In the past 5-6 years I've read numerous articles about how schools and employers are working really hard to encourage Demographic X, Y or Z to join the IT world. Be it women, racial minorities, people with only three toes... whatever, it seems there is a general attitude that it is WRONG to let the people who WANT to be in IT to actually be in IT. We seem to have this really odd notion that we have to have absolutely equal proportions of women to men, of whites to blacks to hispanics to li...
This is a continuation of the "discussion" started in the "Still No November Game" thread. From what I've gathered from Yarlen's post as well as the Stardock Communtiy Chat Brad held a few weeks back, the following is happening with TG.Net: 1. We missed out on a game for the 04 year based on promises of one game per month. This has been acknolwedged and has been apologized for. 2. We will soon be getting two new games: Nexagon and Hacker Elite. 3. TG.Net is undergoing a chang...
We lost the election. We lost it when we should have won it in a landslide. There was so much anti-Bush sentiment out there that it should have been a walk-in-the-park. But it wasn’t. We lost solidly in Congress too. We’re going to lose the next set of elections too the way we’re going. How did we fall so far from The Clinton Years, when even a cigar and a stain on a blue dress weren’t enough to diminish the nation’s love-affair with the Democratic Party? Simple answer really… The De...
It's been a big thing in recent years to sue game developers, publishers and retailers over the claim that their games make children violent. Doom caused the Columbine shootings... iD is the cause of all school shootings many would claim. EverQuest forced someone to committ suicide. World of Warcraft made a guild mate lose their job. Grand Theft Auto made me run people over. MARIO MADE ME HAVE AN IRRATIONAL FEAR AND HATRED FOR MUSHROOMS!!! Every time I see a mushroom now I pull out my...
First off, yes, I know this article falls in the category of "noise" Now, this is a separate complaint from the issues we used to have with people flooding with advertising spam. This is an issue of there just being a ton of useless crap being posted. The main reason I like this site so much is because of the general high-quality of the articles and comments. Though I disagree with many of the opinions of people like DrGuy, Moderateman, drmiller or heck, even Brad himself, I can stil...
The response to Part 1 here was better than I could have possibly expected. I was given a very simple answer to what I thought was a complex problem based on what every ASP.NET help site out there told me. What my ASP.NET book told me was a page and a half of code to do, a helpful reader (mick_k) showed me was really just one line. I'm a huge fan of collaboration and seeking out knowledge and advice from a community... it makes everyone's life so much easier when they hit a roadblock.
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Alright, at work I've been told I have to build a web tool that takes a 40 question survey, analyzes the answers given, then based on the answers generate custom content from a large stack of documents. Fair enough. The catch is I have to do it in ASP.NET, and not PHP because ASP.NET is supported by IT whereas PHP is not (despite the fact that IT runs serveral PHPNuke sites, which obviously relies on PHP). So, I've been trying to learn ASP.NET for the purpose of building this tool. In t...
Ok, it's over and done with. After years of shooting, reshooting, pre and post production work that was done in one solid chunk, making it the single largest film ever produced... Lord of the Rings is finished. All three have seen theatrical release, standard DVD release and now the extended DVD versions are all out and accounted for. Four years ago these movies started coming out to rave reviews. Nerds and geeks the world over were finally getting their day in the spotlight. Our most re...
Continuing on in the only thread of entries that seems to garner any real interest... another game review! Pirates! by Firaxis Ok, this is a remake of what is considered to be one of the classics of PC gaming. Sid Meier is one of those icons of the PC game industry whose name is whispered in hushed tones of reverence and placed along side other greats such as John Carmack (iD) and Will Wright (Maxis). He brought us some of the best games of the early days of PCs... Pirates and Civ ...
I often forget that my style of humor (dry) often doesn't go over well with others. Many miss the joke or the humor and think I'm either being serious or disrespectful. This is a problem I've had to grapple with my entire life as I encountered new people in school, and now in the workforce. Well, last week we had some rather nasty weather here in New England... ice, snow, the works. Since I was merely doing online research for my upcoming project (the ASP.NET one), it was work I could a...
Alright, I've been given a project at work to take a project management process (how to scale down our massive project methodology to fit projects of varrying sizes) and build an automated tool that asks a Project Manager a series of questions about their project, and spits out an evaluation and set of suggestions as to how best scale the methodology. It should also output this all in a mini-manual word document. Well, cool I thought, I know PHP, I know I can do this easily in PHP and get...
Hi, my name is Mike. I'm a liberal, I voted Kerry, I dislike Bush a great deal, I thought Iraq was a mistake, I'm pro-gay marraige... And I celebrate Christmas. I know this probably comes as a shock to the many on the right who like to lump all of us liberals together as God-hating mongrels who want to remove all references to Christiantiy from the face of the Earth replacing it all with icons of other faiths all in the name of "tolerance". This also is probably a shock of a different...
Ok, it's Monday, the week of Thanksgiving and there's no one in the office today to speak of. All the managers for our department are either on vacation all week or "working from home". It's just me, 3 new hires and 3 consultants, all of us largely twiddling our thumbs. I finished my work for the month last week (a database tool), so all I have today is a brief review of it with one of the consultants, and that's it. I've done up the documentation, I've done all the testing I can come u...
So last night around 8:30pm, I finished my trek through Half-Life 2, just about two days after it was released. How was it you ask? How did I do it in two days with a full time job and a human need for sleep? Is something else you may be wondering. Well, let me share with you my complete take on Half-Life 2, the hype, the delays and the distribution… The Hype No doubt about it, this is one of the most hyped PC games ever, which is surprising given the fact that I don’t think I’ve seen a ...
If you’ve ever played an game online, be it Halo, CounterStrike, Everquest or even Chess, you’ve probably encountered a slew of people who act and talk like they’ve suffered some sort of massive head trauma and are housed in special padded cells for both their own safety and the safety of others. These not-so-rare individuals are one of a few general categories of players I’ve seen in online games. Brad has posted in the past his list of forum and blogger stereotypes, so now I present to yo...