costume. Coming up with a name up front is really tough, since people used up tons of them. It's possible to look cool at level 1, and suck. They should have started everyone with normal names and no costume, and given pieces of both as you level. The appearance factor is a huge carrot.
Write scripts for machines to follow, not people. If they are semi-intelligent, the people can figure it out from the script. If not, they need a new career anyway.
Why is it a bad thing that you aren't allowed to be anonymous? I've never really been sure that having to announce who you are is a violation of privacy. Why is everyone so desperate to remain nameless?
Yeah, also keep in mind that for every one of you that fixed a few things, there was likely another non-IT staffer who managed to make it worse and cause the external guy to spend a lot more time than he would have if the problem had been left alone.
Take an extra effort to clarify the language that you are using. A beginner will have a difficult time differentiating between the mandatory syntax and the other things that are done by convention. This goes for all sorts of programming and even basic computer instruction. Use funny or ridiculous variable names and such so that they can't be confused with the other words or statements that are real. Even basic stuff like the word 'integer' can throw people off if they don't have a good math background, so make sure that everyone grasps the vocabulary you are using. If they only miss one word in a sentence, then they've missed the entire point, right?
Seriously? I doubt that anyone cares that much about how good or bad a person is in math. There's no reason you can't be in decent physical shape, and be socially adept enough to have friends, and still be good at math. I was great at math in school, and I had a lot of friends who were and also a lot that weren't. None of them gave a shit about my math skills. They liked me because I was fun to hang out with and didn't take myself that seriously.
I think you are missing the point. The car fixers won't become scientists anyway. They are just using the resources of the ones who would become engineers, and being cheated out of skills that would do them more good than a B.A. in basket weaving and keg stands.
I have used this approach too. Works well, and works with pretty much any unix variant.
Ah! Yes that is true, but not what I had in mind. I was actually thinking of full executables that did specific jobs coded in C, coordinated across processes, networks, etc by other non-C pieces... which I guess is essentially the same thing, since we are building upon a base of code that was written in C (network stack, OS, database, etc).
A lot of that code is getting to be very mature, so things that used to be applications are now infrastructure.
I think you are right, but you overlook the trend towards modularization and multi-threading techniques. I've seen quite a few places where chunks of C code do most the of the real work, and a higher level language like Python or Java are used simply to control data flow and provide interfaces. I think this will be more and more popular as an application architecture, as the number of processors increase and the location of your data and interface get more abstract.
I was not entertained. What a bunch of babies.
I really like this sort of idea, but taken a bit further out. A game like civ, that creates content, for another game, like WOW or another MMORPG/RPG/ or even FPS. With the right kind of infrastructure and reporting / management tools. It's a neverending cycle of content and players that can evolve together. I think some games are drifting towards this, but I don't think anyone has seen the really big picture yet. Couple this with some good competition, prizes, and a serious rendering engine, and you have a reality-based TV show on top of it. It's all technically possible today, there just needs to be a visionary to put it all together in a way that pleases the masses, and caters to different groups of people with different wants. You get something for the hardcore gamer, something for the creative (and/or technical) gamer, and something for the casuals too.
I care some.. If we don't protect the artists rights then we are effectively discouraging people from creating art. Being a musician today is already a dicey proposition at best. Only a very select few manage to make a reasonable living. I'm sure there are many people who would make excellent musicians who simply decided there were better and easier ways to survive. I feel like an artist should retain ownership of their creations until death, plus however many years the law decides after that.
It's people!!!
This would be a really neat interface for musical instruments.. just imagine, hook your head to a set of speakers and ROCK OUT! In all seriousness, If this ever becomes a mature and pervasive technology, the applications are limitless.. imagine a wi-fi brain control unit with an open-source API... Control anything with your brain!