Judging by actual research, the current AI approach would be to model the puzzles with a gaussian curve, then build a Bayesian network to find the most frustrating puzzle.
Actually, I'd be careful on #1. Its quite possible for the compiler to see an empty if body and just optimize the entire program away. Of course, almost every task listed there is an exercise in demonstrating how poorly your complier follows the standard, and generally speaking anyone solving problems that way is only making trouble for their replacement.
The point isnt't to actually cheat, the point is to trick the puzzle solver by moving one of the Rs to the wrong R spot. They'll leave it there when it belongs down below, unless they're lucky or supergeniuses.
I'm sure developers are looking forward to breaking even if the PSP takes off. Seriously though, if you're gonna launch a portable, launch a portable. Don't try risk adverse techniques; they screw early adopters and the market share. Every PSP that could have been sold but wasn't is a loss, a customer that every game developer just missed a chance on. If I were a developer, I'd be either pissed or sceptical, depending on how committed my own company was to the PSP.
UMD is relatively small, somewhat smaller than a gamecube disc. But I don't think its a brilliant move; I know that they're pushing the format as a portable, low-power media but nothing reads it, and given Sony's style, nobody but Sony ever will. I mean, do you plan on purchasing any movies released on the UMD format?
Obviously you don't think that the IT jobs have left, but Sykes closed down its relatively large IT call center in Manhattan, KS. Thankfully someone else bought it, but for a short while it looked as though there was yet another wage depressing factor in Small Town America. But the possibility is certainly there!
How do you think the job market will look if oracle or Ellison simply bought Peoplesoft and closed shop? Certainly in the short term, there'd be some demand for transitional consultants. But I have to wonder how many people the number two database company provides a salary for.
You just need to become a better negotiator! In this case, your clients don't know their next best alternative and what that will cost. Look up local computer stores and ask about their field service rates. If you feel particularly ruthless, carry around business cards of the most expensive one you can find to hand out to people who complain.
But don't expect this tactic to work on your close family. The best you can expect from your mother is some cookies and milk.
Might we see a color hack in the near future? Apparently it uses gba style 16 color tiles. Until you hack up pictochat, I suspect that would be limited to tunnelling and other interference only.
The government is of the people, and somebody feels offended enough that children are playing games to bring it to the attention of city councils and push it to bring regulation forth. Maybe one in ten mothers genuinly cares about how violent grand theft auto is. The others usually buy the game for their kids as a present when asked for.
What would be far more influential in building the hydrogen economy is solar powered electralysis made cheap. I've heard about some prototypes, but I think they're currently far more than your average gas station can afford. Local production would have to be the intermediate solution that bridges between a concept and widespread adoption.
About a year ago, I found a report posted on slashdot indicating that more birds die from glass than windmills. A lot more. Your birds are dumb hypothesis is accurate.
When I hear activists against wind energy, the first thing that comes to mind is how it benefits fossil fuels. Concious of it or not, putting up roadblocks as frequently as they do only helps the incumbant energy sources. Perhaps a reasonable comprimise for these people would be a provision to encourage citizens to purchase more energy efficient cars, fridges and furnace/ac's. This could be accomlished either through a tax break or a sales restriction. I certainly wouldn't mind a tax break on a new fridge or furnace.
Whatever, that site doesn't even mention "posting anonymously to preserve my karma" shoeboy, the only troll I know to be frequently modded up, despite his attempts to spend his karma.
As a theoretical programming/IT guy, I do understand that doctors and their entourage carry an enourmous burden. But rather than give pause, I hope this gives us cause to examine why 88 hours isn't enough, and how we can improve the system from scheduling, training the next generation of doctors to technology to speed the process.
I think the machismo of it is a barrier to the solution, that you just need to suck it up and continue. I don't remember seeing any waiver of humanity for doctors. They're not demigods, they are but men. I don't know who handles what in a hospital, but I'd imagine working 88 hours a week does something fierce to your malpractice insurance, especially in light of studies you linked to.
Finally, the original Ask slashdot question is born out of that exact problem: EA makes video games on a tight schedule. So tight that they appear to plan on near 80 hour work weeks. What I find amazing is the level of compliance they achieve given the lack of immediacy working in a hospital provides. Most of programming/IT guys live a normal 40 hour work life, or maybe a 80-9 if their employer is marginally progressive, with the occasional "crunch time" where you might put in an extra 15 hours a few weeks before a major deadline. That's generally how the engineering profession works. Relying on perpetual crunch time is especially absurd when the only deadlines are company imposed and the pay is below what the employees could command elsewhere.
It's common hospital practice in the medical industry to work interns and residents upwards of 12 hours a day. The practice has been defended in the past as nessecary to educate our soon-to-be doctors on the diseases a hospital may see. In fact, I believe more than a few people have said that "the tradgedy of 12 hour intern workdays is that they're not in the hospital for the other 12." There's also been a backlash at the lack of people opting for specialties that demand this insane behavior. Mostly illwill directed at radiologists and other "doctors of convinence."
But I've never seen a scientific study show that interns and other medical professionals are as effective on hour 12 as hour 3. Its been a while since I've studied this at all; its possible that today the AMA and acadamia has condemned the practice, but I wouldn't count on it.
Indeed. Another way to state that is "eat my own dogfood." What it means is that he's the end user for his software, and if it doesn't work, he knows about it. Joel from Joelonsoftware had a nice article on the subject and how it helps catch problems.
Its not the price, but the fact that the LCD real estate is smaller. If there's one pixel broke on a laptop screen, you have to replace the whole thing to fix it. On the DS, you replace one of the screens, which are less likely to have faulty pixels to begin with. I'll find it interesting to see how this stacks up against the PSP, which has a larger single screen.
I wrote a program for a software engineering course to handle exactly that. In fact, we designed some ways to improve the system through communications. I could liberate the code and have a finished product in a few days, but the communication code would be a difficult migration from encouraged cooperation to discouraged as cheating.
Likely, the part two contest will degrade into a greedy algorithm made distributed; a few smart cookies might decide to avoid overly contested nuts. Any more sophisticated algorithms rely on rational or at least predictable behavior from other contestants.
As an example, there's a nut that you're the closest to, and also another nut you're tied for closest to. Taking one means you'll lose distance on the other. You might think, take the closest one, but if everyone thinks that, then that nut is likely off limits. Its hard to tell traditional gridworld AI techniques where to draw the line between securing what's theoretically yours to take and contesting a resource with a competitor. In theory, you should be competing with the opponent in the lead, but I doubt many squirrels will be that advanced.
But I'm all for this. Valve's property on steam includes several multiplayer games, including the most popular one by far. A central ID that you can't change is a vital part of keeping cheaters and griefers in check. Banning by steamid and wonid work much better than a simple IP ban. Perhaps the one thing I'll fault them for is not letting people know exactly what's going on before they purchase it, but since I haven't purchased HL2 or anything else over steam, I can't say I know this as a certainty.
But hey, I'm also the kind of guy who submits those voluntary machine info statistics. Judging by the typical outrage over privacy, I'm clearly a privacy lunatic giving out personal info willy-nilly.
That doesn't stop city planners from using SimCity as a tool. Which you might have failed to notice: this blog entry was directed at city planners, not gamers.
This blog entry is more a statement that SimCity is not an accurate model for city planning, not an assault on its legitmacy as a form of entertainment. Its a good game but a poor design tool. Imagine Civil Engineers who design their bridges in Pontifex and you might understand the outrage.
I think you misunderstand me; all of the Board of Regents Universities were upset about this, and thereatened not to admit students that didn't have that as part of their studies. As you should know, this measure didn't pass, and I suspect that we both attended a biology class where evolution was taught.
Hello, I'm a Kansan. You might remember us from such right wing propaganda as "God Hates Fags" or a more recent but ephemeral debate over teaching evolution in our schools. I don't have a dog named Toto, and by my local estimation, pancakes are rather bumpy.
So I'm used to dealing with invective, and even the religious right. A few might be my neighbors. But I reject your hypothesis. "Slightly over 40 percent of Americans" is an extreme interpretation of a stastic of relgious beliefs. My own mother admits she feels the Old Testament to be closer to myth than reality, and generally believes that evolution holds more scientific merit than the newly uprising creationist theory. Some Catholics don't adhere to the abolition of birth control, and I hear some even support abortions. Simply because 40 percent marked down Catholic or Protestant or whatever that number includes doesn't mean they hold belief in common with every other member of the congregation. In fact, I'd say thats downright impossible. Personally, I think that Lamarck had better science than creationism or whatever you call it today; a text cannot be adequate substitute for experimental investigation and observation. And I'm not willing to sign off on ignoring evolutionary theory because its spiritually convinient.
Its debateable whether one can call creationism a theory, and I'm willing to let it into our textbooks, but to exclude evolution is both ridiculus and ignores what is the most plausible theory put forth yet. I think mutual inclusion is perhaps a decent middle grounds to acommodate our individual beliefs.
So when I hear people complain about teaching evolution in the classroom, I say to them: fine, butif you don't want it in the classroom, don't expect your children to attend college. In the suburb where I live, that works reasonably well. In other parts of Kansas, that statement would likely be met with laughter, and likely acceptance of the terms.
Re:No room to complain
on
NYT on EA Games
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
And the $120K in options is only good if EA's stock price *quadruples*, something that's totally unlikely; the actual amount will end up being more like $30K, which, spread over the four years it takes to vest, is less than $10K a year.
The irony there is that if their worker abuse case is decided in favor of the employees, those options will likely be worthless. But they'll take it. I recently started a job with a local community college; they're starting to offer game creation courses. I was talking with a coworker who's interested in the field and when I mentioned EA to him, every time, his reply was "But you get to work on games!"
Why is there always an assumption that MS can or even want to buy their way out of trouble?
Because they have a long history of doing just that. They settled with sun for a large sum. They settled with Burst. They settled recently with Novel for 500 million.
These companies all have one very common concern: shareholders. Legal proceedings like taking on Microsoft are costly, and shareholders are interested in their own profits. If you take a risky long term approach (like pursuing a royalty per end user) that's bound to create tension between shareholder and executive, resulting in the board firing the executive team and installing a pro settlement group. Furthermore, every time an investor decides against your policy of plan 1 or 2, the stock price suffers, which only fans the flames between the two groups. So for Microsoft, everyone does have a price. Few people consider patents a moral issue, and are simply willing to comprimise if it means their company can move forward faster in other directions.
Slashdot Mirror
Judging by actual research, the current AI approach would be to model the puzzles with a gaussian curve, then build a Bayesian network to find the most frustrating puzzle.
Actually, I'd be careful on #1. Its quite possible for the compiler to see an empty if body and just optimize the entire program away. Of course, almost every task listed there is an exercise in demonstrating how poorly your complier follows the standard, and generally speaking anyone solving problems that way is only making trouble for their replacement.
The point isnt't to actually cheat, the point is to trick the puzzle solver by moving one of the Rs to the wrong R spot. They'll leave it there when it belongs down below, unless they're lucky or supergeniuses.
I'm sure developers are looking forward to breaking even if the PSP takes off. Seriously though, if you're gonna launch a portable, launch a portable. Don't try risk adverse techniques; they screw early adopters and the market share. Every PSP that could have been sold but wasn't is a loss, a customer that every game developer just missed a chance on. If I were a developer, I'd be either pissed or sceptical, depending on how committed my own company was to the PSP.
UMD is relatively small, somewhat smaller than a gamecube disc. But I don't think its a brilliant move; I know that they're pushing the format as a portable, low-power media but nothing reads it, and given Sony's style, nobody but Sony ever will. I mean, do you plan on purchasing any movies released on the UMD format?
Obviously you don't think that the IT jobs have left, but Sykes closed down its relatively large IT call center in Manhattan, KS. Thankfully someone else bought it, but for a short while it looked as though there was yet another wage depressing factor in Small Town America. But the possibility is certainly there!
How do you think the job market will look if oracle or Ellison simply bought Peoplesoft and closed shop? Certainly in the short term, there'd be some demand for transitional consultants. But I have to wonder how many people the number two database company provides a salary for.
As long as they also keep track of when those grad students shower, and inform them the expiration date for their courtesy shower.
You just need to become a better negotiator! In this case, your clients don't know their next best alternative and what that will cost. Look up local computer stores and ask about their field service rates. If you feel particularly ruthless, carry around business cards of the most expensive one you can find to hand out to people who complain.
But don't expect this tactic to work on your close family. The best you can expect from your mother is some cookies and milk.
Might we see a color hack in the near future? Apparently it uses gba style 16 color tiles. Until you hack up pictochat, I suspect that would be limited to tunnelling and other interference only.
The government is of the people, and somebody feels offended enough that children are playing games to bring it to the attention of city councils and push it to bring regulation forth. Maybe one in ten mothers genuinly cares about how violent grand theft auto is. The others usually buy the game for their kids as a present when asked for.
What would be far more influential in building the hydrogen economy is solar powered electralysis made cheap. I've heard about some prototypes, but I think they're currently far more than your average gas station can afford. Local production would have to be the intermediate solution that bridges between a concept and widespread adoption.
About a year ago, I found a report posted on slashdot indicating that more birds die from glass than windmills. A lot more. Your birds are dumb hypothesis is accurate.
When I hear activists against wind energy, the first thing that comes to mind is how it benefits fossil fuels. Concious of it or not, putting up roadblocks as frequently as they do only helps the incumbant energy sources. Perhaps a reasonable comprimise for these people would be a provision to encourage citizens to purchase more energy efficient cars, fridges and furnace/ac's. This could be accomlished either through a tax break or a sales restriction. I certainly wouldn't mind a tax break on a new fridge or furnace.
Will we resort to banning violent and offensive games even though parents are perfectly okay with gifting them to their children?
Whatever, that site doesn't even mention "posting anonymously to preserve my karma" shoeboy, the only troll I know to be frequently modded up, despite his attempts to spend his karma.
As a theoretical programming/IT guy, I do understand that doctors and their entourage carry an enourmous burden. But rather than give pause, I hope this gives us cause to examine why 88 hours isn't enough, and how we can improve the system from scheduling, training the next generation of doctors to technology to speed the process.
I think the machismo of it is a barrier to the solution, that you just need to suck it up and continue. I don't remember seeing any waiver of humanity for doctors. They're not demigods, they are but men. I don't know who handles what in a hospital, but I'd imagine working 88 hours a week does something fierce to your malpractice insurance, especially in light of studies you linked to.
Finally, the original Ask slashdot question is born out of that exact problem: EA makes video games on a tight schedule. So tight that they appear to plan on near 80 hour work weeks. What I find amazing is the level of compliance they achieve given the lack of immediacy working in a hospital provides. Most of programming/IT guys live a normal 40 hour work life, or maybe a 80-9 if their employer is marginally progressive, with the occasional "crunch time" where you might put in an extra 15 hours a few weeks before a major deadline. That's generally how the engineering profession works. Relying on perpetual crunch time is especially absurd when the only deadlines are company imposed and the pay is below what the employees could command elsewhere.
It's common hospital practice in the medical industry to work interns and residents upwards of 12 hours a day. The practice has been defended in the past as nessecary to educate our soon-to-be doctors on the diseases a hospital may see. In fact, I believe more than a few people have said that "the tradgedy of 12 hour intern workdays is that they're not in the hospital for the other 12." There's also been a backlash at the lack of people opting for specialties that demand this insane behavior. Mostly illwill directed at radiologists and other "doctors of convinence."
But I've never seen a scientific study show that interns and other medical professionals are as effective on hour 12 as hour 3. Its been a while since I've studied this at all; its possible that today the AMA and acadamia has condemned the practice, but I wouldn't count on it.
Indeed. Another way to state that is "eat my own dogfood." What it means is that he's the end user for his software, and if it doesn't work, he knows about it. Joel from Joelonsoftware had a nice article on the subject and how it helps catch problems.
Its not the price, but the fact that the LCD real estate is smaller. If there's one pixel broke on a laptop screen, you have to replace the whole thing to fix it. On the DS, you replace one of the screens, which are less likely to have faulty pixels to begin with. I'll find it interesting to see how this stacks up against the PSP, which has a larger single screen.
I wrote a program for a software engineering course to handle exactly that. In fact, we designed some ways to improve the system through communications. I could liberate the code and have a finished product in a few days, but the communication code would be a difficult migration from encouraged cooperation to discouraged as cheating.
Likely, the part two contest will degrade into a greedy algorithm made distributed; a few smart cookies might decide to avoid overly contested nuts. Any more sophisticated algorithms rely on rational or at least predictable behavior from other contestants.
As an example, there's a nut that you're the closest to, and also another nut you're tied for closest to. Taking one means you'll lose distance on the other. You might think, take the closest one, but if everyone thinks that, then that nut is likely off limits. Its hard to tell traditional gridworld AI techniques where to draw the line between securing what's theoretically yours to take and contesting a resource with a competitor. In theory, you should be competing with the opponent in the lead, but I doubt many squirrels will be that advanced.
But I'm all for this. Valve's property on steam includes several multiplayer games, including the most popular one by far. A central ID that you can't change is a vital part of keeping cheaters and griefers in check. Banning by steamid and wonid work much better than a simple IP ban. Perhaps the one thing I'll fault them for is not letting people know exactly what's going on before they purchase it, but since I haven't purchased HL2 or anything else over steam, I can't say I know this as a certainty.
But hey, I'm also the kind of guy who submits those voluntary machine info statistics. Judging by the typical outrage over privacy, I'm clearly a privacy lunatic giving out personal info willy-nilly.
That doesn't stop city planners from using SimCity as a tool. Which you might have failed to notice: this blog entry was directed at city planners, not gamers.
This blog entry is more a statement that SimCity is not an accurate model for city planning, not an assault on its legitmacy as a form of entertainment. Its a good game but a poor design tool. Imagine Civil Engineers who design their bridges in Pontifex and you might understand the outrage.
I think you misunderstand me; all of the Board of Regents Universities were upset about this, and thereatened not to admit students that didn't have that as part of their studies. As you should know, this measure didn't pass, and I suspect that we both attended a biology class where evolution was taught.
Hello, I'm a Kansan. You might remember us from such right wing propaganda as "God Hates Fags" or a more recent but ephemeral debate over teaching evolution in our schools. I don't have a dog named Toto, and by my local estimation, pancakes are rather bumpy.
So I'm used to dealing with invective, and even the religious right. A few might be my neighbors. But I reject your hypothesis. "Slightly over 40 percent of Americans" is an extreme interpretation of a stastic of relgious beliefs. My own mother admits she feels the Old Testament to be closer to myth than reality, and generally believes that evolution holds more scientific merit than the newly uprising creationist theory. Some Catholics don't adhere to the abolition of birth control, and I hear some even support abortions. Simply because 40 percent marked down Catholic or Protestant or whatever that number includes doesn't mean they hold belief in common with every other member of the congregation. In fact, I'd say thats downright impossible. Personally, I think that Lamarck had better science than creationism or whatever you call it today; a text cannot be adequate substitute for experimental investigation and observation. And I'm not willing to sign off on ignoring evolutionary theory because its spiritually convinient.
Its debateable whether one can call creationism a theory, and I'm willing to let it into our textbooks, but to exclude evolution is both ridiculus and ignores what is the most plausible theory put forth yet. I think mutual inclusion is perhaps a decent middle grounds to acommodate our individual beliefs.
So when I hear people complain about teaching evolution in the classroom, I say to them: fine, butif you don't want it in the classroom, don't expect your children to attend college. In the suburb where I live, that works reasonably well. In other parts of Kansas, that statement would likely be met with laughter, and likely acceptance of the terms.
And the $120K in options is only good if EA's stock price *quadruples*, something that's totally unlikely; the actual amount will end up being more like $30K, which, spread over the four years it takes to vest, is less than $10K a year.
The irony there is that if their worker abuse case is decided in favor of the employees, those options will likely be worthless. But they'll take it. I recently started a job with a local community college; they're starting to offer game creation courses. I was talking with a coworker who's interested in the field and when I mentioned EA to him, every time, his reply was "But you get to work on games!"
Maybe, just maybe, they get what they ask for.
Why is there always an assumption that MS can or even want to buy their way out of trouble?
Because they have a long history of doing just that. They settled with sun for a large sum. They settled with Burst. They settled recently with Novel for 500 million.
These companies all have one very common concern: shareholders. Legal proceedings like taking on Microsoft are costly, and shareholders are interested in their own profits. If you take a risky long term approach (like pursuing a royalty per end user) that's bound to create tension between shareholder and executive, resulting in the board firing the executive team and installing a pro settlement group. Furthermore, every time an investor decides against your policy of plan 1 or 2, the stock price suffers, which only fans the flames between the two groups. So for Microsoft, everyone does have a price. Few people consider patents a moral issue, and are simply willing to comprimise if it means their company can move forward faster in other directions.