Even in the government and defense industry the requirement for IT is Security+. Basically, what it means is every solution involving an end user is at most a 3-step solution:
Wipe machine
Reimage (and add user stuff, i.e. email)
Return to user
They just don't have time to really get to a real solution because you have this "industry standard" of one IT guy per 200 employees.
True, the NES had some issues with the 72-pin connector... but my SNES still works just fine after I cleaned the cartridge contacts and cartidges. First time, every time. Same with my N64 and gameboy color.
Do a web search for Gameboy in Iraq. You'll turn up a fully-functioning gameboy that survived mortars(bombs?) hitting a base. The thing is mostly black and has some of the plastic melting, but it still plays tetris and is on display in a museum.
The thing that first came to mind for me is the cooling. Salt water is much different than fresh water. There will be deposits, evaporites, corrosion, etc... Also, does any body know how well salt water + small fishes cool a nuclear reactor?
And yet dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of trade jobs get completely bypassed because of this same focus on STEM jobs. Why should it be the teachers job to begin teaching specifics to a career field instead of teaching the basics and supporting their interests?
Hell, I didn't know i wanted to be a programmer until college. Up until then I was an art guy.
I think it's more that they are trying to create some super-race of googlers. They already want their employees to live at or very near on-site. Eventually some of those googlers are going to want girlfriends or otherwise start families. If they have both genders there, they can then begin having families of googlers. Imagine what can happen in a few generations, we will have a race of pale, non-athletic "humans" that have developed an intolerance to sunlight, and can be fed entirely by caffeine products and Doritos.
They're not promoting equality, they want to start a new race.
I'd argue that this wouldn't change the fundamental outcome of the experiment, since by definition no one selection has a fundamental advantage or disadvantage over any other. In either game, you make a decision, then have a 50/50 chance of winning the round.
scissors beats paper and lizard; loses to rock and Spock ( 50% win, given even distribution)
paper beats rock and spock; loses to scissors and lizard (50% win, given even distribution)
rock beats scissors and lizard; loses to paper and spock (50% win, given even distribution)
Spock beats scissors and rock; loses to lizard and paper (50% win, given even distribution)
Lizard beats Spock and paper; loses to rock and scissors (50% win, given even distribution)
All this discussion about genetic diversity. What about the knowledge? What sort of information would we need to pass on through those generations to have them actually able to recolonize and succeed? How do we pass on advancements as they get further and further away and the time lapse gets worse and worse?
I'd imagine if we had a bunch of inbreeds to the point we reach Idiocracy and no one knows how to hold a spoon, much less how to construct a building, there would be bigger problems to overcome.
Screw it - let the market decide: If a game is truly offensive, word will get out and it won't be bought, leading to its failure. No one is forcing anyone to buy a given game, FFS.
Letting the market decide is precisely what got us here. Look at those wildly popular games and how they portray people. Gears of War has these overmasculine meat-head soldiers shooting similarly hyper-testosteroned "aliens" (subterranian, whatever). God of War had highly suggestive sex scenes (off camera, but noises still), where the protaganist just has his way with a couple women. Halo has a macho super-soldier that doesn't really respond to the atrocities around him, that's up for the female computer to say "oh no" to dozens of people in a ship being blown up. Medal of Honor and Battlefield both show the tough-as-nails "lets go get them" soldiers. These are all games that sell well and reinforce that male stereotype of no emotion, lets get those bastards. Need I say anything about Grand Theft Auto? Bully? Hell, even Mario reinforces the stereotype of "man saves defenseless woman".
Tomb Raider (original series) is a prominent example of the objectification of women. Yes Lara is strong, but she's always in some skin-tight, moderately revealing outfit. Dead or Alive is no better, all the female characters are highly objecitified, and there's even articles about "breast physics" of the game. They took it to the extreme and made beach volleyball, where all the girls are now in bikinis (though I think that one sold maybe 10 copies). There is a little bit of a turnaround here with the latest Tomb Raider, where Lara is no longer a sex object, and is depicted as vulnerable, yet smart and capable and very human.
Of course, you can turn any representation of something to suite your point, and calling Mario out is a bit of a stretch. I'm not even going to get started on the racism (Shadow Warrior, 50 Cent), and homophobia (Streets of Rage had a gay boss fight that was removed in the US). In some cases the game is so over-the-top that it's almost making fun of it, in others its just included needlessly. God of War could do without the scenes, Gears of War has female soldiers now, etc...
My friends and I were rabid Diablo II fans. I played through DII and it's expansions with many characters and genuinely enjoyed playing with friends. I refused to buy DIII, though I have played the X360 version as well as PC version. My friend did buy DIII and gave me the rundown on why he doesn't care the least about it anymore. Here's a collection of reasons:
Always online. Battle.net, while useful for chatting, is Blizzards answer to Steam for their 4 games. You can no longer play with friends in a LAN party, or via home to home without stopping by a Blizzard server that isn't guaranteed to be there in 10 years.
Incessant grind-fest. While the Diablo games are known for mowing enemies down for hours on end, in order to get to the maximum level pre-expansion you need to beat the game 3 times in a row. It gets tiresome the first time you do everything again. Try levelling more than one character and maintain your sanity... go on... try. D2 had pacing such that you would hit the level cap somewhere in your 3rd play through, though you could certainly grind at a lower level to give yourself better stats in the 2nd or 3rd run. This, in addition to (3)
The maps are not truly random. Many dungeons have a set organization, as you may expect from a scripted story. However, compared to DII, there aren't many "random dungeons" littered along the countryside, and those that are there are much more boring than their DII counterparts.
Loot and the botched Auction House. One of the big problems in DII was endless grinding for new great stuff, Blizzard tried to fix this by creating a real-money Auction House (and net themselves a little profit, much like microtransactions) and create a way for players to spend money instead of hours trying to find that new weapon. Only problem was it wasn't well received and, from what I recall, heavily abused.
Different Dev Team = Different Game. A lot of the original folks behind D1 and D2 went on to form Runic Games and develop Torchlight. The DIII dev team was trying to emulate and expand on that successful formula of D2. From the few hours I played and the reports of friends, it sounds like DIII was hurting in the story and gameplay departments compared to it's predecessors. It just didn't feel "fun" in the way the others did.
That said, I spent my money on Torchlight 2, which I still find enjoyable and more creative than DIII.
Think a bit more about what it means to communicate and what that means for a computer.
You receive some sort of input, a data packet
You segregate it, or parse it
You do some interpretation, understand the contituent parts
You "understand" it, or have applied some understanding to the data (i.e. an integer within a struct)
You respond, in this case Watson would say "cancerous" or "not"
Watson is developed to do just that, it doesn't matter if the data itself is natural speech or genetic data. Data is data and can be separated and processed similarly. The kicker here is that with a genetic code, the "data segments" (words) aren't so readily defined, and the meanings of all those things are not so clear to people. So while on the outside we'll be seeing Watson (potentially) give a "yay" or "nay" to each data item, internally it will be developing some mathematical function to help distinguish and refine it's answers. That equation or "understanding" is what will provide a distinguisher for people to apply. Given the size of the data set and some human verified True/False answer to each piece of data being cancerous, it makes lots of sense that something with the computing power of Watson be thrown into it.
People seem to forget that "Special Education" is both ends of the curve. Remember that for every genius is another kid with a learning disability. The funding doesn't go directly to the upper echelon, it's split at the school level to cover needed materials on both sides. In many cases the lower end gets more due to the necessary equipment (i.e. catering to movement impairments, special furniture, etc...) required by the students.
When was the last time you went to the Science Bowl and it rivalled the crowd seen at your typical Homecoming game?
Schools suffer the same way society does, in the pursuit of the allmighty dollar. Boys/men tackling one another then spanking one another for a job well done generates more money than little Timmy's discovery of cold fusion in a shoebox. The focus isn't only on sports, it's on bringing the average up as well.
I have a friend who is a 5th grade teacher and we were discussing what's goin on in our education system. The standard school year is 180 days. With No Child Left Behind taking ~10, we are left with 170. State standardized tests whittle away another 6. Other (i.e. placement/advancement) tests take up another ~4. It comes down two one entire educational month, 20 days, are taken up by standardized testing. That means 180 day curriculum has to shoehorn into 160. In addition, with all this comes teacher/school reviews that focus on how well the students do, not how well the teacher does. If one class gets a "C", the whole school does and goes into remediation. Add the typical funding cuts and you can see the hurt. The focus is on bringing the lower percentile to the middle, not on helping the upper percentile succeed. Sorry folks, not everyone gets to be a Doctor/Astronaut/Physicist when they grow up.
He also tells me horror stories of how parents just don't give a crap about their kids education. In his class of 30 (state says max of 23, btw) each year, I hear about maybe 2-3 sets of parents that are truly involved and want their kid to succeed. The rest just go with the flow or don't care at all. That's another discussion altogether.
As someone who has done pretty extensive research into CarPC's I can say that the "state of the art" today doesn't really come close to what it truly needs to be to operate in a car. Full-fledged, or even half-fledged (intel NUC) PC's just aren't designed for a car environment. There's the vibration, the user interface, the power requirements, radio interface, speaker/amp connections, etc... Sure, there are some mitigations such as using an SSD, using something like Unity or a netbook or tablet interface, and some power conditioners, but that is all a kludge that your average consumer won't even consider.
Through all the research I did to try to find some solution to my older BMW's stock 1 cd changer and digital watch display, I came across these, which are drop-in replacements for your stereo and many come in two flavors. They all have a base embedded OS that offers bluetooth for hands-free calling, basic radio functions, media playback and even iPod interface. They also come with a second physical board within them purely for navigation, one runs Windows CE, the other runs Android. I can honestly say that the Android deck is pretty damned useful for navigation. I just downloaded CoPilot and all the maps I needed using the built-in wifi as I sat in my garage and I get a navigation solution much like a Garmin. Is it perfect? No, occasionally it will crash reading some music from the SD card input it has, the touch screen is a little inaccurate, and I can't completely customize the look and feel. However, it does what it needs to do 98% of the time.
Googles Android is defective by design since they only publicly release the bare-bones, no frills or shiny features code. A car doesn't really need all the fance Google App integration, I know if I'm driving I don't want gmail or google+ harassing me. Any car manufacturer could take that free source code and make a useful OS out of it... they would just rather shoehorn something somebody else made into something it wasn't designed to do, all in the name of saving money.
Personally, I think the Doom concept translates poorly to modern gaming. Tolkien-esque fantasy is to RPGs -- revolutionary in its time, but bland and generic today. Modern games need distinctive characters, settings, stories, and gameplay to succeed (artistically, anyway). Modern games need distinctive characters, settings, stories, and gameplay to succeed (artistically, anyway).
I disagree. The recent Serious Sam releases were great, and showed that the old-school FPSs formula still makes for a good game in today's world. Fast paced, lots of shooting, and meaningless plot. The good character helped, but it was the gameplay that really made it stand out. The problem with Doom 3 wasn't that it failed to add all the things that modern FPSs have, but rather that it failed to replicate the fun gameplay of the originals.
I agree with this sentiment. Doom 1 and 2 were about survival in a swarm from hell. Some enemies did a craptop on damage (i.e. cyberdemon and other bosses), others were middle-ground (barons, hellknights), and the rest were mostly pushovers. What made it challenging wasn't always the individual enemies, but the hordes and mixtures of them given the level you are in. One of the most frustratingly fun levels in Doom 2 had a staircase along one wall with lost souls chasing you. Doom 3 took the same plot, and turned it into a survival horror game. They effectively made Resident Evil into a first person shooter with demons instead of zombies.
Serious Sam 1 and 2 had cartoony graphics, but really took the Doom1 and Doom2 formula to the point of absurdity. On harder difficulties even the basic enemies did a fair amount of damage and it wasn't unheard of to end up in a small room or hallway and for dozens of enemies to spawn in, and to run out of ammo in all your bigger guns, forcing you to use pistols to finish off the last dozen or so. Serious Sam 3 took things a little more realistic and mature, but followed the same formula of throwing more enemies at you than you can handle. The story is a little different in that an alien warlord is invading earth, but the game doesn't take itself too seriously. I'd argue that the SS games are what Doom should have done. Hell even Quake 4 is more Doom than Doom3.
Up top you have those web sites that have their fingers in damned near everything, because they are looking at "centralization" of the website. More and more websites are using videos, and who better than YouTube to host? Need to provide a way to search your website? Google has already done it for you. Need to update your 3 billion fans what you're having for lunch? Facebook and Twitter have you covered. I can't see the list from work, but I'd wager that Facebook is up there too, with their ever-present "like" buttons. What's surprising is Wikipedia, you'll only sometimes see a link to Wikipedia, even on discussions on Slashdot, they don't go out there and wave their hands saying "everybody link to me" like other sites do.
What about other aspects that would make a website "good"? Such as ease of navigation (find what you want in 5 clicks or less)? Size/amount of useful content? Number of external sites that link to their content?
If we included that sort of data, YouTube could potentially be far up there with Wikipedia. I would think Google and Bing would be ruled out entirely since by their very design they don't hold real data.
Between this and the AC "don't wimp out" comment above, I think you've got sound advice.
My own personal experience is similar, I was in a group in a large corporation that was "subcontracted" to another part of the same business. The project was more of a "shoehorn this into that" sort of setup, and I was the only developer and given a 5 million line plus code-base that broke if you looked at it funny. I told my boss I'd need some time to look through the code and come up with estimates and got the okay. Roughly 2 weeks later I went back to my boss, who was the interface with this other group, and gave him some options. 1 - We make everything shiny, gold, and less likely to break... but at some absurd estimate that wasn't in contract scope. 2 - We build the parts we are on contract to build, and do some shoe-horning (minimal tweaking) of the existing code base. or 3 - somewhere in between.
My boss went for Option 3. Then in 3 months the requirements changed and so did the code base, completely. We got a new version, 2 releases newer. Having already done a lot of development in those three months, we diverted to option 2 and ported as much as we could to the new code. In the end, about a year later, the requirements had changed yet again, and our customer was having issues compiling everything on a new 64-bit architecture... when our code was strictly 32-bit (but had some custom enhancements for 64-bit floating point).
The takeaway is honestly and communication. When the requirements changed, you can bet your ass my boss and I called up the customer and said "by doing this, you are impacting these other things and this development is going to get completely scrapped, are you okay with that?". They were, the understood the extent of their needs, the contract limitations, etc... so they made an informed decision that was the least stressful across the board, while still meeting overarching requirements.
I finally have a definition for "assload", which I will now define as approximately 130 gallons, or maybe 1040 lbs (of water). "how much does that truck weigh?" "About 3 assloads"
Now if only I could define english vs metric fucktons...
Now the angry people of the world can say they're "being helpful" when they take a crap on their neighbors lawn. Not so sure the cops would agree, however...
For the general population to be ignorant of these meanings is perhaps expected. That's why governments and school officials need to understand these things and make reasonable calls -- but it appears they did not seem to know what "warning" meant in this case.
That's the disturbing thing. The NWS had stuff out saying there would be "dangerous" road conditions and that travel was not recommended well in advance of the snow.
The crux of this is that they said it happens every 3 years. That's much more frequent than every 30 or every 300. Government and populous alike should have some basic understanding of what that means already. Other places that get a good snowstorm or ice on the roads infrequently ( 1/yr) still have their fair share of dumbass drivers, but they don't make national headlines with gross incompetence. The story is so sensationalized it makes those 3 inches to be 3 meters. I've lived in Albuquerque and when they get 1 inch, the whole damned city shuts down. One year we got 11 inches and I didn't leave my house for a week, not because I couldn't, but because I didn't want to. The weather made news, a 3000 car pileup didn't, and no students were stuck at school.
Here here! I've already got a linux based desktop in my living room precisely for the console-ish games, and have quite a few of the Steam Linux games on there, as well as a few humble-bundle sales. I loaded up Fedora 20 Games spin, steam, wine+steam, and am playing Dishonored at 1080p with surround sound. I could have done the beta SteamOS, but I wanted more control over what files go where... and I didn't want to learn the ins and outs of Debian. I could always just add Steam to the startup applications and go to big picture mode if I wanted that.
The least you could do is provide some references. I just dug up Chemical dependency on Wikipedia. I don't see sugar in their list, but I do see that heroine, cocaine, barbituates and tobacco are all more addictive than alcohol. Granted that's a somewhat subjective list.
Just to round it out, I looked up sugar addiction too. Which at first read doesn't strike me as quite the same as the other substances. It releases dopamines, but it doesn't fundamentally change your brain chemistry like another drug, caffiene. A little more reading on physical dependence, and another rebuttal. It looks to me like sugar takes advantage of a natural biological response, trigging your brain to produce more dopamine. As opposed to drugs, which go after neuro-receptors or otherwise interfere with normal brain function. I'll end with this quote from scienceblogs: "Sugar may be mechanistically similar to crack in terms of addictiveness, but I have never heard of someone stealing a car radio to get a Twinkie."
Slashdot Mirror
They just don't have time to really get to a real solution because you have this "industry standard" of one IT guy per 200 employees.
Even better... They lost $2.4 million and have to raise the prices on their customers. Yet this Time-Warner buyout is supposed to be in the billions?
Who the hell is fitting the bill for that?
Once you get past all the glitz, glamour and Robocop statue, you're still left with Detroit.
True, the NES had some issues with the 72-pin connector... but my SNES still works just fine after I cleaned the cartridge contacts and cartidges. First time, every time. Same with my N64 and gameboy color. Do a web search for Gameboy in Iraq. You'll turn up a fully-functioning gameboy that survived mortars(bombs?) hitting a base. The thing is mostly black and has some of the plastic melting, but it still plays tetris and is on display in a museum.
The thing that first came to mind for me is the cooling. Salt water is much different than fresh water. There will be deposits, evaporites, corrosion, etc... Also, does any body know how well salt water + small fishes cool a nuclear reactor?
Did she learn from Stephen Elop?
And yet dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of trade jobs get completely bypassed because of this same focus on STEM jobs. Why should it be the teachers job to begin teaching specifics to a career field instead of teaching the basics and supporting their interests? Hell, I didn't know i wanted to be a programmer until college. Up until then I was an art guy.
I think it's more that they are trying to create some super-race of googlers. They already want their employees to live at or very near on-site. Eventually some of those googlers are going to want girlfriends or otherwise start families. If they have both genders there, they can then begin having families of googlers. Imagine what can happen in a few generations, we will have a race of pale, non-athletic "humans" that have developed an intolerance to sunlight, and can be fed entirely by caffeine products and Doritos. They're not promoting equality, they want to start a new race.
I'd argue that this wouldn't change the fundamental outcome of the experiment, since by definition no one selection has a fundamental advantage or disadvantage over any other. In either game, you make a decision, then have a 50/50 chance of winning the round.
All this discussion about genetic diversity. What about the knowledge? What sort of information would we need to pass on through those generations to have them actually able to recolonize and succeed? How do we pass on advancements as they get further and further away and the time lapse gets worse and worse?
I'd imagine if we had a bunch of inbreeds to the point we reach Idiocracy and no one knows how to hold a spoon, much less how to construct a building, there would be bigger problems to overcome.
Screw it - let the market decide: If a game is truly offensive, word will get out and it won't be bought, leading to its failure. No one is forcing anyone to buy a given game, FFS.
Letting the market decide is precisely what got us here. Look at those wildly popular games and how they portray people. Gears of War has these overmasculine meat-head soldiers shooting similarly hyper-testosteroned "aliens" (subterranian, whatever). God of War had highly suggestive sex scenes (off camera, but noises still), where the protaganist just has his way with a couple women. Halo has a macho super-soldier that doesn't really respond to the atrocities around him, that's up for the female computer to say "oh no" to dozens of people in a ship being blown up. Medal of Honor and Battlefield both show the tough-as-nails "lets go get them" soldiers. These are all games that sell well and reinforce that male stereotype of no emotion, lets get those bastards. Need I say anything about Grand Theft Auto? Bully? Hell, even Mario reinforces the stereotype of "man saves defenseless woman".
Tomb Raider (original series) is a prominent example of the objectification of women. Yes Lara is strong, but she's always in some skin-tight, moderately revealing outfit. Dead or Alive is no better, all the female characters are highly objecitified, and there's even articles about "breast physics" of the game. They took it to the extreme and made beach volleyball, where all the girls are now in bikinis (though I think that one sold maybe 10 copies). There is a little bit of a turnaround here with the latest Tomb Raider, where Lara is no longer a sex object, and is depicted as vulnerable, yet smart and capable and very human.
Of course, you can turn any representation of something to suite your point, and calling Mario out is a bit of a stretch. I'm not even going to get started on the racism (Shadow Warrior, 50 Cent), and homophobia (Streets of Rage had a gay boss fight that was removed in the US). In some cases the game is so over-the-top that it's almost making fun of it, in others its just included needlessly. God of War could do without the scenes, Gears of War has female soldiers now, etc...
That said, I spent my money on Torchlight 2, which I still find enjoyable and more creative than DIII.
Be careful about those pictures though... the homophobia is strong over there and you wouldn't want them thinking you're flirting...
Think a bit more about what it means to communicate and what that means for a computer.
Watson is developed to do just that, it doesn't matter if the data itself is natural speech or genetic data. Data is data and can be separated and processed similarly. The kicker here is that with a genetic code, the "data segments" (words) aren't so readily defined, and the meanings of all those things are not so clear to people. So while on the outside we'll be seeing Watson (potentially) give a "yay" or "nay" to each data item, internally it will be developing some mathematical function to help distinguish and refine it's answers. That equation or "understanding" is what will provide a distinguisher for people to apply. Given the size of the data set and some human verified True/False answer to each piece of data being cancerous, it makes lots of sense that something with the computing power of Watson be thrown into it.
People seem to forget that "Special Education" is both ends of the curve. Remember that for every genius is another kid with a learning disability. The funding doesn't go directly to the upper echelon, it's split at the school level to cover needed materials on both sides. In many cases the lower end gets more due to the necessary equipment (i.e. catering to movement impairments, special furniture, etc...) required by the students.
When was the last time you went to the Science Bowl and it rivalled the crowd seen at your typical Homecoming game?
Schools suffer the same way society does, in the pursuit of the allmighty dollar. Boys/men tackling one another then spanking one another for a job well done generates more money than little Timmy's discovery of cold fusion in a shoebox. The focus isn't only on sports, it's on bringing the average up as well.
I have a friend who is a 5th grade teacher and we were discussing what's goin on in our education system. The standard school year is 180 days. With No Child Left Behind taking ~10, we are left with 170. State standardized tests whittle away another 6. Other (i.e. placement/advancement) tests take up another ~4. It comes down two one entire educational month, 20 days, are taken up by standardized testing. That means 180 day curriculum has to shoehorn into 160. In addition, with all this comes teacher/school reviews that focus on how well the students do, not how well the teacher does. If one class gets a "C", the whole school does and goes into remediation. Add the typical funding cuts and you can see the hurt. The focus is on bringing the lower percentile to the middle, not on helping the upper percentile succeed. Sorry folks, not everyone gets to be a Doctor/Astronaut/Physicist when they grow up.
He also tells me horror stories of how parents just don't give a crap about their kids education. In his class of 30 (state says max of 23, btw) each year, I hear about maybe 2-3 sets of parents that are truly involved and want their kid to succeed. The rest just go with the flow or don't care at all. That's another discussion altogether.
As someone who has done pretty extensive research into CarPC's I can say that the "state of the art" today doesn't really come close to what it truly needs to be to operate in a car. Full-fledged, or even half-fledged (intel NUC) PC's just aren't designed for a car environment. There's the vibration, the user interface, the power requirements, radio interface, speaker/amp connections, etc... Sure, there are some mitigations such as using an SSD, using something like Unity or a netbook or tablet interface, and some power conditioners, but that is all a kludge that your average consumer won't even consider.
Through all the research I did to try to find some solution to my older BMW's stock 1 cd changer and digital watch display, I came across these, which are drop-in replacements for your stereo and many come in two flavors. They all have a base embedded OS that offers bluetooth for hands-free calling, basic radio functions, media playback and even iPod interface. They also come with a second physical board within them purely for navigation, one runs Windows CE, the other runs Android. I can honestly say that the Android deck is pretty damned useful for navigation. I just downloaded CoPilot and all the maps I needed using the built-in wifi as I sat in my garage and I get a navigation solution much like a Garmin. Is it perfect? No, occasionally it will crash reading some music from the SD card input it has, the touch screen is a little inaccurate, and I can't completely customize the look and feel. However, it does what it needs to do 98% of the time.
Googles Android is defective by design since they only publicly release the bare-bones, no frills or shiny features code. A car doesn't really need all the fance Google App integration, I know if I'm driving I don't want gmail or google+ harassing me. Any car manufacturer could take that free source code and make a useful OS out of it... they would just rather shoehorn something somebody else made into something it wasn't designed to do, all in the name of saving money.
Personally, I think the Doom concept translates poorly to modern gaming. Tolkien-esque fantasy is to RPGs -- revolutionary in its time, but bland and generic today. Modern games need distinctive characters, settings, stories, and gameplay to succeed (artistically, anyway). Modern games need distinctive characters, settings, stories, and gameplay to succeed (artistically, anyway).
I disagree. The recent Serious Sam releases were great, and showed that the old-school FPSs formula still makes for a good game in today's world. Fast paced, lots of shooting, and meaningless plot. The good character helped, but it was the gameplay that really made it stand out. The problem with Doom 3 wasn't that it failed to add all the things that modern FPSs have, but rather that it failed to replicate the fun gameplay of the originals.
I agree with this sentiment. Doom 1 and 2 were about survival in a swarm from hell. Some enemies did a craptop on damage (i.e. cyberdemon and other bosses), others were middle-ground (barons, hellknights), and the rest were mostly pushovers. What made it challenging wasn't always the individual enemies, but the hordes and mixtures of them given the level you are in. One of the most frustratingly fun levels in Doom 2 had a staircase along one wall with lost souls chasing you. Doom 3 took the same plot, and turned it into a survival horror game. They effectively made Resident Evil into a first person shooter with demons instead of zombies.
Serious Sam 1 and 2 had cartoony graphics, but really took the Doom1 and Doom2 formula to the point of absurdity. On harder difficulties even the basic enemies did a fair amount of damage and it wasn't unheard of to end up in a small room or hallway and for dozens of enemies to spawn in, and to run out of ammo in all your bigger guns, forcing you to use pistols to finish off the last dozen or so. Serious Sam 3 took things a little more realistic and mature, but followed the same formula of throwing more enemies at you than you can handle. The story is a little different in that an alien warlord is invading earth, but the game doesn't take itself too seriously. I'd argue that the SS games are what Doom should have done. Hell even Quake 4 is more Doom than Doom3.
Up top you have those web sites that have their fingers in damned near everything, because they are looking at "centralization" of the website. More and more websites are using videos, and who better than YouTube to host? Need to provide a way to search your website? Google has already done it for you. Need to update your 3 billion fans what you're having for lunch? Facebook and Twitter have you covered. I can't see the list from work, but I'd wager that Facebook is up there too, with their ever-present "like" buttons. What's surprising is Wikipedia, you'll only sometimes see a link to Wikipedia, even on discussions on Slashdot, they don't go out there and wave their hands saying "everybody link to me" like other sites do.
What about other aspects that would make a website "good"? Such as ease of navigation (find what you want in 5 clicks or less)? Size/amount of useful content? Number of external sites that link to their content?
If we included that sort of data, YouTube could potentially be far up there with Wikipedia. I would think Google and Bing would be ruled out entirely since by their very design they don't hold real data.
Between this and the AC "don't wimp out" comment above, I think you've got sound advice.
My own personal experience is similar, I was in a group in a large corporation that was "subcontracted" to another part of the same business. The project was more of a "shoehorn this into that" sort of setup, and I was the only developer and given a 5 million line plus code-base that broke if you looked at it funny. I told my boss I'd need some time to look through the code and come up with estimates and got the okay. Roughly 2 weeks later I went back to my boss, who was the interface with this other group, and gave him some options. 1 - We make everything shiny, gold, and less likely to break... but at some absurd estimate that wasn't in contract scope. 2 - We build the parts we are on contract to build, and do some shoe-horning (minimal tweaking) of the existing code base. or 3 - somewhere in between.
My boss went for Option 3. Then in 3 months the requirements changed and so did the code base, completely. We got a new version, 2 releases newer. Having already done a lot of development in those three months, we diverted to option 2 and ported as much as we could to the new code. In the end, about a year later, the requirements had changed yet again, and our customer was having issues compiling everything on a new 64-bit architecture... when our code was strictly 32-bit (but had some custom enhancements for 64-bit floating point).
The takeaway is honestly and communication. When the requirements changed, you can bet your ass my boss and I called up the customer and said "by doing this, you are impacting these other things and this development is going to get completely scrapped, are you okay with that?". They were, the understood the extent of their needs, the contract limitations, etc... so they made an informed decision that was the least stressful across the board, while still meeting overarching requirements.
I finally have a definition for "assload", which I will now define as approximately 130 gallons, or maybe 1040 lbs (of water).
"how much does that truck weigh?" "About 3 assloads"
Now if only I could define english vs metric fucktons...
Now the angry people of the world can say they're "being helpful" when they take a crap on their neighbors lawn. Not so sure the cops would agree, however...
For the general population to be ignorant of these meanings is perhaps expected. That's why governments and school officials need to understand these things and make reasonable calls -- but it appears they did not seem to know what "warning" meant in this case.
That's the disturbing thing. The NWS had stuff out saying there would be "dangerous" road conditions and that travel was not recommended well in advance of the snow.
The crux of this is that they said it happens every 3 years. That's much more frequent than every 30 or every 300. Government and populous alike should have some basic understanding of what that means already. Other places that get a good snowstorm or ice on the roads infrequently ( 1/yr) still have their fair share of dumbass drivers, but they don't make national headlines with gross incompetence. The story is so sensationalized it makes those 3 inches to be 3 meters. I've lived in Albuquerque and when they get 1 inch, the whole damned city shuts down. One year we got 11 inches and I didn't leave my house for a week, not because I couldn't, but because I didn't want to. The weather made news, a 3000 car pileup didn't, and no students were stuck at school.
Here here! I've already got a linux based desktop in my living room precisely for the console-ish games, and have quite a few of the Steam Linux games on there, as well as a few humble-bundle sales. I loaded up Fedora 20 Games spin, steam, wine+steam, and am playing Dishonored at 1080p with surround sound. I could have done the beta SteamOS, but I wanted more control over what files go where... and I didn't want to learn the ins and outs of Debian. I could always just add Steam to the startup applications and go to big picture mode if I wanted that.
The least you could do is provide some references. I just dug up Chemical dependency on Wikipedia. I don't see sugar in their list, but I do see that heroine, cocaine, barbituates and tobacco are all more addictive than alcohol. Granted that's a somewhat subjective list.
Just to round it out, I looked up sugar addiction too. Which at first read doesn't strike me as quite the same as the other substances. It releases dopamines, but it doesn't fundamentally change your brain chemistry like another drug, caffiene. A little more reading on physical dependence, and another rebuttal. It looks to me like sugar takes advantage of a natural biological response, trigging your brain to produce more dopamine. As opposed to drugs, which go after neuro-receptors or otherwise interfere with normal brain function. I'll end with this quote from scienceblogs: "Sugar may be mechanistically similar to crack in terms of addictiveness, but I have never heard of someone stealing a car radio to get a Twinkie."