Video games have significant more relevance in my daily life than school. You tell me which is more like debugging legacy bank software: Finding out that what the hell the old guy meant by "spectacle rock" and then realizing you could bomb one of them by methodically canvassing all of hyrule... Or Diagraming a past participle.
I happened to be pretty got at scamming teachers into thinking I should get good grades, but the major way I exercised and developed my critical thinking skills was by walking around in Maniac Mansion, trying not to kill the clockwork bird in Zork, and trying to think like gannon to solve the master quest, realizing that the Zelda game engine could only support 1 secret passage per screen in the overworld, and therefore you could actually efficiently discover all secrets screen by screen.
Of course if this guy had critical thinking skills he probably wouldn't be a failed gamestop manager.
Diluting something to the point that it is nothing and admistering it as medicine is not a great testament to Homeopathy in my mind. It is a testament against "western medicine". I think it is very true that often doing nothing is better than doing whatever western medicine says. Example: US has one of the most medicalized Birth process of any country, and one of the worst infant mortality rates of any modern world country. The US also feeds babies medicine(infant "formula") instead of food (breastmilk), cuts off functional parts of the male anatomy at birth out of tradition and ignorance.
All this unnecessary medicalization happens in the first few seconds of life a large percentage of US born babies. Setting that precident, imagine all the rediculious medicalization the "western world" faces and it is not hard to see why backing the *eff* off and using some kind of placebo voodoo water (assuming homeopathy is false) would be popular and even relieving to the bodies of people who have been abused by their own thirst for "medicine".
I am not saying western medicine gives us nothing, or that homeopathy gives us something, but I am saying that psychological response is perhaps more important than chemicals and surgery, and maybe a psudo science of placebo is a nice way to wean lemmings off of "just gimme an antibiotic so I can feel better".
The 360 is already #1 with hardcore gamers. I agree with this statement, but see it as a very big strike against the 360s future success.
The Wii already owns the market of people who are not hardcore gamers, people who spend 300-400 a year on systems and games. People that will never ever own a 360 or a Ps3.
The "hardcore" people have a better chance of buying a Wii later than the Casual gamer has of buying a 360/PS3 later.
To me it is not a market where you choose 1 of the 3. It is a market where you either have a Wii or you have a 360 and a Wii or a PS3 and a Wii.
By going after the casual market first, they have built a foundation that the other 2 can't touch because they have stayed in the "gamer niche".
So my son and I (he is pre-school aged) went to the gamestop... he knows he can ask for games in the PS2, gamecube, Wii or gameboy sections and we will talk about it... Now they have a kid's section with games for all systems randomly strewn about the shelves. Which was particularly confusing to... KIDS. It just ended up Can I get this one? No that is PS3. Can I get this one? No that is Xbox.
I mean I am sure there are families out there with every single system, but I found it particularly annoying that the new layout basically assumes you have all systems.
Could you please hand me the install disk so that I can fix my broken computer? No?? I have to buy $2000 computer to run that and throw away the high end machine I just bought with a pirated copy of vista?
No, if there was anything to compete it would be Linux... but average users aren't willing to use that so sadly I feel that this whole operation will be a sucess. Now if MS decided to give away unusable, non-professional OSs like Vista and charge the easiest customer to prosecute: businesses for the privelage of using operating systems that everyone already knows how to use... that would be an iron clad business plan. But why do that when you can just harass your customers into paying 300 bucks every few years and they will still come begging.
If I want to play twilight princess, but don't have a Wii, I can buy it for the gamecube. If I miss the original Zelda, I don't have to track down a 60 dollar NES on ebay... I can just buy it for whatever Nintendo system I happen to own.
I personally use their rehash strategy not to buy each game more than once as many people claim is their goal, but so that I can choose which systems to buy and not miss out on the games I really love. I feel it is a great service to the consumer. Especially since I can buy gameboy color versions of much more expensive gameboy advance games for my toddler and he doesn't know/care the difference.
[i]I am yet to see a convincing argument on why ADD isn't a problem[/i]
That is probably because you have no idea what ADD is. ADD includes a trait called "Hyperfocus"... Like the developer who finishes coding a system in 30 hours straight because he is "in the zone" this is hyperfocus. Many people with ADD pay much more attention to detail than those without because they are less likely to be blinded by the "forest" because they stop to look at the trees.
I HATE how people call it attention deficit "disorder" and how they say the net effect is "averse".
screw you, I am happy with my short attention span. It serves me financially and personally to have a "short attention span".
Because I VALUE MY TIME(short attention span) more than other people, I am more efficient and I deal with less bullshit because I don't want to. Call it a disorder if you want, I call it an evolutionary advantage.
Unified spellings for words is a fairly recent addition to the few languages that actually tend to conform to them. In my experience and opinion, unified spelling is for people who lack creativity, and who have nothing better to do.
no offense, but you are wasting your life. If my point was clear to everyone who responded/modded then the spelling was sufficient.
Although I appreciate your effort to embiggen the human race, I am fundamentally opposed to spelling correction.
it is an important distinction because in california people sit in traffic, A LOT. A PZ vehicle that makes and average of X emissions while driving in "normal" conditions as compared to an ultra low emissions vehicle who makes X in normal driving conditions.
now take California's "normal" driving conditions of sitting on the freeway STOPPED for hours. An Ultra low is making it's small amount of emissions sitting there... A PZ is making NOTHING.
It makes perfect sense why california would be crazy about them. A prius makes as much pollution as a camry in Texas, but a prius makes much less than a camry(ulev) in california, because in california, pollution is a function of TIME, not MILES like most other places.
California gives automakers huge grants for making CA only cars. The cars are subsidized by the state, so if you sell it in another state you are basically taking tax dollars away from California residents (both in the Car's sale, and in the state's funding of the car manufacturing/R&D).
I am not saying it's right, but it is not 100% rediculious.
I read really crappy sci-fi one time where humans moved to more and more obscure and technical means to store data, untill eventually they were making notches in neutrons. Since the technology to read/write it was so expensive, they just centralized it. The machine broke and all the data needed to fix it was stored on a few atoms in a vault with no way to read it.
I know it is "dimestore" technology alarmist camp, but I thought it was funny that this story is comming true. Anyone know the name of this story??
much of the ice in the universe also contains methane. When you burn methane it produces heat, CO2 and water. Crash that into a large cloud of oxygen and hydrogen, and you have a fairly likely situation of a sustained set of reactions that melt down the comet, produce water, and leave a nice mix of oxygen and CO2 so that life has a bunch of the key ingredients.
Quake was an amazing game. glQuake was the exact same game with a much higher resolution rendering engine. glQuake was not a revolution, it was not suprising, and it did not make Quake magically appeal to more people, it was just an incremental improvement on the resolution of a great game.
When pitchers finally broke the 100mph barrier on fast balls in baseball, the game didn't change at all, fastballs just became more fast. Same for the "Graphics centric" marketplace we are seeing for the 360 and ps3. My hope is that we either make it to complete photorealism or realize 16E10x9E10@900FPS still won't make a game better; before videogame creativity dies completly. I think this is Nintendo's hope as well.
hah if HD is the only thing that makes a "real" game then this indignent Wii owner is glad that I don't own a 360 or a PS3. HDTV is merely incremental, a slight increase in visual sharpness, an aspect which has very little to do with gaming. The Wii might not be "revolutionary" right now (thanks largely to publishers who are scared to break out of the "12 more pixels deep" box), but at least it is not merely incremental. Sometimes going in a different direction is not necessarily successful (although the Wii is at least for now) but I feel like it is usually important. Basically you can't innovate if all you do is follow the leader... you can only hope for second place.
The Wii and to a lesser extent the DS almost require innovative gameplay. The result is that you can't just make a game with slightly bigger levels, more guns, and slightly better graphics and call it "new".
The platform itself is calling for something different, and different takes time.
someone who proves they can do something is much more valuable than someone who has a degree. Obviously you look at the candidates that have both, when those candidates are available, but we have found no specific correlation to those with Bachelors or even Masters degrees and those who can actually do the job.
Of course I am not handing out $25,000 cars or defending people who do.
Slashdot Mirror
Video games have significant more relevance in my daily life than school. You tell me which is more like debugging legacy bank software: Finding out that what the hell the old guy meant by "spectacle rock" and then realizing you could bomb one of them by methodically canvassing all of hyrule... Or Diagraming a past participle.
I happened to be pretty got at scamming teachers into thinking I should get good grades, but the major way I exercised and developed my critical thinking skills was by walking around in Maniac Mansion, trying not to kill the clockwork bird in Zork, and trying to think like gannon to solve the master quest, realizing that the Zelda game engine could only support 1 secret passage per screen in the overworld, and therefore you could actually efficiently discover all secrets screen by screen.
Of course if this guy had critical thinking skills he probably wouldn't be a failed gamestop manager.
Diluting something to the point that it is nothing and admistering it as medicine is not a great testament to Homeopathy in my mind. It is a testament against "western medicine". I think it is very true that often doing nothing is better than doing whatever western medicine says. Example: US has one of the most medicalized Birth process of any country, and one of the worst infant mortality rates of any modern world country. The US also feeds babies medicine(infant "formula") instead of food (breastmilk), cuts off functional parts of the male anatomy at birth out of tradition and ignorance.
All this unnecessary medicalization happens in the first few seconds of life a large percentage of US born babies. Setting that precident, imagine all the rediculious medicalization the "western world" faces and it is not hard to see why backing the *eff* off and using some kind of placebo voodoo water (assuming homeopathy is false) would be popular and even relieving to the bodies of people who have been abused by their own thirst for "medicine".
I am not saying western medicine gives us nothing, or that homeopathy gives us something, but I am saying that psychological response is perhaps more important than chemicals and surgery, and maybe a psudo science of placebo is a nice way to wean lemmings off of "just gimme an antibiotic so I can feel better".
Does not in my opinion count as "cutting off".. cutting off would be some sort of hardware flash on existing devices.
This is a new device that just happens to have the same name, that requires a different hack to work in an unsupported mode.
Hardly suprising, hardly "evil"
Nintendo was also the only console maker turning profit on hardware for a long time with the Gamecube as well.
I'm confused I thought Al Gore invented it.
The 360 is already #1 with hardcore gamers. I agree with this statement, but see it as a very big strike against the 360s future success.
The Wii already owns the market of people who are not hardcore gamers, people who spend 300-400 a year on systems and games. People that will never ever own a 360 or a Ps3.
The "hardcore" people have a better chance of buying a Wii later than the Casual gamer has of buying a 360/PS3 later.
To me it is not a market where you choose 1 of the 3. It is a market where you either have a Wii or you have a 360 and a Wii or a PS3 and a Wii.
By going after the casual market first, they have built a foundation that the other 2 can't touch because they have stayed in the "gamer niche".
the kid in question is 2.5 years old
So my son and I (he is pre-school aged) went to the gamestop... he knows he can ask for games in the PS2, gamecube, Wii or gameboy sections and we will talk about it... Now they have a kid's section with games for all systems randomly strewn about the shelves. Which was particularly confusing to... KIDS. It just ended up Can I get this one? No that is PS3. Can I get this one? No that is Xbox.
I mean I am sure there are families out there with every single system, but I found it particularly annoying that the new layout basically assumes you have all systems.
and apple's cash registers run Windows Pocket PC ;)
he could also stand there looking all sullen and geek chic.
"The Need to move to Mac OS X"
Could you please hand me the install disk so that I can fix my broken computer? No?? I have to buy $2000 computer to run that and throw away the high end machine I just bought with a pirated copy of vista?
No, if there was anything to compete it would be Linux... but average users aren't willing to use that so sadly I feel that this whole operation will be a sucess. Now if MS decided to give away unusable, non-professional OSs like Vista and charge the easiest customer to prosecute: businesses for the privelage of using operating systems that everyone already knows how to use... that would be an iron clad business plan. But why do that when you can just harass your customers into paying 300 bucks every few years and they will still come begging.
Buy this RAM and you have a chance to win 50 dollars by mail!
Price comparison should always be done while ignoring rebates.
If I want to play twilight princess, but don't have a Wii, I can buy it for the gamecube. If I miss the original Zelda, I don't have to track down a 60 dollar NES on ebay... I can just buy it for whatever Nintendo system I happen to own.
I personally use their rehash strategy not to buy each game more than once as many people claim is their goal, but so that I can choose which systems to buy and not miss out on the games I really love. I feel it is a great service to the consumer. Especially since I can buy gameboy color versions of much more expensive gameboy advance games for my toddler and he doesn't know/care the difference.
[i]I am yet to see a convincing argument on why ADD isn't a problem[/i]
That is probably because you have no idea what ADD is. ADD includes a trait called "Hyperfocus"... Like the developer who finishes coding a system in 30 hours straight because he is "in the zone" this is hyperfocus. Many people with ADD pay much more attention to detail than those without because they are less likely to be blinded by the "forest" because they stop to look at the trees.
I HATE how people call it attention deficit "disorder" and how they say the net effect is "averse".
screw you, I am happy with my short attention span. It serves me financially and personally to have a "short attention span".
Because I VALUE MY TIME(short attention span) more than other people, I am more efficient and I deal with less bullshit because I don't want to. Call it a disorder if you want, I call it an evolutionary advantage.
Unified spellings for words is a fairly recent addition to the few languages that actually tend to conform to them. In my experience and opinion, unified spelling is for people who lack creativity, and who have nothing better to do.
no offense, but you are wasting your life. If my point was clear to everyone who responded/modded then the spelling was sufficient.
Although I appreciate your effort to embiggen the human race, I am fundamentally opposed to spelling correction.
it is an important distinction because in california people sit in traffic, A LOT. A PZ vehicle that makes and average of X emissions while driving in "normal" conditions as compared to an ultra low emissions vehicle who makes X in normal driving conditions.
now take California's "normal" driving conditions of sitting on the freeway STOPPED for hours. An Ultra low is making it's small amount of emissions sitting there... A PZ is making NOTHING.
It makes perfect sense why california would be crazy about them. A prius makes as much pollution as a camry in Texas, but a prius makes much less than a camry(ulev) in california, because in california, pollution is a function of TIME, not MILES like most other places.
except when emissions are a function of time.
.005 cu feet CO2 .005 cu feet CO2
lets take a 3 second "timeline"
Second 1 -
second 2 - 0 cu feet CO2
second 3 -
one out of every 3 seconds has ZERO emissions. So the vehicle is a PARTIAL Zero Emissions vehicle.
California gives automakers huge grants for making CA only cars. The cars are subsidized by the state, so if you sell it in another state you are basically taking tax dollars away from California residents (both in the Car's sale, and in the state's funding of the car manufacturing/R&D).
I am not saying it's right, but it is not 100% rediculious.
I read really crappy sci-fi one time where humans moved to more and more obscure and technical means to store data, untill eventually they were making notches in neutrons. Since the technology to read/write it was so expensive, they just centralized it. The machine broke and all the data needed to fix it was stored on a few atoms in a vault with no way to read it.
I know it is "dimestore" technology alarmist camp, but I thought it was funny that this story is comming true. Anyone know the name of this story??
much of the ice in the universe also contains methane. When you burn methane it produces heat, CO2 and water. Crash that into a large cloud of oxygen and hydrogen, and you have a fairly likely situation of a sustained set of reactions that melt down the comet, produce water, and leave a nice mix of oxygen and CO2 so that life has a bunch of the key ingredients.
Quake was an amazing game. glQuake was the exact same game with a much higher resolution rendering engine. glQuake was not a revolution, it was not suprising, and it did not make Quake magically appeal to more people, it was just an incremental improvement on the resolution of a great game.
When pitchers finally broke the 100mph barrier on fast balls in baseball, the game didn't change at all, fastballs just became more fast. Same for the "Graphics centric" marketplace we are seeing for the 360 and ps3. My hope is that we either make it to complete photorealism or realize 16E10x9E10@900FPS still won't make a game better; before videogame creativity dies completly. I think this is Nintendo's hope as well.
hah if HD is the only thing that makes a "real" game then this indignent Wii owner is glad that I don't own a 360 or a PS3. HDTV is merely incremental, a slight increase in visual sharpness, an aspect which has very little to do with gaming. The Wii might not be "revolutionary" right now (thanks largely to publishers who are scared to break out of the "12 more pixels deep" box), but at least it is not merely incremental. Sometimes going in a different direction is not necessarily successful (although the Wii is at least for now) but I feel like it is usually important. Basically you can't innovate if all you do is follow the leader... you can only hope for second place.
The Wii and to a lesser extent the DS almost require innovative gameplay. The result is that you can't just make a game with slightly bigger levels, more guns, and slightly better graphics and call it "new".
The platform itself is calling for something different, and different takes time.
someone who proves they can do something is much more valuable than someone who has a degree. Obviously you look at the candidates that have both, when those candidates are available, but we have found no specific correlation to those with Bachelors or even Masters degrees and those who can actually do the job.
Of course I am not handing out $25,000 cars or defending people who do.