I've worked on programming games of chance for various states and governments, and learned that's there's a lot of problems communicating odds/ratios/differences in the ways this test is laying things out, especially for wide audiences that will validly complain about the terms used.
While they're not always fully ambiguous, you're just going to get a large percentage of test-takers answering incorrectly for things they legitimately know, just because they were thinking 'wrong' about how the information was present at that moment. Now, while this does a good job of showing where real-life problems can mislead people - it does a poor job of testing the actual skills being taught, as it's testing too many distinct things in each question to be meaningful in measuring math alone.
In order to have these kinds of questions be meaningful, you'd have to ask several variants over 100's of questions to filter understanding of each aspect of the questions - and you couldn't do that in one sitting either - which is why these are bad questions for a test of math.
If you wanted to test understanding of language context, use a question just for that - a 'what is the best sentence to describe..', then you don't have to have it as part of every question, and can even use previous questions to establish a context.
What this seems designed to do, is provide poor test results for people who haven't been given special training about 'math sentences' (which don't correspond to much), so that they can inflate their "improvement" when people improve in their tests, which are mostly just about 'math sentences'.
That doesn't sound like a math class - that sounds like a product training class.
So... you're saying that the whole "we've got to alter the polarity on the deflector array" technobabble on Star Trek, may be retconned... as reality? With lasers, onto metals?
Daaaayyym.
Seriously though - neat new twist on material science, and great exploration of particle coupling/entanglement! Could result in some rather odd, but promising advances in chip design and layout.
Sounds less like 'piracy', and more like early America, where our forebears had little stake in maintaining the seemingly unjust control of foreign interests, but much interest in creating a large body of works that the public could use to generate culture in this new world.
I'm sure there were a lot of folks an ocean away decrying the 'free ride' those Americans were taking then too - but those resources had some heavy work to do, and it would rightly seem absurd at the to pay several times the cost of production for a 'licensed' book at the end of the day. What parts of culture we were able to 'steal' helped make us diverse and strong - and I don't blame any developing nation for wanting to repeat that, either officially, or unofficially like most nations.
Using radio waves to track position/movement is VERY far from new. Even imaging through walls is extremely old hat. A control interface with 10cm+/- resolution would be drastically worse than any current game controller.
This isn't for gaming - it's use would be primarily for surveillance and automated 'security' tools of various kinds. It's not Xbox - its NSA/military/creepy 'spy' tools.
A very good video showing movement mapped to real gameplay.
The obvious: It's not QUITE as 1-1 as a mouse with 4 inches of control surface.
But I'd still rate it a bit higher than a trackball, which is high praise from me, since I really enjoy using trackball inputs when a mouse isn't convenient.
This is a real accomplishment in input innovation - even without considering the dynamic haptic feedback portion of the design.
I'd be amazed, if this works as advertised, if Sony and Microsoft don't push for a copycat controller very rapidly - especially given the PC-like nature of their new consoles.
The remaining challenge: How would it fare against a 360/Dualshock controller in specialized console games. From what I've heard from developers so far:
$200 for PLA plasic-only, or $300 for one that handles ABS plastic too. Plastic is around $16/kg, and I just ordered the $200 one after reviewing the inventor's careful (and very honest engineer-style presentation) instructions on how to put it together.
It's an elegant setup, and a really nice looking toy, that might get some interesting use, but I won't even try and justify it on that count.
It would be nice if we could have careful training of each of our precious growing minds, for years and years, at the lowest possible cost, by people who did nothing but deeply care for the interests of who these people were going to be... but having teaching (and research) being one of the lowest quality-of-life jobs, with very low relative pay does mean something.
The best way we end up compensating for that, historically, is offering other forms of quality of life - more time to prepare outside of teaching, more job security, and some other limited benefits. Take away these things, and you fully transform the role into a job for masochists.
The cost dynamics never made sense to me - it really wouldn't cost that comparatively much to make teaching a desirably paid position, and the research positions that go along with them. Instead, what we get are colleges charging historically absurd cost increases every year to have, well, better sports teams, I can only guess.
I guess if this trend continues, we'll just move to compensating them with coupons to Subway, then rail at how so many of them get 20% off for how 'little' they do.
You can't enforce strict copyright. I'm saying this as someone who has worked on a lot of commercial software and games, even written copy protection systems of various kinds.
Public: Police services would charge the public far too much for any meaningful enforcement to make it practical - and we're already spending far more than any other nation on rule enforcement systems. It would either be far too spotty to be effective, or be politically impossible for many reasons, at least in a somewhat democratic system.
Private: DRM systems that get invasive enough to be effective (and there haven't been many for very long), will incur a drastic competitive disadvantage to competitors who are less invasive. Longterm strict DRM would not be sustainable for many, many reasons. DRM is in effect asking players to pay a tax in both money (bandwidth/dev costs) and quality (time, inconvenience) that is far, FAR too high for the results. Oh, and it will always break in commercial software to some degree - and be a giant point of failure, the more strict it gets.
Legal: Even with oceans of legal text, and lawsuits constantly popping up - you can't scale anywhere close to the level of "fixing the problem" using the legal system. Physical counterfeiting you can come close - but you can't stop the world from copying music from radio, or any of the thousands of ways copies of stuff can be made with a legal system. Some judges may be accommodating, but to scale to the level you'd need - even the most industry-friendly judge is going to get sick of the game and dance, and the whole thing is going to get shut down just by targeting such a large portion of the populace. Think the drug war is a travesty? A significant war on 'illegal copying' would catch even more in its net.
This system of vaguely increasing 'ISP warnings' followed by inconvenience is about as close to what you can expect to be tolerated. Give the industry the right to issue fines at will, and the backlash (and targeting failures) would be amazing.
Want to make a system that works? Look at Steam. That setup is amazing - promote the games, make it really easy, prioritize a good direct experience, make it easier and better on average than the Pirate Bay experience - and you'll get 70+% of your potential market. I know that 30% you think you're losing hurts in the gut a little - but irritating your customers with DRM will lose you much more over time, and devote a portion of your development setup towards a developer job everyone in the room will hate, taking up large parts of meetings, making everyone uptight about worrying about pirates, making your product worse.
Amazon and and iTunes and such also do a somewhat decent job, and getting into worse areas would be the XBox/Playstation marketplaces and EA's Origin - the sales techniques get more invasive the worse you go, and they get to feel less a good experience than The Pirate Bay as you travel along this road of annoyance.
I like being paid for my work - but I don't find DRM or annoying interfaces (including unnecessary network usage) to be good ways to make a living. People can and most definitely WILL buy software they would otherwise download if it is a good convenient experience, and if the software isn't sabotaged against use. Investing time in sabotaging your sofware is NOT time well spent.
Everyone in a position of being judged wants to show that they're productive compared to others. Without a strong force to oppose the progression towards everyone doing everything they can to look busy, the trend in every business is to force everyone towards a saturation point of perceived effort.
That tends to include things like more time filling out checklists, more time in more kinds of meetings, "peter principle"-style promotions, increasingly redundant cross-checks with everyone your work touches, and inevitable legacy management of previous projects.
Many of those projects, of course, will be created with the goal of reducing the overhead of other things, and some will succeed - but the culture always seems to still shift towards everyone at least acting busy so they can focus on what they see as more important with the discretionary time they have.
It's the nature of perspective - people will always see things slightly differently, have different priorities, and compromises will be made in any cooperation in order to make something that serves the shared needs. The more "important" perspectives you bring in over time, the more difficult it tends to become to optimize the shared collaboration, and the more time is needed to find a working compromise. And everyone becomes busy just to work through the ever-growing details.
There's simply been no compelling games for the system - and I'm saying that as a fan of most big-hitter Nintendo games, who has purchased all the previous major systems to play those big games, and a large number of the more quirky third party titles and RPGs too.
No Metroid Prime games (haunting and epic), no Mario Galaxy games (wonderful and diverse exploration), no Zelda games (charming and intricate systems to explore), no compelling RPGs over here at least (Dragon Quest, etc.), and nothing interesting like a Kirby game. Even the one captivating game I played at PAX - Pikmin 3 - hasn't even been released yet.
All I've noticed has been lame party games, shameless re-releases, cross-ports, and a freakin' zombie game. Even more for the download titles.
That is precisely a system that should not sell well.
If they wanted to sell this system, there's a risky thing they could do though - open up a downloadable game section devoted to indies, and release a quality free SDK. Only let them be free downloads, but allow an optional (based on developer intention) greenlight-style voting mechanism for them to become sold in the marketplace, with multiple voting questions like "is this game bug-free enough to be a professional product?" THEN, you can charge the indie developer for an in-house testing cycle and you can end up having something more than re-releases to remind people about. This likely wouldn't be acceptable to staunch managers from a software 'piracy' perspective, but if the system is selling so poorly - really, lure the potential pirates in, and let a community of indie developers convert them into paying customers.
Data scraping can work, as long as you have a team that can keep up with changes to the interface and counter various approaches to block the scraping-specific requests. Somehow, I don't think this will work for the long-term on Windows Phone systems - but then again, Windows Phone itself may not last too terribly long in this incarnation either, so it may be fine for its purpose, which is to latch onto low-information customers with shallow but momentary appealing features.
Ha! Am I biased, and selective in the messages I put out into the world? Yes - I'm a human being.
Is there anything wrong with that?
I just want appropriate labeling on the biased articles that are using misleading language to disguise the bias they are proffering.
I'm perfectly OK with bias - in fact, I highly encourage proselytizing and debate, and love to learn about religions of all sorts. I just don't appreciate approaches that use lies and distortions to push the proselytizing as if it were something it were not. Like with the Templeton foundation.
The key thing missing in the headline: "In treatment of depression".
Other things missing: "in one isolated study", "in an article summarizing the study, without any direct link to the research", and of course, "a highly biased interpretation meant to generate views based on obvious controversy."
Keep in mind, this may also be highly cultural, as many nations have much larger percentage non-believing populations, but not worse depression or suicide rates that correlate.
Basically, this advice either boils down to "get out if/while you can", or else we're going to have to take some amazing steps to even get a small portion of the population out of the gravity well.
Which is actually good advice from one perspective - it's a very good negotiating approach.
We know that all paths we see before us seem to lead to epic population tragedies.
The cost of each of them is almost unlimited, in terms of taking away a meaningful future for humanity.
The private sector very strongly resists any attempt to do basic non-commercial research that can lead to a solution to any of these tragedies (and in fact is at least the indirect cause of many of them).
The reasonable answer, without requesting it, would seem to be an increase in funding by many of the nations of the earth for basic research. An increase in space exploration by China, for instance, would lead to a new space race, meaning more research and education.
More research and education will lead to progress towards solving basic problems, and possible escape from earth.
But for now in the US, conservatives think it will lead to more liberals, so it will be opposed strongly until they fear China enough to allow some progress.
Why own a large device pretending to be a smartphone, when you can just use a smart phone?
I mean, if it were set up out of the box to be used for business and, well, PC gaming out of the box, then I'd be interested in a system with Windows 8... but instead, it's an OS that is very ashamed of being a PC, and every time I access it's configuration, I'm going to see whole-screen interfaces, and other throwbacks to pre-3.1 Windows concepts that phones need to use, and for some reason are pushed everywhere in Windows 8.
Why would I use a system that is reluctant at best, to serve as an OS the way I'd like to use it? I'll stick to Windows 7 for my PC games, and I can't imaging any of the businesses I've ever worked at wanting to switch to 8 either.
But I'm sure there's some folks that like Metro. I mean, Microsoft had to be focus testing with someone - I just can't imagine who'd select that interface as the better to use.
From the Journal of Mad Science: A Cure for Addiction
Crazy they called me! CRAZY! But it is not _I_ who have surrendered the war on drugs! I know drugs - and the only real cure is PAIN. And the best PAIN? Direct laser to the brain!
Now, I know what you're all thinking! Dr. Madd, you're thinking, the brain doesn't have any pain receptors! You're thinking I just want to cure addiction with death! Ha! Death is no cure - it is FAILURE.
For you see - this is not some fleshy-burny laser, oh no! This is a laser set to trigger two particular threshold states in the neurotransmitter pathways... specifically, the pathways relating to heat, and cold.
And as any CHILD knows, both of those combined equate to the sensation of PAIN. Raw, sweet PAIN - far sweeter than any drug. Such an all-encompassing PAIN.
Such ecstasy an horror is unleashed, that the mind scrambles through everything it can, just to make sense of it. The end result is usually one of two things - a hyper-receptive state, where the... subject is willing to accept instruction in thanks for the experience, or a simple silence that at least commits no more crimes such as seeking out drugs.
Such a cure! Were I a less modest man, I would call it a REVOLUTION in treatment!
I expect to be able to roll out full production within the next two to five years, and am highly interested in investments.
Importing people who will be automatically put into a process of exporting if they lose their job always seemed more than a bit cruel to me.
The effect of H1b has been to flood the market with fake job offers (intended to find no one available), increase the desperation of the average job seeker (where it doesn't lower wages directly, it has other effects), and to shift the job market gradually overseas as intimate knowledge of US business is shifted to people who aren't allowed to remain in the US market.
It's a mixed result - but mostly negative for the US at large.
Why not just allow more immigrants for technical fields? That way, they can start companies here, they don't have to live in such fear while working, and can pay socially beneficial taxes when they do (statistically) reach the higher incomes they are bound to reach.
Passing laws just to increase profit margins of companies at the expense of workers seems highly corrupt/inefficient. We're a nation of immigrants - we shouldn't shy away from making the nation stronger with citizens - and we've had huge problems with, um, drawing distinctions about labor variants of citizens in the past.
And a [spam]* sandwich is just a sandwich with [spam] as an ingredient. I won't eat a sandwich I suspect has [spam] in it, or smells of [spam]. I raise my eyebrows hearing so many people arguing that "you can hardly notice the [spam]", and "Mmm, mmm - you really got to try this, it's really great [spam]" in cases like these. I'm sure there really are some people who really like [spam], but it's not something anyone I've met would prefer over any other ingredient, given the choice.
*censored for increased Montey Python reference rating.
It's all associations. Associations with nature, associations from culture, associations we build from other music, etc. It's how our brain works, and how it's keyed to react to environmental events.
We can like fast driving beats because they match our excitement we've felt at other things. We can like slower rhythms for their likeness to intelligible patters we recognize in our lives. In general, the music just has to be present, and we'll generate the associations.
Dissonance just tends in our environments to get associated with things breaking, noises of discomfort, and instruments malfunctioning in one way or another.
Electronic music, like Commodore 64 music, has had to cope with odd dissonance being an element of its sometimes limited expressive set - and so has found interesting ways to blend in dissonance that gets interestingly divorced from the usual associations. It's why even though I'm not especially a musical connoisseur, I can appreciate some quality uses of dissonance in context.
When I was at PAX Dev a couple of weeks ago, one good way to get a laugh would be to mention virtually any player-manipulative or too openly copying large sections of games, then just insert the word 'Zynga'.
The words 'E.A.' will also get some laughs connected to generic corporate thuggery, but after the whole 'Worst Company in America" stuff, it's a bit overplayed.
In business economics, this is known as a negative externality, or costs imposed on others through your economic actions- and in modern business, negative externalities are almost something to be maximized, so long as they don't lead to direct consequences.
So yeah, as a modern business, this is exactly what is desired - enact a system that openly screws over everyone, so long as it can have some chance of benefiting your business in some way. Short-term interest is the primary motivation of publicly traded corporations, and indeed folks can and have been sued for not making it the first concern above all others.
From pollution, to overharvesting, to lawsuits, to claims on resources of all kinds - companies will always increase the rate at which they harm others as time goes on.
Ultimately, you need some public, long-term interests expressed as part of the legal/economic/legislative system, otherwise, we'll keep getting crap like this. It's why most of the more developed nations end up being more socially governed than the US has been over time.
Yeah - It was quite late when I posted, and I was a little, well, loopy by then. 5 days of convention events and parties would frazzle anyone, I'd think.
I've been to E3 before PAX existed, and this year I'm at PAX Prime (And PAX Dev), and it's been a totally better experience all around.
1. No booth babes - don't get me wrong, I love the female form, but there's a huge difference between PAX fans of all shapes dressed up in what they genuinely want to, with real life behind it, and the going-through-the-motions gals hired at E3. Don't get me wrong - companies still specifically hire marketing girls between 20-30 from agencies in a lot of cases, but the lowered sleaze factor helps in making for an environment where nerd-sexy can thrive - and I fully support that.
2. Parties are way better. I remember the Rockstar events at E3, and so on - but just last night, I came from a creepy, but superb costume party held in a Mansion clone of the level they've been demoing, compete with a rather well-done ARG - it was certainly money wasted that really should have gone into the development, but as long as these companies waste the money, I did find the whole experience far more compelling than "here's some drinks and music and trailers, don't you think we're cool."
3. The folks are really a functioning community. Any time there's a slack, of someone's having a hard time, you'll find a lot of humanity there. I left my laptop in a room on the first day, and a chain of people helped make sure it got to the lost-and-found - and that's just a tiny story. "Don't be a dick" is still in its functional golden era there, and it doesn't look like it's faltering soon.
Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of healthy skepticism and differences in opinion, and hardships exist all over (mostly from 70,000 people), but it all works remarkably well. Enforcers (small army of volunteers) helps too.
Final day is tomorrow - bittersweet and exhausting, but still awesome.
We have the technology, we can escape the gravity well if we REALLY want to... but thanks to our robot friends and other tools, we also know how little there is right away out there for us.
I agree with the overall idea that technology will advance faster than we can travel. Robots and engineered life will quickly advance to the point of making terraforming plausible to start within a lifetime, possibly making nearby planets worth the extreme costs of travel.
Moreover though, by the time we have a place to travel to to live long-term, we may find it easier to alter ourselves than our environment. What was a robot before may have the mind of a 'real' person in a dozen generations or so, or close enough to it.
As far as we've advanced in the past few centuries, I'd think we'd advance in all kinds of directions before the fruits of terraforming/long-term offworld housing would pay off.
Near-earth technology Sci-fi books always had to postulate that offworlders end up always clever enough to somehow advance scientifically at a rate many times faster than their home planet, and always seem to take place after the incalculable mass was already in place to have terraforming and long-term living already transferred to the moon/mars/wherever. But I don't think that romantic notion of offworld hyper-competence would ever get a chance to play out, compared to the rate of change we've been riding for centuries at an ever-increasing rate, even with revolutions and depressions.
Who thought that CPU's didn't bottleneck gaming performance? Who ever thought that? Only the smallest of tech demos only used GPU resources - every modern computer/console game I'm aware of uses, well, some regular programming language that needs a CPU to interpret instructions and is inherently limited by the standards of clock cycle and interrupt tied to those CPUs.
GPUs only tend to allow you to offload the strait-shot parallelized stuff - graphic blits, audio, textures & lighting - but the core of the game logic is still tied to the CPU. Even if you aren't straining the limits of the CPU in the final implementation, programmers are still limited by the capacity of them.
Otherwise, all our games would just be done with simple ray-traced logic, using pure geometry and physics, there would be no limits on the number or kind of interactions allowed in a game world, game logic would be built on unlimited tables of generated content, and we'd quickly build games of infinite recursion simulating all known aspects of the universe far beyond the shallow cut-out worlds we develop today.
But we can't properly design for that - we design for the CPUs we work with, and the other helper processors have never changed that.
Slashdot Mirror
I've worked on programming games of chance for various states and governments, and learned that's there's a lot of problems communicating odds/ratios/differences in the ways this test is laying things out, especially for wide audiences that will validly complain about the terms used.
While they're not always fully ambiguous, you're just going to get a large percentage of test-takers answering incorrectly for things they legitimately know, just because they were thinking 'wrong' about how the information was present at that moment. Now, while this does a good job of showing where real-life problems can mislead people - it does a poor job of testing the actual skills being taught, as it's testing too many distinct things in each question to be meaningful in measuring math alone.
In order to have these kinds of questions be meaningful, you'd have to ask several variants over 100's of questions to filter understanding of each aspect of the questions - and you couldn't do that in one sitting either - which is why these are bad questions for a test of math.
If you wanted to test understanding of language context, use a question just for that - a 'what is the best sentence to describe..', then you don't have to have it as part of every question, and can even use previous questions to establish a context.
What this seems designed to do, is provide poor test results for people who haven't been given special training about 'math sentences' (which don't correspond to much), so that they can inflate their "improvement" when people improve in their tests, which are mostly just about 'math sentences'.
That doesn't sound like a math class - that sounds like a product training class.
Richard Feynman would rant much about this.
Ryan Fenton
So... you're saying that the whole "we've got to alter the polarity on the deflector array" technobabble on Star Trek, may be retconned... as reality? With lasers, onto metals?
Daaaayyym.
Seriously though - neat new twist on material science, and great exploration of particle coupling/entanglement! Could result in some rather odd, but promising advances in chip design and layout.
Ryan Fenton
Sounds less like 'piracy', and more like early America, where our forebears had little stake in maintaining the seemingly unjust control of foreign interests, but much interest in creating a large body of works that the public could use to generate culture in this new world.
I'm sure there were a lot of folks an ocean away decrying the 'free ride' those Americans were taking then too - but those resources had some heavy work to do, and it would rightly seem absurd at the to pay several times the cost of production for a 'licensed' book at the end of the day. What parts of culture we were able to 'steal' helped make us diverse and strong - and I don't blame any developing nation for wanting to repeat that, either officially, or unofficially like most nations.
Ryan Fenton
Using radio waves to track position/movement is VERY far from new. Even imaging through walls is extremely old hat. A control interface with 10cm+/- resolution would be drastically worse than any current game controller.
This isn't for gaming - it's use would be primarily for surveillance and automated 'security' tools of various kinds. It's not Xbox - its NSA/military/creepy 'spy' tools.
Ryan Fenton
A very good video showing movement mapped to real gameplay.
The obvious: It's not QUITE as 1-1 as a mouse with 4 inches of control surface.
But I'd still rate it a bit higher than a trackball, which is high praise from me, since I really enjoy using trackball inputs when a mouse isn't convenient.
This is a real accomplishment in input innovation - even without considering the dynamic haptic feedback portion of the design.
I'd be amazed, if this works as advertised, if Sony and Microsoft don't push for a copycat controller very rapidly - especially given the PC-like nature of their new consoles.
The remaining challenge: How would it fare against a 360/Dualshock controller in specialized console games. From what I've heard from developers so far:
Super Meat Boy dev trys out the Steam controller
It sounds like it's a good compromise overall - but it's still got some hurdles to clear to being "the best" - but man, it sounds promising so far!
Ryan Fenton
http://makibox.com/
$200 for PLA plasic-only, or $300 for one that handles ABS plastic too. Plastic is around $16/kg, and I just ordered the $200 one after reviewing the inventor's careful (and very honest engineer-style presentation) instructions on how to put it together.
It's an elegant setup, and a really nice looking toy, that might get some interesting use, but I won't even try and justify it on that count.
Here's it printing a Yoda figure:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xcvqI1yoU
It'll probably take a few months before it gets here, but it'll be a great home project.
Ryan Fenton
It would be nice if we could have careful training of each of our precious growing minds, for years and years, at the lowest possible cost, by people who did nothing but deeply care for the interests of who these people were going to be... but having teaching (and research) being one of the lowest quality-of-life jobs, with very low relative pay does mean something.
The best way we end up compensating for that, historically, is offering other forms of quality of life - more time to prepare outside of teaching, more job security, and some other limited benefits. Take away these things, and you fully transform the role into a job for masochists.
The cost dynamics never made sense to me - it really wouldn't cost that comparatively much to make teaching a desirably paid position, and the research positions that go along with them. Instead, what we get are colleges charging historically absurd cost increases every year to have, well, better sports teams, I can only guess.
I guess if this trend continues, we'll just move to compensating them with coupons to Subway, then rail at how so many of them get 20% off for how 'little' they do.
Ryan Fenton
You can't enforce strict copyright. I'm saying this as someone who has worked on a lot of commercial software and games, even written copy protection systems of various kinds.
Public: Police services would charge the public far too much for any meaningful enforcement to make it practical - and we're already spending far more than any other nation on rule enforcement systems. It would either be far too spotty to be effective, or be politically impossible for many reasons, at least in a somewhat democratic system.
Private: DRM systems that get invasive enough to be effective (and there haven't been many for very long), will incur a drastic competitive disadvantage to competitors who are less invasive. Longterm strict DRM would not be sustainable for many, many reasons. DRM is in effect asking players to pay a tax in both money (bandwidth/dev costs) and quality (time, inconvenience) that is far, FAR too high for the results. Oh, and it will always break in commercial software to some degree - and be a giant point of failure, the more strict it gets.
Legal: Even with oceans of legal text, and lawsuits constantly popping up - you can't scale anywhere close to the level of "fixing the problem" using the legal system. Physical counterfeiting you can come close - but you can't stop the world from copying music from radio, or any of the thousands of ways copies of stuff can be made with a legal system. Some judges may be accommodating, but to scale to the level you'd need - even the most industry-friendly judge is going to get sick of the game and dance, and the whole thing is going to get shut down just by targeting such a large portion of the populace. Think the drug war is a travesty? A significant war on 'illegal copying' would catch even more in its net.
This system of vaguely increasing 'ISP warnings' followed by inconvenience is about as close to what you can expect to be tolerated. Give the industry the right to issue fines at will, and the backlash (and targeting failures) would be amazing.
Want to make a system that works? Look at Steam. That setup is amazing - promote the games, make it really easy, prioritize a good direct experience, make it easier and better on average than the Pirate Bay experience - and you'll get 70+% of your potential market. I know that 30% you think you're losing hurts in the gut a little - but irritating your customers with DRM will lose you much more over time, and devote a portion of your development setup towards a developer job everyone in the room will hate, taking up large parts of meetings, making everyone uptight about worrying about pirates, making your product worse.
Amazon and and iTunes and such also do a somewhat decent job, and getting into worse areas would be the XBox/Playstation marketplaces and EA's Origin - the sales techniques get more invasive the worse you go, and they get to feel less a good experience than The Pirate Bay as you travel along this road of annoyance.
I like being paid for my work - but I don't find DRM or annoying interfaces (including unnecessary network usage) to be good ways to make a living. People can and most definitely WILL buy software they would otherwise download if it is a good convenient experience, and if the software isn't sabotaged against use. Investing time in sabotaging your sofware is NOT time well spent.
Ryan Fenton
Everyone in a position of being judged wants to show that they're productive compared to others. Without a strong force to oppose the progression towards everyone doing everything they can to look busy, the trend in every business is to force everyone towards a saturation point of perceived effort.
That tends to include things like more time filling out checklists, more time in more kinds of meetings, "peter principle"-style promotions, increasingly redundant cross-checks with everyone your work touches, and inevitable legacy management of previous projects.
Many of those projects, of course, will be created with the goal of reducing the overhead of other things, and some will succeed - but the culture always seems to still shift towards everyone at least acting busy so they can focus on what they see as more important with the discretionary time they have.
It's the nature of perspective - people will always see things slightly differently, have different priorities, and compromises will be made in any cooperation in order to make something that serves the shared needs. The more "important" perspectives you bring in over time, the more difficult it tends to become to optimize the shared collaboration, and the more time is needed to find a working compromise. And everyone becomes busy just to work through the ever-growing details.
Ryan Fenton
There's simply been no compelling games for the system - and I'm saying that as a fan of most big-hitter Nintendo games, who has purchased all the previous major systems to play those big games, and a large number of the more quirky third party titles and RPGs too.
No Metroid Prime games (haunting and epic), no Mario Galaxy games (wonderful and diverse exploration), no Zelda games (charming and intricate systems to explore), no compelling RPGs over here at least (Dragon Quest, etc.), and nothing interesting like a Kirby game. Even the one captivating game I played at PAX - Pikmin 3 - hasn't even been released yet.
All I've noticed has been lame party games, shameless re-releases, cross-ports, and a freakin' zombie game. Even more for the download titles.
That is precisely a system that should not sell well.
If they wanted to sell this system, there's a risky thing they could do though - open up a downloadable game section devoted to indies, and release a quality free SDK. Only let them be free downloads, but allow an optional (based on developer intention) greenlight-style voting mechanism for them to become sold in the marketplace, with multiple voting questions like "is this game bug-free enough to be a professional product?" THEN, you can charge the indie developer for an in-house testing cycle and you can end up having something more than re-releases to remind people about. This likely wouldn't be acceptable to staunch managers from a software 'piracy' perspective, but if the system is selling so poorly - really, lure the potential pirates in, and let a community of indie developers convert them into paying customers.
Ryan Fenton
Data scraping can work, as long as you have a team that can keep up with changes to the interface and counter various approaches to block the scraping-specific requests. Somehow, I don't think this will work for the long-term on Windows Phone systems - but then again, Windows Phone itself may not last too terribly long in this incarnation either, so it may be fine for its purpose, which is to latch onto low-information customers with shallow but momentary appealing features.
Ryan Fenton
Ha! Am I biased, and selective in the messages I put out into the world? Yes - I'm a human being.
Is there anything wrong with that?
I just want appropriate labeling on the biased articles that are using misleading language to disguise the bias they are proffering.
I'm perfectly OK with bias - in fact, I highly encourage proselytizing and debate, and love to learn about religions of all sorts. I just don't appreciate approaches that use lies and distortions to push the proselytizing as if it were something it were not. Like with the Templeton foundation.
Ryan Fenton
The key thing missing in the headline: "In treatment of depression".
Other things missing: "in one isolated study", "in an article summarizing the study, without any direct link to the research", and of course, "a highly biased interpretation meant to generate views based on obvious controversy."
Keep in mind, this may also be highly cultural, as many nations have much larger percentage non-believing populations, but not worse depression or suicide rates that correlate.
Ryan Fenton
http://what-if.xkcd.com/7/
Basically, this advice either boils down to "get out if/while you can", or else we're going to have to take some amazing steps to even get a small portion of the population out of the gravity well.
Which is actually good advice from one perspective - it's a very good negotiating approach.
We know that all paths we see before us seem to lead to epic population tragedies.
The cost of each of them is almost unlimited, in terms of taking away a meaningful future for humanity.
The private sector very strongly resists any attempt to do basic non-commercial research that can lead to a solution to any of these tragedies (and in fact is at least the indirect cause of many of them).
The reasonable answer, without requesting it, would seem to be an increase in funding by many of the nations of the earth for basic research. An increase in space exploration by China, for instance, would lead to a new space race, meaning more research and education.
More research and education will lead to progress towards solving basic problems, and possible escape from earth.
But for now in the US, conservatives think it will lead to more liberals, so it will be opposed strongly until they fear China enough to allow some progress.
Ryan Fenton
Why own a large device pretending to be a smartphone, when you can just use a smart phone?
I mean, if it were set up out of the box to be used for business and, well, PC gaming out of the box, then I'd be interested in a system with Windows 8... but instead, it's an OS that is very ashamed of being a PC, and every time I access it's configuration, I'm going to see whole-screen interfaces, and other throwbacks to pre-3.1 Windows concepts that phones need to use, and for some reason are pushed everywhere in Windows 8.
Why would I use a system that is reluctant at best, to serve as an OS the way I'd like to use it? I'll stick to Windows 7 for my PC games, and I can't imaging any of the businesses I've ever worked at wanting to switch to 8 either.
But I'm sure there's some folks that like Metro. I mean, Microsoft had to be focus testing with someone - I just can't imagine who'd select that interface as the better to use.
Ryan Fenton
From the Journal of Mad Science: A Cure for Addiction
Crazy they called me! CRAZY! But it is not _I_ who have surrendered the war on drugs! I know drugs - and the only real cure is PAIN. And the best PAIN? Direct laser to the brain!
Now, I know what you're all thinking! Dr. Madd, you're thinking, the brain doesn't have any pain receptors! You're thinking I just want to cure addiction with death! Ha! Death is no cure - it is FAILURE.
For you see - this is not some fleshy-burny laser, oh no! This is a laser set to trigger two particular threshold states in the neurotransmitter pathways... specifically, the pathways relating to heat, and cold.
And as any CHILD knows, both of those combined equate to the sensation of PAIN. Raw, sweet PAIN - far sweeter than any drug. Such an all-encompassing PAIN.
Such ecstasy an horror is unleashed, that the mind scrambles through everything it can, just to make sense of it. The end result is usually one of two things - a hyper-receptive state, where the ... subject is willing to accept instruction in thanks for the experience, or a simple silence that at least commits no more crimes such as seeking out drugs.
Such a cure! Were I a less modest man, I would call it a REVOLUTION in treatment!
I expect to be able to roll out full production within the next two to five years, and am highly interested in investments.
-Dr Maddeus Maddington Madd III, esq.
Importing people who will be automatically put into a process of exporting if they lose their job always seemed more than a bit cruel to me.
The effect of H1b has been to flood the market with fake job offers (intended to find no one available), increase the desperation of the average job seeker (where it doesn't lower wages directly, it has other effects), and to shift the job market gradually overseas as intimate knowledge of US business is shifted to people who aren't allowed to remain in the US market.
It's a mixed result - but mostly negative for the US at large.
Why not just allow more immigrants for technical fields? That way, they can start companies here, they don't have to live in such fear while working, and can pay socially beneficial taxes when they do (statistically) reach the higher incomes they are bound to reach.
Passing laws just to increase profit margins of companies at the expense of workers seems highly corrupt/inefficient. We're a nation of immigrants - we shouldn't shy away from making the nation stronger with citizens - and we've had huge problems with, um, drawing distinctions about labor variants of citizens in the past.
Ryan Fenton
I don't understand it.
Windows 8 is just Windows 7 PLUS metro.
And a [spam]* sandwich is just a sandwich with [spam] as an ingredient. I won't eat a sandwich I suspect has [spam] in it, or smells of [spam]. I raise my eyebrows hearing so many people arguing that "you can hardly notice the [spam]", and "Mmm, mmm - you really got to try this, it's really great [spam]" in cases like these. I'm sure there really are some people who really like [spam], but it's not something anyone I've met would prefer over any other ingredient, given the choice.
*censored for increased Montey Python reference rating.
Ryan Fenton
It's all associations. Associations with nature, associations from culture, associations we build from other music, etc. It's how our brain works, and how it's keyed to react to environmental events.
We can like fast driving beats because they match our excitement we've felt at other things. We can like slower rhythms for their likeness to intelligible patters we recognize in our lives. In general, the music just has to be present, and we'll generate the associations.
Dissonance just tends in our environments to get associated with things breaking, noises of discomfort, and instruments malfunctioning in one way or another.
Electronic music, like Commodore 64 music, has had to cope with odd dissonance being an element of its sometimes limited expressive set - and so has found interesting ways to blend in dissonance that gets interestingly divorced from the usual associations. It's why even though I'm not especially a musical connoisseur, I can appreciate some quality uses of dissonance in context.
Ryan Fenton
When I was at PAX Dev a couple of weeks ago, one good way to get a laugh would be to mention virtually any player-manipulative or too openly copying large sections of games, then just insert the word 'Zynga'.
The words 'E.A.' will also get some laughs connected to generic corporate thuggery, but after the whole 'Worst Company in America" stuff, it's a bit overplayed.
Ryan Fenton
In business economics, this is known as a negative externality, or costs imposed on others through your economic actions- and in modern business, negative externalities are almost something to be maximized, so long as they don't lead to direct consequences.
So yeah, as a modern business, this is exactly what is desired - enact a system that openly screws over everyone, so long as it can have some chance of benefiting your business in some way. Short-term interest is the primary motivation of publicly traded corporations, and indeed folks can and have been sued for not making it the first concern above all others.
From pollution, to overharvesting, to lawsuits, to claims on resources of all kinds - companies will always increase the rate at which they harm others as time goes on.
Ultimately, you need some public, long-term interests expressed as part of the legal/economic/legislative system, otherwise, we'll keep getting crap like this. It's why most of the more developed nations end up being more socially governed than the US has been over time.
Ryan Fenton
Yeah - It was quite late when I posted, and I was a little, well, loopy by then. 5 days of convention events and parties would frazzle anyone, I'd think.
Ryan Fenton
I've been to E3 before PAX existed, and this year I'm at PAX Prime (And PAX Dev), and it's been a totally better experience all around.
1. No booth babes - don't get me wrong, I love the female form, but there's a huge difference between PAX fans of all shapes dressed up in what they genuinely want to, with real life behind it, and the going-through-the-motions gals hired at E3. Don't get me wrong - companies still specifically hire marketing girls between 20-30 from agencies in a lot of cases, but the lowered sleaze factor helps in making for an environment where nerd-sexy can thrive - and I fully support that.
2. Parties are way better. I remember the Rockstar events at E3, and so on - but just last night, I came from a creepy, but superb costume party held in a Mansion clone of the level they've been demoing, compete with a rather well-done ARG - it was certainly money wasted that really should have gone into the development, but as long as these companies waste the money, I did find the whole experience far more compelling than "here's some drinks and music and trailers, don't you think we're cool."
3. The folks are really a functioning community. Any time there's a slack, of someone's having a hard time, you'll find a lot of humanity there. I left my laptop in a room on the first day, and a chain of people helped make sure it got to the lost-and-found - and that's just a tiny story. "Don't be a dick" is still in its functional golden era there, and it doesn't look like it's faltering soon.
Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of healthy skepticism and differences in opinion, and hardships exist all over (mostly from 70,000 people), but it all works remarkably well. Enforcers (small army of volunteers) helps too.
Final day is tomorrow - bittersweet and exhausting, but still awesome.
Ryan Fenton
Obligitory XKCD
We have the technology, we can escape the gravity well if we REALLY want to... but thanks to our robot friends and other tools, we also know how little there is right away out there for us.
I agree with the overall idea that technology will advance faster than we can travel. Robots and engineered life will quickly advance to the point of making terraforming plausible to start within a lifetime, possibly making nearby planets worth the extreme costs of travel.
Moreover though, by the time we have a place to travel to to live long-term, we may find it easier to alter ourselves than our environment. What was a robot before may have the mind of a 'real' person in a dozen generations or so, or close enough to it.
As far as we've advanced in the past few centuries, I'd think we'd advance in all kinds of directions before the fruits of terraforming/long-term offworld housing would pay off.
Near-earth technology Sci-fi books always had to postulate that offworlders end up always clever enough to somehow advance scientifically at a rate many times faster than their home planet, and always seem to take place after the incalculable mass was already in place to have terraforming and long-term living already transferred to the moon/mars/wherever. But I don't think that romantic notion of offworld hyper-competence would ever get a chance to play out, compared to the rate of change we've been riding for centuries at an ever-increasing rate, even with revolutions and depressions.
Ryan Fenton
Who thought that CPU's didn't bottleneck gaming performance? Who ever thought that? Only the smallest of tech demos only used GPU resources - every modern computer/console game I'm aware of uses, well, some regular programming language that needs a CPU to interpret instructions and is inherently limited by the standards of clock cycle and interrupt tied to those CPUs.
GPUs only tend to allow you to offload the strait-shot parallelized stuff - graphic blits, audio, textures & lighting - but the core of the game logic is still tied to the CPU. Even if you aren't straining the limits of the CPU in the final implementation, programmers are still limited by the capacity of them.
Otherwise, all our games would just be done with simple ray-traced logic, using pure geometry and physics, there would be no limits on the number or kind of interactions allowed in a game world, game logic would be built on unlimited tables of generated content, and we'd quickly build games of infinite recursion simulating all known aspects of the universe far beyond the shallow cut-out worlds we develop today.
But we can't properly design for that - we design for the CPUs we work with, and the other helper processors have never changed that.
Ryan Fenton