They are awesome if you are happy working within their bounds. True, its easy to snap together pre-built elements into powerful applications. On the down-side, it can sometimes be damned difficult to do anything outside of the box created by the standards implementers. If you are trying to write innovative software (which may just mean solving a novel problem), you are eventually going to bump into the limitations of any guideline or standard. What then? Do you give-up? Or break the standard and create the same old mess -- perhaps worsened by the expectations set by the obsolete standard you just had to break to get the job done?
OS X is a mass-market desktop OS. It can thrive within Apple's UI guidelines because its bread-and-butter is providing very familiar functionality to a user-base with shallow expectations. Is this where Linux should be heading? If you are trying to do more than provide the typical "productivity" suite, browsing, media playback and photo editing software, you aren't going to get by with strident UI guidelines -- unless they are so broad as to defeat the point. Same situation if your entire user base isn't satisfied with having their user experience dictated to them.
Meanwhile, conventional, real-world sports have not died out, even though they require (gasp) moving your body!
If you want a real-world sports experience, play a real-world sport. Motion control is a gimmick because standing in front of a TV mimicking the motions of playing a sport within the confines of a room in your home will simply never be a substitute.
Some of the tactics used by this researcher remind me of the full court press in basketball. The rules of basketball allow a full court press, yet to do so never crosses the mind of most players. Playing one side of the court at a time is convention. The full court press is extremely effective, yet if you use it, the other team will no doubt call your win "cheap".
Still, when you are the underdog, and must win at all costs, the press is your only option. I sympathize with those who use it (and recognize that it isn't easy to pull off either).
Full court presses are not considered "cheap". They just aren't used all the time because they are only effective under rare circumstances -- either when the offensive team is under a time crunch to move the ball across half court or score, or when weak ball handlers can be trapped and forced into a low-percentage pass.
Otherwise, trying to guard the entire court is not as effective as concentrating your defense in the half where the other team can score points. A full court press is hard because it is basically a man-to-man defence over the entire court, giving the offense plenty of room to maneuver and making it that much harder to double team or switch defensive assignments.
Maybe you need to take on something more challenging than gaming, like creating a game that will be a challenge to experts and still sell enough copies to justify the effort. Or is that to much challenge?
20 years ago the "challenge" that most games offered was basically rote learning. BS tricks like insta-kills that you could never possibly anticipate the first time you saw them. Oh and forcing you to start from square one over and over again.
I'm glad that game designers have mostly abandoned that crap. But if you feel differently, there is nothing stopping you from hitting the reset button when you fall off a cliff.
I don't think people often learn programming because they love gaming. Rather, they learn programming because they love programming.
Take a programming course. If you are a virtuoso, you might make it even with the late start.
Otherwise (or perhaps instead) take inventory of the skills you have now and find a way to apply them to the gaming industry. If that's a dead end, then you are starting from scratch anyway, and it will take some effort on your part to figure out what the best niche in the industry is for you.
Twitter the service is indeed useless. . .
on
The Twitter Book
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· Score: 1
. . . but Twitter the phenomenon is obviously a handy place to hang marketing and hype. I doubt Twitter is behind the PR at all, or getting much out of their fame. Rather, PR/marketing teams for companys/celebritys are fueling the Twitter phenom because it is a new, low cost platform on which to manage publicity/marketing campaigns. Twitter doesn't get a slice when AnyCo. or Joe Superstar pays a PR team to come up with the idea of starting a Twitter account. All Twitter gets is the headaches of managing the service.
That depends on the actual distance covered in that 1.5 hours. If it is spent crawling along in traffic, riding on a bike might not add a lot of time to the commute. If it meant 4 hours on the bike a day instead of 3 in the car, for that extra hour OP would have no problem staying in shape. Even doing this a couple times a week would probably suffice.
If you acknowledge that its a rare instance when how someone is doing is actually worth hearing, how is a service that encourages as many people as possible to constantly update their status not a step in the wrong direction? Now you have that much more noise to filter through.
I also see nothing about Twitter that would make it the only way one could possibly learn about "exclusive parties, specials and news" (which sounds like a euphemism for "advertising" anyway).
Re:And what could be more pointless than Twitter?
on
The Twitter Book
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· Score: 1
At best, social media is competing for the portion of time that people waste on mainstream media, but AFAIK none of those sites are capitalizing as effectively. Before we start confusing "pointless" content with "quality" content, lets remember that the point of any of these endeavors is to make money.
I think GP was referring to the period when 3D console games first reared their blocky heads (circa Playstation 1, IIRC). 2D graphics still hadn't reached their peak, but ugly, gimmicky 3D junk flooded the market and (a paltry few exceptions notwithstanding) 2D was relatively done.
And it wasn't as though it was just a graphical shift. Compare Street Fighter EX Plus alpha to contemporary 2D versions, for example. Whereas it took stunning graphics and tight gameplay to make a standout 2D game at the time, people seemed willing to suffer through awful looking and playing 3D games because their very 3D-ness was novel.
Moreover, 2D and 3D are suited to different types of games -- hence the popularity of simulators and then FPS over platformers and arcade style fighters (possible chicken v. egg there, but that's my opinion anyway).
If you think that 2D games are taken seriously, you probably weren't seriously gaming 15 years ago. Nothing wrong with that -- just sayin'.
3D games have more than come into their own at this point, but I have to agree that they came at the expense of 2D gaming.
There is a lot of differences between a hacker and a cowboy. The cowboy want to save the day, the hacker wants to make a shiny piece of thingie that works and does awesome. Not only does he want that, but he alwo wants to get recognition for that. He wants others to use his shiny piece of awesome. Documentations and protocols are a part of the process that is very natural (awesomeness points are awarded for auto-generated usable documentations). The hacker works usually in small teams, most of the time in teams of one. That doesn't change the fact that he is quite able to produce a standard-abiding well-documented thing. Like everyone, he notes in meetings what is important and discards the rest. He mocks regular procedures because if there was an easy procedure for the thing he planned doing, it would lack awesomeness. He will occasionally come up with his own custom-made procedure.
I added bold are attitudes and practices that any competent developer will adhere to, regardless of the environment they work in.
I added emphasis to attitudes and practices that I feel will detract from their competence (or are evidence that they are fooling themselves with respect to their adhereance to the former set).
I hate being a drone. I get bored, frustrated and ultimately wander off, to the betterment of everyone involved.
That said, I agree. I was once in charge of a 3 person team (non-software-development) and the absolute best guy I ever had working for me just wanted clear instructions, a constant supply of work to apply them too and a place to work without being distracted. The more repetitive the better. He would go into his zone and out-produce everyone else by miles. He seemed to derive personal satisfaction from things like consistency and productivity, rather than expecting a job to be entertainment or a chance to repeatedly demonstrate his individual genius.
Of course, he was an oddball by the standards of upper management, who were convinced that their company should only employ enthusiastic, young go-getters. These types would get bored within a few weeks and require constant motivation and incentives just to do the bare minimum. Not that I blame them -- I wouldn't have wanted their jobs or their paychecks either. But if I could have split 3 salaries among 2 people who were actually suited to the job, I could have go more work done more consistently and wasted less time listening to gripes and training replacements.
There are aspects of software design that require creativity. There are aspects that require technical rigor. There are aspects that require procedural diligence. Etc. You are rarely going to get all of these things in a single person, and if you don't match the specific requirements to the strengths of the "programmer" you are likely applying the wrong person to the task.
At the same time, "programming" in the US tends to attract very smart people, and very smart people often overestimate their capabilities (often by underestimating the significance of things that don't interest them).
Knowing what is possible and how to get there helps create the engineers of tomorrow, not some desk jockeys that solve transient problems and are equally interchangable with counterparts from any country.
"Solving transient problems" is not necessarily a trivial or commodity skill. Its may not be something that someone with a Computer Science degree wants to spend time on, but it probably isn't something that an MBA or a marginal coder is going to do well either (whether they are trying to come up with a solution or even effectively define the problem). It still takes talent and specific skills that can't necessarily be taught to just anyone who happens to want a desk job with a decent paycheck.
If you are fascinated by "maths, physics and philosophy that underpins the whole concept of computing", well those are valuable things, but they are not enough anymore. Software has become too broad to be left to either Computer Scientists or cube drones.
"Developers", what have you. These names are overly generic, causing needless bickering about what they mean to various people. For a project of any size or consequence, you are likely going to need a spectrum of skills and perspectives to achieve anything worthwhile. If you are whining to the wold at large that every "programmer" doesn't fit the role you want someone to fill, you probably don't have such a project, or *you* are the problem.
In HS I showed out net admin that I could access anyone's private doc folder - across multiple campuses. I wasn't caught, I explicitly showed it to the proper authorities. I got suspended and my computer privileges revoked.
Did you "show" it by doing it, or "show" it by laying out how a hypothetical someone might do it, strictly in theory mind you, if they chose to do so.
If it was against your school's policy to access another users folder and you did so, then you deserved to be punished. It doesn't matter what your intentions were or who you demonstrated the infraction for. Rules are rules and breaking them to prove how easily they can be broken is still breaking them.
There is a big difference between telling someone that they left their garage door wide open to thieves it and committing burglary to prove the point (even if you were, like, totally going to return the stuff after they got your informative and well-meaning message). In the former case, they thank you or tell you to buzz off and you both go about your business. In the later case the police get involved.
I'd love to see more prosecution of fraud, but the problem with going after banks, credit card service providers etc. is that it will raise prices and limit selection for legitimate products and services.
If the alternative is that idiots get screwed trying to get rich, healthy or "confident" quick, I know which strikes me as the lesser evil.
Does the "desktop" metaphor really need replacing, especially with something that seems even more precious and contrived? Maybe its just me, but I don't find these concepts useful. I know what a "desktop" is with respect to computers, but it has lost all meaningful connection to the top of a desk. Maybe that's because the only thing typically found on my desk is a computer.
My sense is that the computer has been around long enough that the UI doesn't need to be imagined as a desktop, theater, etc.
. ..the article also claims that Apple's policy "is at odds with the approach taken by many other companies". So. ..uh. ..so how do you like those apples?
US schools have Advanced Placement classes. Oh yeah, and there is no reason motivated students can't move at their own pace outside of the classroom (or inside).
All you are calling for is a system that offers more than one sized spoon with which to feed students. That's just a better version of a fundamentally flawed educational philosophy. Or rather, it stretches a fine philosophy beyond its logical limit and makes it flawed. A chef can get by just fine with a US HS level understanding of math, for example. More math won't make better chefs (the opposite, potentially).
If a person's excuse for having less education than they wanted (or than Europenas might have) is that the US school system only caters to the lowest common denominator, they are lazy, not deprived.
Slashdot Mirror
They are awesome if you are happy working within their bounds. True, its easy to snap together pre-built elements into powerful applications. On the down-side, it can sometimes be damned difficult to do anything outside of the box created by the standards implementers. If you are trying to write innovative software (which may just mean solving a novel problem), you are eventually going to bump into the limitations of any guideline or standard. What then? Do you give-up? Or break the standard and create the same old mess -- perhaps worsened by the expectations set by the obsolete standard you just had to break to get the job done?
OS X is a mass-market desktop OS. It can thrive within Apple's UI guidelines because its bread-and-butter is providing very familiar functionality to a user-base with shallow expectations. Is this where Linux should be heading? If you are trying to do more than provide the typical "productivity" suite, browsing, media playback and photo editing software, you aren't going to get by with strident UI guidelines -- unless they are so broad as to defeat the point. Same situation if your entire user base isn't satisfied with having their user experience dictated to them.
Meanwhile, conventional, real-world sports have not died out, even though they require (gasp) moving your body!
If you want a real-world sports experience, play a real-world sport. Motion control is a gimmick because standing in front of a TV mimicking the motions of playing a sport within the confines of a room in your home will simply never be a substitute.
Some of the tactics used by this researcher remind me of the full court press in basketball. The rules of basketball allow a full court press, yet to do so never crosses the mind of most players. Playing one side of the court at a time is convention. The full court press is extremely effective, yet if you use it, the other team will no doubt call your win "cheap".
Still, when you are the underdog, and must win at all costs, the press is your only option. I sympathize with those who use it (and recognize that it isn't easy to pull off either).
Full court presses are not considered "cheap". They just aren't used all the time because they are only effective under rare circumstances -- either when the offensive team is under a time crunch to move the ball across half court or score, or when weak ball handlers can be trapped and forced into a low-percentage pass.
Otherwise, trying to guard the entire court is not as effective as concentrating your defense in the half where the other team can score points. A full court press is hard because it is basically a man-to-man defence over the entire court, giving the offense plenty of room to maneuver and making it that much harder to double team or switch defensive assignments.
Either way I really don't see why he's a stupid fratboy, or why his opinions are idiocy.
Well, there's crap like this. . .http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/playoffs/2009/news/story?id=4157481
Maybe you need to take on something more challenging than gaming, like creating a game that will be a challenge to experts and still sell enough copies to justify the effort. Or is that to much challenge?
20 years ago the "challenge" that most games offered was basically rote learning. BS tricks like insta-kills that you could never possibly anticipate the first time you saw them. Oh and forcing you to start from square one over and over again.
I'm glad that game designers have mostly abandoned that crap. But if you feel differently, there is nothing stopping you from hitting the reset button when you fall off a cliff.
I don't think people often learn programming because they love gaming. Rather, they learn programming because they love programming.
Take a programming course. If you are a virtuoso, you might make it even with the late start.
Otherwise (or perhaps instead) take inventory of the skills you have now and find a way to apply them to the gaming industry. If that's a dead end, then you are starting from scratch anyway, and it will take some effort on your part to figure out what the best niche in the industry is for you.
. . . but Twitter the phenomenon is obviously a handy place to hang marketing and hype. I doubt Twitter is behind the PR at all, or getting much out of their fame. Rather, PR/marketing teams for companys/celebritys are fueling the Twitter phenom because it is a new, low cost platform on which to manage publicity/marketing campaigns. Twitter doesn't get a slice when AnyCo. or Joe Superstar pays a PR team to come up with the idea of starting a Twitter account. All Twitter gets is the headaches of managing the service.
Sounds like you need to find more interesting people to follow. Twitter's what you make of it, you need to be thoughtful about who you listen to.
Ignoring people who use Twitter is a good start.
That depends on the actual distance covered in that 1.5 hours. If it is spent crawling along in traffic, riding on a bike might not add a lot of time to the commute. If it meant 4 hours on the bike a day instead of 3 in the car, for that extra hour OP would have no problem staying in shape. Even doing this a couple times a week would probably suffice.
You will feel better in just about every way for however many years that you do happen to live.
If you acknowledge that its a rare instance when how someone is doing is actually worth hearing, how is a service that encourages as many people as possible to constantly update their status not a step in the wrong direction? Now you have that much more noise to filter through.
I also see nothing about Twitter that would make it the only way one could possibly learn about "exclusive parties, specials and news" (which sounds like a euphemism for "advertising" anyway).
At best, social media is competing for the portion of time that people waste on mainstream media, but AFAIK none of those sites are capitalizing as effectively. Before we start confusing "pointless" content with "quality" content, lets remember that the point of any of these endeavors is to make money.
I think GP was referring to the period when 3D console games first reared their blocky heads (circa Playstation 1, IIRC). 2D graphics still hadn't reached their peak, but ugly, gimmicky 3D junk flooded the market and (a paltry few exceptions notwithstanding) 2D was relatively done.
And it wasn't as though it was just a graphical shift. Compare Street Fighter EX Plus alpha to contemporary 2D versions, for example. Whereas it took stunning graphics and tight gameplay to make a standout 2D game at the time, people seemed willing to suffer through awful looking and playing 3D games because their very 3D-ness was novel.
Moreover, 2D and 3D are suited to different types of games -- hence the popularity of simulators and then FPS over platformers and arcade style fighters (possible chicken v. egg there, but that's my opinion anyway).
If you think that 2D games are taken seriously, you probably weren't seriously gaming 15 years ago. Nothing wrong with that -- just sayin'.
3D games have more than come into their own at this point, but I have to agree that they came at the expense of 2D gaming.
There is a lot of differences between a hacker and a cowboy. The cowboy want to save the day, the hacker wants to make a shiny piece of thingie that works and does awesome. Not only does he want that, but he alwo wants to get recognition for that. He wants others to use his shiny piece of awesome. Documentations and protocols are a part of the process that is very natural (awesomeness points are awarded for auto-generated usable documentations). The hacker works usually in small teams, most of the time in teams of one. That doesn't change the fact that he is quite able to produce a standard-abiding well-documented thing. Like everyone, he notes in meetings what is important and discards the rest. He mocks regular procedures because if there was an easy procedure for the thing he planned doing, it would lack awesomeness. He will occasionally come up with his own custom-made procedure.
I added bold are attitudes and practices that any competent developer will adhere to, regardless of the environment they work in.
I added emphasis to attitudes and practices that I feel will detract from their competence (or are evidence that they are fooling themselves with respect to their adhereance to the former set).
I hate being a drone. I get bored, frustrated and ultimately wander off, to the betterment of everyone involved.
That said, I agree. I was once in charge of a 3 person team (non-software-development) and the absolute best guy I ever had working for me just wanted clear instructions, a constant supply of work to apply them too and a place to work without being distracted. The more repetitive the better. He would go into his zone and out-produce everyone else by miles. He seemed to derive personal satisfaction from things like consistency and productivity, rather than expecting a job to be entertainment or a chance to repeatedly demonstrate his individual genius.
Of course, he was an oddball by the standards of upper management, who were convinced that their company should only employ enthusiastic, young go-getters. These types would get bored within a few weeks and require constant motivation and incentives just to do the bare minimum. Not that I blame them -- I wouldn't have wanted their jobs or their paychecks either. But if I could have split 3 salaries among 2 people who were actually suited to the job, I could have go more work done more consistently and wasted less time listening to gripes and training replacements.
There are aspects of software design that require creativity. There are aspects that require technical rigor. There are aspects that require procedural diligence. Etc. You are rarely going to get all of these things in a single person, and if you don't match the specific requirements to the strengths of the "programmer" you are likely applying the wrong person to the task.
At the same time, "programming" in the US tends to attract very smart people, and very smart people often overestimate their capabilities (often by underestimating the significance of things that don't interest them).
Knowing what is possible and how to get there helps create the engineers of tomorrow, not some desk jockeys that solve transient problems and are equally interchangable with counterparts from any country.
"Solving transient problems" is not necessarily a trivial or commodity skill. Its may not be something that someone with a Computer Science degree wants to spend time on, but it probably isn't something that an MBA or a marginal coder is going to do well either (whether they are trying to come up with a solution or even effectively define the problem). It still takes talent and specific skills that can't necessarily be taught to just anyone who happens to want a desk job with a decent paycheck.
If you are fascinated by "maths, physics and philosophy that underpins the whole concept of computing", well those are valuable things, but they are not enough anymore. Software has become too broad to be left to either Computer Scientists or cube drones.
"Developers", what have you. These names are overly generic, causing needless bickering about what they mean to various people. For a project of any size or consequence, you are likely going to need a spectrum of skills and perspectives to achieve anything worthwhile. If you are whining to the wold at large that every "programmer" doesn't fit the role you want someone to fill, you probably don't have such a project, or *you* are the problem.
Except that the world isn't a museum, and I don't need a guided tour of every chain convenience store within walking distance at any given time.
In HS I showed out net admin that I could access anyone's private doc folder - across multiple campuses. I wasn't caught, I explicitly showed it to the proper authorities. I got suspended and my computer privileges revoked.
Did you "show" it by doing it, or "show" it by laying out how a hypothetical someone might do it, strictly in theory mind you, if they chose to do so.
If it was against your school's policy to access another users folder and you did so, then you deserved to be punished. It doesn't matter what your intentions were or who you demonstrated the infraction for. Rules are rules and breaking them to prove how easily they can be broken is still breaking them.
There is a big difference between telling someone that they left their garage door wide open to thieves it and committing burglary to prove the point (even if you were, like, totally going to return the stuff after they got your informative and well-meaning message). In the former case, they thank you or tell you to buzz off and you both go about your business. In the later case the police get involved.
A lot of you
I'd love to see more prosecution of fraud, but the problem with going after banks, credit card service providers etc. is that it will raise prices and limit selection for legitimate products and services.
If the alternative is that idiots get screwed trying to get rich, healthy or "confident" quick, I know which strikes me as the lesser evil.
Something about being generally savvy makes it harder for ideas like labor unions and collectivism to take root.
If you think that reading Slashdot promotes general savvy, I have a specious worldview to sell you.
Does the "desktop" metaphor really need replacing, especially with something that seems even more precious and contrived? Maybe its just me, but I don't find these concepts useful. I know what a "desktop" is with respect to computers, but it has lost all meaningful connection to the top of a desk. Maybe that's because the only thing typically found on my desk is a computer.
My sense is that the computer has been around long enough that the UI doesn't need to be imagined as a desktop, theater, etc.
. . .the article also claims that Apple's policy "is at odds with the approach taken by many other companies". So. . .uh. . .so how do you like those apples?
. . .if it means the end of musical ringtones.
US schools have Advanced Placement classes. Oh yeah, and there is no reason motivated students can't move at their own pace outside of the classroom (or inside).
All you are calling for is a system that offers more than one sized spoon with which to feed students. That's just a better version of a fundamentally flawed educational philosophy. Or rather, it stretches a fine philosophy beyond its logical limit and makes it flawed. A chef can get by just fine with a US HS level understanding of math, for example. More math won't make better chefs (the opposite, potentially).
If a person's excuse for having less education than they wanted (or than Europenas might have) is that the US school system only caters to the lowest common denominator, they are lazy, not deprived.