So they are doing it right. That is so fucking funny. Calculator hell on earth. Imagine the shock and horror when the #1 way to cheat on math exams (calculators) became required to use.
Abolish? Infix is appalling, and I use calculators very sparingly, like 5 or 10 numbers added together per week.
It has no purpose, unless you want to perform exactly one operation on exactly two numbers and then never do anything again. If that's what you're doing, infix is A-OK.
At some point, you have to let go of the old ideas to teach the new ones. For example, do we let kids ride the bus or do we make them build internal combustion engines? I mean, someone had to build the first ICE. Why not make kids learn that too.
Thing is, I noticed in programming, programmers have a slightly irrational tendency to want to start things from scratch. I realized people have an innate desire to start from scratch so they understand the entire system. It's just more satisfying when there's no stone unturned.
So yes, we should be teaching algebra sans calculator, they should be building their own cars, and elementary school should be about making fire, fashioning arrows, and sewing clothes with sinew harvested from a deer carcass. Also, school should go until you're 55.
Whether I'm being serious or not is left as an exercise to the reader. But I do enjoy knowing how to add and subtract - something that is no longer taught - so take that as a clue.
There's no abstract thought or inference on written exams. The purpose of an exam is to test proficiency in a language. In this language, you have to know the specific meaning of = and (). Most exam languages are useful only for the exam and have little use later on. For example, someone taking this test will learn the meaning of () and then NEVER use it again for the rest of their lives.
Thus, I would speculate that kids not understanding = has more to do with illiteracy than math fail. Lemme guess, the minority population in these schools is 70%? Wow, that would make some sense.
In other news, mexican people don't know how to plug red, white, and yellow cables into plugs that are colored red, white, and yellow. Do you think they don't know colors? They don't know that it's important.
The Von Neumann bottleneck is sort of inevitable. A campfire might be able to eat more logs than you throw at it, but it's still the brightest place in the field. And let's say you throw all the logs at it, now you run out of logs and feel stupid the other way.
Example, for all the times you've gotten 12fps in a game, how many times has your cpu idled at near zero? Like right now?
One part is always going to be faster than another. Except when CPU's finally top out, and that will be interesting.
>Even at the current rate of growth, the need for dozens of cores on a desktop is decades out, at least.
When you're applying an effect in Photoshop, don't most of the effects only depend on the pixels near it? So Photoshop should be scalable to number of cores equal to the number of pixels. No fancy programming needed, just break up the work into chunks.
Video editing would be the same way.
Most other productivity apps - those involving text - are usually focused on interrupts from the user, network or I/O, so they wouldn't benefit much at all, except maybe in rendering.
>That's always been my biggest pet peeve with the "Star Wars" movies in that they really played up the "rebel vs. empire" theme (with a real bias towards the rebels IMO) and didn't focus on the technology or culture of that era.
>Event producer AEG has already filed trademark infringement claims against 100 John Does and 100 Jane Does in anticipation that they're going to bootleg
Is there a legally generic name for a transgender Doe? Maybe Chris Doe? Or Pat?
Would you pre-sue fewer of them, perhaps only 10 Pat Does for every 100 Johns, based on statistical rarity?
I find it interesting how Starcraft and Warcraft have huge map-making communities that have sprung up around increasingly sophisticated editing software, some of it enabled by Blizzard, some handwritten to be even more powerful.
And yet within Blizzard they seem to have no concept of how these fan-made games actually work. By 2006 or so, the company finally released a pair of custom maps, both of them fairly sophisticated, one of them plagued by memory overflows so severe that it was unplayable.
It turns out these memory overflows are caused by a lack of garbage collection in their editing software, something that fan-made software was designed to fix. I also didn't have much luck importing sounds or music into maps, importing models is scary (but others do it), and there's no free-text programming (it's all click-through menus, which is very slow for large projects).
Oh, and since the map info is stored in some kind of database in memory, changing one numeric value on one unit can freeze your computer for sixty seconds while it grinds that one change into the map. That also slows you down. A lot.
We'll see what happens with Starcraft2. The Warcraft editor was a huge improvement over the Starcraft editor, but as you can see, also plagued with some big problems.
FPS was a hack anyway. Remember Wolfenstein? Precious little 3D code in there. That was "3D" done with sprites. Now think back to Phantasy Star I. Remember those dungeons? How about Bard's Tale? Same dungeons. Ultima I? Here you go:
Ever play Seven Deadly Sins? You'd never think a game where you have to get a girl drunk and have sex with her would be so goddamn charming.
The flash industry could probably use some quality control and maybe a technology other than Flash lol. But otherwise, it's like a fucking talent explosion. The games aren't even shallow either - I'm finding more and more that have save functionality, and in terms of gameplay have as much features as comparable freestanding games on either PC or console.
No 3D games yet, but at this rate, that'll probably happen tomorrow.
There are a lot of game genres that have dead-ended. Most of them, actually.
Fighting games reached their logical conclusion with Marvel vs Capcom. Nobody is going to play a fighting game ever again. Nobody wants to learn codes, or have a 34-hit combo pulled off on them by a Chinese kid.
Shooting games reached their logical conclusion with bullet hell.
FPS reached its logical conclusion with Duke Nukem. The first one. Well okay, Team Fortress was cool too.
Space piloting games pretty much ended with Descent. After that, everyone tossed their joysticks.
Platformers ended with Mario64. Woah, you can control the camera? Better never do that again. It's too confusing.
Sports games reached their logical conclusion the moment they were officially sanctioned.
RPG's were strong on early PC, and then got ruined by the Final Fantasy franchise.
Driving games? Who knows. But I can tell you I had a steering wheel in 1983 and I've barely seen one since.
So as you can see, a LOT of genres aren't even worth playing. They are over. If you're young, it's "new to you," but to anyone else it's technically correct to call them rehashes.
The innovation I'm seeing is in RTS (multiple unit control), tactical fighting (basically chess), and tower defense (basically solitaire). In 2010, if you ask me to play chess, I'm going to say, "Does it have a longbow and rifle? Does it have terrain effects? How does the rain affect the accuracy of the rook when it shoots? Oh it doesn't shoot, then what does it do? How do I level it up?"
Yeah I don't think anybody in the 90's was wishing to return to the days of Atari. This is an example of AC who was expecting to take a karma hit for posting total garbage.
>Workers have been under all-out attack by the elites ever since Ronald Reagan declared war on unions.
It's amazing to me that anyone wants the middle class to be poor. At first, "I have all the money and nobody else does," sounds like a great idea...until you go outside.
You walk down the street surrounded by poor people. So you get in your Lexus and you are surrounded by poor people in their cars. You go to work and a poor person brings you lunch. You turn on your TV and a poor person is talking about how a poor president is sending all of our poor people into a poor country to fight with their poor people.
When everybody else is poor, everything is about poverty. Even your own life as a rich man.
No, I'm sure it is, because this keeps coming up. And as a former (web/db) programmer, I've experienced it.
There's no reason that a job where a highly experienced, educated person sits at a desk and pushes buttons should:
a) Cause your arms to fall off b) Make you sleep on the couch c) Destroy all your friendships d) Give you money you can't spend e) Ruin your resume f) Cause the company to go bankrupt and everybody loses their jobs and the whole industry is shot
White-collar jobs are supposed to be easier than physical labor jobs. They're supposed to be classier, with better conditions and take-home.
But many programming jobs - and apparently all gaming jobs - are not classy in the slightest, not easy, have shitty conditions, and who cares how much you get paid if you never get to eat out.
Maybe, maybe not. The worst working conditions I can think of were probably in early factories. And armies.
But let's reflect. Farming always was hard, and is assumed to stay hard, although I've heard musings that it's a solved problem. Cooks always were cooks, and always will be cooks. Sailing has gotten a lot better. Truckers always will be truckers. Construction workers always will have to climb up to high places, since that's the whole point. Mechanics always will be dirty, lawyers and accountants always will be half-blind, and bankers always will be bald.
IT workers most likely always will be overworked and under-appreciated. That's because what they create is invisible. Nobody can see what they do, therefore, no credit.
Thus, I don't see a sharp cutoff line between "before" and "after." And to say that the slumdwellers of Calcutta (non-technological society) don't have leisure time is giving them way too much credit for their high-powered careers.
What you do see over time, is that the proportion of "landed" families (white collar) to wage slaves is steadily increasing. For example, I've gathered that in the 1500's, the entire cultural elite of the British Empire could fit inside the king's castle. You're talking maybe a few dozen people.
Now, obviously, we have a lot more. We're getting more productive, because fewer wage slaves are supporting more managers.
>I think it is safe to say that mr. Assange is in it for himself and himself alone.
It's pretty clear that Wikileaks is an ego trip for someone who has little else to contribute to society. Assnagel lives in a tent in Africa. To his credit, he thinks he's helping. But why a famously paranoid person would live in a tent in a country with no infrastructure just speaks to the inconsistency of his own ideas.
Slashdot Mirror
So they are doing it right. That is so fucking funny. Calculator hell on earth. Imagine the shock and horror when the #1 way to cheat on math exams (calculators) became required to use.
"That was back before steroids were mandatory!"
Abolish? Infix is appalling, and I use calculators very sparingly, like 5 or 10 numbers added together per week.
It has no purpose, unless you want to perform exactly one operation on exactly two numbers and then never do anything again. If that's what you're doing, infix is A-OK.
Hah!
At some point, you have to let go of the old ideas to teach the new ones. For example, do we let kids ride the bus or do we make them build internal combustion engines? I mean, someone had to build the first ICE. Why not make kids learn that too.
Thing is, I noticed in programming, programmers have a slightly irrational tendency to want to start things from scratch. I realized people have an innate desire to start from scratch so they understand the entire system. It's just more satisfying when there's no stone unturned.
So yes, we should be teaching algebra sans calculator, they should be building their own cars, and elementary school should be about making fire, fashioning arrows, and sewing clothes with sinew harvested from a deer carcass. Also, school should go until you're 55.
Whether I'm being serious or not is left as an exercise to the reader. But I do enjoy knowing how to add and subtract - something that is no longer taught - so take that as a clue.
Americans are better at playing FarmVille than anyone else, that's why.
You're looking at the answer, not the problem.
The problem is 4+3+2=()+2 solve for ()
To me, the most obvious answer is "4+3". I wonder if they would mark that correct.
There's no abstract thought or inference on written exams. The purpose of an exam is to test proficiency in a language. In this language, you have to know the specific meaning of = and (). Most exam languages are useful only for the exam and have little use later on. For example, someone taking this test will learn the meaning of () and then NEVER use it again for the rest of their lives.
Thus, I would speculate that kids not understanding = has more to do with illiteracy than math fail. Lemme guess, the minority population in these schools is 70%? Wow, that would make some sense.
In other news, mexican people don't know how to plug red, white, and yellow cables into plugs that are colored red, white, and yellow. Do you think they don't know colors? They don't know that it's important.
The Von Neumann bottleneck is sort of inevitable. A campfire might be able to eat more logs than you throw at it, but it's still the brightest place in the field. And let's say you throw all the logs at it, now you run out of logs and feel stupid the other way.
Example, for all the times you've gotten 12fps in a game, how many times has your cpu idled at near zero? Like right now?
One part is always going to be faster than another. Except when CPU's finally top out, and that will be interesting.
>Even at the current rate of growth, the need for dozens of cores on a desktop is decades out, at least.
When you're applying an effect in Photoshop, don't most of the effects only depend on the pixels near it? So Photoshop should be scalable to number of cores equal to the number of pixels. No fancy programming needed, just break up the work into chunks.
Video editing would be the same way.
Most other productivity apps - those involving text - are usually focused on interrupts from the user, network or I/O, so they wouldn't benefit much at all, except maybe in rendering.
>There are SATA 6GB/s disks out there with >400MB/s rates,
Right, that's why the charts top out at 158, Enterprise 2010 chart tops out at 200 and it's all SAS.
Caught reading the specs again?
>That's always been my biggest pet peeve with the "Star Wars" movies in that they really played up the "rebel vs. empire" theme (with a real bias towards the rebels IMO) and didn't focus on the technology or culture of that era.
Firefly.
>Event producer AEG has already filed trademark infringement claims against 100 John Does and 100 Jane Does in anticipation that they're going to bootleg
Is there a legally generic name for a transgender Doe? Maybe Chris Doe? Or Pat?
Would you pre-sue fewer of them, perhaps only 10 Pat Does for every 100 Johns, based on statistical rarity?
When Wired sells out Adrian Lolcat, please post the same garbage so I can laugh again.
Just look at who you're sticking up for and you'll know who your friends are.
It depends whether you consider it "action" or "adventure."
Long, difficult games like Contra and BT definitely blurred the lines. Ultimately it comes down to expectations.
The biggest complaint on NES was that BlasterMaster didn't have codes. For a game that does take, actually, 1 hr. to complete.
Goonies2 (with codes)? 2 hours.
Zelda (with batteries)? 4-6 hours, we've all done it. They could have ditched the batteries and it would have been the same game.
But, you know, not having that map is a bitch.
Good for you.
I find it interesting how Starcraft and Warcraft have huge map-making communities that have sprung up around increasingly sophisticated editing software, some of it enabled by Blizzard, some handwritten to be even more powerful.
And yet within Blizzard they seem to have no concept of how these fan-made games actually work. By 2006 or so, the company finally released a pair of custom maps, both of them fairly sophisticated, one of them plagued by memory overflows so severe that it was unplayable.
It turns out these memory overflows are caused by a lack of garbage collection in their editing software, something that fan-made software was designed to fix. I also didn't have much luck importing sounds or music into maps, importing models is scary (but others do it), and there's no free-text programming (it's all click-through menus, which is very slow for large projects).
Oh, and since the map info is stored in some kind of database in memory, changing one numeric value on one unit can freeze your computer for sixty seconds while it grinds that one change into the map. That also slows you down. A lot.
We'll see what happens with Starcraft2. The Warcraft editor was a huge improvement over the Starcraft editor, but as you can see, also plagued with some big problems.
FPS was a hack anyway. Remember Wolfenstein? Precious little 3D code in there. That was "3D" done with sprites. Now think back to Phantasy Star I. Remember those dungeons? How about Bard's Tale? Same dungeons. Ultima I? Here you go:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/ultima-collection/screenshots/gameShotId,23667/
That's 1981 for you. The graphics have gotten better since then, but the perspective is the same. Is he too close for a rocket launcher?
Ever play Seven Deadly Sins? You'd never think a game where you have to get a girl drunk and have sex with her would be so goddamn charming.
The flash industry could probably use some quality control and maybe a technology other than Flash lol. But otherwise, it's like a fucking talent explosion. The games aren't even shallow either - I'm finding more and more that have save functionality, and in terms of gameplay have as much features as comparable freestanding games on either PC or console.
No 3D games yet, but at this rate, that'll probably happen tomorrow.
>things are just as they've always been.
There are a lot of game genres that have dead-ended. Most of them, actually.
Fighting games reached their logical conclusion with Marvel vs Capcom. Nobody is going to play a fighting game ever again. Nobody wants to learn codes, or have a 34-hit combo pulled off on them by a Chinese kid.
Shooting games reached their logical conclusion with bullet hell.
FPS reached its logical conclusion with Duke Nukem. The first one. Well okay, Team Fortress was cool too.
Space piloting games pretty much ended with Descent. After that, everyone tossed their joysticks.
Platformers ended with Mario64. Woah, you can control the camera? Better never do that again. It's too confusing.
Sports games reached their logical conclusion the moment they were officially sanctioned.
RPG's were strong on early PC, and then got ruined by the Final Fantasy franchise.
Driving games? Who knows. But I can tell you I had a steering wheel in 1983 and I've barely seen one since.
So as you can see, a LOT of genres aren't even worth playing. They are over. If you're young, it's "new to you," but to anyone else it's technically correct to call them rehashes.
The innovation I'm seeing is in RTS (multiple unit control), tactical fighting (basically chess), and tower defense (basically solitaire). In 2010, if you ask me to play chess, I'm going to say, "Does it have a longbow and rifle? Does it have terrain effects? How does the rain affect the accuracy of the rook when it shoots? Oh it doesn't shoot, then what does it do? How do I level it up?"
Yeah I don't think anybody in the 90's was wishing to return to the days of Atari. This is an example of AC who was expecting to take a karma hit for posting total garbage.
And somebody modded him up!
>Workers have been under all-out attack by the elites ever since Ronald Reagan declared war on unions.
It's amazing to me that anyone wants the middle class to be poor. At first, "I have all the money and nobody else does," sounds like a great idea...until you go outside.
You walk down the street surrounded by poor people. So you get in your Lexus and you are surrounded by poor people in their cars. You go to work and a poor person brings you lunch. You turn on your TV and a poor person is talking about how a poor president is sending all of our poor people into a poor country to fight with their poor people.
When everybody else is poor, everything is about poverty. Even your own life as a rich man.
>The game industry is in no way unique.
No, I'm sure it is, because this keeps coming up. And as a former (web/db) programmer, I've experienced it.
There's no reason that a job where a highly experienced, educated person sits at a desk and pushes buttons should:
a) Cause your arms to fall off
b) Make you sleep on the couch
c) Destroy all your friendships
d) Give you money you can't spend
e) Ruin your resume
f) Cause the company to go bankrupt and everybody loses their jobs and the whole industry is shot
White-collar jobs are supposed to be easier than physical labor jobs. They're supposed to be classier, with better conditions and take-home.
But many programming jobs - and apparently all gaming jobs - are not classy in the slightest, not easy, have shitty conditions, and who cares how much you get paid if you never get to eat out.
Maybe, maybe not. The worst working conditions I can think of were probably in early factories. And armies.
But let's reflect. Farming always was hard, and is assumed to stay hard, although I've heard musings that it's a solved problem. Cooks always were cooks, and always will be cooks. Sailing has gotten a lot better. Truckers always will be truckers. Construction workers always will have to climb up to high places, since that's the whole point. Mechanics always will be dirty, lawyers and accountants always will be half-blind, and bankers always will be bald.
IT workers most likely always will be overworked and under-appreciated. That's because what they create is invisible. Nobody can see what they do, therefore, no credit.
Thus, I don't see a sharp cutoff line between "before" and "after." And to say that the slumdwellers of Calcutta (non-technological society) don't have leisure time is giving them way too much credit for their high-powered careers.
What you do see over time, is that the proportion of "landed" families (white collar) to wage slaves is steadily increasing. For example, I've gathered that in the 1500's, the entire cultural elite of the British Empire could fit inside the king's castle. You're talking maybe a few dozen people.
Now, obviously, we have a lot more. We're getting more productive, because fewer wage slaves are supporting more managers.
Not quite. The video was a big deal because it was their first one.
Of course they misspelled "gunsight" in the title, which is a bit like James Cameron releasing "Tytanic" or "Avater."
>I think it is safe to say that mr. Assange is in it for himself and himself alone.
It's pretty clear that Wikileaks is an ego trip for someone who has little else to contribute to society. Assnagel lives in a tent in Africa. To his credit, he thinks he's helping. But why a famously paranoid person would live in a tent in a country with no infrastructure just speaks to the inconsistency of his own ideas.
Nobody else wants his job. That's the biggest way he differs from Kennedy.
Also, Kennedy was popular. And smart. And a drug addict.
How is he like Kennedy again?