>>Nintendo has proven graphics don't have to matter.
The problem is, their QA control of games released for the Wii is really spotty. More than half the games I've bought for the Wii have been so horrendously bad, that we stopped playing them in 10 minutes. Sega Tennis, Godzilla Unleashed, Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz, the list goes on and on.
Sony maintains a much tighter control of game development, and there's only been one game for the PS3 (the Sonic game that came out when the PS3 first came out) that was really, really terrible.
>>For instance, while it is true that redheads statistically require more anesthesia, it would be foolish for a doctor to administer more than normal because you can't guarantee that THIS particular redhead will behave like that.
But if you're aware that redheads often need more anesthesia, your medical treatment of them during surgery will likely be more successful, as that's something you'll be watching for.
>>Races aren't the only marker used in medical care. For instance, redheads require more anesthesia for some reason - yet few people would call redheads a "race".
Sure. I believe that any time a label can be used to create a medicially-significant difference of treatments, then it's valid to use that label, as a difference does exist. I don't think it's justified to use it in the common, racist ways.
A lot of people think that race is just a social construct. While it may be a social construct, it's not *just* a social construct, as statistics can separate the groups.
>>Of course you can say that, and it's perfectly fine for people interested in genealogy or anthropology. There's nothing wrong or racist about that. But the second you find yourself generalizing based on these categories you have set up, you are on a slippery slope
There's an entire field called pharmacogenetics which studies the different effects drugs have on people of genetic backgrounds. Our categories of race are useful enough for drug companies to recommend certain drugs be not used with certain races. The amount of liver enzymes for breaking down alcohol, to use a simple example, vary wildly between the races. So even though you might call races "arbitary" it doesn't mean that they're not useful.
I'm not arguing for racism, just that there is a basis to the categorization beyond a mere label.
>>I was saying that the categorization is arbitrary.
To a certain extent, yes, but when you can identify people's race solely by DNA analysis (which you can -- reports to the contrary are wrong, usually only looking at one gene locus instead of multiple), it has a meaning. In other words, if stats can separate two populations by whatever means (say, sickle-cell rates), then the populations are indeed distinct, regardless of politically correct inspired hatred of "labels" to the contrary.
>>And how does this affect the price of tea in China?
They use a "basket" of good to derive the CPI. Unfortunately, electronic products are used in the mix, and they plummet in price from the day they're entered into the basket, leading to an artifically low inflation measure. So they pull them out from time to time. Nowadays, the Black and White CRT would be a 36" Plasma Screen. In a year or two, it'll probably be a 46" 120Hz LCD.
AFAIK, there's no biometric scans of the 9/11 terrorists, so it's just like the company is guessing anyway. For all we know, terrorists could be the only completely calm people going through security, as they're the only ones not worried about arriving at their destination late.
>>The Community Reinvestment Act had nothing to do with the subprime crisis
Don't believe the hype. I've read that article before (or a close enough cousin to it), and found it to be not just wrong, but deceptively so.
To wit, it's points are: 1) The CRA is a well-respected law that's been on the books since 1977. That's a whopper. What it doesn't say is that it was a limited program until the Clinton administration rewrote and expanded it in 1995. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act)
Claiming that it's been "on the books since 1977" is deceptive. The CRA as we know it was started in 1995 under the Clinton Administration.
2) CRA doesn't require loans to be made, to minorities or anyone else. Hugely deceptive. Banks make loans, and the CRA requires loan making to follow diversity targets (including neighborhood, income, and race) which include forcing banks to make loans to low-income populations that they would prefer to avoid. This means the CRA forces banks to make bad loans.
(I mean, sure, technically, a bank could just choose not to make any loans at all, but then the CRA would be shutting down banks from lending entirely, which would be worse. I think that's how they're trying to weasel out of that claim.)
The CRA requires banks to write reports on how they're achieving diversity targets with their loans, and exposes banks to lawsuits if they do not meet diversity targets. Let me rephrase: If banks do not make loans to poor people they would not otherwise give a loan to, they will be sued by someone -- like Obama, who sued Citibank for not issuing enough bad loans.
3) CRA only applies to federally-regulated banks and thrifts whose deposits are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Sure. Maybe a zillion non-CRA bad loans were made. What difference does it make?
This does not excuse the CRA forcing banks to make bad loans.
4) Federally-regulated banks, which are covered by CRA, have operated under more supervision, and therefore the failure rate for mortgages made by those institutions has been significantly lower Deceptive again. What difference does bad loans made by others make?
CRA default rates are much higher than normal mortgage default rates, and securitized CRA loans, pioneered by Wachovia and Bear Stearns (sound familiar?) are some of the premiere poison assets that congress then wanted to bail out.
Why did we get securitization in the first place? Because banks could meet their CRA targets by making a bad loan and then passing it off to someone else. Why did these securitized loans have higher default rates? Because banks issuing the loans didn't have to bear the risk for them any more. why did securitized loans have a high credit rating? Because banks normally bore the risk of the loans they issued, so the default rate was lower. It sounds like a circular argument, but the base engine for the entire mess was the CRA.
CRA only applies to designated low-income neighborhoods Why, yes. Yes, it does. And it tries to do away with traditional checks on bad loans, like "low income" and "credit history" in the loans it forces banks to make. Like I said, bad loans made elsewhere are irrelevant... unless one claims (and with some evidence, too) that the subprime craze was triggered by the CRA forcing banks into bad loans, and thus pioneering vehicles to deal with such loans, which were then used in non-low-income neighborhoods, since they were an easy source of money.
>>"Derek Donovan, The Star's readers' representative" is not a "guy writing to the editor". Also please read the attached article:
To clarify, I don't think that a blogger who reads letters to the newspaper is an especially good source - he's on the level of me writing a Livejournal entry, except he doesn't appear to know anything about what he's writing about, and doesn't have any references of any value.
As someone who has gone to the effort of understanding the mess -- and you can see references for every point I made -- an article like that is worse than useless.
>>Derek Donovan, The Star's readers' representative" is not a "guy writing to the editor".
"About Ad Astrum
Ad Astrum is a place for you to share your thoughts about how The Star and KansasCity.com cover the news. Ad Astrum is the blog of Derek Donovan, The Kansas City Star's readers' representative."
>>Blame may be misdirected; Critics have contended that the Clinton administration pushed Fannie and Freddie into riskier mortgages.
They did. That's not an error. I recommend reading that livejournal article I wrote for references.
(1999) "The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets -- including the New York metropolitan region -- will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans.
And: "''Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990's by reducing down payment requirements,'' said Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae's chairman and chief executive officer. ''Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.''"
The Community Reinvestment Act also let unscrupulous lawyers sue companies that they thought weren't making enough bad loans. This included a certain Barrack Obama, Esquire. The CRA was heavily expanded under the Clinton Administration. That's what Card was talking about - the guy writing that letter to the editor of the Kansas City Star (which is all that was that you linked) doesn't know what he's talking about, pure and simple.
>>When McCain said, "The fundamentals of our economy are strong," (emphasis mine) he was -- and still is -- 100% correct.
I think it depends what you mean by "fundamentals". Obviously, by that point we'd seen that the securitization of loans where nobody knew the quality of the mortgages they were based on, and the entire "lets force banks to loan money to people they otherwise wouldn't loan money to" ideas were fundamentally flawed.
>>Unfortunately, it was better for some liberals to push the idea of a recession, which will now end up becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Absolutely. I wish more people would recognize this. If an average person hears that we're in the worst depression since the 30s, they're going to cut spending, and this will directly lead to a depression. I flew over Thanksgiving weekend, and talked with some of the airlines people, and they said it was the least busy Thanksgiving at the airport that they could remember. If you're in danger of losing your job, because the Next Great Depression is coming, you don't spend.
>>1. I didn't vote for Bush. >>2. I voted for Obama.
I voted for Bush, but I didn't vote for McCain. But it drove me nuts during the election when Obama supporters kept telling me the subprime meltdown was Bush's fault. And everything else bad under the sun. It's nice to see an intelligent supporter of Obama. =)
Ever since the 70's (and maybe even before) items were taken out of the inflation figures. >>How can we compare the rate of inflation now with what it was in previous years if we use different ways of making the measurement?
I think because not too many people these days are buying black and white CRT televisions.
>>By that long-accepted definition of recession, the US is not even yet in a recession. The US GDP decreased for the first time in recent history only in the third (most recent) quarter, by 0.3%. In the second quarter -- earlier this year -- real GDP increased 2.8%.
Correct. But if you asked the average man on the street, they'd tell you not only have we been in a recession, we've been in the worst depression since the '30s.
Whose fault?
The media's. And I'm not sure it's a coincidence, since this was a presidential election year.
>>creating panic and fear, causing people to pull investments and hold onto their wallets, change purchasing plans, in turn creating bleak forecasts for manufacturers and other business, which causes job loss, and then -- voilà!:
Yep. In fact, I think the media and its relentless attacks on customer confidence is one of the biggest factors in play.
>>The way they reject things for being non-notable (as if there was a lack of space in wikipedia) and the other rules they fling at people sometimes
Look, if we fill up Wikipedia with totally non-notable theoretical computer science stuff, then we'll run out of room for our highly detailed, referenced, verifiable pages on every episode of the Simpsons made, ever.
>>I dont know how the Brits let the authorities get aways with it.
I'd like to say it's because us Americans have protection against unreasonable search and seizures, but that protection got ripped out of the constitution a long time ago.
>>As far as I know, my computers have never accepted a bribe, or made a power-grab.
It's a good thing we don't have viruses, trojans, or other ways of compromising computers, then.
Wouldn't want our terminators to get haxxored by China.
It's also good computers always run properly. I highly recommend replacing our police force with robots that can faultlessly detect when people are holding guns on them, and shooting them if they don't drop the gun.
>>I disagree. Not because Mario64 is better, but because *both* are damn good.
I think Mario64 was fun, sure, but I haven't played a 3D platformer that "works" as well as a 2D platformer. The problem is, in 3D, you have a lot harder time hitting the platforms. Even LittleBigPlanet has this problem - they solved the 3D platformer gameplay issues by trying to map it down to 2D, but retained enough 3D to make it annoying to play. The only real gameplay issues with LBP, in fact, come up when you're trying to move left and right on the screen at a certain depth, but the game "helpfully" slides the character to the depth it thinks you should be at.
>>Age of Empires and Age of Empires II is a great example of this. A great game that goes down the crapper in later versions trying to "go 3D."
You mean Age of Empires III, right? I and II were 2D.
And, yeah, I totally agree. Moving to 3D made the game worse.
Along the same lines, I'd say that Super Mario 3 was better than the Super Mario for the N64, but game companies always have to have the latest buzzwords or they think people won't buy it (and they may be right -- I bought Force Unleashed for the PS3 instead of the Wii since the Wii's resolution is so blocky).
While the main reason people do 3D instead of 2D sprite games these days is that 1) 3D scales (you don't have to have individual artwork for each resolution level) and 2) You don't have to animate each frame individually, you can do "2D" games that are actually 3D, but presented in such a way that the player doesn't need to worry about depth. Civ IV did a very nearly perfect job with this, with the exception that when you zoomed out, it sucked the map back onto a globe which obscured most of the map you were trying to zoom out to look at.
>>Using map/reduce will work, but there are better approaches to sorting.
It kinda bugs me that Google trademarked (or, at least, what they named their software) after a programming modality that has been in parallel processing for ages. In fact, MPI has a mapreduce() function that, well, does a map/reduce operation. I.e., farms out instances of a function to a cluster, then gathers the data back in, summates it, and presents the results to someone.
It kind of bugs me (in their Youtube video linked in TFA, at least) that they make it seem that this model is their brilliant idea, when all they've done is write the job control layer under it. There's other job control layers that control spawning new processes, fault tolerance, etc., and have been for many, many years. Maybe it's nicer than other packages, in the same way that Google Maps is nicer than other map packages, but I think most people like it just because they don't realize how uninspired it is.
It'd be like them coming out with Google QuickSort(beta) next.
Slashdot Mirror
LOL
I had Supermassive Black Hole playing in the background when I read this article summary.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xsp3_a-PMTw
>>I consciously refused to upgrade to 3.0-- a number of my extensions and scripts don't work right and it's incredibly ugly in my opinion
Yep, and yep.
For me, merging the left and right arrows was the biggest issue for me.
>>Nintendo has proven graphics don't have to matter.
The problem is, their QA control of games released for the Wii is really spotty. More than half the games I've bought for the Wii have been so horrendously bad, that we stopped playing them in 10 minutes. Sega Tennis, Godzilla Unleashed, Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz, the list goes on and on.
Sony maintains a much tighter control of game development, and there's only been one game for the PS3 (the Sonic game that came out when the PS3 first came out) that was really, really terrible.
>>For instance, while it is true that redheads statistically require more anesthesia, it would be foolish for a doctor to administer more than normal because you can't guarantee that THIS particular redhead will behave like that.
But if you're aware that redheads often need more anesthesia, your medical treatment of them during surgery will likely be more successful, as that's something you'll be watching for.
>>Races aren't the only marker used in medical care. For instance, redheads require more anesthesia for some reason - yet few people would call redheads a "race".
Sure. I believe that any time a label can be used to create a medicially-significant difference of treatments, then it's valid to use that label, as a difference does exist. I don't think it's justified to use it in the common, racist ways.
A lot of people think that race is just a social construct. While it may be a social construct, it's not *just* a social construct, as statistics can separate the groups.
>>I long ago discovered my text-messaging device allows me to talk directly to another person through his or her text-messaging device. Amazing!
You mean those wireless devices which replaced the devices which ran over wires which were originally built to text messages to each other in morse?
>>Of course you can say that, and it's perfectly fine for people interested in genealogy or anthropology. There's nothing wrong or racist about that. But the second you find yourself generalizing based on these categories you have set up, you are on a slippery slope
There's an entire field called pharmacogenetics which studies the different effects drugs have on people of genetic backgrounds. Our categories of race are useful enough for drug companies to recommend certain drugs be not used with certain races. The amount of liver enzymes for breaking down alcohol, to use a simple example, vary wildly between the races. So even though you might call races "arbitary" it doesn't mean that they're not useful.
I'm not arguing for racism, just that there is a basis to the categorization beyond a mere label.
>>I was saying that the categorization is arbitrary.
To a certain extent, yes, but when you can identify people's race solely by DNA analysis (which you can -- reports to the contrary are wrong, usually only looking at one gene locus instead of multiple), it has a meaning. In other words, if stats can separate two populations by whatever means (say, sickle-cell rates), then the populations are indeed distinct, regardless of politically correct inspired hatred of "labels" to the contrary.
>>Screw that. If I want to cut back on my spending then I will do just that. You have no right whatsoever to dictate how I use my money.
What the hell are you talking about?
I said that the media is scaring people into not spending money, that's all. I'm certainly not dictating to you what you can do with your money.
>>I have never met an intelligent supporter of Bush, McCain, or Obama. Present company included.
Huh. I voted for Barr.
>>And how does this affect the price of tea in China?
They use a "basket" of good to derive the CPI. Unfortunately, electronic products are used in the mix, and they plummet in price from the day they're entered into the basket, leading to an artifically low inflation measure. So they pull them out from time to time. Nowadays, the Black and White CRT would be a 36" Plasma Screen. In a year or two, it'll probably be a 46" 120Hz LCD.
And how did they devise a control for this?
AFAIK, there's no biometric scans of the 9/11 terrorists, so it's just like the company is guessing anyway. For all we know, terrorists could be the only completely calm people going through security, as they're the only ones not worried about arriving at their destination late.
>>The Community Reinvestment Act had nothing to do with the subprime crisis
Don't believe the hype. I've read that article before (or a close enough cousin to it), and found it to be not just wrong, but deceptively so.
To wit, it's points are:
1) The CRA is a well-respected law that's been on the books since 1977.
That's a whopper. What it doesn't say is that it was a limited program until the Clinton administration rewrote and expanded it in 1995. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act)
Claiming that it's been "on the books since 1977" is deceptive. The CRA as we know it was started in 1995 under the Clinton Administration.
2) CRA doesn't require loans to be made, to minorities or anyone else.
Hugely deceptive. Banks make loans, and the CRA requires loan making to follow diversity targets (including neighborhood, income, and race) which include forcing banks to make loans to low-income populations that they would prefer to avoid. This means the CRA forces banks to make bad loans.
(I mean, sure, technically, a bank could just choose not to make any loans at all, but then the CRA would be shutting down banks from lending entirely, which would be worse. I think that's how they're trying to weasel out of that claim.)
The CRA requires banks to write reports on how they're achieving diversity targets with their loans, and exposes banks to lawsuits if they do not meet diversity targets. Let me rephrase: If banks do not make loans to poor people they would not otherwise give a loan to, they will be sued by someone -- like Obama, who sued Citibank for not issuing enough bad loans.
3) CRA only applies to federally-regulated banks and thrifts whose deposits are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).
Sure. Maybe a zillion non-CRA bad loans were made. What difference does it make?
This does not excuse the CRA forcing banks to make bad loans.
4) Federally-regulated banks, which are covered by CRA, have operated under more supervision, and therefore the failure rate for mortgages made by those institutions has been significantly lower
Deceptive again. What difference does bad loans made by others make?
Even before the housing meltdown, CRA loans had much higher default rates, and lower profitability than other loans. Here's a report from the Fed in 2000: http://www.clevelandfed.org/research/Commentary/2000/1100.htm
CRA default rates are much higher than normal mortgage default rates, and securitized CRA loans, pioneered by Wachovia and Bear Stearns (sound familiar?) are some of the premiere poison assets that congress then wanted to bail out.
Why did we get securitization in the first place? Because banks could meet their CRA targets by making a bad loan and then passing it off to someone else. Why did these securitized loans have higher default rates? Because banks issuing the loans didn't have to bear the risk for them any more. why did securitized loans have a high credit rating? Because banks normally bore the risk of the loans they issued, so the default rate was lower. It sounds like a circular argument, but the base engine for the entire mess was the CRA.
CRA only applies to designated low-income neighborhoods
Why, yes. Yes, it does. And it tries to do away with traditional checks on bad loans, like "low income" and "credit history" in the loans it forces banks to make. Like I said, bad loans made elsewhere are irrelevant... unless one claims (and with some evidence, too) that the subprime craze was triggered by the CRA forcing banks into bad loans, and thus pioneering vehicles to deal with such loans, which were then used in non-low-income neighborhoods, since they were an easy source of money.
>>"Derek Donovan, The Star's readers' representative" is not a "guy writing to the editor". Also please read the attached article:
To clarify, I don't think that a blogger who reads letters to the newspaper is an especially good source - he's on the level of me writing a Livejournal entry, except he doesn't appear to know anything about what he's writing about, and doesn't have any references of any value.
As someone who has gone to the effort of understanding the mess -- and you can see references for every point I made -- an article like that is worse than useless.
>>Derek Donovan, The Star's readers' representative" is not a "guy writing to the editor".
"About Ad Astrum
Ad Astrum is a place for you to share your thoughts about how The Star and KansasCity.com cover the news. Ad Astrum is the blog of Derek Donovan, The Kansas City Star's readers' representative."
>>Blame may be misdirected; Critics have contended that the Clinton administration pushed Fannie and Freddie into riskier mortgages.
They did. That's not an error. I recommend reading that livejournal article I wrote for references.
Read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Raines
or this:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0DE7DB153EF933A0575AC0A96F958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
(1999) "The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets -- including the New York metropolitan region -- will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans.
And: "''Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990's by reducing down payment requirements,'' said Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae's chairman and chief executive officer. ''Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.''"
The Community Reinvestment Act also let unscrupulous lawyers sue companies that they thought weren't making enough bad loans. This included a certain Barrack Obama, Esquire. The CRA was heavily expanded under the Clinton Administration. That's what Card was talking about - the guy writing that letter to the editor of the Kansas City Star (which is all that was that you linked) doesn't know what he's talking about, pure and simple.
I wrote a long analysis of the politically correct roots of the subprime meltdown here:
http://shakauvm.livejournal.com/57671.html
>>When McCain said, "The fundamentals of our economy are strong," (emphasis mine) he was -- and still is -- 100% correct.
I think it depends what you mean by "fundamentals". Obviously, by that point we'd seen that the securitization of loans where nobody knew the quality of the mortgages they were based on, and the entire "lets force banks to loan money to people they otherwise wouldn't loan money to" ideas were fundamentally flawed.
>>Unfortunately, it was better for some liberals to push the idea of a recession, which will now end up becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Absolutely. I wish more people would recognize this. If an average person hears that we're in the worst depression since the 30s, they're going to cut spending, and this will directly lead to a depression. I flew over Thanksgiving weekend, and talked with some of the airlines people, and they said it was the least busy Thanksgiving at the airport that they could remember. If you're in danger of losing your job, because the Next Great Depression is coming, you don't spend.
>>1. I didn't vote for Bush.
>>2. I voted for Obama.
I voted for Bush, but I didn't vote for McCain. But it drove me nuts during the election when Obama supporters kept telling me the subprime meltdown was Bush's fault. And everything else bad under the sun. It's nice to see an intelligent supporter of Obama. =)
Ever since the 70's (and maybe even before) items were taken out of the inflation figures.
>>How can we compare the rate of inflation now with what it was in previous years if we use different ways of making the measurement?
I think because not too many people these days are buying black and white CRT televisions.
>>By that long-accepted definition of recession, the US is not even yet in a recession. The US GDP decreased for the first time in recent history only in the third (most recent) quarter, by 0.3%. In the second quarter -- earlier this year -- real GDP increased 2.8%.
Correct. But if you asked the average man on the street, they'd tell you not only have we been in a recession, we've been in the worst depression since the '30s.
Whose fault?
The media's. And I'm not sure it's a coincidence, since this was a presidential election year.
>>creating panic and fear, causing people to pull investments and hold onto their wallets, change purchasing plans, in turn creating bleak forecasts for manufacturers and other business, which causes job loss, and then -- voilà!:
Yep. In fact, I think the media and its relentless attacks on customer confidence is one of the biggest factors in play.
>>The way they reject things for being non-notable (as if there was a lack of space in wikipedia) and the other rules they fling at people sometimes
Look, if we fill up Wikipedia with totally non-notable theoretical computer science stuff, then we'll run out of room for our highly detailed, referenced, verifiable pages on every episode of the Simpsons made, ever.
>>How does this counter freedom? the information is not being censored, it is not being eliminated, it is simply being, well, not advertised.
I think you missed the "must not assist" part of the phrase...
>>I dont know how the Brits let the authorities get aways with it.
I'd like to say it's because us Americans have protection against unreasonable search and seizures, but that protection got ripped out of the constitution a long time ago.
>>As far as I know, my computers have never accepted a bribe, or made a power-grab.
It's a good thing we don't have viruses, trojans, or other ways of compromising computers, then.
Wouldn't want our terminators to get haxxored by China.
It's also good computers always run properly. I highly recommend replacing our police force with robots that can faultlessly detect when people are holding guns on them, and shooting them if they don't drop the gun.
>>I disagree. Not because Mario64 is better, but because *both* are damn good.
I think Mario64 was fun, sure, but I haven't played a 3D platformer that "works" as well as a 2D platformer. The problem is, in 3D, you have a lot harder time hitting the platforms. Even LittleBigPlanet has this problem - they solved the 3D platformer gameplay issues by trying to map it down to 2D, but retained enough 3D to make it annoying to play. The only real gameplay issues with LBP, in fact, come up when you're trying to move left and right on the screen at a certain depth, but the game "helpfully" slides the character to the depth it thinks you should be at.
>>Age of Empires and Age of Empires II is a great example of this. A great game that goes down the crapper in later versions trying to "go 3D."
You mean Age of Empires III, right? I and II were 2D.
And, yeah, I totally agree. Moving to 3D made the game worse.
Along the same lines, I'd say that Super Mario 3 was better than the Super Mario for the N64, but game companies always have to have the latest buzzwords or they think people won't buy it (and they may be right -- I bought Force Unleashed for the PS3 instead of the Wii since the Wii's resolution is so blocky).
While the main reason people do 3D instead of 2D sprite games these days is that 1) 3D scales (you don't have to have individual artwork for each resolution level) and 2) You don't have to animate each frame individually, you can do "2D" games that are actually 3D, but presented in such a way that the player doesn't need to worry about depth. Civ IV did a very nearly perfect job with this, with the exception that when you zoomed out, it sucked the map back onto a globe which obscured most of the map you were trying to zoom out to look at.
>>Using map/reduce will work, but there are better approaches to sorting.
It kinda bugs me that Google trademarked (or, at least, what they named their software) after a programming modality that has been in parallel processing for ages. In fact, MPI has a mapreduce() function that, well, does a map/reduce operation. I.e., farms out instances of a function to a cluster, then gathers the data back in, summates it, and presents the results to someone.
It kind of bugs me (in their Youtube video linked in TFA, at least) that they make it seem that this model is their brilliant idea, when all they've done is write the job control layer under it. There's other job control layers that control spawning new processes, fault tolerance, etc., and have been for many, many years. Maybe it's nicer than other packages, in the same way that Google Maps is nicer than other map packages, but I think most people like it just because they don't realize how uninspired it is.
It'd be like them coming out with Google QuickSort(beta) next.