It's gotten to the point where we could probably replace "Internet Explorer" with "Google" and people would call the internet "the google".
I have heard that already. Some people get the impression that anything you reach through Google is on Google. And I've heard people complain when they find Google "hosting" a site with offensive material.
I liked the commercial. It tells people that Google is still doing very cool and useful things with simple text instead of pretty pictures and vast advertising campaigns (Bing). And it reminds people that Google still does search. With all the Google-branded phones and software, I'm worried that Google is going to get a black eye from one of them and spoil the entire brand.
During a baseball game the bat is in contact with the ball for only 7.3 seconds. And a two-hour movie has only 18 minutes of dialogue if you remove all the pauses. And a four-hour drive has only 5 minute of actual turns. And during an eight-hour workday a key on your keyboard is depressed for only 19 minutes.
You have to have a really skewed perception of time to feel that you're shortchanged by getting only 11 minutes of boom-boom action in a football game. I have watched many football games in person without commercial broadcast (high school and college) and somehow they still take more than 11 minutes to finish.
The young people think you're being anal because the linguistic norms are changing. They don't even see the spelling and grammar errors because they're a part of the language they know. It's only us older folk who learned our language in a time when publishing was much more restricted that get hung up on these changes. Still, it's a good thing they had you to proofread what they wrote since many of your customers would be likewise appalled at their spelling and grammar.
How could young people today be less literate than the young people of decades past? They consume vastly more written information and write frequently. When I was young, voluntary writing was a rarity. During school breaks I might write nothing for days or weeks except short lists and game codes. Kids now are texting, emailing, blogging, and commenting constantly. They have far more chance to absorb, practice, and communicate with written language.
So is it really a tragedy if "because" morphs into "cuz"? Or apostrophes become redundant when meaning is clear without them? Language has been changing as long as language has existed. There are plenty of words in Middle English that I can't make any sense of, and even writing as recent as the early 1900's is jarring and awkward to my eyes. It's like reading Fortran - I can do it with effort, but I wouldn't write it unless forced to for a particular task.
English is becoming simpler in spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure. If people gradually agree on these changes then communication can continue or expand unimpeded.
Some people suggest that the best way to preserve humanity is by building robotic probes that carry the spark of life and all knowledge to the stars. It's impractical to build an actual interstellar Noah's Ark and Library of Congress. But if the information is stored digitally and sent on durable probes to seed other worlds then life and civilization can be spread ad infinitum.
I'd be happy to see NASA focus its resources on unmanned projects instead of putting meat on the moon (again). But this line worries me:
NASA will look at developing a new "heavy-lift" rocket that one day will take humans and robots to explore beyond low Earth orbit.
Are they saying that NASA will focus only on Earth science? While that is valuable and practical, I still want to know what's left to discover in our solar system, around the galaxy, and throughout the universe. I want robotic probes searching for life on Mars and Europa. I want telescopes looking for habitable planets around nearby stars. And I want to know how the universe works and what's in its future. Those things don't need Constellation, but they do need attention beyond the surface of Earth.
Your concept of "game" is foreign to me. A game is a contest with rules. You play by discovering/learning/developing the ability to win the contest within the rules. An activity that lets you progress without challenge or accomplishment isn't a game.
I am playing through New Super Mario Bros myself and while I appreciate the ease with which I can advance without ever losing, it does detract from the sense of accomplishment.
On the other hand, I do respect your definition of fun. As an amateur game designer (Starcraft maps, mostly) I've learned that players bring a wide variety of goals to each game. Some want to win by the intended rules. Some want to win by breaking rules. Some want to spend time socializing. Some want to give other players grief.
So I accept that NSMB is not a hardcore game. But I'd be sad if all games were as easy and forgiving as NSMB.
Agreed. Just because the maker of a tool operates in a closed manner doesn't mean that the tool itself is closed or that users of the tool are closed-minded.
Yamaha is closed when it comes to production of their pianos. Cross is closed when it comes to production of their pens. And Ford is closed when it comes to production of their cars. But it's no paradox that anybody is creative, productive, independent, or expressive with those pianos, pens, and cars.
The Unix foundations of Mac OS X appeal to technology geeks. The Just Works interface appeals to artistic types who want to create without hacking or fighting the tool itself. And the high quality hardware appeals to anyone who favors reliability and sturdiness.
I think the flaw with the question is that it presumes money is rare and time is unlimited. Maybe they are if you're a kid living on a small allowance and killing time until you get a driver's license. But as a grown up I find that my time is the limiting factor. With more time I can earn more money. So with games costing tens of dollars, the time I spend acquiring, learning, and playing is worth far more dollar-wise than the game itself.
So the worth of a game is how much I enjoy playing it versus time spent on other activities. Elegance, depth of play, session length, and availability of opponents are the key factors for me. The game needs to look nice, feel nice, and respond smoothly to controls. It should be easy enough to learn in twenty minutes but sophisticated enough to reward years of replay. I should be able to complete a session in half an hour or generate stories and fond memories from sessions lasting two hours or longer. And it needs to have balanced computer opponents, readily available online opponents, or be easy to introduce to casual gaming friends.
The one you uploaded to two others has become three copies. And those two each share it with two others, making seven copies. And those four with eight more for fifteen copies.
So books shared in a library spread linearly. The author might sell less than if sharing were impossible, but he'll still sell a number proportional to the public's interest in his work. Books shared online spread exponentially. The author might receive no more compensation for a book that a million people read than for a book that ten people read. In fact, the more popular book will be easier to find and spread for the sharers.
Responding to a cousin post, the Founding Fathers didn't institute copyright to compensate publishers for the cost of materials. They made copyright to give the creators an incentive to create. Buying and sharing still compensate creators in proportion to the value of their creation. Copying does not.
It sounds to me like you were addicted to WoW. But you're also addicted to life. You're grinding for grades, degrees, jobs, promotions, papers, and relationships.
The only way to judge that you are healthier than a WoW-only addict is to declare that traditional accomplishments are more important than video game accomplishments. And that judgment is a matter of happiness. Do traditional accomplishments generate more happiness than video game accomplishments? Probably, especially in the long term. But only if you truly enjoy both the process and the completion of those goals. If you're just racing to check off a list of real life accomplishments and not really happy, then you're just addicted to a more socially acceptable game.
Backus found that there are 26 women in London who match his outrageously narrow criteria. He doesn't have to search all of the UK, just his own city. Now if he searches for them by randomly calling numbers in the phone book and asking the answerer if she's the one, then yes it will take many years to find her. But if he networks a little and asks the answerer if they might know the woman he's searching for then he'll find her much faster.
Or maybe he can do something crazy like hang out around a university where those intelligent, educated, interesting women might already be. Or go to social gatherings with people his age, where the population is already self-selected for women meeting his age, geographic, and availability requirements. Neglecting the factor of locality and self-selection is like declaring that the International Space Station has only a 0.00000003% chance of harboring intelligent life since it's just one of billions of objects in the galaxy.
Or maybe this genius should try Internet dating. There are 26 fabulous women whom he's a perfect match for within ten miles of him. If he posts on the most popular dating sites, what are the chances that one of them will find him there within one year?
And remember, that's 26 perfect women in London even if he's attracted to only 5% of the highly-educated women his age. Seriously? Who here found only 5% of their gender-appropriate college classmates attractive? And he narrows the pool twice, supposing that only 5% of the women that he finds attractive will find him attractive. That ignores the correlation of people being attracted to mates that match their own racial, genetic, and social background. Bumping those numbers to a more realistic 25% would give him 657 wonderful, beautiful, interesting, intelligent, friendly, available, captivated, local women to date.
I wouldn't hang my hat on Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail being a neutral domain. You might like their image today, but any one of them could easily do something boneheaded or evil in the next couple years and reflect negatively on you. Or they could decide to stop providing free email accounts (or any public accounts at all) and then you'll be cut off from everybody who knows you by that address.
Likewise for Comcast, Verizon, or other ISP addresses. As soon as you move or change providers, everybody loses contact with you. And those companies have even more volatile images, since they advertise for themselves and against competitors primarily on image itself.
You could use your address at your current employer if you have one. But then you're also tied to their image, will lose your address if you leave the job, might reveal too much or reflect badly on your employer if you publish that address, and open yourself up to monitoring by your employer.
There's also the route of rolling your own. But then you're stuck administering your own domain, paying the registration and hosting fees, and relying on your own taste and domain availability to choose a neutral-sounding name.
And finally there are organizations that will allow you to subscribe to an account. There are private email providers which leave you with the risk that the provider could go out of business and leave your address dead. And there are public institutions like universities which are constructed to exist in perpetuity and generally maintain a favorable image, but leave you associated with education and might connote inexperience.
Personally, I have all of these kinds of email accounts. Most of them I use for only very specialized purposes. But the one I use for my independent professional interactions is the EDU account. I can rely on that one to continue existing as long as email accounts are popular and it follows me around from job to job and city to city. The academic association isn't too bad since my field values education, but I can imagine that some potential associates might get the idea that I'm fresh out of school. And some people might have feelings of rivalry toward my university or animosity toward higher education in general.
So I think it's really hard to find a neutral email address. All of them leave you vulnerable to negative images, discontinuation of service, or extra expense and hassle. You can hitch your wagon to whichever seems neutral today, but somebody somewhere someday will judge against you based on it.
Close. Since SVG is a markup language, I develop mine in a text editor. Or I write Python programs that turn my data into SVG animations automatically.
I have Adobe Illustrator CS3 but there's not much point exporting from it into SVG. I'm better off exporting to PDF for static documents or using Flash for animations since those formats are widely viewable.
Why are they still pressing a new plastic disc for each player list refresh? It would seem they could publish a baseline Madden 2010 and then offer downloads to update the teams and players for '11, '12, etc. When they really have a new game engine ready, then they could release a new baseline Madden 2015.
I bet they could make even more money that way. Charge $3 per team so that if you update the whole league you'll end up spending more than for another game disc. Or offer mid-season and post-season updates so players can simulate the playoffs with each team's regular season performance factored in.
Madden '10 came out in August 2009. Just like cars, they start selling a new model year months before that calendar year arrives. Madden '09 will have been out for 18 months and out of production for six months.
But the thing that still doesn't make sense: If the box says that online play will be available for one year from release date, then anyone who bought the latest version available in July 2009 will have had only six months of online access. And theoretically EA could shut down the server the day after the last player bought Madden '09. Evil.
Organizations commonly become short-sighted. They become so worried about increasing profits this quarter that they really stop caring about the distant future.
The Daily Show interviewed a legislator in some state with budget shortfalls. Her plan was to sell the government buildings to a private company and then lease them back for twenty years. That would let them fill a $20 million gap in the year that the buildings were sold. When asked how the state would ever pay the rent in following years without a $20 million windfall, her response was: "We have to get through this year first. I'm just trying to balance the budget this year."
Killing all those servers will immediately lower administration and bandwidth costs. And it may very well give a kick to sales of the current versions. When the boss sees lower costs and higher sales he'll be happy. When sales slump again in six months they can blame piracy.
Right now. I'm watching football (Orange Bowl) on my HDTV. This is good, but it would be better if it was in 3D.
Also, nature documentaries. They're beautiful in HD, but they'd be even better in 3D.
Whether I'd pay extra or wear uncomfortable glasses is another matter. But if I had the choice between 2D and 3D for those programs without significant cost or inconvenience, I'd choose 3D every time.
That's the same phenomenon as color, stereo, high definition, and surround sound. At the time that each was introduced it was a luxury and only gimmicky shows made much use of them. But eventually they became cheap, standard, and ubiquitous.
Princess and the Frog is another movie worth seeing even as an adult. Interesting story, colorful characters, funny jokes, pretty animation, and good music. Maybe not terribly original, deep, or groundbreaking; but a worthwhile kid-friendly film.
Yeah, that's kind of what "2.0" usually means. Thing 1.0 is what the developer thought was necessary to fulfill the vision of how something should work. Thing 2.0 is what he came up with after watching people actually try to use Thing 1.0 and realizing it didn't working as intended.
Web 1.0 was only interactive for programmers. Web 2.0 is interactive for people, including programmers who want to spend more time on the message and less time on the mechanics of writing the message.
"Information gathered from personal conversations is often stale, incomplete, misleading, unreviewed, or simply wrong."
I can't count the number of times that I've had a discussion about politics, art, or technology and been told something that sounded fishy. And then I looked it up on the Internet and found that the personally delivered information was misguided or just plain wrong. Without technology, I would have been stuck relying on the conversation for all my knowledge and then gone spreading the misinformation myself.
Personal interactions are great for getting exposure to new ideas, getting advice tailored to personal situations, and rapid-fire two-way communication. But networked communications blow them away at getting information that is accurate and complete.
I saw him speak at the University of Michigan around 1999. I knew him only from his Wired articles and was interested to hear what this guru had to say to an auditorium full of open-minded students.
His most memorable point in that lecture was that digital music can never be as rich as analog music because whereas an analog instrument allows infinite variation in how each note is played, a digital instrument has only a finite number possible outputs. I saw several weaknesses in that argument: 1) The quantization of a digital device blurs into a continuum when the increments are small enough. 2) Analog devices operate by physics which is itself quantized. 3) Combinatorics means that even an instrument with only a dozen notes, ten amplitudes, and a hundred durations could produce immense numbers of different songs. Just look at what can be written with the few characters of ASCII. A finite vocabulary hardly limits what a language can express.
Based on that lecture and everything I've read by him since, I'd have to moderate the guy as "Not interesting", "Not informative", and "Not insightful". His role in life seems to be to take a contrarian position on some point of modern culture and then act smug and enlightened about it. It would be poetic justice if it's only the gadgets that find his book interesting and we humans just ignore it as we continue creating and communing in our digital domain.
Here's some of my own code with the comments removed:
uint32 randInt(); uint32 randInt( const uint32 n ); double rand(); double rand( const double n ); double randExc(); double randExc( const double n ); double randDblExc(); double randDblExc( const double n ); double operator()();
inline MTRand::uint32 MTRand::randInt( const uint32 n ) { uint32 used = n; used |= used >> 1; used |= used >> 2; used |= used >> 4; used |= used >> 8; used |= used >> 16;
uint32 i; do i = randInt() & used; while( i > n ); return i; }
And here are the missing comments:
Access to 32-bit random numbers integer in [0,2^32-1] integer in [0,n] for n < 2^32 real number in [0,1] real number in [0,n] real number in [0,1) real number in [0,n) real number in (0,1) real number in (0,n) same as rand()
Find which bits are used in n Optimized by Magnus Jonsson (magnus@smartelectronix.com) Draw numbers until one is found in [0,n] toss unused bits to shorten search
v1.0 Revised seeding to match 26 Jan 2002 update of Nishimura and Matsumoto Allowed for seeding with arrays of any length Added access for real numbers in [0,1) with 53-bit resolution Added access for real numbers from normal (Gaussian) distributions Increased overall speed by optimizing twist() Doubled speed of integer [0,n] generation Fixed out-of-range number generation on 64-bit machines Improved portability by substituting literal constants for long enum's Changed license from GNU LGPL to BSD
Did you fully understand the code by itself? Are any of these comments harmful? Would anyone seriously rather have the code without the comments?
Slashdot Mirror
I have heard that already. Some people get the impression that anything you reach through Google is on Google. And I've heard people complain when they find Google "hosting" a site with offensive material.
I liked the commercial. It tells people that Google is still doing very cool and useful things with simple text instead of pretty pictures and vast advertising campaigns (Bing). And it reminds people that Google still does search. With all the Google-branded phones and software, I'm worried that Google is going to get a black eye from one of them and spoil the entire brand.
During a baseball game the bat is in contact with the ball for only 7.3 seconds. And a two-hour movie has only 18 minutes of dialogue if you remove all the pauses. And a four-hour drive has only 5 minute of actual turns. And during an eight-hour workday a key on your keyboard is depressed for only 19 minutes.
You have to have a really skewed perception of time to feel that you're shortchanged by getting only 11 minutes of boom-boom action in a football game. I have watched many football games in person without commercial broadcast (high school and college) and somehow they still take more than 11 minutes to finish.
The young people think you're being anal because the linguistic norms are changing. They don't even see the spelling and grammar errors because they're a part of the language they know. It's only us older folk who learned our language in a time when publishing was much more restricted that get hung up on these changes. Still, it's a good thing they had you to proofread what they wrote since many of your customers would be likewise appalled at their spelling and grammar.
How could young people today be less literate than the young people of decades past? They consume vastly more written information and write frequently. When I was young, voluntary writing was a rarity. During school breaks I might write nothing for days or weeks except short lists and game codes. Kids now are texting, emailing, blogging, and commenting constantly. They have far more chance to absorb, practice, and communicate with written language.
So is it really a tragedy if "because" morphs into "cuz"? Or apostrophes become redundant when meaning is clear without them? Language has been changing as long as language has existed. There are plenty of words in Middle English that I can't make any sense of, and even writing as recent as the early 1900's is jarring and awkward to my eyes. It's like reading Fortran - I can do it with effort, but I wouldn't write it unless forced to for a particular task.
English is becoming simpler in spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure. If people gradually agree on these changes then communication can continue or expand unimpeded.
Some people suggest that the best way to preserve humanity is by building robotic probes that carry the spark of life and all knowledge to the stars. It's impractical to build an actual interstellar Noah's Ark and Library of Congress. But if the information is stored digitally and sent on durable probes to seed other worlds then life and civilization can be spread ad infinitum.
Others suggest that this has already happened.
I'd be happy to see NASA focus its resources on unmanned projects instead of putting meat on the moon (again). But this line worries me:
Are they saying that NASA will focus only on Earth science? While that is valuable and practical, I still want to know what's left to discover in our solar system, around the galaxy, and throughout the universe. I want robotic probes searching for life on Mars and Europa. I want telescopes looking for habitable planets around nearby stars. And I want to know how the universe works and what's in its future. Those things don't need Constellation, but they do need attention beyond the surface of Earth.
I was thinking of a response more like:
We're all full up of idiocy here. Why don't you try next door?
Your concept of "game" is foreign to me. A game is a contest with rules. You play by discovering/learning/developing the ability to win the contest within the rules. An activity that lets you progress without challenge or accomplishment isn't a game.
I am playing through New Super Mario Bros myself and while I appreciate the ease with which I can advance without ever losing, it does detract from the sense of accomplishment.
On the other hand, I do respect your definition of fun. As an amateur game designer (Starcraft maps, mostly) I've learned that players bring a wide variety of goals to each game. Some want to win by the intended rules. Some want to win by breaking rules. Some want to spend time socializing. Some want to give other players grief.
So I accept that NSMB is not a hardcore game. But I'd be sad if all games were as easy and forgiving as NSMB.
Agreed. Just because the maker of a tool operates in a closed manner doesn't mean that the tool itself is closed or that users of the tool are closed-minded.
Yamaha is closed when it comes to production of their pianos. Cross is closed when it comes to production of their pens. And Ford is closed when it comes to production of their cars. But it's no paradox that anybody is creative, productive, independent, or expressive with those pianos, pens, and cars.
The Unix foundations of Mac OS X appeal to technology geeks. The Just Works interface appeals to artistic types who want to create without hacking or fighting the tool itself. And the high quality hardware appeals to anyone who favors reliability and sturdiness.
I think the flaw with the question is that it presumes money is rare and time is unlimited. Maybe they are if you're a kid living on a small allowance and killing time until you get a driver's license. But as a grown up I find that my time is the limiting factor. With more time I can earn more money. So with games costing tens of dollars, the time I spend acquiring, learning, and playing is worth far more dollar-wise than the game itself.
So the worth of a game is how much I enjoy playing it versus time spent on other activities. Elegance, depth of play, session length, and availability of opponents are the key factors for me. The game needs to look nice, feel nice, and respond smoothly to controls. It should be easy enough to learn in twenty minutes but sophisticated enough to reward years of replay. I should be able to complete a session in half an hour or generate stories and fond memories from sessions lasting two hours or longer. And it needs to have balanced computer opponents, readily available online opponents, or be easy to introduce to casual gaming friends.
Fullscreen is not supported.
I've yet to encounter a caption, ad, or annotation that I'd miss. But a lack of fullscreen is a big loss.
The one you uploaded to two others has become three copies. And those two each share it with two others, making seven copies. And those four with eight more for fifteen copies.
So books shared in a library spread linearly. The author might sell less than if sharing were impossible, but he'll still sell a number proportional to the public's interest in his work. Books shared online spread exponentially. The author might receive no more compensation for a book that a million people read than for a book that ten people read. In fact, the more popular book will be easier to find and spread for the sharers.
Responding to a cousin post, the Founding Fathers didn't institute copyright to compensate publishers for the cost of materials. They made copyright to give the creators an incentive to create. Buying and sharing still compensate creators in proportion to the value of their creation. Copying does not.
It sounds to me like you were addicted to WoW. But you're also addicted to life. You're grinding for grades, degrees, jobs, promotions, papers, and relationships.
The only way to judge that you are healthier than a WoW-only addict is to declare that traditional accomplishments are more important than video game accomplishments. And that judgment is a matter of happiness. Do traditional accomplishments generate more happiness than video game accomplishments? Probably, especially in the long term. But only if you truly enjoy both the process and the completion of those goals. If you're just racing to check off a list of real life accomplishments and not really happy, then you're just addicted to a more socially acceptable game.
Backus found that there are 26 women in London who match his outrageously narrow criteria. He doesn't have to search all of the UK, just his own city. Now if he searches for them by randomly calling numbers in the phone book and asking the answerer if she's the one, then yes it will take many years to find her. But if he networks a little and asks the answerer if they might know the woman he's searching for then he'll find her much faster.
Or maybe he can do something crazy like hang out around a university where those intelligent, educated, interesting women might already be. Or go to social gatherings with people his age, where the population is already self-selected for women meeting his age, geographic, and availability requirements. Neglecting the factor of locality and self-selection is like declaring that the International Space Station has only a 0.00000003% chance of harboring intelligent life since it's just one of billions of objects in the galaxy.
Or maybe this genius should try Internet dating. There are 26 fabulous women whom he's a perfect match for within ten miles of him. If he posts on the most popular dating sites, what are the chances that one of them will find him there within one year?
And remember, that's 26 perfect women in London even if he's attracted to only 5% of the highly-educated women his age. Seriously? Who here found only 5% of their gender-appropriate college classmates attractive? And he narrows the pool twice, supposing that only 5% of the women that he finds attractive will find him attractive. That ignores the correlation of people being attracted to mates that match their own racial, genetic, and social background. Bumping those numbers to a more realistic 25% would give him 657 wonderful, beautiful, interesting, intelligent, friendly, available, captivated, local women to date.
I wouldn't hang my hat on Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail being a neutral domain. You might like their image today, but any one of them could easily do something boneheaded or evil in the next couple years and reflect negatively on you. Or they could decide to stop providing free email accounts (or any public accounts at all) and then you'll be cut off from everybody who knows you by that address.
Likewise for Comcast, Verizon, or other ISP addresses. As soon as you move or change providers, everybody loses contact with you. And those companies have even more volatile images, since they advertise for themselves and against competitors primarily on image itself.
You could use your address at your current employer if you have one. But then you're also tied to their image, will lose your address if you leave the job, might reveal too much or reflect badly on your employer if you publish that address, and open yourself up to monitoring by your employer.
There's also the route of rolling your own. But then you're stuck administering your own domain, paying the registration and hosting fees, and relying on your own taste and domain availability to choose a neutral-sounding name.
And finally there are organizations that will allow you to subscribe to an account. There are private email providers which leave you with the risk that the provider could go out of business and leave your address dead. And there are public institutions like universities which are constructed to exist in perpetuity and generally maintain a favorable image, but leave you associated with education and might connote inexperience.
Personally, I have all of these kinds of email accounts. Most of them I use for only very specialized purposes. But the one I use for my independent professional interactions is the EDU account. I can rely on that one to continue existing as long as email accounts are popular and it follows me around from job to job and city to city. The academic association isn't too bad since my field values education, but I can imagine that some potential associates might get the idea that I'm fresh out of school. And some people might have feelings of rivalry toward my university or animosity toward higher education in general.
So I think it's really hard to find a neutral email address. All of them leave you vulnerable to negative images, discontinuation of service, or extra expense and hassle. You can hitch your wagon to whichever seems neutral today, but somebody somewhere someday will judge against you based on it.
Close. Since SVG is a markup language, I develop mine in a text editor. Or I write Python programs that turn my data into SVG animations automatically.
I have Adobe Illustrator CS3 but there's not much point exporting from it into SVG. I'm better off exporting to PDF for static documents or using Flash for animations since those formats are widely viewable.
Why are they still pressing a new plastic disc for each player list refresh? It would seem they could publish a baseline Madden 2010 and then offer downloads to update the teams and players for '11, '12, etc. When they really have a new game engine ready, then they could release a new baseline Madden 2015.
I bet they could make even more money that way. Charge $3 per team so that if you update the whole league you'll end up spending more than for another game disc. Or offer mid-season and post-season updates so players can simulate the playoffs with each team's regular season performance factored in.
Or maybe I shouldn't give them ideas.
Madden '10 came out in August 2009. Just like cars, they start selling a new model year months before that calendar year arrives. Madden '09 will have been out for 18 months and out of production for six months.
But the thing that still doesn't make sense: If the box says that online play will be available for one year from release date, then anyone who bought the latest version available in July 2009 will have had only six months of online access. And theoretically EA could shut down the server the day after the last player bought Madden '09. Evil.
Money. Now.
Organizations commonly become short-sighted. They become so worried about increasing profits this quarter that they really stop caring about the distant future.
The Daily Show interviewed a legislator in some state with budget shortfalls. Her plan was to sell the government buildings to a private company and then lease them back for twenty years. That would let them fill a $20 million gap in the year that the buildings were sold. When asked how the state would ever pay the rent in following years without a $20 million windfall, her response was: "We have to get through this year first. I'm just trying to balance the budget this year."
Killing all those servers will immediately lower administration and bandwidth costs. And it may very well give a kick to sales of the current versions. When the boss sees lower costs and higher sales he'll be happy. When sales slump again in six months they can blame piracy.
Right now. I'm watching football (Orange Bowl) on my HDTV. This is good, but it would be better if it was in 3D.
Also, nature documentaries. They're beautiful in HD, but they'd be even better in 3D.
Whether I'd pay extra or wear uncomfortable glasses is another matter. But if I had the choice between 2D and 3D for those programs without significant cost or inconvenience, I'd choose 3D every time.
That's the same phenomenon as color, stereo, high definition, and surround sound. At the time that each was introduced it was a luxury and only gimmicky shows made much use of them. But eventually they became cheap, standard, and ubiquitous.
Forget the radius. Now I can calculate zero to 2.7 trillion digits of precision: pow(e,i*pi)+1=0
Princess and the Frog is another movie worth seeing even as an adult. Interesting story, colorful characters, funny jokes, pretty animation, and good music. Maybe not terribly original, deep, or groundbreaking; but a worthwhile kid-friendly film.
Yeah, that's kind of what "2.0" usually means. Thing 1.0 is what the developer thought was necessary to fulfill the vision of how something should work. Thing 2.0 is what he came up with after watching people actually try to use Thing 1.0 and realizing it didn't working as intended.
Web 1.0 was only interactive for programmers. Web 2.0 is interactive for people, including programmers who want to spend more time on the message and less time on the mechanics of writing the message.
Well, he also nailed real life:
"Information gathered from personal conversations is often stale, incomplete, misleading, unreviewed, or simply wrong."
I can't count the number of times that I've had a discussion about politics, art, or technology and been told something that sounded fishy. And then I looked it up on the Internet and found that the personally delivered information was misguided or just plain wrong. Without technology, I would have been stuck relying on the conversation for all my knowledge and then gone spreading the misinformation myself.
Personal interactions are great for getting exposure to new ideas, getting advice tailored to personal situations, and rapid-fire two-way communication. But networked communications blow them away at getting information that is accurate and complete.
I saw him speak at the University of Michigan around 1999. I knew him only from his Wired articles and was interested to hear what this guru had to say to an auditorium full of open-minded students.
His most memorable point in that lecture was that digital music can never be as rich as analog music because whereas an analog instrument allows infinite variation in how each note is played, a digital instrument has only a finite number possible outputs. I saw several weaknesses in that argument: 1) The quantization of a digital device blurs into a continuum when the increments are small enough. 2) Analog devices operate by physics which is itself quantized. 3) Combinatorics means that even an instrument with only a dozen notes, ten amplitudes, and a hundred durations could produce immense numbers of different songs. Just look at what can be written with the few characters of ASCII. A finite vocabulary hardly limits what a language can express.
Based on that lecture and everything I've read by him since, I'd have to moderate the guy as "Not interesting", "Not informative", and "Not insightful". His role in life seems to be to take a contrarian position on some point of modern culture and then act smug and enlightened about it. It would be poetic justice if it's only the gadgets that find his book interesting and we humans just ignore it as we continue creating and communing in our digital domain.
And here are the missing comments:
Did you fully understand the code by itself? Are any of these comments harmful? Would anyone seriously rather have the code without the comments?