Refuse to hire anyone who still says "two point oh." They're cretins who jump on a buzzword theme rather than understanding issues.
Unaware: An interwuh?
Moronic: It's a series of tubes.
Cretin: 2.0 is where it's at.
Ideal: Let's look at net neutrality, airforce cyber-command, the events in any former Soviet state that pisses off Russia, the DMCA, etc., address the issues of today and also look at what the potential upcoming issues of tomorrow are so we're a little more prepared before they hit us. Let's bring a pannel of advisors together from both the corporate, academic and non-profit worlds, ensuring no single voice is too strong but all have the ability to inform a single decision maker who isn't allowed to entertain lobbyists. We'll never please everyone all of the time but we'll fail America less than every other method tried (except Al Gore's as he built this thing).
If you look at the speedrun subculture, people can "complete" most classic, deeply loved, games in ridiculously short amounts of time.
Does it devalue Doom to tens of millions of players, many of whom logged hundreds or thousands of hours in it, knowing that someone's managed a speedrun in an hour or two?
Besides, modern MMOs are about a huge number of things interacting:
Have they looted enough of the highest level drops that their players are now fully kitted out in the best gear available? Or did they just scrape by with enough to claim they could do it, only to get slapped down in PvP, next week, by a guild that didn't claim "completion" and is now better equipped?
Have they collected everything they need for their crafters to make the highest end items they also had opened up to them?
Have they gained the new mounts?
How about PvP specific loot? Have they gained the full sets of that stuff that were put there for the huge number of players that don't consider level 80 and a few raids to be the pinacle of the game?
And that's all before you get in to the broader culture of a game like that... mapping things out, raising interesting alts, side quests, etc.
A junior high bully gets to claim he's the most awesomest by having no one who can beat him in a fight. Yet the kids who're on dates, getting in to bands, on the sports teams, even nerdier stuff like winning science olympiads or actually understanding their classes so they'll get great grades in highschool, a great college place and be much better off in life... they're probably not all that impressed that, yes, he got to the top on a single axis. Did he really "complete" junior high as he likes to tell himself?
I'm so completely used to random crashes to the main screen, random complete lockdowns, random freezes, dropped calls, you name it... that it'd have to take something pretty remarkable before I even realized it was a fault I could make a warranty claim over as opposed to just "buggy as usual" functioning.
Looking at the typical blackberry users who regard it as a critical piece of their god given right and duty to answer emails even when on the can... I'd imagine they're vastly less tolerant than iPhone users.
Most iPhone users I know, who haven't previously used Blackberries, are pretty happy with their iPhones. Just about every former Blackberry user I know who converted to an iPhone hates the thing's unreliability and wants to go back.
In short: Relying on reported failures doesn't always tell you which device is more reliable. It can just be an indicator of which user group is more tolerant.
You gain efficiency by understanding a feature set and picking the right tools to do that job.
The problem is, most people/organizations desperately want to build something now, so they feel something's happening, then keep tweaking it all over the place until they're happy, totally changing the spec once it's underway.
In short, they want you to do the job in order for them to then understand it - making it nigh impossible to select the right tools at the beginning.
Most of the really great, really efficient systems are built by someone who had a firm idea, figured out all the aspects, then got on and built just that. Or they played with ideas, building multiple prototypes that likely weren't very efficient, then went back and rebuilt it with what they'd then learned.
Most systems aren't like that. They're designed by committee who won't think through most issues until they see a working version. They essentially force prototyping on you - yet consider what you're building the final system and won't pay for you to do a final rebuild. As a result, they're bloated and suck.
Welcome to the real life of a programmer. Yes, code re-use is something great programmers do. But only if they have great designers who really think everything through first. If you ever find such a mythical beast, let me know and I'll be clamoring to work there too.
Re:Most humans aren't that smart
on
The State of Game AI
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Huh, you must be right. I guess that's why online gaming and LAN parties are so incredibly unpopular.
Everyone still hates campers. Most LAN party games have rulesets that discourage it.
If you have rapid respawns, the guy who runs out, gets fifty kills vs. twenty deaths, is going to massively outscore the guy who nurses his last two percent of health and snipes five guys from hiding.
Similarly, with short round times, it's much more fun to try something a little bit crazy so you can tell your friends about how you got a last point of health kill. After all, you know there's another round starting in thirty seconds.
Ask yourself how many LAN party games really encourage a real world fear of pain, desperately trying to keep the one life you're given, etc.
The games don't encourage realistic play from players. Why on earth would you want it from AI?
And, for that reason, saying "AI could be more real because LAN parties are fun" doesn't really hold up - the humans aren't playing realistically, due to the rulesets imposed, who wants the AI to either?
"...indicate that they want to have a serious discussion on the issues surrounding this election"
Sorry, wrong country. Please move along.
Modern elections are all about negativity. People look for reasons to vote against someone, not vote for them.
Take gay marriage:
You pick a strongly pro view - every homophobe in America now votes against you. You pick a strongly negative view - every liberal in America calls you a homophobe and now votes against you. You pick a well thought out, moderate view - both sides decide you're wrong and vote against you.
About the only way to win is say, "Hmm... I believe I've always been clear on my views here." and leave everyone to think you support whatever they want to believe you support.
Multiply that across the war in Iraq (no good way to stay, no good way to get out), the economy (it's circling the pan for the next couple of years, even with the greatest people doing the best things), taxes (no one wants to pay them yet everyone wants the spending on their pet whatever-it-is) and all the rest and you have a situation that guarantees anyone who dares espouse an opinion will be hated by a large enough majority to ensure they lose.
A game I've been playing for the majority of this election campaign. You can try it yourselves:
Every time someone professes to be an Obama supporter, ask them to name/describe three of his policies. Out of several dozen people I've asked, every one of them tells me he's the new hope, that he's a stable guy, that he's not old... and ONE has been able to actually name three policies.
Obama has perfected saying absolutely nothing and all indicators imply he's going to win because of it. McCain pisses off the liberals by being a conservative, the conservatives by being a free thinker and made the mistake of picking a VP who keeps having opinions about everything, whether they fit the platform or not... and is on course to lose because of it.
So, by all means, debate policy amongst yourselves. But don't expect too much of it from any candidate who actually wants to win an election with the current electorate. By being the people we are, we've created a situation where no politician in their right mind would ever dare try it.
When drug manufacturers stop spending millions on advertising campaigns to convince patients that the latest and greatest drug (which is really exactly the same as the generic but with added ibuprofen or whatever) is essential, doctors might start getting honest information from their patients about what they really need.
About fifteen years ago, looking at med school as an option, I did work experience with a doctor. It was cold season. 95% of his patients were there because they had little more than a cold and a desire to stay home from work. He told me to watch. For the first five minutes he would do everything in his power to just give them the treatment they really needed. After that, if not satisfied, he'd write them a prescription for exactly the same thing but with a more impressive name, that they'd have to buy over the counter, that would cost them twice as much as the off the shelf for exactly the same thing.
The first five minutes they were pissed. What did he mean, he didn't think they needed a prescription?! That off the shelf drug couldn't possibly help someone as sick as them. They were angry. They were outraged.
Then he agreed with them, admitted he was wrong, that he'd underestimated and was going to write them a prescription for a new drug that's just come on to the market. With an impressive new name, essentially a reformulation of what he'd been trying to give them, they left happy.
Honesty and a good bedside manner are worth slightly less than zero when people are bombarded by dozens of commercials a day telling them how only the drug with the obviously happier people, with the cool smiling bumble bee, and the blisteringly fast side-effects in 0.001 point text can really make everything OK.
Actually, Jedi was ignored because, like an electron, it existed in two places, simultaneously.
Sure, it had a giant teddy bear's picnic. Major points against.
But it had Leia in that bikini, a formative moment in so, so many lives.
Therefore it was simultaneously the worst of the original three and yet also the very best - all depending on your criteria.
Now, had Lucas put Natalie Portman in that outfit, we might be regarding the originals in a wholly different way too. They'd still suck... yet they'd still get a certain guilty vote.
I don't know why the E3 organizers would want to go back to the horrible old format
Simple: They want to make money. Or: They want to generate press for the industry's benefit. Or: They want to generate public awareness for the industry's benefit.
Everyone bitched about how "wrong" the old event way. And yet a ton of press were there, generating a ton of press for all of the studios/etc. Studios that, for all their bitching, turned up, rented space, etc. for it.
Then they went ultra exclusive. And the press got bored because it wasn't a spectacle. And the companies realized they may as well do their own private gig, across town, and totally squeeze out the competition. And now no one paid for it and it kept dying a slow death.
A very good lesson is to ignore everyone talking about how things "should be" but instead look at what the evidence really supports. The "bad old days" that everyone "hated" kept getting more and more successful when judged by the simple metric of "did more and more vendors see it as worth being there?" The "improved" recent events failed by that simple metric.
If E3's goal is to function as a profitable event, the old way was better. If E3's goal was to generate press attention, the old way was better. If E3's goal was to generate public excitement with the industry, the old way was better.
If E3's goal was to be elitist but lonely to the point of insignificance, the new way rocks.
I'd say the other three are three great reasons to go back, holier-than-thou protesting about how bad it was aside.
(Speaking as a non-Gamestop stockroom industryperson. *grins*)
ANH +3: Empire - Arguably the high point ANH +0: A New Hope - Pretty good ANH -19: Revenge Of The Sith - Bad ANH -22: Clone Wars - Very bad. ANH -32: Phantom Menace - Terrible
ANH -1000...?
If we extrapolate the level of suck achieved as the canon goes back in time, there is the potential for a vortex of such terrible suck to be created that it sucks us all in long before the LHC ever comes close.
Our only hope is that the existing KOTOR games weren't just flukes and estabished the timeline vs. suck rule only applies to Lucas penned movies. We can but hope.
Even though paper has a proven n hundred year archival track record
Depends on your definition of proven and archival.
Given susceptibility to liquid spills, sun bleaching, crumpling, tearing, ink fading, etc... Even if you discount the huge percentages that are tossed away because no one really cares anymore, most paper copies still don't survive all that long at all.
It's true, there are some instances of old paper mediums where most of the data is recoverable hundreds of years on, if you're willing to work hard enough.
But, by that token, most of the media we dismiss as fallible, we're judging by a different standard. We expect sub 1% fail rates for any bits of data for the time periods we're judging media as stable for. By that, paper would fail terribly. Apply the criteria we use for paper and the floppies I have from the early 80s are doing amazingly.
The formerly United States becoming a mass of vaguely related governments, new ones sprining up every few weeks as people keep deciding they could do better.
A lot of people wandering around, lost, joining and leaving dozens of these different micro governments while they try and find the right one for them.
A registration process for becoming a citizen, each time you wish to join a different one, that 99% of citizens go back feudalism, a system they know is totally broken and screws them horribly, simply because it's less hassle.
The remaining 1% sneering at the fools who stayed with feudalism, completely unable to understand why no one else is joining their new, amazing form of government.
While most citizens don't sign up, after a few years of major distrust, most companies register with these new governments because they realize it avoids letting them pay a lot of their taxes. Much like Delaware does at the moment.
ENDLESS wrangling over trying to form a common bill of rights. Eventually 30 different bills of rights pop up, with even the feudal nations claiming they have one too. Everyone argues over what "free" really means.
Only being able to buy cars from two manufacturers while every other car maker just can't be bothered dealing with the requirements of this new, weird, tiny little governments.
Every time the mail comes late, the roads aren't iced, there's a power cut, telephones don't work properly, or any other inconvenience, your mother, sister, brother in law, grandmother and two guys from down the street come to you and demand you fix it because you talked them in to this amazing system of government. You rapidly discover you're spending most of your life providing basic services to the people, like an idiot, you converted - rather than living in this new utopia.
BestBuy sets up the SocialServicesSquad. Any time a lightbulb blows out, a street needs repairing, they'll send out a "qualified" technician who'll manage to fix it, most of the time, for a huge fee. However, they only go to feudal areas because your hydrogen powered monorails are way too confusing compared to the dirt tracks they're used to working on.
Seeing as you're stuck making every little repair, you quickly ask around for pointers. Everyone laughs at you and calls you a n00b if you can't figure out how to build your own exchange rate mechanism, detached from the gold standard, capable of resisting speculators. I mean, that's just the basic stuff, loser. Everyone else tweaks their own daily.
The only games you can play for years are really obscure, really boring, math based ones that don't require anything more complex than a sheet of paper and a pencil. Eventually someone figures out how to make a clone of soccer. But they made the ball out of a rock because they didn't really understand what makes balls fun. Many of your neighbors keep kicking the rock anyway, declaring there's no fun those feudal types can have that we can't have in our enlightened system of government.
And... other than your mom who you brought along... no women. Sure, there are rumors of this really hot red headed one who wears chunky black glasses, a few villages over... but you've never actually seen her, have you.
Spore already feels like a really cool game engine with just some demo content.
Anyone who has played the first phase, where you can add flappy bits, fins or a jet... carnivore or omnivore mouth... and that's about it... already knows they so dumbed down the content as to leave you with essentially no actual game there.
Same holds for many of the later stages. A few very core pieces used in unimaginative ways to solve a simple puzzle and then be done.
When your core gameplay is near utterly devoid because of too few interesting combinations... to then sell what can't be argued as anything other than an essential part of the core, a second time, is sickening.
The stupid thing is, had they made the core game fun then added to it, like they did with The Sims series, I'd be buying add ons. This time, they went so far as to leave you feeling like your time was wasted with the original and cause you to lose so much faith you doubt the add on will rememdy it.
EA's best bet, right now, would be to give away a massive parts pack as a free download, turn the original game back in to something fun and not an empty game engine... then charge for real upgrades to a product people can actually care about.
the latest mobile phones come with 3D hardware acceleration that rivals the power of desktop graphics hardware
If, by "desktop graphics hardware" we're comparing to the books, empty bottles and other assorted clutter, it exceeds them.
If, however, we mean "desktop PC"... it only rivals it if we're talking about integrated chipsets from a decade ago.
It's a cute dream. And Monkey Ball on my 480x320, ~50% of VGA resolution iPhone doesn't look half bad for a simplified version of a GameCube era title. But, even accepting there's better hardware than the iPhone for 3D... It's a LONG way from rivalling desktop graphics quality, even on a pixel for pixel comparrison where a 0.15MP phone is trying to compete with a 2.3MP 24 inch monitor that's pushing around 15x the number of pixels.
It's kind of like saying I rival an olympic runner. It's true in so far as we both have legs and, if I limit my competing to being against small children in my own backyard, I can often win. In every other way that counts, it's just not happening though.
The dotcom boom brought about massive numbers of totally disinterested programmers who were only there for the perception of the money it was supposed to bring them and were thus only as good as a minimally passing grade required them to be.
Worse, fairweather career chasers are always stuck behind the curve. It takes a couple of years for the media to pick up on a starting boom. Then it takes them four years to get the degree based qualification (admittedly less to get the MCSEs etc. that then got such a terrible reputation). That means they usually manage to turn up right around the end of any given boom... or often a little after... and bitch about how much they hate this career that was supposed to be an easy way out for them, all the while taking the few remaining jobs from the people who do want to be there.
Combine terrible "just enough to qualify" attitudes, diluting overall quality, and creating a massive imbalance of supply over demand when the field's hurting the worst, pushing salaries even lower... and I left wondering if there's a single way computer science actually gains, as opposed to loses, from these people?
Yes, Wall Street has had them for the last little over half a decade. And the sickening little idiots have leeched everything out of that market and crashed it around their own ears. They were also there, en masse, in the real estate industry. You remember the raging a-holes who figured they'd get BMWs and a huge paycheck out of raping anyone who wanted to buy a home during a housing boom.
Please, for the love of everything holy, nerdy, or whatever you subscribe to... don't encourage them back in to our field.
Go out to schools, colleges, career fairs...
Tell them all about the long hours of unpaid overtime. Tell them all about management that doesn't get technical reality. Tell them about the stresses. Tell them about how tough the lean years were after the dotcom boom and how that's a cycle that will keep coming back.
Then carefully only talk up the parts that'll appeal to those with a genuine love. Tell them about how they will get the latest IDEs and graphics suites paid for. Tell them how they'll get the satisfaction of seeing their own name in the back of a game manual. Tell them how their embedded code could end up, admittedly unheralded, saving lives in some critical application.
But, for the love of God, don't make the mistake of thinking fairweather career chasers are something we want back in the industry.
For adults, it makes a fair amount of sense to allow everything and then try and catch the bad stuff.
For kids, it's much more reasonable to adopt a policy of, "Only those addresses I've specifically approved get to send anything."
That's essentially what you're doing right now by not letting them have accounts - you're just blocking 100% with no exceptions. Adding exceptions on a case by case basis is therefore pretty reasonable. Sure, it's not all the freedom of true email... but that's not what you want to give them anyway.
So, the problem is the teachers can only be bothered to test twice per class... Meaning a student getting 20% on the first test has to get 100% on the second to get a 60% average.
As a radical suggestion, somewhere in the long summer vacations, after the 2pm finishes... Get off your lazy asses and come up with say ten tests throughout the course.
Now a 20% on the first test only knocks 8% off the total grade, not 40%, and is quite surmountable without needing pity grades.
I realize this is clearly advanced rocket science so take your time to fully digest the idea. I'm freely offering it for the good of ull duh stoodnts in pitsbug.
Let's try not to make their being even stupider any more acceptable. One of these kids could end up becoming president one day and the last thing we need is a moron spending eight years in the whitehouse, driving the country, its military and its economy in to the ground. Let's keep that an unthinkable impossibility people!
those told to act suspicious were detected with 'about 78% accuracy on mal-intent detection
Congratulations. You can now detect bad acting.
The guy doing ninja rolls, lurking, wearing comedy glasses and a big nose, looking through holes in a newspaper... he's completely screwed now.
The terrorist who's spent five minutes running some deep breathing exercises to lower his heartrate, who's come to terms with the fact he's about to blow himself up over the last several months, who has been schooled on how to act normal rather than "act like a guy with mal-intent"... is going to walk straight through.
If you train your system on actors, you can successfully spot people "acting" a certain way.
Now, pull a guy out of a jail cell, tell him you're part of a black ops CIA branch who needs a national disaster to shore up presidential support, tell him he gets his freedom if he can get what he believes is a real bomb on to a real aircraft... and give him a few weeks to prepare with expert help... now you've got something approximating an actual terrorist, with real intent, trying to "act" as normally as possible. Train your system on that and you might have something.
It sounds a hell of a lot like the classic AI program that could detect tanks, even hidden ones, with near perfect accuracy. Then someone pointed out all the tank pictures were taken on a cloudy day and the non tank pictures on a sunny day. Their expensive system could now tell when the weather sucked but knew absolutely nothing about tanks.
This systems sounds like it knows a hell of a lot about bad acting and nothing whatsoever about terrorists beyond the self congratulatory assumptions of a bunch of idiots.
You'll notice pretty much any survey of crime shows:
Violent Crimes per 100,000 Serious Sexual Assaults per 100,000 Murders per 100,000 etc.
They don't just say, "Crimes" because...
Any smart person would choose somewhere with a billion people and 10,000 crimes over a million people with 1,000 crimes. That's why per capita is critical.
Any smart person would also likely choose somewhere with 10,000 littering offences and 1 murder over somewhere with 1000 murders.
It only takes two massive cyber attacks against the entire infrastructure of Georgia and Estonia to make Russia (assuming you don't accept their denials) far more offensive on a global scale than a million spam botnets.
Now which is worse? The country that spams millions of times or the country that cripples the infrastructure of any small nation that dares oppose it? Still care about pure numbers without caring what the numbers actually record?
I'm not claiming the U.S.'s vast numbers of offenses are purely the equivalent of littering, nor that they never do anything worse... Simply that big but meaningless because it's not clarified number A vs. big but meaningless because it's not clarified number B is still... meaningless.
And when Apple figures out that loud noise is everyone clamouring for them to make their bluetooth iPhone work with their bluetooth keyboard, it'll be an amazing note taking tool.
Until then, ignoring the staggeringly obvious, it's a pain in the ass to write more than a few sentences.
Don't get me wrong, I own one, I love it and I recommend it to people despite its many flaws because I think, even with them, it's still an amazing tool... But there are a few staggeringly, achingly obvious things they've totally failed to put in there. Copy and paste is one of them, bluetooth keyboard support on a bluetooth enabled device is another.
Slashdot Mirror
Refuse to hire anyone who still says "two point oh." They're cretins who jump on a buzzword theme rather than understanding issues.
Unaware: An interwuh?
Moronic: It's a series of tubes.
Cretin: 2.0 is where it's at.
Ideal: Let's look at net neutrality, airforce cyber-command, the events in any former Soviet state that pisses off Russia, the DMCA, etc., address the issues of today and also look at what the potential upcoming issues of tomorrow are so we're a little more prepared before they hit us. Let's bring a pannel of advisors together from both the corporate, academic and non-profit worlds, ensuring no single voice is too strong but all have the ability to inform a single decision maker who isn't allowed to entertain lobbyists. We'll never please everyone all of the time but we'll fail America less than every other method tried (except Al Gore's as he built this thing).
If you look at the speedrun subculture, people can "complete" most classic, deeply loved, games in ridiculously short amounts of time.
Does it devalue Doom to tens of millions of players, many of whom logged hundreds or thousands of hours in it, knowing that someone's managed a speedrun in an hour or two?
Besides, modern MMOs are about a huge number of things interacting:
Have they looted enough of the highest level drops that their players are now fully kitted out in the best gear available? Or did they just scrape by with enough to claim they could do it, only to get slapped down in PvP, next week, by a guild that didn't claim "completion" and is now better equipped?
Have they collected everything they need for their crafters to make the highest end items they also had opened up to them?
Have they gained the new mounts?
How about PvP specific loot? Have they gained the full sets of that stuff that were put there for the huge number of players that don't consider level 80 and a few raids to be the pinacle of the game?
And that's all before you get in to the broader culture of a game like that... mapping things out, raising interesting alts, side quests, etc.
A junior high bully gets to claim he's the most awesomest by having no one who can beat him in a fight. Yet the kids who're on dates, getting in to bands, on the sports teams, even nerdier stuff like winning science olympiads or actually understanding their classes so they'll get great grades in highschool, a great college place and be much better off in life... they're probably not all that impressed that, yes, he got to the top on a single axis. Did he really "complete" junior high as he likes to tell himself?
Releasing your game on 11/11/2008
90 years to the day after 11/11/1918
The day dedicated, each year, to the memory of the millions who lost their lives in that war.
The day dedicated, each year, to reflect on the terrible cost of war.
Launching your videogame on that day of all days.
How could anyone call that crass?
I'm so completely used to random crashes to the main screen, random complete lockdowns, random freezes, dropped calls, you name it... that it'd have to take something pretty remarkable before I even realized it was a fault I could make a warranty claim over as opposed to just "buggy as usual" functioning.
Looking at the typical blackberry users who regard it as a critical piece of their god given right and duty to answer emails even when on the can... I'd imagine they're vastly less tolerant than iPhone users.
Most iPhone users I know, who haven't previously used Blackberries, are pretty happy with their iPhones. Just about every former Blackberry user I know who converted to an iPhone hates the thing's unreliability and wants to go back.
In short: Relying on reported failures doesn't always tell you which device is more reliable. It can just be an indicator of which user group is more tolerant.
Because the last thing you want, in prison, is someone sniffing your ports, looking for an unguarded backdoor.
Well, you know, unless you're the kind who's in to setting up "honeypots."
You gain efficiency by understanding a feature set and picking the right tools to do that job.
The problem is, most people/organizations desperately want to build something now, so they feel something's happening, then keep tweaking it all over the place until they're happy, totally changing the spec once it's underway.
In short, they want you to do the job in order for them to then understand it - making it nigh impossible to select the right tools at the beginning.
Most of the really great, really efficient systems are built by someone who had a firm idea, figured out all the aspects, then got on and built just that. Or they played with ideas, building multiple prototypes that likely weren't very efficient, then went back and rebuilt it with what they'd then learned.
Most systems aren't like that. They're designed by committee who won't think through most issues until they see a working version. They essentially force prototyping on you - yet consider what you're building the final system and won't pay for you to do a final rebuild. As a result, they're bloated and suck.
Welcome to the real life of a programmer. Yes, code re-use is something great programmers do. But only if they have great designers who really think everything through first. If you ever find such a mythical beast, let me know and I'll be clamoring to work there too.
Huh, you must be right. I guess that's why online gaming and LAN parties are so incredibly unpopular.
Everyone still hates campers. Most LAN party games have rulesets that discourage it.
If you have rapid respawns, the guy who runs out, gets fifty kills vs. twenty deaths, is going to massively outscore the guy who nurses his last two percent of health and snipes five guys from hiding.
Similarly, with short round times, it's much more fun to try something a little bit crazy so you can tell your friends about how you got a last point of health kill. After all, you know there's another round starting in thirty seconds.
Ask yourself how many LAN party games really encourage a real world fear of pain, desperately trying to keep the one life you're given, etc.
The games don't encourage realistic play from players. Why on earth would you want it from AI?
And, for that reason, saying "AI could be more real because LAN parties are fun" doesn't really hold up - the humans aren't playing realistically, due to the rulesets imposed, who wants the AI to either?
"At what point does this start to make a difference in the market place?"
Has there been a version of Linux that hasn't out performed Windows from the same era?
Has the market ever said, "Gee, it's zippier, let's move over en masse!"?
I think that might be your answer.
"...indicate that they want to have a serious discussion on the issues surrounding this election"
Sorry, wrong country. Please move along.
Modern elections are all about negativity. People look for reasons to vote against someone, not vote for them.
Take gay marriage:
You pick a strongly pro view - every homophobe in America now votes against you.
You pick a strongly negative view - every liberal in America calls you a homophobe and now votes against you.
You pick a well thought out, moderate view - both sides decide you're wrong and vote against you.
About the only way to win is say, "Hmm... I believe I've always been clear on my views here." and leave everyone to think you support whatever they want to believe you support.
Multiply that across the war in Iraq (no good way to stay, no good way to get out), the economy (it's circling the pan for the next couple of years, even with the greatest people doing the best things), taxes (no one wants to pay them yet everyone wants the spending on their pet whatever-it-is) and all the rest and you have a situation that guarantees anyone who dares espouse an opinion will be hated by a large enough majority to ensure they lose.
A game I've been playing for the majority of this election campaign. You can try it yourselves:
Every time someone professes to be an Obama supporter, ask them to name/describe three of his policies. Out of several dozen people I've asked, every one of them tells me he's the new hope, that he's a stable guy, that he's not old... and ONE has been able to actually name three policies.
Obama has perfected saying absolutely nothing and all indicators imply he's going to win because of it. McCain pisses off the liberals by being a conservative, the conservatives by being a free thinker and made the mistake of picking a VP who keeps having opinions about everything, whether they fit the platform or not... and is on course to lose because of it.
So, by all means, debate policy amongst yourselves. But don't expect too much of it from any candidate who actually wants to win an election with the current electorate. By being the people we are, we've created a situation where no politician in their right mind would ever dare try it.
How about honesty and good bedside manner?
When drug manufacturers stop spending millions on advertising campaigns to convince patients that the latest and greatest drug (which is really exactly the same as the generic but with added ibuprofen or whatever) is essential, doctors might start getting honest information from their patients about what they really need.
About fifteen years ago, looking at med school as an option, I did work experience with a doctor. It was cold season. 95% of his patients were there because they had little more than a cold and a desire to stay home from work. He told me to watch. For the first five minutes he would do everything in his power to just give them the treatment they really needed. After that, if not satisfied, he'd write them a prescription for exactly the same thing but with a more impressive name, that they'd have to buy over the counter, that would cost them twice as much as the off the shelf for exactly the same thing.
The first five minutes they were pissed. What did he mean, he didn't think they needed a prescription?! That off the shelf drug couldn't possibly help someone as sick as them. They were angry. They were outraged.
Then he agreed with them, admitted he was wrong, that he'd underestimated and was going to write them a prescription for a new drug that's just come on to the market. With an impressive new name, essentially a reformulation of what he'd been trying to give them, they left happy.
Honesty and a good bedside manner are worth slightly less than zero when people are bombarded by dozens of commercials a day telling them how only the drug with the obviously happier people, with the cool smiling bumble bee, and the blisteringly fast side-effects in 0.001 point text can really make everything OK.
Actually, Jedi was ignored because, like an electron, it existed in two places, simultaneously.
Sure, it had a giant teddy bear's picnic. Major points against.
But it had Leia in that bikini, a formative moment in so, so many lives.
Therefore it was simultaneously the worst of the original three and yet also the very best - all depending on your criteria.
Now, had Lucas put Natalie Portman in that outfit, we might be regarding the originals in a wholly different way too. They'd still suck... yet they'd still get a certain guilty vote.
I don't know why the E3 organizers would want to go back to the horrible old format
Simple: They want to make money.
Or: They want to generate press for the industry's benefit.
Or: They want to generate public awareness for the industry's benefit.
Everyone bitched about how "wrong" the old event way. And yet a ton of press were there, generating a ton of press for all of the studios/etc. Studios that, for all their bitching, turned up, rented space, etc. for it.
Then they went ultra exclusive. And the press got bored because it wasn't a spectacle. And the companies realized they may as well do their own private gig, across town, and totally squeeze out the competition. And now no one paid for it and it kept dying a slow death.
A very good lesson is to ignore everyone talking about how things "should be" but instead look at what the evidence really supports. The "bad old days" that everyone "hated" kept getting more and more successful when judged by the simple metric of "did more and more vendors see it as worth being there?" The "improved" recent events failed by that simple metric.
If E3's goal is to function as a profitable event, the old way was better.
If E3's goal was to generate press attention, the old way was better.
If E3's goal was to generate public excitement with the industry, the old way was better.
If E3's goal was to be elitist but lonely to the point of insignificance, the new way rocks.
I'd say the other three are three great reasons to go back, holier-than-thou protesting about how bad it was aside.
(Speaking as a non-Gamestop stockroom industry person. *grins*)
ANH +3: Empire - Arguably the high point
ANH +0: A New Hope - Pretty good
ANH -19: Revenge Of The Sith - Bad
ANH -22: Clone Wars - Very bad.
ANH -32: Phantom Menace - Terrible
ANH -1000...?
If we extrapolate the level of suck achieved as the canon goes back in time, there is the potential for a vortex of such terrible suck to be created that it sucks us all in long before the LHC ever comes close.
Our only hope is that the existing KOTOR games weren't just flukes and estabished the timeline vs. suck rule only applies to Lucas penned movies. We can but hope.
Even though paper has a proven n hundred year archival track record
Depends on your definition of proven and archival.
Given susceptibility to liquid spills, sun bleaching, crumpling, tearing, ink fading, etc... Even if you discount the huge percentages that are tossed away because no one really cares anymore, most paper copies still don't survive all that long at all.
It's true, there are some instances of old paper mediums where most of the data is recoverable hundreds of years on, if you're willing to work hard enough.
But, by that token, most of the media we dismiss as fallible, we're judging by a different standard. We expect sub 1% fail rates for any bits of data for the time periods we're judging media as stable for. By that, paper would fail terribly. Apply the criteria we use for paper and the floppies I have from the early 80s are doing amazingly.
I personally look forward to years of...
The formerly United States becoming a mass of vaguely related governments, new ones sprining up every few weeks as people keep deciding they could do better.
A lot of people wandering around, lost, joining and leaving dozens of these different micro governments while they try and find the right one for them.
A registration process for becoming a citizen, each time you wish to join a different one, that 99% of citizens go back feudalism, a system they know is totally broken and screws them horribly, simply because it's less hassle.
The remaining 1% sneering at the fools who stayed with feudalism, completely unable to understand why no one else is joining their new, amazing form of government.
While most citizens don't sign up, after a few years of major distrust, most companies register with these new governments because they realize it avoids letting them pay a lot of their taxes. Much like Delaware does at the moment.
ENDLESS wrangling over trying to form a common bill of rights. Eventually 30 different bills of rights pop up, with even the feudal nations claiming they have one too. Everyone argues over what "free" really means.
Only being able to buy cars from two manufacturers while every other car maker just can't be bothered dealing with the requirements of this new, weird, tiny little governments.
Every time the mail comes late, the roads aren't iced, there's a power cut, telephones don't work properly, or any other inconvenience, your mother, sister, brother in law, grandmother and two guys from down the street come to you and demand you fix it because you talked them in to this amazing system of government. You rapidly discover you're spending most of your life providing basic services to the people, like an idiot, you converted - rather than living in this new utopia.
BestBuy sets up the SocialServicesSquad. Any time a lightbulb blows out, a street needs repairing, they'll send out a "qualified" technician who'll manage to fix it, most of the time, for a huge fee. However, they only go to feudal areas because your hydrogen powered monorails are way too confusing compared to the dirt tracks they're used to working on.
Seeing as you're stuck making every little repair, you quickly ask around for pointers. Everyone laughs at you and calls you a n00b if you can't figure out how to build your own exchange rate mechanism, detached from the gold standard, capable of resisting speculators. I mean, that's just the basic stuff, loser. Everyone else tweaks their own daily.
The only games you can play for years are really obscure, really boring, math based ones that don't require anything more complex than a sheet of paper and a pencil. Eventually someone figures out how to make a clone of soccer. But they made the ball out of a rock because they didn't really understand what makes balls fun. Many of your neighbors keep kicking the rock anyway, declaring there's no fun those feudal types can have that we can't have in our enlightened system of government.
And... other than your mom who you brought along... no women. Sure, there are rumors of this really hot red headed one who wears chunky black glasses, a few villages over... but you've never actually seen her, have you.
Sounds, uh, Utopian.
Spore already feels like a really cool game engine with just some demo content.
Anyone who has played the first phase, where you can add flappy bits, fins or a jet... carnivore or omnivore mouth... and that's about it... already knows they so dumbed down the content as to leave you with essentially no actual game there.
Same holds for many of the later stages. A few very core pieces used in unimaginative ways to solve a simple puzzle and then be done.
When your core gameplay is near utterly devoid because of too few interesting combinations... to then sell what can't be argued as anything other than an essential part of the core, a second time, is sickening.
The stupid thing is, had they made the core game fun then added to it, like they did with The Sims series, I'd be buying add ons. This time, they went so far as to leave you feeling like your time was wasted with the original and cause you to lose so much faith you doubt the add on will rememdy it.
EA's best bet, right now, would be to give away a massive parts pack as a free download, turn the original game back in to something fun and not an empty game engine... then charge for real upgrades to a product people can actually care about.
I'm reminded of the old saying, "If you make owning a gun a crime, only criminals will own guns."
If you hide drunk mailing behind math problems, only Engineers will drunk mail.
*shudders*
the latest mobile phones come with 3D hardware acceleration that rivals the power of desktop graphics hardware
If, by "desktop graphics hardware" we're comparing to the books, empty bottles and other assorted clutter, it exceeds them.
If, however, we mean "desktop PC"... it only rivals it if we're talking about integrated chipsets from a decade ago.
It's a cute dream. And Monkey Ball on my 480x320, ~50% of VGA resolution iPhone doesn't look half bad for a simplified version of a GameCube era title. But, even accepting there's better hardware than the iPhone for 3D... It's a LONG way from rivalling desktop graphics quality, even on a pixel for pixel comparrison where a 0.15MP phone is trying to compete with a 2.3MP 24 inch monitor that's pushing around 15x the number of pixels.
It's kind of like saying I rival an olympic runner. It's true in so far as we both have legs and, if I limit my competing to being against small children in my own backyard, I can often win. In every other way that counts, it's just not happening though.
I think you mean "loss."
The dotcom boom brought about massive numbers of totally disinterested programmers who were only there for the perception of the money it was supposed to bring them and were thus only as good as a minimally passing grade required them to be.
Worse, fairweather career chasers are always stuck behind the curve. It takes a couple of years for the media to pick up on a starting boom. Then it takes them four years to get the degree based qualification (admittedly less to get the MCSEs etc. that then got such a terrible reputation). That means they usually manage to turn up right around the end of any given boom... or often a little after... and bitch about how much they hate this career that was supposed to be an easy way out for them, all the while taking the few remaining jobs from the people who do want to be there.
Combine terrible "just enough to qualify" attitudes, diluting overall quality, and creating a massive imbalance of supply over demand when the field's hurting the worst, pushing salaries even lower... and I left wondering if there's a single way computer science actually gains, as opposed to loses, from these people?
Yes, Wall Street has had them for the last little over half a decade. And the sickening little idiots have leeched everything out of that market and crashed it around their own ears. They were also there, en masse, in the real estate industry. You remember the raging a-holes who figured they'd get BMWs and a huge paycheck out of raping anyone who wanted to buy a home during a housing boom.
Please, for the love of everything holy, nerdy, or whatever you subscribe to... don't encourage them back in to our field.
Go out to schools, colleges, career fairs...
Tell them all about the long hours of unpaid overtime. Tell them all about management that doesn't get technical reality. Tell them about the stresses. Tell them about how tough the lean years were after the dotcom boom and how that's a cycle that will keep coming back.
Then carefully only talk up the parts that'll appeal to those with a genuine love. Tell them about how they will get the latest IDEs and graphics suites paid for. Tell them how they'll get the satisfaction of seeing their own name in the back of a game manual. Tell them how their embedded code could end up, admittedly unheralded, saving lives in some critical application.
But, for the love of God, don't make the mistake of thinking fairweather career chasers are something we want back in the industry.
For adults, it makes a fair amount of sense to allow everything and then try and catch the bad stuff.
For kids, it's much more reasonable to adopt a policy of, "Only those addresses I've specifically approved get to send anything."
That's essentially what you're doing right now by not letting them have accounts - you're just blocking 100% with no exceptions. Adding exceptions on a case by case basis is therefore pretty reasonable. Sure, it's not all the freedom of true email... but that's not what you want to give them anyway.
So, the problem is the teachers can only be bothered to test twice per class... Meaning a student getting 20% on the first test has to get 100% on the second to get a 60% average.
As a radical suggestion, somewhere in the long summer vacations, after the 2pm finishes... Get off your lazy asses and come up with say ten tests throughout the course.
Now a 20% on the first test only knocks 8% off the total grade, not 40%, and is quite surmountable without needing pity grades.
I realize this is clearly advanced rocket science so take your time to fully digest the idea. I'm freely offering it for the good of ull duh stoodnts in pitsbug.
Let's try not to make their being even stupider any more acceptable. One of these kids could end up becoming president one day and the last thing we need is a moron spending eight years in the whitehouse, driving the country, its military and its economy in to the ground. Let's keep that an unthinkable impossibility people!
those told to act suspicious were detected with 'about 78% accuracy on mal-intent detection
Congratulations. You can now detect bad acting.
The guy doing ninja rolls, lurking, wearing comedy glasses and a big nose, looking through holes in a newspaper... he's completely screwed now.
The terrorist who's spent five minutes running some deep breathing exercises to lower his heartrate, who's come to terms with the fact he's about to blow himself up over the last several months, who has been schooled on how to act normal rather than "act like a guy with mal-intent"... is going to walk straight through.
If you train your system on actors, you can successfully spot people "acting" a certain way.
Now, pull a guy out of a jail cell, tell him you're part of a black ops CIA branch who needs a national disaster to shore up presidential support, tell him he gets his freedom if he can get what he believes is a real bomb on to a real aircraft... and give him a few weeks to prepare with expert help... now you've got something approximating an actual terrorist, with real intent, trying to "act" as normally as possible. Train your system on that and you might have something.
It sounds a hell of a lot like the classic AI program that could detect tanks, even hidden ones, with near perfect accuracy. Then someone pointed out all the tank pictures were taken on a cloudy day and the non tank pictures on a sunny day. Their expensive system could now tell when the weather sucked but knew absolutely nothing about tanks.
This systems sounds like it knows a hell of a lot about bad acting and nothing whatsoever about terrorists beyond the self congratulatory assumptions of a bunch of idiots.
You'll notice pretty much any survey of crime shows:
Violent Crimes per 100,000
Serious Sexual Assaults per 100,000
Murders per 100,000
etc.
They don't just say, "Crimes" because...
Any smart person would choose somewhere with a billion people and 10,000 crimes over a million people with 1,000 crimes. That's why per capita is critical.
Any smart person would also likely choose somewhere with 10,000 littering offences and 1 murder over somewhere with 1000 murders.
It only takes two massive cyber attacks against the entire infrastructure of Georgia and Estonia to make Russia (assuming you don't accept their denials) far more offensive on a global scale than a million spam botnets.
Now which is worse? The country that spams millions of times or the country that cripples the infrastructure of any small nation that dares oppose it? Still care about pure numbers without caring what the numbers actually record?
I'm not claiming the U.S.'s vast numbers of offenses are purely the equivalent of littering, nor that they never do anything worse... Simply that big but meaningless because it's not clarified number A vs. big but meaningless because it's not clarified number B is still... meaningless.
And when Apple figures out that loud noise is everyone clamouring for them to make their bluetooth iPhone work with their bluetooth keyboard, it'll be an amazing note taking tool.
Until then, ignoring the staggeringly obvious, it's a pain in the ass to write more than a few sentences.
Don't get me wrong, I own one, I love it and I recommend it to people despite its many flaws because I think, even with them, it's still an amazing tool... But there are a few staggeringly, achingly obvious things they've totally failed to put in there. Copy and paste is one of them, bluetooth keyboard support on a bluetooth enabled device is another.
"Traditionally the best treatment for [PTSD] â" being raped . . . is to have the person relive the trauma using his or her imagination . . .
Now Clinical Psychologist Albert "Skip" Rizzo has developed a program that has had great success . . .
Other programs offered to treat PTSD include Virtual Airplane, Virtual Audiences, Virtual Heights, Virtual Storm, and Virtual Vietnam."
Or, for people who've been raped and need repeated exposure, AT&T have created a program called "our EULA"