So that individual states can ban the teaching of evolution and institutionally ignoring climate change? If they can't find, or don't want to pay for someone who happens to understand alternating current versus direct current that's no problem, they'll just make whomever is the least liked teacher amongst the department do it.
Education should be a federal responsibility, US students go to schools all around the country, and compete on an international stage. Allowing one state to permanently disadvantage its children by institutionalizing stupidity is precisely the sort of thing that federal governments should work to prevent. Nor is it fair that a child in a poor state will have less education resources just because that's where he or she was born, when someone who had the foresight to be born in a rich neighbourhood in a rich state will get a much better experience.
That doesn't make any given standardized test a good idea, and it certainly doesn't make a lot of standardized testing a good idea. But you can't serious want a system where you have no idea how the kids are doing or where you need improvement. Big states (think New York, Florida, Texas, California) will still have to have some sort of standardized testing because they are big enough to warrant it, but when each state does it you can't even compare state to state easily.
The world is in an era where you can be born in India, raised in Dubai for public school, go to highschool in Georgia (the State), got to University in California, work in New York. At no step in that process do you really want states determining your education. Does Georgia (the state) really want to have some criteria on how to assess a student coming in from every country in the world? Does some university in California really want to have thousands of different metrics for every state in every country in the world to try and figure out who to admit, and does some company based in New York really want a situation where it can't trust education from some states, but not others, and to try and figure out how to track all of that? That system is enormously wasteful, and mind numbingly stupid. Part of why the US system has so many holes in it is because individual states and school boards have decided their should be holes. (Think Kansas and Texas on evolution).
Giving individual states responsibility for something makes sense if you can then extract the good ideas and apply them federally. It's not like states would ever be completely excluded from the process no more than the local school board or individual teacher are ever excluded from the process. But if you're all going to be americans, or south koreans or whatever, you should hope that the federal government will make sure you all get a fair opportunity if the states won't. Which they can't anymore.
If you want a truly harsh example look at what is going to happen to kids in Greece and Spain compared to germany and france. The former two are going to have to savagely cut education (along with everything else) because they're fucked in a currency union without a fiscal union. Those kids are going to have a much harder time helping their countries fix problems in 10 years because they aren't going to be as well prepared. Should some kid born in california get a shitty education because some dipshits voted for more spending and less taxes for the last 30 years, and left no money for schools today? They're having their futures held hostage by a stupid political process which they aren't responsible for nor even a part of.
Of course. Because once you've been a researcher in the US for a few years or so you can get citizenship, at which point you're no longer a foreigner, and your children aren't either and your publications aren't.
I'm not misinformed. These guys would be one step down from Nobel prize winner sort of pay grade.
Most places in the US, and most professors in the US are in the same situation (good or bad depending on your perspective) as the rest of of the world, with unionized and defined pay packages.
But the US has a handful of places that can pluck out the truly exceptional and pay them really well. And while that can happen in canada and the UK, it's much much rarer.
The US has been able to attract top notch scientists that speak english for a long time. As essentially the wealthiest country of the lot, and english forming the biggest scientific block there's a natural advantage there. The US also has universities that can pay top scientists relatively large amounts of money. I'm in canada and the university I'm at (and the department I'm in) have had two professors who are particularly well renowned in their field, with several prestigious awards. But they get paid the same as everyone else, because there's no room to give them extra money. We are fortunate their spouses have low mobility jobs. One passed away due to heart attack earlier this year so we're down to one. But either way. If they were in the US they'd be easily making 250k and potentially up over 300k whereas here they're stuck at 120 ish. There are only a handful of universities in canada, the UK etc that can pay a premium for premium staff, and even then they can only afford a small group of them, because they charge the same per student as we do. (This would be, in canada. University of Toronto, U of British Columbia, in the Uk Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial College and a few others). In the US Harvard can have as many 400k/year staff as it wants.
In terms of actual scientific output the US isn't in a bad place, unless you consider reliance on foreign born scientists a problem (which it sort of is, and sort of isn't). Where they're always struggling is in science education at lower levels. And even there, there's only so much you can do. If you need 300k people to work assembly lines and 3000 to design the cars that are made on the lines there's only so much motivation for people to be scientifically literate anyway. When you have a political party that institutionally ignores science there's a reinforcement mechanism for generations of people to not learn, and be proud of not learning.
You only need a handful of basic quantities, and with any piece of information you only know to within an error. What time is it? Your error is +/- half the last significant digit on the clock. You can then propagate that error through to your next calculation.
What time are you going to be here? If it takes 30 minutes to drive, and it is 1 O'Clock well you have an error on the measure of 1 O clock, an error on 30 minutes, and you can very easily calculate where the significant errors are.
With something like how do you know if people over 70 believe something, the answer is that you have sampling from other areas, or you may have data from some census you can use.
This is like a second year problem in data analysis, it's really not complicated.
Again, it doesn't meaningfully add to the complexity though. You can calculate error propagation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propagation_of_uncertainty) which is like a second year problem in physics. Or at least I did it in second year and that was 12 years ago.
Not all polling will have equal error either. You can have huge datasets or collections of datasets for certain questions (e.g. Creationist questions) because there are dozens of polling companies all asking the same question, of thousands upon thousands of people
The alternative is your much more sophisticated networking solutions that would require enterprise level remote syncing.
If you're talking about 20 or 30 GB of data per day that might need to be synced in whole or in part, rather than 2-300 MB of files, then you would want something like a VPN solution or enterprise cloud services. Which is basically dropbox that you pay a lot of money for.
If this is windows I would think synctoy could be configured to do what the OP wants, but... why?
You fix third-party software... by modifying drivers?
How about forcing the game makers to TEST THEIR DAMN GAME before releasing? Is it really so hard to throw together four test-beds with GPUs from different vendors?
Having been on both sides of this.
There are some functions, usually directx functions that just do not behave properly with certain drivers. There is, in many cases, nothing you can do except ask the company to fix it. This is a double problem because a lot of times they won't look at your game until it's finished, so if you finish on friday and release on tuesday guess how much it's been looked at by nVIDIA or AMD.
While you are writing your game nVIDIA and AMD are writing new drivers and changing how their drivers behave. usually to accommodate someone eleses release, but not necessarily. That's incredibly frustrating, because you may not know whether the bug is your end, or theirs, especially if it behaves differently between driver releases.
For anyone who got the original version of the witcher 2 you could see the problem with 'test their damn game'. There was a problem with how ubersampling the ability to interact with objects. So the game came out with this problem, which is actually rare because almost no one had a card capable of doing ubersampling (even a new gtx680 today has slowdown with it). So AMD and the Witcher devs get onto fixing this problem. I think the problem was actually in how AMD was handling the sampling, but I'm not 100% sure. CD projekt did a hack workaround patch that changed how they did the sampling slightly, and at the same time AMD issued a fix, that wasn't compatible with the workaround. So you ended up in this problem where you're not even sure which solution you should be using as an end user.
Sure, a lot of the releases basically exists to clarify which codepath a particular game should be rendered with, or which SLI/crossfire profile it should use, which is relatively minor on the scale of things. But it really is a problem on the driver end that games are all treated inconsistently, or maybe that's a feature. Depends on your perspective. Treating games differently is a massive pain in the ass for development, but makes the experience much better for players, so take your pick.
It doesn't matter if the plan is underfunded. It's still in your contract that you get that money. Governments would have a very hard time backing out of those commitments. How they manage to get that money is their problem. That isn't an administrator not paying money problem either. It's a matter of how you estimate returns on investment, and how much employees have to contribute. There are quite a lot of laws around defining pension plans to make them self sustaining (for example) to be able to provide defined benefit plans.
That's a public policy issue, not what happens to a teacher as an employee issue. As a public policy question it's a fairly legitimate and serious one. But as an individual teacher with employment history it's basically irrelevant, since you contract states how your pension will be calculated.
-1 for teaching in private school. They hired a part timer. That's a job for a fresh grad trying to get cash, not a career person looking for something else to do. Depends on the school, but part time usually implies limited benefits. One single data point doesn't determine the style of the school, but I wouldn't want a kid going to a school that's avoiding hiring full time staff. It keeps the price down, and profits up, but doesn't necessarily create a good long term learning environment. Again though, a single part timer because they happen to be short a math teacher this year isn't a serious problem though.
Right, but those aren't making games anymore. That's making game engine technology that is sold to game companies. And is very amply supplied with our graduates from CS degrees specializing in it. Not that you can't make a go of it from physics or maths, you can, but it's not guaranteed, and game development jobs have this shitty downside of being one failed title away from unemployment. The tools jobs are a little more regular business than that, but the competition for those is stiff.
Teaching has all the right time off, it's hard to convey just how valuable that is.
Even if you have to work at home, you can pick up your kid at 3, no babysitting, and work at home. No babysitting on march break, that extra week at christmas, or the two months in the summer etc. Those costs add up fast if you're in the private sector.
Then there are pension benefits. As in: you actually have a real pension. Usually they are defined benefit, meaning you will know how much you are going to get when you retire, and can plan accordingly (which is a huge stress reliever as you get older) and they are usually overall good plans.
Tutoring is a decent gig if you can't get a teaching job. Not the other way around.
To teach an university now days more or less requires a PhD if you want to make a career of it. A one off course that pays next to nothing sure, even a Bachelors can teach that if you have enough experience. But one thing you definitely do not want to do right now is teach at a university as just a full time lecturer position (non tenured). Because you're constantly one year away from having your job taken away, regardless of your performance.
When push comes to shove tenured faculty have to be retained, which is part of tenure (and they do a lot more than just teach), and lecturers can get cut. When they get the budget for a full time tenured position to fill that spot you don't qualify. All ways around it's a bad job to have.
You could always try and teach math at a community college, but there you run the risk of being overqualified, and they will happily replace you with someone else.
That's actually easy to track. Because you can compare your results to known information. The census for example, and past data you have.
The results could be shifted by systematic error. Lets say you know that people over 70 are 70% more likely to believe something. But they represent 50% of the respondents in your survey, even though they only make up 20% of the population. Well then you can re weight their contributions accordingly. This is non trivial with things like populations because you have a wide selection of different groups that all need to be accounted for, but it's not all that difficult.
Kinda true. But cartridges are expensive to make. Especially high capacity ones, and this way you can use the same device as a media player and as a gaming device. That's a big plus.
The disks the games themselves are on certainly be printed in some bizarro world way, as long as the drive can read regular optical disks it still partially solves the problem.
There's no reason to not have a local copy as well. But save games are sufficiently small that having them backed up to the cloud as the only actual user data on the device makes sense. That way if the drive fails you don't lose all your save games.
Secondly, if your savegames are on the cloud and you have internet they can keep track of who's playing what and doing what. That is, creepy as it may sound, tremendously valuable to game developers. So we can know what people are actually doing with our games.
When you're in the business of trying to do random data sampling you are well aware of the both the systematic and random error elements in your data, and can account for that in the margins of error or in shifting the data appropriately around the systematic error.
I'm sure MS secretly wonders if copyrighted APIs might be good for them.
But you can't be completely vertically integrated and compatible with anything. An oracle database doesn't do you any good if it won't talk to any of the computers that need to access it.
But Java isn't really a money maker for oracle, it never was going to be. They sell databases, big fancy expensive databases. If they suddenly find out that APIs are copyrightable all their database management software, that uses linux/windows copyrights for all of the UI elements to manage the databases, all of the library api calls they use for the graphics system to visualize the database etc. All of their networking hooks, probably someone elses APIs...
They'd have been in deep shit. Fast. If their sole business was Java, or if this was Sun (after abandoning solaris) I could buy your argument. But Oracle is a database solutions company. Copyrighting APIs would be monumentally bad for anything their database's talk to as part of a solution.
And yes, Java going into a slow eclipse was funny.
Well the virtualization licences are a whole other ballgame anyway.
We'll have to see how it's implemented to know for sure what is, and isn't killed. It's possible the virtualization software itself can get all the permissions it needs to behave properly. If that wasn't the case I would think VMWare would have had a very public fit by now.
So? Your experience is not statistically significant. Well, actually the Wii side of it probably is, my Wii isn't net connected either, and hasn't been turned on in 4 years. The wii is a go no where console. It's not relevant in the marketplace or these discussions. Selling 100 million consoles and no games that's aren't first party means you're whole separate entity, and even then they will probably go a similar route though it's not clear if that's the case with the Wii U or not. They may as well be PowerPC macs or dishwashers. The only games that weren't nintendo that made a dent on the Wii are the Just Dance games and The michael jackson experience by Ubisoft. EA made a wii sports knock of that managed 1.8 million units or so, that wasn't bad. Everything else is a Nintendo developed and published title.
If you're not using a PS3 or Xbox online you are, as per the link I gave you, decidedly in the minority, and you're potentially seriously gimping a lot of your potential gaming experience. Depends on the games naturally. You're also locking yourself out of those stores with sell some nifty stuff you can't get boxed copies of.
Game consoles are very much becoming part of a social experience where even when you're playing single player you can connect with your friends, etc. Whatever you may think of used game sales and that side of the business, the future of gaming has a huge social component to it, and that will be online, even if the games you're playing are single player, you're going to miss out on a lot by refusing to connect it to the net.
And steam has shown quite successfully how the alternative method will work. Just because consumers want it to behave a particular way doesn't mean it will. The industry can't survive with institutionalized used game sales the way they are. Either the used game model that gamestop has needs to change, or used games will go the way of the dodo bird.
The entire industry has been telling gamestop this since they started this plan, they didn't listen. They used to be the premium place to have your game and you were really making it if you could specially brand something for their stores. Now, no one will shed a tear if they have to close all their doors, and we'd be quite happy if they never touched our products. Actually that's not true, a lot of us are happy they never touch our products, because online only makes a lot more money per copy, in many cases sells a lot more copies and is less risky investment upfront (you don't need to print 10 or 15k copies of your game to have 2 or 3 at every gamestop). Which is all around better for our customers, because then we can afford to make more games. When the government stops this ridiculous 40-50% subsidy we get the industry is going to have to be ruthless about making money. This is a start.
If you're running something at the OS level unintentionally that can be really fucking bad for your computer can't it? If you want to install linux this isn't a particularly difficult problem to solve.
The vast vast vast vast majority of users have no idea what the hell is going on on their computers. But they're on the network with the rest of us. Should we take away anti lock brakes because professional drivers can use regular brakes better than anti lock brakes? I think not. There is a way to circumvent UEFI if you definitely know you want to. If you don't know you want to, you don't want to, and should be protected from some malicious application doing it for you.
The vast majority of consumers aren't going to run, or want to run anything on this particular computer they are buying other than windows. I know that's not a popular concept around here, but it's reality. Making it easier for them to be more secure significantly trumps the relatively minor inconvenience suffered by people who know stuff about computers having to use that knowledge and their ability to read.
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So that individual states can ban the teaching of evolution and institutionally ignoring climate change? If they can't find, or don't want to pay for someone who happens to understand alternating current versus direct current that's no problem, they'll just make whomever is the least liked teacher amongst the department do it.
Education should be a federal responsibility, US students go to schools all around the country, and compete on an international stage. Allowing one state to permanently disadvantage its children by institutionalizing stupidity is precisely the sort of thing that federal governments should work to prevent. Nor is it fair that a child in a poor state will have less education resources just because that's where he or she was born, when someone who had the foresight to be born in a rich neighbourhood in a rich state will get a much better experience.
That doesn't make any given standardized test a good idea, and it certainly doesn't make a lot of standardized testing a good idea. But you can't serious want a system where you have no idea how the kids are doing or where you need improvement. Big states (think New York, Florida, Texas, California) will still have to have some sort of standardized testing because they are big enough to warrant it, but when each state does it you can't even compare state to state easily.
The world is in an era where you can be born in India, raised in Dubai for public school, go to highschool in Georgia (the State), got to University in California, work in New York. At no step in that process do you really want states determining your education. Does Georgia (the state) really want to have some criteria on how to assess a student coming in from every country in the world? Does some university in California really want to have thousands of different metrics for every state in every country in the world to try and figure out who to admit, and does some company based in New York really want a situation where it can't trust education from some states, but not others, and to try and figure out how to track all of that? That system is enormously wasteful, and mind numbingly stupid. Part of why the US system has so many holes in it is because individual states and school boards have decided their should be holes. (Think Kansas and Texas on evolution).
Giving individual states responsibility for something makes sense if you can then extract the good ideas and apply them federally. It's not like states would ever be completely excluded from the process no more than the local school board or individual teacher are ever excluded from the process. But if you're all going to be americans, or south koreans or whatever, you should hope that the federal government will make sure you all get a fair opportunity if the states won't. Which they can't anymore.
If you want a truly harsh example look at what is going to happen to kids in Greece and Spain compared to germany and france. The former two are going to have to savagely cut education (along with everything else) because they're fucked in a currency union without a fiscal union. Those kids are going to have a much harder time helping their countries fix problems in 10 years because they aren't going to be as well prepared. Should some kid born in california get a shitty education because some dipshits voted for more spending and less taxes for the last 30 years, and left no money for schools today? They're having their futures held hostage by a stupid political process which they aren't responsible for nor even a part of.
Of course. Because once you've been a researcher in the US for a few years or so you can get citizenship, at which point you're no longer a foreigner, and your children aren't either and your publications aren't.
I'm not misinformed. These guys would be one step down from Nobel prize winner sort of pay grade.
Most places in the US, and most professors in the US are in the same situation (good or bad depending on your perspective) as the rest of of the world, with unionized and defined pay packages.
But the US has a handful of places that can pluck out the truly exceptional and pay them really well. And while that can happen in canada and the UK, it's much much rarer.
The US has been able to attract top notch scientists that speak english for a long time. As essentially the wealthiest country of the lot, and english forming the biggest scientific block there's a natural advantage there. The US also has universities that can pay top scientists relatively large amounts of money. I'm in canada and the university I'm at (and the department I'm in) have had two professors who are particularly well renowned in their field, with several prestigious awards. But they get paid the same as everyone else, because there's no room to give them extra money. We are fortunate their spouses have low mobility jobs. One passed away due to heart attack earlier this year so we're down to one. But either way. If they were in the US they'd be easily making 250k and potentially up over 300k whereas here they're stuck at 120 ish. There are only a handful of universities in canada, the UK etc that can pay a premium for premium staff, and even then they can only afford a small group of them, because they charge the same per student as we do. (This would be, in canada. University of Toronto, U of British Columbia, in the Uk Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial College and a few others). In the US Harvard can have as many 400k/year staff as it wants.
In terms of actual scientific output the US isn't in a bad place, unless you consider reliance on foreign born scientists a problem (which it sort of is, and sort of isn't). Where they're always struggling is in science education at lower levels. And even there, there's only so much you can do. If you need 300k people to work assembly lines and 3000 to design the cars that are made on the lines there's only so much motivation for people to be scientifically literate anyway. When you have a political party that institutionally ignores science there's a reinforcement mechanism for generations of people to not learn, and be proud of not learning.
Except that skype is now owned by microsoft.
Although they represent separate business units and products.
You only need a handful of basic quantities, and with any piece of information you only know to within an error. What time is it? Your error is +/- half the last significant digit on the clock. You can then propagate that error through to your next calculation.
What time are you going to be here? If it takes 30 minutes to drive, and it is 1 O'Clock well you have an error on the measure of 1 O clock, an error on 30 minutes, and you can very easily calculate where the significant errors are.
With something like how do you know if people over 70 believe something, the answer is that you have sampling from other areas, or you may have data from some census you can use.
This is like a second year problem in data analysis, it's really not complicated.
Again, it doesn't meaningfully add to the complexity though. You can calculate error propagation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propagation_of_uncertainty) which is like a second year problem in physics. Or at least I did it in second year and that was 12 years ago.
Not all polling will have equal error either. You can have huge datasets or collections of datasets for certain questions (e.g. Creationist questions) because there are dozens of polling companies all asking the same question, of thousands upon thousands of people
The alternative is your much more sophisticated networking solutions that would require enterprise level remote syncing.
If you're talking about 20 or 30 GB of data per day that might need to be synced in whole or in part, rather than 2-300 MB of files, then you would want something like a VPN solution or enterprise cloud services. Which is basically dropbox that you pay a lot of money for.
If this is windows I would think synctoy could be configured to do what the OP wants, but... why?
You fix third-party software... by modifying drivers?
How about forcing the game makers to TEST THEIR DAMN GAME before releasing? Is it really so hard to throw together four test-beds with GPUs from different vendors?
Having been on both sides of this.
There are some functions, usually directx functions that just do not behave properly with certain drivers. There is, in many cases, nothing you can do except ask the company to fix it. This is a double problem because a lot of times they won't look at your game until it's finished, so if you finish on friday and release on tuesday guess how much it's been looked at by nVIDIA or AMD.
While you are writing your game nVIDIA and AMD are writing new drivers and changing how their drivers behave. usually to accommodate someone eleses release, but not necessarily. That's incredibly frustrating, because you may not know whether the bug is your end, or theirs, especially if it behaves differently between driver releases.
For anyone who got the original version of the witcher 2 you could see the problem with 'test their damn game'. There was a problem with how ubersampling the ability to interact with objects. So the game came out with this problem, which is actually rare because almost no one had a card capable of doing ubersampling (even a new gtx680 today has slowdown with it). So AMD and the Witcher devs get onto fixing this problem. I think the problem was actually in how AMD was handling the sampling, but I'm not 100% sure. CD projekt did a hack workaround patch that changed how they did the sampling slightly, and at the same time AMD issued a fix, that wasn't compatible with the workaround. So you ended up in this problem where you're not even sure which solution you should be using as an end user.
Sure, a lot of the releases basically exists to clarify which codepath a particular game should be rendered with, or which SLI/crossfire profile it should use, which is relatively minor on the scale of things. But it really is a problem on the driver end that games are all treated inconsistently, or maybe that's a feature. Depends on your perspective. Treating games differently is a massive pain in the ass for development, but makes the experience much better for players, so take your pick.
It doesn't matter if the plan is underfunded. It's still in your contract that you get that money. Governments would have a very hard time backing out of those commitments. How they manage to get that money is their problem. That isn't an administrator not paying money problem either. It's a matter of how you estimate returns on investment, and how much employees have to contribute. There are quite a lot of laws around defining pension plans to make them self sustaining (for example) to be able to provide defined benefit plans.
That's a public policy issue, not what happens to a teacher as an employee issue. As a public policy question it's a fairly legitimate and serious one. But as an individual teacher with employment history it's basically irrelevant, since you contract states how your pension will be calculated.
-1 for teaching in private school. They hired a part timer. That's a job for a fresh grad trying to get cash, not a career person looking for something else to do. Depends on the school, but part time usually implies limited benefits. One single data point doesn't determine the style of the school, but I wouldn't want a kid going to a school that's avoiding hiring full time staff. It keeps the price down, and profits up, but doesn't necessarily create a good long term learning environment. Again though, a single part timer because they happen to be short a math teacher this year isn't a serious problem though.
Right, but those aren't making games anymore. That's making game engine technology that is sold to game companies. And is very amply supplied with our graduates from CS degrees specializing in it. Not that you can't make a go of it from physics or maths, you can, but it's not guaranteed, and game development jobs have this shitty downside of being one failed title away from unemployment. The tools jobs are a little more regular business than that, but the competition for those is stiff.
Teaching has all the right time off, it's hard to convey just how valuable that is.
Even if you have to work at home, you can pick up your kid at 3, no babysitting, and work at home. No babysitting on march break, that extra week at christmas, or the two months in the summer etc. Those costs add up fast if you're in the private sector.
Then there are pension benefits. As in: you actually have a real pension. Usually they are defined benefit, meaning you will know how much you are going to get when you retire, and can plan accordingly (which is a huge stress reliever as you get older) and they are usually overall good plans.
Tutoring is a decent gig if you can't get a teaching job. Not the other way around.
That's every job these days. She should get used to it.
The trick is to get paid the most money possible for putting up with them.
To teach an university now days more or less requires a PhD if you want to make a career of it. A one off course that pays next to nothing sure, even a Bachelors can teach that if you have enough experience. But one thing you definitely do not want to do right now is teach at a university as just a full time lecturer position (non tenured). Because you're constantly one year away from having your job taken away, regardless of your performance.
When push comes to shove tenured faculty have to be retained, which is part of tenure (and they do a lot more than just teach), and lecturers can get cut. When they get the budget for a full time tenured position to fill that spot you don't qualify. All ways around it's a bad job to have.
You could always try and teach math at a community college, but there you run the risk of being overqualified, and they will happily replace you with someone else.
That's actually easy to track. Because you can compare your results to known information. The census for example, and past data you have.
The results could be shifted by systematic error. Lets say you know that people over 70 are 70% more likely to believe something. But they represent 50% of the respondents in your survey, even though they only make up 20% of the population. Well then you can re weight their contributions accordingly. This is non trivial with things like populations because you have a wide selection of different groups that all need to be accounted for, but it's not all that difficult.
Kinda true. But cartridges are expensive to make. Especially high capacity ones, and this way you can use the same device as a media player and as a gaming device. That's a big plus.
The disks the games themselves are on certainly be printed in some bizarro world way, as long as the drive can read regular optical disks it still partially solves the problem.
There's no reason to not have a local copy as well. But save games are sufficiently small that having them backed up to the cloud as the only actual user data on the device makes sense. That way if the drive fails you don't lose all your save games.
Secondly, if your savegames are on the cloud and you have internet they can keep track of who's playing what and doing what. That is, creepy as it may sound, tremendously valuable to game developers. So we can know what people are actually doing with our games.
That assumes they aren't aware of this bias.
When you're in the business of trying to do random data sampling you are well aware of the both the systematic and random error elements in your data, and can account for that in the margins of error or in shifting the data appropriately around the systematic error.
Naturally.
I'm sure MS secretly wonders if copyrighted APIs might be good for them.
But you can't be completely vertically integrated and compatible with anything. An oracle database doesn't do you any good if it won't talk to any of the computers that need to access it.
But Java isn't really a money maker for oracle, it never was going to be. They sell databases, big fancy expensive databases. If they suddenly find out that APIs are copyrightable all their database management software, that uses linux/windows copyrights for all of the UI elements to manage the databases, all of the library api calls they use for the graphics system to visualize the database etc. All of their networking hooks, probably someone elses APIs...
They'd have been in deep shit. Fast. If their sole business was Java, or if this was Sun (after abandoning solaris) I could buy your argument. But Oracle is a database solutions company. Copyrighting APIs would be monumentally bad for anything their database's talk to as part of a solution.
And yes, Java going into a slow eclipse was funny.
Well the virtualization licences are a whole other ballgame anyway.
We'll have to see how it's implemented to know for sure what is, and isn't killed. It's possible the virtualization software itself can get all the permissions it needs to behave properly. If that wasn't the case I would think VMWare would have had a very public fit by now.
So? Your experience is not statistically significant. Well, actually the Wii side of it probably is, my Wii isn't net connected either, and hasn't been turned on in 4 years. The wii is a go no where console. It's not relevant in the marketplace or these discussions. Selling 100 million consoles and no games that's aren't first party means you're whole separate entity, and even then they will probably go a similar route though it's not clear if that's the case with the Wii U or not. They may as well be PowerPC macs or dishwashers. The only games that weren't nintendo that made a dent on the Wii are the Just Dance games and The michael jackson experience by Ubisoft. EA made a wii sports knock of that managed 1.8 million units or so, that wasn't bad. Everything else is a Nintendo developed and published title.
If you're not using a PS3 or Xbox online you are, as per the link I gave you, decidedly in the minority, and you're potentially seriously gimping a lot of your potential gaming experience. Depends on the games naturally. You're also locking yourself out of those stores with sell some nifty stuff you can't get boxed copies of.
Game consoles are very much becoming part of a social experience where even when you're playing single player you can connect with your friends, etc. Whatever you may think of used game sales and that side of the business, the future of gaming has a huge social component to it, and that will be online, even if the games you're playing are single player, you're going to miss out on a lot by refusing to connect it to the net.
I'm fully aware how it works now.
And steam has shown quite successfully how the alternative method will work. Just because consumers want it to behave a particular way doesn't mean it will. The industry can't survive with institutionalized used game sales the way they are. Either the used game model that gamestop has needs to change, or used games will go the way of the dodo bird.
The entire industry has been telling gamestop this since they started this plan, they didn't listen. They used to be the premium place to have your game and you were really making it if you could specially brand something for their stores. Now, no one will shed a tear if they have to close all their doors, and we'd be quite happy if they never touched our products. Actually that's not true, a lot of us are happy they never touch our products, because online only makes a lot more money per copy, in many cases sells a lot more copies and is less risky investment upfront (you don't need to print 10 or 15k copies of your game to have 2 or 3 at every gamestop). Which is all around better for our customers, because then we can afford to make more games. When the government stops this ridiculous 40-50% subsidy we get the industry is going to have to be ruthless about making money. This is a start.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/28058/Study_PS3_Has_Highest_Percentage_Of_Connected_Consoles.php
PS3 78%, XBox 360 73%. Wii is way down in the 50's but Wii use is way down too (inactive in the sampling period).
And that's from 2010.
Um.... that's as it should be.
If you're running something at the OS level unintentionally that can be really fucking bad for your computer can't it? If you want to install linux this isn't a particularly difficult problem to solve.
The vast vast vast vast majority of users have no idea what the hell is going on on their computers. But they're on the network with the rest of us. Should we take away anti lock brakes because professional drivers can use regular brakes better than anti lock brakes? I think not. There is a way to circumvent UEFI if you definitely know you want to. If you don't know you want to, you don't want to, and should be protected from some malicious application doing it for you.
The vast majority of consumers aren't going to run, or want to run anything on this particular computer they are buying other than windows. I know that's not a popular concept around here, but it's reality. Making it easier for them to be more secure significantly trumps the relatively minor inconvenience suffered by people who know stuff about computers having to use that knowledge and their ability to read.