I totally agree with you. Of all the "ports" they did, the only ones I thought were worth it were FF1-FF3 and FF5. While I played the original, I didn't see how making FF4-esque graphics and numerous interface improvements (oh, like being able to see if chests were already open;)) was necessarily a bad thing. Using charts and whatnot to play a game was OK in the 80's but the updated system was better.
FF2,3,5 weren't released in the US and I think they deserved a state-side release (other than via emulator;))
Overall, I totally share your sentiment that Square seems to be a whole lot more interested in merchandising now than creating great games and it saddens me; but then again, we're now in the longest gap in FF history between two single player FF games. It saddens me.
(Speaking of which, what good console-style RPGs has there been in the past few years? (Don't get me wrong I loved KoTR1 at 2 but they're not really the same style). I was going to get Paper Mario, but I'd like something with a bit more storyline in addition to good battle mechanics.)
While they don't do benchmarks, it's updated every month and includes 3 different PCs designed for different people's needs. For people who complained that $1k is too much, they've managed to spend $500 on their cheapest PC (if you don't count a monitor, which firing squad doesn't include in their system). The $500 PC will also run WoW, San Andreas, HL2 just fine as well.
If you thought $1k was too much to spend on a box, definitely check it out (the updated every month thing is also very nice).
Completely wrong is a bit of a stretch. As several posters commented, I used the phrase "largely unprofitable" to describe the Video game crash of '83. And yes, I was essentially thanking Nintendo for bringing the gaming industry out of that slump. I was essentially saying that few times in the history of consoles does one dominate for so long the way the original NES did. While Atari did dominate the market, the market was smaller.
I would wager the real reason Atari died was that they tried to treat games as comodity items rather than art forms. Had the Pac-man and ET games been given the time and resources needed, the developers could've suceeded and continued to hold market share (and make a profit). But consoles don't sell themselves, games sell the consoles. Nintendo, I think -- and many companies as well (EA, Activision, and Sierra just to name a few) -- understood at a management level that good games took time and effort; delaying a game for better playability is almost always a good decision.
You're right to point out that Nintendo has historically been unkind to 3rd parties (which is why most have jumped ship by now), but that doesn't diminish the revolutionary quality of their 1st party offerings which were the ultimate selling point behind the NES.
While other console companies existed before Nintendo, they were largely unprofitable. Atari's abysmal failures in Pac-man and E.T. are just one example. In short, the entire console industry was about to be written off as just another fad. Nintendo's entry into the market was largely seen as suicide at best, according to many insiders. However, Nintendo did what Magnavox, Atari, and Colecovision could not: brought gaming into the mainstream and were comercially viable. To this day, some people call console gaming (regardless of platform) "playing Nintendo" just as some people call all sodas "coke".
While gaming would've carried if Nintendo hadn't existed, it would've been mainly on the PC/Mac in my opinion. So while Nintendo was not the first console, it's the landmark console through which all modern consoles trace their roots.
By saying "Newtonian Mechanics" is hardly state of the art you're missing the point.
While relativity and quantum physics are at odds with one another (everyone from Einstein to Stephen Hawking have been working on a unified theory without a whole lot of luck (string theory is promising)), Newton's theory ultimately managed to unify cosmic and terrestrial forces as were observable in his time period. To this day, the Newtonian physics model is still valid in many disciplines and is still used.
Rather than knocking Newton/Leibnitz's calculus and comparing this to Unix, perhaps Unix is more like Newtonian physics: it's not complete nor perfect, but it's darn useful.
I'm currently in the process of rebuilding my system and am curious...how well does this module work for everyday use? Does anyone use it regularly?
I'm basically looking to share large volumes of data between OSes (personal documents, gigs of media, and whatnot) with minimum hassle. I was using FAT32 but it's showing its age. I had no idea I could be using EXT2 instead for this purpose.
I think my biggest issue with MS interoperability currently is NTFS write support in Linux or EXT3/ReiserFS/XFS support in Windows. Being a dual boot person, I really need a partition that's fast, efficient, reliable enough for everyday use, and interoperable.
Does MS have any such plan in the work to either a) support alternative file systems (such as EXT2/3) natively or at least publish something explaining how their older FS (NTFS) works such that OSS people can write a better interoperability module?
"Equal Time" indeed...it should be equal, 0 hours on creationism (by whatever name) and 0 hours on evolution.
Evolution is the foundation of Biology. Why else would we be disecting cats to explore human biology? With ID, we may as well dissect mushrooms (with evolution, sharing one trait makes two organisms likely to be related and thus share further traits. ID makes no such distinction and therefore there's no reason why we wouldn't find 4 legged insects or a reptile with human eyes or a species of deer that reproduces using pollen).
We can talk about ID the same way scientists talked about the heliocentric universe and Galileo vs Ptolemy. Ptolemy's theory of the solar system held that all planets revolve around the Earth and actually had very accurate equations (with a plethora of arbitrary constants) to describe their motion.
The problem with the heliocentric theory was that one of the orbits was off. The theory predicted a planet would have to be there of a certain mass to cause the orbital shift. A telescope revealed a new planet exactly as predicted and Ptolemy's theory largely died.
Evolution predicts the existence of similar things called "fossils". Every day, we find new fossils which bridge gaps between our record of species and sometimes new lines which died off. While we could have fossils with ID, the chances of finding what we've found is exactly as likely as finding ancient skeletons of giant two-headed rabbits.
There's a lot more to evolution than the tiny history of our species and a lot of the fossil record is more complete as well.
I don't think these views are necessarily at odds.
The best way to preserve privacy against intrusions/data miners is simply not to record the information in the first place. Swiss bank accounts, for example, are legendary for their privacy since they simply don't have personal information of their clients.
How can we do this? Give false information in any required field that you feel invades your privacy or simply only use services/products which only require reasonable information.
Actually men and women both do porn except in different ways. While most men prefer visual stimulation in a very straightforward manner, women prefer a somewhat better backstory and can use their imagination.
It comes as no surprise therefore, that romance novels are big sellers. For those of us who don't like to go to the library, there's erotic fan fiction. There's lots of women who don't enjoy porn but, being just as sexual as men but in a different way, like to read these.
Being male, it's really hard to find decent pr0n. So much of it's...just so fake or uninteresting or gross (some men are actually turned off by anal (not that there's anything wrong with it; I just don't want to watch)). While the cinematography is horrible, amateur pr0n can often be the most erotic for me since they're not...actors.
I recently heard an interview with the youngest person on the manhatten project (he's now 85). Reminds me of hearing techno-babble on Star Trek except this stuff is real.
I wouldn't say I don't understand how marriage works, nor would I say I do.
Success depends on a lot of factors, like duration of marriage thus far and culture. In my country (the US), about half of marriages end in divorce and thus one could say any other outcome is sadly "above average". I fully agree and embrace the ideal I put forth as the template for marriage (i.e. supporting one another for better or worse in all each other's aspirations) however, I was simply pointing out having a healthy relationship is actually atypical, both statistically and in my personal experiences thus far (but I'm only 23).
Also, there's a huge difference between "making a career move" to something like a priest and starting your own company in an unproven market with no income from your product for over a year. In the former, there is a good chance you'll get positive income at the end (therefore, more of a matter of willing to wait for income later). In the latter, it's very probable you'll make absolutely no money even after a few years.
I'm glad your experiences were positive, and though I think it is how marriage should work, we ought never to impose our ideals on reality. Instead, see it for how it is, for it is because of this descrepancy that dreams are possible.
Both the founders are married and have great wives
on
Trolltech Releases Qt 4.0
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Haavard Nord, Trolltech's CEO, and Eirik Eng, Trolltech's President, had been working together with various cross-platform GUI tools back in 1991. We were both very disappointed in their quality and were sure we could do it much better. Haavard went on to write his Masters thesis on GUI design, while I wrote a C++ GUI toolkit for a Norwegian company. In 1993 he called me up and suggested that we should join forces and use our experience in GUI design to write the toolkit that would be the king of toolkits. We had no customers, no funding and a lot of enthusiasm. Luckily we were both married to wives who had full-time jobs. We used some savings to rent a small office and hacked away for a year while our wives fed and cared for us.
Personally, I find the entire thing rather neat and almost romantic. If you told your spouse/sig. other "I'm gonna go work on something and make absolutely no money for a year and you're going to support me...do you mind?" (s)he'd probably say something along the lines of "hell no" or go packing. The company name comes from a dream one of the cofounders had about their wife as well.
I dunno. I don't see that many couples that're close or stable enough to do that.
There's more important things "chicks" can have than a "hot" body. Like...helping you realize your dreams?
And everything to do with marketing. Anyone who's seen earthlink's recent commercials know they're promoting the wazoo out of spam blocking. How do you know how good spam blocking is? I'd assume everyone gets some. Why not sign up for a bunch of junkmail lists with each ISP and see which one clobbers the most?
This survey means very little to me other than if I was in marketing for one of these groups. Then I'd care.
Talk to one of these so-called watchdog groups and offer testimony in exchange for diplomatic immunity and a tidy sum (because you risk losing your job).
Machiavellian? Maybe. Remember the alternative: participating in blatant ethics violations that you know are wrong but decide to do anyway.
A group of 4 engineers and a group of 4 executives were on a train. Naturally, executives are always interested in cutting costs. They asked the engineers how they always paid 1/4 the rate. The engineers said they'd demonstrate.
The next trip, when the conductor came around to collect tickets, the engineers huddled in the bathroom. There was a knock on the door. "Ticket Please?" The engineers collectively gave him a single ticket. The executives thought this was a fabulous idea and tried the same the next trip. They huddled in the bathroom until they heard the knock on the door "Ticket please?" And then gave him their ticket.
Never satisfied, the engineers announced an improvement in their alogrithm -- free train rides. The executives said they'd wait and see how it worked about before they switched. So again, the executives huddled in the bathroom. There was a knock on the door. "Ticket please?" So the executives gave him their ticket. A few minutes later, the was another knock on the door. "Ticket please?"
Moral: Executives like to use things without understanding how or why they work or the ramifications thereof.
One of the most rewarding experiences I've found in many games is that complexity continuously increases with gameplay as not to overwhelm the user. Consider FF6 for example. There's no skill system for the first few hours of the game; people have skills they do stuff and that's it. After that, they slowly introduce new abilities, a skill system, new characters and whatnot. It's simply a design flaw to introduce the player to a complex system all at once and say "sink or swim". Additionally, I like playing a game where complexity does increase as it keeps me from getting bored of it.
Do modern games that do this? GTA San Andreas. Half Life 2. Not exactly obscure titles. Doom 3 tried the "all at once simple approach" and I was bored in 10 minutes.
Of course, what do we mean by simple? Chess is a complex but simple game as is Tetris (proven NP hard!) but that's another discussion.
I don't know about startups but...(stealth good?)
on
Do Stealth Startups Suck?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
...there was a CEO who decided to mostly stealth a portable music player. It actually ended up working out pretty well. He did the same thing for his music store. iTunes and the iPod rock, despite naysayers constantly nagging "Why do we need yet another portable music player? How exactly is this revolutionay?"
But then again, maybe veterans are different vs startups in this respect.
My problem with this statement is that the constution specifically specifies freedom from state imposed religious hegemony. It's possible to have religion, but whenever the "right" protests, it's not about their right to express their fervor, it's about their right to do so and repress anyone from expressing theirs if it happens to disagree. The media loves to make this into a "yes/no" when it's really not.
The entire "displaying of the 10 commandments" has become a huge yes/no issue. The state attourney general (I believe) stated that he was in favor of their removal. Thus, he's put in the "anti" column. What's not as widely reported is his reason why which was that he believed they could be displayed constitutionally as they are in the US Supreme Court building.
Of course, in this simple world of black and white, we wouldn't want to ask why, but I'll explain anyway. We can express our heritage, but in expressing religious heritage, we must acknowledge the beliefs of others; in the SCOTUS building, we can also find Hamarabi's code and other influences of early law accross different cultures. In school prayer, it's similar. You can pray, but you cannot have a public official in a public capacity leading that prayer. Of course, translated through the appropriate channels of right-wing Orwell-speak "teachers leading prayer" becomes "school prayer". However, I'm sure these same peopel would object to having a Muslim lead it (since the religion's following in the US is growing very fast, this is a possibility if this were allowed).
The state has no business telling people what to believe and courts have every business ensuring this is the case.
I thought we'd be over it by now. I think diversity ought to be something to be encouraged rather than discouraged so I'm dismayed when a corperation talks diversity but means race.
Shaving your facial hair isn't a matter of maturity it's a matter of culture. Many cultures (Amish, Sikhs, and more) have rules dictating this. I fail to see how the body mod scene fails to qualify as a distinct culture, yet people enjoy discriminating against them and calling them names despite having met maybe 2 of said people and making a judgement call in the first 5 minutes of having met them. Personally, I have no tattoos or piercings but I don't have any disrespect for those who do.
Business is about making money, not wearing long pants and a tie.
Unless it's applied, most higher math doesn't require a calculator (at least the Calculus/Diff Eq. I've taken). Calculators belong in science class, not in math class (unless you want to teach kids how to program on them, which is what I spent most of math class doing).
TW at least has real assets that can be valued, while Google is primarily a IP (intellectual property) company.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the vast majority of TW's worth is their film/music catalogue. Which is um...IP.
Google's major earnings come not from licensing IP, but from advertising revenue, making it not unlike a traditional media outlet (e.g. TV station) as far as revenue model goes.
I would agree with your earnings assement. Google has shown that they can grow fast while remaining profitable on a sustainable revenue model. Does anyone remember the companies during the.Com era actually making profits? Certain tech companies (IBM, MS, Apple) on the other hand, have managed to justify these high IPO values since their stock rises are now near-legendary on wall street.
If genetic group A on average were shown to be generally more intelligent than genetic group B, I don't think this would have huge negative side effects. The problem is that people go from populations to specific instances without a decent grasp of probability.
For example, light eyed people generally have worse reflexes than darker-eyed people. No baseball recruiter bases their picks on eye-color, they base it on the player's statistics, since it's already factored in. In the same way, if a person from the group with the average lower intelligence got a higher SAT score, higher grades, etc. than someone from the group with "better" genetic intelligence background, the person with the higher scores/grades should to be admitted to college/given the job/etc, just as in the baseball example (note that this decision only depends, like the baseball example, on the desire of the institution to be better, not because of a gov't program or equality concerns).
Just because a group on average happens to be better than another group, it says nothing determinate about any one member of either group. The group with the lower average intelligence may even have the smartest person as a member and the group with the higher average may the twenty dimmest.
The only reason a study like this would make a difference this would make is that from a population standpoint, people from one genetic group may have different jobs/salaries/etc than people from another genetic group. While this is trivially true right now, I don't think genetics is necessarily the explaination (or even part thereof). Probably heavily cultural. But how can we know if we don't study it?
If I say black people are generally taller than Chinese people, that's pretty non-controversial, but any other tests, people are likely to blame the ruler I'm using.
Slashdot Mirror
I totally agree with you. Of all the "ports" they did, the only ones I thought were worth it were FF1-FF3 and FF5. While I played the original, I didn't see how making FF4-esque graphics and numerous interface improvements (oh, like being able to see if chests were already open;)) was necessarily a bad thing. Using charts and whatnot to play a game was OK in the 80's but the updated system was better.
FF2,3,5 weren't released in the US and I think they deserved a state-side release (other than via emulator;))
Overall, I totally share your sentiment that Square seems to be a whole lot more interested in merchandising now than creating great games and it saddens me; but then again, we're now in the longest gap in FF history between two single player FF games. It saddens me.
(Speaking of which, what good console-style RPGs has there been in the past few years? (Don't get me wrong I loved KoTR1 at 2 but they're not really the same style). I was going to get Paper Mario, but I'd like something with a bit more storyline in addition to good battle mechanics.)
Which can be found here.
While they don't do benchmarks, it's updated every month and includes 3 different PCs designed for different people's needs. For people who complained that $1k is too much, they've managed to spend $500 on their cheapest PC (if you don't count a monitor, which firing squad doesn't include in their system). The $500 PC will also run WoW, San Andreas, HL2 just fine as well.
If you thought $1k was too much to spend on a box, definitely check it out (the updated every month thing is also very nice).
Completely wrong is a bit of a stretch. As several posters commented, I used the phrase "largely unprofitable" to describe the Video game crash of '83. And yes, I was essentially thanking Nintendo for bringing the gaming industry out of that slump. I was essentially saying that few times in the history of consoles does one dominate for so long the way the original NES did. While Atari did dominate the market, the market was smaller.
I would wager the real reason Atari died was that they tried to treat games as comodity items rather than art forms. Had the Pac-man and ET games been given the time and resources needed, the developers could've suceeded and continued to hold market share (and make a profit). But consoles don't sell themselves, games sell the consoles. Nintendo, I think -- and many companies as well (EA, Activision, and Sierra just to name a few) -- understood at a management level that good games took time and effort; delaying a game for better playability is almost always a good decision.
You're right to point out that Nintendo has historically been unkind to 3rd parties (which is why most have jumped ship by now), but that doesn't diminish the revolutionary quality of their 1st party offerings which were the ultimate selling point behind the NES.
While other console companies existed before Nintendo, they were largely unprofitable. Atari's abysmal failures in Pac-man and E.T. are just one example. In short, the entire console industry was about to be written off as just another fad. Nintendo's entry into the market was largely seen as suicide at best, according to many insiders. However, Nintendo did what Magnavox, Atari, and Colecovision could not: brought gaming into the mainstream and were comercially viable. To this day, some people call console gaming (regardless of platform) "playing Nintendo" just as some people call all sodas "coke".
While gaming would've carried if Nintendo hadn't existed, it would've been mainly on the PC/Mac in my opinion. So while Nintendo was not the first console, it's the landmark console through which all modern consoles trace their roots.
Halo Movie Slated For 2003
Gosh, I must've missed it!
By saying "Newtonian Mechanics" is hardly state of the art you're missing the point.
While relativity and quantum physics are at odds with one another (everyone from Einstein to Stephen Hawking have been working on a unified theory without a whole lot of luck (string theory is promising)), Newton's theory ultimately managed to unify cosmic and terrestrial forces as were observable in his time period. To this day, the Newtonian physics model is still valid in many disciplines and is still used.
Rather than knocking Newton/Leibnitz's calculus and comparing this to Unix, perhaps Unix is more like Newtonian physics: it's not complete nor perfect, but it's darn useful.
Thanks a bundle.
I'm currently in the process of rebuilding my system and am curious...how well does this module work for everyday use? Does anyone use it regularly?
I'm basically looking to share large volumes of data between OSes (personal documents, gigs of media, and whatnot) with minimum hassle. I was using FAT32 but it's showing its age. I had no idea I could be using EXT2 instead for this purpose.
Thanks again!
I think my biggest issue with MS interoperability currently is NTFS write support in Linux or EXT3/ReiserFS/XFS support in Windows. Being a dual boot person, I really need a partition that's fast, efficient, reliable enough for everyday use, and interoperable.
Does MS have any such plan in the work to either a) support alternative file systems (such as EXT2/3) natively or at least publish something explaining how their older FS (NTFS) works such that OSS people can write a better interoperability module?
"Equal Time" indeed...it should be equal, 0 hours on creationism (by whatever name) and 0 hours on evolution.
Evolution is the foundation of Biology. Why else would we be disecting cats to explore human biology? With ID, we may as well dissect mushrooms (with evolution, sharing one trait makes two organisms likely to be related and thus share further traits. ID makes no such distinction and therefore there's no reason why we wouldn't find 4 legged insects or a reptile with human eyes or a species of deer that reproduces using pollen).
We can talk about ID the same way scientists talked about the heliocentric universe and Galileo vs Ptolemy. Ptolemy's theory of the solar system held that all planets revolve around the Earth and actually had very accurate equations (with a plethora of arbitrary constants) to describe their motion.
The problem with the heliocentric theory was that one of the orbits was off. The theory predicted a planet would have to be there of a certain mass to cause the orbital shift. A telescope revealed a new planet exactly as predicted and Ptolemy's theory largely died.
Evolution predicts the existence of similar things called "fossils". Every day, we find new fossils which bridge gaps between our record of species and sometimes new lines which died off. While we could have fossils with ID, the chances of finding what we've found is exactly as likely as finding ancient skeletons of giant two-headed rabbits.
There's a lot more to evolution than the tiny history of our species and a lot of the fossil record is more complete as well.
I don't think these views are necessarily at odds.
The best way to preserve privacy against intrusions/data miners is simply not to record the information in the first place. Swiss bank accounts, for example, are legendary for their privacy since they simply don't have personal information of their clients.
How can we do this? Give false information in any required field that you feel invades your privacy or simply only use services/products which only require reasonable information.
Actually men and women both do porn except in different ways. While most men prefer visual stimulation in a very straightforward manner, women prefer a somewhat better backstory and can use their imagination.
It comes as no surprise therefore, that romance novels are big sellers. For those of us who don't like to go to the library, there's erotic fan fiction. There's lots of women who don't enjoy porn but, being just as sexual as men but in a different way, like to read these.
Being male, it's really hard to find decent pr0n. So much of it's...just so fake or uninteresting or gross (some men are actually turned off by anal (not that there's anything wrong with it; I just don't want to watch)). While the cinematography is horrible, amateur pr0n can often be the most erotic for me since they're not...actors.
I recently heard an interview with the youngest person on the manhatten project (he's now 85). Reminds me of hearing techno-babble on Star Trek except this stuff is real.
It can be found here
There's also a legnthy discussion about the life of times of the father of the A-bomb, Oppenheimer.
You can already do this in Firefox my friend, just download the GCache extension and give it a whirl. Works like a charm.
I wouldn't say I don't understand how marriage works, nor would I say I do.
Success depends on a lot of factors, like duration of marriage thus far and culture. In my country (the US), about half of marriages end in divorce and thus one could say any other outcome is sadly "above average". I fully agree and embrace the ideal I put forth as the template for marriage (i.e. supporting one another for better or worse in all each other's aspirations) however, I was simply pointing out having a healthy relationship is actually atypical, both statistically and in my personal experiences thus far (but I'm only 23).
Also, there's a huge difference between "making a career move" to something like a priest and starting your own company in an unproven market with no income from your product for over a year. In the former, there is a good chance you'll get positive income at the end (therefore, more of a matter of willing to wait for income later). In the latter, it's very probable you'll make absolutely no money even after a few years.
I'm glad your experiences were positive, and though I think it is how marriage should work, we ought never to impose our ideals on reality. Instead, see it for how it is, for it is because of this descrepancy that dreams are possible.
From here:
Haavard Nord, Trolltech's CEO, and Eirik Eng, Trolltech's President, had been working together with various cross-platform GUI tools back in 1991. We were both very disappointed in their quality and were sure we could do it much better. Haavard went on to write his Masters thesis on GUI design, while I wrote a C++ GUI toolkit for a Norwegian company. In 1993 he called me up and suggested that we should join forces and use our experience in GUI design to write the toolkit that would be the king of toolkits. We had no customers, no funding and a lot of enthusiasm. Luckily we were both married to wives who had full-time jobs. We used some savings to rent a small office and hacked away for a year while our wives fed and cared for us.
Personally, I find the entire thing rather neat and almost romantic. If you told your spouse/sig. other "I'm gonna go work on something and make absolutely no money for a year and you're going to support me...do you mind?" (s)he'd probably say something along the lines of "hell no" or go packing. The company name comes from a dream one of the cofounders had about their wife as well.
I dunno. I don't see that many couples that're close or stable enough to do that.
There's more important things "chicks" can have than a "hot" body. Like...helping you realize your dreams?
And everything to do with marketing. Anyone who's seen earthlink's recent commercials know they're promoting the wazoo out of spam blocking. How do you know how good spam blocking is? I'd assume everyone gets some. Why not sign up for a bunch of junkmail lists with each ISP and see which one clobbers the most?
This survey means very little to me other than if I was in marketing for one of these groups. Then I'd care.
Talk to one of these so-called watchdog groups and offer testimony in exchange for diplomatic immunity and a tidy sum (because you risk losing your job).
Machiavellian? Maybe. Remember the alternative: participating in blatant ethics violations that you know are wrong but decide to do anyway.
A group of 4 engineers and a group of 4 executives were on a train. Naturally, executives are always interested in cutting costs. They asked the engineers how they always paid 1/4 the rate. The engineers said they'd demonstrate.
The next trip, when the conductor came around to collect tickets, the engineers huddled in the bathroom. There was a knock on the door.
"Ticket Please?"
The engineers collectively gave him a single ticket. The executives thought this was a fabulous idea and tried the same the next trip. They huddled in the bathroom until they heard the knock on the door
"Ticket please?"
And then gave him their ticket.
Never satisfied, the engineers announced an improvement in their alogrithm -- free train rides. The executives said they'd wait and see how it worked about before they switched. So again, the executives huddled in the bathroom. There was a knock on the door.
"Ticket please?"
So the executives gave him their ticket.
A few minutes later, the was another knock on the door.
"Ticket please?"
Moral: Executives like to use things without understanding how or why they work or the ramifications thereof.
One of the most rewarding experiences I've found in many games is that complexity continuously increases with gameplay as not to overwhelm the user. Consider FF6 for example. There's no skill system for the first few hours of the game; people have skills they do stuff and that's it. After that, they slowly introduce new abilities, a skill system, new characters and whatnot. It's simply a design flaw to introduce the player to a complex system all at once and say "sink or swim". Additionally, I like playing a game where complexity does increase as it keeps me from getting bored of it.
Do modern games that do this? GTA San Andreas. Half Life 2. Not exactly obscure titles. Doom 3 tried the "all at once simple approach" and I was bored in 10 minutes.
Of course, what do we mean by simple? Chess is a complex but simple game as is Tetris (proven NP hard!) but that's another discussion.
...there was a CEO who decided to mostly stealth a portable music player. It actually ended up working out pretty well. He did the same thing for his music store. iTunes and the iPod rock, despite naysayers constantly nagging "Why do we need yet another portable music player? How exactly is this revolutionay?"
But then again, maybe veterans are different vs startups in this respect.
My problem with this statement is that the constution specifically specifies freedom from state imposed religious hegemony. It's possible to have religion, but whenever the "right" protests, it's not about their right to express their fervor, it's about their right to do so and repress anyone from expressing theirs if it happens to disagree. The media loves to make this into a "yes/no" when it's really not.
The entire "displaying of the 10 commandments" has become a huge yes/no issue. The state attourney general (I believe) stated that he was in favor of their removal. Thus, he's put in the "anti" column. What's not as widely reported is his reason why which was that he believed they could be displayed constitutionally as they are in the US Supreme Court building.
Of course, in this simple world of black and white, we wouldn't want to ask why, but I'll explain anyway. We can express our heritage, but in expressing religious heritage, we must acknowledge the beliefs of others; in the SCOTUS building, we can also find Hamarabi's code and other influences of early law accross different cultures. In school prayer, it's similar. You can pray, but you cannot have a public official in a public capacity leading that prayer. Of course, translated through the appropriate channels of right-wing Orwell-speak "teachers leading prayer" becomes "school prayer". However, I'm sure these same peopel would object to having a Muslim lead it (since the religion's following in the US is growing very fast, this is a possibility if this were allowed).
The state has no business telling people what to believe and courts have every business ensuring this is the case.
I thought we'd be over it by now. I think diversity ought to be something to be encouraged rather than discouraged so I'm dismayed when a corperation talks diversity but means race.
Shaving your facial hair isn't a matter of maturity it's a matter of culture. Many cultures (Amish, Sikhs, and more) have rules dictating this. I fail to see how the body mod scene fails to qualify as a distinct culture, yet people enjoy discriminating against them and calling them names despite having met maybe 2 of said people and making a judgement call in the first 5 minutes of having met them. Personally, I have no tattoos or piercings but I don't have any disrespect for those who do.
Business is about making money, not wearing long pants and a tie.
Unless it's applied, most higher math doesn't require a calculator (at least the Calculus/Diff Eq. I've taken). Calculators belong in science class, not in math class (unless you want to teach kids how to program on them, which is what I spent most of math class doing).
TW at least has real assets that can be valued, while Google is primarily a IP (intellectual property) company.
.Com era actually making profits? Certain tech companies (IBM, MS, Apple) on the other hand, have managed to justify these high IPO values since their stock rises are now near-legendary on wall street.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the vast majority of TW's worth is their film/music catalogue. Which is um...IP.
Google's major earnings come not from licensing IP, but from advertising revenue, making it not unlike a traditional media outlet (e.g. TV station) as far as revenue model goes.
I would agree with your earnings assement. Google has shown that they can grow fast while remaining profitable on a sustainable revenue model. Does anyone remember the companies during the
If genetic group A on average were shown to be generally more intelligent than genetic group B, I don't think this would have huge negative side effects. The problem is that people go from populations to specific instances without a decent grasp of probability.
For example, light eyed people generally have worse reflexes than darker-eyed people. No baseball recruiter bases their picks on eye-color, they base it on the player's statistics, since it's already factored in. In the same way, if a person from the group with the average lower intelligence got a higher SAT score, higher grades, etc. than someone from the group with "better" genetic intelligence background, the person with the higher scores/grades should to be admitted to college/given the job/etc, just as in the baseball example (note that this decision only depends, like the baseball example, on the desire of the institution to be better, not because of a gov't program or equality concerns).
Just because a group on average happens to be better than another group, it says nothing determinate about any one member of either group. The group with the lower average intelligence may even have the smartest person as a member and the group with the higher average may the twenty dimmest.
The only reason a study like this would make a difference this would make is that from a population standpoint, people from one genetic group may have different jobs/salaries/etc than people from another genetic group. While this is trivially true right now, I don't think genetics is necessarily the explaination (or even part thereof). Probably heavily cultural. But how can we know if we don't study it?
If I say black people are generally taller than Chinese people, that's pretty non-controversial, but any other tests, people are likely to blame the ruler I'm using.