First, yeah there will be no scouring of the shire. As is said above, Peter Jackson in the extended DVD says so. Also Sam gets given a rope by Galadriel as his parting gift instead of a box of earth with a seed in. (IIRC, in the book Sam just finds the rope in the boat?) Thus there is nothing to repair the damage done back at the shire.
Second, I agree the scouring is one of the most important parts of the book. I strongly suspect Tolkien would tell you that as well. Its not only about "cleaning up". Its about returning from war to a changed world. Certainly Tolkien himself felt that upon returning to England after his service in the First World War (which included the Battle of the Somme). The world had moved on and what he fought to protect no longer survived as he remembered it. And many who came back were too traumatised to ever feel settled in what they had risked all to preserve (cf. Frodo). Both are cruel ironies indeed but true for many of his generation. This is also tied in with Tolkien's general dislike of industrialisation itself and his pain at what was happening to the area where he grew up. Its a popular myth incidentally that Tolkien said his stories were totally unconnected to anything in the real world. What he really said was they were not allegorical particularly with regard to WW2 or nuclear war. In the introduction to the 2nd Ed of LoTR (IIRC) he makes it clear how much is based on his experiences in France and in later interviews, how he felt about environmental issues and "progress".
For me, the Scouring of the Shire is in many ways the single part of the book that has some emotional depth, despite the fact it is here more than anywhere else in book that you can hear the author more of less hectoring you through the mouths of his characters. Whilst I understand filmmakers are under constraints, I hope RoTK doesnt end in pure triumphalism as that would I feel betray a big part of the spirit of the book.
With the net and the general increase in computer use in general theres clearly more resources out there for the aspiring programmer. Theres more choice, but you can still download QBASIC if you want. Only now you can get source code that won't be full of typos (anyone recall the back of magazine programs that blighted a generations eyesight?) And then its simple. I think the *real* predicament is actually the gulf between what you want to play (or use, but more realistically for kids, play) and what you can program yourself. This is discouraging. When I started out I wanted to write a text adventure like those I enjoyed playing, which was a tractable goal. Setting out to write GTA4 isn't. Take a look at say the gamedev.net forums. They are bursting with kids who are new to programming and what they have in mind doing amounts to Everquest 2.
Darkbasic (http://www.darkbasic.com) is pretty good for addressing this problem *and* the wish list stated in the article. Program away in what is more or less BBC BASIC but also get relatively easy access to DirectX etc and in particular 3D. Does it teach "good" habits? Probably not, but you can something fairly flashy done within a short period time which is useful motivationally. This is important I think before taking on the more difficult programming challenges out there. It has little or no kudos associated with its use, but I'd argue its the right horse for this particular course. Sure, its not a great language compared to even VB, but I feel its niche is right here. Its not free (although there are evaluation versions for free) but its I think about 30 UK pounds, which is clearly cheap by comparison with say VB.
I think there can be a bit of stigma.
It depends a lot I guess on the nature of acreditation and grade moderation from external bodies (so look carefully when choosing). I'd guess your personal circumstances might be important as to "how it looks" as well; getting a degree whilst working to support young children etc., would certainly appear to paint you as highly motivated and impressively proactive vs. someone who partied for 3 years then crammed. If it was by distance because you didn't want to leave the hotel service offered by your parents, or because you weren't brave enough to leave the town you grew up in might play altogether differently.
In the UK we have had the OU (Open University) for quite a long time now. The primary way of teaching there was TV programs and texts (radio/cassettes and now the internet as well), with some element of face-to-face work over the summer. I think its fair to say this has been succesful way to learn for hundreds of thousands [they have 158k undergrads atm] of people, and the relative ranking of the OU in league tables and the like is competitive with many good "real" universities. [Slightly OT, but their internet developments look interesting, they claim 17k email/chat messages a day and a "virtual arena" holding 100k participants, see http://www.open.ac.uk]
So with this example in mind theres certainly no reason why online education, by its very nature, *has* to be bad. If possible though, I would suggest looking for a course with some "face time" invovled, even if its just a fortnight of summer school. I've been involved in tutoring at these and students have told me its make all the difference to them; particularly in terms of motivation and self-confidence (which are Very Important in getting through it obviously)
To be honest its hard to comment further without more detail; certainly you have every right to raise any problems you have with the institution. --sorry if this sounds negative-- but even within the bricks and mortar world profs can be aloof, apparently lazy (at least as regards teaching) and arbritary in their rules about things. And to be even more honest, the fact that college students are in that little world with all its trappings (and are usually quite young) means often they get away with it. Its perhaps possible that distance is just giving you a degree of objectivity? Which of course, in no way means you are wrong to be pissed off about it.
From the second article it shows that much of the stats were compared from automated searches of both the web and P2P programs.
Of course what they haven't factored in is the fact that "warez" websites never really offer anything for download, they are just click-through scams. And the percentage of working stuff on Kazaa can't be that high. This is apparent just from the fact that all sorts of things are offered with implausible file sizes (e.g., WindowsXP Pro; 18MB. I wish...)
On reflection it was a crappy post that didn't really come off. Seemed OK at the time, but now I read it again its not very amusing. It wasn't meant to be offensive, but if you try to make a joke nobody gets... It was modded down which is as it should be.
I'm going to get in here before anyone else.
Argh!!!! Nooooo!!!! I can't believe it.
Yes, OK, I was the last person to explain the connection between music and hearing here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=65787&cid=6064 297
C'mon, you get my drift though!?...inserts shotgun into mouth....depresses trigger.
..Patent "(i)Making inane comments having not RTFA" and "(ii)Repeating the same old jokes" and "(iii)Crazed Linux advocacy/kneejerk MS-bashing" or we've all had it!
(Won't mind if you don't bother with the one for "posting duplicate articles" though).
Why is parent modded down?
I agree. Its fine to make fun of spammers, and yes there is a particular scam being referenced here, but on the other hand, some of the comments above the parent are a little near-the-knuckle frankly. (see also comments about the Indian IT sector recently).
Also the story itself; crickets for breakfast? running water gags? FFS.
Its ironic that this site has annoyingly stood up to a slashdotting.
You'd of thought the link to a pron page so kindly offered would of mitigated any charges of sanctimony!
Can't believe I chose this one time to RTFA...!
(Minor LoTR/Sopranos spoilerage here btw).
First, what the hell is it?
Its not science; theres no method, no data, no design. Its not anything sociological/philosophical either, theres no perspective informing it that I can uncover. So really is just someones opinions. Why should we be interested in them then? I assume we are supposed to accept validity by the authority imbued by academic credentials. Analysis is signally lacking here; its reads rather like "what we did on our holidays". I'm afraid I recognise what has gone on here only too well; fellow academics will immediately rumble it, but I shall shall say only this: it is perhaps not unconnected that the conference was in sunny Australia...
...so the shocking truth is that people who play EverQuest, a multi-player game, actually group together and communicate. And get this, they are real people in real life, and occasionally this gets transfered into an online game. Great, only, er, this concept is intrinsic to the game itself...it wouldn't be a MMORPG if this wasn't the case. What next, "Music and hearing: We explain the connection"!?
In any case, I'm not the world's greatest Sopranos or LoTR buff, but I distinctly recall that Gandalf had a wide network of friends and allies all of whom could be called on in extremis (every character in the entire novel knows him or his reputation. he gets rescued by an otherwise aloof maian spirit/given the best horse in the world(!)/trusted to lead armies/offered the Ring/so well connected he gets reincarnated/invited to go on holiday with the elves etc.). By contrast, Tony Soprano is isolated, lonely, can trust no-one it seems (hes killed at least two capos that i'm aware of for example, his wife is cheating on him, his kids hate him, Pauly is plotting against him etc.). What the authors mean to say is "like Micheal Corleone in the Godfather sequels". But hey, the Sopranos is newer, they heard its about the mafia, guessed it will be the same. Well, it isn't. Given they are too lazy to even depict two incredibly famous and popular fictional characters correctly, this undermines the article as a whole, particularly because it purports to be some sort of cultural analysis.
In conclusion, the point the argue for is at best banal, really redundant and even if it wasn't, the weak attempt at rhetoric to support it falls embarassingly under any sort of examination.
This is a very late posting, but what the hell.
First, nice to see some reasoned debate. Props to you both.
But second; do you know who Clarkson is?! I can only assume you are not aware of his style...
Sadly I think what he really meant was "The drivers in meandering ugly, girly and puny french cars should should get out the way when my 4 litre Jag wants to overtake".
You really would want to read Speaker for the Dead IMHO. Ender's Game is about war. SFTD is about what you do after you've had to do some terrible things...food for thought in our current jingoistic "we rock" kind of post-Gulf war 2 environment?
(If you like the second, and well third, books are the conscience much lacking from the first).
I'm not into anything dodgy or illegal (beyond a stable, and hopefully in future, managable mp3 habit) but am I only the only one who doesn't like the idea of sending a Harddrive thats been living in my machine for months back to the factory? (especially given the risk it may be reconditioned and flogged on ebay without being properly scrubbed. someone is supplying that particular market). Seems a bad idea to me.
My view is a harddrive either works in my machine or its hung, drawn, quartered, stamped on, zapped with magnets, zapped with laser beams, tactically nuked and *then* and only *then* launched into the sun itself. I'm exaggerating (erm slightly, who'd stamp on a HD?), but you get my point.
No. Thats entirely wrong. The point of their paper was that practise from a single activity (playing an FPS but not Tetris) transfers to a *range* of different tasks, some really quite different from each other (some the issues are spatial span of attention, others are an issue of temporal resolution -- analogously think of how a spotlight beam can differ its size and also in its intensity) , that are (as far as we know) known to actually be performed using different parts of the visual cortex from each other.
I'm personally not very impressed with the paper, and from the tone, I assume you agree with me that it appears rather mundane, but much of science is like that. We check assumptions and normally the world conforms to them. When the data and the assumptions deviate thats when the prizes get given out and its on the front pages of newspapers. But, as an experimenter, you can't have the fun stuff without the more mundane stuff. You cite an acedote there. Its interesting, but theres no data, no measurement, no design. Could we base, for example, an aviation training programme on that alone? I wouldn't. The history of science is littered with sensible anecdotal/common sense accounts that turned out to be entirely wrong upon closer examination. Ether was very plausible for hundreds of years. Theres no substitute for measurement.
I don't know how far your interest extends but this phenomenon has been studied in some depth by a psychologist called Albert Bregman who wrote a seminal book about it called "Auditory scene analysis".
IIRC, Bregman argues that "streaming" contains elements of both automaticity and, as you say, learning. There have been some quite accurate measurements of the physical parameters of streaming, although of course its to be acknowledged that the Baroque composers informally rumbled how it worked on some level (for example, the ways they found to simulate polyphony on monophonic instruments by alternating notes belonging to two different melodies).
Interesting audio demonstrations available here:
http://www.psych.mcgill.ca/labs/auditory/bregmancd.html
IIACP:
Having read a few comments I'd just like to clarify a few things. I haven't read the paper itself, but from the summaries I've tried to work out what the findings are. In a way the main thrust of the paper seems to be being missed because of the headline grabbing video games element.
Basically, from what I've read, the authors are claiming that game players (either from self-report or through training) perform better on tests of *visual selective attention*. Please note, this is not the same as saying "can see better" or "are more intelligent". Instead, this refers to the efficiency with which visual items can be selected and processed.
The more important finding here is not really that "computer games are good for you" but that there is transfer of perceptual learning across domains. Now, it is no secret that training improves performance on visual attention tasks; I myself was invovled in a study where people did a simple keep-the-cursor-on-the-target task for *20 days*. This may surprise you, but they never reached asymptote ("maxxed out") performance. They just got better. And better. And better. But normally, practice effects are restricted to specific domains; if you practice tracking targets, you improve only on tracking targets. Another test of visual attention, say detecting letters amongst a stream of rapidly presented numbers, wouldn't benefit. Thus what makes this paper Nature worthy (I'm sure many biochemists etc. are were wondering) is that training on video games benefits a number of domains of visual attention.
Now, this said, a simple hypothesis comes to mind which is that, of course, video games like Medal of Honour or whatever contained a variety of elements; spatial 3D (navigating around), spatial 2D (reading gauges, checking health), an element of reaction time/twitch responding etc. Thus it is perhaps not entirely surprsing that there is transfer of perceptual learning from a modern FPS to a range of attentional tasks. By contrast, we would not expect Tetris to generalise so widely because it is very specific in what it requires players to do. It is purely 2D, motion is one direction only etc.
A counterpoint to that argument is to suppose that visual attention isnt a grab-bag of individual elements as I argue above, but rather a unified ability that somehow a modern FPS can uniquely tap (this appears to be what some of the commentators are saying, its hard to tell though). I'd say this is fairly controversial.
Finally, it is important to note that the paper simply does not speak to arguments about personality and character and social behavior: whether games "make you clever/dumb/violent/passive/etc." Its really addressing a more technical issue.
There will be some original formats in the future. If I knew what they were of course I wouldnt be wasting time on/. though!
Sure a lot of new games are rather identikit, but dont get misty eyed about the 8-bit past too quick, there was a lot of complete dross around and *how many* remakes of the popular formats of the day (frogger/space invaders/donkey kong)? Anyone remember Ocean's run of woeful film tie-ins? And believe it or not people were having the same debates as this in the early 80s. Just like they have had about music, theatre, the novel, poetry etc. for hundreds of years.
Bear in mind also we only tend to remember the succesful experiments that stood the test of time. Anyone for a game of Deus Ex Machina (a widely heralded classic of invention in its day)? Thought not.
In any case, I personally find the established formats (e.g., FPS) are popular for a reason. And all it takes is a good instantion of said format to make you remember. I was fed up with the FPS for a while, until I tried BF1942 and it rekindled the sort of excitement I used to have for Doom. Largely because it was executed well and brought a few new additions to the table.
Not that Doom was as original as often portrayed. There are many 8-bit antecdents of that format as well. Which rather supports my claim; Doom seemed was a watershed because it did something well and thus seemed incredibly exciting and original.
So I say don't worry about originality per se, worry more about quality. And the rest shall follow.
Hmm...Redmond 'humor' bypassed you huh. Excel = pun on "cell", as in, spreadsheet cell. Hey, plus most people buy it as part of the enigmatically named "Mircosoft Office Suite" (you thought this was a kind of office sofa?)
Where do you draw the line though? Is "Word" a bible-scholarship aid? Does "Minesweeper" actually dredge the Atlantic? Is "google" a cricketing website? Does "Slashdot" piss on full-stops?
But seriously... Thing is, Win32 application makers generally pay for advertising to establish market share, so naming isn't such an issue for them. Indeed it helps to have a distinctive name for marketing reasons and if only so you can get a memorable and available webpage. But if you dont have this budget, as OSS developers generally don't, then a bit of intuitive naming would help IMHO.
I pay through the nose for my internet access and I'll use it anyway I choose to thanks. This mustn't be lost sight of, despite some people's attempts (e.g., NTL) to call people who use a service *as advertised* "offenders" (http://slashdot.org/articles/03/02/09/2210214.sht ml?tid=95) [American readers; I should say they once ran an advertising campaign daring the public to break their modems through using them too much].
Sadly, the killer app for broadband at least (rather than dial-up) is P2P. I don't think this can be a secret, its just no-one wants to admit it. (a 1mb/s line won't offer you faster gaming latencys or "nicer" emails to your granny than a 512k line or a even a 120k connection). ISPs should refrain from playing bait and switch with their customers; the market can only get more competitive.
Am I alone in thinking the "philosophical points" raised by the Matrix are rather banal?
Most people by the time they are adolescent have entertained the notion that what seems real isn't real etc etc. Philosophy itself pre-empted the issue a long time ago, read Descartes on "demon doubt". I think the whole "matrix as a philosophical film" thing has been overhyped frankly. The only deep contemplation I did was of Trinity's leather-clad butt.
What may be more interesting is the way this (ultimately unanswerable, thus fairly pointless) question about the "way things seem vs. the way things might really be" reguarly resurfaces under different guises. For example, in the 1950s we have paranoia about the governemnt and UFOs as part of the mix (Philip K. Dicks early work onwards; e.g., Martian Timeslip). In the 1960s it resurfaces as to do with LSD and Eastern mysticism (--I say this out of respect for Eastern Religions; the 60s Western version was a rather self-serving bastardisation)
And now in 1990s/C21, its all to do with technology.
A final wild speculation is that this might really be the expression of a widely held fear rather than a philosophical notion per se (in the same way that say gothic horror, like Dracula, is arguably reducable to contemporary concerns about sexuality etc.)...and as I end this post, speaking out of my rear, I realise I'm just as bad as the people I was flaming as I began. Hohum. Now thats a paradox.
First, I don't think we can without reservation slam people for simply creating these hacks. We are back here to the old hacking chestnut; for some people theres the intellectual challenge. In many ways its ideal; theres an "armsrace" ongoing which pushes the standard, you can't as yet be jailed for it, and kudos is available in abundance from grateful users. I don't want to be an apologist for cheating (it drives me puce with rage when I encounter it) but there is the other side here that geeks might like to consider.
What is a problem is the distribution and the actual use of these things against people playing by the rules.
My favoured solution would actually be to sidestep technical issues, and cut to the motivation the kiddies have for using these cheats (which may not be the same as the coders; see above). On the onehand, the Griefers (ie. Trolls) are hard to stop. Hell, take away their aimbots and they'll just spam abuse on IRC or walkaway from unfinished games of Yahoo Literati or something. BUT, the main thing seems to be individual scoring in games, even though CS and BF1942 are team based games.
Thus I think a simple solution (or at least experiment) would be to can the individual score screens and just keep posted team scores. It won't defeat the problem, but I suspect it might cause it to abate somwhat./rant
[I have to be honest, the individual scoring thing is an annoyance to me, and seems to denature BF1942 even when everyone is presumably playing straight because it fails to reward tactical play (e.g., you might die 5 times and kill no-one, but if in doing that you've won ground/protected a flag/weakened the enemy etc. that may have been a more valuable contribution to have made than just fragging for the sake of it).]/rantoff
At the risk of pissing in the wind here... the answer to quite a few questions that are above this are in the article.
Those confused by the viability of the business model: NOTE: Not *all* the tickets will cost 20p. In fact, probably relatively few. As the article says, you could actually pay 5 pounds, which is more than my local cinema charges now. Sure, the tickets will be on average cheaper but this 20p thing is clearly an advertising gimmick. And as such it seems to be working so far.
I wonder how succesful this will be. Flying, if the experience as a whole is reduced in quality is fine; its a functional activity getting from A-to-B. (EasyJet=no "free" inflight snack or drink, no "free" papers, the crews do the cleaning etc, you are herded on, you are herder off) You don't fly for the sake of it. Going to the cinema on the otherhand is about more than the film itself. Depending on how far corners are cut (maintenance, technical specs of equipment, cleanliness etc.) it might be a bit unappealing as something you might do for the sake of it.
Personally I welcome this if only because I can grandly goto a more expensive cinema round the corner and be able to watch in peace without rowdy teenagers annoying me. All for a few extra quid. Seems like a bargain to me. Everyone will be happy:-P
Slashdot Mirror
First, yeah there will be no scouring of the shire. As is said above, Peter Jackson in the extended DVD says so. Also Sam gets given a rope by Galadriel as his parting gift instead of a box of earth with a seed in. (IIRC, in the book Sam just finds the rope in the boat?) Thus there is nothing to repair the damage done back at the shire.
Second, I agree the scouring is one of the most important parts of the book. I strongly suspect Tolkien would tell you that as well. Its not only about "cleaning up". Its about returning from war to a changed world. Certainly Tolkien himself felt that upon returning to England after his service in the First World War (which included the Battle of the Somme). The world had moved on and what he fought to protect no longer survived as he remembered it. And many who came back were too traumatised to ever feel settled in what they had risked all to preserve (cf. Frodo). Both are cruel ironies indeed but true for many of his generation. This is also tied in with Tolkien's general dislike of industrialisation itself and his pain at what was happening to the area where he grew up. Its a popular myth incidentally that Tolkien said his stories were totally unconnected to anything in the real world. What he really said was they were not allegorical particularly with regard to WW2 or nuclear war. In the introduction to the 2nd Ed of LoTR (IIRC) he makes it clear how much is based on his experiences in France and in later interviews, how he felt about environmental issues and "progress".
For me, the Scouring of the Shire is in many ways the single part of the book that has some emotional depth, despite the fact it is here more than anywhere else in book that you can hear the author more of less hectoring you through the mouths of his characters. Whilst I understand filmmakers are under constraints, I hope RoTK doesnt end in pure triumphalism as that would I feel betray a big part of the spirit of the book.
With the net and the general increase in computer use in general theres clearly more resources out there for the aspiring programmer. Theres more choice, but you can still download QBASIC if you want. Only now you can get source code that won't be full of typos (anyone recall the back of magazine programs that blighted a generations eyesight?) And then its simple. I think the *real* predicament is actually the gulf between what you want to play (or use, but more realistically for kids, play) and what you can program yourself. This is discouraging. When I started out I wanted to write a text adventure like those I enjoyed playing, which was a tractable goal. Setting out to write GTA4 isn't. Take a look at say the gamedev.net forums. They are bursting with kids who are new to programming and what they have in mind doing amounts to Everquest 2.
Darkbasic (http://www.darkbasic.com) is pretty good for addressing this problem *and* the wish list stated in the article. Program away in what is more or less BBC BASIC but also get relatively easy access to DirectX etc and in particular 3D. Does it teach "good" habits? Probably not, but you can something fairly flashy done within a short period time which is useful motivationally. This is important I think before taking on the more difficult programming challenges out there. It has little or no kudos associated with its use, but I'd argue its the right horse for this particular course. Sure, its not a great language compared to even VB, but I feel its niche is right here. Its not free (although there are evaluation versions for free) but its I think about 30 UK pounds, which is clearly cheap by comparison with say VB.
I think there can be a bit of stigma. It depends a lot I guess on the nature of acreditation and grade moderation from external bodies (so look carefully when choosing). I'd guess your personal circumstances might be important as to "how it looks" as well; getting a degree whilst working to support young children etc., would certainly appear to paint you as highly motivated and impressively proactive vs. someone who partied for 3 years then crammed. If it was by distance because you didn't want to leave the hotel service offered by your parents, or because you weren't brave enough to leave the town you grew up in might play altogether differently.
In the UK we have had the OU (Open University) for quite a long time now. The primary way of teaching there was TV programs and texts (radio/cassettes and now the internet as well), with some element of face-to-face work over the summer. I think its fair to say this has been succesful way to learn for hundreds of thousands [they have 158k undergrads atm] of people, and the relative ranking of the OU in league tables and the like is competitive with many good "real" universities. [Slightly OT, but their internet developments look interesting, they claim 17k email/chat messages a day and a "virtual arena" holding 100k participants, see http://www.open.ac.uk]
So with this example in mind theres certainly no reason why online education, by its very nature, *has* to be bad. If possible though, I would suggest looking for a course with some "face time" invovled, even if its just a fortnight of summer school. I've been involved in tutoring at these and students have told me its make all the difference to them; particularly in terms of motivation and self-confidence (which are Very Important in getting through it obviously)
To be honest its hard to comment further without more detail; certainly you have every right to raise any problems you have with the institution. --sorry if this sounds negative-- but even within the bricks and mortar world profs can be aloof, apparently lazy (at least as regards teaching) and arbritary in their rules about things. And to be even more honest, the fact that college students are in that little world with all its trappings (and are usually quite young) means often they get away with it. Its perhaps possible that distance is just giving you a degree of objectivity? Which of course, in no way means you are wrong to be pissed off about it.From the second article it shows that much of the stats were compared from automated searches of both the web and P2P programs.
Of course what they haven't factored in is the fact that "warez" websites never really offer anything for download, they are just click-through scams. And the percentage of working stuff on Kazaa can't be that high. This is apparent just from the fact that all sorts of things are offered with implausible file sizes (e.g., WindowsXP Pro; 18MB. I wish...)
On reflection it was a crappy post that didn't really come off. Seemed OK at the time, but now I read it again its not very amusing. It wasn't meant to be offensive, but if you try to make a joke nobody gets... It was modded down which is as it should be.
Thanks for being so bloody nasty anyhow.I'm going to get in here before anyone else. Argh!!!! Nooooo!!!! I can't believe it. Yes, OK, I was the last person to explain the connection between music and hearing here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=65787&cid=6064 297
C'mon, you get my drift though!? ...inserts shotgun into mouth. ...depresses trigger.
MTV has been giving awards to computer-enhanced pseudo-muppets for years!
..Patent "(i)Making inane comments having not RTFA" and "(ii)Repeating the same old jokes" and "(iii)Crazed Linux advocacy/kneejerk MS-bashing" or we've all had it!
(Won't mind if you don't bother with the one for "posting duplicate articles" though).Why is parent modded down? I agree. Its fine to make fun of spammers, and yes there is a particular scam being referenced here, but on the other hand, some of the comments above the parent are a little near-the-knuckle frankly. (see also comments about the Indian IT sector recently). Also the story itself; crickets for breakfast? running water gags? FFS. Its ironic that this site has annoyingly stood up to a slashdotting. You'd of thought the link to a pron page so kindly offered would of mitigated any charges of sanctimony!
First, what the hell is it? Its not science; theres no method, no data, no design. Its not anything sociological/philosophical either, theres no perspective informing it that I can uncover. So really is just someones opinions. Why should we be interested in them then? I assume we are supposed to accept validity by the authority imbued by academic credentials. Analysis is signally lacking here; its reads rather like "what we did on our holidays". I'm afraid I recognise what has gone on here only too well; fellow academics will immediately rumble it, but I shall shall say only this: it is perhaps not unconnected that the conference was in sunny Australia...
In any case, I'm not the world's greatest Sopranos or LoTR buff, but I distinctly recall that Gandalf had a wide network of friends and allies all of whom could be called on in extremis (every character in the entire novel knows him or his reputation. he gets rescued by an otherwise aloof maian spirit/given the best horse in the world(!)/trusted to lead armies/offered the Ring/so well connected he gets reincarnated/invited to go on holiday with the elves etc.). By contrast, Tony Soprano is isolated, lonely, can trust no-one it seems (hes killed at least two capos that i'm aware of for example, his wife is cheating on him, his kids hate him, Pauly is plotting against him etc.). What the authors mean to say is "like Micheal Corleone in the Godfather sequels". But hey, the Sopranos is newer, they heard its about the mafia, guessed it will be the same. Well, it isn't. Given they are too lazy to even depict two incredibly famous and popular fictional characters correctly, this undermines the article as a whole, particularly because it purports to be some sort of cultural analysis.
In conclusion, the point the argue for is at best banal, really redundant and even if it wasn't, the weak attempt at rhetoric to support it falls embarassingly under any sort of examination.But second; do you know who Clarkson is?! I can only assume you are not aware of his style... Sadly I think what he really meant was "The drivers in meandering ugly, girly and puny french cars should should get out the way when my 4 litre Jag wants to overtake".
You really would want to read Speaker for the Dead IMHO. Ender's Game is about war. SFTD is about what you do after you've had to do some terrible things...food for thought in our current jingoistic "we rock" kind of post-Gulf war 2 environment? (If you like the second, and well third, books are the conscience much lacking from the first).
I'm not into anything dodgy or illegal (beyond a stable, and hopefully in future, managable mp3 habit) but am I only the only one who doesn't like the idea of sending a Harddrive thats been living in my machine for months back to the factory? (especially given the risk it may be reconditioned and flogged on ebay without being properly scrubbed. someone is supplying that particular market). Seems a bad idea to me. My view is a harddrive either works in my machine or its hung, drawn, quartered, stamped on, zapped with magnets, zapped with laser beams, tactically nuked and *then* and only *then* launched into the sun itself. I'm exaggerating (erm slightly, who'd stamp on a HD?), but you get my point.
What does it do? Automatically and blindly defend Kevin Mitnick or something?
No. Thats entirely wrong. The point of their paper was that practise from a single activity (playing an FPS but not Tetris) transfers to a *range* of different tasks, some really quite different from each other (some the issues are spatial span of attention, others are an issue of temporal resolution -- analogously think of how a spotlight beam can differ its size and also in its intensity) , that are (as far as we know) known to actually be performed using different parts of the visual cortex from each other.
I'm personally not very impressed with the paper, and from the tone, I assume you agree with me that it appears rather mundane, but much of science is like that. We check assumptions and normally the world conforms to them. When the data and the assumptions deviate thats when the prizes get given out and its on the front pages of newspapers. But, as an experimenter, you can't have the fun stuff without the more mundane stuff. You cite an acedote there. Its interesting, but theres no data, no measurement, no design. Could we base, for example, an aviation training programme on that alone? I wouldn't. The history of science is littered with sensible anecdotal/common sense accounts that turned out to be entirely wrong upon closer examination. Ether was very plausible for hundreds of years. Theres no substitute for measurement.I don't know how far your interest extends but this phenomenon has been studied in some depth by a psychologist called Albert Bregman who wrote a seminal book about it called "Auditory scene analysis".
IIRC, Bregman argues that "streaming" contains elements of both automaticity and, as you say, learning. There have been some quite accurate measurements of the physical parameters of streaming, although of course its to be acknowledged that the Baroque composers informally rumbled how it worked on some level (for example, the ways they found to simulate polyphony on monophonic instruments by alternating notes belonging to two different melodies).
Interesting audio demonstrations available here: http://www.psych.mcgill.ca/labs/auditory/bregmancd .html
Bad form to reply to ones own post but: IIACP? Ironically that was meant to be IAACP. (I Am A Cognitive Psychologist).
IIACP: Having read a few comments I'd just like to clarify a few things. I haven't read the paper itself, but from the summaries I've tried to work out what the findings are. In a way the main thrust of the paper seems to be being missed because of the headline grabbing video games element. Basically, from what I've read, the authors are claiming that game players (either from self-report or through training) perform better on tests of *visual selective attention*. Please note, this is not the same as saying "can see better" or "are more intelligent". Instead, this refers to the efficiency with which visual items can be selected and processed. The more important finding here is not really that "computer games are good for you" but that there is transfer of perceptual learning across domains. Now, it is no secret that training improves performance on visual attention tasks; I myself was invovled in a study where people did a simple keep-the-cursor-on-the-target task for *20 days*. This may surprise you, but they never reached asymptote ("maxxed out") performance. They just got better. And better. And better. But normally, practice effects are restricted to specific domains; if you practice tracking targets, you improve only on tracking targets. Another test of visual attention, say detecting letters amongst a stream of rapidly presented numbers, wouldn't benefit. Thus what makes this paper Nature worthy (I'm sure many biochemists etc. are were wondering) is that training on video games benefits a number of domains of visual attention. Now, this said, a simple hypothesis comes to mind which is that, of course, video games like Medal of Honour or whatever contained a variety of elements; spatial 3D (navigating around), spatial 2D (reading gauges, checking health), an element of reaction time/twitch responding etc. Thus it is perhaps not entirely surprsing that there is transfer of perceptual learning from a modern FPS to a range of attentional tasks. By contrast, we would not expect Tetris to generalise so widely because it is very specific in what it requires players to do. It is purely 2D, motion is one direction only etc. A counterpoint to that argument is to suppose that visual attention isnt a grab-bag of individual elements as I argue above, but rather a unified ability that somehow a modern FPS can uniquely tap (this appears to be what some of the commentators are saying, its hard to tell though). I'd say this is fairly controversial. Finally, it is important to note that the paper simply does not speak to arguments about personality and character and social behavior: whether games "make you clever/dumb/violent/passive/etc." Its really addressing a more technical issue.
There will be some original formats in the future. If I knew what they were of course I wouldnt be wasting time on /. though!
Sure a lot of new games are rather identikit, but dont get misty eyed about the 8-bit past too quick, there was a lot of complete dross around and *how many* remakes of the popular formats of the day (frogger/space invaders/donkey kong)? Anyone remember Ocean's run of woeful film tie-ins? And believe it or not people were having the same debates as this in the early 80s. Just like they have had about music, theatre, the novel, poetry etc. for hundreds of years.
Bear in mind also we only tend to remember the succesful experiments that stood the test of time. Anyone for a game of Deus Ex Machina (a widely heralded classic of invention in its day)? Thought not.
In any case, I personally find the established formats (e.g., FPS) are popular for a reason. And all it takes is a good instantion of said format to make you remember. I was fed up with the FPS for a while, until I tried BF1942 and it rekindled the sort of excitement I used to have for Doom. Largely because it was executed well and brought a few new additions to the table.
Not that Doom was as original as often portrayed. There are many 8-bit antecdents of that format as well. Which rather supports my claim; Doom seemed was a watershed because it did something well and thus seemed incredibly exciting and original.
So I say don't worry about originality per se, worry more about quality. And the rest shall follow.
Hmm...Redmond 'humor' bypassed you huh.
Excel = pun on "cell", as in, spreadsheet cell. Hey, plus most people buy it as part of the enigmatically named "Mircosoft Office Suite" (you thought this was a kind of office sofa?)
Where do you draw the line though? Is "Word" a bible-scholarship aid? Does "Minesweeper" actually dredge the Atlantic? Is "google" a cricketing website? Does "Slashdot" piss on full-stops?
But seriously...
Thing is, Win32 application makers generally pay for advertising to establish market share, so naming isn't such an issue for them. Indeed it helps to have a distinctive name for marketing reasons and if only so you can get a memorable and available webpage. But if you dont have this budget, as OSS developers generally don't, then a bit of intuitive naming would help IMHO.
I pay through the nose for my internet access and I'll use it anyway I choose to thanks. This mustn't be lost sight of, despite some people's attempts (e.g., NTL) to call people who use a service *as advertised* "offenders" (http://slashdot.org/articles/03/02/09/2210214.sht ml?tid=95)
[American readers; I should say they once ran an advertising campaign daring the public to break their modems through using them too much].
Sadly, the killer app for broadband at least (rather than dial-up) is P2P. I don't think this can be a secret, its just no-one wants to admit it. (a 1mb/s line won't offer you faster gaming latencys or "nicer" emails to your granny than a 512k line or a even a 120k connection). ISPs should refrain from playing bait and switch with their customers; the market can only get more competitive.
Am I alone in thinking the "philosophical points" raised by the Matrix are rather banal? Most people by the time they are adolescent have entertained the notion that what seems real isn't real etc etc. Philosophy itself pre-empted the issue a long time ago, read Descartes on "demon doubt". I think the whole "matrix as a philosophical film" thing has been overhyped frankly. The only deep contemplation I did was of Trinity's leather-clad butt. What may be more interesting is the way this (ultimately unanswerable, thus fairly pointless) question about the "way things seem vs. the way things might really be" reguarly resurfaces under different guises. For example, in the 1950s we have paranoia about the governemnt and UFOs as part of the mix (Philip K. Dicks early work onwards; e.g., Martian Timeslip). In the 1960s it resurfaces as to do with LSD and Eastern mysticism (--I say this out of respect for Eastern Religions; the 60s Western version was a rather self-serving bastardisation) And now in 1990s/C21, its all to do with technology. A final wild speculation is that this might really be the expression of a widely held fear rather than a philosophical notion per se (in the same way that say gothic horror, like Dracula, is arguably reducable to contemporary concerns about sexuality etc.) ...and as I end this post, speaking out of my rear, I realise I'm just as bad as the people I was flaming as I began. Hohum. Now thats a paradox.
First, I don't think we can without reservation slam people for simply creating these hacks. We are back here to the old hacking chestnut; for some people theres the intellectual challenge. In many ways its ideal; theres an "armsrace" ongoing which pushes the standard, you can't as yet be jailed for it, and kudos is available in abundance from grateful users. I don't want to be an apologist for cheating (it drives me puce with rage when I encounter it) but there is the other side here that geeks might like to consider. What is a problem is the distribution and the actual use of these things against people playing by the rules. My favoured solution would actually be to sidestep technical issues, and cut to the motivation the kiddies have for using these cheats (which may not be the same as the coders; see above). On the onehand, the Griefers (ie. Trolls) are hard to stop. Hell, take away their aimbots and they'll just spam abuse on IRC or walkaway from unfinished games of Yahoo Literati or something. BUT, the main thing seems to be individual scoring in games, even though CS and BF1942 are team based games. Thus I think a simple solution (or at least experiment) would be to can the individual score screens and just keep posted team scores. It won't defeat the problem, but I suspect it might cause it to abate somwhat. /rant
[I have to be honest, the individual scoring thing is an annoyance to me, and seems to denature BF1942 even when everyone is presumably playing straight because it fails to reward tactical play (e.g., you might die 5 times and kill no-one, but if in doing that you've won ground/protected a flag/weakened the enemy etc. that may have been a more valuable contribution to have made than just fragging for the sake of it).] /rantoff
First a point of order and then an opinion...
:-P
At the risk of pissing in the wind here... the answer to quite a few questions that are above this are in the article.
Those confused by the viability of the business model: NOTE: Not *all* the tickets will cost 20p. In fact, probably relatively few. As the article says, you could actually pay 5 pounds, which is more than my local cinema charges now. Sure, the tickets will be on average cheaper but this 20p thing is clearly an advertising gimmick. And as such it seems to be working so far.
I wonder how succesful this will be. Flying, if the experience as a whole is reduced in quality is fine; its a functional activity getting from A-to-B. (EasyJet=no "free" inflight snack or drink, no "free" papers, the crews do the cleaning etc, you are herded on, you are herder off) You don't fly for the sake of it. Going to the cinema on the otherhand is about more than the film itself. Depending on how far corners are cut (maintenance, technical specs of equipment, cleanliness etc.) it might be a bit unappealing as something you might do for the sake of it.
Personally I welcome this if only because I can grandly goto a more expensive cinema round the corner and be able to watch in peace without rowdy teenagers annoying me. All for a few extra quid. Seems like a bargain to me. Everyone will be happy