I was a straight A student learning responsibility and the value of a dollar simultaneously.
You also had parents who recognized this. Many children don't.
Thousands [of houses needing domestic services] within half a mile?
Are their legs broken?
Walking miles across town to do a job and walking miles back across town takes up hours that the parent says ought to be used for homework.
Also, there was nothing illegal about handling money for my family's business under the age of 16
Perhaps I wasn't clear, but I wasn't saying it was illegal. Indiana allows children under 16 both to handle money and to carry food to customers in the establishment. A private insurer might not.
I carried food purchased from the restaurant supply store from the car to the refrigeration units.
Unloading food purchased at the restaurant supply store from a truck is still "loading and unloading goods to and from trucks". Should a restaurant switch from a truck to a car just to retain a 14- or 15-year-old? And how many of these refrigeration units had freezers?
First, I don't give a fuck what your redneck state's laws are.
The old "I got mine" argument. In which state did you work? I can look up its child labor law if you want.
and delivering food?
Indiana forbids children under 18 to drive for pay.
Third, what the fuck does a driving job have to do with any of this?
Then I must have misunderstood what you meant by "delivering food".
So you're saying that in your experience, every single child takes jobs at multiple houses for long terms in your neighborhood?
I have no such experience because at the relevant age, my parents gave me the old "You need to concentrate on school; that's your work." I was forming a hypothetical business plan in my head for a child's door-to-door sale of domestic services and trying to find the most likely obstacles. And one of them was lack of demand for domestic services due to market saturation. My question is what a child should do if he does encounter this sort of saturation.
There are thousands of houses around me right now.
Thousands within half a mile? Children under 16 are forbidden to drive.
You guessed correctly that I have never worked at a restaurant because at the relevant age, my parents told me they would deny their signature on a work permit because "You need to concentrate on school; that's your work," despite a 3.6 GPA in high school. But based on the duties you mentioned, very few of them would be available to 14- and 15-year-olds in Indiana.
Most restaurant duties? You mean like washing dishes, mopping the floors, scrubbing the boards, washing the windows, cleaning the toilets
Children under 16 in Indiana must not perform "work in connection with maintenance or repair of the establishment, machines, or equipment" and "outside window washing that involves working from window sills, and all work requiring the use of ladders, scaffolds, or their substitutes". I imagine that the cleaning duties you mention count as "maintenance [...] of the establishment, machines, or equipment".
taking orders
Cashier or server is perhaps the only position you mentioned that a child under 16 in Indiana is clearly legally qualified to perform, provided the restaurant's insurer allows children under 16 to handle money.
stocking food
Children under 16 in Indiana must not perform "work in freezers and meat coolers in preparation of meats for sale" or "loading and unloading goods to and from trucks". The major fast food chains' standard procedures are unlikely to separate out prohibited receiving or freezer stocking duties from allowed non-freezer, non-receiving stocking duties.
serving food
See money handling above.
and delivering food?
Indiana forbids children under 18 to drive for pay. Besides, even if you're referring to spring semester high school seniors, a pizza delivery driver needs to own a personal car. This means she has to start in another job and forgo the console while earning money to buy driving lessons and a car.
You act as though there are only a couple houses in your neighborhood.
You act as though a child can't take multiple houses as clients. My assumption was that other children would have already taken multiple houses. Then all houses that desire the service are taken by other children by the time each child turns 12, the age at which a child becomes legally eligible for this sort of thing.
Why does it have to be your parents? I worked at a relative's restaurant.
Most restaurant duties that I can think of are prohibited until 16, and I saw no explicit family exception in the guide I linked.
Some adults either are parents or often babysit. I guess you must not be among them.
Isn't that what Capcom would be paying you to figure out?
Some people are stumped by their jobs. How would someone hired by Capcom go about solving this problem without putting "go buy a JXD or a MOGA" in the system requirements?
in most cases a game is not on the PC because the console company paid the developer to not release it on the PC. This is what is known as a paid exclusive. Effectively MS or Sony are holding your game hostage and saying that you can't play it unless you use their systems.
Subsidized exclusivity would be a plausible explanation if a game were Wii U only, or Xbox 360/One only, or PlayStation 3/4 only. But these toy-based games are on all major consoles and not PC.
I acknowledge an oversimplification in my previous statement:
Steam is no more walled than Google Play
From a developer's perspective, Steam is more walled, as the Greenlight process is a bit more involved than self-publishing on Google Play as a means of keeping out a flood of 1983-1984 class crap. But from a user's perspective, support for windowed mode is a plus. There is a total order of being closed for sideloading, Google Play self-publishing, Apple App Store approval, and console makers' approval process. But with Steam Greenlight in the mix, I see no total order, and even a partial order including Greenlight could only be computed by developers who are under NDA with both Valve and the console makers.
Why not just use the traditional "open-platform" vs. "closed platform/walled garden" terminology.
Because it confuses iOS (closed) with the big three (closeder). With iOS, any individual developer or home-based business can get started for only $1000 to buy a Mac mini and iPad mini, and then another $99 per year to distribute non-free apps or distribute apps to iOS users who aren't also Mac owners. There's a continuum between open and closed platforms, and some people think iOS and the big three are on opposite sides of the line. Some Slashdot users, for example, draw the line between Apple's policy since Xcode 7 (install self-compiled apps on your device without charge) and Apple's prior policy ($99 per year fee to do so).
I'd tentatively draw the continuum of flexibility as follows:
Free operating systems
Windows and OS X
Android with Gapps
OS X with Gatekeeper turned on
Windows Phone 8
Windows and OS X if you choose to install apps only from Steam or Windows Store/Mac App Store
Android with "Unknown sources" off
iOS today
Windows Phone 7, Xbox Live Indie Games, and iOS prior to Xcode 7
PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo today
PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo prior to the eighth generation
Different people will draw lines between "clearly open" (with shorthand "master"), "gray area", and "clearly closed" ("peasant") in different places. Free Software Foundation, for example, thinks anything below "free operating systems" is in clearly closed territory. But I'd imagine the majority would call Windows clearly open and PlayStation clearly closed.
Though on the PC, Steam itself is a form of "walled garden." in certain ways.
Steam is no more walled than Google Play, as both Windows and Android officially support installation of applications from unknown sources. In fact, in practice, Steam is a bit less walled because many Steam games have official mod hooks. It's possible to make mod hooks in a Google Play game through Android's intent and service system, but I'm not aware of any notable game whose developers have bothered.
I would however say that "walled gardens" and "open gardens" BOTH have a place in the modern gaming universe.
I can understand this point of view. Both PlayStation Vita and JXD's Android-powered gaming tablets currently have a place in mobile. But do both closed and open have a place in the living room? You've been trying to convince people for years that open platforms have no place in the living room, but I can cite plenty of Slashdot users who think they do. And so does Valve, which isn't Tivoizing its Debian-powered Steam Machines.
It's still possible to play the game without the day one patch. So even in a poorly QA'd game, you can complete the part of the game prior to the game-breaking bug before you have a chance to bring the console to a place with better Internet and update the game.
I'm aware of the potentially undesirable association between the term "PC Master Race" and the ideology of a German administration responsible for some of the most atrocious war crimes of the twentieth century. In order to help myself and the rest of Slashdot get away from this framing, first please let me clarify the reasoning behind my own use of "peasant" and "master".
I have intended it as an analogy for who has control over a given piece of computing machinery. The term "peasant" literally means a tenant farmer. A peasant works land leased from a landlord and must obey the landlord's rules. "Master", by contrast, means one who is his own lord. Likewise, console gamers must obey the console makers' rules, but PC gamers control their own machines. If you are your own master, you can install mods or even (if you're inclined) make mods.
If you can think of a better analogy than ownership of agricultural land, I'm interested.
You make a good point. So let me ask another question taking that into account: Is online multiplayer still running on older PlayStation 3 games? That console has been out for nearly nine years, so there should be a larger sample indicative of SCE's intent going forward.
Xbox Live for Xbox games was forked to make Xbox Live for Xbox 360 games. Microsoft ran into limits of the original Xbox Live architecture, such as limits on the friends list, that it couldn't easily patch into existing Xbox games.
Esperanto's just Latin with the grammar taked out.
You're probably thinking of Giuseppe Peano's Latino sine flexione. That language replaces the inflection-driven grammar of Latin with a more syntax-based approach. Esperanto is some sort of agglutinative mutant Polish with pan-European vocabulary, as Justin B. Rye likes to point out throughout his Ranto.
I think the point of curing a disease to remission or preventing it entirely is to let patients live longer so that they can be patients longer. Reduce infant mortality and children survive to catch adult ailments. Get the infectious diseases out of the way (measles, mumps, whooping cough, tetanus, Tetris) and people survive to need treatment for type 2 diabetes. Keep the diabetics alive and they survive to need treatment for cancer.
Part of that depends on what scale of gnomes. Do we want the Poortvliet/Huygen gnomes, who are 15 cm tall like the Lilliputians that live with mice and rats in Who Moved My Cheese and its parodies? Or do we want the more Warcraft-style ones closer in height to dwarves and halflings? If the latter, we could probably start with the allele for Laron syndrome (growth hormone insensitivity), which has fewer adverse effects than some other forms of human dwarfism, and then add a few other desirable traits associated with fantasy gnomes.
No time wasted mapping buttons on a USB/BT generic HID controller.
can't remember the last time I did that with my 360 controller
That's because game developers hardcoded a special case button layout for your brand of controller. There are too many available makes and models of controller for PC and mobile for game developers to be able to special-case everything's button layouts. With a console, on the other hand, either your controller is automatically configured or it's incompatible. This is a yes-or-no proposition easily understood by the majority of the market that does not use Slashdot.
not really quite a lot of cheaters abound on console and pc platforms
How do modern PC games work around aimbots, wallhacks, and the like?
being able to have three computers capable of doing much more then just playing games/browsing the web
I guess it depends on how many games you play and whether they come with some sort of quantity discount for a home LAN.
Disc games mean no risk of hitting your ISP's cap.
hasn't been playing attention to more recent console games
But is this comfort worth buying three copies of each game for a household?
Why would I do that? My friends are already going to have their own copies
Because a parent is often the source of all these copies for a household.
If it were, then critics wouldn't have panned the Turbo Touch 360 controller so hard. How would you control, say, Mega Man series on a touch screen?
Did the Turbo Touch 360 guys have access to the Mega Man source code so that they could make a control layout that worked well?
Hypothetical: Let's say I get a contract with Capcom, and I've been given the source code for Mega Man 2. I've already got it ported to a modern assembler (ca65), and I've built enough NES compatibility infrastructure in an Android app that I can interpret the 6502 code and MMC1 paging commands and translate NES PPU display lists to Android display commands. It works great with a Bluetooth keyboard. Now all I have to do is fill port $4016 with move, jump, and fire commands. So how do I translate touch start, touch move, and touch end events that the Android OS provides into move, jump, and fire commands in a way comfortable for the player?
For the record, I'm not the jerk. I'm not even a parent. The fictional parents in my example are a composite of parents I've met and read about. But I wholeheartedly agree with you that they're jerks. But the question remains: What is a child with jerk parents supposed to do?
It's not necessarily whether you are capable of managing a gaming PC as whether you are willing to spend time doing so.
if you can't handle a PC for gaming effortlessly then you have no business commenting on/.
Sadly, the Slashdot population alone does not make a video game or gaming platform profitable. This means it's not whether I personally can build and maintain a gaming PC as much as whether a substantial number of people can.
I agree: When Xbox, Nintendo DS, and Wii matchmaking, shut down the vast majority of it shut down at the same time for the whole platform. So how long does Xbox Live matchmaking for Xbox 360 have left?
Slashdot Mirror
I was a straight A student learning responsibility and the value of a dollar simultaneously.
You also had parents who recognized this. Many children don't.
Thousands [of houses needing domestic services] within half a mile?
Are their legs broken?
Walking miles across town to do a job and walking miles back across town takes up hours that the parent says ought to be used for homework.
Also, there was nothing illegal about handling money for my family's business under the age of 16
Perhaps I wasn't clear, but I wasn't saying it was illegal. Indiana allows children under 16 both to handle money and to carry food to customers in the establishment. A private insurer might not.
I carried food purchased from the restaurant supply store from the car to the refrigeration units.
Unloading food purchased at the restaurant supply store from a truck is still "loading and unloading goods to and from trucks". Should a restaurant switch from a truck to a car just to retain a 14- or 15-year-old? And how many of these refrigeration units had freezers?
First, I don't give a fuck what your redneck state's laws are.
The old "I got mine" argument. In which state did you work? I can look up its child labor law if you want.
and delivering food?
Indiana forbids children under 18 to drive for pay.
Third, what the fuck does a driving job have to do with any of this?
Then I must have misunderstood what you meant by "delivering food".
So how would the control scheme designed by "someone else who could do the job" work?
So you're saying that in your experience, every single child takes jobs at multiple houses for long terms in your neighborhood?
I have no such experience because at the relevant age, my parents gave me the old "You need to concentrate on school; that's your work." I was forming a hypothetical business plan in my head for a child's door-to-door sale of domestic services and trying to find the most likely obstacles. And one of them was lack of demand for domestic services due to market saturation. My question is what a child should do if he does encounter this sort of saturation.
There are thousands of houses around me right now.
Thousands within half a mile? Children under 16 are forbidden to drive.
You guessed correctly that I have never worked at a restaurant because at the relevant age, my parents told me they would deny their signature on a work permit because "You need to concentrate on school; that's your work," despite a 3.6 GPA in high school. But based on the duties you mentioned, very few of them would be available to 14- and 15-year-olds in Indiana.
Most restaurant duties? You mean like washing dishes, mopping the floors, scrubbing the boards, washing the windows, cleaning the toilets
Children under 16 in Indiana must not perform "work in connection with maintenance or repair of the establishment, machines, or equipment" and "outside window washing that involves working from window sills, and all work requiring the use of ladders, scaffolds, or their substitutes". I imagine that the cleaning duties you mention count as "maintenance [...] of the establishment, machines, or equipment".
taking orders
Cashier or server is perhaps the only position you mentioned that a child under 16 in Indiana is clearly legally qualified to perform, provided the restaurant's insurer allows children under 16 to handle money.
stocking food
Children under 16 in Indiana must not perform "work in freezers and meat coolers in preparation of meats for sale" or "loading and unloading goods to and from trucks". The major fast food chains' standard procedures are unlikely to separate out prohibited receiving or freezer stocking duties from allowed non-freezer, non-receiving stocking duties.
serving food
See money handling above.
and delivering food?
Indiana forbids children under 18 to drive for pay. Besides, even if you're referring to spring semester high school seniors, a pizza delivery driver needs to own a personal car. This means she has to start in another job and forgo the console while earning money to buy driving lessons and a car.
You act as though there are only a couple houses in your neighborhood.
You act as though a child can't take multiple houses as clients. My assumption was that other children would have already taken multiple houses. Then all houses that desire the service are taken by other children by the time each child turns 12, the age at which a child becomes legally eligible for this sort of thing.
Why does it have to be your parents? I worked at a relative's restaurant.
Most restaurant duties that I can think of are prohibited until 16, and I saw no explicit family exception in the guide I linked.
I'm an adult. I don't hang out with kids.
Some adults either are parents or often babysit. I guess you must not be among them.
Isn't that what Capcom would be paying you to figure out?
Some people are stumped by their jobs. How would someone hired by Capcom go about solving this problem without putting "go buy a JXD or a MOGA" in the system requirements?
in most cases a game is not on the PC because the console company paid the developer to not release it on the PC. This is what is known as a paid exclusive. Effectively MS or Sony are holding your game hostage and saying that you can't play it unless you use their systems.
Subsidized exclusivity would be a plausible explanation if a game were Wii U only, or Xbox 360/One only, or PlayStation 3/4 only. But these toy-based games are on all major consoles and not PC.
I acknowledge an oversimplification in my previous statement:
Steam is no more walled than Google Play
From a developer's perspective, Steam is more walled, as the Greenlight process is a bit more involved than self-publishing on Google Play as a means of keeping out a flood of 1983-1984 class crap. But from a user's perspective, support for windowed mode is a plus. There is a total order of being closed for sideloading, Google Play self-publishing, Apple App Store approval, and console makers' approval process. But with Steam Greenlight in the mix, I see no total order, and even a partial order including Greenlight could only be computed by developers who are under NDA with both Valve and the console makers.
Why not just use the traditional "open-platform" vs. "closed platform/walled garden" terminology.
Because it confuses iOS (closed) with the big three (closeder). With iOS, any individual developer or home-based business can get started for only $1000 to buy a Mac mini and iPad mini, and then another $99 per year to distribute non-free apps or distribute apps to iOS users who aren't also Mac owners. There's a continuum between open and closed platforms, and some people think iOS and the big three are on opposite sides of the line. Some Slashdot users, for example, draw the line between Apple's policy since Xcode 7 (install self-compiled apps on your device without charge) and Apple's prior policy ($99 per year fee to do so).
I'd tentatively draw the continuum of flexibility as follows:
Different people will draw lines between "clearly open" (with shorthand "master"), "gray area", and "clearly closed" ("peasant") in different places. Free Software Foundation, for example, thinks anything below "free operating systems" is in clearly closed territory. But I'd imagine the majority would call Windows clearly open and PlayStation clearly closed.
Though on the PC, Steam itself is a form of "walled garden." in certain ways.
Steam is no more walled than Google Play, as both Windows and Android officially support installation of applications from unknown sources. In fact, in practice, Steam is a bit less walled because many Steam games have official mod hooks. It's possible to make mod hooks in a Google Play game through Android's intent and service system, but I'm not aware of any notable game whose developers have bothered.
I would however say that "walled gardens" and "open gardens" BOTH have a place in the modern gaming universe.
I can understand this point of view. Both PlayStation Vita and JXD's Android-powered gaming tablets currently have a place in mobile. But do both closed and open have a place in the living room? You've been trying to convince people for years that open platforms have no place in the living room, but I can cite plenty of Slashdot users who think they do. And so does Valve, which isn't Tivoizing its Debian-powered Steam Machines.
It's still possible to play the game without the day one patch. So even in a poorly QA'd game, you can complete the part of the game prior to the game-breaking bug before you have a chance to bring the console to a place with better Internet and update the game.
I'm aware of the potentially undesirable association between the term "PC Master Race" and the ideology of a German administration responsible for some of the most atrocious war crimes of the twentieth century. In order to help myself and the rest of Slashdot get away from this framing, first please let me clarify the reasoning behind my own use of "peasant" and "master".
I have intended it as an analogy for who has control over a given piece of computing machinery. The term "peasant" literally means a tenant farmer. A peasant works land leased from a landlord and must obey the landlord's rules. "Master", by contrast, means one who is his own lord. Likewise, console gamers must obey the console makers' rules, but PC gamers control their own machines. If you are your own master, you can install mods or even (if you're inclined) make mods.
If you can think of a better analogy than ownership of agricultural land, I'm interested.
You make a good point. So let me ask another question taking that into account: Is online multiplayer still running on older PlayStation 3 games? That console has been out for nearly nine years, so there should be a larger sample indicative of SCE's intent going forward.
Xbox Live for Xbox games was forked to make Xbox Live for Xbox 360 games. Microsoft ran into limits of the original Xbox Live architecture, such as limits on the friends list, that it couldn't easily patch into existing Xbox games.
Esperanto's just Latin with the grammar taked out.
You're probably thinking of Giuseppe Peano's Latino sine flexione. That language replaces the inflection-driven grammar of Latin with a more syntax-based approach. Esperanto is some sort of agglutinative mutant Polish with pan-European vocabulary, as Justin B. Rye likes to point out throughout his Ranto.
Darmok and Jihad with Viagra.
Because LEGO Dimensions appears not to be coming to PC.
But is the mouse genome mapped well enough that one can order a mouse that, say, does not develop hind legs but is otherwise normal?
Cancer is much too profitable for their AMA.
I think the point of curing a disease to remission or preventing it entirely is to let patients live longer so that they can be patients longer. Reduce infant mortality and children survive to catch adult ailments. Get the infectious diseases out of the way (measles, mumps, whooping cough, tetanus, Tetris) and people survive to need treatment for type 2 diabetes. Keep the diabetics alive and they survive to need treatment for cancer.
Maybe we could code an ACTUAL gnome, though
Part of that depends on what scale of gnomes. Do we want the Poortvliet/Huygen gnomes, who are 15 cm tall like the Lilliputians that live with mice and rats in Who Moved My Cheese and its parodies? Or do we want the more Warcraft-style ones closer in height to dwarves and halflings? If the latter, we could probably start with the allele for Laron syndrome (growth hormone insensitivity), which has fewer adverse effects than some other forms of human dwarfism, and then add a few other desirable traits associated with fantasy gnomes.
No time wasted mapping buttons on a USB/BT generic HID controller.
can't remember the last time I did that with my 360 controller
That's because game developers hardcoded a special case button layout for your brand of controller. There are too many available makes and models of controller for PC and mobile for game developers to be able to special-case everything's button layouts. With a console, on the other hand, either your controller is automatically configured or it's incompatible. This is a yes-or-no proposition easily understood by the majority of the market that does not use Slashdot.
not really quite a lot of cheaters abound on console and pc platforms
How do modern PC games work around aimbots, wallhacks, and the like?
being able to have three computers capable of doing much more then just playing games/browsing the web
I guess it depends on how many games you play and whether they come with some sort of quantity discount for a home LAN.
Disc games mean no risk of hitting your ISP's cap.
hasn't been playing attention to more recent console games
All tested PS4 games worked without having to go online and download the patch.
But is this comfort worth buying three copies of each game for a household?
Why would I do that? My friends are already going to have their own copies
Because a parent is often the source of all these copies for a household.
If it were, then critics wouldn't have panned the Turbo Touch 360 controller so hard. How would you control, say, Mega Man series on a touch screen?
Did the Turbo Touch 360 guys have access to the Mega Man source code so that they could make a control layout that worked well?
Hypothetical: Let's say I get a contract with Capcom, and I've been given the source code for Mega Man 2. I've already got it ported to a modern assembler (ca65), and I've built enough NES compatibility infrastructure in an Android app that I can interpret the 6502 code and MMC1 paging commands and translate NES PPU display lists to Android display commands. It works great with a Bluetooth keyboard. Now all I have to do is fill port $4016 with move, jump, and fire commands. So how do I translate touch start, touch move, and touch end events that the Android OS provides into move, jump, and fire commands in a way comfortable for the player?
For the record, I'm not the jerk. I'm not even a parent. The fictional parents in my example are a composite of parents I've met and read about. But I wholeheartedly agree with you that they're jerks. But the question remains: What is a child with jerk parents supposed to do?
Doing yardwork or housework for neighbors is exempt
Unless another kid already has the neighbors locked in. How is a kid who just turned 12 supposed to compete with incumbents?
as is working for a family business.
Good luck convincing your parents to start one in the first place.
12 year olds can manage a PC
It's not necessarily whether you are capable of managing a gaming PC as whether you are willing to spend time doing so.
if you can't handle a PC for gaming effortlessly then you have no business commenting on /.
Sadly, the Slashdot population alone does not make a video game or gaming platform profitable. This means it's not whether I personally can build and maintain a gaming PC as much as whether a substantial number of people can.
I agree: When Xbox, Nintendo DS, and Wii matchmaking, shut down the vast majority of it shut down at the same time for the whole platform. So how long does Xbox Live matchmaking for Xbox 360 have left?
ScummVM works on Android
ScummVM is an emulator, needing games obtained elsewhere. Does Android support a floppy or CD drive to load supported games from authentic media?