He says he has a hard time keeping kids' attention in class when every one of them has a computer installed on his or her desk.
I am certainly not an expert on ergonomics, but I would suspect the form factor of computers used is very important. I can easily see how a traditional desktop PC can become a distraction. May be a PDA or a Tablet PC can be better for many classrooms, while some other classrooms can benefit from something like a built-in touch-sensitive LCD without a mouse or keyboard. Furthermore, the degree of control the teacher should have over the computing experience is important as well. It's obvious that kids (students) should not have an option of using IM or randomly browsing the web anytime they want. The third important shortcoming of most solutions is that no decent "groupware" (for the lack of a better word) is used. Most disciplines need very specific functionality that can't be found in off-the-shelf office software or DVD encyclopedias. Unless such software is developed, a computer would remain a hurdle to some extent.
The bottom line is the teacher-student relationship. That is one of the most important factors in teaching. A good teacher (as long as they have support in discipline issues), can teach students with nothing but a blackboard and chalk for the teacher and paper and pencils for the students. Any teacher who thinks computers are the solution should find another job! On the other end, a good teacher who learns how to use computers, could find many ways to integrate them into the classroom and assignments. But what if you don't have good teachers? What if your society doesn't want (can't afford?) to pay them well? What if there are too few people interested in taking the job? There is a thin hope, not yet grounded in reality, perhaps, that good computers with good educational software, films, e-books and other materials, coupled with a lousy teaching assistant can help.
A few weeks ago I was reading a great site (in Russian) with memoirs of Russian soldiers who fought in the WW2. It really is amazing how some 18 year old kids from some village enlisted in the army and after some intensive training (a few months or so) managed to understood enough math to guide artillery fire (which involves a fair bit of understanding of basic physics and requires some math more complex than simple arithmetics). I think that everyone needs to learn math and science - as much of it as is currently included in decent curriculums. Moreover, everyone is capable of that feat, everyone except those unlucky 2-3 percent who are retarded. We need to keep in mind the fact that schools of today prepare people for the 2010-2030 at least, and without solid math and science education people will be as helpless as beached whales.
Well, but Cabot only decided to travel to America (or rather to Asia) after Columbus discovered it. The fact that he happened to land on the continent first doesn't negate the fact that America was discovered a year before. And in any case, neither Cabot, nor Columbus realised it wasn't Asia - only Vespucci did.
And they use that bandwidth to serve advertisments to end users. So they thought it would be a great idea to force the users jump through the hoops in order to view these ads...
I can't really see the point of using the mouse when there is the lock-on feature, but each to his own.:-)
Immersion. For some players the mouse becomes an extension of your body - a virtual representation of your hand and your head. You can look around, you can point the gun at someone. The same reason GTA moved from 2D to 3D, to make it easier for the player to believe he's in the game.
If the PS2 isn't capable of keeping track of offscreen vehicles, they could at least add it in for the PC and Xbox versions. The lack of PS2 capabilities is just a bad excuse for sloppy programming. Any person who ever wrote as little as a "Hello world" program is capable of fixing this with few lines of code. All that is needed is for the car to continue moving along the road - a detailed physics simulation is not needed when you don't see the car - assume it's just a point that moves along the line with a fixed speed. Then, when the player turns back to that elusive car, the game engine has to repopulate the world with cars anyway - it would be extremely simple to add the car back, since you know where approximately it should be now.
Assuming you need to track a hundred cars at most, you will probably need an extra kilobyte of memory and about 500-1000 processor operations per second.
Rockstar programmers are not perfect, actually, to tell the truth they are quite average (it's the designers and the producer who are great). Remember how faster Vice City was than GTA3? The only improvement was that programming geniuses from Rockstar finally understood that it makes little sense to render hidden surfaces in the game... Of course, that was described as a real improvement in the engine, not as fixing a glaring hole in its functionality...
I think a better contender will be Mafia 2. That's the game you can directly compare with GTA in practically all respects. The fact is that modern consoles have effective screen resolution 5-10 times lower than PC monitors. If PC gamers would be content with VGA graphics, it would be much easier to generate reaslitic environments. As it is, though, things like realistic skins, water, human eyes, quality textures are only relevant in PC games, because you can't see them on a TV screen anyway.
Console developers have learned to compensate the deficiencies of their hardware with gratituous special effects (flashy stuff of all sorts) and cinematic cut-scenes. In addition to that, animation and level design are pretty much the same on both PC and consoles. A game similar to ATi Double Cross demo (Ruby) can be rendered on PS2 easily if you are willing to sacrifice the subtle quality details (make 2K poly models with flat low-res textures and without shaders) - this can lead people to the conclusion that consoles are somehow on par with PCs, which is a ridiculous proposition because for a 4+ year old technology (PS2) to beat modern (or 1-2 year old tech) would be quite surprising and unexpected, really.
So while the next Metal Gear Solid may be a pleasant game to play (and if it comes out for the PC I might buy it), it will be exactly 4 years behind Far Cry in terms of jungle realism.
But I don't think anyone cares much for TF2 anymore. Now that we have CS, BF, UT2004 and tons of other lesser known multiplayer team games, TF2 is no longer that impressive or unique.
And what about printing the URL in a standard simple font? Underline it to provide a reference frame for the reader, make all letters and numbers distinct, add redundancy to the characters to defeat noise and minor damage to the text, and you are fine. If you are really serious, add error-checking and error-correction in a form of a short additional code (5-10 characters). The phone should be able to recognize it just great. The additional benefit is that a human will do it easily too.
Isn't it better to just use a computer-legible font for the URLs? If designed with both human and computer legibility in mind it can provide 100% accuracy when read by the phone and not require a lot of CPU power. The presence of the URL can be indicated either by the standard http:// prefix or by a special icon, by the address itself will be written in plain text. This is thousands of times more compatible and useful.
What the FUCK? Sponsor a presidency? How the hell is THAT possible? What next? Arthur Anderson sponsoring the judicial system?
Anyway, in mid-nighties Russian president and the prime minister were sitting in the Kremlin. The prime minister said: "Mr. President, I've got a letter from Coca-Cola here. They suggest that if we change our flag back to the Soviet one and add "Coca-Cola" in the corner, they will solve all our budget problems for the next decade." "Hmmm" said the president, "could you check when our deal with Pepsi ends."
After all, 1) as mentioned above, it is indisputable that life is present at all stages; and 2) the right to life trumps the right to liberty.
Does life beging at conception? Yes, but not human life. The embryo is alive just as a bacteria is alive and less alive than a mosquito. And there is nothing wrong with ending life per se. Now does human life begin at conception? If you argue that it does, I will argue that it doesn't end when a person dies. After a person dies some cells will remain alive for hours, some even for days. So a cadaver should enjoy all rights a human being enjoys, shouldn't it? Or, if you argue that embryo should be protected because it has the potential to develop into human, I will simply say it's irrelevant. You have the potential to become President of your country, but that doesn't give you immunity from prosecution and other perks today. The potential is irrelevant, simply because nowhere else in the legal system we take it into account.
Movies are bad enough when the script has passed through five sets of hands who all think they know best. How could 500 or 5000 possibly be better? May be some of the fans will be able to point out how lame the script is before it is turned into a movie? Nobody is giving customers creative freedom, neither in game developement, nor in movies, but it is always good to listen to the customer.
We usually judge games on story, graphics and gameplay. Story in most games is quite basic, even in Half-Life it's not the story that is important (you can buy tons of pulp sci-fi with better story), it's how it is integrated with gameplay. Graphics dramatically improve every year because games still have not reached the ultimate target (real world). Movies, on the other hand, had nearly perfect graphics 50 years ago and you don't have any gameplay there. Acting is also constant - actors today don't play much better then they did 50 years ago. So the only way for films to compete is to improve the story.
But with games you don't need that - and so you rely on better graphics and gameplay instead, leaving the spirit of the story the same. And everyone is happy.
After 173 sequels, maybe people are tired of playing the same game. But then again, may be they aren't...
Show people a game with a moral dilemma, or a moment of real drama, or a game that might make someone cry. I would honestly suggest you check out Kana - Little Sister. While on the surface it appears to be a hentai game about incest, it actually has the best story I ever saw in a game. It has moral dillema (a couple of them), it has a moment of real drama (a few of them too) and it made a lot of people cry (including myself). Check it out, you won't regret it.
If id is making a sellable engine with Doom3, it looks like they are going to fail. Doom3 is not even adequate to existing hi-end 3D hardware. It seems that both nVidia 6800 and ATi X800 would happily run Doom3 in 2048x1536 on max settings. Well, may be only in 1600x1200, I don't know. There isn't much in Doom3 in terms of technology any longer. Lighting and shadows are still good, but nothing to salivate about. Physics is barely passable, bump-mapping is ok, but much more is already possible today, they have no water or outdoor environments. I would expect Valve's Source be much more popular choice among developers. Or Stalker developers, if they try selling their engine.
You were being mislead. Pro-choicers don't think life begins at birth, in practice they (if they have given any thought to this) think that life begins gradually. An embrion, then a fetus, then a baby becomes more alive every day. Therefore it is impossible to draw a clear line between not alive and alive. In practice they prefer to be cautious - an abortion after 8 months would not be defended by any pro-choicer (except when there is danger to the health of the mother), while an abortion after 1 month is nothing special. Where to draw the line is up to everyone, but we usually rely on legislators to set some limits and then stick to them.
- Extremely powerful computers, able to simulate human brains much faster than in real-time - general AI running on such computers too - uploading of humans into computers, merger with AI - transcendence into superhuman state
You played games for 20 years and you still are afraid that you will feel remorse or just go kill someone after playing? Bullshit. We've had real[istic] people dying on movie screens for a century and still most people understand that when the film ends, they are back in RL. I am pretty sure you are lying about your "feelings" and I don't give a shit anyway, just like all game developers and all other game players. If you can't handle it, don't play. If there will be many people like you (which I doubt), developers will add a "green blood, plastic skin" options to make you feel better.
Of course he can call people and get info from them. Now let's see what happens when everyone starts calling embassies with stupid trivia questions... An average person doesn't have easy access to knowledgeable people. So Google is their friend (for the time being) and using telephone is out of the question. Library is better, but not when you need to know something right now (unless you happen to have a huge library in your house/office, like they probably do in Guardian).
I do have some reference books at home, but I mostly use Internet. And while today it may still be more efficient to use a mixture of books and net search, I don't want to cling to old books - in a few years (5-10 years at most) most books will hopefully be digitised and put online in one form or another.
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Computers are merely tools that do what the operator tells them to.
Remember the old saying about a hammer and a nail? Computers do influence what users do and it's silly arguing otherwise.
He says he has a hard time keeping kids' attention in class when every one of them has a computer installed on his or her desk.
I am certainly not an expert on ergonomics, but I would suspect the form factor of computers used is very important. I can easily see how a traditional desktop PC can become a distraction. May be a PDA or a Tablet PC can be better for many classrooms, while some other classrooms can benefit from something like a built-in touch-sensitive LCD without a mouse or keyboard. Furthermore, the degree of control the teacher should have over the computing experience is important as well. It's obvious that kids (students) should not have an option of using IM or randomly browsing the web anytime they want. The third important shortcoming of most solutions is that no decent "groupware" (for the lack of a better word) is used. Most disciplines need very specific functionality that can't be found in off-the-shelf office software or DVD encyclopedias. Unless such software is developed, a computer would remain a hurdle to some extent.
The bottom line is the teacher-student relationship. That is one of the most important factors in teaching. A good teacher (as long as they have support in discipline issues), can teach students with nothing but a blackboard and chalk for the teacher and paper and pencils for the students. Any teacher who thinks computers are the solution should find another job! On the other end, a good teacher who learns how to use computers, could find many ways to integrate them into the classroom and assignments.
But what if you don't have good teachers? What if your society doesn't want (can't afford?) to pay them well? What if there are too few people interested in taking the job? There is a thin hope, not yet grounded in reality, perhaps, that good computers with good educational software, films, e-books and other materials, coupled with a lousy teaching assistant can help.
A few weeks ago I was reading a great site (in Russian) with memoirs of Russian soldiers who fought in the WW2. It really is amazing how some 18 year old kids from some village enlisted in the army and after some intensive training (a few months or so) managed to understood enough math to guide artillery fire (which involves a fair bit of understanding of basic physics and requires some math more complex than simple arithmetics). I think that everyone needs to learn math and science - as much of it as is currently included in decent curriculums. Moreover, everyone is capable of that feat, everyone except those unlucky 2-3 percent who are retarded. We need to keep in mind the fact that schools of today prepare people for the 2010-2030 at least, and without solid math and science education people will be as helpless as beached whales.
Well, but Cabot only decided to travel to America (or rather to Asia) after Columbus discovered it. The fact that he happened to land on the continent first doesn't negate the fact that America was discovered a year before. And in any case, neither Cabot, nor Columbus realised it wasn't Asia - only Vespucci did.
In Russian you say "pyatoe noyabrya" - same order.
And they use that bandwidth to serve advertisments to end users. So they thought it would be a great idea to force the users jump through the hoops in order to view these ads...
I can't really see the point of using the mouse when there is the lock-on feature, but each to his own. :-)
Immersion. For some players the mouse becomes an extension of your body - a virtual representation of your hand and your head. You can look around, you can point the gun at someone. The same reason GTA moved from 2D to 3D, to make it easier for the player to believe he's in the game.
If the PS2 isn't capable of keeping track of offscreen vehicles, they could at least add it in for the PC and Xbox versions.
The lack of PS2 capabilities is just a bad excuse for sloppy programming. Any person who ever wrote as little as a "Hello world" program is capable of fixing this with few lines of code. All that is needed is for the car to continue moving along the road - a detailed physics simulation is not needed when you don't see the car - assume it's just a point that moves along the line with a fixed speed. Then, when the player turns back to that elusive car, the game engine has to repopulate the world with cars anyway - it would be extremely simple to add the car back, since you know where approximately it should be now.
Assuming you need to track a hundred cars at most, you will probably need an extra kilobyte of memory and about 500-1000 processor operations per second.
Rockstar programmers are not perfect, actually, to tell the truth they are quite average (it's the designers and the producer who are great). Remember how faster Vice City was than GTA3? The only improvement was that programming geniuses from Rockstar finally understood that it makes little sense to render hidden surfaces in the game... Of course, that was described as a real improvement in the engine, not as fixing a glaring hole in its functionality...
I think a better contender will be Mafia 2. That's the game you can directly compare with GTA in practically all respects. The fact is that modern consoles have effective screen resolution 5-10 times lower than PC monitors. If PC gamers would be content with VGA graphics, it would be much easier to generate reaslitic environments. As it is, though, things like realistic skins, water, human eyes, quality textures are only relevant in PC games, because you can't see them on a TV screen anyway.
Console developers have learned to compensate the deficiencies of their hardware with gratituous special effects (flashy stuff of all sorts) and cinematic cut-scenes. In addition to that, animation and level design are pretty much the same on both PC and consoles. A game similar to ATi Double Cross demo (Ruby) can be rendered on PS2 easily if you are willing to sacrifice the subtle quality details (make 2K poly models with flat low-res textures and without shaders) - this can lead people to the conclusion that consoles are somehow on par with PCs, which is a ridiculous proposition because for a 4+ year old technology (PS2) to beat modern (or 1-2 year old tech) would be quite surprising and unexpected, really.
So while the next Metal Gear Solid may be a pleasant game to play (and if it comes out for the PC I might buy it), it will be exactly 4 years behind Far Cry in terms of jungle realism.
But I don't think anyone cares much for TF2 anymore. Now that we have CS, BF, UT2004 and tons of other lesser known multiplayer team games, TF2 is no longer that impressive or unique.
Yep. That would mean about 3 seconds of MP3 music and 1.5 pixels per account.
And what about printing the URL in a standard simple font? Underline it to provide a reference frame for the reader, make all letters and numbers distinct, add redundancy to the characters to defeat noise and minor damage to the text, and you are fine. If you are really serious, add error-checking and error-correction in a form of a short additional code (5-10 characters). The phone should be able to recognize it just great. The additional benefit is that a human will do it easily too.
Isn't it better to just use a computer-legible font for the URLs? If designed with both human and computer legibility in mind it can provide 100% accuracy when read by the phone and not require a lot of CPU power. The presence of the URL can be indicated either by the standard http:// prefix or by a special icon, by the address itself will be written in plain text. This is thousands of times more compatible and useful.
What the FUCK? Sponsor a presidency? How the hell is THAT possible? What next? Arthur Anderson sponsoring the judicial system?
Anyway, in mid-nighties Russian president and the prime minister were sitting in the Kremlin. The prime minister said: "Mr. President, I've got a letter from Coca-Cola here. They suggest that if we change our flag back to the Soviet one and add "Coca-Cola" in the corner, they will solve all our budget problems for the next decade." "Hmmm" said the president, "could you check when our deal with Pepsi ends."
After all, 1) as mentioned above, it is indisputable that life is present at all stages; and 2) the right to life trumps the right to liberty.
Does life beging at conception? Yes, but not human life. The embryo is alive just as a bacteria is alive and less alive than a mosquito. And there is nothing wrong with ending life per se. Now does human life begin at conception? If you argue that it does, I will argue that it doesn't end when a person dies. After a person dies some cells will remain alive for hours, some even for days. So a cadaver should enjoy all rights a human being enjoys, shouldn't it? Or, if you argue that embryo should be protected because it has the potential to develop into human, I will simply say it's irrelevant. You have the potential to become President of your country, but that doesn't give you immunity from prosecution and other perks today. The potential is irrelevant, simply because nowhere else in the legal system we take it into account.
Movies are bad enough when the script has passed through five sets of hands who all think they know best. How could 500 or 5000 possibly be better?
May be some of the fans will be able to point out how lame the script is before it is turned into a movie? Nobody is giving customers creative freedom, neither in game developement, nor in movies, but it is always good to listen to the customer.
We usually judge games on story, graphics and gameplay. Story in most games is quite basic, even in Half-Life it's not the story that is important (you can buy tons of pulp sci-fi with better story), it's how it is integrated with gameplay. Graphics dramatically improve every year because games still have not reached the ultimate target (real world). Movies, on the other hand, had nearly perfect graphics 50 years ago and you don't have any gameplay there. Acting is also constant - actors today don't play much better then they did 50 years ago. So the only way for films to compete is to improve the story.
But with games you don't need that - and so you rely on better graphics and gameplay instead, leaving the spirit of the story the same. And everyone is happy.
After 173 sequels, maybe people are tired of playing the same game.
But then again, may be they aren't...
Show people a game with a moral dilemma, or a moment of real drama, or a game that might make someone cry.
I would honestly suggest you check out Kana - Little Sister. While on the surface it appears to be a hentai game about incest, it actually has the best story I ever saw in a game. It has moral dillema (a couple of them), it has a moment of real drama (a few of them too) and it made a lot of people cry (including myself). Check it out, you won't regret it.
If id is making a sellable engine with Doom3, it looks like they are going to fail. Doom3 is not even adequate to existing hi-end 3D hardware. It seems that both nVidia 6800 and ATi X800 would happily run Doom3 in 2048x1536 on max settings. Well, may be only in 1600x1200, I don't know. There isn't much in Doom3 in terms of technology any longer. Lighting and shadows are still good, but nothing to salivate about. Physics is barely passable, bump-mapping is ok, but much more is already possible today, they have no water or outdoor environments. I would expect Valve's Source be much more popular choice among developers. Or Stalker developers, if they try selling their engine.
You were being mislead. Pro-choicers don't think life begins at birth, in practice they (if they have given any thought to this) think that life begins gradually. An embrion, then a fetus, then a baby becomes more alive every day. Therefore it is impossible to draw a clear line between not alive and alive. In practice they prefer to be cautious - an abortion after 8 months would not be defended by any pro-choicer (except when there is danger to the health of the mother), while an abortion after 1 month is nothing special. Where to draw the line is up to everyone, but we usually rely on legislators to set some limits and then stick to them.
He probably meant 50% of dedicated video cards, not including integrated video on Intel motherboards.
- Extremely powerful computers, able to simulate human brains much faster than in real-time
- general AI running on such computers too
- uploading of humans into computers, merger with AI
- transcendence into superhuman state
All this is often called Singularity.
You played games for 20 years and you still are afraid that you will feel remorse or just go kill someone after playing? Bullshit. We've had real[istic] people dying on movie screens for a century and still most people understand that when the film ends, they are back in RL. I am pretty sure you are lying about your "feelings" and I don't give a shit anyway, just like all game developers and all other game players. If you can't handle it, don't play. If there will be many people like you (which I doubt), developers will add a "green blood, plastic skin" options to make you feel better.
Of course he can call people and get info from them. Now let's see what happens when everyone starts calling embassies with stupid trivia questions... An average person doesn't have easy access to knowledgeable people. So Google is their friend (for the time being) and using telephone is out of the question. Library is better, but not when you need to know something right now (unless you happen to have a huge library in your house/office, like they probably do in Guardian).
I do have some reference books at home, but I mostly use Internet. And while today it may still be more efficient to use a mixture of books and net search, I don't want to cling to old books - in a few years (5-10 years at most) most books will hopefully be digitised and put online in one form or another.