What do you think a gifted child needs, particularly? Gifted children are already pretty much set; they don't need one on one instruction, they don't need remedial materials. Between the internet and local libraries, the one thing often missing from such a program is a talented gifted education teacher to guide them and fill something more then the "supervisor" role they often fall into. Google's lecture series alone holds enough interesting material that a teacher in a gifted education program could put a diverse exposure to subjects.
Of course, the sports program is something that A) draws in money, and B) gets local and state attention, and serves to advertise student athletes to recruiters working for our bizarre college athletic program. Basically, football should just about pay for the whole thing; if people paid to watch your Knowledge Bowl team, maybe you'd have gotten the pocket protectors or whatever it is you're seeking here.
Who decided that things that measure tilt should be called "accelerometers"? They can be used to measure acceleration, but thats not what the sensor directly measures!
Moreover, EA isn't a successful game creator, they're successful as a game publisher. This means focusing on the traditional business areas: marketing, advertising, and financing. None of which is promoted via this Canadian contest. This isn't about making the next EA or Ubisoft, it's about making the next company for EA to buy and lay to waste.
I think the fact that microcredit took so long to succeed had less to to with understanding people than administrative costs. The men who won the 2006 Nobel peace prize were both giving microloans in their own countries. And they started in 1976. The Mises Foundation seems to believe that the markets haven't catered to the poor because they're unprofitable, generally citing heresay on the profitability of microloans and the closed books the Nobel winners run their company on. If it does become profitable, it will be in part by finding ways to reach broad numbers of people. What scares me is how quickly this begins to sound like a credit card.
Maybe I'm just reading this Wikipedia wrong, but isn't this just talking about loaning money placed in savings accounts? It's not like they're secretly minting money in the back room, they're just not holding onto all the money given to them in the bank. The amount they keep on hand is the fractional reserve. The money they loan out comes directly from deposits. Now, economically, giving out these loans does create money, but you'd have to have had quite a few drinks before your econ class to learn this and not learn why its okay. It creates money because loans in aggregate come back through the banking system as deposits!
I played the old Final Fantasy games, on the systems for which they were designed. I guess this makes me an "old guard player". But I stopped playing FF for exactly the reasons the Gambit system makes clear: the minor battles are boring and repetitive. At the time I was enthusiastic at how FF6 included the option to "remember" the commands you gave out last time; I was less focused on the reason why this was useful - you do the same damn commands most of the time to level up. character 1 fight, character 2 fight, character C special melee attack, character 4 heal.
Essentially, you the game player, can be replaced by a disturbingly small shell script. I believe the "game" Progress Quest proved how fun that is.
At least to me, the system in practice is quite ugly. A beautiful capitalist system wouldn't have retailers and manufacturers leaving dollars on the table for end consumers. When faced with highly limited supply, a dutch auction would do a better job for manufacturers, and cut out the middlemen warehousers, retailers, and ebayers. If Sony had only made a few hundred thousand more, these ebayers might have even ran at a loss, which at least I would appreciate.
You know, this raises an interesting question (at least to me). If many people can see into the future, what would happen to stock valuations? Seems like the worst that would happen is stocks would move sooner on events than otherwise would, and speculation dies out.
The irony here is that I've heard multiple accounts that there is a working WoW client for linux that was never released. Seems that Blizzard isn't waiting to realize to port the game, but waiting to give it to customers.
The ideas the article brings up is more a design of AI problem (and computer hardware) than a game design problem. Moving from local decision making to a coherent strategy isn't much of a win for humans. Pattern recognition, like believed to be helpful in Go, is making progress and I suspect something like Deep Blue's processor power applied there would probably make significant improvements over the best efforts made today.
However, the place a computer is really at a disadvantage is predicting the behavior of other players. People are really good at this sort of thing, but nobody's quite sure how to even write a program that attempts this, let alone one that does so quickly. Predicting behavior requires a set of skills largely centered around common knowledge. This is what makes Counter-Strike stealth games so much fun in the absence of cheating; near the end of a round its a game of predicting your opponent's behavior and capitalizing on that while not being predictable yourself. It becomes a game of letting information (sound primarily) out intentionally to mislead your opponent and knife them in the head.
This is slightly different than "strategy." Strategy can be something as simple as noticing that the key to winning Starcraft is the investment curve, and avoiding dents in the curve, or noticing that 1 battle of 10 vs 10 units will fare worse for you than one battle of 11 vs 10 or ten battles of 10 vs 1. (aka the concept of concentrated fire and superior numbers). Essentailly, what people are far better at than computers is the strategy of manipulating your opponent.
Another example of a bad computer game is Pictionary. It's not so much about vocabulary as it is communicating based on common knowledge and perceptions. A pair of robots could perhaps use bar codes or other common knowledge communication schemes to circumvent the rules, but a robot and a human pair would have significant disadvantage.
The author's heart is in the right place, but they need to keep thinking on that for a bit. I'm sure they can come up with several such games.
It's a tradegy of the primary and secondary education system that logic puzzles are consistantly of the form "Bob is tom's neighbor, dave's house is not green" and so on such of the form of Einstein's puzzle. In formal logic, the meaning of english sentences is lightly touched upon, but far from the focus. Instead, the focus is on things like Natural Deduction (things like, if and only if, Law of Excluded Middles, and implication), first order logic (for all x, such and such is true, or there exists an x such that blah is true). CS courses typically use those as a starting point for moving into programming logic, which is useful in proving that a does something useful, like sorting an array. Much of it you use in your daily life implicity, and most of the consequences are built into a good programmer's mind pretty much universally before they have the chance to learn about it. But it should come as no surprise that it's possible to construct a program that is difficult to be sure is correct, and formal logic is the toolset we use to fall back on in such cases.
Why can't we do both? Admittedly, far more people know how to explain complexity theory than teach undergraduates why x=x+5 isn't completely insane. But 4 years is a long time, especially at 5 classes a semester. There's no reason a ciricculum can't teach students how to program, and then teach them how to find a solution to a problem that runs quickly if they were to program it.
The sad thing is that there DO exist CS programs where programming is extra-ciriculuar, and EVERYTHING is theoretical. Theory is important, vitally so at the higher levels of Computer Science research, but there's no reason to cripple the graduates in your own program because nobody on staff feels comfortable teaching C. Maybe bringing nachOS to Java is harming our graduate's abilities to work at the system level, WHEN BUILDING A SYSTEM.
Most people disparaging theory are the "if I can get a job programming without a degree, degrees aren't that important" types who want to apply their situation 20 years ago to young people today. I don't know why they feel the need to disparage education, their experience should have done them well, and its not like graduates fresh out of college are "better" than they are.
But they are at certain disadvantages: heavy software engineering, especially defense contractors, are moving towards proving their code is correct. This is an approach we spend three semesters educating students on, from different perspectives and intensities. At the beginning we simply try to get them to think about loop invariants, which we find is the hardest topic to grasp if they're just exposed to "programming logic 101." We then run a course that covers natural deduction, first order logic, programming logic and ends with some temporal state logic oriented towards the department's Validation and Verification research--things like Globally and Until. Finally our algorithms course covers the design of, correctness and runtime complexity of algoritms, with a proof oriented structure. Hopefully, in combination with a few math classes, they're well prepared to handle making statements and assertions about their program's pre and post conditions, if not whether the post conditions are satisfied from the preconditions.
This is why, if your intended for CS graduates to go forth and write software, whether their title be "programmer", or "developer", or "software engineer," I suggest logic courses. Statistics is also useful, if only because so many benchmarks and other research projects use faulty statistics.
You've probably never heard them call it the first derivative because they call it "marginal rate". It's so important they came up with their own jargon to confuse people who aren't in the in-group. Most of what businessmen deal with is rates of change, ie "everything is on the margin," but the only way we know what the curve even looks like is through statistics.
Thats one link found buried in the wiki. I never really noticed much difference. In fact, as an Edgy tester, a ton of the proposed artwork never hit the repo at all. This is partly because, as a glimpse at that single step in the process ("Polish") will show you, there's a ton of ideas floating around. However, much of the art concepts were incorporated. I vaguely also recall a page somewhere that pretty much had the boot splash concept as a login screen, but I can't find it currently. It may be that the bootsplash had some longstanding problems and the art team wasn't responsible for it as there is a portion of programming involved there.
Of course, if you don't like the theme as it stands, search your repos for things like "blubuntu" or "tropic". Maybe some day an ambitious junior college graphics design course will have "make a gdk theme" for a project instead of the silly fake things they do now (obviously this would be more online oriented than print oriented). Doesn't seem like we can do much worse, though there could problems regarding Adobe.
A combination of Waacom Tablet & Apple MacBook for a tablet (I'd pay for that!) I haven't tried it, partly because I don't own a valid copy of OSX, but one could probably throw OSX on a tablet PC like my Toshiba Tecra; Linux mostly works, I don't see why it would be a challenge to get OSX to cooperate.
Apple isn't restricting my creativity; I primarily use Linux, if only because I find "only saving myself some money" worthwhile and interesting. They're certainly restricting the creativity of people who want to legally do things like put OSX on a tablet PC. Most people I know aren't very concerned with that, but it does force them to be somewhat mysterious and underground about it when it isn't legal.
How many people do you know of that are using XNU in some innovative and interesting way that is eliminated by this new license agreement... so far I'm counting 1 and he's pretty questionable.
Unless you count running OSX on a laptop you already own as interesting...;)
The silly thing is that anybody interested in using Apple's source to remove copy protection from OSX won't be bothered by the small hurdle of violating a license agreement. But AFAIK, XNU is the OSX kernel, and there is source code available. I have no idea how hard you'd have to stretch your personal concept of "Operating System" to where running traditional OSX binaries on a modified / recompiled version of the XNU, but for me, at least, that's really where the OS is at. Not a collection of software, but more like 'the program on a computer that's always running.'
So to me, this is indeed something of a threat to those interested in XNU and those interested in modifying it, and not a threat to those who intend to write small simple applications on top of it, as the GP seemed to suggest.
"And on the other hand again, am I the only one who remembers when a console used to come with a game and two controllers?"
I do. It seems silly to sell something nearly worthless on its own, on the one hand. On the other, I wound up buying a stand alone SNES and Zelda instead of the bundle with Mario World. Given the ridiculous amounts of friends of mine who already had Mario World, the bundle seemed pointless. I also opted for the fabulous ASCII controller, instead of the decent but comparatively inferior Nintendo product, as a second controller. I guess what I'm saying is that choice is good, and in as much as bundles represent forcing expensive choices on consumers, I'm against such bundling. You mention accessories as a stealth cost, but if I'm going to have to pay for a memory card, I'd rather have free reign to choose a card that fits my capacity and price needs, to put this into a modern perspective
However, the price of games and software in the modern perspective seems awfully independent of the cost to manufacture these days. A pressed and lightly packaged version of Wii Sports included with every system seems like it should be cheap enough that it would be a drop in the bucket. If that means the Wii costs a dollar more than it would otherwise, that's fine by me. I don't think that was quite the case with Mario World. Additionally, there's nobody around I'd trust anymore to make a quality controller for the Wii, not even a year after.
Slashdot Mirror
What do you think a gifted child needs, particularly? Gifted children are already pretty much set; they don't need one on one instruction, they don't need remedial materials. Between the internet and local libraries, the one thing often missing from such a program is a talented gifted education teacher to guide them and fill something more then the "supervisor" role they often fall into. Google's lecture series alone holds enough interesting material that a teacher in a gifted education program could put a diverse exposure to subjects.
Of course, the sports program is something that A) draws in money, and B) gets local and state attention, and serves to advertise student athletes to recruiters working for our bizarre college athletic program. Basically, football should just about pay for the whole thing; if people paid to watch your Knowledge Bowl team, maybe you'd have gotten the pocket protectors or whatever it is you're seeking here.
I guess my big hangup is that an object experiences 1G at rest, and 0G in a freefall.
Who decided that things that measure tilt should be called "accelerometers"? They can be used to measure acceleration, but thats not what the sensor directly measures!
Moreover, EA isn't a successful game creator, they're successful as a game publisher. This means focusing on the traditional business areas: marketing, advertising, and financing. None of which is promoted via this Canadian contest. This isn't about making the next EA or Ubisoft, it's about making the next company for EA to buy and lay to waste.
I think the fact that microcredit took so long to succeed had less to to with understanding people than administrative costs. The men who won the 2006 Nobel peace prize were both giving microloans in their own countries. And they started in 1976. The Mises Foundation seems to believe that the markets haven't catered to the poor because they're unprofitable, generally citing heresay on the profitability of microloans and the closed books the Nobel winners run their company on. If it does become profitable, it will be in part by finding ways to reach broad numbers of people. What scares me is how quickly this begins to sound like a credit card.
Maybe I'm just reading this Wikipedia wrong, but isn't this just talking about loaning money placed in savings accounts? It's not like they're secretly minting money in the back room, they're just not holding onto all the money given to them in the bank. The amount they keep on hand is the fractional reserve. The money they loan out comes directly from deposits. Now, economically, giving out these loans does create money, but you'd have to have had quite a few drinks before your econ class to learn this and not learn why its okay. It creates money because loans in aggregate come back through the banking system as deposits!
I played the old Final Fantasy games, on the systems for which they were designed. I guess this makes me an "old guard player". But I stopped playing FF for exactly the reasons the Gambit system makes clear: the minor battles are boring and repetitive. At the time I was enthusiastic at how FF6 included the option to "remember" the commands you gave out last time; I was less focused on the reason why this was useful - you do the same damn commands most of the time to level up. character 1 fight, character 2 fight, character C special melee attack, character 4 heal.
Essentially, you the game player, can be replaced by a disturbingly small shell script. I believe the "game" Progress Quest proved how fun that is.
At least to me, the system in practice is quite ugly. A beautiful capitalist system wouldn't have retailers and manufacturers leaving dollars on the table for end consumers. When faced with highly limited supply, a dutch auction would do a better job for manufacturers, and cut out the middlemen warehousers, retailers, and ebayers. If Sony had only made a few hundred thousand more, these ebayers might have even ran at a loss, which at least I would appreciate.
Oh, yea, how I long for those cerebral days of DooM and Quake. And Scorched Earth.
You know, this raises an interesting question (at least to me). If many people can see into the future, what would happen to stock valuations? Seems like the worst that would happen is stocks would move sooner on events than otherwise would, and speculation dies out.
You clearly don't remember the "Enos lives" campaign. Apparently Enos meant the Ninth of September. I'd say ///7 is an improvement, comparatively.
Ok. Now our student with experience in VLSI asks why it doesn't result in x tending towards MAXINT. How do you quickly remedy his thought process.
It's the same writing and research skills they're missing, but ON A COMPUTER!
The irony here is that I've heard multiple accounts that there is a working WoW client for linux that was never released. Seems that Blizzard isn't waiting to realize to port the game, but waiting to give it to customers.
The ideas the article brings up is more a design of AI problem (and computer hardware) than a game design problem. Moving from local decision making to a coherent strategy isn't much of a win for humans. Pattern recognition, like believed to be helpful in Go, is making progress and I suspect something like Deep Blue's processor power applied there would probably make significant improvements over the best efforts made today.
However, the place a computer is really at a disadvantage is predicting the behavior of other players. People are really good at this sort of thing, but nobody's quite sure how to even write a program that attempts this, let alone one that does so quickly. Predicting behavior requires a set of skills largely centered around common knowledge. This is what makes Counter-Strike stealth games so much fun in the absence of cheating; near the end of a round its a game of predicting your opponent's behavior and capitalizing on that while not being predictable yourself. It becomes a game of letting information (sound primarily) out intentionally to mislead your opponent and knife them in the head.
This is slightly different than "strategy." Strategy can be something as simple as noticing that the key to winning Starcraft is the investment curve, and avoiding dents in the curve, or noticing that 1 battle of 10 vs 10 units will fare worse for you than one battle of 11 vs 10 or ten battles of 10 vs 1. (aka the concept of concentrated fire and superior numbers). Essentailly, what people are far better at than computers is the strategy of manipulating your opponent.
Another example of a bad computer game is Pictionary. It's not so much about vocabulary as it is communicating based on common knowledge and perceptions. A pair of robots could perhaps use bar codes or other common knowledge communication schemes to circumvent the rules, but a robot and a human pair would have significant disadvantage.
The author's heart is in the right place, but they need to keep thinking on that for a bit. I'm sure they can come up with several such games.
It's a tradegy of the primary and secondary education system that logic puzzles are consistantly of the form "Bob is tom's neighbor, dave's house is not green" and so on such of the form of Einstein's puzzle. In formal logic, the meaning of english sentences is lightly touched upon, but far from the focus. Instead, the focus is on things like Natural Deduction (things like, if and only if, Law of Excluded Middles, and implication), first order logic (for all x, such and such is true, or there exists an x such that blah is true). CS courses typically use those as a starting point for moving into programming logic, which is useful in proving that a does something useful, like sorting an array. Much of it you use in your daily life implicity, and most of the consequences are built into a good programmer's mind pretty much universally before they have the chance to learn about it. But it should come as no surprise that it's possible to construct a program that is difficult to be sure is correct, and formal logic is the toolset we use to fall back on in such cases.
Why can't we do both? Admittedly, far more people know how to explain complexity theory than teach undergraduates why x=x+5 isn't completely insane. But 4 years is a long time, especially at 5 classes a semester. There's no reason a ciricculum can't teach students how to program, and then teach them how to find a solution to a problem that runs quickly if they were to program it.
The sad thing is that there DO exist CS programs where programming is extra-ciriculuar, and EVERYTHING is theoretical. Theory is important, vitally so at the higher levels of Computer Science research, but there's no reason to cripple the graduates in your own program because nobody on staff feels comfortable teaching C. Maybe bringing nachOS to Java is harming our graduate's abilities to work at the system level, WHEN BUILDING A SYSTEM.
Most people disparaging theory are the "if I can get a job programming without a degree, degrees aren't that important" types who want to apply their situation 20 years ago to young people today. I don't know why they feel the need to disparage education, their experience should have done them well, and its not like graduates fresh out of college are "better" than they are.
But they are at certain disadvantages: heavy software engineering, especially defense contractors, are moving towards proving their code is correct. This is an approach we spend three semesters educating students on, from different perspectives and intensities. At the beginning we simply try to get them to think about loop invariants, which we find is the hardest topic to grasp if they're just exposed to "programming logic 101." We then run a course that covers natural deduction, first order logic, programming logic and ends with some temporal state logic oriented towards the department's Validation and Verification research--things like Globally and Until. Finally our algorithms course covers the design of, correctness and runtime complexity of algoritms, with a proof oriented structure. Hopefully, in combination with a few math classes, they're well prepared to handle making statements and assertions about their program's pre and post conditions, if not whether the post conditions are satisfied from the preconditions.
This is why, if your intended for CS graduates to go forth and write software, whether their title be "programmer", or "developer", or "software engineer," I suggest logic courses. Statistics is also useful, if only because so many benchmarks and other research projects use faulty statistics.
You've probably never heard them call it the first derivative because they call it "marginal rate". It's so important they came up with their own jargon to confuse people who aren't in the in-group. Most of what businessmen deal with is rates of change, ie "everything is on the margin," but the only way we know what the curve even looks like is through statistics.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Specs/EdgyArtworkP lan/Polish/Incoming
Thats one link found buried in the wiki. I never really noticed much difference. In fact, as an Edgy tester, a ton of the proposed artwork never hit the repo at all. This is partly because, as a glimpse at that single step in the process ("Polish") will show you, there's a ton of ideas floating around. However, much of the art concepts were incorporated. I vaguely also recall a page somewhere that pretty much had the boot splash concept as a login screen, but I can't find it currently. It may be that the bootsplash had some longstanding problems and the art team wasn't responsible for it as there is a portion of programming involved there.
Of course, if you don't like the theme as it stands, search your repos for things like "blubuntu" or "tropic". Maybe some day an ambitious junior college graphics design course will have "make a gdk theme" for a project instead of the silly fake things they do now (obviously this would be more online oriented than print oriented). Doesn't seem like we can do much worse, though there could problems regarding Adobe.
With 300 billion spent in the US alone fixing it, it seems like a significant "disaster" even if most people managed to avoid it.
A combination of Waacom Tablet & Apple MacBook for a tablet (I'd pay for that!)
I haven't tried it, partly because I don't own a valid copy of OSX, but one could probably throw OSX on a tablet PC like my Toshiba Tecra; Linux mostly works, I don't see why it would be a challenge to get OSX to cooperate.
Apple isn't restricting my creativity; I primarily use Linux, if only because I find "only saving myself some money" worthwhile and interesting. They're certainly restricting the creativity of people who want to legally do things like put OSX on a tablet PC. Most people I know aren't very concerned with that, but it does force them to be somewhat mysterious and underground about it when it isn't legal.
How many people do you know of that are using XNU in some innovative and interesting way that is eliminated by this new license agreement... so far I'm counting 1 and he's pretty questionable.
;)
Unless you count running OSX on a laptop you already own as interesting...
The silly thing is that anybody interested in using Apple's source to remove copy protection from OSX won't be bothered by the small hurdle of violating a license agreement. But AFAIK, XNU is the OSX kernel, and there is source code available. I have no idea how hard you'd have to stretch your personal concept of "Operating System" to where running traditional OSX binaries on a modified / recompiled version of the XNU, but for me, at least, that's really where the OS is at. Not a collection of software, but more like 'the program on a computer that's always running.'
So to me, this is indeed something of a threat to those interested in XNU and those interested in modifying it, and not a threat to those who intend to write small simple applications on top of it, as the GP seemed to suggest.
"And on the other hand again, am I the only one who remembers when a console used to come with a game and two controllers?"
I do. It seems silly to sell something nearly worthless on its own, on the one hand. On the other, I wound up buying a stand alone SNES and Zelda instead of the bundle with Mario World. Given the ridiculous amounts of friends of mine who already had Mario World, the bundle seemed pointless. I also opted for the fabulous ASCII controller, instead of the decent but comparatively inferior Nintendo product, as a second controller. I guess what I'm saying is that choice is good, and in as much as bundles represent forcing expensive choices on consumers, I'm against such bundling. You mention accessories as a stealth cost, but if I'm going to have to pay for a memory card, I'd rather have free reign to choose a card that fits my capacity and price needs, to put this into a modern perspective
However, the price of games and software in the modern perspective seems awfully independent of the cost to manufacture these days. A pressed and lightly packaged version of Wii Sports included with every system seems like it should be cheap enough that it would be a drop in the bucket. If that means the Wii costs a dollar more than it would otherwise, that's fine by me. I don't think that was quite the case with Mario World. Additionally, there's nobody around I'd trust anymore to make a quality controller for the Wii, not even a year after.
More like, you'll have a longer time frame to sell a game with the ps3 than the ps2. I guess backwards compatibility would make that moot however.