It is time that Java was taught at the Jr. High School level. You wouldn't start a mathematics undergrad in college on pre-algebra, and you really shouldn't have to teach a college student a fucking for loop.
A novel, as viewed by the outside world, is a piece full of creative expression. The novelist (traditionally) creates a wonderful work, then shops it around. A software developer, on the other hand, follows a specification to connect point A on a supply chain with point B. They're following a prescription hammered out by managers and the creative visionaries in marketing. The massive amount of creative architecting, etc, to get it to that point is never seen by anyone other than the coders on the team.
Growing up in a coder household, we always saw it as plumbing. Sure, plumbing can be an intricate, delicate balance of pressures and hoses with a high amount of creativity and technical skill. But the average person just wants to connect the toilet to the septic line, and never really cares how it gets from point A to point B until it backs up. And all of your work is hidden behind the walls of the house.
Not to be too elitist, but would it be a bad thing if they did ban other games like football? I mean, I don't mean to be harsh here, but these people are in prison. I'd like a fair, equitable, just applications of principles here. But at the same time, anything more than educational reading and meditation in a prison seems like it's a reward not a right.
Perhaps someone here with more experience in this sort of thing can comment on how rights like these apply when you're in jail.
As a game developer myself, spending time and money is usually the anthesis of innovation. The more the suits invest in a project, the more guaranteed ROI they will want. That means, the more like every other bloody game out there it will need to be.
NSMBWii took a formula that once was popular but now has few games in it, added some really fun new ways of interacting (4 player!), and hit it out of the park. The title probably didn't cost more than 5 million to produce, but it has a ton of gameplay and can be a lot of fun. This proves that, like Bionic Commando Rearmed, a small game with a solid creative idea and classic gameplay can be very profitable. I welcome that realization, and look forward to more accessible, fun 2D titles.
That's not completely far from the truth. The gravity well out of the earth is much, much deeper than the gravity well of the moon.. In essence, it takes 1/20th as much effort to get something from the moon to the earth, as from the earth to the moon.
I believe it would take about 2.3 km/s firing speed with no further engines or guidance to escape the moon's gravity well. This is *really fast*, but not completely out of the question. Add a few rockets, and it should be relatively easy to get material to the earth.
Considering how cheap artificial diamonds are compared to hauling them to Earth from offworld sources with 40 million times earth's atmospheric pressure, I doubt importing this far will be commercially viable for a long time.
This tab thing makes Slashdot front page and the following didn't?
Of course the tab thing made Slashdot front page. Some people here virtually LIVE in Visual Studio, and code indentation is a heavily entrenched basic function of coding that people get surprisingly fired up about. Even if this particular aspect of code indentation isn't going to effect people, it's just begging for a heated emacs level discussion.
Your article, on the other hand, basically confirms that people like Windows 7 more than Vista, and that Windows 7 continues the well known and understood tradition of Windows outselling OSX by a factor of 10 to 1. These are things we already knew. Also, the article you site isn't even the source of the information, but refers to a much better Ars Technica article, which itself gets the data from Net Applications. I wonder if you didn't link the Ars Technica article directly because it claims that "Linux was the only operating system [in December] to show positive percentage growth in market share." Or maybe this one "When putting this into perspective across the whole year, though, we see that Windows was actually sliding steadily throughout 2009 (93.66 percent in January 2009), while both Mac OS (4.71 percent in January 2009) and Linux (0.90 percent in January 2009) have been gaining." Or maybe the fact that Windows XP continues to hold onto 2/3rds of the active Windows installbase.
Also, it might be nice to point out that you're work at Microsoft in the Windows org as a development manger. It would boost your credibility as a poster, and reduce potential conflicts of interest.
And even if you could implement it, it would frequently take up more power than a home computer should devote to basic UI stuff. Avatar has a great bit where a lab technician drags a file from a main computer screen to a portable laptop, which he then walks off with. Doing something like that wouldn't be rocket science: it would take positional awareness, negotiated file transfer protocols, apps running in flexible virtual machines, and some other understood factors. But even if you invested the coding and hardware time to make it real, it would be agonizingly slow under current technology.
Do you remember hearing about AT&T's 'horrible network' before the iPhone?
As a longtime AT&T customer, I've always had problems on AT&T's network, but they weren't terrible enough to warrant worrying about. GSM coverage over California started out pretty spotty outside of major population centers, with roaming charges (or no coverage) throughout large swaths of driving between the Silicon Valley and Los Angeles. When launched, their internet access services were just spotty and terrible.
Later on, I picked up a 3G compatible handset, and it was losing coverage throughout major areas in Boston. The airport, MIT, and other major spots had no or minimal 3G of which to speak. You'd walk down the street and pass through a couple of 3G zones, a couple of normal zones, and genearlly keep bouncing back and forth.
From that, i picked up a 1st generation iPhone. Edge was slow, but it basically worked. And it worked fine throughout most of Boston, with a few dropped spots between large buildings.
When the 3G iPhone rolled out here in Boston, coverage was miserable. You could still walk down a street for 15 minutes, and pass through a couple of 3G zones, and a couple of edge zones. And the phone would cling tenaciously to 3G, meaning spotty 3G connections were prioritized over Edge connections. Finally, they threw a switch, upgraded Boston, and since then the 3G network has been stable and nice.
I know a single case is not real data, but in my experience the problem was that AT&T seemed to upgrade their network to quiet complaints, rather than anticipating need and building out in advance. The iPhone just happened to bring a lot of demand to a network which at the time had better marketing than infrastructure. And it did so in a way that grabbed press headlines in a way that previous problems just couldn't.
I've known a lot of people who live in the red perpetually. Who are trying to pay off one late bill or another, dealing with credit card debt that is permanently growing, or who are basically just waiting for people to repossess their car / house / etc since they can't afford the bills. Living so close to the red line, it makes perfect sense to get your tax return faster, so that you can pay to get your car out of the repair shop to get to work the next day. That perpetual state of panic makes you do stupid short-term things to get by, even if it hurts your total long-term position.
You can say it's these people's faults for having made bad decisions in the past. But the reality is that it can happen to anyone. One of them took a "fixed for life morgage" that turned out to be fixed interest for life for just 5 years. Another was divorced and couldn't maintain the cost. And another had her salary slowly degraded to one third of its 2002 levels.
And you have to look at available alternatives for time as well. Assuming you could borrow a bunch of great games from your friends, would you rather play Shattered Memories, No More Heroes, A Boy and His Blob, Muramasa, and Mad World... or Fire Emblem once. Sure, game X might be amazing, but with the alternatives out there, is it amazing *enough* to warrant all the time not spent doing other things?
But to be a good game, you need to have more expensive setpiece moments and less filler. A game like Bayonetta or Metal Gear Solid basically jumps from amazing, intense setpiece moment to amazing, intense setpiece moment. All of these require large amounts of custom code, art, animation, and other resources. These don't translate well into replays, however, as your first raw emotional reactions don't repeat on subsequent playthroughs. And, of course, you can't spend that many resources on a 100 hour game... the pacing and inherent gameplay have to be very different.
Saying game X is "good" and game Y is "bad" is a simplification. Burnout Paradise and Brutal Legend were both good games. But Brutal Legend was a good game whose experience was paced to last 10 hours, and Burnout Paradise was paced to last 100. Burnout Paradise had lots of filler, but Brutal Legend probably wouldn't be able to hold anyone's attention for 100 hours. The intended duration of the games are just very different.
Personally, I have so little time these days that when I play one I want it to be a complete, intense, wholistic experience and wrap everything up in about 10 hours or less.
If a game gets extra content, then you will play it more.
See above. Extra Content just means more dollars for something I won't have time to play.
If a game has multiplayer, then you will play it more.
If it was really good multiplayer, maybe. Frequently, games have a crappy tacked-on multiplayer that just diverts development funding from the single player experience. Uncharted 2 and Assassin's Creed 2 had no multiplayer, and they were probably better games for it.
I, for one, welcome the move to the full ratification of corporations into citizenship. And as soon as that happens in a full and legal sense, I'm incorporating myself, and my corporation is robbing a bank. As a sole shareholder, I'm sure that will reap a pretty good dividend and great ROI, before dissolving the company under the weight unexpected criminal charges against it. I'll visit that corporate charter every month as it learns its lesson for 10 - 20.
A corporation is a legal entity with specific rights and restrictions placed upon it. It has specific reporting requirements if the number of shareholders exceeds a certain amount, other tax and specific liabilities, and specific ways that it can and cannot treat employees. Further, it is required to have a board of directors and elect a set of officers, all of whom are required to do what is in the best financial interest of the shareholders. By law, corporate boards are not free to do things which run counter to the business's interest, or else they open themselves to shareholder liability. They're not humans, they're not free, they're already specifically restricted.
And if you don't like it, OPEN A SOLE PROPRIETORSHIP. That way you're not beholden to stockowners's rights, reporting responsibilities, and certain other behavioral boundaries. Wait, you want access to easier funding sources and don't want to be 100% liable for all debts incurred by your creation? Well then form a corporation, and accept certain limitations. The founding executives of the companies chose this structure with eyes wide open.
It's a legal construct to fit specific needs of business. There are other legal constructs that exist to fit a reasonable need to lobby and inform without unduly influencing and creating dependencies upon said entity. There are also legal constructs specifically created for the needs of getting elected. There are also legal constructs specifically created for the needs of two people to partner up for life and reproduce, but you don't see a marriage itself trying to open a genetics research lab and claim the two constituent members as independent contractors.
A bit offtopic, I know, but can we please stop referring to everyone and everything as scientists? If you need better terms, try "Geneticists" or "Breeders" or "Italians." Saying that Scientists are going to do it is an overused catch-all phrase that doesn't actually add any information. What, could it have been that Creationists were going to breed the auroch from extinction? Linguists? Liberal arts majors?
I'm completely with you. Unfortunately video games are not about fun and, well, video games any more. They are about making money, and most of the time that means low innovation/risk taking.
In the early 80's it was about copying everything Atari did. In the late 80's everyone was making a sidescrolling platform. Cue the 90's, where suddenly mascot sidescrollers and fighting titles were all important.
Personally, I think the early 00's \ PS2 era were the most innovative in gaming in quite some time. But either way, games have always been sold out to business. This is sadly not a new development.
Also, once you've milked a single franchise for too long, you can no longer get guaranteed profits from it. Player interest starts to die out, and you start getting smaller and smaller returns from each iteration.
EA's current administration recognized that problem. NFS's underperformance isn't a reflection of a failure of planning, but rather that the series has been milked to death for far too long. The sales curve for NFS had plummeted already, and was arguably long past the possibility of a yearly iteration remaining relevant or salable at previous levels. in 2006, they had pushed so few new IP's that when Medal of Honor started to fade they really had little to bring up in its place.
Of course, with any new series or universe in the gaming world generally speaking the second iteration sells better than the first. You really do build up a lot of awareness and interest on the first go. Mass Effect 2 (one of the new post 2006 worlds they specifically created) looks posed to be one of next year's biggest games. Army of Two 2 is looking to make up ground. Skate has basically stolen "Best Skater Game" from the now officially flopped over Tony Hawk. Even Dante's Inferno has a surprising amount of player awareness at this point. That's a lot of profit potential that they wouldn't have just grinding out Need for Speed sequels twice a year.
I bet you call your ISP for that kind of support too....
Oh god, I can't tell you the number of people who do this. My favorite was the gentleman who called for help untangling the mess he made when attempting to replace his motherboard. Apparently, the lack of a working processor was inhibiting his ability to go online.
Slashdot Mirror
It is time that Java was taught at the Jr. High School level. You wouldn't start a mathematics undergrad in college on pre-algebra, and you really shouldn't have to teach a college student a fucking for loop.
A novel, as viewed by the outside world, is a piece full of creative expression. The novelist (traditionally) creates a wonderful work, then shops it around. A software developer, on the other hand, follows a specification to connect point A on a supply chain with point B. They're following a prescription hammered out by managers and the creative visionaries in marketing. The massive amount of creative architecting, etc, to get it to that point is never seen by anyone other than the coders on the team.
Growing up in a coder household, we always saw it as plumbing. Sure, plumbing can be an intricate, delicate balance of pressures and hoses with a high amount of creativity and technical skill. But the average person just wants to connect the toilet to the septic line, and never really cares how it gets from point A to point B until it backs up. And all of your work is hidden behind the walls of the house.
Not to be too elitist, but would it be a bad thing if they did ban other games like football? I mean, I don't mean to be harsh here, but these people are in prison. I'd like a fair, equitable, just applications of principles here. But at the same time, anything more than educational reading and meditation in a prison seems like it's a reward not a right.
Perhaps someone here with more experience in this sort of thing can comment on how rights like these apply when you're in jail.
As a game developer myself, spending time and money is usually the anthesis of innovation. The more the suits invest in a project, the more guaranteed ROI they will want. That means, the more like every other bloody game out there it will need to be.
NSMBWii took a formula that once was popular but now has few games in it, added some really fun new ways of interacting (4 player!), and hit it out of the park. The title probably didn't cost more than 5 million to produce, but it has a ton of gameplay and can be a lot of fun. This proves that, like Bionic Commando Rearmed, a small game with a solid creative idea and classic gameplay can be very profitable. I welcome that realization, and look forward to more accessible, fun 2D titles.
That's not completely far from the truth. The gravity well out of the earth is much, much deeper than the gravity well of the moon.. In essence, it takes 1/20th as much effort to get something from the moon to the earth, as from the earth to the moon.
I believe it would take about 2.3 km/s firing speed with no further engines or guidance to escape the moon's gravity well. This is *really fast*, but not completely out of the question. Add a few rockets, and it should be relatively easy to get material to the earth.
Considering how cheap artificial diamonds are compared to hauling them to Earth from offworld sources with 40 million times earth's atmospheric pressure, I doubt importing this far will be commercially viable for a long time.
This tab thing makes Slashdot front page and the following didn't?
Of course the tab thing made Slashdot front page. Some people here virtually LIVE in Visual Studio, and code indentation is a heavily entrenched basic function of coding that people get surprisingly fired up about. Even if this particular aspect of code indentation isn't going to effect people, it's just begging for a heated emacs level discussion.
Your article, on the other hand, basically confirms that people like Windows 7 more than Vista, and that Windows 7 continues the well known and understood tradition of Windows outselling OSX by a factor of 10 to 1. These are things we already knew. Also, the article you site isn't even the source of the information, but refers to a much better Ars Technica article, which itself gets the data from Net Applications. I wonder if you didn't link the Ars Technica article directly because it claims that "Linux was the only operating system [in December] to show positive percentage growth in market share." Or maybe this one "When putting this into perspective across the whole year, though, we see that Windows was actually sliding steadily throughout 2009 (93.66 percent in January 2009), while both Mac OS (4.71 percent in January 2009) and Linux (0.90 percent in January 2009) have been gaining." Or maybe the fact that Windows XP continues to hold onto 2/3rds of the active Windows installbase.
Also, it might be nice to point out that you're work at Microsoft in the Windows org as a development manger. It would boost your credibility as a poster, and reduce potential conflicts of interest.
And even if you could implement it, it would frequently take up more power than a home computer should devote to basic UI stuff. Avatar has a great bit where a lab technician drags a file from a main computer screen to a portable laptop, which he then walks off with. Doing something like that wouldn't be rocket science: it would take positional awareness, negotiated file transfer protocols, apps running in flexible virtual machines, and some other understood factors. But even if you invested the coding and hardware time to make it real, it would be agonizingly slow under current technology.
Do you remember hearing about AT&T's 'horrible network' before the iPhone?
As a longtime AT&T customer, I've always had problems on AT&T's network, but they weren't terrible enough to warrant worrying about. GSM coverage over California started out pretty spotty outside of major population centers, with roaming charges (or no coverage) throughout large swaths of driving between the Silicon Valley and Los Angeles. When launched, their internet access services were just spotty and terrible.
Later on, I picked up a 3G compatible handset, and it was losing coverage throughout major areas in Boston. The airport, MIT, and other major spots had no or minimal 3G of which to speak. You'd walk down the street and pass through a couple of 3G zones, a couple of normal zones, and genearlly keep bouncing back and forth.
From that, i picked up a 1st generation iPhone. Edge was slow, but it basically worked. And it worked fine throughout most of Boston, with a few dropped spots between large buildings.
When the 3G iPhone rolled out here in Boston, coverage was miserable. You could still walk down a street for 15 minutes, and pass through a couple of 3G zones, and a couple of edge zones. And the phone would cling tenaciously to 3G, meaning spotty 3G connections were prioritized over Edge connections. Finally, they threw a switch, upgraded Boston, and since then the 3G network has been stable and nice.
I know a single case is not real data, but in my experience the problem was that AT&T seemed to upgrade their network to quiet complaints, rather than anticipating need and building out in advance. The iPhone just happened to bring a lot of demand to a network which at the time had better marketing than infrastructure. And it did so in a way that grabbed press headlines in a way that previous problems just couldn't.
I've known a lot of people who live in the red perpetually. Who are trying to pay off one late bill or another, dealing with credit card debt that is permanently growing, or who are basically just waiting for people to repossess their car / house / etc since they can't afford the bills. Living so close to the red line, it makes perfect sense to get your tax return faster, so that you can pay to get your car out of the repair shop to get to work the next day. That perpetual state of panic makes you do stupid short-term things to get by, even if it hurts your total long-term position.
You can say it's these people's faults for having made bad decisions in the past. But the reality is that it can happen to anyone. One of them took a "fixed for life morgage" that turned out to be fixed interest for life for just 5 years. Another was divorced and couldn't maintain the cost. And another had her salary slowly degraded to one third of its 2002 levels.
There is a web version of Bastet here.
And of course, the obligatory college humor video.
And you have to look at available alternatives for time as well. Assuming you could borrow a bunch of great games from your friends, would you rather play Shattered Memories, No More Heroes, A Boy and His Blob, Muramasa, and Mad World... or Fire Emblem once. Sure, game X might be amazing, but with the alternatives out there, is it amazing *enough* to warrant all the time not spent doing other things?
But to be a good game, you need to have more expensive setpiece moments and less filler. A game like Bayonetta or Metal Gear Solid basically jumps from amazing, intense setpiece moment to amazing, intense setpiece moment. All of these require large amounts of custom code, art, animation, and other resources. These don't translate well into replays, however, as your first raw emotional reactions don't repeat on subsequent playthroughs. And, of course, you can't spend that many resources on a 100 hour game... the pacing and inherent gameplay have to be very different.
Saying game X is "good" and game Y is "bad" is a simplification. Burnout Paradise and Brutal Legend were both good games. But Brutal Legend was a good game whose experience was paced to last 10 hours, and Burnout Paradise was paced to last 100. Burnout Paradise had lots of filler, but Brutal Legend probably wouldn't be able to hold anyone's attention for 100 hours. The intended duration of the games are just very different.
If a game is good, then you will play it more.
Personally, I have so little time these days that when I play one I want it to be a complete, intense, wholistic experience and wrap everything up in about 10 hours or less.
If a game gets extra content, then you will play it more.
See above. Extra Content just means more dollars for something I won't have time to play.
If a game has multiplayer, then you will play it more.
If it was really good multiplayer, maybe. Frequently, games have a crappy tacked-on multiplayer that just diverts development funding from the single player experience. Uncharted 2 and Assassin's Creed 2 had no multiplayer, and they were probably better games for it.
I, for one, welcome the move to the full ratification of corporations into citizenship. And as soon as that happens in a full and legal sense, I'm incorporating myself, and my corporation is robbing a bank. As a sole shareholder, I'm sure that will reap a pretty good dividend and great ROI, before dissolving the company under the weight unexpected criminal charges against it. I'll visit that corporate charter every month as it learns its lesson for 10 - 20.
A corporation is a legal entity with specific rights and restrictions placed upon it. It has specific reporting requirements if the number of shareholders exceeds a certain amount, other tax and specific liabilities, and specific ways that it can and cannot treat employees. Further, it is required to have a board of directors and elect a set of officers, all of whom are required to do what is in the best financial interest of the shareholders. By law, corporate boards are not free to do things which run counter to the business's interest, or else they open themselves to shareholder liability. They're not humans, they're not free, they're already specifically restricted.
And if you don't like it, OPEN A SOLE PROPRIETORSHIP. That way you're not beholden to stockowners's rights, reporting responsibilities, and certain other behavioral boundaries. Wait, you want access to easier funding sources and don't want to be 100% liable for all debts incurred by your creation? Well then form a corporation, and accept certain limitations. The founding executives of the companies chose this structure with eyes wide open.
It's a legal construct to fit specific needs of business. There are other legal constructs that exist to fit a reasonable need to lobby and inform without unduly influencing and creating dependencies upon said entity. There are also legal constructs specifically created for the needs of getting elected. There are also legal constructs specifically created for the needs of two people to partner up for life and reproduce, but you don't see a marriage itself trying to open a genetics research lab and claim the two constituent members as independent contractors.
A bit offtopic, I know, but can we please stop referring to everyone and everything as scientists? If you need better terms, try "Geneticists" or "Breeders" or "Italians." Saying that Scientists are going to do it is an overused catch-all phrase that doesn't actually add any information. What, could it have been that Creationists were going to breed the auroch from extinction? Linguists? Liberal arts majors?
Don't worry. I'm sure they'll be billed back to the Dept. of Labor at 100k per year, +20% finder's fee.
I prefer to google a phone number and just click "call."
Why not say "Yes, we're way too popular. We're adding capacity as quickly as we can, but people are just lapping up our service!"
This seems like a missed marketing opportunity.
I'm completely with you. Unfortunately video games are not about fun and, well, video games any more. They are about making money, and most of the time that means low innovation/risk taking.
In the early 80's it was about copying everything Atari did. In the late 80's everyone was making a sidescrolling platform. Cue the 90's, where suddenly mascot sidescrollers and fighting titles were all important.
Personally, I think the early 00's \ PS2 era were the most innovative in gaming in quite some time. But either way, games have always been sold out to business. This is sadly not a new development.
Also, once you've milked a single franchise for too long, you can no longer get guaranteed profits from it. Player interest starts to die out, and you start getting smaller and smaller returns from each iteration.
EA's current administration recognized that problem. NFS's underperformance isn't a reflection of a failure of planning, but rather that the series has been milked to death for far too long. The sales curve for NFS had plummeted already, and was arguably long past the possibility of a yearly iteration remaining relevant or salable at previous levels. in 2006, they had pushed so few new IP's that when Medal of Honor started to fade they really had little to bring up in its place.
Of course, with any new series or universe in the gaming world generally speaking the second iteration sells better than the first. You really do build up a lot of awareness and interest on the first go. Mass Effect 2 (one of the new post 2006 worlds they specifically created) looks posed to be one of next year's biggest games. Army of Two 2 is looking to make up ground. Skate has basically stolen "Best Skater Game" from the now officially flopped over Tony Hawk. Even Dante's Inferno has a surprising amount of player awareness at this point. That's a lot of profit potential that they wouldn't have just grinding out Need for Speed sequels twice a year.
It has been a while since I built a Linux system. Can someone comment on the specific advantages of EXT4 over EXT2?
I bet you call your ISP for that kind of support too....
Oh god, I can't tell you the number of people who do this. My favorite was the gentleman who called for help untangling the mess he made when attempting to replace his motherboard. Apparently, the lack of a working processor was inhibiting his ability to go online.
It was a slow day. I walked him through it.
You're totally right. My brain mistake. I have seen 32" tv's for the 300 - 400 dollar range recently, though.
They can be had very cheaply, as you say. Probably much more cheaply than people realize.
For the record, being moderated Funny doesn't help your Karma.