There is no punitive damage for trying to get out of the contract or making it difficult for you to get the money you're owed.
Insurers can be assessed punitive damages in this kind of situation. In terms of litigation costs, that is indeed a problem - but not a huge one. This isn't going to be a hard case to take, and there's a good chance the insurer will roll over as soon as they find insured has lawyered up (unless they REALLY think they can establish fraud).
Person files claim, looking for $20000. Insurer suggests a settlement of $0. There's a disagreement about an appropriate settlement.
When there's a disagreement on settlement, you go to court. It happens all the time. One dumb adjuster/investigator can make your time as a claimant difficulty - but by moving to court you can ensure a due process.
And why limit people to the players on the field? You could let people play benchwarmers too. You could cheer for your teammates, drink a variety of licensed products, ogle cheerleaders, take your jacket off (and/or put it on), or ask the coach to be put in (but why would you want to be).
Their design and development (and to some extent their marathon and multi-threading) competitions all allow much less restrictive timelines, and use very "real-world" problems (in fact, they sell the results of the design/development work). There's substantial prize support, and potential for royalties on the software you develop. They're evaluated by real people who look for bugs, run tests, and reward efficient, readable code.
But most people prefer competing in the algorithm competition (which are an hour and a half). I know I do - I'd much rather be done with the competition in a couple hours than spend a whole week stewing on it. I also do regular component development programming for a living - I don't feel the urge to go do more of that after work for less pay.
I was using random numbers to illustrate the math in question. As I said in that first post, the original point still stands (ie. more drives = greater chance of one or more failing).
And the top post that prompted the reply I replied to was clearly a joke.
But I guess the pros do NOT joke around, or use easy to understand numbers in examples to explain a point. I'll try to be more PRO in the future.
But I don't think I can make it any clearer. Maybe I'll try: Your chance of losing one or more of the drives is around 79% if you have 7 drives (and they each fail at a rate of 20%). That's definitely more than the rate of 1 drive - but it's not nearly 7 times the rate (which would be 140%).
If you've got 7 drives and I've got 1, you're seven times more likely to lose a drive than I am.
Let's say each drive has a 20% chance of failing. So if you have seven of them, do you have a 140% chance of one failing? Of course not. What you really have is 80%^7 percent chance of them all remaining OK. 80%^7 = 21%. Thus you have around a 79% chance of failure with 7 drives (if they all have 20% failure rate).
Your point still stands - but I noticed pretty much all of the replies to this guy used the same bad math.
why did you capitali(s|z)e the words 'Akimbo' and 'Penultimate'?
Why didn't you capitalize the first word in your sentence?
If you want, I can find a few other mistakes in my comment or your comment. Neither of us automatically write perfect English. Nor do either of us bother to edit our own comments, understanding where they fit in the continuum of importance. Nor have either of us made errors that detract from reader's understanding of our intent. However, when I write an article that thousands of people will read I try to stick to words I know the meaning of. I don't think I'm being too much of a Nazi to expect that much.
I think Slashdot could use "editorial" comments that can be acted upon then hidden - or just not visible by default to normal readers. As much as you apparently see me as hypocritical, I think there's value in trying to improve articles - but I'm sometimes tempted to respond as you have done when I see an editorial comment mixed in with more interesting content.
Sure there's a game going on that you want to win, but you don't have to spend all your time on the "main quest". In fact, some people may choose never to finish the game. Instead of scoring and defending, get mini-quests from fans and do them! Do karaoke at center ice! Wander out of the stadium and interact with real people online! Build a tree-house out of hockey sticks! End sentences with exclamation marks!
figuring out optimal ways to search, sort, navigate fully connected networks
Well, I'm kind of surprised that you would call them "networks" when the usual CS term is "graph" - and I don't see why "fully connected" is an important distinction - but I think you'd be surprised by the type of problem TopCoder actually involves.
Graph theory is central to probably 30-40% of the hard TopCoder problems. For example, this last round (SRM 301) involved a simple Floyd-Warshall on a graph. That was the medium problem. The hard problem, "ContextFreeGrammar", was a lot more interesting (and I certainly didn't submit anything on it). The writeup mentions "chomsky normal forms" - I'll look into that later.
But graph theory is hardly the end of computer science. A simple recursion problem like "Towers of Hanoi" isn't much of a challenge, but it's got some interesting ideas. And actually if you change it to 50 towers and 100000 disks it's an interesting optimization problem. Moving out a bit, there's a lot of interesting CS concepts that you explore in TopCoder - everything from the basic pattern of Dyanamic Programming, to compression and encoding, to game theory, to computer geometry, or to stuff like gradient analysis.
That's all valid CS material, and I've learned lots about all those concepts from competing in TopCoder. Many of these subjects are glanced over in University, whereas in TopCoder the pressure of using that knowledge quickly tends to pack the ideas into your mind pretty well.
Yes, and in basketball the teams should co-operate to put the ball in the basket. That way, the score would be much higher.
Sharing is great, but competing is fun too - and is a great way/motivator to build skills.
These competitions actually foster a great deal of comradery and idea-sharing - via pre- and post-match chats, forums, and new contacts. I'm pretty sure most of the conversations about gradient analysis I've had with Polish developers wouldn't have happened without TopCoder. Without TopCoder, I wouldn't think about these things at all - in my "day job", I never have to deal with complex algorithms. Very few programmers do.
Re:AJAX Apps Will Never Replace the Real Thing
on
In-Depth ajaxWrite Review
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Huh - they already did at my company. We wrote a web script based word processor about 4 years ago. Since then it has processed around 2 million documents, and generally has high user satisfaction.
Our users were initially concerned - as you are - about losing docs, so we wrote a component that allows periodic backup saves to your hard disk. But it's seldom used - a good percentage of people don't even have it installed. People's net connections just don't die that often.
The one feature people missed was dotted-right-aligned tabs (as our base, HTML, doesn't really do that so well). We simulate the effect with tables - it's not perfect but it's just fine. Pretty much any other big feature - from mail merge to pictures to spellcheck - we got working pretty quickly. Script may be slow - but not slow enough to bog down reasonably fast computers. It's actually a very pleasant platform to develop an application on.
When I think of truly mature games, I think of the games that adult visitors would be willing to play in a group setting (hint, not DOA volleyball). My games that currently fall into this "mature" category are:
1. Mario Kart DD 2. Donkey Konga 3. Super Monkey Ball
I own other good games like Resident Evil 4 (or now Oblivion on the PC) that feature more non-child-appropriate content that's appropriate for the type of game. I suppose there's a teen demographic that specifically looks for violent or sexual content - but that content is hardly "adult" or "mature", it's adolescent and often detrimental to a game. It certainly dissuades me from buying it, as it makes it much less likely to ever be played multiplayer. It's not that my friends are prudes, it's just that very few females I know are interested in playing a zombie game. They find it distasteful - and when the content is not attractive they assume the gameplay will not be as well (although they'll overcome their distaste if they do like the gameplay - Typing of the Dead is a favorite with many visitors who don't like other games).
I don't hunger for more "adult" content on my Gamecube or DS - in fact I wish more games were cast in less threatening settings, as it increases the number of people who can enjoy playing.
It's worth noting that the combat, especially at the beginning, is much softer than in Morrowind. For the first few levels in Morrowind, there were very few things you could kill. Go near a cave? Guy kills you. Go near a tree? You're dead, bird eats you. Go in a lake? You're dead, fish eats you. See a rat? Make sure you have health potions.
My first time playing Oblivion I ran into a human who was angry - and so I ran away. In Morrowind, a similar human caster would eat any new player. When I finally gave up running in Oblivion, buddy died in a few hits. It was kind of shocking. Another good tip for new Oblivion players is that if you have any acrobatics skill you can kill a lot of enemies by running them off cliffs.
The only brutal combat thusfar in Oblivion (level 15 or so) has been the hero-level guy in the Arena with (what seems like) 100% magical resistance. He's proving hard for me to kill as a pure magic user.
A lot of the enjoyment I get out of a game is in progressing - in feeling like I'm becoming a more capable player. In some games (eg. Tetris), this is a big part of why I play: I enjoy getting better and breaking that old high score.
Levelling over time is a way of introducing this element of "getting better" artificially. It's not perfect, but it's very controllable. Developers who mete progress out in time-based levels can control how long it takes to reach the "flat", unsatisfying portion of the curve (where many will quit playing). When you get paid by the month, it's in your interest to have the most control possible of the progression curve (and thus how long you get paid) - and that's why pretty much all MMOs end up with time-locked progression.
Why do so many developers try to bite off so much more than they can chew? Why not implement a game like this isometrically (or straight 2d) so that the art resources requirements are more manageable? You can't just say, "I'm going to use one human model, and then texture-shift the hell out of it for every character in the game. Oh, and stretch out the ears sometimes." Let me guess, some enemies have horns, or big hats. Or tails? Hmm.. what else is easy to add onto a stock model...
I understand that "gameplay is king" and whatever - I've developed a fair bit myself - but if you don't have any art resources then you need to pick a different graphical presentation. I won't lie, the games I've developed aren't going to win any art awards - but I pick a graphical look that I can implement reasonably.
If you can't make a few different humanoid models:
1. Don't make a 3d RPG with a whole bunch of playable races (and assumedly a lot of humanoid enemies) 2. Find someone who can help with art - or find some free models somewhere 3. Try anyways! Even if the art is lower quality, at least there will be some variety.
People will forgive a game with bad graphics - if the graphics are of a certain nature, or demonstrate a coherent vision, or are interesting or unique. But when a game's interface just screams "I AM A LAZY DEVELOPER WITH NO RESOURCES" - people tend to assume other elements of the game will be similarly shoddy.
RPG's are not a horrible genre for a "commando" developer - but you need to pick a simple graphical interface so that you can spend your time with the parts your good at (which, likely, is a rich gameplay system with a lot of "code content").
This was the best Kart racing game ever (until Mario Kart DS, which beats it mostly due to the amazing online multiplayer). Planes, cars, and hovercrafts - all different, all awesome. Great game.
But I'll admit I've slowed down on my evangelism.. Honestly, Firefox seems to perform worse now for me than it did at.9 (or so). It's getting to be fairly regular that I see the "Firefox is already running - go kill the process" dialog. It's getting to be fairly regular that I see All-In-One Gestures in wacky mode where it's building a huge string while I don't have the button down (and then usually crashing). It's a little annoying, too, that the association with QuickTime (for playing.WAVs or.MP3s) doesn't ever "just work". I was thinking about writing a little game based on the Canvas object - but when it came to adding sound in a manner that was going to work for people I just gave up.
Maybe I've just had bad luck, but Firefox seems bigger, slower and less stable than it did a year ago - and I can't think of any added feature that I've cared about during that same period.
the positioning and motion of a sign conveys location and tense of nouns and verbs
You're just being silly. All this robot does is take words and map them to gestures. It doesn't convey all this crap you're imagining. And if you're going to do signs which require relation to body parts - as many do - you're going to need a big f'ing robot body to make it visible to lots of people - and you're back to viewing from one direction.
In the very worst case scenario, they could have a 3d representation of a hand on the screen (or on a giant screen, or on ten screens - either way still many times cheaper than a robot hand with this kind of articulation). It could then carry out exactly the same motions as the robot hand - only way, way cheaper, easier and more easily replicable. No maintenance, easier viewing, everything.
Again, this thing is cool - but 100% not practical.
In the time it takes to program the robot to do a bad simulacrum of someone doing each sign, they could have just video'd someone doing all the signs. Then it's more visible to a bigger audience, too.
I'm not saying it's not an interesting project, but it's not a practical solution to the problem.
I loved being able to carry a few extra AAs for the GBA - and thus being sure I wouldn't run out of juice on a long flight. I use mostly rechargeable AAs; they aren't perfect, but are cheap and easy to replace. And if they run out, regular AAs are cheap and universally available.
While I realize good Li batteries are more specialized, I'd love to see a "standard Li format" arise. That way I wouldn't be so disappointed when I learn my new electronic device has an expensive, hard-to-replace, will-barely-get-me-off-the-runway "built-in-rechargeable".
How does this kind of rumor still exist? It's not like it's difficult to confirm this kind of thing. You can research this yourself - for example by opening the lid of a GameCube while the disk is spinning.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no punitive damage for trying to get out of the contract or making it difficult for you to get the money you're owed.
Insurers can be assessed punitive damages in this kind of situation. In terms of litigation costs, that is indeed a problem - but not a huge one. This isn't going to be a hard case to take, and there's a good chance the insurer will roll over as soon as they find insured has lawyered up (unless they REALLY think they can establish fraud).
That kind of clause is rare - especially in personal lines. Even where such clauses exist, they're usually not enforceable.
Person files claim, looking for $20000. Insurer suggests a settlement of $0. There's a disagreement about an appropriate settlement.
When there's a disagreement on settlement, you go to court. It happens all the time. One dumb adjuster/investigator can make your time as a claimant difficulty - but by moving to court you can ensure a due process.
And why limit people to the players on the field? You could let people play benchwarmers too. You could cheer for your teammates, drink a variety of licensed products, ogle cheerleaders, take your jacket off (and/or put it on), or ask the coach to be put in (but why would you want to be).
Their design and development (and to some extent their marathon and multi-threading) competitions all allow much less restrictive timelines, and use very "real-world" problems (in fact, they sell the results of the design/development work). There's substantial prize support, and potential for royalties on the software you develop. They're evaluated by real people who look for bugs, run tests, and reward efficient, readable code.
But most people prefer competing in the algorithm competition (which are an hour and a half). I know I do - I'd much rather be done with the competition in a couple hours than spend a whole week stewing on it. I also do regular component development programming for a living - I don't feel the urge to go do more of that after work for less pay.
and is NOT what the pros do
I was using random numbers to illustrate the math in question. As I said in that first post, the original point still stands (ie. more drives = greater chance of one or more failing).
And the top post that prompted the reply I replied to was clearly a joke.
But I guess the pros do NOT joke around, or use easy to understand numbers in examples to explain a point. I'll try to be more PRO in the future.
But I don't think I can make it any clearer. Maybe I'll try: Your chance of losing one or more of the drives is around 79% if you have 7 drives (and they each fail at a rate of 20%). That's definitely more than the rate of 1 drive - but it's not nearly 7 times the rate (which would be 140%).
If you've got 7 drives and I've got 1, you're seven times more likely to lose a drive than
I am.
Let's say each drive has a 20% chance of failing. So if you have seven of them, do you have a 140% chance of one failing? Of course not. What you really have is 80%^7 percent chance of them all remaining OK. 80%^7 = 21%. Thus you have around a 79% chance of failure with 7 drives (if they all have 20% failure rate).
Your point still stands - but I noticed pretty much all of the replies to this guy used the same bad math.
why did you capitali(s|z)e the words 'Akimbo' and 'Penultimate'?
Why didn't you capitalize the first word in your sentence?
If you want, I can find a few other mistakes in my comment or your comment. Neither of us automatically write perfect English. Nor do either of us bother to edit our own comments, understanding where they fit in the continuum of importance. Nor have either of us made errors that detract from reader's understanding of our intent. However, when I write an article that thousands of people will read I try to stick to words I know the meaning of. I don't think I'm being too much of a Nazi to expect that much.
I think Slashdot could use "editorial" comments that can be acted upon then hidden - or just not visible by default to normal readers. As much as you apparently see me as hypocritical, I think there's value in trying to improve articles - but I'm sometimes tempted to respond as you have done when I see an editorial comment mixed in with more interesting content.
The castle is the penultimate showdown for the current World
Penultimate: next to last.
The castle is the not the next to last showdown for the current World. It's the last showdown in the current world.
slide in the shell through enemies, knocking them akimbo
Akimbo: In or into a position in which the hands are on the hips and the elbows are bowed outward:
They really get knocked akimbo? That doesn't make sense. If you don't know what words mean, don't use them.
Sure there's a game going on that you want to win, but you don't have to spend all your time on the "main quest". In fact, some people may choose never to finish the game. Instead of scoring and defending, get mini-quests from fans and do them! Do karaoke at center ice! Wander out of the stadium and interact with real people online! Build a tree-house out of hockey sticks! End sentences with exclamation marks!
figuring out optimal ways to search, sort, navigate fully connected networks
Well, I'm kind of surprised that you would call them "networks" when the usual CS term is "graph" - and I don't see why "fully connected" is an important distinction - but I think you'd be surprised by the type of problem TopCoder actually involves.
Graph theory is central to probably 30-40% of the hard TopCoder problems. For example, this last round (SRM 301) involved a simple Floyd-Warshall on a graph. That was the medium problem. The hard problem, "ContextFreeGrammar", was a lot more interesting (and I certainly didn't submit anything on it). The writeup mentions "chomsky normal forms" - I'll look into that later.
But graph theory is hardly the end of computer science. A simple recursion problem like "Towers of Hanoi" isn't much of a challenge, but it's got some interesting ideas. And actually if you change it to 50 towers and 100000 disks it's an interesting optimization problem. Moving out a bit, there's a lot of interesting CS concepts that you explore in TopCoder - everything from the basic pattern of Dyanamic Programming, to compression and encoding, to game theory, to computer geometry, or to stuff like gradient analysis.
That's all valid CS material, and I've learned lots about all those concepts from competing in TopCoder. Many of these subjects are glanced over in University, whereas in TopCoder the pressure of using that knowledge quickly tends to pack the ideas into your mind pretty well.
Yes, and in basketball the teams should co-operate to put the ball in the basket. That way, the score would be much higher.
Sharing is great, but competing is fun too - and is a great way/motivator to build skills.
These competitions actually foster a great deal of comradery and idea-sharing - via pre- and post-match chats, forums, and new contacts. I'm pretty sure most of the conversations about gradient analysis I've had with Polish developers wouldn't have happened without TopCoder. Without TopCoder, I wouldn't think about these things at all - in my "day job", I never have to deal with complex algorithms. Very few programmers do.
Huh - they already did at my company. We wrote a web script based word processor about 4 years ago. Since then it has processed around 2 million documents, and generally has high user satisfaction.
Our users were initially concerned - as you are - about losing docs, so we wrote a component that allows periodic backup saves to your hard disk. But it's seldom used - a good percentage of people don't even have it installed. People's net connections just don't die that often.
The one feature people missed was dotted-right-aligned tabs (as our base, HTML, doesn't really do that so well). We simulate the effect with tables - it's not perfect but it's just fine. Pretty much any other big feature - from mail merge to pictures to spellcheck - we got working pretty quickly. Script may be slow - but not slow enough to bog down reasonably fast computers. It's actually a very pleasant platform to develop an application on.
That's an excellent comment.
When I think of truly mature games, I think of the games that adult visitors would be willing to play in a group setting (hint, not DOA volleyball). My games that currently fall into this "mature" category are:
1. Mario Kart DD
2. Donkey Konga
3. Super Monkey Ball
I own other good games like Resident Evil 4 (or now Oblivion on the PC) that feature more non-child-appropriate content that's appropriate for the type of game. I suppose there's a teen demographic that specifically looks for violent or sexual content - but that content is hardly "adult" or "mature", it's adolescent and often detrimental to a game. It certainly dissuades me from buying it, as it makes it much less likely to ever be played multiplayer. It's not that my friends are prudes, it's just that very few females I know are interested in playing a zombie game. They find it distasteful - and when the content is not attractive they assume the gameplay will not be as well (although they'll overcome their distaste if they do like the gameplay - Typing of the Dead is a favorite with many visitors who don't like other games).
I don't hunger for more "adult" content on my Gamecube or DS - in fact I wish more games were cast in less threatening settings, as it increases the number of people who can enjoy playing.
That combat, too, can be brutally unforgiving.
It's worth noting that the combat, especially at the beginning, is much softer than in Morrowind. For the first few levels in Morrowind, there were very few things you could kill. Go near a cave? Guy kills you. Go near a tree? You're dead, bird eats you. Go in a lake? You're dead, fish eats you. See a rat? Make sure you have health potions.
My first time playing Oblivion I ran into a human who was angry - and so I ran away. In Morrowind, a similar human caster would eat any new player. When I finally gave up running in Oblivion, buddy died in a few hits. It was kind of shocking. Another good tip for new Oblivion players is that if you have any acrobatics skill you can kill a lot of enemies by running them off cliffs.
The only brutal combat thusfar in Oblivion (level 15 or so) has been the hero-level guy in the Arena with (what seems like) 100% magical resistance. He's proving hard for me to kill as a pure magic user.
A lot of the enjoyment I get out of a game is in progressing - in feeling like I'm becoming a more capable player. In some games (eg. Tetris), this is a big part of why I play: I enjoy getting better and breaking that old high score.
Levelling over time is a way of introducing this element of "getting better" artificially. It's not perfect, but it's very controllable. Developers who mete progress out in time-based levels can control how long it takes to reach the "flat", unsatisfying portion of the curve (where many will quit playing). When you get paid by the month, it's in your interest to have the most control possible of the progression curve (and thus how long you get paid) - and that's why pretty much all MMOs end up with time-locked progression.
Why do so many developers try to bite off so much more than they can chew? Why not implement a game like this isometrically (or straight 2d) so that the art resources requirements are more manageable? You can't just say, "I'm going to use one human model, and then texture-shift the hell out of it for every character in the game. Oh, and stretch out the ears sometimes." Let me guess, some enemies have horns, or big hats. Or tails? Hmm.. what else is easy to add onto a stock model...
I understand that "gameplay is king" and whatever - I've developed a fair bit myself - but if you don't have any art resources then you need to pick a different graphical presentation. I won't lie, the games I've developed aren't going to win any art awards - but I pick a graphical look that I can implement reasonably.
If you can't make a few different humanoid models:
1. Don't make a 3d RPG with a whole bunch of playable races (and assumedly a lot of humanoid enemies)
2. Find someone who can help with art - or find some free models somewhere
3. Try anyways! Even if the art is lower quality, at least there will be some variety.
People will forgive a game with bad graphics - if the graphics are of a certain nature, or demonstrate a coherent vision, or are interesting or unique. But when a game's interface just screams "I AM A LAZY DEVELOPER WITH NO RESOURCES" - people tend to assume other elements of the game will be similarly shoddy.
RPG's are not a horrible genre for a "commando" developer - but you need to pick a simple graphical interface so that you can spend your time with the parts your good at (which, likely, is a rich gameplay system with a lot of "code content").
This was the best Kart racing game ever (until Mario Kart DS, which beats it mostly due to the amazing online multiplayer). Planes, cars, and hovercrafts - all different, all awesome. Great game.
3*3*3 is 3^3, not 3*3.
3*2=6 3*3-3=6
But I'll admit I've slowed down on my evangelism.. Honestly, Firefox seems to perform worse now for me than it did at .9 (or so). It's getting to be fairly regular that I see the "Firefox is already running - go kill the process" dialog. It's getting to be fairly regular that I see All-In-One Gestures in wacky mode where it's building a huge string while I don't have the button down (and then usually crashing). It's a little annoying, too, that the association with QuickTime (for playing .WAVs or .MP3s) doesn't ever "just work". I was thinking about writing a little game based on the Canvas object - but when it came to adding sound in a manner that was going to work for people I just gave up.
Maybe I've just had bad luck, but Firefox seems bigger, slower and less stable than it did a year ago - and I can't think of any added feature that I've cared about during that same period.
the positioning and motion of a sign conveys location and tense of nouns and verbs
You're just being silly. All this robot does is take words and map them to gestures. It doesn't convey all this crap you're imagining. And if you're going to do signs which require relation to body parts - as many do - you're going to need a big f'ing robot body to make it visible to lots of people - and you're back to viewing from one direction.
In the very worst case scenario, they could have a 3d representation of a hand on the screen (or on a giant screen, or on ten screens - either way still many times cheaper than a robot hand with this kind of articulation). It could then carry out exactly the same motions as the robot hand - only way, way cheaper, easier and more easily replicable. No maintenance, easier viewing, everything.
Again, this thing is cool - but 100% not practical.
In the time it takes to program the robot to do a bad simulacrum of someone doing each sign, they could have just video'd someone doing all the signs. Then it's more visible to a bigger audience, too.
I'm not saying it's not an interesting project, but it's not a practical solution to the problem.
I loved being able to carry a few extra AAs for the GBA - and thus being sure I wouldn't run out of juice on a long flight. I use mostly rechargeable AAs; they aren't perfect, but are cheap and easy to replace. And if they run out, regular AAs are cheap and universally available.
While I realize good Li batteries are more specialized, I'd love to see a "standard Li format" arise. That way I wouldn't be so disappointed when I learn my new electronic device has an expensive, hard-to-replace, will-barely-get-me-off-the-runway "built-in-rechargeable".
How does this kind of rumor still exist? It's not like it's difficult to confirm this kind of thing. You can research this yourself - for example by opening the lid of a GameCube while the disk is spinning.