I second that. My brother was an extremely introvert kid, after his 16th or so he changed into a highly social extrovert. For me it was the other way around, I was an extrovert kid until my 12th or so and became much more introvert.
It's maybe interesting to note that we both went through several personality changes after / during specific events, going to high school, university, moving abroad, getting married, having kids...
I'm not sure if our perceived personality changes are real changes or it's just a shiny accumulation of self-awareness, social skills, confidence (and whatever else we pick up as we grow up) over a set of core traits
At my first job we had a project that required overtime. We had two managers. One was an ex coder, who taught himself the basics of the then novel language we were working in (Java). He help with deployment and his database skills were as good as ever. The other one was of the kind that you can manage anything by just dealing with the processes. One stuck with the team until there was a stable build, helping with database issues, deployments and helping make thorny decisions based on arguments. The other was out at 1700 because he had to pick up his girlfriend from horse riding.
Now 12 years later, I found that the latter seems to be the norm, worrying over generally trivial processes and their usefulness defined by how well they can keep upper management away from production. A project's success generally won't be determined by their contributions (a project's failure is another story). The former I remember as the best manager I've had up to date, leading by example without using useless one-liners that apply to only others not himself, capable of communicating (and getting) our needs to the upper levels and sticking with the team.
To me a manager that sticks around with the team and manages to make himself useful is a valuable asset. A manager that sticks around and provides nothing but a sign - off is replaceable by any from the large pool of line managers.
If you'd like to visit Washington state and don't want to be harassed that much you may want to consider booking a flight to Vancouver. The border procedures of getting into Canada are generally much better here as long as you speak English and don't start throwing chairs around. Hang out for a bit, then rent a car and go South along the coast. I've heard some bad stories about the Peace Arch / Pacific Crossing borders here too, but in general the officers are much nicer than the porkers you find at the airport. I'd highly recommend doing a road trip from Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, something in between Portland and SF, SF, LA and finally to San Diego.
A friend of mine used to ask counter questions whenever his kid asked a question he couldn't / didn't want to answer. It didn't help the kid learn new facts, but it did build up his reasoning and imagination. I remember a conversation that went something like:
"Daddy how do planes fly?" "Well what else should they do ?" "They could swim" "How would they do that?" "Like duckies" "But planes are big, where would the duckies go?" "They could live in our bath with my duckies"
It's far from perfect but there are several leagues out there that track stats and have leaderboards. People in those leagues tend to be slightly better behaved because being a total asshat may result in a ban. However, new players will still be... "asked"... to go play "pubs" first before playing another "pro" league game.
There are parts in games that rely on accurate results. Games using deterministic networking, require connected computers to be sync. To test for synchronized states, games usually abstract the overall state of the game as a number. If the connected computers come up with numbers that are the same, the game is supposed to be in sync. If the numbers are different, it may indicate one or more computers are lagging behind.
Even in today's games, it can be quite tricky to get these numbers right. Multi core processors and minor differences in hardware may result in hard to spot diverging execution orders and as such could result in desyncs.
Graphics may seem like a suitable candidate, but there are parts of the graphics that maintain a state. In those parts, you may not want to introduce too much error as it may carry over (numerical drift) and need some error-counter code or code resets.
Games nowadays already make trade offs between accuracy and speed and I could see this work as an additional tool for optimization. However I'm afraid that it will not be as trivial as it sounds. I wouldn't be too surprised if it resulted in similar challenges (and advantages) as multithreading is giving us now...
Not sure how well this compares, but I had a similar problem with a Dell laptop. It looked like as if the harddisk was accessed and blocking other processes.
After going through all the usual suspects like yourself, it turned out that that particular line of Dell laptops was just badly designed. It simply couldn't cope with the heat build up and slowed down the CPU instead.
Hm that's a harsh PS. From what I recall from my history lessons blitzkrieg is an initial concentration of heavy bombardments on a relative small region followed by mechanized infantry rushing said region.
Or as wiki describes it:
Blitzkrieg (lightning war in German;) is a popular name for an offensive operational-level military doctrine which involves an initial bombardment followed by the employment of motorized mobile forces attacking with speed and surprise to prevent an enemy from implementing a coherent defense.
What problems do you have with it? Apart from some issues I had due to some user errors (origins at the wrong places primarily) and some useless warnings, it's been not that hard on me.
But then again I'm only exporting animations with a skeleton and models.
I agree with some of what you say. I'd like to point out that the "desktop tower defense" is leeching of a fairly substantial mod community in the War Craft 3 "scene" that build on one of the add-ons that came with the game (I don't know what WC3 is using as a source of "inspiration"). In that respect, I'd agree more with your statement if it said: "There's a lot of innovation, it's all in flash or coming from mods".
Regarding your third comment, I'd think any reasonable design lead would look at the quality of the modeling rather than at the tools learned. Given the choice between two graduates, one who knows 3ds but can't model to save his life, or one who only knows blender but models like it's his second nature, I'm pretty sure I know who's going to be offered a job.
This may depend on the state of the project though, during crunch you may need some UV unwrapper right now and you don't have time to train them - in which prior experience may matter.
The TSA has some nice pledges http://www.tsa.gov/assets/pdf/Pledge_v5.pdf, which sound good in theory... In practice they seem to serve a guideline for their officers to do exactly the opposite. Effectively it comes down to something like this:
We pledge to briefly look into important issues but pay huge attention to irrelevant trivialities that will result in maximal discomfort. We'll take so much time you won't be boarding your flight in time. We consider this "one-passenger-less-is-one-threat-less-based-secur ity".
You will treat us respectfully. We will huff and puff, you will respect our hand gestures as if you were our female dawg. Failure to comply will give us further reason to "secure" your flight.
We will not explain any of our steps, pro-actively or in a reactive fashion. Try asking us a question, go ahead, make our day.
You may request a private screening. Did you notice you need to request a private screening ? That requires you asking something... make our day, no really...
If you make it to this step, you must be guilty of something, we'll see to securing your flight.
Our trash bin will more gratefully receive your feedback. If we don't like your tone, we'll feed you to our lawyer. Be assured that your next flight will be very safe and secure.
Unless we didn't receive your feedback in the first place, we'll respond in a timely matter
Living up to the original pledges would be an awesome improvement... Next achievement will be: how to treat other people's property without spilling them all throughout their luggage.
I remember a column / tv show one a local biologist did on this topic. His name is Midas Dekkers, I guess you have to know him to fully explain him. Lets just say he tends to have alternative vision on things, usually very funny (read sarcastic).
Anyway, he discussed the same possibility but starting with a different premise: why do the smaller countries in europe, such as Holland, Belgium and Denmark have armies ? In case of warfare they are most probably going to be whiped away anyway. Via a long and amusing road he came across the possibility of another ice age. This ice age would mean the end of our economy. Where would we have to go ?
Well, his answer was South, africa, which should be somewhat of a paradise due to the climate changes. Africa probably won't be very happy to receive several million immigrants. The problem is that these immigrants will bring along their highly advanced armies...
Slashdot Mirror
I second that. My brother was an extremely introvert kid, after his 16th or so he changed into a highly social extrovert. For me it was the other way around, I was an extrovert kid until my 12th or so and became much more introvert. It's maybe interesting to note that we both went through several personality changes after / during specific events, going to high school, university, moving abroad, getting married, having kids... I'm not sure if our perceived personality changes are real changes or it's just a shiny accumulation of self-awareness, social skills, confidence (and whatever else we pick up as we grow up) over a set of core traits
The Dutch do relatively well without being too worried about helmets... bet this will be ground for a heart attack or overblown reaction or two ...
At my first job we had a project that required overtime. We had two managers. One was an ex coder, who taught himself the basics of the then novel language we were working in (Java). He help with deployment and his database skills were as good as ever. The other one was of the kind that you can manage anything by just dealing with the processes. One stuck with the team until there was a stable build, helping with database issues, deployments and helping make thorny decisions based on arguments. The other was out at 1700 because he had to pick up his girlfriend from horse riding. Now 12 years later, I found that the latter seems to be the norm, worrying over generally trivial processes and their usefulness defined by how well they can keep upper management away from production. A project's success generally won't be determined by their contributions (a project's failure is another story). The former I remember as the best manager I've had up to date, leading by example without using useless one-liners that apply to only others not himself, capable of communicating (and getting) our needs to the upper levels and sticking with the team. To me a manager that sticks around with the team and manages to make himself useful is a valuable asset. A manager that sticks around and provides nothing but a sign - off is replaceable by any from the large pool of line managers.
If you'd like to visit Washington state and don't want to be harassed that much you may want to consider booking a flight to Vancouver. The border procedures of getting into Canada are generally much better here as long as you speak English and don't start throwing chairs around. Hang out for a bit, then rent a car and go South along the coast. I've heard some bad stories about the Peace Arch / Pacific Crossing borders here too, but in general the officers are much nicer than the porkers you find at the airport. I'd highly recommend doing a road trip from Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, something in between Portland and SF, SF, LA and finally to San Diego.
This practice has been extensively covered by some excellent research a couple of years from now
Standard practice in the games industry ?
I have only read about half of them but what Discworld book had terror as a secondary genre ?
I wonder how and if it relates to priming ...
Any psychologists around ?
A friend of mine used to ask counter questions whenever his kid asked a question he couldn't / didn't want to answer. It didn't help the kid learn new facts, but it did build up his reasoning and imagination. I remember a conversation that went something like:
"Daddy how do planes fly?"
"Well what else should they do ?"
"They could swim"
"How would they do that?"
"Like duckies"
"But planes are big, where would the duckies go?"
"They could live in our bath with my duckies"
I'll put my money on the swarm .
For what it's worth the book makes a nice read while hanging out on the beach ...
EA employees read slashdot as well... ;)
It's far from perfect but there are several leagues out there that track stats and have leaderboards. People in those leagues tend to be slightly better behaved because being a total asshat may result in a ban. However, new players will still be... "asked"... to go play "pubs" first before playing another "pro" league game.
There are parts in games that rely on accurate results. Games using deterministic networking, require connected computers to be sync. To test for synchronized states, games usually abstract the overall state of the game as a number. If the connected computers come up with numbers that are the same, the game is supposed to be in sync. If the numbers are different, it may indicate one or more computers are lagging behind.
Even in today's games, it can be quite tricky to get these numbers right. Multi core processors and minor differences in hardware may result in hard to spot diverging execution orders and as such could result in desyncs.
Graphics may seem like a suitable candidate, but there are parts of the graphics that maintain a state. In those parts, you may not want to introduce too much error as it may carry over (numerical drift) and need some error-counter code or code resets.
Games nowadays already make trade offs between accuracy and speed and I could see this work as an additional tool for optimization. However I'm afraid that it will not be as trivial as it sounds. I wouldn't be too surprised if it resulted in similar challenges (and advantages) as multithreading is giving us now...
Not sure how well this compares, but I had a similar problem with a Dell laptop. It looked like as if the harddisk was accessed and blocking other processes. After going through all the usual suspects like yourself, it turned out that that particular line of Dell laptops was just badly designed. It simply couldn't cope with the heat build up and slowed down the CPU instead.
Yeah ... and some of them have gone beyond that. This (Dutch) article describes a truck guzzling down chicken fat for a fuel.
Indeed ! For instance moving our travelling circus back and forth between Strasbourg and Brussels gives us a much bigger bang for our buck.
Hm that's a harsh PS. From what I recall from my history lessons blitzkrieg is an initial concentration of heavy bombardments on a relative small region followed by mechanized infantry rushing said region.
Or as wiki describes it:
Blitzkrieg (lightning war in German;) is a popular name for an offensive operational-level military doctrine which involves an initial bombardment followed by the employment of motorized mobile forces attacking with speed and surprise to prevent an enemy from implementing a coherent defense.
What problems do you have with it? Apart from some issues I had due to some user errors (origins at the wrong places primarily) and some useless warnings, it's been not that hard on me. But then again I'm only exporting animations with a skeleton and models.
I agree with some of what you say. I'd like to point out that the "desktop tower defense" is leeching of a fairly substantial mod community in the War Craft 3 "scene" that build on one of the add-ons that came with the game (I don't know what WC3 is using as a source of "inspiration"). In that respect, I'd agree more with your statement if it said: "There's a lot of innovation, it's all in flash or coming from mods".
There's actually a book on this topic with some interesting scenarios and viewpoints by Robert Zubrin. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Landing
Regarding your third comment, I'd think any reasonable design lead would look at the quality of the modeling rather than at the tools learned. Given the choice between two graduates, one who knows 3ds but can't model to save his life, or one who only knows blender but models like it's his second nature, I'm pretty sure I know who's going to be offered a job.
This may depend on the state of the project though, during crunch you may need some UV unwrapper right now and you don't have time to train them - in which prior experience may matter.
- We pledge to briefly look into important issues but pay huge attention to irrelevant trivialities that will result in maximal discomfort. We'll take so much time you won't be boarding your flight in time. We consider this "one-passenger-less-is-one-threat-less-based-secu
r ity".
- You will treat us respectfully. We will huff and puff, you will respect our hand gestures as if you were our female dawg. Failure to comply will give us further reason to "secure" your flight.
- We will not explain any of our steps, pro-actively or in a reactive fashion. Try asking us a question, go ahead, make our day.
- You may request a private screening. Did you notice you need to request a private screening ? That requires you asking something... make our day, no really...
- If you make it to this step, you must be guilty of something, we'll see to securing your flight.
- Our trash bin will more gratefully receive your feedback. If we don't like your tone, we'll feed you to our lawyer. Be assured that your next flight will be very safe and secure.
- Unless we didn't receive your feedback in the first place, we'll respond in a timely matter
Living up to the original pledges would be an awesome improvement... Next achievement will be: how to treat other people's property without spilling them all throughout their luggage.Anyway, he discussed the same possibility but starting with a different premise: why do the smaller countries in europe, such as Holland, Belgium and Denmark have armies ? In case of warfare they are most probably going to be whiped away anyway. Via a long and amusing road he came across the possibility of another ice age. This ice age would mean the end of our economy. Where would we have to go ?
Well, his answer was South, africa, which should be somewhat of a paradise due to the climate changes. Africa probably won't be very happy to receive several million immigrants. The problem is that these immigrants will bring along their highly advanced armies ...