The Washington post is supposed to be a reputable newspaper with a reputation for reliable informaiton. So why was this article not basic fact checked by anybody?
That is, anybody before us.
Come 'on everybody! Let's all pile on to poor Jose Antonio Vargas and point out everything he just plain got wrong.
I'll take the obvious ones.
1. Tron was not a videogame-turned-into-a-movie. It was an original movie about games in general. The videogame followed. 2. Doom cannot be categorized as an Xbox game. Doom has seen basically all of it's sales on the PC for about a dozen years, with the occasional port. 3. Console gaming and movies don't "crave" the 13 - 25 year old male audience. According to the Entertainmetn Software Association the average gamer age is 30, and 43% are female. This skewes a little lower on consoles, but the numbers are far better than the shallow stereotype Vargas passes as journalism. And hasn't box office gold been Date Movies?
Arguable points
1. Doom is not the Granddaddy of FPS games. Wolfenstein 3D is. Wolfenstein 3D begat Doom. There were other FPS games before Wolfie, but it was the first to see real commercial success. 2. Half-Life was based more on classic adventure games than Doom. It certainly didn't "follow the Doom model." 3. He points to Spielberg signing a deal to create 3 franchisable games for EA as a sign that the industry is at a crossroads. However, Spielberg has worked on games many times before, though his LucasArts and Dreamworks Interactive studios. Don't get me wrong, I'm excited to see him spend more time trying to alter the craft, but it's still nothing he hasn't done before.
As a side note: Movies are about why you do something. Games are about how you do something. Movies about "how" are hollow, and games about "why" are boring.
The first Resident Evil movie should get lots of props. It took the RE world, but altered the plot dramatically. It put characters in difficult, complex situations. A woman wakes up in a house full of guns, and is smuggled down into an underground laboratory she didn't know existed trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Characters make mistakes that other characters have to pay for. They choose between killing one of their own or facing death together.
Most of the actors were pretty good. And let's face it, some of the moments, like the laser dicer machine, were pretty cool.
The problem seemed to be that a few of the actors were distractingly bad, and the CGI monster was ATROCIOUS. Laughably bad. It looked like something out of a cheap CGI fan hentai. Really, if there was a moderately competent sense of dread that the director managed to get out of the great scenario writing, it was killed every time that giant plastic tongue came on screen. Sure, the dogs covered in prosciutto were distractingly bad too and should have been cut from the script. But at least they weren't recurring characters.
RE: Apocalypse didn't have as strong a scenario, writing, or anything else really. But it did drive the characters forward and did succeed in making RE: 3 the Movie look really, really appealing. At this point, it would make a great serial drama for the sci-fi channel.
I wish someone would go back and re-do RE:1 with the love and skill it deserved. It was definitely a problem of one or two weak links in an otherwise strong chain.
Moderators on Slashdot have gotten a lot better about modding down opinions they disagree with, and instead have taken to just posting disagreements. You'll notice the number of pro-Microsoft comments that get modded up in any Microsoft-is-evil story.
As one guy who posts more than he probably should, Modders seem to respond these days to forcefully held opinions part of which they personally, individually agree with. Therefore the best way to get modded up is to agressively defend a lot of little positions that will appeal to several subgroups, especially underrepresented ones. For example, "It is clear that the furry community of Canada have become THE mainstream SkyOS users of choice, but not all of the time." Don't do it all in one sentence, of course, and don't get fur into your keyboard. Defending two fundamentally opposite but technically non-conflicting viewpoints also helps get mod points. If the "Microsoft is a convicted monopolist" half of your post doesn't get a particular moderator, the "but Microsoft has done a lot of good things" half will.
Changing your subject line seems to reduce your chances of getting modded up, strangely enough. Also swear once, and only once. This proves just how muck you fucking believe what you're posting. Real people swear.
All of that is only if you don't have anything to say. These days, the other good way to get modded up is to know your stuff and have something to actually say. If it is an article about Unix Microsoft, and you happened to sit in on a few dozen meetings with MS about it, post. It will be moderated up. If it is about the Free Software Federation of Florence, and you happen to be a member of Love, Linux, and Linguine, post.
While it can be gamed, the Slashdot moderating system seems to work. I hardly ever see posts modded to 0 which don't deserve it, or posts at +5 which really, really shouldn't be. Really, the only major problem is that there aren't enough genuinely good posts. But that's not a fault of the moderation system, just a sign that people have things to do with their lives.
As someone that has worked with user-created content professionally, I'd have to say that Slashdot is a shining example of what's possible. You have hundreds of comments on a story, 10 of which are worth reading. But those 10 are of the quality of journalism you would find at News.com, the Register.co.uk, and the New York Times... You know, the "I'm professional, really" rags. And there are whole threads of interesting discussions that haven't degraded to usenet-level postings. All of this by volunteers who probably should be doing something else.
And if you want to see what's possible, try browsing with everything turned down except "funny" mods up +5.
I'm really looking forward to Flickr. Collaborative content, collaborative filtering, and multi-direction communication seems to be driving the internet forward these days. And it's about time... TNINTV.
At the risk of getting it all back on a rational level, the ESRB is a group of people that sits in a room and watches a video of the "worst" parts of a game, reads a description of it, and decides what they think it should be. They don't have published standards, really, but go on "feel."
I wish they could be bought: it would help keep publishers from overreacting to the oddest things when creating games. "No the character can't shoot milk out of their nose when laughing in the cafeteria scene. What would the ESRB think of that?"
But I have yet to see them abuse their power, or "sell out." The closest one that might be underrated is Manhunt, but that's no worse than what you see in an R-rated slasher flick.
I have never seen the ESRB give an M rating to porn. As you're not the first person to say that, can you cite specifics? Specifics beyond, say, how 7-11 is complacent in the selling of porn. Or the local government is complacent in the selling of porn. Or how you and I are complacent in the selling of porn because we're not out picketing 7-11 right now.
And for that matter, can you recommend a porn game with national distribution? I have yet to find one, and I've looked all over Walmart and Electronics Boutique.
Is it time for the Entertainment Software Ratings Board to stand down in favor of a truly independent ratings system, thereby nullifying a major criticism levelled against our industry?
Do people who complain about excessive violence in videogames actually have any idea who the ESRB is? Or how it works?
It's like Anime. Clueless people see Japanese Animation and think "It's a cartoon. It's for kids." Likewise, they take the same stereotypical view of videogames and come to the same completely incorrect conclusion. And then they complain that they bought a game for their kid that had decapitations, disembowlments, or a bare woman's ankle showing.
If we're going anywhere, it should be to simplify the system even more. Do you know what I mean when I say G? T? T+? What about 13? 17? 21? Cut down on the symbology and the choice, parents just want to know if a particular game is reasonably appropriate for a kid the age of theirs. Or not. One simple answer.
While another poster is right about MIDI being possibly unnecessary on a consumer portable device, I would have bought it for MIDI capability. The "advanced" features of my little QY-70 are going largely unused, as it is functioning as a basic MIDI to audio device. A flexible piece of consumer kit that had midi capability would go a long way towards simplifying portable music creation.
Sure, you can program your own stuff. But unless you want to be a programmer, it is a lot more problematic than it is worth. Generally you can make several professional-looking mods that explore certain new aspects of gameplay in the time it would take to write up a small engine of your own. Professionally you would likely be re-using someone else's engine anyway, either an in-house developed one or an externally purchased one.
Deconstructing other games, however, is necessary no matter what you get into. Think of it as writing book reports or taking filmstudies. Unless you study what games are out there, you'll be doomed to repeat the same mistkes. This is true across all disciplines. I've worked with programmers so on-point they could take a design and finesse it on-the-fly to come up with something slightly different than the spec but tons of fun. I've also worked with programmers so dead to the world that they would completely misunderstand specs and implement things that had no relevance to the game whatsoever, and couldn't figure out why.
most mods are just a few new models/maps/weapons models, nothing spectacular
What do you think most game development is? Game companies are only about 1/4th programmers. The rest are artists, designers, and managers / support staff.
also dont think I've been doing enough stuff like OpenGL in my spare time
Except for the specialized job of an engine programmer, that's not that relevant.
If people are smart enough to be expected to follow the law, they are smart enough to propose and vote on law. People are smart enough to do all of the above. People are smart enough to finance their homes, vehicles, and education; they are smart enough to run their own businesses, and they are smart enough to follow the law in everyday life.
What are you talking about? They're not even smart enough to elect someone coherent.
The kinds of skills that get you by in life aren't necessarily the kinds of skills that help out in running a government. The average citizen is no more likely to do a good job running the government than the government is running the job of the average citizen. Figuring out the tax code is a nightmare for the average person. What would make them qualified to decide if the estate tax should be compounded per bracket or not? Or if ranchers in north dakota should recieve a 5% tax break but a lower monthly subsidy? Or if the joint chiefs of staff should make new threat assessments and readyness plans every 12 months or 36 months. Or argue out the minutiae of whether education funding should get $13.3 billion for Title I Grants to Local Educational Agencies and $1.3 billion in Vocational and Technical training, or $13.4 billion in Title I Grants and $1.2 billion in vocational training.
If we had a direct democracy, people would turn to talking heads to decide how to vote. People would look to people they considered "specialists." People like Oprah Winfrey, Margret Cho, and Jack Thompson. And the idea promoted by the silliest celebrity of the moment would win. And ultimately, nobody would have time to read the bills and vote anyway. Hell, the senators we've elected don't have time to read the bills and vote, and they have a lot more help than we do.
I love democracy, and I believe that the will of the people should be the guiding hand that points the direction of the nation. That having been said, people have lives. They don't have time, education, or inclination enough to be involved in every single decision their city, state, and country makes any more than their city, state, and country has the time to send an inspector to sit over their shoulder and make sure they are doing their work right. The will of everyone should set the direction of government, but certain people devoted to the government full-time are needed to make things work.
I applied to basically every open post throughout the US after I had graduated college. I needed to look for a year before I found something. But someone finally foolishly hired me for QA.
I'd like to think that it was the backcatalog of levels and mods I had worked on / faqs that I had written / the thousands of games that I had deconstructed that got me that job. But the fact is the person who gave me the phone interview obviously hadn't read my resume, asked me a few sports-related questions that I didn't know the answer to, and offered me the position on the spot. Weird industry, this one.
BTW, parent is right. Apply to your local companies while you're still in early college, or late high school even. Anything you can do in your spare time, like figuring out how systems are working under the hood or creating mods, is very helpful. Your mod skillz may not be enough to land you a lead level design position right away, but they might be enough to convince a QA manager to hire you to test. Or might be enough to convince an office manager that you're hardworking enough to be an assistant. Or get you an art internship.
Not to be too pessimistic, but no matter how large the project is, no matter how important it is to everyone involved, it will be faster to slip it now and get it done right than to fsck it up and need to do it over.
Projects slip all of the time. Someone is setting up how much time you have. Time is always variable, and is negotiated with outside entities. Your boss's boss, the loonies in marketing... someone is setting the schedule. Schedules are always optimistic. The bigger and more important the project, the more likely it is to slip.
The key is not to do what people want, but what will make them happy. Your immediate boss probably wants Stanford dissertation level code, but would be happy with good documentation and re-usable classes. Your higher-ups may want it done fully featured last week, but would be happy if you explained that the extra time you spent now can save a week off of all of your other projects. And if you can only make one person happy, tell everyone else to go to that one person. It takes guts to tell a high-level executive to talk to your manager, but that's what it takes. And sometimes you have to tell your manager to talk to the high-level executives. But if you can't make lots of people happy, make one person happy, and tell everyone else to stuff it on their authority.
Most importantly, the code you make should make you happy. If it doesn't, it isn't going to please anyone else. More importantly, though, you're selling your company your time and experience, not your soul. If your experience (however young) says to do something differently, that's what they're paying you to know. And if it's your soul they want... just recognize that a wall-street banker can make upwards of 200,000 dollars their first year. Souls go for a lot more money than you probably make.
Either way, you're getting laid off in 5 years. Good luck!
A friend at work just bought the PSP version of SSX 4. He was royally pi$$ed to find out that the PSP version he just bought is 10 dollars more than the regular console versions.
On the one hand, I'm surprised that as many UMD movie disks are selling as they are. The idea of portable movies isn't new or revolutionary, and the PSP has the capacity to playback movies from resonably affordable flash memory.
On the other hand, I can't see strapping a cheap digitizer to an LCD screen, feeding the video to a television, and having it be anything other than crappy. PSP UMD disks have resolutions significantly below broadcast quality, and not at all up to DVD standards. But if you really wanted to do something like that, the best way would be to use a inline digitizer that snags the signal before it goes to the LCD screen. That way the resolution you do have remains as crisp as it is likely to be, short of having a dedicated UMD player.
And don't worry too much about voiding your warranty. Sony has already made clear that nothing that is likely to go wrong with your PSP is covered under warranty.
It seems to be a question of degrees. And I say this for the people reading, not necessarily to the parent poster who seems to know how it works.
You have an idea. You let it mull around the back of your mind for a few years. You get maybe three friends and associates interested in the idea, and over the course of quite a few weekends you pull together a very rough demo. At this point you may need to finagle some art resources either by schmoozing or paying someone. You hit every industry contact you know with your demo, and many that you don't. Look for a "champion" who really likes your game and will help drive it through. While you do that, on the strength of your demo get some fundraising going. VC's are nice, but really hit up small businesses, people, friends, family, etc. Now scale up production, moving into a low-cost but rat free office space, and hiring artists, developers, an office manager, a business manager, etc. Appoint yourself project director (or somesuch), and get to work making that game. Hit your milestones, piggyback into your publisher's E3 booth, and ship. There is nothing in the above scenario that prevents people who are genuinely interested from breaking in.
Most independent studios really are indie studios that got funding and scaled up. The studio that released Alien Homonid, for example, started as a few guys working their tales off, found investers, scaled up, created a great game, shopped for a publisher, and released. Other studios get a publisher involved earlier to mitigate risk.
And these aren't rare: somewhere in the realm of 1/2 of all games are created by independent developers. See that logo that pops up on the screen after the EA title? That's the developer. Not all of those are independent, but many are.
The difference between and indie and an independent developer is just that an independent developer wasn't afraid to grow. At some point they may get bought out by a major studio and enter what is somewhat pessimistically known as a "decline phase," but that's also another step in the natural evolution of things. I believe parent poster pointed out the "craploads of cash..."
If you want to be independent, and all of the risks / control that entails, you can do it. Or perhaps more strongly, that is how it is done.
The barber problem is not really a problem in that there is no paradox. Your ackward wording makes it unclear, but the common phrasing of this problem is "the barber shaves all men who don't shave themselves." That means that of the subset of all men who don't shave themselves, the barber shaves them. Don't shave themselves -> Barber shaves them. However, the opposite is NOT specified by the rules of logic. Shaves themselves does not -> Barber does not shave them. It does imply something known as the contrapositive, the negative of both sides of the equation with the order of implication reversed... Hence if the barber does not shave them, then they must shave themselves.
None of this precludes the barber from shaving someone that shaves themselves. Or precludes the barber from not shaving someone who shaves themselves. This says NOTHING about people who shave themselves. It only makes a logical statement about the subset of people who do not shave themselves.
Hence, there is no problem if the barber shaves themself.
Of course, I'm using the common form of the problem not the one from the poster above. The one from the poster above seems to be trying to close that "loophole" in the equation, but just winds up saying the equivalent of "I've got a dollar, but I've only got twenty-five cents."
The best part of this is, so the story goes, that it wound up as an actual extra credit problem on an actual high school test. And that the teacher who administered the test was fired for it. This was years ago, and the person who told this to me was a high school teacher, so take that with a grain of salt.
And if three isn't enough for you there is a more generalized form.
My variant on solution #2 was apparently a little more violent than yours: Flip the switch rapidly until you burn out the bulb. That should take a lot less time than waiting for it to burn out. Static charge might also help.
The problem with logic puzzles like this is that logic puzzles presuppose a lot of things. In the real world, you could pretty easily take a switch out of the wall and add a resister so that one of the bulbs was dimmer than the others. Or you could get to the other room and the bulbs could be high up in the ceiling and out of reach, and your solution is screwed. If you're fast enough you could theoretically throw the switch and make it to the other room in time to see the bulb change states. Considering all of the walls these days are a variant on carbonized newspaper, you could pretty easily kick a hole into the wall to see the lights change. You could pull the wire attached to the switch until you yanked back the bulb in the other room. Even without getting violent, every light switch seems to have a state in the middle which causes the bulb to be much louder than the rest.
Heck, take off your clothes, cut / tear them into thin strands. Loop one strand around one of the switches in the "on" position, and hook that around something low to the ground, such as the bottom of a door frame. Walk to the other room. Pull the switch. Or cut the clothes and soak it in a liquid before anchoring it snugly to the switch just barely in the on position and something on the ground. Walk into the other room, and wait for the clothes to dry and shrink.
Do you even know which way is the on position? I've walked into a lot of old houses where swithches were mounted with "down" as the on position, and without any labeling at all. Newer houses frequently use multiple switches, whereby the XOR of two switches determines whether or not a light is on. What about switches that are mounted Left / Right? Are you assured that all of the lights work? All of the switches work? Does the house have power?
The only way that NONE of the light from the other room can reach the current one is if none of the switches did anything. If there was any light variance, you could measure that and get a relative position based upon strength.
It also says that you can't see the other room. Are you blind?
Logic puzzles, basically, are a nice way of communicating a simple state problem. And if you want it to work as a puzzle, you agree to this limitation / logical purity. Light switches only have two states. Walls are impermeable. No light gets through. That way you can permutate through the simplified logical consequences of each potential action and the ramifications thereof. Actual real-world solutions are usually much easier. A light in the real world may have a tremendous number of states, but in a puzzle it is on or off. A chalice in the real world has angle and position information, can be scratched into, fashioned into a weapon, stolen, etc, but in the puzzle it is either up or down. Otherwise it doesn't work as a puzzle.
If you're proposing a logic puzzle, but you use a real-world side-effect that you don't make explicitly clear in the puzzle , you're violating how logic puzzles work. That doesn't make you smarter than people who solve lots of puzzles, it just means you've written a bad logic puzzle.
The only thing I can add to this is that the number of meddlings the king can do is actually k+1, as he gets to set the default chalice position (up / down). So, much like N = n - 1, K should equal k+1.
The problem is that the king could choose to negate or add to any or some of the signal or not. You have n(k+1)-k=Resultant Signal=n(k+1)+k. The number of flips was significant previously, because it was telling the leader that everyone had been out. The leader could count them all, and know the moment everyone was out. But the key that made it work was everyone flipping it only once, otherwise the leader would overcount and get himself / herself killed.
I suspect that playing with this possible negation will be key to solving the riddle... that you don't need every prisoner to flip the chalice k+1 times, but some ratio of k/n times. But all that does is reduce the margin of error from something way too big to something a little too big, as now your signal is between n(k/n)-k and n(k/n)+k, or between 0 and 2k. And the king doesn't have to, so the range is actually between k to 0 and k to 2k.
Not everyone needs to send signal through, but the signal that doesn't get through should be used to sap the king's k alterations in a reliable fashion.
Of course, my old puzzle solving buddy would be the first to point out that chalices are generally very heavy, and kings are generally very soft.
On the one hand, the technology could develop into something very cool. If you could use multiple cards and have a separate, different proc running on each one, it could be the coolest multiprocessor system around. Or simply using the motherboard as support for separate running systems in a system-on-a-card configuration (these are already available, but expensive). It currently could be a very useful little test bed if someone wanted to check performance across different processors. It could also be useful for large system builders like Dell who could simplify their parts management and support costs by having one motherboard used across all of their lineup.
That having been said, there is a lot on a motherboard that gets upgraded each generation: RAM style, upgrade card slots, video card slots, small device connectivity, HD connections, bus... I would guess that these are ultimately more important to the overall speed of the system than the processor. Can you imagine hamstringing an Athalon 64 with a 66mhz bus and an AGPx1 graphics card? I doubt this will ultimately be beneficial to the end consumer... they might get one upgrade generation for a nice little last speed boost, but as the motherboard needs to support more than just a processor, upgrading just a processor isn't as much help as it could be.
On the one hand, I can see the appeal of Microsoft's development ideology: Make it big, cheap, slow, and usable by idiots. Sadly, though, it tends to be used by idiots. And why would you pay an idiot 80 dollars an hour to setup your mail server and another 200 dollars every two weeks to reboot it, when you can pay someone competent to set it up once and have it run consistently indefinitely?
It's possible that everyone there was a unix geek. If they've been around long enough, that's really the only option. But the fact that they're doing recruiting at a university instead of coding should tell you something about who they are. I leave the ramifications of that as an exercise to the reader.
I was hired by someone once to try and develop, train, and release a neural network based upon input from the dating service they ran. He had no luck finding patterns in the information, and so he tried offloading that onto an artificial brain. Unfortunately he also wanted to feed it astrological information, horoscopes, etc. Any information he could find.
He also didn't really want to pay me, and kept being creepy about it.
Point is, people have been doing this for years, in various forms. With little success. Yes with a computer. And before that with tabulating machines. And before that, ancient texts and good-old-fashioned "who paid the most." I fail to see how feeding "chemistry" into a computer (and let's be honest, "chemistry" WRT the brain is also called "voodoo") will get you better information about who someone will like.
The best indicator of who you will like is who you've liked before. But that's not a new idea either.
You have to define a journalist if all journalists are going to get special legal protection. For example, journalists are not required to reveal their sources (usually). Journalists can be present at certain illegal activities and not be charged with abetting (I'm sure a lawyer will correct me).
How do you prevent Frank the drug dealer from setting up a blog and refusing to reveal his sources? How would the police get anything done if everyone refused to reveal their sources?
Personally I think the law needs to change from protecting journalists (which has always been a vague concept) to protecting journalistic activities. The ThinkSecret kid is a law student, not a journalist, but he was dissemenating information in a journalistic fashion and those activities deserve protection.
A brief and largely incorrect summary of the current state of things:
MS Messenger: Ships standard on all Windows PC's. Pops up every five minutes asking you if you would like to sign up for service. Causes your computer to explode if you try to uninstall it, or indeed just try to get it to shut up. The fact that this still isn't the #1 instant messaging client should tell you something. I have the most luck with voice chat through firewalls on Messenger.
Aim: Comes automatically with AOL, or you can download it free from aol.com. Also comes free with LOTS and LOTS of ads. Ads pop up on your screen. Ads are built into your client. Smart a$$ movie executives send you ads directly. Sex chatbots try to lure you into filthyness before posting the transcript on Fark. Everyone's personal icon is loud, animated, and obnoxious. In short, AIM is a lot like the internet. And like the internet, nearly everyone uses AIM.
ICQ: Still the greatest communications medium of all time. Really. Greatest ever. (There, I said what you wanted Mr. 3098014563. Now give me my family back, like in the deal.)
Yahoo: No really, Yahoo has a chat medium. I was shocked too. Isn't Yahoo just adorable sometimes? On a side note, I've had better luck getting webcams through firewalls over Yahoo. This leads to great situations where I'm videoconferencing with someone over Yahoo, but the audio stream is in MSN and the chat is happening in Jabber.
Google Chat: Google chat is based on Jabber, the open source next-generation world dominating chat protocol of the fut-- hey, why are you laughing? No seriously, Jabber, which can communicate with AIM and MSN through... Yes it says so on the box. No, I don't care if almost never works. Ok, fine, Jabber, which can sometimes communicate with AIM and MSN through server-side plug ins, is the basis for Google Chat. Unlike all of the other protocols Jabber is an encrypted medium, meaning that even the server doesn't know what is being said. psi is the jabber client of choice, though there are a lot out there. It's also the only reason to buy Trillian Pro. What was that about Google Chat again?
Now if I remember correctly, AIM, as a condition of its merger with Time Warner was required to open its chat network to everyone. It then proceeded to shut out all 3rd party clients and other protocols that had the nerve to try and connect with it. MSN tried to connect to AOL without permission, but kept refusing 3rd party clients that tried to connect to it. We thought Yahoo was shutting out 3rd party clients as well, but it turns out they just broke their system a few times. Oops. Jabber will sleep with anyone, and Jabber servers will sleep with other Jabber servers. Jabber servers will even sleep with AOL and MSN, but only if they're really happy or really drunk. ICQ... I refuse to say anything about ICQ on the grounds that ICQ users are even more insane than Apple users.
All of this is very close to e-mail, circa 1992... Back when AOL, Compuserve, and all of the rest of the providers thought that locking their users into their system would keep the most people. Then AOL bought them all, and the whole thing seemed kind of moot.
Slashdot Mirror
The Washington post is supposed to be a reputable newspaper with a reputation for reliable informaiton. So why was this article not basic fact checked by anybody?
That is, anybody before us.
Come 'on everybody! Let's all pile on to poor Jose Antonio Vargas and point out everything he just plain got wrong.
I'll take the obvious ones.
1. Tron was not a videogame-turned-into-a-movie. It was an original movie about games in general. The videogame followed.
2. Doom cannot be categorized as an Xbox game. Doom has seen basically all of it's sales on the PC for about a dozen years, with the occasional port.
3. Console gaming and movies don't "crave" the 13 - 25 year old male audience. According to the Entertainmetn Software Association the average gamer age is 30, and 43% are female. This skewes a little lower on consoles, but the numbers are far better than the shallow stereotype Vargas passes as journalism. And hasn't box office gold been Date Movies?
Arguable points
1. Doom is not the Granddaddy of FPS games. Wolfenstein 3D is. Wolfenstein 3D begat Doom. There were other FPS games before Wolfie, but it was the first to see real commercial success.
2. Half-Life was based more on classic adventure games than Doom. It certainly didn't "follow the Doom model."
3. He points to Spielberg signing a deal to create 3 franchisable games for EA as a sign that the industry is at a crossroads. However, Spielberg has worked on games many times before, though his LucasArts and Dreamworks Interactive studios. Don't get me wrong, I'm excited to see him spend more time trying to alter the craft, but it's still nothing he hasn't done before.
As a side note: Movies are about why you do something. Games are about how you do something. Movies about "how" are hollow, and games about "why" are boring.
The first Resident Evil movie should get lots of props. It took the RE world, but altered the plot dramatically. It put characters in difficult, complex situations. A woman wakes up in a house full of guns, and is smuggled down into an underground laboratory she didn't know existed trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Characters make mistakes that other characters have to pay for. They choose between killing one of their own or facing death together.
Most of the actors were pretty good. And let's face it, some of the moments, like the laser dicer machine, were pretty cool.
The problem seemed to be that a few of the actors were distractingly bad, and the CGI monster was ATROCIOUS. Laughably bad. It looked like something out of a cheap CGI fan hentai. Really, if there was a moderately competent sense of dread that the director managed to get out of the great scenario writing, it was killed every time that giant plastic tongue came on screen. Sure, the dogs covered in prosciutto were distractingly bad too and should have been cut from the script. But at least they weren't recurring characters.
RE: Apocalypse didn't have as strong a scenario, writing, or anything else really. But it did drive the characters forward and did succeed in making RE: 3 the Movie look really, really appealing. At this point, it would make a great serial drama for the sci-fi channel.
I wish someone would go back and re-do RE:1 with the love and skill it deserved. It was definitely a problem of one or two weak links in an otherwise strong chain.
Oddly enough, I'd have to disagree.
Moderators on Slashdot have gotten a lot better about modding down opinions they disagree with, and instead have taken to just posting disagreements. You'll notice the number of pro-Microsoft comments that get modded up in any Microsoft-is-evil story.
As one guy who posts more than he probably should, Modders seem to respond these days to forcefully held opinions part of which they personally, individually agree with. Therefore the best way to get modded up is to agressively defend a lot of little positions that will appeal to several subgroups, especially underrepresented ones. For example, "It is clear that the furry community of Canada have become THE mainstream SkyOS users of choice, but not all of the time." Don't do it all in one sentence, of course, and don't get fur into your keyboard. Defending two fundamentally opposite but technically non-conflicting viewpoints also helps get mod points. If the "Microsoft is a convicted monopolist" half of your post doesn't get a particular moderator, the "but Microsoft has done a lot of good things" half will.
Changing your subject line seems to reduce your chances of getting modded up, strangely enough. Also swear once, and only once. This proves just how muck you fucking believe what you're posting. Real people swear.
All of that is only if you don't have anything to say. These days, the other good way to get modded up is to know your stuff and have something to actually say. If it is an article about Unix Microsoft, and you happened to sit in on a few dozen meetings with MS about it, post. It will be moderated up. If it is about the Free Software Federation of Florence, and you happen to be a member of Love, Linux, and Linguine, post.
While it can be gamed, the Slashdot moderating system seems to work. I hardly ever see posts modded to 0 which don't deserve it, or posts at +5 which really, really shouldn't be. Really, the only major problem is that there aren't enough genuinely good posts. But that's not a fault of the moderation system, just a sign that people have things to do with their lives.
As someone that has worked with user-created content professionally, I'd have to say that Slashdot is a shining example of what's possible. You have hundreds of comments on a story, 10 of which are worth reading. But those 10 are of the quality of journalism you would find at News.com, the Register.co.uk, and the New York Times... You know, the "I'm professional, really" rags. And there are whole threads of interesting discussions that haven't degraded to usenet-level postings. All of this by volunteers who probably should be doing something else.
And if you want to see what's possible, try browsing with everything turned down except "funny" mods up +5.
I'm really looking forward to Flickr. Collaborative content, collaborative filtering, and multi-direction communication seems to be driving the internet forward these days. And it's about time... TNINTV.
At the risk of getting it all back on a rational level, the ESRB is a group of people that sits in a room and watches a video of the "worst" parts of a game, reads a description of it, and decides what they think it should be. They don't have published standards, really, but go on "feel."
I wish they could be bought: it would help keep publishers from overreacting to the oddest things when creating games. "No the character can't shoot milk out of their nose when laughing in the cafeteria scene. What would the ESRB think of that?"
But I have yet to see them abuse their power, or "sell out." The closest one that might be underrated is Manhunt, but that's no worse than what you see in an R-rated slasher flick.
I have never seen the ESRB give an M rating to porn. As you're not the first person to say that, can you cite specifics? Specifics beyond, say, how 7-11 is complacent in the selling of porn. Or the local government is complacent in the selling of porn. Or how you and I are complacent in the selling of porn because we're not out picketing 7-11 right now.
And for that matter, can you recommend a porn game with national distribution? I have yet to find one, and I've looked all over Walmart and Electronics Boutique.
Good parents would read a review of the game before spending 50 dollars on something that their kids are going to spend 50 hours in front of.
Bad parents need instant ratings.
Is it time for the Entertainment Software Ratings Board to stand down in favor of a truly independent ratings system, thereby nullifying a major criticism levelled against our industry?
Do people who complain about excessive violence in videogames actually have any idea who the ESRB is? Or how it works?
It's like Anime. Clueless people see Japanese Animation and think "It's a cartoon. It's for kids." Likewise, they take the same stereotypical view of videogames and come to the same completely incorrect conclusion. And then they complain that they bought a game for their kid that had decapitations, disembowlments, or a bare woman's ankle showing.
If we're going anywhere, it should be to simplify the system even more. Do you know what I mean when I say G? T? T+? What about 13? 17? 21? Cut down on the symbology and the choice, parents just want to know if a particular game is reasonably appropriate for a kid the age of theirs. Or not. One simple answer.
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20040211/olsen_0 1.shtml
While another poster is right about MIDI being possibly unnecessary on a consumer portable device, I would have bought it for MIDI capability. The "advanced" features of my little QY-70 are going largely unused, as it is functioning as a basic MIDI to audio device. A flexible piece of consumer kit that had midi capability would go a long way towards simplifying portable music creation.
Sure, you can program your own stuff. But unless you want to be a programmer, it is a lot more problematic than it is worth. Generally you can make several professional-looking mods that explore certain new aspects of gameplay in the time it would take to write up a small engine of your own. Professionally you would likely be re-using someone else's engine anyway, either an in-house developed one or an externally purchased one.
Deconstructing other games, however, is necessary no matter what you get into. Think of it as writing book reports or taking filmstudies. Unless you study what games are out there, you'll be doomed to repeat the same mistkes. This is true across all disciplines. I've worked with programmers so on-point they could take a design and finesse it on-the-fly to come up with something slightly different than the spec but tons of fun. I've also worked with programmers so dead to the world that they would completely misunderstand specs and implement things that had no relevance to the game whatsoever, and couldn't figure out why.
most mods are just a few new models/maps/weapons models, nothing spectacular
What do you think most game development is? Game companies are only about 1/4th programmers. The rest are artists, designers, and managers / support staff.
also dont think I've been doing enough stuff like OpenGL in my spare time
Except for the specialized job of an engine programmer, that's not that relevant.
If people are smart enough to be expected to follow the law, they are smart enough to propose and vote on law. People are smart enough to do all of the above. People are smart enough to finance their homes, vehicles, and education; they are smart enough to run their own businesses, and they are smart enough to follow the law in everyday life.
What are you talking about? They're not even smart enough to elect someone coherent.
The kinds of skills that get you by in life aren't necessarily the kinds of skills that help out in running a government. The average citizen is no more likely to do a good job running the government than the government is running the job of the average citizen. Figuring out the tax code is a nightmare for the average person. What would make them qualified to decide if the estate tax should be compounded per bracket or not? Or if ranchers in north dakota should recieve a 5% tax break but a lower monthly subsidy? Or if the joint chiefs of staff should make new threat assessments and readyness plans every 12 months or 36 months. Or argue out the minutiae of whether education funding should get $13.3 billion for Title I Grants to Local Educational Agencies and $1.3 billion in Vocational and Technical training, or $13.4 billion in Title I Grants and $1.2 billion in vocational training.
If we had a direct democracy, people would turn to talking heads to decide how to vote. People would look to people they considered "specialists." People like Oprah Winfrey, Margret Cho, and Jack Thompson. And the idea promoted by the silliest celebrity of the moment would win. And ultimately, nobody would have time to read the bills and vote anyway. Hell, the senators we've elected don't have time to read the bills and vote, and they have a lot more help than we do.
I love democracy, and I believe that the will of the people should be the guiding hand that points the direction of the nation. That having been said, people have lives. They don't have time, education, or inclination enough to be involved in every single decision their city, state, and country makes any more than their city, state, and country has the time to send an inspector to sit over their shoulder and make sure they are doing their work right. The will of everyone should set the direction of government, but certain people devoted to the government full-time are needed to make things work.
I applied to basically every open post throughout the US after I had graduated college. I needed to look for a year before I found something. But someone finally foolishly hired me for QA.
I'd like to think that it was the backcatalog of levels and mods I had worked on / faqs that I had written / the thousands of games that I had deconstructed that got me that job. But the fact is the person who gave me the phone interview obviously hadn't read my resume, asked me a few sports-related questions that I didn't know the answer to, and offered me the position on the spot. Weird industry, this one.
BTW, parent is right. Apply to your local companies while you're still in early college, or late high school even. Anything you can do in your spare time, like figuring out how systems are working under the hood or creating mods, is very helpful. Your mod skillz may not be enough to land you a lead level design position right away, but they might be enough to convince a QA manager to hire you to test. Or might be enough to convince an office manager that you're hardworking enough to be an assistant. Or get you an art internship.
Not to be too pessimistic, but no matter how large the project is, no matter how important it is to everyone involved, it will be faster to slip it now and get it done right than to fsck it up and need to do it over.
Projects slip all of the time. Someone is setting up how much time you have. Time is always variable, and is negotiated with outside entities. Your boss's boss, the loonies in marketing... someone is setting the schedule. Schedules are always optimistic. The bigger and more important the project, the more likely it is to slip.
The key is not to do what people want, but what will make them happy. Your immediate boss probably wants Stanford dissertation level code, but would be happy with good documentation and re-usable classes. Your higher-ups may want it done fully featured last week, but would be happy if you explained that the extra time you spent now can save a week off of all of your other projects. And if you can only make one person happy, tell everyone else to go to that one person. It takes guts to tell a high-level executive to talk to your manager, but that's what it takes. And sometimes you have to tell your manager to talk to the high-level executives. But if you can't make lots of people happy, make one person happy, and tell everyone else to stuff it on their authority.
Most importantly, the code you make should make you happy. If it doesn't, it isn't going to please anyone else. More importantly, though, you're selling your company your time and experience, not your soul. If your experience (however young) says to do something differently, that's what they're paying you to know. And if it's your soul they want... just recognize that a wall-street banker can make upwards of 200,000 dollars their first year. Souls go for a lot more money than you probably make.
Either way, you're getting laid off in 5 years. Good luck!
A friend at work just bought the PSP version of SSX 4. He was royally pi$$ed to find out that the PSP version he just bought is 10 dollars more than the regular console versions.
On the one hand, I'm surprised that as many UMD movie disks are selling as they are. The idea of portable movies isn't new or revolutionary, and the PSP has the capacity to playback movies from resonably affordable flash memory.
On the other hand, I can't see strapping a cheap digitizer to an LCD screen, feeding the video to a television, and having it be anything other than crappy. PSP UMD disks have resolutions significantly below broadcast quality, and not at all up to DVD standards. But if you really wanted to do something like that, the best way would be to use a inline digitizer that snags the signal before it goes to the LCD screen. That way the resolution you do have remains as crisp as it is likely to be, short of having a dedicated UMD player.
And don't worry too much about voiding your warranty. Sony has already made clear that nothing that is likely to go wrong with your PSP is covered under warranty.
It seems to be a question of degrees. And I say this for the people reading, not necessarily to the parent poster who seems to know how it works.
You have an idea. You let it mull around the back of your mind for a few years. You get maybe three friends and associates interested in the idea, and over the course of quite a few weekends you pull together a very rough demo. At this point you may need to finagle some art resources either by schmoozing or paying someone. You hit every industry contact you know with your demo, and many that you don't. Look for a "champion" who really likes your game and will help drive it through. While you do that, on the strength of your demo get some fundraising going. VC's are nice, but really hit up small businesses, people, friends, family, etc. Now scale up production, moving into a low-cost but rat free office space, and hiring artists, developers, an office manager, a business manager, etc. Appoint yourself project director (or somesuch), and get to work making that game. Hit your milestones, piggyback into your publisher's E3 booth, and ship. There is nothing in the above scenario that prevents people who are genuinely interested from breaking in.
Most independent studios really are indie studios that got funding and scaled up. The studio that released Alien Homonid, for example, started as a few guys working their tales off, found investers, scaled up, created a great game, shopped for a publisher, and released. Other studios get a publisher involved earlier to mitigate risk.
And these aren't rare: somewhere in the realm of 1/2 of all games are created by independent developers. See that logo that pops up on the screen after the EA title? That's the developer. Not all of those are independent, but many are.
The difference between and indie and an independent developer is just that an independent developer wasn't afraid to grow. At some point they may get bought out by a major studio and enter what is somewhat pessimistically known as a "decline phase," but that's also another step in the natural evolution of things. I believe parent poster pointed out the "craploads of cash..."
If you want to be independent, and all of the risks / control that entails, you can do it. Or perhaps more strongly, that is how it is done.
Clearly the barber is a Cretan. :)
The barber problem is not really a problem in that there is no paradox. Your ackward wording makes it unclear, but the common phrasing of this problem is "the barber shaves all men who don't shave themselves." That means that of the subset of all men who don't shave themselves, the barber shaves them. Don't shave themselves -> Barber shaves them. However, the opposite is NOT specified by the rules of logic. Shaves themselves does not -> Barber does not shave them. It does imply something known as the contrapositive, the negative of both sides of the equation with the order of implication reversed... Hence if the barber does not shave them, then they must shave themselves.
None of this precludes the barber from shaving someone that shaves themselves. Or precludes the barber from not shaving someone who shaves themselves. This says NOTHING about people who shave themselves. It only makes a logical statement about the subset of people who do not shave themselves.
Hence, there is no problem if the barber shaves themself.
Of course, I'm using the common form of the problem not the one from the poster above. The one from the poster above seems to be trying to close that "loophole" in the equation, but just winds up saying the equivalent of "I've got a dollar, but I've only got twenty-five cents."
The best part of this is, so the story goes, that it wound up as an actual extra credit problem on an actual high school test. And that the teacher who administered the test was fired for it. This was years ago, and the person who told this to me was a high school teacher, so take that with a grain of salt.
Z ZLES/condoms-n-m
And if three isn't enough for you there is a more generalized form.
http://www.mathematik.uni-bielefeld.de/~sillke/PU
My variant on solution #2 was apparently a little more violent than yours: Flip the switch rapidly until you burn out the bulb. That should take a lot less time than waiting for it to burn out. Static charge might also help.
The problem with logic puzzles like this is that logic puzzles presuppose a lot of things. In the real world, you could pretty easily take a switch out of the wall and add a resister so that one of the bulbs was dimmer than the others. Or you could get to the other room and the bulbs could be high up in the ceiling and out of reach, and your solution is screwed. If you're fast enough you could theoretically throw the switch and make it to the other room in time to see the bulb change states. Considering all of the walls these days are a variant on carbonized newspaper, you could pretty easily kick a hole into the wall to see the lights change. You could pull the wire attached to the switch until you yanked back the bulb in the other room. Even without getting violent, every light switch seems to have a state in the middle which causes the bulb to be much louder than the rest.
Heck, take off your clothes, cut / tear them into thin strands. Loop one strand around one of the switches in the "on" position, and hook that around something low to the ground, such as the bottom of a door frame. Walk to the other room. Pull the switch. Or cut the clothes and soak it in a liquid before anchoring it snugly to the switch just barely in the on position and something on the ground. Walk into the other room, and wait for the clothes to dry and shrink.
Do you even know which way is the on position? I've walked into a lot of old houses where swithches were mounted with "down" as the on position, and without any labeling at all. Newer houses frequently use multiple switches, whereby the XOR of two switches determines whether or not a light is on. What about switches that are mounted Left / Right? Are you assured that all of the lights work? All of the switches work? Does the house have power?
The only way that NONE of the light from the other room can reach the current one is if none of the switches did anything. If there was any light variance, you could measure that and get a relative position based upon strength.
It also says that you can't see the other room. Are you blind?
Logic puzzles, basically, are a nice way of communicating a simple state problem. And if you want it to work as a puzzle, you agree to this limitation / logical purity. Light switches only have two states. Walls are impermeable. No light gets through. That way you can permutate through the simplified logical consequences of each potential action and the ramifications thereof. Actual real-world solutions are usually much easier. A light in the real world may have a tremendous number of states, but in a puzzle it is on or off. A chalice in the real world has angle and position information, can be scratched into, fashioned into a weapon, stolen, etc, but in the puzzle it is either up or down. Otherwise it doesn't work as a puzzle.
If you're proposing a logic puzzle, but you use a real-world side-effect that you don't make explicitly clear in the puzzle , you're violating how logic puzzles work. That doesn't make you smarter than people who solve lots of puzzles, it just means you've written a bad logic puzzle.
Good answer.
The only thing I can add to this is that the number of meddlings the king can do is actually k+1, as he gets to set the default chalice position (up / down). So, much like N = n - 1, K should equal k+1.
The problem is that the king could choose to negate or add to any or some of the signal or not. You have n(k+1)-k=Resultant Signal=n(k+1)+k. The number of flips was significant previously, because it was telling the leader that everyone had been out. The leader could count them all, and know the moment everyone was out. But the key that made it work was everyone flipping it only once, otherwise the leader would overcount and get himself / herself killed.
I suspect that playing with this possible negation will be key to solving the riddle... that you don't need every prisoner to flip the chalice k+1 times, but some ratio of k/n times. But all that does is reduce the margin of error from something way too big to something a little too big, as now your signal is between n(k/n)-k and n(k/n)+k, or between 0 and 2k. And the king doesn't have to, so the range is actually between k to 0 and k to 2k.
Not everyone needs to send signal through, but the signal that doesn't get through should be used to sap the king's k alterations in a reliable fashion.
Of course, my old puzzle solving buddy would be the first to point out that chalices are generally very heavy, and kings are generally very soft.
On the one hand, the technology could develop into something very cool. If you could use multiple cards and have a separate, different proc running on each one, it could be the coolest multiprocessor system around. Or simply using the motherboard as support for separate running systems in a system-on-a-card configuration (these are already available, but expensive). It currently could be a very useful little test bed if someone wanted to check performance across different processors. It could also be useful for large system builders like Dell who could simplify their parts management and support costs by having one motherboard used across all of their lineup.
That having been said, there is a lot on a motherboard that gets upgraded each generation: RAM style, upgrade card slots, video card slots, small device connectivity, HD connections, bus... I would guess that these are ultimately more important to the overall speed of the system than the processor. Can you imagine hamstringing an Athalon 64 with a 66mhz bus and an AGPx1 graphics card? I doubt this will ultimately be beneficial to the end consumer... they might get one upgrade generation for a nice little last speed boost, but as the motherboard needs to support more than just a processor, upgrading just a processor isn't as much help as it could be.
How do you take back something you never owned in the first place?
Gaim? Trillian?
I thought the rebellion was here, it happened, and everyone who rebelled walked away with a free shiny toaster.
On the one hand, I can see the appeal of Microsoft's development ideology: Make it big, cheap, slow, and usable by idiots. Sadly, though, it tends to be used by idiots. And why would you pay an idiot 80 dollars an hour to setup your mail server and another 200 dollars every two weeks to reboot it, when you can pay someone competent to set it up once and have it run consistently indefinitely?
It's possible that everyone there was a unix geek. If they've been around long enough, that's really the only option. But the fact that they're doing recruiting at a university instead of coding should tell you something about who they are. I leave the ramifications of that as an exercise to the reader.
I was hired by someone once to try and develop, train, and release a neural network based upon input from the dating service they ran. He had no luck finding patterns in the information, and so he tried offloading that onto an artificial brain. Unfortunately he also wanted to feed it astrological information, horoscopes, etc. Any information he could find.
He also didn't really want to pay me, and kept being creepy about it.
Point is, people have been doing this for years, in various forms. With little success. Yes with a computer. And before that with tabulating machines. And before that, ancient texts and good-old-fashioned "who paid the most." I fail to see how feeding "chemistry" into a computer (and let's be honest, "chemistry" WRT the brain is also called "voodoo") will get you better information about who someone will like.
The best indicator of who you will like is who you've liked before. But that's not a new idea either.
You have to define a journalist if all journalists are going to get special legal protection. For example, journalists are not required to reveal their sources (usually). Journalists can be present at certain illegal activities and not be charged with abetting (I'm sure a lawyer will correct me).
How do you prevent Frank the drug dealer from setting up a blog and refusing to reveal his sources? How would the police get anything done if everyone refused to reveal their sources?
Personally I think the law needs to change from protecting journalists (which has always been a vague concept) to protecting journalistic activities. The ThinkSecret kid is a law student, not a journalist, but he was dissemenating information in a journalistic fashion and those activities deserve protection.
A brief and largely incorrect summary of the current state of things:
MS Messenger: Ships standard on all Windows PC's. Pops up every five minutes asking you if you would like to sign up for service. Causes your computer to explode if you try to uninstall it, or indeed just try to get it to shut up. The fact that this still isn't the #1 instant messaging client should tell you something. I have the most luck with voice chat through firewalls on Messenger.
Aim: Comes automatically with AOL, or you can download it free from aol.com. Also comes free with LOTS and LOTS of ads. Ads pop up on your screen. Ads are built into your client. Smart a$$ movie executives send you ads directly. Sex chatbots try to lure you into filthyness before posting the transcript on Fark. Everyone's personal icon is loud, animated, and obnoxious. In short, AIM is a lot like the internet. And like the internet, nearly everyone uses AIM.
ICQ: Still the greatest communications medium of all time. Really. Greatest ever. (There, I said what you wanted Mr. 3098014563. Now give me my family back, like in the deal.)
Yahoo: No really, Yahoo has a chat medium. I was shocked too. Isn't Yahoo just adorable sometimes? On a side note, I've had better luck getting webcams through firewalls over Yahoo. This leads to great situations where I'm videoconferencing with someone over Yahoo, but the audio stream is in MSN and the chat is happening in Jabber.
Google Chat: Google chat is based on Jabber, the open source next-generation world dominating chat protocol of the fut-- hey, why are you laughing? No seriously, Jabber, which can communicate with AIM and MSN through... Yes it says so on the box. No, I don't care if almost never works. Ok, fine, Jabber, which can sometimes communicate with AIM and MSN through server-side plug ins, is the basis for Google Chat. Unlike all of the other protocols Jabber is an encrypted medium, meaning that even the server doesn't know what is being said. psi is the jabber client of choice, though there are a lot out there. It's also the only reason to buy Trillian Pro. What was that about Google Chat again?
Now if I remember correctly, AIM, as a condition of its merger with Time Warner was required to open its chat network to everyone. It then proceeded to shut out all 3rd party clients and other protocols that had the nerve to try and connect with it. MSN tried to connect to AOL without permission, but kept refusing 3rd party clients that tried to connect to it. We thought Yahoo was shutting out 3rd party clients as well, but it turns out they just broke their system a few times. Oops. Jabber will sleep with anyone, and Jabber servers will sleep with other Jabber servers. Jabber servers will even sleep with AOL and MSN, but only if they're really happy or really drunk. ICQ... I refuse to say anything about ICQ on the grounds that ICQ users are even more insane than Apple users.
All of this is very close to e-mail, circa 1992... Back when AOL, Compuserve, and all of the rest of the providers thought that locking their users into their system would keep the most people. Then AOL bought them all, and the whole thing seemed kind of moot.