As an engineer, anyone you deal with will know English. It's considered part of the core curriculum from high school on in most developed countries. I haven't been all around the world, but I have gotten around fine only picking up very little of the local language. In a business setting they will be more interested in your technical skills.
I wouldn't recommend learning a new language to advance your career. It can be very interesting in other ways though.
A second vote for MiPL!! This is great advice. I recommend meetin.org and other social clubs. Arranging things online makes it convenient, but all the social interaction happens offline.
One problem I have is that on a dating site most women will screen me out automatically because of my height (5'6"). But in person I am attractive, intelligent and an accomplished dancer, so I had no trouble finding a high-quality woman.
A community I am involved with uses a forum and an IRC channel. The hook in between is a bot created by the main administrator. Whenever there is a post on the forum, the bot announces it on the IRC channel, with a very convenient link. Not sure if it's what original poster had in mind but I think it's a neat system.
I would totally dump Bally's and join an adult version of this if there was one nearby! DDR takes some time to get into, but now that I play mostly heavy (most difficult) mode it is better exercise and way way more fun than an elliptical machine. I do have pads at home but I hit an arcade about once every week or two to get out and enjoy the real thing. I only hit Bally's once a week but I would go at least twice as often if they had DDR!
For a long time I switched on and off between console and PC games. But I am trending more and more towards console. My computer has enough oomph to handle recent games at an acceptable level for me. My main beef is number two on the list. I was sooo excited when Doom 3 came out I got it right away. After messing around with downloading new drivers and changing settings it still wouldn't run. Well, at least it makes a good display piece because the box is still sitting on a shelf by my computer. Meanwhile, I've played through a few dozen ps2 games.
Unless you get a job in the same area you do your thesis, the main selling point you will get from the MS is just that piece of paper. However, it is a very valuable piece of paper when combined with some actual experience, even just internships. And by spending another 2-3 years in school you get to make some connections and maybe spend some more summers interning. This is more likely what will get you the job, not the junk you learn in class.
I was just thinking about this recently, that the reason I can play newer games for hours on end but older games only a short time is because of just one thing. Older games had extra lives, new games have save points. The only reason I can imagine for having extra lives is as a carryover from arcades, where you needed to limit the amount of time someone was playing for each quarter. The difference is in how much each sets you back:
Lose a life: only a few minutes at most for most games Continue: Back to beginning of level, so maybe five or ten minutes Restart game: However long you were playing, so could be 20-30 mins or more Restart from save point: Depends, but usually only a few minutes in a well-made game. However, memory card and disc access add time.
Because of this, modern games flow so much better. It still can be frustrating, especially if the load sequence is long, but most older games would be so much better with infinite lives. This is very true for the original Castlevania.
Yeah, DDR rules! This guy probably has no rhythm and failed on beginner mode or something. However, I play at home; I once tried an arcade and the machine was in poor shape. If you can afford to buy and maintain (not very tough) a decent pad at home then there is no reason to go out to an arcade and either put up with a crappy machine or wait in line for a decent one.
As far as cost comparisons, even after you get past the quarters, there is maintenance and operating costs. That has to have exploded as the complexity of the games and labor costs both increase continually. If you have unsupervised kids breaking things regularly, it's gotta be tough to make any money, and unfortunately that's the classical US arcade clientelle.
It's not lucrative for the students, it's lucrative for the school. How much easier would it be to get up in the morning after a late night of your latest gaming obsession if you knew that you would be spending all day learning about games? A major like this will attract and retain new students, which is good for the school.
I agree that the current industry probably only needs a few real designers. However, in the future, the programming aspects will be reduced and hopefully there will be some breakthroughs in managing artwork. That will at least increase the importance of design.
FF VIII started the trend of romance between the two main heroes being a major part of the plot. But they never did it right, it was never a Han Solo/Princess Leia romance. The male hero was always moody and emotional and the female lead was even more pathetic.
Consider Cloud in VII: in the beginning, he explains the battle systems to you, bragging about how he prefers the more difficult modes. He's a total badass, even when his big-ass sword is sheathed. Cloud would crush the VIII-X girly-man heroes, steal their women, and not think twice about it.
That's why the later FFs are less appealing, though you don't consciously think about it. The whole point of an RPG is to see yourself as the hero. So do you look forward to being an emotional, whipped pretty-boy who spends long amounts of time brooding and agonizing over a difficult relationship with a pathetic woman? Probably not. Personally, I'd rather be a silent protaganist.
So my hope is that FF XII will give us a badass hero, so I can really look forward to spending some time in his shoes. Maybe I'll run into a woman here or there, but she won't mean too much. Unfortunately, I don't think this is likely, but we'll see.
I have to admit that I never did pick up a DVD player after getting my PS2. But if the situation were different, I might have.
My point is that the core market may be gamers, but some people will be interested in the other uses. If you don't watch many movies, then the DVD functionality of the PS2 is probably fine. Many induhviduals would like to experiment with online games, but are turned off the complexity of PCs. So not every feature is useful to everyone, but there is crossover.
I don't see any point in remixing standard video to HD. Any HDTV has the capability to play standard video and can give you more options as far as converting the aspect, etc. You could try to make an HD version of something and anti-alias lines or change colors or something, but why bother? I don't think an automatic process could improve the video quality by much.
Can you use the new version to seed a torrent you've already downloaded? I tried doing this and it didn't seem to recognize that I had already downloaded the file. Using windows version, and it generally seems a bit buggy.
In fifth grade I circulated a petition to keep my teacher from punishing the whole class at once. It worked, and I got to get and spend recess with my friends. It was important for me because I was in a large school, and the brainier kids were spread out among classes, so I only got to see my friends during recess when everyone went out on the playground.
As far as "who started it" I never got around that--I got bullied plenty more than my share and generally got in just as much trouble, if not more than the bully. Oh well!
There's absolutely no incentive for Microsoft to split the OS into a kernel and interface, much less making any part of it open-source. It seems unlikely that this will ever be the case. Proprietary formats and interfaces, keeping software monolithic and highly tied together is what keeps them in control. Any sort of split like would make it much easier for someone else to get in on it, in this case making a replacement for that Windows interface. Could be FOSS, could be Google or Oracle, and they would all rightly say "the bottom half of our OS is the same as M$'s." It would be much easier to break in and steal some of the pie that Microsoft has all to itself right now, and they aren't going to let that happen.
What most people fail to see is that people have different social priorities and views in different places. In the west, our general way of life has evolved to fit a democratic society. In particular, the rule of law is considered absolute in most cases. People may not respect a certain leader, but they respect the system enough to follow him.
Luckily, Americans do not have the notion that blowing yourself up in a crowded area or kidnapping and killing people is a good way to support a political cause. If they did, then democracy would probably not work here either. "Crossfire" is just a TV show.
The social backing that allows democracy to work takes generations to develop. If this social climate isn't there, then no amount of security force or monetary incentive will make democracy work. Sadly, the rest of the world needs to catch up in social maturity. It's going to be a long and painful process for some countries. But it will happen eventually. I'm not that old and I can't even count how many countries have converted to democracy during my lifetime. Some countries will have a blend of democracy with some other government, but others will be more revolutionary. Even the middle east will reach this point, but it's not something that can be forced.
In college I played games at a really unhealthy rate, like 50+ hrs a week. Luckily I was smart enough to scrape by all my classes with this habit. Anyway, it turns out that the "addiction" was really caused by seasonal affective disorder. I've got this under control now and am gaming at a much healthier level. I remember reading some article, probably linked by/. that mentioned how gaming "addiction" is usually just a sign of some other mental problem. I'll agree with that and I think that not being able to separate fantasy from reality might be a similar sign.
Ok, so I have to admit that the flash cartridge is a great idea. I'll have to keep up on that. The SNES produces nice output, but the NES has trouble keeping up with a good emulated setup. Many GBA games also work very well in a full screen format, so why would you want to squint at a little handheld?
Don't know what Zelda run you saw, but I have never seen one (or any other speedrun) on an inaccurate emulator. There could be many reasons why it seems like the game is bugged. In fact, many games do have bugs which are exploited, but all are part of the game, not the emulator. There are some debatable ones, like the effects of pressing left+right simultaneously in some games (this produced an amazing run through Ninja Gaiden 2), but I don't think anything like that was used in Zelda. Also, sometimes different versions (U/J/E) behave differently, but I don't know if that is the case here.
Here is where you'll find the latest version of the Zelda run and others.
So obviously nothing is going to change until our alien overlords arrive, but our current system could use some change. However, if you were going to change it, wouldn't it make sense to go a little further and make each month be a round number of weeks? This would make it much easier to remember the date--It's tuesday, so it has to be 2,9,16... You could do this with 10 35-day months and an extra one-week month. Newton week would probably be added to that. But I guess it's not really practical as so many things are monthly, so you pay the same for less in February. Unfortunately the floating week is an absolute killer.
I spend most of my at home free time playing emulated games. In fact, I've organized my living room entertainment setup around it. With a digital connections between my souped-up computer and TV/sound system, the emulator is actually better than the original system in many respects.
Emulation has brought so many other things as well, like translation patches for previously Japanese-only games. As an American, this is a must, as I can't even speak English that well. Would Square have released translated versions of older FFs if emulation hadn't shown there was a demand?
I'm also involved in tool-assisted timeattacks, and of course the tool is the emulator. It's a very fascinating hobby for retro gamers like me. It's simply mindblowing to watch the original Legend of Zelda finished in under 25 mins, or a difficult game like Ninja Gaiden run through effortlessly. Recently, Dragon Warrior was finished in under 20 mins!
So more on topic, I read some of the paper and was wondering how downloading any number of N64 games at this point in time hurts actual video game companies. No new games are being made or even sold, so the only ones losing money are the retail industry! Also, the figure they give computes to about $35 a game, a ludicrous price for all but a few N64 games. Of course they could point to Game Boy Advance which is actually losing money, since you can download the games and even play them on the actual system with a flash chip.
I think the game companies are much, much more worried about copied games than emulation.
Some companies will care about a big-name degree and others don't. Generally it depends where the boss has his degree from. Your chances go up when yours is from the same place. Like others have said, interning is very important to breaking into the job market, no matter what and where your degree is. Finally, you have to make contacts that can help you get where you want. Want to get into grad school? Find faculty with degrees or contacts where you want to go. If you want to work for a company that doesn't recruit at your school, it's going to be much harder.
As far as education, I was all ECE, but I got a BS from a top 25 school and MS from a top 5 school. On graduation, the job outlook was about the same for graduates from either. Educationally, there wasn't much difference, but you can tell that different companies are interested in different universites.
After growing up and going to school in the midwest I couldn't wait to get out after graduating. None of my immediate family lives there anymore and we are all much happier. To the company trying to recruit talented workers in Ft. Wayne of all places, good luck, you're gonna need it.
I looked at jobs just about everywhere but only got one offer and took it. Luckily it was a good one. I'm now in the Portland, OR area and life is good. The job market seems to be fine here, and I keep meeting people who have moved back here after living somewhere else. Just guessing here, but I don't think many people move _back_ to Ft. Wayne.
Computer and plasma HDTV both in living room, with monitor and TV set up as dual monitors, in clone mode. TV picture is slightly stretched, but very nice. I got a DVI-component converter which I need to try out, might make it even better. Sound has a digital connection to the stereo system. I have Creative Video Blaster and just use their software which is fine for my TV needs. Yeah, it's all windows and sometimes I need to switch "main" display which is annoying. Otherwise I can do anything on my computer on my TV, it's great for game emulation, flash videos, etc. ATI 9700 and Audigy 2 in the comp were tops when I got them but I my wish list is fiber out on an audio card and HD component out right from the video card.
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As an engineer, anyone you deal with will know English. It's considered part of the core curriculum from high school on in most developed countries. I haven't been all around the world, but I have gotten around fine only picking up very little of the local language. In a business setting they will be more interested in your technical skills.
I wouldn't recommend learning a new language to advance your career. It can be very interesting in other ways though.
A second vote for MiPL!! This is great advice. I recommend meetin.org and other social clubs. Arranging things online makes it convenient, but all the social interaction happens offline.
One problem I have is that on a dating site most women will screen me out automatically because of my height (5'6"). But in person I am attractive, intelligent and an accomplished dancer, so I had no trouble finding a high-quality woman.
A community I am involved with uses a forum and an IRC channel. The hook in between is a bot created by the main administrator. Whenever there is a post on the forum, the bot announces it on the IRC channel, with a very convenient link. Not sure if it's what original poster had in mind but I think it's a neat system.
I would totally dump Bally's and join an adult version of this if there was one nearby! DDR takes some time to get into, but now that I play mostly heavy (most difficult) mode it is better exercise and way way more fun than an elliptical machine. I do have pads at home but I hit an arcade about once every week or two to get out and enjoy the real thing. I only hit Bally's once a week but I would go at least twice as often if they had DDR!
For a long time I switched on and off between console and PC games. But I am trending more and more towards console. My computer has enough oomph to handle recent games at an acceptable level for me. My main beef is number two on the list. I was sooo excited when Doom 3 came out I got it right away. After messing around with downloading new drivers and changing settings it still wouldn't run. Well, at least it makes a good display piece because the box is still sitting on a shelf by my computer. Meanwhile, I've played through a few dozen ps2 games.
Unless you get a job in the same area you do your thesis, the main selling point you will get from the MS is just that piece of paper. However, it is a very valuable piece of paper when combined with some actual experience, even just internships. And by spending another 2-3 years in school you get to make some connections and maybe spend some more summers interning. This is more likely what will get you the job, not the junk you learn in class.
I was just thinking about this recently, that the reason I can play newer games for hours on end but older games only a short time is because of just one thing. Older games had extra lives, new games have save points. The only reason I can imagine for having extra lives is as a carryover from arcades, where you needed to limit the amount of time someone was playing for each quarter. The difference is in how much each sets you back:
Lose a life: only a few minutes at most for most games
Continue: Back to beginning of level, so maybe five or ten minutes
Restart game: However long you were playing, so could be 20-30 mins or more
Restart from save point: Depends, but usually only a few minutes in a well-made game. However, memory card and disc access add time.
Because of this, modern games flow so much better. It still can be frustrating, especially if the load sequence is long, but most older games would be so much better with infinite lives. This is very true for the original Castlevania.
If the resources are used for system calls from the game code then it may be fine.
Yeah, DDR rules! This guy probably has no rhythm and failed on beginner mode or something. However, I play at home; I once tried an arcade and the machine was in poor shape. If you can afford to buy and maintain (not very tough) a decent pad at home then there is no reason to go out to an arcade and either put up with a crappy machine or wait in line for a decent one.
As far as cost comparisons, even after you get past the quarters, there is maintenance and operating costs. That has to have exploded as the complexity of the games and labor costs both increase continually. If you have unsupervised kids breaking things regularly, it's gotta be tough to make any money, and unfortunately that's the classical US arcade clientelle.
It's not lucrative for the students, it's lucrative for the school. How much easier would it be to get up in the morning after a late night of your latest gaming obsession if you knew that you would be spending all day learning about games? A major like this will attract and retain new students, which is good for the school.
I agree that the current industry probably only needs a few real designers. However, in the future, the programming aspects will be reduced and hopefully there will be some breakthroughs in managing artwork. That will at least increase the importance of design.
FF VIII started the trend of romance between the two main heroes being a major part of the plot. But they never did it right, it was never a Han Solo/Princess Leia romance. The male hero was always moody and emotional and the female lead was even more pathetic.
Consider Cloud in VII: in the beginning, he explains the battle systems to you, bragging about how he prefers the more difficult modes. He's a total badass, even when his big-ass sword is sheathed. Cloud would crush the VIII-X girly-man heroes, steal their women, and not think twice about it.
That's why the later FFs are less appealing, though you don't consciously think about it. The whole point of an RPG is to see yourself as the hero. So do you look forward to being an emotional, whipped pretty-boy who spends long amounts of time brooding and agonizing over a difficult relationship with a pathetic woman? Probably not. Personally, I'd rather be a silent protaganist.
So my hope is that FF XII will give us a badass hero, so I can really look forward to spending some time in his shoes. Maybe I'll run into a woman here or there, but she won't mean too much. Unfortunately, I don't think this is likely, but we'll see.
I have to admit that I never did pick up a DVD player after getting my PS2. But if the situation were different, I might have.
My point is that the core market may be gamers, but some people will be interested in the other uses. If you don't watch many movies, then the DVD functionality of the PS2 is probably fine. Many induhviduals would like to experiment with online games, but are turned off the complexity of PCs. So not every feature is useful to everyone, but there is crossover.
I don't see any point in remixing standard video to HD. Any HDTV has the capability to play standard video and can give you more options as far as converting the aspect, etc. You could try to make an HD version of something and anti-alias lines or change colors or something, but why bother? I don't think an automatic process could improve the video quality by much.
If I was designed by some sort of omniscient intelligence, where do I file a bug report?
Can you use the new version to seed a torrent you've already downloaded? I tried doing this and it didn't seem to recognize that I had already downloaded the file. Using windows version, and it generally seems a bit buggy.
In fifth grade I circulated a petition to keep my teacher from punishing the whole class at once. It worked, and I got to get and spend recess with my friends. It was important for me because I was in a large school, and the brainier kids were spread out among classes, so I only got to see my friends during recess when everyone went out on the playground.
As far as "who started it" I never got around that--I got bullied plenty more than my share and generally got in just as much trouble, if not more than the bully. Oh well!
There's absolutely no incentive for Microsoft to split the OS into a kernel and interface, much less making any part of it open-source. It seems unlikely that this will ever be the case. Proprietary formats and interfaces, keeping software monolithic and highly tied together is what keeps them in control. Any sort of split like would make it much easier for someone else to get in on it, in this case making a replacement for that Windows interface. Could be FOSS, could be Google or Oracle, and they would all rightly say "the bottom half of our OS is the same as M$'s." It would be much easier to break in and steal some of the pie that Microsoft has all to itself right now, and they aren't going to let that happen.
What most people fail to see is that people have different social priorities and views in different places. In the west, our general way of life has evolved to fit a democratic society. In particular, the rule of law is considered absolute in most cases. People may not respect a certain leader, but they respect the system enough to follow him.
Luckily, Americans do not have the notion that blowing yourself up in a crowded area or kidnapping and killing people is a good way to support a political cause. If they did, then democracy would probably not work here either. "Crossfire" is just a TV show.
The social backing that allows democracy to work takes generations to develop. If this social climate isn't there, then no amount of security force or monetary incentive will make democracy work. Sadly, the rest of the world needs to catch up in social maturity. It's going to be a long and painful process for some countries. But it will happen eventually. I'm not that old and I can't even count how many countries have converted to democracy during my lifetime. Some countries will have a blend of democracy with some other government, but others will be more revolutionary. Even the middle east will reach this point, but it's not something that can be forced.
In college I played games at a really unhealthy rate, like 50+ hrs a week. Luckily I was smart enough to scrape by all my classes with this habit. Anyway, it turns out that the "addiction" was really caused by seasonal affective disorder. I've got this under control now and am gaming at a much healthier level. I remember reading some article, probably linked by /. that mentioned how gaming "addiction" is usually just a sign of some other mental problem. I'll agree with that and I think that not being able to separate fantasy from reality might be a similar sign.
Ok, so I have to admit that the flash cartridge is a great idea. I'll have to keep up on that. The SNES produces nice output, but the NES has trouble keeping up with a good emulated setup. Many GBA games also work very well in a full screen format, so why would you want to squint at a little handheld?
Don't know what Zelda run you saw, but I have never seen one (or any other speedrun) on an inaccurate emulator. There could be many reasons why it seems like the game is bugged. In fact, many games do have bugs which are exploited, but all are part of the game, not the emulator. There are some debatable ones, like the effects of pressing left+right simultaneously in some games (this produced an amazing run through Ninja Gaiden 2), but I don't think anything like that was used in Zelda. Also, sometimes different versions (U/J/E) behave differently, but I don't know if that is the case here.
Here is where you'll find the latest version of the Zelda run and others.
bisqwit.iki.fi/nesvideos is the best tool-assisted run site. They have avis on bittorrent for all the published movies.
I am known as TheAxeMan there and have a couple runs to my name.
So obviously nothing is going to change until our alien overlords arrive, but our current system could use some change. However, if you were going to change it, wouldn't it make sense to go a little further and make each month be a round number of weeks? This would make it much easier to remember the date--It's tuesday, so it has to be 2,9,16... You could do this with 10 35-day months and an extra one-week month. Newton week would probably be added to that. But I guess it's not really practical as so many things are monthly, so you pay the same for less in February. Unfortunately the floating week is an absolute killer.
I spend most of my at home free time playing emulated games. In fact, I've organized my living room entertainment setup around it. With a digital connections between my souped-up computer and TV/sound system, the emulator is actually better than the original system in many respects.
Emulation has brought so many other things as well, like translation patches for previously Japanese-only games. As an American, this is a must, as I can't even speak English that well. Would Square have released translated versions of older FFs if emulation hadn't shown there was a demand?
I'm also involved in tool-assisted timeattacks, and of course the tool is the emulator. It's a very fascinating hobby for retro gamers like me. It's simply mindblowing to watch the original Legend of Zelda finished in under 25 mins, or a difficult game like Ninja Gaiden run through effortlessly. Recently, Dragon Warrior was finished in under 20 mins!
So more on topic, I read some of the paper and was wondering how downloading any number of N64 games at this point in time hurts actual video game companies. No new games are being made or even sold, so the only ones losing money are the retail industry! Also, the figure they give computes to about $35 a game, a ludicrous price for all but a few N64 games. Of course they could point to Game Boy Advance which is actually losing money, since you can download the games and even play them on the actual system with a flash chip.
I think the game companies are much, much more worried about copied games than emulation.
Some companies will care about a big-name degree and others don't. Generally it depends where the boss has his degree from. Your chances go up when yours is from the same place. Like others have said, interning is very important to breaking into the job market, no matter what and where your degree is. Finally, you have to make contacts that can help you get where you want. Want to get into grad school? Find faculty with degrees or contacts where you want to go. If you want to work for a company that doesn't recruit at your school, it's going to be much harder.
As far as education, I was all ECE, but I got a BS from a top 25 school and MS from a top 5 school. On graduation, the job outlook was about the same for graduates from either. Educationally, there wasn't much difference, but you can tell that different companies are interested in different universites.
After growing up and going to school in the midwest I couldn't wait to get out after graduating. None of my immediate family lives there anymore and we are all much happier. To the company trying to recruit talented workers in Ft. Wayne of all places, good luck, you're gonna need it.
I looked at jobs just about everywhere but only got one offer and took it. Luckily it was a good one. I'm now in the Portland, OR area and life is good. The job market seems to be fine here, and I keep meeting people who have moved back here after living somewhere else. Just guessing here, but I don't think many people move _back_ to Ft. Wayne.
Computer and plasma HDTV both in living room, with monitor and TV set up as dual monitors, in clone mode. TV picture is slightly stretched, but very nice. I got a DVI-component converter which I need to try out, might make it even better. Sound has a digital connection to the stereo system. I have Creative Video Blaster and just use their software which is fine for my TV needs. Yeah, it's all windows and sometimes I need to switch "main" display which is annoying. Otherwise I can do anything on my computer on my TV, it's great for game emulation, flash videos, etc. ATI 9700 and Audigy 2 in the comp were tops when I got them but I my wish list is fiber out on an audio card and HD component out right from the video card.