Dungeons & Dragons and IT 243
boyko.at.netqos writes "An editorial in Network Performance Daily tries to take a (1d6) stab at explaining why geeky engineering types are also typically the types that enjoy a rousing game of D&D. From the article "The greatest barrier to creativity is a lack of boundaries. Counter-intuitive — almost zen-like — but we've found it to be true. This is why people play Dungeons & Dragons (and similar games), and why network engineers often spend time putting out fires when they could be improving the network."
We wouldn't have to put out as many fires... (Score:5, Funny)
Hmm.... (Score:2, Flamebait)
And this is why people play Dungeons & Dragons (and similar games), and why network engineers often spend time putting out fires when they could be improving the network.
I wonder of these are the same folk who post on
Hint: Your boss cares more about making things better.
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Come review time, a good manager is less likely to focus on the 4-hour network outage 5 months ago that you could have fixed in 2 than she is on how much improvement there is in the overall performance of the network.
If you are doing a good job and things are running smoothly, then you need to make people aware of what you have been doing to keep it that way. If you keep quiet and nobody knows what you are do
Re:We wouldn't have to put out as many fires... (Score:5, Funny)
You can get four or five wizards for the price of one, but the catch is, the wizards come with the curse that Rutger Hauer and his girlfriend Michelle Pfeiffer had in that movie Ladyhawke. He was a wolf at night and his girlfriend Michelle Pfeiffer turned into a hawk during the day. A simple email conversation would have taken them days and days!
Re:We wouldn't have to put out as many fires... (Score:5, Funny)
Just like working with overseas teams. Except neither of us look like Michelle Pfeiffer OR Rutger Hauer.
Re:We wouldn't have to put out as many fires... (Score:5, Funny)
There, you can get both stunning blonds and werewolves in IT. Whichever you prefer.
Re:We wouldn't have to put out as many fires... (Score:5, Funny)
The way to check is that you say "say, what's your opinion on packaging systems?". If they growl and try rip your throat out, use the silver bullets. If they start to tell their grand view of how packaging should work, use regular ammo.
If ever a werewolf were to evolve that has a fur pattern that looks the same as a short sleeved shirt with pocket protector, the human race is doomed.
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a Mac user trying to convince the rest of the world he doesn't like taking it in the ass
All he's saying is don't force it, it will make you unhappy. Sounds like the voice of experience to me.
Wait...? (Score:3, Funny)
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I don't know what this D&D prattle is about, but it certainly isn't played by the majority of IT - so it's hardly an IT culture thing.
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Most people in IT have skills that are subpar anyway. Why do you think companies are always complaining about a lack of good candidates. Lemme guess... you decided to get into IT back in the late 90's when it was all the rage. Chances are, you and your 'IT friends' all into this category due to your poor THAC0.
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Whilst still not PnP, Neverwinter nights came close.
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Re:Wait...? (Score:5, Informative)
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Burger assembly technician?
Life avoidance counselor?
Subterranean familial couch parasite?
Take your pick
Re:Wait...? (Score:4, Funny)
Sad but true.
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Giant In The Park (Score:5, Informative)
The real reason D&D is so appealing (Score:3, Insightful)
Ask yourself, when is the last time you saw a D&D character drawing that featured an overweight or underweight,
Re:The real reason D&D is so appealing (Score:5, Interesting)
Granted, this is an unorthodox campaign, heavy on RP and low on combat (although it does happen, and we did once have a combat that covered three sessions as there were 30 soldiers + catapults vs. 50 soldiers across two battlemats in an all-out battle scenario). We don't do XP either, the characters advance by DM fiat when it appears that they have learned enough to progress or when story considerations demand it. They started at level 1 (effectively level 0 as peasants, that level got traded in for a real class), and after 2 years real time they are finally to level 10 and are adventuring on their own. They had a lot of help along the way as there are only two players in the campaign so there are a ton of NPCs that have been effective party members over the two years. Heck, some of the NPCs have as much stake in the story as the PCs and pthe players switch off playing them at times as secondary characters. One of the original PCs died and the player took over playing one of the more interesting NPCs at that point and still uses him as his primary. You know it's a big deal when even the NPCs have their own character sheets and backstories. None of the NPCs are heroes, either, most of them were from the same military unit or in one case was a town guard captain of the dinky town by the military post that got burned to the ground after the combo of a war, orc attacks, and undead rampages took it out. He was kind of a Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry guy who had his whole life thrown upside down and has now become very bitter.
It's a fun, different take on D&D. There are very few monsters involved, and the worst thing the players have had to confront in combat was a human army. They spend more time geting screwed over by politicians and dealing with their own personlity flaws that get them into trouble. Creativity does play a large role in it, as the players actions often determine where the story is going next. We are constrained by the world that the campaign is set in (Forgotten Realms), but that gives a good springboard for story events to occur. Somehow everything, even spontaneous stuff, always manages to mesh with the world as it exists in game materials (even the ones that hadn't come out at the time - that's the weird part, some of the stuff we thought we "invented" for the campaign has shown up in newer FR books, so we're inadvertently keeping canon). Granted all of us know FR pretty well so it would make sense that we'd take it in a similar direction as the game material writers.
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Putting out fires vs "impoving the network" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Putting out fires vs "improving the network" (Score:4, Insightful)
E.X. if it's really easy for someone to fuck up some critical thing in the network, they will fuck it up....often. If you're constantly trying to undo every network fuckup, you don't have much time to improve the network that would prevent people from fucking it up all together.
But here's the problem. If you stop undoing every single fuckup and just let the network remain broken for a couple days while you work on a fix for the network, your boss just thinks you're lazy and aren't doing your job.
Re:Putting out fires vs "improving the network" (Score:5, Interesting)
A simple network that is very prone to fuckup can be managed by morons. Managing it is simple procedural activity governed by work experience. By just sitting there and extinguishing fires according to instructions you gain experience which allows you to be hired elsewhere to extinguish the same fires. This is a concept UK bosses understand and cherish as 95%+ they hire solely based on experience, not skills.
If you design a network that can take a serious beating and still function after, managing it requires qualified people with skills. It requires people who are capable and willing to understand how the system works to be able to fix it on the rear occasions where it goes wrong. These are in very short supply (and getting shorter) so you always end up facing your boss in a silly conversation along the lines of "How can we simplify this". Not surprising as he does not see "experience items" which he can hire on. He is accustomed to hiring based on "you have worked with this in Company C", you should be OK working with this here". He does not know how select the correct skills and how to hire as he is most likely a failed techie or a humanities person with an MBA and he is not willing to delegate the evaluation to techies. Further to this, he is very happy to override any technical opinion on this in the name of nepotism and politics.
So no wander that 95% extinguish fires instead of building fireproof networks.
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Well, almost any business I know comes to a grinding halt these days when the network is broken. Central email/calendar, central file server, central application servers and central database servers, any sort of B2B or B2C systems you run and so on means that network down equals business d
You do illustrate a point (Score:4, Insightful)
And there you have it, the much saner explanation of why people would rather stick to fighting fires than improve something: it's not lack of creativity, it's that someone will blame you if anything, no matter how unrelated, goes wrong. If there's a fire, you have your excuse. If you just tweaked the firewall on your own, and an entirely unrelated intranet (i.e., not even accessed through that firewall) server crashes, it's you who's to blame.
And it's not just the network. There are other things that don't just work and stay working, but actually need constant monitoring and occasionally tweaking, or you _will_ get a fire. E.g., if an application server's utilization is constantly climbing, someone _should_ monitor it and notice the problem long before it becomes basically "slashdotted". If you just wait until there's a fire, and just stick to keeping your grubby paws off it until it's too late, then, frankly, you're dong a crap job. E.g., if a database is doing more full table scans than it should, then your job as a DBA should be to notice the problem long before there's a fire. Maybe the cache needs to be tweaked, or maybe the indexes or statistics need to be rebuilt, or maybe you should just notify the developpers that their SQL statements are crap. Keeping your grubby paws off it until there's a fire -- e.g., everyone's transactions start getting timeouts -- is, frankly, doing a crap job. Your job should be to help prevent the fire in the first place. And that goes for the developpers and maintenance engineers too, btw, not just the IT guys.
Except there too you're to blame if you did anything and anything else went wrong. If you just optimized one of the company's programs or the database, you're suddenly the one to blame if anything even unrelated goes wrong. E.g., you optimized the templates for generating HTML? Congrats, now you're to blame every time the user sees an error page. Even if in reality at that time the messaging system croaked, or whatever. The question will always first be if it's your change that caused it. Sometimes even if some unrelated program running on the same server, if it happened after your deployment, the first assumption will be, basically, Post hoc ergo propter hoc [wikipedia.org]. It must be because of what you did.
Additionally, if we're talking IT, a lot of companies have implemented a thoroughly counter-productive policy where you can't do anything without writing an invoice to someone. The mis-guided idea is to gauge the need for an IT department and make those guys justify their salary. The result invariably is that noone does anything any more unless explicitly being asked to, by someone they can get money from. Suddenly if you need, say, an Apache server, you have to personally talk to the server admins, and to the network admins, and to the MQ admins, and the Apache admins, and everything else. You can no longer talk to just one guy and have him ask the others for the details, because every single one of those guys need to justify their salaries by sending you a bill.
At any rate, that's the end of showing any initiative or creativity right there. Why bother tweaking the database server on your own? It's outright counter-productive. It's something you could be writing a bill for, if they just wait until someone else requests it. Just stick your head in the sand until there's a fire to fight.
Basically, blaming it on lack of creativity is somewhat missing the point.
Some people would be creative all right, and are creative in their free time all right. They write fan stories, write their own cool programs or libraries, try to code their own game or mod, are "wizards" (coders) on some MUD, role-play, etc. They don't reall
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Hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Bad Manager != uncreative IT workers (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it strange that a opinion on management problems is based on D&D, but that's just me. This didn't say anything about the problem where a network engineer sees a problem but is held back because the management can't envision the problem as a problem, never mind fixing it.
What I see more often is groups that are having trouble keeping up with required changes (SarbOx et al) to run around making things perfect. When a problem does happen, it is put out like a fire and work shifts back to making required changes rather than trying to make sure that particular fire doesn't happen again.
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Realistically (Score:5, Insightful)
Other people can work on their own provided they are provided with scope, goals, etc.
A minority of people don't need any guidance or roadmap at all in order to do their work and inevitably they are the ones who do the most innovation because their thought process is not confined to space/boundaries defined by someone else.
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as this:
and I wanted to know who's been snooping around my orkplace.
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Of course it requires great minds to innovate, but it is rare that these people really work on their own without constraints. Some of them do however, and the
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Everyone is confined by someone else's boundaries. If they weren't, then that would be anarchy. Boundaries are not the issue. Setting a goal and getting around boundaries is the issue or having enough boundaries to land in the goal by accident is.
Poetry too (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's not actually true in the case of haiku, but you could probably guess that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku [wikipedia.org]
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What the... ?! (Score:2)
almost, but not quite (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:almost, but not quite (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:almost, but not quite (Score:5, Interesting)
Interestingly enough, that's also been suggested as a reason for the radical growth behind incidence of depression in modern society. Fascinating book on it here:
The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse [amazon.com]
In this he attempts to explain why by any quantifiable measure any member of society at any level in the present day has more riches, more opportunities, and more career options than their counterparts had at any time in history, psychological measures keep insisting that we're more miserable; most spectacularly in the case of females, who have had their career choices open up radically since WWII and have had their incidence of clinical depression skyrocket pretty much in tandem.
To compress an excellent book down to a sentence, your quote above basically gets it almost right. When your options are all but limitless, you can never be sure you've made the _best_ choice
And therefore, we have the paradox that people are actually happier when they have a restricted option of poor choices than when they have an effectively unrestricted option of much better choices; because the first problem is optimizable, the second isn't, and our happiness apparently comes from certainty that we have optimized the available selections, not from the absolute value of the selection.
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The Miss America contest is probably the only place you could hear so many people saying they want to cure cancer and put an end to war and starvation. Why don't everyone spend all their energy actu
Yeah. Why are computer geeks so often D&D gee (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly. You were wondering why? Maybe because they're both geeks. Geek takes geek profession, news at 11! And D&D is to a large extent generational, anyway. Later it's the collectible card game or video game geek, and before D&D it was the, I don't know, transistor radio geek. You get my point. Not all engineers are geeks, as time goes on especially, but it takes a mentality that was often found in the, say, socially unacustomed?
That doesn't seem to be what the article is about. It seems to be more about how you can get geeks to work better within well specified rules, with D&D as an explanation or example. Not that I really agree; the cool thing about D&D with a real DM was that you could do whatever you wanted even if the rules didn't say how. It's only computer RPGs that have rigid limitations. But it's probably good advice in general anyway, to have some well specified goals and restrictions. Goals that aren't well specified is a fun way to mess with player's heads if you're an evil dungeon master, maybe not a good way to manage.
It's simpler. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now look at some of the RPGs and LRPs which have failed over time. Tunnels and Trolls, for example. Treasure Trap. These are games that have far too simple a system. They lack the structure or the coherence I've outlined as existing in those games that do well.
Some of the themed RPGs - the Dr Who RPG, for example - have not done well because there is too much structure or too great an imbalance. There's no room for optimization or one thread gets all of the useful time.
No, a successful RPG or LRP is one that mimics the tools that every engineer - software or hardware - uses every working day, along with the same tradeoffs, the same architecture and the same flexibility. RISC-architecture games (like D&D) generally produce faster, more exciting games than those that are CISC-architectured (like Rolemaster), but each has devotees. And I'll bet almost anything that the devotee mappings are almost identical for the processor design as they are for the game design.
To say that they are both geeks is missing something much more fundamental. I've shown that RPGs and engineering are essentially identical. What about other devotees - the DIY radio geek mentioned in the parent post, for example? Exactly the same elements are present, in exactly the same form. Instead of balancing which stat to bump up, you're balancing circuit layout vs. noise, sensitivity vs. squelch, or any number of other factors. Imaginative solutions? There are hundreds of ways to make a tuned circuit, depending on how much drift you want to allow or how exact you want the results. Tables? Well, you look up any component spec sheet and tell me what there's plenty of. There's no such thing as a 100 ohm resistor, or rather there are a few thousand, depending on the exact characteristics you are looking for.
Oh, you'll find geeks amongst the wargamers, as well. A good game of "Squad Leader", "Britannia" or "Decline and Fall" has every bit as much mathematical elegance and logic as a finely-honed encryption library or precision-made racing engine. Again, if you look at the wargames that have done badly, you find they are mostly games with too little in them or are so heavy that they are unplayable.
They all have exactly the same common elements and - this is the key part - they all read like a diagnostic manual for so-called Geek Syndrome. In other words, the "geeks", the games, the professions and the hobbies are not logically distinguishable. Different sides, same coin. To say that a geek is attracted to the game has no more meaning than to say that the game is attracted to the geek. It just doesn't make any sense to make that kind of distinction. It simply doesn't exist.
Wonderful Post Above (Score:2)
Even at my humble level, I still lurch around the office doing version control, documenting software bugs sorted by upgrade version, typo-checking accounting data, and so on.
Tech work requires a certain style of thinking. It makes perfect sense that to develop an instinct for manipulating fine details, a young IT trainee would
McDonalds is currently running what I consider to be the best example of corporate humor I have ever
It's even simpler. (Score:2)
Re:It's simpler. (Score:4, Interesting)
Hehe...ah yes Rolemaster [wikipedia.org] (aka Chartmaster or Rulemonster) now that was an interesting system, exceeded perhaps only by the Hero system in its complexity. The one thing that always struck me as odd about Rolemaster was the rule concerning theoretically unlimited re-rolls of maximum individual rolls meaning that there was no upper or lower limit, at least in principle, to how well or poorly your character could roll. This led to the infamous situations where the mighty barbarian champion is felled in a single hit with a broken bottle by a very very lucky kobold. Rolemaster always struck me as being better suited to a CRPG where the complexity could be more easily managed and the true variety of the system could be better manifested in all its variations, but as a pencil paper RPG it, like the Hero system, can be very tedious to play according to the rules, whereas games like D&D sometimes fudge a bit to keep things moving along. Perhaps if I had run in a better Rolemaster campaign then I would have a better opinion of the system, but D&D always struck me as being more fun.
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If you have not played D&D since AD&D 2nd edition (or maybe 1st edition?) then I can see how you might hold this opinion, but they really addressed most of those issues when they converted the game over to the D20 system and the newest release, 3.5 I believe, fixed most of the minor erra
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Different sides, same coin.
Or, in this case, "different sides, same d4"
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The RuneQuest-Family (RuneQuest, Elfquest, Cthulhu, Ringworld) ist RISC.
D&D exactly looks like CISC -- Not so much commands initially, but hundreds of MMX- and SSE-Extensions
this guy has it backwards. (Score:5, Insightful)
D&D helped me be a better engineer by:
1. learning and working with a complex rule set.
2. Reading and comprehending specifications. The rulebook is several hundred pages long.
3. Problem solving within a strict set of boundaries, both individually and as a group
4. Failing a quest gracefully, without a hissy fit or seppeku, and without blaming the Damned Managers! (DM)
Of course, I also found that many people like playing D&D specifically to fight about and try to break the rules. I ended up working with many of the same kinds of people.
Maybe the manager should run his project more like a DM running a campaign. Then see how hard they work, in full costume.
Re: this guy has it backwards. (Score:5, Funny)
1. learning and working with a complex rule set.
2. Reading and comprehending specifications. The rulebook is several hundred pages long.
3. Problem solving within a strict set of boundaries, both individually and as a group
4. Failing a quest gracefully, without a hissy fit or seppeku, and without blaming the Damned Managers! (DM)
Re: this guy has it backwards. (Score:5, Funny)
1. learning and working with a complex rule set.
2. Reading and comprehending specifications. The rulebook is several hundred pages long.
3. Problem solving within a strict set of boundaries, both individually and as a group
4. Failing a quest gracefully, without a hissy fit or seppeku, and without blaming the Damned Managers! (DM)
5. Carrying a +5 Bastard Sword, for cutting through the red tape when it gets in your way.
6. Limiting time wasted talking to members of the opposing gender.
Reminds me of an old saying:
"D&D: Where every girl there is the hottest girl there."
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For going postal on your pointy-haired boss, you use the Holy Avenger.
Every half-way competent Fighter 8 knows the value of using the right weapon for the job.
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For going postal on your pointy-haired boss, you use the Holy Avenger.
A new box (Score:2)
Re:A new ... (Score:2)
(One of you Geometry experts, help me here: what marvels are possible in Non-Euclidian Sphere geometry?)
I'll vote for Taco Bell, "Think Outside the Bun".
They have developed the best spread of creations I have ever seen for a fast food chain. Then they're usually accomodating when I come up with my own spin, like adding the second tortilla shell to the base so the whole thing doesn't cave and drop 2.7
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At the end of the day this article is garbage,
I used to be a Level 12 Programmer/Analyst (Score:5, Interesting)
I tried to beg the level 27 Vice-President of IT and the level 35 CEO to help me, but like the level 21 Middle-Manager their alignment was also chaotic evil so they cast a spell of disability and a spell of career-ruining on me instead.
Faced with serious mental and physical illnesses, I became a level 1 disabled person, but kept all of my Programmer/Analyst feats and skills, but I just couldn't use them for employment any more.
Re:I used to be a Level 12 Programmer/Analyst (Score:4, Funny)
I'll tell you why (Score:5, Insightful)
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In one light, technology is our way of creating "magic". The whole idea of computers, the internet, robotics.. etc, would all be looked at as magic a few centuries ago. Even today, a lot of people have no idea how most of this stuff works and it may as well be magic to them. There's that line, can't remember who stated it: "Any significantly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Or something like that.
So in a way, I
Improving the network? I wish! (Score:5, Insightful)
Good network engineers, sysadmins, infrastructure support folks, and so forth, don't avoid improving their environments. They usually don't have time to do so, because any down-time from disasters is considered wasteful. In the rare event of time to work on stuff, they're generally so burnt out they don't have time. After nonstop hours (or days!) of fixing emergencies, they often barely have enough energy to slump into their chairs, let alone improve the landscape. Basically, they don't have the time or energy to reduce their workload, except when opportunity presents itself.
Now bad network engineers (etc.) have another problem, and that problem is called tunnel vision. They're incapable of seeing anything other than the immediate task in front of them, so even when the opportunity comes up to truly solve a problem, they duct-tape the broken symptom for the umpteenth time, and end up creating even MORE work for themselves. (And for the rest of their team, not to mention giving users an unrealistic expectation of service.)
In come the productivity enhancing solutions. "Our product will reduce these six disparate reactive monitoring tasks you do now into a single proactive tool." There's a good chance that it will actually do what it says, but only after a test phase, approval, design, rollout (including installing clients on all 400 of your servers), and then tuning. For a medium-to-large scale environment, I'd throw out a rough guess of 9 months, consuming an average of 1/3 of an engineer's time. Given that you're looking at a group of probably 4 people for that environment, that's not insignificant. Still, the company takes a look at it--they bring in a box to build a limited-scope test, and look at it for a few weeks. Those weeks turn into a month and change, and the group realises that the tuning will take a LOT of time afterwards (because extensive tuning isn't part of the proposed rollout scope or timeframe), and ultimately decides to say no.
The vendor's conclusion: These guys would rather put out fires than solve problems.
Not to say that the connection between D&D and IT is invalid, but the firefighting/systemic improvement argument is total crap.
The simple explanation... (Score:2)
bad example on creativity (Score:2)
That's a little easier, isn't it?
The more limitations that are given - boundaries or obstacles - the more the brain works to be creative."
Oh, dear. Another techy nerd who thinks they understand how humans 'think' but really doesn't..
Creativity is NOT the ability for your brain to pattern match a couple of ideas and recall related information , which is what the example above suggests.
The reasons the above task seems easi
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Creativity is about new ideas and concepts that didn't exist before and actually making them happen.
While I agree with you that creativity specifically refers to creating original thoughts, ideas, literature, "content", etc., there's a fine line between outright original creativity and synthesis. If you push the line too far in the fascist "that's not an original idea" direction, then you end up claiming that the first human to fluently speak a language is responsible for all original thought. Clearly that's absurd.
Synthesis is about "remixing" (a good term since that's what many electronic musicians/tec
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The original article was a techie and mentioned the no dates, fitting the category of 'techy nerd'.
My posting on the other hand did not give away who I am or my background.
As such your posting is pretty funny and typical of
oh, and excellent effort in the use of cut paste to send back my original snipe, that's very witty. Have you considered a career in radio?
What do y
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Everyone who posts on
From the source code on their web sites you can see the sort of tools they use and hence work out how computer literate they are, whether they prefer windoze or command line etc. User names are generally unique and Google is your friend.
These are the things I worked out: Your background is IT, m
D&D is for Whimps (Score:2)
For picking up girl^h^h^heeks! (Score:3, Funny)
Seriously: Geeks love stuffing their brains full of obscure facts and extracting them to demonstrate their vast mental superiority. Whether it's from a VAX VMS manual (which is actually worse than hearing voices in your head) or from the Dungeons and Dragons DM's Manual, it impresses others. Not ladies unfortunately, but it will impress other nerds. This is called "The Force Dot Net Syndrome" or "I can't win at the Jocks games so I will invent my own"
I'd love to play D&D, but have you seen those manuals. There are three thick core rulebooks, plus a zillion extra rulebooks and appenpums and addendiums. In a cave? Get the Wilderness Guide. A magical portal opens? Quick! The Planes Guide. It'd be a nice idea if they could describe the whole game in 32 pages, but there must be over a hundred tomes of 'essential' information.
Fortunately Blizzard, Mastercard and Peter Jackson have since invented things for those of us who can't be bothered reading.
Interesting Tidbit (Score:2)
By the way if anyone doubts that boundaries and requirements often make a problem more difficult to solve just consider problems in CS or mathematics. Frequently the right solutions come from solving special cases that add more constraints to the problem and then generalizing.
Sourcemage Linux (Score:2)
Something Else Too. (Score:5, Interesting)
D&D, and games like it, allow you to become someone else entirely. It's been my experience that people tend to choose characters that fit into one of two groups. A. Someone who is their polar opposite (it's fun to do things YOU would never do, and not really have to worry about the consequences) or B. Someone very close to themselves. The "B" characters are not necessarily less imaginative, as it still allows the player a great deal of liberty, while being enjoyable and able to 'stick close to home'. For example, one might play a character who is super intelligent, possibly pretty wise, but lacks much physical strength and dexterity. The punchline? The character is a Fighter. Or perhaps a Mage with great physical prowess, but a few fries short of a Happy Meal. These types of characters are often the most fun to play, because they make for some rather interesting situations down the road.
In the world of anal retentive ACLs, Stack Dumps, tedious reports, and just plain dumb users, who wouldn't want to just occasionally fantasize about swinging around a 6' sword and lopping someone's head off, or blasting someone into charred oblivion?
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Every time I have to sit through a tedious programme review meeting - or indeed any meeting with programme mis^H^H^Hmanagement.
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The Computer is always right, citizen! (Score:2)
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Don't piss off the geeky engineer. . . (Score:2)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=425486957
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Some interesting insights (Score:2)
d4 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Me, I don't have time - I'm working on feat selection for my third-level warlock.
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I don't know, but it doesn't sound like the AD&D I played throughout the 80s (which is to say, 1e) ... elf was a race, not a class. Popular at low levels especially because as non-humans they could be multi-classed. I thought maybe you were referring to Basic D&D but AFAICT elf was a race there too.
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You're not. Raving on Slashdot is *stupid*. It's the world's most useless activity. Get a job. Get married. Get a hobby that doesn't involve trying to save VIRTUAL communities. You're an adult for Spaghetti's sake.
Re: Oh give me a break (Score:2)
Rave on!
> Get a job. Get married. Get a hobby that doesn't involve trying to save VIRTUAL communities. You're an adult for Spaghetti's sake.
Don't take the FSM's name in vain.
*snork* Too bloody true. (Score:2)
Oh, but that costs money too.
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People who put out lots of high-profile fires get raises, promotions, bonuses.
People who make a stable network get RIF'd because there's not enough work for them to do.