I think most of the people saying that are people who already know whichever instrument and then try to move to RB/GH and discover that it doesn't work the way they're "used to" and therefore have problems with it. But there's no secret to the fact that not everyone plays instruments exactly the same way.. so someone starting from scratch (ie: without any pre-conditioned notions of how to play) may well be able to learn the guitar.. in the RB playing style.
Can RB teach you to be a world class master guitarist? Probably not. But most people are happy if they can just sit around the fire strumming a few tunes to impress the girls (or guys as the case may be). Of course RB doesn't have much in the way of folksy music so you'd still have to go out and learn some less showy/more personal songs on your own for that sort of scenario;).
A good plumber probably doesn't use much if anything of math higher than a general knowledge of length and pipe diameter.. basic measurements. Very few plumbers are going to spend the time computing the flow volume required to satisfy a toilet drain -- they've got a bunch of "standards" that they know work for the job at hand (whether by experience or from building codes).
That's why you hire engineers to design any sort of complicated structure -- the actual contractors doing the job will know how to read the blueprints and make sure everything is the right size and lines up and whatnot, but they're not going to be sitting there doing load and weight calculations. That's not their job. Their only job is making sure the actual building matches the blueprints and they just trust that the engineer did his calculations correctly. And the further down the line you go right from the foreman of the whole project down to the guy hired off the street to carry lumber and cement, the less math they're going to care about. The flip-side of course is that the engineer can sit back in his office not having to care about things like table saw operation, construction site safety concerns, dealing with the city/etc with respect to road closures or other political junk and so on.
Now whether or not knowing the work required to move a 40lb bag of cement 1 foot is helpful to the guy lugging it around is up for debate.. he's certainly not going to do a worse job because he understands that (unless of course he spends all of his time computing the amount of work needed instead of actually doing the work!)
The article is definitely right -- very few of us are in positions to care about math once we've left school. But I'd go on to say that that applies to EVERY subject in school. Why? Because if you've got say.. 10 subjects and by chance you have 10 occupations, each one (primarily) associated with a subject.. then even with a perfectly uniform distribution, only 1 in 10 people will care about any specific subject after they're out of school (oh wait, I just used math!)
About the only thing that's (nearly) universally required amongst everyone is communication skills. And that's something they don't really teach in school (English class is what most people will claim but really, knowing Shakespeare doesn't really help you much in the real world either. You might get a slightly larger vocabulary but that's only really relevant for large written communication (writing books for example -- things that themselves are generally categorized as professions). The type of communication I'm referring to is more the emails to your boss, phone calls with your customer, etc where the preference is to be as short and concise as possible while still getting your point across.
I think the main reason math gets so much focus is that science has been the biggest driver of progress over the past 100 years or so, and almost all science requires math of some type -- even if its just basic statistics. Producing the next Picasso or Beethoven may well be a blessing, but no amount of paintings or songs and no matter how good they are will ever change the world in the same way as say, the development of computers or the atomic bomb. So we keep pushing people into math and science because if we have to make a choice, we'd rather miss out on the next Michelangelo than the next Einstein (of course defining "we" in that sentence can be a bit of a challenge in itself!)
Sure.. but that's like trying to bring a boulder to a rock fight. You might have the most destructive power in theory, but you're probably gonna get whooped long before you can get it moving.
"The people" may have overwhelming power by simple mass numbers, but the vast majority of us have our own lives and would prefer government, anti-governments, terrorist organizations and everyone else just mind their own damned business.
Not that we usually get our way, but you've got to be doing something pretty nasty to get any sort of large civilian force to rise up against you. Its happened before and it will almost certainly happen again at some point, but its not common. And I doubt the political pissing contests "far away" countries, no matter how atrocious the acts being committed are, will be the sort of thing that will get average citizens to rise up (risking their livelihoods, families, their own life, etc).
I have a 32" 720p LCD TV with a native panel res of 1366x768 pixels. I set my PC to 1024x768, and text looks as good as it does on a PC monitor. Even Windows XP ClearType works as intended.
Depends on the native res of your PC. If you set the PC to a non-native res, then its going to look relatively worse than it could. But yes, an equal-sized TV with equal resolution should have approximately equal quality (I actually prefer my TV on a per-pixel basis, but that's probably more to do with it being a $1700 tv compared to a $200 monitor!) But TVs are usually much much larger than a PC monitor of equal resolution -- THAT'S where the problem lies.
Then perhaps 720p and 1080p need different seating arrangements.
To some degree yes. But again, its not just a difference in pixel rows, its a difference in pixel rows relative to the size of the screen. And of course no matter how good the screen is, there's going to be a distance beyond which the text is illegible.. but low resolutions (again, relative to the screen size) just make the distance that much closer.
Windows itself has a DPI control.
Yep, and I use it, and its great for the fonts that Windows itself has control over. Which unfortunately does not include Firefox from what I've seen.
The entire second half of your comment ignores that a PC can take at least four USB gamepads through a hub. Xbox 360 wired controllers work as expected on every PC I've tried, under both Windows XP and Ubuntu 10.04.
Yes it does. Because very very few people have those relatively to the total population of PC gamers. If I try to sell you my little indie game for $15 but require you to purchase a $60 controller to play it, you're probably not going to bother. Of course if I make a game and give you the option of using a gamepad well great, but it still doesn't change the fact that most people won't have one.. so unless you're building the game purely for yourself (in which case, have fun with whatever you've got available), the gamepad argument on a PC is pretty much moot.
Exact motion tracking would have had to wait for the MotionPlus accessory.
True, but I'm pretty sure you don't need motion to be extremely precise for just swinging a sword around. Wii sports managed to make the bowling and tennis games pretty fun without the MotionPlus. Ie: they could have made the sword follow the Wiimote (granular as it is) rather than the existing two-part "did they swing horizontal or vertical?" Its kind of the same situation I was referring to with the analog sticks in the older (2D) FF games -- you have full 360 degree freedom to play with and you're artificially limiting it to a simple 2 "button" system. Of course there's another problem with swinging a sword around -- the sword and shield hands are physically tethered by the rather short nunchuck cord. But still, I think they could have done better.. and if not, just don't use the motion sensor at all and give us a more classic feeling game where you don't have to randomly spasm to make some arbitrary moves work.
Very true. And even the best of us will end up writing extensive documentation for a product that never gets used, or write a quick hack that ends up being around 10 years later. The trick is to minimize the number of those edge cases.
Though of course management is a huge portion of this, and a point I didn't even touch on. There's only so much you can do when you tell management a project will take 2 months and they give you until next Tuesday. And for all we can complain about bad management, the bottom line is they're the ones cutting checks and its usually you who's out looking for a new job if the gloves get thrown down.
Then your first step should be recreating LEX and YACC:P. Noone in their right mind would build parse tables by hand outside of their class assignments;).
(of course if all you need is a simple RD parser then that's another story.. those are usually easier to write by hand than dealing with LEX/YACC syntax).
Doubtful. Console makers definitely have a lot of control over the developers, but I seriously doubt that they have enough control (or information) to say who the development companies can hire and who they can't.
It might be different if you wrote up a game as homebrew and then decided to call up Nintendo and ask for a license after the fact, but as long as all you're doing is demoing your project to a dev studio, it would be up the the studio to decide whether or not to hire you (there's a good chance that they would -- if you can actually get a homebrew game to run well, you're probably as good if not better than the people they've already got on staff since you would have had to do it with limited documentation and no dev tools, so you'd have to be basically working right on the hardware.. of course your employment contract would probably stipulate that you have to completely dissociate yourself from homebrew after that point).
The kids who are going to be great programmers started before high school. As a CS degree holder, I can say that you definitely get taught a lot of useless theory. But you also get taught a lot of useful theory. In the "real world", its a lot better if you know how to write up a quicksort routine in 20 minutes rather than spending 2 days reinventing the bubble sort. And its also occasionally helpful to know when a bubble sort is "good enough". On the other hand, they will never teach you to just use sort(2) or its equivalent in your language of choice.
That said, there are two problems I can see having been through the course: - Grads who just slid by. Everyone who's done any research on the topic knows that a great programmer is 10 times more productive than a good programmer, and a bad programmer is counter-productive all together. There were MANY people in my classes who couldn't code their way out of a Logo program without help, even by the 3rd or 4th year!
- Being too smart. This is kind of what you were referring to above. But you have to remember, these kids aren't WRONG, they just don't know the economic side of things. Its simply not feasible to do up entire UML documents for every single one-off utility, and frequently its not even feasible to do so for saleable products. Where in college, being right is the primary goal, in business the primary goal is and always will be money. Quick and dirty always wins the race. At least initially. There's a reason WHY colleges teach these things -- its because there's been craploads of research done to show that these methodologies work better long term. Ie: Dealing with the age-old problem of maintenance being 90+% of a product's total cost over time. Where the "real world" comes in is having the experience to know when your current project is a throwaway and when it will still be requiring maintenance 10 years down the road. In the latter case, all of the "useless theory" is a hell of a lot more useful!
It would definitely be nice if CS courses would start offering (or even requiring) practicums where the students are actually out in the field learning the things that can't easily be taught by a lecturer standing in front of the class. Internships are a great option but you've got to be motivated enough to get one and have the foresight to realize how useful they are in terms of your future employment (both in terms of resume candy and simply getting to know people in the industry.. sadly I'm not one of the people who realized this until I was already done school).
For games, the input device is far more important than the output device. Its pretty much universal amongst games that bigger screens makes for better play. You can see more of the map/peripheral/whatever on a bigger (well, at least higher resolution) screen. The main reason PCs don't often plug into TVs is that TVs aren't all that good for text. You have to go to a pretty high-end TV to get the same sort of image quality as you would on a fairly moderate computer monitor. And a large (physically.. generally >24") computer monitor will blow an equivalently sized TV out of the water due to the fact that 1080p is still "top end" even for 57" or 60" TV monitors. I get (the equivalent of) 1050p on my 22" computer screen for comparison -- a ~3% increase in scan lines across a ~250-300% increase in dimension. Ouch!
But when you get into a gaming (or movie) scenario, how much/"far" you see is a lot more important than the overall clarity of the image -- chances are the fast movement within games is going to blur it more than the basic image clarity anyway. But being able to see the goblin coming at you from an extra 3 (virtual) feet away can mean a huge advantage.
By the way I'm well-versed in both these days. I use a triple monitor setup for work, and a dual HDTV for my gaming machine. Its absolutely brutal trying to read anything on the TVs -- even the good TV. If you're far enough away to see the screen comfortably, the text is illegible. If you get close enough to read the text, you lose half of the screen outside of your visual field. Luckily firefox has some nice easy hotkeys for increasing the text size on webpages, but most other programs are difficult. Steam chat is absolutely ridiculous as they use a tiny font to begin with and I've found absolutely no way to increase it (though I haven't looked for skins yet so maybe there's something in there). I'm definitely looking forward to them releasing higher resolution screens (List), but I don't know what sort of time scale we're looking at for those.
I guess I should consider getting back to my point though. Which is basically, keyboard+mouse makes for a very different gaming experience than a controller, and the recent "motion" controllers provide a very different gaming experience again. And while there's no shortage of companies trying to shoehorn games into the "wrong" input device, it never comes out as well as they hope. Consider Mario or Zelda on the Wii. You run around doing normal Mario/Zelda-ish things.. but then every once in a while you have to swing your arm around like an idiot for no purpose other than to force you to use the motion sensors. Zelda was especially disappointing -- real motion tracking from the Wiimote would have made for AWESOME sword battles. But no, they opted to simply have you swing it back and forth to accomplish the exact equivalent of a single button push. It felt extremely awkward and annoying -- I couldn't play either game for long. On the other hand, the Wii sports games (particularly bowling and tennis) are enormously fun -- just very basic games that make great use of the Wiimote device.
For another example, I tried the FFXIV open beta. The controls were utterly horrendous. They were designed for a PS3 controller and hacked into kb+mouse as an afterthought and it definitely shows in certain places. (Of course I could forgive all of that if they'd give me a non-laggy mouse lol). I certainly hope they did something to improve this for the release!
And for a final example to close the loop, imagine what something like EA's NHL series would look like on a keyboard where you don't have the nice analog stick? Doable for sure, but they'd have to put a lot more thought into their control structure and avatar response when they've only got 4 (or even 8) poorly-aligned digital buttons compared to two smooth analog axes. Or compare FF7 (designed for the original pre-analog PS1) vs
If you insist on doing this, while still having a job, family and other responsibilities.. you're probably going to be sitting with a small handful of hours to work on your game a week. Expect it to take a LONG time if its even moderately complex. If you want to port it to consoles, you're pretty much SoL unless you can afford the (ridiculously expensive) dev kits for those consoles. You might get somewhere using XNA if you happen to like Xbox, but the PS3 and the Wii are more challenging (you can homebrew it, but you'll be fighting an uphill battle with regards to documentation and the such, and you'd probably get smacked with a lawsuit pretty fast if you tried to actually make money on a homebrew game). I don't know what sort of hoops Sony makes you go through for PS3/PSP "Minis".. I imagine the dev requirements are less for those but I haven't looked into it.
Its probably a losing battle to try generating a decent port folio in a reasonable amount of time if you're only able to put a handful of hours a week towards it.
Now if you're just wanting to create and sell something independently well, you still have all of the issues listed above, but you've also got to deal with finding people who are interested and willing to pay for your game, plus setting up payment methods and web pages and whatever else. And remember, you're competing against thousands of other games that were developed in a similar manner, never mind the mainstream studio-developed games that have hundreds of times the resources (time and money) that you do.
My recommendation? If you're doing it for the money, make the commitment and put all of your effort into it. If you're doing it as a hobby then do it as a hobby and keep profit as a secondary motive -- if you get something for your work then great, but if you're expecting large sums of money then you'll probably be disappointed.
In fact, if you really like developing games, you ought to take 8/5 corporate soul-crushing job (that will crush your soul much, much less) and just make games in your spare time (or at work during downtime) for fun.
Bad advice! If you do that you're working 80-hour weeks anyway, you might as well get one of those soul-crushing 80-hour-week games industry jobs and spend all your time doing what you want to and not just half of it. (Or did you think being a corporate programmer was fun and not soul-crushing...?)
No, its great advice. I'd go one step further and say get a non-programming (or even non-computer) job. Its a rare person who can spend 40 hours a week doing something for work and then come home and spend another 20-40 doing the same thing as a hobby. Of course it depends what you mean by "developing". If you're happy working long boring hours as most of the anecdotes on this thread suggest, then getting a job at a major game studio might be for you. If you want to design your own vision then you'll need to do it on your own (or at best, find a smallish studio and hope that you'll be able to add some input for the next project they start). Of course, "on your own" could also mean drumming up some VC and starting your own studio with your own grunt programmers, so you've got a third option if you've got the motivation and VC pitching skills!
Plus, if you're actually working in the industry, you will (a) get to work with other, more experienced game programmers and learn the game-specific parts of the trade 5x faster and (b) meet a lot of talented and motivated artists and game designers, so that when you do decide to break away and do some fun indie stuff, you don't have to do it alone. Unless you want to, in which case you can use those contacts for mentorship too.
Now this is a good point. And I'd probably say that if you could manage it, working short term in a real games studio (perhaps just an internship) would give you some real experience and introduce you to people who've been doing the job for years, but I don't know if a long-term position is really great unless like mentioned above you enjoy being tortured (or at least can put up with it until you get high enough in the organization to be listened to).
You've got to keep in mind that they're going to be asking for the stars when they really only want the moon, because they know that candidates are going to pad their resumes to some degree.
The person who walks in with an impressive port folio but doesn't quite make the requirements is going to have a huge advantage over the person who has the requirements but a poor or non-existent port folio.
Remember, the port folio says what you can actually do. The degree only tells them that you absorbed enough of the professor's lectures to pass the test without any indication that you pulled any deeper understanding out of the information.
Experience always wins over education if everything else is equal. Of course experience AND education is better still!
Of course the real trump card is knowing someone in your target company with enough pull to get you in the door. Even if you just start with a crummy position that you don't like, once you're in the company you're 3/4 of the way to the job you want -- just get chummy with the department you're interested in and when a position opens up, you're a good several steps ahead of any outside candidates.
Remember that fonts sizes are based off the size of your physical display, and have no relation to the number of pixels used to render them. If you're lucky enough to use a program built to do that.
Fixed that too. Go take a look at Steam or Winamp* for some nice popular counter-examples, and I'm sure there's loads more. Sure there's "skins" that might have bigger fonts defined, but its up to the user to locate and install such skins -- they don't come with the programs.
Of course there's a very good reason why programs fail to handle font sizing properly -- its hard! Laying out controls is a pain in the ass as it is.. trying to make them dynamically adjust to match the size of your display and/or non-standard font choices makes it several times harder. I think the new WPF stuff from MS was meant to partly aid in this issue, but I haven't really played around with it (XML -- the standardized way to complicate your software!) and I have no idea what there might be in the open-source world that tries to take the hassle of font changes away from the developer.
*I haven't used Winamp since I discovered Foobar2000, but this was certainly the case last time I saw it.
but it doesn't answer how it helps if an intruder is getting into Apps through a lost or stolen phone
That would be what the first factor is for. Unless you also store your passwords on your phone in which case you've just intentionally reduced yourself back to one-factor security and well.. don't do that.
Two-factor security isn't 100% perfect. Its always possible for someone who knows your password to also steal your phone. But the chance is significantly reduced compared to the individual chances of your phone being stolen or your password being keylogged/otherwise compromised. Three-factor security would be better still (a biometric "touch" perhaps?).. 100-factor security would be better still. But as with most security issues, you get an annoyance/benefit trade-off and its a matter of figuring out how much people will be willing to do to prevent their friends from changing their facebook status to "I am the suxx0r!" That amount will go up as time goes on of course -- between more people being aware of security issues, and technology making the extra factors less intrusive (oh, and they have to be free -- few home users will be willing to drop $50 or $100 for a biometric scanner for example. Unless they've already been a victim of identity theft.)
Which is why most firewall software has a "always do this" option of some sort. The first week or so after you install a new firewall program generally sucks, but after that you've usually got most of your "real" apps marked off and things go pretty smoothly from there on.
Of course for some people, a week worth of always clicking "Allow" is enough to train them badly forever.. but there's only so much that can be done:P.
You obviously failed the class on modern business practices. If they decided that something is worth $50, no matter how arbitrary or inane, then its obviously "costing" them $50 if they turn around and give it to you for free. And you should tell your customers that they're actually SAVING $50 if they decide not to purchase the extra power, so that they feel good about you and their purchase.
People who pirate the program will be dealt with in modern business practices II, taught by representatives from the RIAA. There you will learn how each pirated copy of the unlock software is actually costing Intel $50 _per transistor_!
My thought is that the encrypted one will be the one that asks for a password when you try to open it.
I suppose the big question is.. "who are you trying to hide this from?" If you're just trying to hide from basic security screenings at the airport and whatnot well, just make sure your encrypted data is on a USB drive or some such, hide the files/partitions and make sure you don't have your decrypting tools with you. Your average security screener isn't going to have the time or technical skills to delve in too deeply, even if you get flagged for additional screening. Short of being on the terrorist watch list, you're probably pretty safe here as long as you don't make it too obvious that you have hidden data.
On the other hand, if you're under investigation for one reason or another and your equipment gets confiscated, you've got a much bigger problem. Even if your data is 100% undetectable from a pure bits-and-bytes perspective, there's a simple fact that you (presumably) need to be able to access the data yourself somehow. And that means you'll need some form of tool.. software programs or hardware dongles or whatever. If you're using any sort of common tools, the investigators will simply note that those tools exist and assume you're hiding something.
Your only real hope is to roll your own encryption software AND mask it as something innocuous (say an IM clone where if you type in a different "hidden" password it unlocks your hidden partition). Of course, I doubt there's more than a few thousand people in the world (if even that many) who would have the knowledge and abilities to write such a program (and again, you can't just use something common or it would be a dead giveaway).
And yet here I see you on Slashdot. As an unsubscribed plain old user, I can find: - Your last few comments - The last few stories you've submitted - Your Slashdot friends / fans / foes - Their comments / stories / etc
I'm not trying very hard, and I'm certainly not a data miner, but I'd guess even that amount of data would be enough to put something together about you -- at least a vague sense of your interests and disinterests. And how much more information would the Slashdot admins have about you? All they have to do is miss a single creep in their hiring process and all of that information is free reign. It might not be as sensitive as your emails, but its still an invasion of your privacy. And the chances for creeps to slip through the cracks grows with the size of your company (I'd imagine sub-linearly as screening procedures typically would get better as the company grows, but its still not a DECREASING chance).
Except of course that your extra $45 is actually going towards funding the lawyers that are going to then try and claim your $50 of stolen content (which is 1-2 Blu-Rays at today's prices) somehow cost the entertainment industry $185million, so your petty $45 enforcement fee is a drop in the ocean.
Basically you're paying them to destroy your privacy and then sue you. You're certainly not paying them for content.
5. Extra Cars - Also fair, as long as they're not unbalanced in online play. 8. Cheats/Unlocks - Terrible. Paying for stuff that really should be free. Like paying to unlock all the fighting game's characters.
Really? Why is a car in a racing game somehow a better DLC than a fighter in a fighting game? Just because they call it an "extra" instead of an "unlock" doesn't change that you have to pay more to get it. I suppose calling it an "unlock" implies that its already built into the game and specifically disabled until paid, whereas an "extra" sounds more like it gets downloaded when you pay.. but does it really make that much difference whether the locked bits came from the DVD or from the net?
The same argument applies to your #4 and #6. I don't know about other music games, but Rock Band certainly doesn't allow you to play songs you don't have, even if your opponent does. Yet somehow not being able to play a specific 5min race is worse than not being able to play a specific 5min song?
Honestly this whole thread seems pretty stupid. The/. crowd has been going on for years now about "just change your business model". And yet when someone tries to figure out ways to earn money in the internet age, everyone gets up in arms.
Or just make sure you're "collaborating" with scientists in countries with more reasonable laws. The article states that the press reports were based on comments from associated British scientists. Those reports were still out there -- the only thing that's different is that one particular scientist didn't get his piece in in time.
Which definitely sucks for him, no doubt about it. Science is definitely about claims to fame and being the first to discover or intuit something new. But I would hope that at least a few of the scientists who are working on really important stuff (environmental research, contaminants, etc) will be able to let go of their egos and have their associates in other countries publish for them, for the sake of getting important information out into the world.
Then again, if that starts happening to any great extent while Harper's still in power, we'll probably start requiring a license to associate with foreign scientists or some BS like that.
I cried a little inside when Harper was elected. I cried a lot more inside when he was re-elected. The only saving grace is that he's been in a minority position in both cases. I shudder to think what would happen if he ever got a majority.
That's a good way to lose an election. It makes you sound like you either don't really care or don't really know why you're running in the first place. There's a reason why parties still toss out grandiose claims when everyone knows they're bogus -- its still better than nothing, and given the choices between two (or more) evils, people will in general pick the one that seems the least evil to them. And "I don't care about current issues" seems pretty evil to most people when they're talking about the folks who are charged with dealing with those issues.
There's no question that our system is short-sighted and highly subject to dishonesty (even if a politician is honest, the problems people vote on today will usually have nothing to do with the problems they face in 2 or 3 years). But its still the fairest practical system we've come up with so far (give or take a specific vote representation mechanism or two).
I don't know where you live. Around here its pretty much the opposite. They start off in school believing in "authority" without any consideration about where that authority comes from (most 5 years olds don't care what political party is in power).
By the time they start hitting high school (mid-teens), they're usually anti-authority of any kind, but still without much consideration.. they just want to do whatever they feel like and think they should have that freedom.
Once they start hitting their early to mid 20s (especially if they go to college/university where actually thinking about things is encouraged), they start putting some real thought into why they like (or dislike) what they do. They actually are able to vote so they start actually considering what they're voting for (as much as the propaganda allows.. we're all well aware that what the parties say they'll do often gets ignored or even 180'd).
By the time they've hit their 30s they've pretty much figured out where they lie on the political spectrum. Sure they'll differ slightly from year to year, but short of some massive bullocks on the part of their chosen party (such as the liberal scandal that got Harper elected in the first place), its pretty rare for people to do much of a party swap beyond a certain age.. they've already become set in their ways.. and they've got real responsibilities (work, family) and less time to think about their choices, and so on.
Obviously I'm generalizing and I'm sure there's loads of counter-examples but that's sort of a general flow of things.
Slashdot Mirror
I think most of the people saying that are people who already know whichever instrument and then try to move to RB/GH and discover that it doesn't work the way they're "used to" and therefore have problems with it. But there's no secret to the fact that not everyone plays instruments exactly the same way.. so someone starting from scratch (ie: without any pre-conditioned notions of how to play) may well be able to learn the guitar .. in the RB playing style.
Can RB teach you to be a world class master guitarist? Probably not. But most people are happy if they can just sit around the fire strumming a few tunes to impress the girls (or guys as the case may be). Of course RB doesn't have much in the way of folksy music so you'd still have to go out and learn some less showy/more personal songs on your own for that sort of scenario ;).
A good plumber probably doesn't use much if anything of math higher than a general knowledge of length and pipe diameter.. basic measurements. Very few plumbers are going to spend the time computing the flow volume required to satisfy a toilet drain -- they've got a bunch of "standards" that they know work for the job at hand (whether by experience or from building codes).
That's why you hire engineers to design any sort of complicated structure -- the actual contractors doing the job will know how to read the blueprints and make sure everything is the right size and lines up and whatnot, but they're not going to be sitting there doing load and weight calculations. That's not their job. Their only job is making sure the actual building matches the blueprints and they just trust that the engineer did his calculations correctly. And the further down the line you go right from the foreman of the whole project down to the guy hired off the street to carry lumber and cement, the less math they're going to care about. The flip-side of course is that the engineer can sit back in his office not having to care about things like table saw operation, construction site safety concerns, dealing with the city/etc with respect to road closures or other political junk and so on.
Now whether or not knowing the work required to move a 40lb bag of cement 1 foot is helpful to the guy lugging it around is up for debate.. he's certainly not going to do a worse job because he understands that (unless of course he spends all of his time computing the amount of work needed instead of actually doing the work!)
The article is definitely right -- very few of us are in positions to care about math once we've left school. But I'd go on to say that that applies to EVERY subject in school. Why? Because if you've got say.. 10 subjects and by chance you have 10 occupations, each one (primarily) associated with a subject.. then even with a perfectly uniform distribution, only 1 in 10 people will care about any specific subject after they're out of school (oh wait, I just used math!)
About the only thing that's (nearly) universally required amongst everyone is communication skills. And that's something they don't really teach in school (English class is what most people will claim but really, knowing Shakespeare doesn't really help you much in the real world either. You might get a slightly larger vocabulary but that's only really relevant for large written communication (writing books for example -- things that themselves are generally categorized as professions). The type of communication I'm referring to is more the emails to your boss, phone calls with your customer, etc where the preference is to be as short and concise as possible while still getting your point across.
I think the main reason math gets so much focus is that science has been the biggest driver of progress over the past 100 years or so, and almost all science requires math of some type -- even if its just basic statistics. Producing the next Picasso or Beethoven may well be a blessing, but no amount of paintings or songs and no matter how good they are will ever change the world in the same way as say, the development of computers or the atomic bomb. So we keep pushing people into math and science because if we have to make a choice, we'd rather miss out on the next Michelangelo than the next Einstein (of course defining "we" in that sentence can be a bit of a challenge in itself!)
Sure.. but that's like trying to bring a boulder to a rock fight. You might have the most destructive power in theory, but you're probably gonna get whooped long before you can get it moving.
"The people" may have overwhelming power by simple mass numbers, but the vast majority of us have our own lives and would prefer government, anti-governments, terrorist organizations and everyone else just mind their own damned business.
Not that we usually get our way, but you've got to be doing something pretty nasty to get any sort of large civilian force to rise up against you. Its happened before and it will almost certainly happen again at some point, but its not common. And I doubt the political pissing contests "far away" countries, no matter how atrocious the acts being committed are, will be the sort of thing that will get average citizens to rise up (risking their livelihoods, families, their own life, etc).
I have a 32" 720p LCD TV with a native panel res of 1366x768 pixels. I set my PC to 1024x768, and text looks as good as it does on a PC monitor. Even Windows XP ClearType works as intended.
Depends on the native res of your PC. If you set the PC to a non-native res, then its going to look relatively worse than it could. But yes, an equal-sized TV with equal resolution should have approximately equal quality (I actually prefer my TV on a per-pixel basis, but that's probably more to do with it being a $1700 tv compared to a $200 monitor!) But TVs are usually much much larger than a PC monitor of equal resolution -- THAT'S where the problem lies.
Then perhaps 720p and 1080p need different seating arrangements.
To some degree yes. But again, its not just a difference in pixel rows, its a difference in pixel rows relative to the size of the screen. And of course no matter how good the screen is, there's going to be a distance beyond which the text is illegible.. but low resolutions (again, relative to the screen size) just make the distance that much closer.
Windows itself has a DPI control.
Yep, and I use it, and its great for the fonts that Windows itself has control over. Which unfortunately does not include Firefox from what I've seen.
The entire second half of your comment ignores that a PC can take at least four USB gamepads through a hub. Xbox 360 wired controllers work as expected on every PC I've tried, under both Windows XP and Ubuntu 10.04.
Yes it does. Because very very few people have those relatively to the total population of PC gamers. If I try to sell you my little indie game for $15 but require you to purchase a $60 controller to play it, you're probably not going to bother. Of course if I make a game and give you the option of using a gamepad well great, but it still doesn't change the fact that most people won't have one.. so unless you're building the game purely for yourself (in which case, have fun with whatever you've got available), the gamepad argument on a PC is pretty much moot.
Exact motion tracking would have had to wait for the MotionPlus accessory.
True, but I'm pretty sure you don't need motion to be extremely precise for just swinging a sword around. Wii sports managed to make the bowling and tennis games pretty fun without the MotionPlus. Ie: they could have made the sword follow the Wiimote (granular as it is) rather than the existing two-part "did they swing horizontal or vertical?" Its kind of the same situation I was referring to with the analog sticks in the older (2D) FF games -- you have full 360 degree freedom to play with and you're artificially limiting it to a simple 2 "button" system. Of course there's another problem with swinging a sword around -- the sword and shield hands are physically tethered by the rather short nunchuck cord. But still, I think they could have done better.. and if not, just don't use the motion sensor at all and give us a more classic feeling game where you don't have to randomly spasm to make some arbitrary moves work.
Very true. And even the best of us will end up writing extensive documentation for a product that never gets used, or write a quick hack that ends up being around 10 years later. The trick is to minimize the number of those edge cases.
Though of course management is a huge portion of this, and a point I didn't even touch on. There's only so much you can do when you tell management a project will take 2 months and they give you until next Tuesday. And for all we can complain about bad management, the bottom line is they're the ones cutting checks and its usually you who's out looking for a new job if the gloves get thrown down.
Don't you think that the dwarves on Level 4 look a little too similar to the elves on Level 6?
no cheating using LEX or YACC
Then your first step should be recreating LEX and YACC :P. Noone in their right mind would build parse tables by hand outside of their class assignments ;).
(of course if all you need is a simple RD parser then that's another story.. those are usually easier to write by hand than dealing with LEX/YACC syntax).
Doubtful. Console makers definitely have a lot of control over the developers, but I seriously doubt that they have enough control (or information) to say who the development companies can hire and who they can't.
It might be different if you wrote up a game as homebrew and then decided to call up Nintendo and ask for a license after the fact, but as long as all you're doing is demoing your project to a dev studio, it would be up the the studio to decide whether or not to hire you (there's a good chance that they would -- if you can actually get a homebrew game to run well, you're probably as good if not better than the people they've already got on staff since you would have had to do it with limited documentation and no dev tools, so you'd have to be basically working right on the hardware.. of course your employment contract would probably stipulate that you have to completely dissociate yourself from homebrew after that point).
The kids who are going to be great programmers started before high school. As a CS degree holder, I can say that you definitely get taught a lot of useless theory. But you also get taught a lot of useful theory. In the "real world", its a lot better if you know how to write up a quicksort routine in 20 minutes rather than spending 2 days reinventing the bubble sort. And its also occasionally helpful to know when a bubble sort is "good enough". On the other hand, they will never teach you to just use sort(2) or its equivalent in your language of choice.
That said, there are two problems I can see having been through the course:
- Grads who just slid by. Everyone who's done any research on the topic knows that a great programmer is 10 times more productive than a good programmer, and a bad programmer is counter-productive all together. There were MANY people in my classes who couldn't code their way out of a Logo program without help, even by the 3rd or 4th year!
- Being too smart. This is kind of what you were referring to above. But you have to remember, these kids aren't WRONG, they just don't know the economic side of things. Its simply not feasible to do up entire UML documents for every single one-off utility, and frequently its not even feasible to do so for saleable products. Where in college, being right is the primary goal, in business the primary goal is and always will be money. Quick and dirty always wins the race. At least initially. There's a reason WHY colleges teach these things -- its because there's been craploads of research done to show that these methodologies work better long term. Ie: Dealing with the age-old problem of maintenance being 90+% of a product's total cost over time. Where the "real world" comes in is having the experience to know when your current project is a throwaway and when it will still be requiring maintenance 10 years down the road. In the latter case, all of the "useless theory" is a hell of a lot more useful!
It would definitely be nice if CS courses would start offering (or even requiring) practicums where the students are actually out in the field learning the things that can't easily be taught by a lecturer standing in front of the class. Internships are a great option but you've got to be motivated enough to get one and have the foresight to realize how useful they are in terms of your future employment (both in terms of resume candy and simply getting to know people in the industry.. sadly I'm not one of the people who realized this until I was already done school).
For games, the input device is far more important than the output device. Its pretty much universal amongst games that bigger screens makes for better play. You can see more of the map/peripheral/whatever on a bigger (well, at least higher resolution) screen. The main reason PCs don't often plug into TVs is that TVs aren't all that good for text. You have to go to a pretty high-end TV to get the same sort of image quality as you would on a fairly moderate computer monitor. And a large (physically.. generally >24") computer monitor will blow an equivalently sized TV out of the water due to the fact that 1080p is still "top end" even for 57" or 60" TV monitors. I get (the equivalent of) 1050p on my 22" computer screen for comparison -- a ~3% increase in scan lines across a ~250-300% increase in dimension. Ouch!
But when you get into a gaming (or movie) scenario, how much/"far" you see is a lot more important than the overall clarity of the image -- chances are the fast movement within games is going to blur it more than the basic image clarity anyway. But being able to see the goblin coming at you from an extra 3 (virtual) feet away can mean a huge advantage.
By the way I'm well-versed in both these days. I use a triple monitor setup for work, and a dual HDTV for my gaming machine. Its absolutely brutal trying to read anything on the TVs -- even the good TV. If you're far enough away to see the screen comfortably, the text is illegible. If you get close enough to read the text, you lose half of the screen outside of your visual field. Luckily firefox has some nice easy hotkeys for increasing the text size on webpages, but most other programs are difficult. Steam chat is absolutely ridiculous as they use a tiny font to begin with and I've found absolutely no way to increase it (though I haven't looked for skins yet so maybe there's something in there). I'm definitely looking forward to them releasing higher resolution screens (List), but I don't know what sort of time scale we're looking at for those.
I guess I should consider getting back to my point though. Which is basically, keyboard+mouse makes for a very different gaming experience than a controller, and the recent "motion" controllers provide a very different gaming experience again. And while there's no shortage of companies trying to shoehorn games into the "wrong" input device, it never comes out as well as they hope. Consider Mario or Zelda on the Wii. You run around doing normal Mario/Zelda-ish things.. but then every once in a while you have to swing your arm around like an idiot for no purpose other than to force you to use the motion sensors. Zelda was especially disappointing -- real motion tracking from the Wiimote would have made for AWESOME sword battles. But no, they opted to simply have you swing it back and forth to accomplish the exact equivalent of a single button push. It felt extremely awkward and annoying -- I couldn't play either game for long. On the other hand, the Wii sports games (particularly bowling and tennis) are enormously fun -- just very basic games that make great use of the Wiimote device.
For another example, I tried the FFXIV open beta. The controls were utterly horrendous. They were designed for a PS3 controller and hacked into kb+mouse as an afterthought and it definitely shows in certain places. (Of course I could forgive all of that if they'd give me a non-laggy mouse lol). I certainly hope they did something to improve this for the release!
And for a final example to close the loop, imagine what something like EA's NHL series would look like on a keyboard where you don't have the nice analog stick? Doable for sure, but they'd have to put a lot more thought into their control structure and avatar response when they've only got 4 (or even 8) poorly-aligned digital buttons compared to two smooth analog axes. Or compare FF7 (designed for the original pre-analog PS1) vs
If you insist on doing this, while still having a job, family and other responsibilities.. you're probably going to be sitting with a small handful of hours to work on your game a week. Expect it to take a LONG time if its even moderately complex. If you want to port it to consoles, you're pretty much SoL unless you can afford the (ridiculously expensive) dev kits for those consoles. You might get somewhere using XNA if you happen to like Xbox, but the PS3 and the Wii are more challenging (you can homebrew it, but you'll be fighting an uphill battle with regards to documentation and the such, and you'd probably get smacked with a lawsuit pretty fast if you tried to actually make money on a homebrew game). I don't know what sort of hoops Sony makes you go through for PS3/PSP "Minis".. I imagine the dev requirements are less for those but I haven't looked into it.
Its probably a losing battle to try generating a decent port folio in a reasonable amount of time if you're only able to put a handful of hours a week towards it.
Now if you're just wanting to create and sell something independently well, you still have all of the issues listed above, but you've also got to deal with finding people who are interested and willing to pay for your game, plus setting up payment methods and web pages and whatever else. And remember, you're competing against thousands of other games that were developed in a similar manner, never mind the mainstream studio-developed games that have hundreds of times the resources (time and money) that you do.
My recommendation? If you're doing it for the money, make the commitment and put all of your effort into it. If you're doing it as a hobby then do it as a hobby and keep profit as a secondary motive -- if you get something for your work then great, but if you're expecting large sums of money then you'll probably be disappointed.
In fact, if you really like developing games, you ought to take 8/5 corporate soul-crushing job (that will crush your soul much, much less) and just make games in your spare time (or at work during downtime) for fun.
Bad advice! If you do that you're working 80-hour weeks anyway, you might as well get one of those soul-crushing 80-hour-week games industry jobs and spend all your time doing what you want to and not just half of it. (Or did you think being a corporate programmer was fun and not soul-crushing...?)
No, its great advice. I'd go one step further and say get a non-programming (or even non-computer) job. Its a rare person who can spend 40 hours a week doing something for work and then come home and spend another 20-40 doing the same thing as a hobby. Of course it depends what you mean by "developing". If you're happy working long boring hours as most of the anecdotes on this thread suggest, then getting a job at a major game studio might be for you. If you want to design your own vision then you'll need to do it on your own (or at best, find a smallish studio and hope that you'll be able to add some input for the next project they start). Of course, "on your own" could also mean drumming up some VC and starting your own studio with your own grunt programmers, so you've got a third option if you've got the motivation and VC pitching skills!
Plus, if you're actually working in the industry, you will (a) get to work with other, more experienced game programmers and learn the game-specific parts of the trade 5x faster and (b) meet a lot of talented and motivated artists and game designers, so that when you do decide to break away and do some fun indie stuff, you don't have to do it alone. Unless you want to, in which case you can use those contacts for mentorship too.
Now this is a good point. And I'd probably say that if you could manage it, working short term in a real games studio (perhaps just an internship) would give you some real experience and introduce you to people who've been doing the job for years, but I don't know if a long-term position is really great unless like mentioned above you enjoy being tortured (or at least can put up with it until you get high enough in the organization to be listened to).
You've got to keep in mind that they're going to be asking for the stars when they really only want the moon, because they know that candidates are going to pad their resumes to some degree.
The person who walks in with an impressive port folio but doesn't quite make the requirements is going to have a huge advantage over the person who has the requirements but a poor or non-existent port folio.
Remember, the port folio says what you can actually do. The degree only tells them that you absorbed enough of the professor's lectures to pass the test without any indication that you pulled any deeper understanding out of the information.
Experience always wins over education if everything else is equal. Of course experience AND education is better still!
Of course the real trump card is knowing someone in your target company with enough pull to get you in the door. Even if you just start with a crummy position that you don't like, once you're in the company you're 3/4 of the way to the job you want -- just get chummy with the department you're interested in and when a position opens up, you're a good several steps ahead of any outside candidates.
Remember that fonts sizes are based off the size of your physical display, and have no relation to the number of pixels used to render them. If you're lucky enough to use a program built to do that.
Fixed that too. Go take a look at Steam or Winamp* for some nice popular counter-examples, and I'm sure there's loads more. Sure there's "skins" that might have bigger fonts defined, but its up to the user to locate and install such skins -- they don't come with the programs.
Of course there's a very good reason why programs fail to handle font sizing properly -- its hard! Laying out controls is a pain in the ass as it is.. trying to make them dynamically adjust to match the size of your display and/or non-standard font choices makes it several times harder. I think the new WPF stuff from MS was meant to partly aid in this issue, but I haven't really played around with it (XML -- the standardized way to complicate your software!) and I have no idea what there might be in the open-source world that tries to take the hassle of font changes away from the developer.
*I haven't used Winamp since I discovered Foobar2000, but this was certainly the case last time I saw it.
but it doesn't answer how it helps if an intruder is getting into Apps through a lost or stolen phone
That would be what the first factor is for. Unless you also store your passwords on your phone in which case you've just intentionally reduced yourself back to one-factor security and well.. don't do that.
Two-factor security isn't 100% perfect. Its always possible for someone who knows your password to also steal your phone. But the chance is significantly reduced compared to the individual chances of your phone being stolen or your password being keylogged/otherwise compromised. Three-factor security would be better still (a biometric "touch" perhaps?).. 100-factor security would be better still. But as with most security issues, you get an annoyance/benefit trade-off and its a matter of figuring out how much people will be willing to do to prevent their friends from changing their facebook status to "I am the suxx0r!" That amount will go up as time goes on of course -- between more people being aware of security issues, and technology making the extra factors less intrusive (oh, and they have to be free -- few home users will be willing to drop $50 or $100 for a biometric scanner for example. Unless they've already been a victim of identity theft.)
Which is why most firewall software has a "always do this" option of some sort. The first week or so after you install a new firewall program generally sucks, but after that you've usually got most of your "real" apps marked off and things go pretty smoothly from there on.
Of course for some people, a week worth of always clicking "Allow" is enough to train them badly forever.. but there's only so much that can be done :P.
You obviously failed the class on modern business practices. If they decided that something is worth $50, no matter how arbitrary or inane, then its obviously "costing" them $50 if they turn around and give it to you for free. And you should tell your customers that they're actually SAVING $50 if they decide not to purchase the extra power, so that they feel good about you and their purchase.
People who pirate the program will be dealt with in modern business practices II, taught by representatives from the RIAA. There you will learn how each pirated copy of the unlock software is actually costing Intel $50 _per transistor_!
My thought is that the encrypted one will be the one that asks for a password when you try to open it.
I suppose the big question is.. "who are you trying to hide this from?" If you're just trying to hide from basic security screenings at the airport and whatnot well, just make sure your encrypted data is on a USB drive or some such, hide the files/partitions and make sure you don't have your decrypting tools with you. Your average security screener isn't going to have the time or technical skills to delve in too deeply, even if you get flagged for additional screening. Short of being on the terrorist watch list, you're probably pretty safe here as long as you don't make it too obvious that you have hidden data.
On the other hand, if you're under investigation for one reason or another and your equipment gets confiscated, you've got a much bigger problem. Even if your data is 100% undetectable from a pure bits-and-bytes perspective, there's a simple fact that you (presumably) need to be able to access the data yourself somehow. And that means you'll need some form of tool.. software programs or hardware dongles or whatever. If you're using any sort of common tools, the investigators will simply note that those tools exist and assume you're hiding something.
Your only real hope is to roll your own encryption software AND mask it as something innocuous (say an IM clone where if you type in a different "hidden" password it unlocks your hidden partition). Of course, I doubt there's more than a few thousand people in the world (if even that many) who would have the knowledge and abilities to write such a program (and again, you can't just use something common or it would be a dead giveaway).
And yet here I see you on Slashdot. As an unsubscribed plain old user, I can find:
- Your last few comments
- The last few stories you've submitted
- Your Slashdot friends / fans / foes
- Their comments / stories / etc
I'm not trying very hard, and I'm certainly not a data miner, but I'd guess even that amount of data would be enough to put something together about you -- at least a vague sense of your interests and disinterests. And how much more information would the Slashdot admins have about you? All they have to do is miss a single creep in their hiring process and all of that information is free reign. It might not be as sensitive as your emails, but its still an invasion of your privacy. And the chances for creeps to slip through the cracks grows with the size of your company (I'd imagine sub-linearly as screening procedures typically would get better as the company grows, but its still not a DECREASING chance).
Except of course that your extra $45 is actually going towards funding the lawyers that are going to then try and claim your $50 of stolen content (which is 1-2 Blu-Rays at today's prices) somehow cost the entertainment industry $185million, so your petty $45 enforcement fee is a drop in the ocean.
Basically you're paying them to destroy your privacy and then sue you. You're certainly not paying them for content.
Which is still a tiny bit short of the 100,000,000K that they're looking at. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iter#Reactor_overview.
5. Extra Cars - Also fair, as long as they're not unbalanced in online play.
8. Cheats/Unlocks - Terrible. Paying for stuff that really should be free. Like paying to unlock all the fighting game's characters.
Really? Why is a car in a racing game somehow a better DLC than a fighter in a fighting game? Just because they call it an "extra" instead of an "unlock" doesn't change that you have to pay more to get it. I suppose calling it an "unlock" implies that its already built into the game and specifically disabled until paid, whereas an "extra" sounds more like it gets downloaded when you pay.. but does it really make that much difference whether the locked bits came from the DVD or from the net?
The same argument applies to your #4 and #6. I don't know about other music games, but Rock Band certainly doesn't allow you to play songs you don't have, even if your opponent does. Yet somehow not being able to play a specific 5min race is worse than not being able to play a specific 5min song?
Honestly this whole thread seems pretty stupid. The /. crowd has been going on for years now about "just change your business model". And yet when someone tries to figure out ways to earn money in the internet age, everyone gets up in arms.
Or just make sure you're "collaborating" with scientists in countries with more reasonable laws. The article states that the press reports were based on comments from associated British scientists. Those reports were still out there -- the only thing that's different is that one particular scientist didn't get his piece in in time.
Which definitely sucks for him, no doubt about it. Science is definitely about claims to fame and being the first to discover or intuit something new. But I would hope that at least a few of the scientists who are working on really important stuff (environmental research, contaminants, etc) will be able to let go of their egos and have their associates in other countries publish for them, for the sake of getting important information out into the world.
Then again, if that starts happening to any great extent while Harper's still in power, we'll probably start requiring a license to associate with foreign scientists or some BS like that.
I cried a little inside when Harper was elected. I cried a lot more inside when he was re-elected. The only saving grace is that he's been in a minority position in both cases. I shudder to think what would happen if he ever got a majority.
That's a good way to lose an election. It makes you sound like you either don't really care or don't really know why you're running in the first place. There's a reason why parties still toss out grandiose claims when everyone knows they're bogus -- its still better than nothing, and given the choices between two (or more) evils, people will in general pick the one that seems the least evil to them. And "I don't care about current issues" seems pretty evil to most people when they're talking about the folks who are charged with dealing with those issues.
There's no question that our system is short-sighted and highly subject to dishonesty (even if a politician is honest, the problems people vote on today will usually have nothing to do with the problems they face in 2 or 3 years). But its still the fairest practical system we've come up with so far (give or take a specific vote representation mechanism or two).
I don't know where you live. Around here its pretty much the opposite. They start off in school believing in "authority" without any consideration about where that authority comes from (most 5 years olds don't care what political party is in power).
By the time they start hitting high school (mid-teens), they're usually anti-authority of any kind, but still without much consideration.. they just want to do whatever they feel like and think they should have that freedom.
Once they start hitting their early to mid 20s (especially if they go to college/university where actually thinking about things is encouraged), they start putting some real thought into why they like (or dislike) what they do. They actually are able to vote so they start actually considering what they're voting for (as much as the propaganda allows.. we're all well aware that what the parties say they'll do often gets ignored or even 180'd).
By the time they've hit their 30s they've pretty much figured out where they lie on the political spectrum. Sure they'll differ slightly from year to year, but short of some massive bullocks on the part of their chosen party (such as the liberal scandal that got Harper elected in the first place), its pretty rare for people to do much of a party swap beyond a certain age.. they've already become set in their ways.. and they've got real responsibilities (work, family) and less time to think about their choices, and so on.
Obviously I'm generalizing and I'm sure there's loads of counter-examples but that's sort of a general flow of things.