And if you change the code a little more, it takes single-threaded tasks and automatically finds an efficient parallelization of them, distributing the work out to those million cores!
I was about to post a comment on this article complaining that "TCP doesn't work unless routers drop packets" is oversimplifying how TCP works at best, partly by citing RFC 896, then I come and see the author of the damn RFC beat me to it. This discussion in the article of buffers so large that they never fill (so can in effect be considered infinite) makes RFC 970 seem relevant, also.
True, but in this case they would have to be public-domain in the United States to be included, since it's a set of books being compiled by archive.org and the OLPC project, both of which have to respect US copyright law.
Immigrants from some countries do typically perform above average in American universities, but generally only those from countries where the immigration distribution is skewed towards the better-educated upper-class of that country, as with those who come to the U.S. from India, China, and parts of Africa. In cases where we get a different socioeconomic skew, like with Mexican immigrants, the same patterns of overachievement aren't borne out.
Many are, though a good deal aren't. I don't see a way to browse their texts archive by language (am I missing something?), but you can search by specific language in the advanced search. I can't get them to add up to anything near 1.6 million, so presumably many aren't language-tagged.
But some rough figures:
354,000 - English
101,000 - French
99,000 - German
22,000 - Italian
17,000 - Spanish
14,000 - Latin
7,000 - Russian
6,000 - Dutch
4,000 - Portuguese
2,000 - Polish
2,000 - Arabic
800 - Urdu 400 - Swahili
200 - Malay
200 - Turkish
200 - Tamil
Definitely a skewed distribution, but e.g. 17,000 texts in Spanish is quite a few, certainly more than most children can read!
Although there's not much that can be done about it due to copyright laws, the fact that they're restricted to public-domain books likely skews it even more: there's a lot of 20th-century and 21st-century African literature, for example, but much less from pre-1923.
It does point to an increasing problem when a large proportion of public officials have personal stakes in many of the firms that might be affected by decisions they make. The US Supreme Court has actually declined to take a few cases that they might otherwise have taken because too many justices held stock in one of the companies, meaning that they'd have to recuse themselves.
Even games that have accurate summarizations of history in their story rarely use it to much good effect beyond a sort of flavorful seasoning. It's not really playable history that makes you think about it, in the way good historical fiction helps you understand and imagine aspects of history. If anything, the use of history in educational games like Oregon Trail is the closest to that, and even there it's a little superficial. (The article does correctly point out that alternate history has been dealt with pretty well in games... but oddly, real history, not so much.)
We do, for whatever reason, have that more with current events to some extent. In the mid-1980s, Chris Crawford released the excellent Balance of Power, which attempted to use gameplay to interactively illustrate some aspects of the Cold War. More recently, there's been a flurry of interest in "newsgames" and "persuasive games", using games as a sort of editorial-cartoon-style take on smallish current issues, like tainted spinach outbreaks.
But where's playable history in any real fashion? It doesn't have to be pedantically boring, designed by Professors of Roman History to illustrate some sort of minutiae of interest to their field. Even semi-accurate, dramatized history of the History Channel variety would be interesting if it were playable in some significant sense, not just "you're playing an RTS that has Roman legions as units". Or something as good as the alternate-history games, but with actual history. Lack of interest? Too hard to figure out how to make it work? I mean this as a serious question, fwiw, not as berating game designers. It seems there's a lot of popular interest in at least some kinds of history, as evidenced by things like the History Channel, and yet in games we've gotten only really superficial elements. It may just be inherently impossible / really really hard, but somehow it seems to me that it ought to be doable.
Their one-week revenue is actually considerably higher than $100k to begin with, though, since that doesn't include Steam or console sales. I wouldn't be surprised if a few $million is accurate.
Yeah, it seems to basically be the argument that current games build on ideas, representations, and mechanics used in previous games. And a lot of the influence comes from, well influential games, of which Doom was one. I do tend to see Doom as pretty large too, but then I'm also in my mid-20s.
I do find the general idea of trying to trace where particular things originated interesting, though. I hadn't, until this article pointed it out, noticed that the gun-wobble was an id invention, though I suppose it makes sense.
It wouldn't have made 56,000 sales in a week without this experiment, though, so comparing to what revenue a game could've made on 56,000 sales at a higher price point is kind of irrelevant. A better question might be: is $100,000 in a week (implying $5.2 million/year) rate of revenues a good one, or could they do better with another model?
There's plenty of $0.01 payments, yeah, but also a considerable number of higher payments. They say 57,000 total sales at an average of $2.03, minus 13% of the total in PayPal fees, which equals a take of $100,000. They're a two-man company, so that's $50k per person, from a single week of sales. Sounds like a success to me.
The security-skepticism in the summary doesn't seem like it'll necessarily be borne out, either. It depends on how well Apple's thought through all the options, but a decent hand-holding interface to powerful software can often help ensure that the common case (the clueless user) ends up with a sane/secure setup.
That's technically the theory, but the way the initiative process has evolve in California and Washington, among other states, the petition-gathering process is more of a bureaucratic hurdle than anything actually resembling a petition. It's not a group of people getting together to make a public statement--- it's a bunch of canvassers at the mall getting random passerby to sign something that they spent 20 seconds reading and considering, which is more akin to a quick poll. I personally sign most initiatives I run across, good idea or not, because I want more things on the ballot to be voted on.
I think you've got it backwards. It's the KKK that used to publicize names of petition-signers in order to intimidate them. I don't recall the NAACP ever doing that.
That's what causes the trouble, though. If the purpose of marriage isn't some individual benefit but "social benefits" to the nation at large, it opens up the door for society to decide which marriages it deems beneficial and which it would prefer to exclude.
I agree, but then why this pathetic patch on an obsolete institution? Marriage is still fundamentally a conservative institution out of its depth in the modern era. Sure, patching it up to add in gay marriage, by including the largest single currently excluded group, will probably allow it to hobble on for a while longer. But it isn't a solution.
The consensus among biologists and anthropologists these days is that the incest taboo has very little to do with gene-pool problems, and more due to social benefits conferred by exogamy (marriage forming ties between clans).
It's hardly all "activists" or people associated with a movement. I personally sign all ballot-initiative petitions that I run across, because I think having a vote on most issues is a good idea. I may vote against them on the ballot, but I'll sign the petition. (Of course, I didn't sign this particular one, because I don't live in WA.)
That's just another way of saying that the free market fails to produce some things we'd like, so the government needs to do intervene to ensure that they happen. Whether it's something like instituting a patent system to produce artificial scarcity, directly fund research via the National Science Foundation, or some other method, there are pros and cons to all the interventions. But regardless of the pros and cons, one thing they aren't is laissez-faire.
Patents don't have much to do with Adam Smith, though, since they're a government-created artificial monopoly, not something that exists in a free market.
That's both an advantage and a disadvantage, though. It's not only easier to add stops and routes, but to change or remove them. That makes the value of the transit to property owners considerably less--- someone might put up a condo building next to a metro station, confident that the station will be there for decades, but nobody is going to bank on a bus line.
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And if you change the code a little more, it takes single-threaded tasks and automatically finds an efficient parallelization of them, distributing the work out to those million cores!
I was about to post a comment on this article complaining that "TCP doesn't work unless routers drop packets" is oversimplifying how TCP works at best, partly by citing RFC 896, then I come and see the author of the damn RFC beat me to it. This discussion in the article of buffers so large that they never fill (so can in effect be considered infinite) makes RFC 970 seem relevant, also.
True, but in this case they would have to be public-domain in the United States to be included, since it's a set of books being compiled by archive.org and the OLPC project, both of which have to respect US copyright law.
Immigrants from some countries do typically perform above average in American universities, but generally only those from countries where the immigration distribution is skewed towards the better-educated upper-class of that country, as with those who come to the U.S. from India, China, and parts of Africa. In cases where we get a different socioeconomic skew, like with Mexican immigrants, the same patterns of overachievement aren't borne out.
Many are, though a good deal aren't. I don't see a way to browse their texts archive by language (am I missing something?), but you can search by specific language in the advanced search. I can't get them to add up to anything near 1.6 million, so presumably many aren't language-tagged.
But some rough figures:
400 - Swahili
Definitely a skewed distribution, but e.g. 17,000 texts in Spanish is quite a few, certainly more than most children can read!
Although there's not much that can be done about it due to copyright laws, the fact that they're restricted to public-domain books likely skews it even more: there's a lot of 20th-century and 21st-century African literature, for example, but much less from pre-1923.
It does point to an increasing problem when a large proportion of public officials have personal stakes in many of the firms that might be affected by decisions they make. The US Supreme Court has actually declined to take a few cases that they might otherwise have taken because too many justices held stock in one of the companies, meaning that they'd have to recuse themselves.
You could say that about novels, too, yet people complain about Dan Brown's historical inaccuracies to no end.
Even games that have accurate summarizations of history in their story rarely use it to much good effect beyond a sort of flavorful seasoning. It's not really playable history that makes you think about it, in the way good historical fiction helps you understand and imagine aspects of history. If anything, the use of history in educational games like Oregon Trail is the closest to that, and even there it's a little superficial. (The article does correctly point out that alternate history has been dealt with pretty well in games... but oddly, real history, not so much.)
We do, for whatever reason, have that more with current events to some extent. In the mid-1980s, Chris Crawford released the excellent Balance of Power, which attempted to use gameplay to interactively illustrate some aspects of the Cold War. More recently, there's been a flurry of interest in "newsgames" and "persuasive games", using games as a sort of editorial-cartoon-style take on smallish current issues, like tainted spinach outbreaks.
But where's playable history in any real fashion? It doesn't have to be pedantically boring, designed by Professors of Roman History to illustrate some sort of minutiae of interest to their field. Even semi-accurate, dramatized history of the History Channel variety would be interesting if it were playable in some significant sense, not just "you're playing an RTS that has Roman legions as units". Or something as good as the alternate-history games, but with actual history. Lack of interest? Too hard to figure out how to make it work? I mean this as a serious question, fwiw, not as berating game designers. It seems there's a lot of popular interest in at least some kinds of history, as evidenced by things like the History Channel, and yet in games we've gotten only really superficial elements. It may just be inherently impossible / really really hard, but somehow it seems to me that it ought to be doable.
Their one-week revenue is actually considerably higher than $100k to begin with, though, since that doesn't include Steam or console sales. I wouldn't be surprised if a few $million is accurate.
Multiple tens of thousands for one week, i.e. millions of dollars per year, is a "miserable salary"?
They don't have an office or pay rent, fwiw.
Yeah, it seems to basically be the argument that current games build on ideas, representations, and mechanics used in previous games. And a lot of the influence comes from, well influential games, of which Doom was one. I do tend to see Doom as pretty large too, but then I'm also in my mid-20s.
I do find the general idea of trying to trace where particular things originated interesting, though. I hadn't, until this article pointed it out, noticed that the gun-wobble was an id invention, though I suppose it makes sense.
It wouldn't have made 56,000 sales in a week without this experiment, though, so comparing to what revenue a game could've made on 56,000 sales at a higher price point is kind of irrelevant. A better question might be: is $100,000 in a week (implying $5.2 million/year) rate of revenues a good one, or could they do better with another model?
There's plenty of $0.01 payments, yeah, but also a considerable number of higher payments. They say 57,000 total sales at an average of $2.03, minus 13% of the total in PayPal fees, which equals a take of $100,000. They're a two-man company, so that's $50k per person, from a single week of sales. Sounds like a success to me.
The security-skepticism in the summary doesn't seem like it'll necessarily be borne out, either. It depends on how well Apple's thought through all the options, but a decent hand-holding interface to powerful software can often help ensure that the common case (the clueless user) ends up with a sane/secure setup.
That's technically the theory, but the way the initiative process has evolve in California and Washington, among other states, the petition-gathering process is more of a bureaucratic hurdle than anything actually resembling a petition. It's not a group of people getting together to make a public statement--- it's a bunch of canvassers at the mall getting random passerby to sign something that they spent 20 seconds reading and considering, which is more akin to a quick poll. I personally sign most initiatives I run across, good idea or not, because I want more things on the ballot to be voted on.
I think you've got it backwards. It's the KKK that used to publicize names of petition-signers in order to intimidate them. I don't recall the NAACP ever doing that.
That's what causes the trouble, though. If the purpose of marriage isn't some individual benefit but "social benefits" to the nation at large, it opens up the door for society to decide which marriages it deems beneficial and which it would prefer to exclude.
I agree, but then why this pathetic patch on an obsolete institution? Marriage is still fundamentally a conservative institution out of its depth in the modern era. Sure, patching it up to add in gay marriage, by including the largest single currently excluded group, will probably allow it to hobble on for a while longer. But it isn't a solution.
The consensus among biologists and anthropologists these days is that the incest taboo has very little to do with gene-pool problems, and more due to social benefits conferred by exogamy (marriage forming ties between clans).
It's hardly all "activists" or people associated with a movement. I personally sign all ballot-initiative petitions that I run across, because I think having a vote on most issues is a good idea. I may vote against them on the ballot, but I'll sign the petition. (Of course, I didn't sign this particular one, because I don't live in WA.)
That's just another way of saying that the free market fails to produce some things we'd like, so the government needs to do intervene to ensure that they happen. Whether it's something like instituting a patent system to produce artificial scarcity, directly fund research via the National Science Foundation, or some other method, there are pros and cons to all the interventions. But regardless of the pros and cons, one thing they aren't is laissez-faire.
Patents don't have much to do with Adam Smith, though, since they're a government-created artificial monopoly, not something that exists in a free market.
That's both an advantage and a disadvantage, though. It's not only easier to add stops and routes, but to change or remove them. That makes the value of the transit to property owners considerably less--- someone might put up a condo building next to a metro station, confident that the station will be there for decades, but nobody is going to bank on a bus line.
Both--- aggregate them under government control, then farm them out to well-connected contractors who can operate them shielded from market pressures.