Except for the part about what little susie has heard - she ain't heard it in our house.
The reasons for the rataings (that they put under the big letter) are more useful to me than the letter itself. The "T" rating is almost useless, because it goes from "saturday morning cartoon violence" to "the video game equivalent of an R rated movie".
I actually prefer the system they use with toys "3 and under", "8 to 14" and so on.
My littlest badly wanted a copy of Brain Age because she heard so much about it, and she assumed she could play it because it was rated "E" - but there aren't many 3rd graders who can do sudoku puzzles, and I know she's not one of them...
The biggest problem I have with the ESRB is that the ratings can be incredibly vague. Seeing how "T" technically covers everyone from 9 to 17, "T" doesn't tell me much except to check the game out before letting my son play it. Even some "M" games are relatively tame, while giving a game like "Darkwatch" a "T" is really pushing the line.
First, thanks for all the parenting advice. From the tone of it, I'm certain you don't have any.
Second, the next time I'm playing Car Wars, Munchkin or Ghost Recon with my son, or Crash, Jak, Ratchet or Sly with my daughter, I'll be sure to reflect on how you think parents have no idea what role playing, or video games are actually about - and that it's people like you who think that putting a sticker on a box that says "Teen" is censorship, while a sticker on a box of legos that says "not for 3 and under" is merely a safety warning.
By the way - I began playing D&D with the first edition.
You don't know much about developmental psychology, do you?
Here's a hint: "explaining" to a 7 year old that the graphic violence they just saw is inappropriate for them isn't going to keep them from having nightmares about it.
you're opposed to the movie rating system, as well? Kids should be allowed to wander into porn theaters because it's their parents' fault for letting them?
Yeah. That will work. Because Gamespot always quantifies games by whether or not they contain foul language, or nudity, or way to much blood for a 7 year old, or anything else.
Or you could read all the reviews and note that the ESRB rated the game "T" for language.
Nice attempt at not connecting the dots.
on
The 64% Violent Pacman
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Only one group of people is responsible for that: the children's caretakers...
Nice. Well, as the "caretaker" of two children I find rating systems like the ESRB essential. Exactly how do you expect me to keep adult material from children if I can't determine which material is "adult"?
Do you expect me to purchase a game and play it through before I give it to my children?
And yet... I have an ADC membership, and I've written all this Cocoa Objective-C USB code that's definitely interfacing with C++ constructs in the IOKit. Which is a major PITA. And there's the little complaint that - I've also had to write device drivers for OS X, and they are also written in C++.
I may, of course, have been mistaken in thinking that simply because the IO subsystem is written in C++ that that meant that portions of the kernel were also written in C++
"On both languages" - what languages are you talking about? The original statement didn't mention any languages by name. I can easily imagine a Lisp compiler that dynamically decides how to store the data in a complex list, or a Fortran compiler that takes advantage of SIMD. The point is that a language that has a built-in Dictionary type allows the compiler to make optimizations that aren't possible in a language that doesn't.
In other words, none of your three points make any sense.
C is best at what it was designed for - controlling the computer. It used to be that people chose the language to match the app they were writing: For math, use Fortran or APL. For reports use Cobol or RPG. C for flipping bits. Pascal for teaching.
We're where we are today because, for many years, C was the one you could get for free. The others cost hundreds of dollars.
I remember the first time I encountered a computer that shipped from the vendor with GCC instead of a proprietary compiler - it was like seeing a death sentence for Abacus, Lightspeed, and all those other little compiler companies.
the compiler wouldn't have generated better code anyway since it wouldn't use MMX opcodes
Wasn't that a point of the original article - that languages that are "higher level" than C support constructs that could be mapped right onto MMX (now SIMD) instructions?
The lack of sophisticated data types in C is a consequence of the abilities of the machines C was originally designed to run on. While that was C's greatest strength of many years, someone starting from scratch could certainly design a new language that had a better mapping to the current generation of processors.
This paragraph is complete crap. If you're using a Dictionary API in a so called "low-level language", it's as possible for the API to do the same optimization as it is for the runtime he talks about; and you're still letting "someone else do the optimization".
That makes no sense. TFA says " This kind of dynamic optimization is simply impossible in a low-level language without building higher-level semantics on top..." and you say "this is crap because all I have to do is call a 3rd party API to get the same thing."
In other words, you're saying it's not true that you have to add another layer of abstraction to C to get dynamic dictionaries because all you have to do is add dynamic dictionaries.
then the complaints will just be "Learn to do x, noob!" Where x wasn't covered by the AI.
In other words, additional training may change the range over which skills vary but it won't change the fact that skills vary - nor will it change the behavior of the skilled and the unskilled.
Have you ever noticed how much of life consists of arms races in one form or another?
If everybody uses AI coaches, will that make everyone l33t or will it just raise the minimum requirement for playing online without embarrassing yourself?
A lot of the SM's important values are empirical and "bolted on".
But, I thought that that was part of the point - that those constants were, to some degree, arbitrary, and simply represent how this universe settled down after the big bang?
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Please give special attention to the subject line.
Except for the part about what little susie has heard - she ain't heard it in our house.
The reasons for the rataings (that they put under the big letter) are more useful to me than the letter itself. The "T" rating is almost useless, because it goes from "saturday morning cartoon violence" to "the video game equivalent of an R rated movie".
I actually prefer the system they use with toys "3 and under", "8 to 14" and so on.
My littlest badly wanted a copy of Brain Age because she heard so much about it, and she assumed she could play it because it was rated "E" - but there aren't many 3rd graders who can do sudoku puzzles, and I know she's not one of them...
You're absolutely right.
Real death is very different from glamorized game/tv/movie death.
Which is exactly the reason I let my daughter get a hamster.
And, yeah, I'm serious.
The biggest problem I have with the ESRB is that the ratings can be incredibly vague. Seeing how "T" technically covers everyone from 9 to 17, "T" doesn't tell me much except to check the game out before letting my son play it. Even some "M" games are relatively tame, while giving a game like "Darkwatch" a "T" is really pushing the line.
First, thanks for all the parenting advice. From the tone of it, I'm certain you don't have any.
Second, the next time I'm playing Car Wars, Munchkin or Ghost Recon with my son, or Crash, Jak, Ratchet or Sly with my daughter, I'll be sure to reflect on how you think parents have no idea what role playing, or video games are actually about - and that it's people like you who think that putting a sticker on a box that says "Teen" is censorship, while a sticker on a box of legos that says "not for 3 and under" is merely a safety warning.
By the way - I began playing D&D with the first edition.
Untrue.
Last time I checked, neither did the ESRB ratings - although people like Hillary Clinton have been trying to change that.
I like that. Retro-active parenting.
You don't know much about developmental psychology, do you?
Here's a hint: "explaining" to a 7 year old that the graphic violence they just saw is inappropriate for them isn't going to keep them from having nightmares about it.
you're opposed to the movie rating system, as well? Kids should be allowed to wander into porn theaters because it's their parents' fault for letting them?
Yeah. That will work. Because Gamespot always quantifies games by whether or not they contain foul language, or nudity, or way to much blood for a 7 year old, or anything else.
Or you could read all the reviews and note that the ESRB rated the game "T" for language.
It went to people who passed math class.
Only one group of people is responsible for that: the children's caretakers...
Nice. Well, as the "caretaker" of two children I find rating systems like the ESRB essential. Exactly how do you expect me to keep adult material from children if I can't determine which material is "adult"?
Do you expect me to purchase a game and play it through before I give it to my children?
That's why IE for Mac is a dead end that hasn't been updated for years, while Apple's own web browser is based on a Linux HTML engine.
Ah. Sorry - I misread your comment; I thought you were saying that none of the kernel was written in C++ - my bad.
And yet... I have an ADC membership, and I've written all this Cocoa Objective-C USB code that's definitely interfacing with C++ constructs in the IOKit. Which is a major PITA. And there's the little complaint that - I've also had to write device drivers for OS X, and they are also written in C++.
I may, of course, have been mistaken in thinking that simply because the IO subsystem is written in C++ that that meant that portions of the kernel were also written in C++
"On both languages" - what languages are you talking about? The original statement didn't mention any languages by name. I can easily imagine a Lisp compiler that dynamically decides how to store the data in a complex list, or a Fortran compiler that takes advantage of SIMD. The point is that a language that has a built-in Dictionary type allows the compiler to make optimizations that aren't possible in a language that doesn't.
In other words, none of your three points make any sense.
C is best at what it was designed for - controlling the computer. It used to be that people chose the language to match the app they were writing: For math, use Fortran or APL. For reports use Cobol or RPG. C for flipping bits. Pascal for teaching.
We're where we are today because, for many years, C was the one you could get for free. The others cost hundreds of dollars.
I remember the first time I encountered a computer that shipped from the vendor with GCC instead of a proprietary compiler - it was like seeing a death sentence for Abacus, Lightspeed, and all those other little compiler companies.
the compiler wouldn't have generated better code anyway since it wouldn't use MMX opcodes
Wasn't that a point of the original article - that languages that are "higher level" than C support constructs that could be mapped right onto MMX (now SIMD) instructions?
The lack of sophisticated data types in C is a consequence of the abilities of the machines C was originally designed to run on. While that was C's greatest strength of many years, someone starting from scratch could certainly design a new language that had a better mapping to the current generation of processors.
This paragraph is complete crap. If you're using a Dictionary API in a so called "low-level language", it's as possible for the API to do the same optimization as it is for the runtime he talks about; and you're still letting "someone else do the optimization".
That makes no sense. TFA says " This kind of dynamic optimization is simply impossible in a low-level language without building higher-level semantics on top..." and you say "this is crap because all I have to do is call a 3rd party API to get the same thing."
In other words, you're saying it's not true that you have to add another layer of abstraction to C to get dynamic dictionaries because all you have to do is add dynamic dictionaries.
Huh?
n Fortran, modifying the same variable through two different names leads to undefined behavior
So, COMMON blocks have been removed from the language?
I want to say "all the OS X kernel" but I'm not sure that's true.
then the complaints will just be "Learn to do x, noob!" Where x wasn't covered by the AI.
In other words, additional training may change the range over which skills vary but it won't change the fact that skills vary - nor will it change the behavior of the skilled and the unskilled.
Have you ever noticed how much of life consists of arms races in one form or another?
If everybody uses AI coaches, will that make everyone l33t or will it just raise the minimum requirement for playing online without embarrassing yourself?
A lot of the SM's important values are empirical and "bolted on".
But, I thought that that was part of the point - that those constants were, to some degree, arbitrary, and simply represent how this universe settled down after the big bang?
Science wouldn't lie to me, would it?
this would be old news.
I mean, "neophilia" has been in the jargon file since, what, 1973?