8 posts tagged “links”
I found this link and I think it's worth sharing. Let me say first of all that I have never played World of Warcraft. I probably never will. I'm sure it's lots of fun, but I was saved from that black hole by the simple fact that I am extremely cheap. I won't pay $15/month to play a game I've already had to spend $50 just to take home from the store. I've haven't stayed up past midnight playing games since college, and never past 10:30 or 11 if I had to be at work the next morning. Unfortunately, the cheap factor works against me as well, because from an entertainment perspective video games as I buy them (usually for around $10 two years after they come out) are a pretty good value in terms of the amount of entertainment you get (quality + amount of time) vs dollars spent.
I think recently some things have come together to make video games more compelling than ever before (and I'm not talking about high-def graphics): Broadband and voice chat. Playing online with and against real opponents is much more fulfilling. It's not only that you get to beat a real person (though the respect you can earn there is very compelling as well). It's that the person you play against is a lot more creative than any bot or AI could ever hope to be, and it makes for a much better experience. You can't take shortcuts just because you know the bots don't go that way, and you really have to watch your back. Thjis is a real person; he could do anything. Also, the team aspect improves greatly. You can coordinate actions with teammates as events unfold even in very fast paced situations. The gratification and respect earned for a job well done is instant, and I would argue not necessarily quite as fleeting as the link I posted suggests (at least, if you tend to play on the same server and meet the same people. They remember). Even during lulls in the game, playing with voice enabled allows a new social aspect. You get to know the real person, hear about some of the things that happen to them in real life as well. When chatting with a person (often the same set of people repeatedly) they can't hide behind a simple profile like you may hear people do on websites. You can hear real emotion in what they say and how they say it.
Those who know me well now know that I am an avid gamer. I read Penny Arcade. I still play the original Counter-Strike when I get the chance (I even got good at TactialOps, a counter-stirke clone). I like Final Fantasy. Make no mistake- video games are my favorite past time. I have no intention to just quit, but when I look at the amount of time I spend gaming I think that maybe I could cut back some. Allowing that, what is a reasonable amount of time to spend gaming? How much time did you spend watching TV last week? Just to be clear- while the link prompted this post, I've been thinking about cutting back for a while now.
I do spend perhaps more time than I should gaming. I'd say maybe as much as 20 hours a week at times (though weeks like that are rare), and I can very much identify with some of the things mentioned in the link. I've been 'addicted' to video games ever since we got our first computer sometime around 1988, playing pac-man, wheel of fortune (lol), then later the original duke nukem. In college I played Warcraft/Starcraft, Duke3d, Civilization, and eventually Unreal Tournament and Counter-Strike. UT, especially, pulled me in. I was spending a lot of time at that point playing games, but at a reasonable, if high, level. More recently, I bet I've spent probably 10-15 hours over the last week playing Counter-Strike:Source, GunGame (my current favorite). That's still a little high, but it's been a slow week otherwise so I've had the time and before that I went three weeks straight without playing any serious games. I'd say on weeknights, I play 2 or 3 days of the five, for about 2 1/2 to 3 hours. On weekends, if there's nothing else going on I might spend 6 to 8 hours total between saturday evening and sunday afternoon. Or I might not play at all; you never know.
When I think about an appropriate amount of time to spend playing games (trading off what I'd like to do with what I need to do) I think that a typical week could still be 2 weeknights (not counting Friday), but bring the hours per night down to 1 1/2 to no more than 2 hours. Weekends (including Friday) should typically be no more than 4 to 6 hours. These numbers would be typical. Lets say I just got Half-Life 3. I would expect to be able to spend a lot of time that weekend playing it, but that's a rare scenario.
The trick now is how to enforce this. This is not an easy task; the person from the link I posted decided he couldn't, and had seen too many others who were the same way, so he decided to quit completely. I'm not to that point yet.
http://www.mimoco.com/swlanding.htm
It's kind of cool and sad at the same time. I mean- Darth Vader is cool, but what are those round things at the top of his head? Ears?
For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match. (Bill Bryson)
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers. (Larry Niven)
Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window. (Steve Wozniak)
Since the invention of the microprocessor, the cost of moving a byte of information around has fallen on the order of 10-million-fold. Never before in the human history has any product or service gotten 10 million times cheaper-much less in the course of a couple decades. That's as if a 747 plane, once at $150 million a piece, could now be bought for about the price of a large pizza. (Michael Rothschild)
I've noticed lately that the paranoid fear of computers becoming intelligent and taking over the world has almost entirely disappeared from the common culture. Near as I can tell, this coincides with the release of MS-DOS. (Larry DeLuca)
I found them here.
I read a technology blog called Techdirt. They tend to be a little opinionated, but usually pretty well written. As when any two entities with opinions meet, there are of course some points of contention. One of those is issues is the use of monitoring software by parents. To read some of their posts, you'd think they believe that parents should just let their children run wild once they're old enough to use a computer. Of course I exagerate a little, but you get the idea. So today there was another article that dissed the software (even if only in passing), and I left a response that I want to include here as well.
I occasionally see opinions here coming down against parents monitoring their child's online behavior. That stance is based on the false assumption that the parent, from the start, knows how to be a parent and has done so. It would much more accurate to say that when a child is born, the parent knows very little about the needs of that specific child (especially the first one!).
Good parents are constantly watching not only their children, but also their own actions and the results they produce to see what is effective and what is more counter-productive. I can't image a parent allowing a small child play near the street without close supervision. The child at that point is just not prepared. The same holds for a 12 year old girl just starting to assert her independence on the internet.
Additionally, not all parents have been the best parents throughout the development of the child, but only really begin to notice the child after problems have started to develop. For these parents, unobtrusive monitoring can be a valuable tool to help determine where the children really are.
Also, to suggest the monitoring is worthless just because you can't do it 100% of the time is ludicrous. You don't need full coverage as long as you have a good representative sample. And even if the child finds a way to disable the sofware you'll know somethings up when the monitor reports zero activity even though the child spent a long time on the computer.
Trust doesn't have to be an issue. I don't want to use the street example again because ideally the child isn't playing near the street in the first place, but I'm sure you can think of good activity in which a young child should be allowed to participate, but only with close supervision. The point is that the child should be used to this supervision, especially if they are exposed to computers and internet at a younger age and the monitor has just 'always been there' as far as the child is concerned. The parent need not even check it that often as long as they do occasionally check it. Of course, sometime trust will become an issue. In those cases, I think it unlikely that monitoring software will be the cause of the issue, but rather merely a flashpoint for deeper problems.
Certainly a trust relationship should develop, and eventually the parent must let go of the child, but even at this age it is still a parent's job to know what their child is up to. Monitoring software can be a valuable tool for the parent, especially as a child first begins to be a content producer on the internet rather than soley a consumer. By that I mean about the time the child may get it's own instant messenger account, start it's own blog, or play an online game more of the caliber of World of Warcraft than something to promote a Saturday morning cartoon show. This is usually about the time children also go through puberty, and we all know the kind of change that can bring to an adolescent. It is extremely important through this stage that parents are able to know what their child thinking and feeling, and increasingly that means monitoring thei child's online activies.
Found via Coding Horror:
http://news.com.com/2100-1006_3-6119618.html?part=rss&tag=6119618&subj=news
It boggles the mind.
Thinking as a programmer- I'm wondering what in the world I'd do with 80 different cores. It's very clear to me that our current mutli-threaded paradigms aren't going to cut it if we're gonna have to think on that scale. I'm hoping for a model that works pretty much like what we have now, but everytime you create a new object (ie, use New is visual basic) the object gets it's own thread. Then we change the way we think about objects to more closely match the real world; each object exists independently of those around it, with it's own goals and systems. Essentially, what I'm talking about is each object can have it's own event loop, rather than one per application, and you'll never have to worry about a runaway object or program bogging down the system.
Thinking as a gamer- I've heard talk about merging the video card functions into the cpu and I've always been skeptical, but maybe it's possible after all. The improved throughput of not having to send video data over a bus will help graphics, and there's obviously going to be enough horsepower. I can also image playing a future version of unreal tournament where instead of a single AI thread that controls everything each bot will have it's own thread, running on it's own processor. I want to talk for a moment about AI. There's a lot of talk about making AI's more difficult, but I don't think that's the issue. When I go play a game I'm often not looking for a challenge, but for a chance to relieve some stress. In that case an easy bot that I can walk all over works to my advantage and can be a lot more fun. I think want gamers really want is an AI that will play more like a human, even if it's a stupid human. That means rather than laying out bot paths in a map, the bot should form it's own image of what the map looks like the same way a human would. It should adapt to how a game is going over a series of rounds like a human would (and be subject to the same random issues). If a gun isn't working, try a different one. If you get beat down this way then try that one. Explore a little- find good places to camp (when appropriate) just like a human. It should look for and find trends in how the opposing team works, and exploit them. I could list more, but the real important thing is that it should do it as much as is possible the same way a human player does it. Tactical Ops, I'm talking to you here.
Finally, thinking as a sys/netadmin: I've been in several environments where a company has between 3 and 11 separate servers. This chip should be able to handle that entire workload on one machine, and through virualization do it much the same way it's done now. As a sysadmin I'd still have a separate file server, mail server, gateway, etc, so there's not much to gain there. The advantage is all of a sudden I only have to worry about one set of hardware. And this chip makes thin clients very attractive on some levels. It'd be nice to see a sound card and NIC designed specifically to serve multiple VM's or clients simultaneously. And this is without any changes to the current traditional setup. With this many cores more software will get better at being parallel, including operating system. I'm talking specifically about clustering. I expect a new version of windows or patch that will make clustering setup extremely simple and part of the basic OS. So now that 3 server company may still have three servers, but each individual server can do the work of all three if needed, and the improved OS means failover is automatic. We're talking about dramatically improved reliability. And since (ideally), the machines are all identical, with identical configs, there's still really only one system to manage. And those same three boxes ought to now be powerful enough to do all of the work formerly done at the company with 11 servers.
http://slashdot.org/articles/06/09/20/1552236.shtml
In summary: A University of Virginia student graduates (with a double major no less!) in just one year.
While his 72 AP credits didn't hurt, that's still very impressive. Talk about all work and no play.
