Still to inside-the-box for me. Personally, I'd think infinite improbability has much more interesting ramifications. If only there wasn't that darn Total Existence Failure thingy to worry about. Technical enterprise, who cares? I'm talking about undergarments suddenly jumping three feet to the left.
Perhaps we can start out small and work on a bistromathic processor and a finite improbability drive and work our way up from there.
Yeah, I was just kidding. Both gaming and surgery require hand-eye cooridnation and the ability to continue to act thoughtfully under pressure, so the study isn't that unbelievable. But when you see an article trying to create a positive link between gaming and surgery, one can't help but think of Trauma Center, since it is one of the most popular Wii eclusives.
However, the biggest one I find is that your average citizen can be subjected to that level of invasion, yet it is illegal to do the same to a member of parliment. That is a travesty. They need to start showing parliment what the bugged life is like. Let a damaging private phone call be exposed by a system abuse. It's the very best thing that could happen. Perhaps after a parliment member actually has real stakes in what they are allowing to go on, the may make some more rational decisions about it, and they will back off their seeming lack of interest in the privacy of their constituents.
I suprised there hasn't been more about FF12. The only dark skinned character is an actual bunny that lives in a jungle. That definitely caught my attention.
Well, certainly I would grant that some of the hype was unlikely. But I could imagine immense economic damage due to computers not knowing how to compare a timestamp to the current time. I would imagine most large businesses (especially banking) that have long relied on automation would not have the man power to pick up for the computers and the finance sector would basically grind to halt, throwing everything else out of whack until things were fixed. Such a meltdown would be catastrophic in my book.
And I wouldn't say that the world would end on either occasion. But I myself have a mission critical app that could be hurt by a DST change, If Windows does not handle it properly. So I'm saying a DST change is hardly inconsequential. Not nearly as consequential as not being able to tell what century it is, but still problematic to time sensative apps.
Most people look back at Y2K as fear mongering. Nothing catastrophic happened, therefor it was all a media hoax. BS. Nothing happened because it an urgent fear while there was still enough time to fix it, and alot of people put alot of effort into getting all the critical software patched.
I have a program that updates our Australia plant with new design files, some of which are modified within the hour of the last revision. The program uses a GMT timestamp for each file, and it will never overwrite an newer file with the older one. To get the timestamp, the program uses the Windows API. If Windows doesn't handle the switch, I'm going to have a lot of urgent work on my hands.
So in answer to your question, yes not dealing with DST changes could cause lots of trouble! No, the issue will not resolve itself magically. Same with Y2K. People think it was a big hoax or FUD, but in reality, people really do have to work to fix these things in the background and never get credit for it when catastrophy doesn't strike. Hoepfully the OS programmers have been on top of it.
Microsoft's format in and of itself is an attempt to sabatoge OpenDocument. Their refusal to support it, despite having the most popular Office Suit is another clear sign of their contempt for it, and the customers they claim to care about now.
God forbid IBM promotes their own standard. Jeez, that's almost like having competition! We'de hate to have to make MS actually compete with anyone. On top of all that, why in the world would IBM trust MS not to tweak the standand and make it MS only? Why would anyone who actually cares about an open format trust MS to touch it?
Ya, but if I remember right, you still had to kill yourself in the disintegration chamber if the computer said you died in it's war simulation. So I don't think that would work out too well.
I loved Gears Of War, but I don't think it should have beat out Oblivion in the graphics categories. Gears of War does look great. However, Oblivion could be awe inspiring at times. Bethesda needs a better hype machine.
Well, then they have yet to learn their lessons. Wait till they pay a vendor or contractor to do something for them only to find they get little or no support, or extremely overpriced support. We've proven many cases where having an in-house programmer can be much cheaper than buying or contracting software. Especially when you have to employ a full time DBA to manage an overly complex application that you are already paying liscensing and support costs for.
But I do know that second one is a killer. I was later told that one reason I was hired is because I was engaged and bought a house in the area, which made them feel comfortable I was going to stick around. I would seem to think a 50 year old would be much less likely to up and leave than a kid right out of school though. I know they won't hire young engineers here for that reason.
Anyway, I truly do wish you the best of luck. I'll also add that Minnesota seems to have quite a few of these jobs popping up from time to time. There just aren't alot of programmers that stay up here.
Maybe I'm the only one to put hundreds of hours into Oblivion, but I doubt it. I will admit that after playing through several characters at a couple hundred hours each, you do eventually tire of the game. To say the graphics are nice is a bit of an understatement. I was blown away when stepping out of the sewers. Perhaps, and hopefully, it's not all the 360 can do, but it has to be said that the game raised the bar immensly for RPGs.
Depends on they definition of adventure game. If you include RPGs (which I certainly would), I say they are as strong as they every were. Zelda, Elder Scrolls, and Final Fantasy all have great new releases. All consoles have a great adventure game. BTW, the problem with them hasn't been with the controls, so no, the Wii will not fix the plot staleness of adventure games, developers willing to take a chance on an unproven concept will.
Perhaps my perspective could help. I only have a few lowely AAS degrees combined with credits toward the CS. I've been at my current job, apps programmer for about 5 years, and had pretty much the same job for 3 years at a different company before moving. Most of the jobs I have applied for, and the 2 I have taken have been with small-medium size companies. The demand for programmers at these companies is very overlooked. Especially in manufacturing shops. Companies that have grown themselves from the ground up usually develop a unique mode of operation that suits them. Cookie-cutter scheduling and inventory management programs often don't fit their needs well. There are also alot of automation to be done in all sorts of areas.
As a small/medium business programmer, I have developed bigger projects like a server side PHP Inventory/QC management system (prints inventory tags too, pretty cool), a few VB (recently converted to.NET)design performance programs for our products, a.NET sales and scheduling tool, a VB (not yet converted) document viewer and search tool, and even web site development. Not to mention alot of misc DB work on purchased software. Now, I'm not a master of CS, but I found developing an inventory system very fascinating work. Getting the PHP server to print to 2 dozen thermal printers around the shop floor (and send them to the printer closest the user without having them have to specify their location each time) was a pretty interesting task. Using Solidworks libraries to automate CAD development was challenging and interesting. The cooling programs were a whole heck of alot of work. But in the end, you end up with all these nice curve fitting and printing classes, polynomial curve fitting libraries, CAD plugins, etc. It's great work, IMO.
Especially at a smaller place where you are in charge of the programming, there is alot of freedom and job satisfaction. In a growing company when you can see filing cabinets dissapear and productivity pick up as a direct result of your work, it's very rewarding. Some of the ads for DBAs and programmers for these smaller, non-tech companies are actually great jobs that can be far more rewarding than one would think.
I have seen alot of these jobs around. They would be perfect for someone who wants to program and have a bit of freedom in doing so. That's just my $.02. In my area (Northern MN), they would be very happy to find someone with your education and experience. Heck, I had several offers with just AAS degrees and no experience.
Come on now, we should all know the answer to that by now
The questionable veracity of the story would certainly not scare the 24 hour news cycle away. The subject matter is certainly important enough to everyone. But does it scare you? No, a non-poisonous cure for cancer doesn't keep you glued to TV in fear to watch the 55 minutes of speculation, filler, and opinion to follow, and is therefore not news.
The news day has to be really slow to get more than a passing mention of good news on any major media network.
Then again, I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed.
AC, you have it all wrong. First of all, the problem is these activist judges supporting terrorism. It seems they have them in Germany too. Those darn activist judges don't trust the executive branch. It's just Un-German not to trust your president to have sweeping and uncheckable power to protect the children from terrorists. If you need more help with the concept of activist judges and their affinity for terrorists, tune into Papa Bear Bill O'Reilly and he'll explain all about them, their eternal war on Christmas, and the TB carrying Mexicans that are crossing the border.
Secondly, if any super bowl player is to blame for anything, its Vinatieri for missing my $400 field goal. (numbers 4 and 9) at the half. Although I only lost $20, it would have been nice if he would have made it.
However, in this case we ask you to show mercy and withdraw your complaint against Alexander Ponosov
Unless Gorbachev is confused, it would appear MS is taking legal action against the man. Pretty much suing for damages from the act of piracy, it would seem.
If you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about. When will you privacy lunatics grasp that simple point? For once, could we stop and think of all the children this would save? You don't hate children, do you???
I would say Halo at least deserves consideration. I think it helped bring alot more people to online FPS that wouldn't have made the plunge. It made online gaming easier than ever before. Other than impressive looks and sounds for it's generation, it didn't bring a whole lot new, but IMO, it didn't get anything wrong. It had plenty of user configurable game variants, good weapon selection (magnum was a bit strong), and reliable online play. Where I think it changed online play was by increasing the fan base for online shooters.
Worms
I don't know about anyone else, but it seemed to me that for a while, every geek was playing worms. A great twist on a pretty simple concept. Lots of fun.
Unreal
Already mentioned above, I thought it was a big step up from earlier online shooters, one of the few online shooters I'd want to play at the time.
Command and Conquer
IMO, Command and Conquer really put online RTS on the map.
Gears Of War
I'd offer for consideration because it brought a great covering system to online play where others have failed.
It's hard to say that these drastically changed online play. The question is a bit to subjective. There are so many games that brought just a little something new that has been adopted by others that it is really hard to say.
Slashdot Mirror
Still to inside-the-box for me. Personally, I'd think infinite improbability has much more interesting ramifications. If only there wasn't that darn Total Existence Failure thingy to worry about. Technical enterprise, who cares? I'm talking about undergarments suddenly jumping three feet to the left.
Perhaps we can start out small and work on a bistromathic processor and a finite improbability drive and work our way up from there.
Yeah, I was just kidding. Both gaming and surgery require hand-eye cooridnation and the ability to continue to act thoughtfully under pressure, so the study isn't that unbelievable. But when you see an article trying to create a positive link between gaming and surgery, one can't help but think of Trauma Center, since it is one of the most popular Wii eclusives.
Rueters is a Wii astroturfing organization and this is just a thinly veiled Trauma ER marketing atttmept. (yes, I'm kidding)
However, the biggest one I find is that your average citizen can be subjected to that level of invasion, yet it is illegal to do the same to a member of parliment. That is a travesty. They need to start showing parliment what the bugged life is like. Let a damaging private phone call be exposed by a system abuse. It's the very best thing that could happen. Perhaps after a parliment member actually has real stakes in what they are allowing to go on, the may make some more rational decisions about it, and they will back off their seeming lack of interest in the privacy of their constituents.
I suprised there hasn't been more about FF12. The only dark skinned character is an actual bunny that lives in a jungle. That definitely caught my attention.
I use the Win API to get the file modification time and convert it to GMT. So I rely on the Windows offset that will have to change along with GMT.
Well, certainly I would grant that some of the hype was unlikely. But I could imagine immense economic damage due to computers not knowing how to compare a timestamp to the current time. I would imagine most large businesses (especially banking) that have long relied on automation would not have the man power to pick up for the computers and the finance sector would basically grind to halt, throwing everything else out of whack until things were fixed. Such a meltdown would be catastrophic in my book.
And I wouldn't say that the world would end on either occasion. But I myself have a mission critical app that could be hurt by a DST change, If Windows does not handle it properly. So I'm saying a DST change is hardly inconsequential. Not nearly as consequential as not being able to tell what century it is, but still problematic to time sensative apps.
Absolutely.
Most people look back at Y2K as fear mongering. Nothing catastrophic happened, therefor it was all a media hoax. BS. Nothing happened because it an urgent fear while there was still enough time to fix it, and alot of people put alot of effort into getting all the critical software patched.
I have a program that updates our Australia plant with new design files, some of which are modified within the hour of the last revision. The program uses a GMT timestamp for each file, and it will never overwrite an newer file with the older one. To get the timestamp, the program uses the Windows API. If Windows doesn't handle the switch, I'm going to have a lot of urgent work on my hands. So in answer to your question, yes not dealing with DST changes could cause lots of trouble! No, the issue will not resolve itself magically. Same with Y2K. People think it was a big hoax or FUD, but in reality, people really do have to work to fix these things in the background and never get credit for it when catastrophy doesn't strike. Hoepfully the OS programmers have been on top of it.
Microsoft's format in and of itself is an attempt to sabatoge OpenDocument. Their refusal to support it, despite having the most popular Office Suit is another clear sign of their contempt for it, and the customers they claim to care about now.
God forbid IBM promotes their own standard. Jeez, that's almost like having competition! We'de hate to have to make MS actually compete with anyone. On top of all that, why in the world would IBM trust MS not to tweak the standand and make it MS only? Why would anyone who actually cares about an open format trust MS to touch it?
Ya, but if I remember right, you still had to kill yourself in the disintegration chamber if the computer said you died in it's war simulation. So I don't think that would work out too well.
Even better news for you then. Epic promised the new Unreal Tournament currently in development is going to blow Gears of War out of the water.
I loved Gears Of War, but I don't think it should have beat out Oblivion in the graphics categories. Gears of War does look great. However, Oblivion could be awe inspiring at times. Bethesda needs a better hype machine.
(sorry, his first name escapes me right now)
Looks fine to me
Or if all telephone conversations must be recorded in case the Justice Department needs access to them at a later date?
Oops. Yeah, one would think people would be mad if such things happened without warrents. Turns out, not so much.
To protect youth from exploitation from adults
It's for the kids! How dare you be concerned that the government wants to watch your every move at a time like this? Kids are in danger!
We need to make sure all the fine, upstanding people (*cough* Mark Foley *cough*) in government can see what are kids are doing at all times.
Well, then they have yet to learn their lessons. Wait till they pay a vendor or contractor to do something for them only to find they get little or no support, or extremely overpriced support. We've proven many cases where having an in-house programmer can be much cheaper than buying or contracting software. Especially when you have to employ a full time DBA to manage an overly complex application that you are already paying liscensing and support costs for.
But I do know that second one is a killer. I was later told that one reason I was hired is because I was engaged and bought a house in the area, which made them feel comfortable I was going to stick around. I would seem to think a 50 year old would be much less likely to up and leave than a kid right out of school though. I know they won't hire young engineers here for that reason.
Anyway, I truly do wish you the best of luck. I'll also add that Minnesota seems to have quite a few of these jobs popping up from time to time. There just aren't alot of programmers that stay up here.
Maybe I'm the only one to put hundreds of hours into Oblivion, but I doubt it. I will admit that after playing through several characters at a couple hundred hours each, you do eventually tire of the game. To say the graphics are nice is a bit of an understatement. I was blown away when stepping out of the sewers. Perhaps, and hopefully, it's not all the 360 can do, but it has to be said that the game raised the bar immensly for RPGs.
Turn the difficulty up. The final boss takes longer to beat on insane difficulty than the entire game on casual.
Depends on they definition of adventure game. If you include RPGs (which I certainly would), I say they are as strong as they every were. Zelda, Elder Scrolls, and Final Fantasy all have great new releases. All consoles have a great adventure game. BTW, the problem with them hasn't been with the controls, so no, the Wii will not fix the plot staleness of adventure games, developers willing to take a chance on an unproven concept will.
First off, good luck yourself.
Perhaps my perspective could help. I only have a few lowely AAS degrees combined with credits toward the CS. I've been at my current job, apps programmer for about 5 years, and had pretty much the same job for 3 years at a different company before moving. Most of the jobs I have applied for, and the 2 I have taken have been with small-medium size companies. The demand for programmers at these companies is very overlooked. Especially in manufacturing shops. Companies that have grown themselves from the ground up usually develop a unique mode of operation that suits them. Cookie-cutter scheduling and inventory management programs often don't fit their needs well. There are also alot of automation to be done in all sorts of areas.
As a small/medium business programmer, I have developed bigger projects like a server side PHP Inventory/QC management system (prints inventory tags too, pretty cool), a few VB (recently converted to .NET)design performance programs for our products, a .NET sales and scheduling tool, a VB (not yet converted) document viewer and search tool, and even web site development. Not to mention alot of misc DB work on purchased software. Now, I'm not a master of CS, but I found developing an inventory system very fascinating work. Getting the PHP server to print to 2 dozen thermal printers around the shop floor (and send them to the printer closest the user without having them have to specify their location each time) was a pretty interesting task. Using Solidworks libraries to automate CAD development was challenging and interesting. The cooling programs were a whole heck of alot of work. But in the end, you end up with all these nice curve fitting and printing classes, polynomial curve fitting libraries, CAD plugins, etc. It's great work, IMO.
Especially at a smaller place where you are in charge of the programming, there is alot of freedom and job satisfaction. In a growing company when you can see filing cabinets dissapear and productivity pick up as a direct result of your work, it's very rewarding. Some of the ads for DBAs and programmers for these smaller, non-tech companies are actually great jobs that can be far more rewarding than one would think.
I have seen alot of these jobs around. They would be perfect for someone who wants to program and have a bit of freedom in doing so. That's just my $.02. In my area (Northern MN), they would be very happy to find someone with your education and experience. Heck, I had several offers with just AAS degrees and no experience.
The questionable veracity of the story would certainly not scare the 24 hour news cycle away. The subject matter is certainly important enough to everyone. But does it scare you? No, a non-poisonous cure for cancer doesn't keep you glued to TV in fear to watch the 55 minutes of speculation, filler, and opinion to follow, and is therefore not news.
The news day has to be really slow to get more than a passing mention of good news on any major media network.
Then again, I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed.
No, no, no
AC, you have it all wrong. First of all, the problem is these activist judges supporting terrorism. It seems they have them in Germany too. Those darn activist judges don't trust the executive branch. It's just Un-German not to trust your president to have sweeping and uncheckable power to protect the children from terrorists. If you need more help with the concept of activist judges and their affinity for terrorists, tune into Papa Bear Bill O'Reilly and he'll explain all about them, their eternal war on Christmas, and the TB carrying Mexicans that are crossing the border.
Secondly, if any super bowl player is to blame for anything, its Vinatieri for missing my $400 field goal. (numbers 4 and 9) at the half. Although I only lost $20, it would have been nice if he would have made it.
However, in this case we ask you to show mercy and withdraw your complaint against Alexander Ponosov
Unless Gorbachev is confused, it would appear MS is taking legal action against the man. Pretty much suing for damages from the act of piracy, it would seem.
If you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about. When will you privacy lunatics grasp that simple point? For once, could we stop and think of all the children this would save? You don't hate children, do you???
I would say Halo at least deserves consideration. I think it helped bring alot more people to online FPS that wouldn't have made the plunge. It made online gaming easier than ever before. Other than impressive looks and sounds for it's generation, it didn't bring a whole lot new, but IMO, it didn't get anything wrong. It had plenty of user configurable game variants, good weapon selection (magnum was a bit strong), and reliable online play. Where I think it changed online play was by increasing the fan base for online shooters.
Worms
I don't know about anyone else, but it seemed to me that for a while, every geek was playing worms. A great twist on a pretty simple concept. Lots of fun.
Unreal
Already mentioned above, I thought it was a big step up from earlier online shooters, one of the few online shooters I'd want to play at the time.
Command and Conquer
IMO, Command and Conquer really put online RTS on the map.
Gears Of War
I'd offer for consideration because it brought a great covering system to online play where others have failed.
It's hard to say that these drastically changed online play. The question is a bit to subjective. There are so many games that brought just a little something new that has been adopted by others that it is really hard to say.