Slashdot Mirror

Indeed. I feel like this whenever the topic of education is brought up.

What do kids want? To be out playing, having fun with friends, enjoying life.
What do parents want? The kids to be learned enough to live on their own.
What do educators want? A paycheck and a submissive student body.

You've tried lengthening and shortening the school year to compensate for lower test scores (and everyone hates being in class during the month of June; the heat is tremendous, and it's almost worth calling in a bomb threat just to have a day off), You've tried tweaking the tests to more accurately reflect students' learning. You've tried parent-teacher conferences. You've tried cutting teacher's salaries and increasing them. You've tried changing the teaching methods. You have Montessori schools and Play schools. You've employed off-duty police as security guards to make sure the students are in their classrooms as the appointed times. You've tried using fear, fear of the known and unknown, to motivate kids to learn, because the life you're living is similar to the one they will be living. You've tried honours classes, and you've tried remedial classes. None of it seems to work, does it? Every attempt to increase the yield of better learned students seems to make things worse.

I am here to tell you that you don't know what you want. Could children be taught subjects like Calculus, Physics, and Advanced Humanities at grade 5? Yes, but you have a plan, or someone does, which requires the workforce to maintain a certain number of people; is that not the rally cry these days, why don't the older ones retire, so the younger ones can give it a try? If you created an army of PhD candidates by grade 8, where would all the jobs go for the former generations? Face it guys, this is all social engineering gone awry. You can't have your cake and eat it. You can't have super-intelligent kids at a young age without having to change how things work, but in doing so, everyone older loses out on their 'shares' in the way things are. They're too old to change, to adapt, too unwilling, and doing so means they 'lose' everything. So, make up your minds. Do you want Doctoral candidates by grade 8, or do you want a slightly idiotic workforce that is still maturing well into their 50s? Lengthening or shortening their summers won't do much here, save the students enjoying themselves or growing up to be terribly dull.

Are you giving birth to sentient beings, who have the rights and privileges to be whomever they want to be, or are you putting out a product, for future consumption by some terrible beings? I will play the game however you want to play it. Idiots or geniuses, the choice is yours.

Chinese Democracy cost around $14 millions, and Duke Nukem Forever cost up to $30 millions. Now, while Chinese Democracy is the most expensive record ever, DNF is not even in the top 10. So I'd say Chinese Democracy was far more wasteful (but still a damn good album).

Surely you'd agree that if we went back to shooting your black dot with my blue dots, gameplay wouldn't matter much beyond the first 10 minutes. People would abandon it relatively quickly for something with superior graphics, even if it did have inferior gameplay. That said, I'd say art design and utilizing the capabilities of the system to the fullest would be the most important factor, and Wii does excel in that area. Even if they don't have the sharpest graphics, many of the Nintendo Wii games are very, very good at setting the mood and drawing you into the game just with their stage design.

Also, don't forget the issue of price. The PS2 outsold the PS3 early on in the PS3's lifecycle. With all of the extra capabilities of the PS3 and the fact that it was backwards compatible (at the time) you would think it should have won handily over it's older sibling, but price was an important factor.

Another thing that you've completely failed to include is the age ranges of people who play both the three systems. I can't find the information, but I know that I've read it somewhere, but, basically, while all three major systems have a similar average age (between 25-35), the Wii has a much larger standard deviation. More parents buy it for their children (whether due to price, the coolness factor, or that it gets their kids off the couch) and more older people who have never played video games before have taken to it. Because of this, the games are often simpler, and many long time gamers get bored with them quickly.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the Wii is a bad system, I'm just saying that it had different goals than the XBox and the PS3. Even if it was wildly successful in achieving those goals, this doesn't make it a better system, it just makes it a different system.

You know, suprising as it seems, the VC is not actually that big of a rip-off (depending on the title). Cost analysis has shown that it can be cheaper to byt the VC versions than their physical counterparts, especially for rarer titles. So while it seems like they are overpriced, with many exceptions (mainly the popular games), it can be cheaper to buy it off VC than used - not to mention the developers/publishers of the game get some money in that case.

http://www.digitalbattle.com/2006/11/29/crytek-mig ht-leave-germany/

November 29th, 2006

Those billboards are created by the server you're playing on replacing the normal billboard texture with an advertisement. Nothing to do with Valve.

Are you sure?

"Valve's Doug Lombardi confirmed that in-game advertising, served by IGA, will appear in CS 1.6, and in CS:Source later on. He spoke to CS-nation about the ads, where he said, 'There will be some ads posted on walls in the game world, an ad on the scoreboard screen, and one in the letterboxed area of Spectator mode. Counter-Strike levels aren't going to turn into Times Square or a Nextel Cup racecar. We have control over what ads show up in Counter-Strike and how they are presented.'"

"Counter-Strike's in-game adverts are the pilot for a Steam-wide system Valve intend to offer to independent developers, Gabe Newell has explained..."

It outsold Zelda this week. Zelda launched last week. The title is wrong.

The real story, without falsified title

Basically, Zelda sold twice the amount Blue Dragon did in its first week (140,000 to 70,000). Did Zonk even click the link he cited for the story? :/

Come on, the simplist google would have given you sources.

http://digitalbattle.com/2006/11/07/zelda-getting- downloadable-content/
and many other links.

...yet I've only ever heard bad news about the PS3. The Wii is the first console I've ever been excited about, simply because it's meant for my gaming style: multiplayer, social fun.

The problem with TFA's thinking, though, is that Sony is in a completely different position from Microsoft and Nintendo. Nintendo spent relatively little developing the Wii, they will probably sell the console at a small loss if any, and their existing console has almost no momentum at all. From this position, if Nintendo captures 30% of the market they will have achieved a massive success.

http://digitalbattle.com/2006/07/24/another-ps3-ga me-cancelled/
http://www.kotaku.com/gaming/business/ps3-costs-ca use-little-studio-to-bail-184195.php
http://www.news0r.com/index.php?p=3690

There are others, but it's hard to find articles on it. In a lot of cases the "PS3" part simply vanishes from the website and all future press releases. Longer list of cases (some of which are just conjecture) here: http://www.technophilia.org/2006/07/list-of-cancel led-ps3-games.html

Like I said, no huge companies, except THQ, which does actually plan to make the NEXT game in the series on PS3.

Seeing as I've not purchased one, I can't really verify my statement, but there was a flurry of articles a few months back in regards to the Wii devkit price. I also read somewhere that a few smaller game dev houses recieved free devkits from Nintendo. Although you're probably right about the strings attached part.

http://www.nwiizone.com/nintendo-wii/nwii/wii-deve lopment-kit-to-cost-1700/
http://digitalbattle.com/2006/06/21/wii-developmen t-kit-to-cost-1700/
http://www.wiisworld.com/wii-news/wii-sdk-is-cheap .html
http://www.everythingwii.net/news/latest/wii-offer s-low-cost-development.html

Well, the good news, is that the Nintendo Wii Dev Kit will cost somewhere around $1700. That's not too bad a price, considering the PS3 kit is rumoured to cost between $30,000 and $50,000. I'm not sure how much the full dev kit on the XBox 360 goes for. I think this could open up a lot of possiblities for the Wii. You get the full dev kit for under $2000. Not some rinky dink homebrew version, the whole thing. At this price, there could be WiiNux before we know it. And it would probably sell if it offered good multimedia functionality to the Wii, such as playing downloaded movies, and Linux games. Although I don't think Nintendo would let that fly, as people would just install an emulator, and play the Old NES games for free instead of paying for them.

For games (why else do you buy a gaming device) you can play Lumines, Katamari, or any of a half-dozen racing games. The DS Lite is better if you want to play anything else.