Personally, I'm of the view that Activision has just paid rather too much money to acquire a developer whose value has already passed its peak. A lot of these mobile developers tend to get big on the basis of one or two apps that "go viral" but then struggle to follow up on initial successes. The mobile gaming market is so over-crowded that producing the next big-hit is a complete crapshoot. Nobody's come up with a formula that works; the Next Big Thing is as likely to be a so-bad-it's-funny Flappy Bird game from some guy in his bedroom as it is to be a carefully crafted and marketed sequel to the Last Big Thing.
That said, I'm not surprised that Activision is looking to diversify. For a long time, it has been dependant upon two big cash cows; World of Warcraft and Call of Duty. Both of those have passed their peak.
World of Warcraft's subscriber numbers have fallen a long way since their peak in the late-Lich King/early Cataclysm era. It's down at around 5 million subscribers now, down from a peak of over 12 million (and Activision/Blizzard have just announced they're going to stop reporting subscriber numbers). 5 million is still a huge user-base for a subscriber-MMO, but they are on a fast downward trend and likely to lose the "world's biggest subscriber MMO" crown soon.
Call of Duty, meanwhile, has also fallen a long way from its sales peak. The peak was achieved in 2011, with 26.5 million sales of Modern Warfare 3. 2012's Black Ops 2 managed an only-slightly-lower 24.4 million, but things went into serious decline after that. 2013's Ghosts sold 16.5 million copies, which Activision blamed at the time on the game coming out during a transition in console generations (the fact that it was a poor game even by Call of Duty standards probably didn't help either). It never reported final numbers for 2014's Advanced Warfare, but did indicate that after 3 months on sale, numbers were "27% lower than Ghosts at a similar point in time", which would indicate that it probably eventually landed somewhere in the 12-13 million sales range.
Now, don't get me wrong, both World of Warcraft and Call of Duty are still spectacularly successful franchises (breaking over 10 million sales is something most AAA developers can only dream of, let along over 20 million). But they are far and away the most important jewels in Activision's crown and if they are in decline, that gives the company a problem.
On that basis, it's not surprising to see them take a punt on something like King (even though I think this was the wrong punt to take).
My school had some systems that ran on it in the mid-90s. It also, after the member of staff who brought it in left, had nobody who knew how to use it. Our IT "teachers" were elderly Catholic priests teaching from a series of worksheets that basically had step-by-step instructions on "how to save a document in Word" and so on. There were no dedicated IT support staff, only an off-site support contractor.
I ended up teaching myself to use it and doing a few admin-type jobs for the school, in exchange for a tacit agreement that I'd be excused from the pathetic IT "lessons" and, once I moved into the 6th Form (ages 16-18 for non-UK readers) from Religious Education. Pretty good deal, although I've never used an OS/2 system since I graduated.
Hate to break it to you, but even as a fully signed up supporter of the green team, I have to admit their driver-bloat situation is no better. It's around 170mb for a set of Nvidia drivers these days, most of which is for their ludicrously over-engineered "Geforce Experience" crap. Oh, plus all of the Nvidia Shield intergration, which I'm sure is of huge interest to both of the people who've bought a Shield tablet.
There are valid reasons to go for an Nvidia card - heat, power consumption, general stability - but a lack of driver-bloat sadly isn't one of them.
Back in 2004, I moved into a new rental apartment. The previous occupant, it transpired, had skipped out owing a whole load of money to major retailers.
Now, at no point did I get any of this on my credit record (though I did buy copies of my reports), but what I got for about 3 years after that point was a constant stream of letters and calls (roughly 50/50 human/robocall) to the landline. Some of these were extremely threatening. On one occasion, I had to take a day off work because they had threatened to send collection agents to the address on a particular date and I didn't want to come home and find my door broken down and my stuff removed (I waited in all day - nobody showed up).
Things have gotten a little better here in the UK - there's now slightly tighter regulation of debt collectors which would have curtailed the worst of this. But it's still a shady industry.
The problem is that there is money to be made in continuing to pick at the scab, rather than letting it heal. If you're running an online news/opinion outlet, then stories on issues like this are guaranteed page-views and ad-views. Hell, if you get a flamewar going in the comments section, then you've got hundreds of people refreshing the page constantly (more adviews), posting fresh replies, then going back to refreshing the page to watch for people following up on their posts. Meanwhile, an informative news article or insightful news piece on a less informative topic will get people to read once, maybe post once and then move on.
If you're running a real-world event, then panels like these are guaranteed to get publicity, and cancelling them gets you even more publicity (and I would bet a substantial sum of money that at least some of the threats made towards events like this over the last year or two have been "false flag" operations for just this purpose).
You are right that letting the issue be starved of the oxygen of publicity for a while would be the best thing for all concerned. Unfortunately, there's too much cash to be made by feeding the beast.
I think a big factor here is whether the choice relates to a luxury or a necessity. And to be clear, I'm going to stretch the definition of "necessity" slightly, to include things such as pension plans. In fact, the words "luxury" and "necessity" aren't really quite the right ones here, but I can't think of better ones.
When it comes to necessities, what we generally want is security. We want to find something that works for us fairly quickly and to then have the mental security that comes from being able to stick with it. This is why so few people switch banks or utility providers, even though they could often save money by doing so. Being bombarded with options when buying something you need (rather than something you want) is stressful. You'll be likely to fixate more on the downsides of making the wrong choice rather than the upsides of making the right choice.
When it comes to luxuries, on the other hand, we tend to like choice. If we can afford high end food products, we like to be able to choose from lots of different varieties. If we're buying a luxury car, we want to be able to pick and choose options. Having choices makes us excited about our shiny new purchase.
The complicating factor here is that the line between necessities and luxuries isn't static and won't be the same for everybody. If you have a lot of disposable income, you will probably approach your food-shop as though you're shopping for luxuries. If you're struggling to make ends meet, you will be firmly in necessity mode (I've been in both camps).
It's not even all about income. I can illustrate this with a comparison between myself and my mother. We both actually have fairly similar levels of disposable income, but our interests and priorities are very different.
I'm a big PC user; I enjoy gaming on a high end PC. I bought a full new PC recently. Deciding I couldn't be bothered with a self-build this time, I looked around for UK-based vendors who would allow me to customise my build extensively before they put it together. I took time to do my research, picked out the case, the motherboard, the CPU, the RAM, the graphics card and all the rest. And yes, I quite enjoyed this. I chose the vendor I did largely because they offered me this degree of control, rather than an off the peg system.
My mother, by contrast, does not like PCs. She needs one, but she doesn't like that fact and doesn't treat it as anything more than a tool. When her old laptop died and she needed a replacement, she found the degree of choice available first confusing and then infuriating. We eventually solved it after I looked around for 3 acceptable options and narrowed the choice down to those for her ("this one costs a bit more but has a bigger screen, that one costs a bit less but might be a bit slow to start up").
Flip things around to the last time we bought new sofas; I spent an afternoon browsing online for something that was about the right size, reasonably cheap and not a horrible colour clash for my living room. My mother spent a month and a half of weekends walking around show-rooms and comparing textile samples.
We each believe that the other is completely mad. But what it really comes down to is a value judgement over "luxury" vs "necessity" and how that impacts on your approach to choice.
Prices vary a lot around the country. At the upper end, you're looking at £30 per hour-long lesson, with most people requiring 10-15 lessons before they're ready for the test. It's a further £75 per practical test - and more than half of people will require more than one test. There's a lower fee as well for the theory test you have to take before the practical test. The pass rate for that is over 50% and it is pretty easy, so there's no excuse for failing that one.
I think that in most parts of the UK, you're looking at maybe £500-£600 on average. In London, where everything costs more, maybe add another £200 to that.
If this seems high, remember that the UK's ratio of cars to mile of road is higher than any other country in the world. We have high speed limits and very busy roads, so it's inevitable that we set a higher bar to get a driving license. My experience of UK drivers vs US drivers (and I go to the US several every year and hire a car every time I'm there) is that UK drivers are more aggressive and impatient, but also more disciplined. I see some shocking lane-changing behaviors in the US that would be very rare indeed in the UK, but UK drivers are very quick to express their displeasure with anybody who violates road etiquette.
Another factor here is that the "enthusiast PC gamer", long a major consumer of large hard drives, is moving rapidly onto SSDs.
Too many recent games; Watch_Dogs, Dragon Age: Inquisition and, Far Cry 4, to name some of the most serious offenders, have suffered from in-game stutter when running from mechanical drives. The trend towards open-world gaming and higher resolution textures that's picked up speed since the introduction of the PS4 and Xbox One (which remain the main target-platforms for most games) has shone a light on asset streaming and drive-access speeds on PC, which had previously only been an issue when it came to load-times.
Gamers are starting to realise that there's no point spending thousands of dollars on motherboard, CPU, RAM and graphics card, only to hobble game-performance by running from a cheap mechanical drive.
Large cities have large populations. Just over 90% of the UK population lives in urban areas, with almost 15% in London. Other European and Asian countries are following similar trends, at various paces. Most people travel to work in the rush hour.
What I selected might be a worst case scenario, but it is a common worst case scenario. If anything, the US is more of a fringe-case, because so many of its cities are so poorly supported by public transport.
The way it works in the UK at least (and many other European countries), most people who learn to drive do so via lessons from a paid instructor (this isn't a legal requirement in the UK, but it is widely acknowledged as the best way to learn). The instructor will provide the car for both the lessons and the practical test (there's also a written test that must be passed before you can take the practical test). There are specific insurance packages for professional driving instructors that facilitate this.
The UK, it should be noted, has some of the world's toughest requirements to get a driving license and the practical tests, particularly if you live in a major city (you take the test on local roads) can be tough (veteran drivers who are required to re-take them following a disqualification sometimes struggle). But "not owning a car" is no impediment here to getting a driving license and for most people, getting their license comes before owning a car.
Entirely depends on location. I live in an outer London suburb and can be at my workplace by train in 50 minutes door to door. That's a 20 minute train journey (factoring in a couple of minutes wait-time on the platform), plus 15 minutes walk at either end. The equivalent car journey, which I've done a handful of times (though I don't currently own a car) is around 110 minutes in the morning peak, given London congestion and the need to walk from the nearest (expensive) public car parking to my office.
I've had a handful of occasions over the last 5 years, usually when needing either to make a very-early-morning (pre-5AM) journey or buying a large electrical item, that I've needed a car. That's what taxi and car-hire firms are for.
With London property prices, owning a car is a daft move unless you absolutely need to (for family reasons or due to a disability). I wouldn't have been able to afford the deposit/mortgage for my current place on the salary I was on at the time if I had owned a car and been paying all the costs associated with it (plus I had the benefit of managing to buy during a brief dip in the market). Most other European cities are not quite so extreme as London (I gather Tokyo is the same, though), but most of the big ones are moving the same direction.
Apologies - you're correct. I allowed myself to get stuck back at the WW2-level for tanks there. Warships, however, do still fire explosive shells, as do land-based ballistic artillery pieces.
Yes - though not at the level of the one in TFA and probably, for the foreseeable future, only in the realm of large naval guns (and possibly - slightly further down the line - guns mounted on tanks or large aircraft).
With a traditional naval or tank shell, much of the damage comes from the explosive contents of the shell (which tend to be quite sophisticated in their design these days). The downside of this is that the ship or tank ends up carrying a substantial quantity of explosive material, just waiting to be set off. Magazine explosion is a particular danger for ships.
Railguns, by contrast, fire inert slugs. The damage comes from the (much) higher velocity at which the slug is fired, which translates into much higher kinetic energy transfer on impact. This means that the ammunition tends to be smaller (so you can carry more of it) and safer. The higher velocity also has significant potential benefits in terms of accuracy.
The US Navy is currently conducting real-world tests of railguns on ships and there has been a lot of progress over the last few years. The challenges include the high power requirement and the need to replace rails regularly (due to the extreme stresses associated with each firing), which can substantially harm rate of fire.
Practical handheld railguns which offer significant benefits over existing firearms are still a long way off (if, indeed, they ever happen). The one in TFA has a muzzle velocity which is at the low end of the range for a "traditional" firearm, with significantly lower convenience (and some quite worrying looking safety issues).
Isn't this going to be incredibly nausea-inducing to use? My understanding of what's needed for a "pleasant" VR experience in terms of resolution, image quality and framerate does not align with my experience of most PSP games.
Now sure, you can use emulation to upscale the resolution and - in some cases - increase the framerate. But that's not going to get around boarder issues with PSP games in general.
First of all, a good number of PSP games tied the game's logic to framerate (Square-Enix games in particular), so unlocking framerates via emulation can cause some very odd effects. If you've tried the PC version of the first Dark Souls with a third party mod to remove the 30fps cap, you'll have seen something similar (animations becoming de-synchronised from actions and so on).
Second, a lot of PSP 3d games had very short draw distances and used heavy fogging and blur effects to disguise this. That's not too bad on a small screen, but it starts to look fairly unpleasant if you output the video to a monitor or TV, let alone a VR headset
And finally, the fact that the PSP only had a single analogue stick means that in many 3d games, camera controls were put either on the face or shoulder buttons. These are digital, not analogue inputs, so there is basically only one speed at which the player can rotate the camera. Take a look at the home-console versions of Final Fantasy Type-0 (which are ports of a PSP game with higher resolution art assets but few other changes) if you want to see how jarring this is even on a television and twin-stick controller. That's going to be seriously unpleasant in VR.
Yeah, well, the same could be said for sports, and look at all the crap that's accumulated around those.
There's money involved in eSports now, both in terms of the prize money, the sponsorship cash and in terms of the associated gambling scene. Where there's money on offer (particularly though not exclusively through gambling), there will be people trying to get their hands on that money via illegitimate means.
There's always been an ugly side to "professional gaming". I was running a Counter-Strike league back in 2002-3 with no cash prizes (though you could win a year's server rental) and was already seeing early signs of that ugly side. We had teams throwing a tantrum over every loss, and crucially over how losses were reported, because of the impact it would have on "potential sponsors". In some cases, these complaints were coming from teams who I, as an only-slightly-above-average player (I was always more of an organiser than a player) could have beaten 5 vs 1 without breaking a sweat.
If all of the stuff associated with professional gaming annoys you (like it does me), then the best thing to do is ignore it. The misbehaviour, match fixing and general whining isn't going to go away; chances are, it's only going to get worse. But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter very much for the average gamer. There are a small number of developers who pitch their games at the eSports market (and even some of those, like Blizzard, don't exclusively focus on it), but the rest of the industry mostly ignores it due to high risks and poor commercial returns for developers in most cases.
I agree with your first line. Your second, however, just demonstrates that you haven't actually read Atlas Shrugged. That's not uncommon; I can't, off the top of my head, think of another book which more people claim to have read without ever having done so. I read it a couple of years ago - I make a point, once a year, of reading something completely outside of my usual comfort zone, and Alas Shrugged got its turn.
Altas Shrugged has a number of passages on the "proper" role of the state, which include: national security, upholding law and order, protecting property rights and acting as the final enforcement body for contracts. This is why, for instance, the pirate character never attacks military ships (because they are a legitimate use of state power).
Atlas Shrugged is a more complex book than is generally understood, but that complexity tends to get lost in any kind of discussion of it. It has many weaknesses, in particular:
- It has a black-and-white world view which admits very few shades of gray. - It ignores or brushes over a number of issues which don't sit neatly with the author's world-view (such as the role of international trade and warfare). - Its dialogue can, at times, be incredibly stilted. - The 100+ page speech by John Galt near the end of the book is an absolute slog to read and completely breaks the narrative flow just as the plot is reaching its climax (and is also unnecessary as it just repeats points that have already been made). - Its obsession with the Gold Standard has aged badly. - Every single passage relating to romance and sex is completely cringeworthy.
That said, it also has some real strengths:
- It is in some respects (though not all), remarkably prophetic, particularly in terms of the uncanny accuracy with which it predicts Bolivarian socialism in Central and South America and the current Eurozone crisis (albeit with the timing out by a couple of decades). - It's also pretty damned prophetic about General Motors and Detroit (albeit via their lightly-fictionalised incarnations). - It can be remarkably visually evocative, with some amazingly good descriptive passages about its cityscapes and railways. - It has a few brilliant passages, particularly towards the end of the novel (and especially the final flight over New York as the lights go out) which stand alongside the best dystopian fiction. - Stilted dialogue aside, it has some very strongly drawn characters.
Making the book the core of your personal philosophy is a bad idea. It's written from a pretty extreme political position and is occasionally pretty detached from reality. But nor is it some kind of horrific atrocity. Unfortunately, knee-jerk condemnation of it on the basis of little actual knowledge of it has become a fairly popular form of virtue signalling.
This is going to depend a lot on the form of dementia. If you'll forgive a horrible over-simplification, the big question is whether you are dealing with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) or with one of the progressive forms, of which Alzheimer's and Vascular Dementia are the most common varieties. I've had one grandparent with MCI and another with Vascular Dementia and they require very different responses.
If you're dealing with MCI (and it is the most common form of dementia), then some kind of technological solution might get you somewhere, depending on how comfortable your relative is with technology. MCI tends to advance slowly and the symptoms could remain mild for years to come. A device that gives a few easily-recognised prompts might help.
If you are dealing with one of the progressive forms of dementia, then forget it. With Alzheimer's and Vascular Dementia, the symptoms will progress rapidly and viciously. Your relative's current state, where he is basically coherent but forgetful, will not last long. His personality will rapidly change and, over time, he will appear to withdraw into himself completely (though you will potentially pass through stages along the way where he wanders and becomes depressed or even aggressive). Within a year or two, he is going to require full-time nursing assistance for even basic bodily functions and he will increasingly not even recognise close family members. There are some interim steps you can take to manage your relative's quality of life in the early-to-mid stages, but clever technological tricks are not likely to play a role.
Vascular Dementia took about 3 years from diagnosis (so probably 4-5 years after initial symptoms) to turn my granddad into what was basically a hollow shell. The progression is not the same in every case; while the usual pattern is for short term memory to go first, the point we realised my granddad had something more than MCI was when his long term memory was damaged fairly suddenly and he lost all recollection of everything before the age of 20 or so (including the fact that he had grown up in Ireland and only moved to England in his late-teens).
You might already have done this and just not thought to mention it in the article you submitted, but I would suggest that your first step should be to seek a diagnosis. Only once you have that can you begin to think about how best to manage things and whether technology has a role to play.
I know, but with Microsoft's apparent determination to explicitly place different value on different users this time around (eg. on the ability to defer upgrades), I was wondering whether there was any kind of differentiation between "free upgrade" and "purchased OEM license" Win10 Pro users.
I think it means "years of relative economic stability".
Don't forget that perceptions of economic (in)stability tend to affect political discourse more than any other factor. The 1984 Miner's Strike and the Iraq War excite a lot of emotion in some quarters, but don't forget that Thatcher and Blair respectively went on to win elections after both of them.
The declines of the 1979-1997 Conservative Government and the 1997-2010 Labour Governments almost certainly had more to do with a combination of general fatigue and factors that threatened economic stability (Black Monday and Europe for the former, the 2007 financial crash for the latter).
On this basis, the speeches were actually well tuned to what the majority seem to have been concerned about.
For the moment, at least, you can turn this off. Indeed, you can turn off more of the Windows 10 start menu nastiness than is initially apparent and get back to something fairly civilised without third party addons. For now.
In its current form, it's not completely catastrophic even if you don't disable it. It's significantly less intrusive than the advertising you get on the top-level menus on the PS4, Wii-U and, in particular, Xbox One.
The worry, of course, is about the slippery slope. Look at how advertising has flooded over the menus on the Xbox series:
- Basically absent on the original Xbox and the first-gen Xbox 360 UI. - Present but subdued on the second-gen 360 UI. - Completely dominant on the third-gen 360 UI (at the cost of useful navigation features that were present in the second-gen). - A major presence on the Xbox One.
Actually, now I'm wondering whether my ability to disable the advertising in Win10 has been because I'm both on Professional rather than Home and on an OEM license purchased with a new PC rather than a free upgrade. Anybody applied this patch on the Home edition or a free upgrade yet?
It's also not fantastic in the top-end home user Alienware line. And by "not fantastic", I mean "terrible unless you fork out a fortune for the top-end package, on top of a PC price which already has a huge mark-up". Plus they make it as difficult as possible to fix certain hardware issues with their machines yourself.
Helped with a friend's Aurora R4 which had a dodgy PSU. In most cases, you'd expect replacing a PSU to be a bit of a pain, but not a show-stopper. Except (for the R4 at least), Alienware use a bespoke PSU which is pretty much integral to the case and whose dimensions mean that most off-the-shelf third-party PSUs won't fit. If you don't have the top-end support package, good luck trying to get them to do anything about it.
Replacing the thing requires going to Ebay for an allegedly-working second-hand like-for-like replacement PSU, followed by a very challenging replacement job. Ended up wishing I'd just bought a replacement case and transplanted the PC guts over.
What we've seen over the last 18 months or so is a trend from storage drive speed being almost irrelevant in terms of game performance (aside from loading-times), towards it becoming one of the most critical factors. I'm guessing that, as you suggest, it is caused by a combination of the move towards more "open world" games, and an increase in the detail-level, and hence size, of game-assets.
The first game I'm aware of where it was a serious issue was Watch_Dogs. You'll recall that the PC version of that game took quite the hammering at launch. Not just because the game was rubbish (although it was), but because a lot of players were experiencing severe in-game stutter. In fact, I noticed it myself when I first installed the game. While it was ok on the indoor on-foot sequences, the moment I started moving around the open-world city, particularly in a car, it was stuttering constantly. Then I noticed that the timing of the stutter was perfectly in-sync with the activity of my disk-access light. So I reinstalled the game on my solid state drive and, surprise surprise, the stutter was completely eliminated.
There have been a large number of games since then which have been affected to varying degrees. Particular culprits include:
Dragon Age: Inquistion (infrequent but very severe periods of stutter when moving across invisible transition-points when running from a mechanical drive).
Far Cry 4 (at the lower end of severity, but stutter noticeable when opening doors or entering vehicles while running from a mechanical drive).
Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (mild stutter and long texture-loading delays when running from a mechanical drive - for some reason much more noticeable than in Borderlands 2, which used the same engine).
The Witcher 3 (mild but noticeable stutter when moving at speed on horseback, particularly around towns/villages, when running from a mechanical drive).
Pillars of Eternity (yes, even in a top-down 2D RPG, there's stutter after issuing some commands, particularly for spells whose visual effects need to be loaded, when running from a mechanical drive).
Batman: Arkham Knight (the original unpatched release essentially unplayable due to severe stutter when running from a mechanical drive).
I suspect that poor optimisation is also a factor in some of these cases. After all, the console versions mostly avoid this stutter, despite the fact that they contain fairly slow and crusty mechanical drives. Irritatingly, some of the performance-comparison sites out there, particularly the (formerly excellent) Eurogamer Digital Foundry don't do drive speed comparisons and seem to use SSDs by default, so they don't pick up these issues.
There are still a few major releases that appear to run well from mechanical drives on PC; Shadows of Mordor and Metal Gear Solid 5, despite being open-world games, don't seem to have particular stuttering issues. But we're getting to the point now where if you want a decent experience in PC games, having a solid state drive (and preferably a large one) is as important as having a decent graphics card.
Because that would encourage the spread of an "act first, apologise later" mentality. If the breaches committed by SkyPan were severe and endangered safety, then the simple fact that they have now altered their behaviour should not excuse them from penalties in respect of their earlier breaches.
This is true in any area of law, but is particularly true in safety-critical areas. It only takes one drone getting sucked into a jet engine to endanger or end the lives of hundreds of people. What you absolutely do not want are companies or individuals thinking that they'll do something outside of the current rules (potentially profiting from it) for as long as they can get away with it, knowing that they will be able to wriggle off the hook with an apology and a promise to be better behaved in future when they get caught.
Few people are fully introverted or extroverted and they shouldn't be encouraged to think of themselves as such. TFA makes a few reasonable points, but I can't help but feel that it is founded upon a false premise. A premise which stems from the way in which people misuse the results of Myers-Briggs and other similar personality-tests.
Running through the article is a belief that people must, in both education and the workplace, be allowed to work in the manner that best fits their personality types. That's not how the world works.
On Myers-Briggs, I show up as a mild-to-moderate introvert. I match some of the descriptors for "introvert" pretty well, but not others. However, what I've always been clear about is that this is not an "excuse" for anything.
Myers-Briggs and the like should be more about enabling the individual being tested to understand how they might need to change their own actions and behaviours to compensate for inbuilt tendencies; not to give them a list of demands for how the world should change to suit them. I found it a fairly useful exercise; I've been able to apply it at work to both play to strengths and compensate for weaknesses. But it's not an excuse.
Back at school, some of my most effective teachers were those who, as I now realise, understood my introvert tendencies and knew how to encourage me to stretch myself beyond what I was comfortable with. We all need that from time to time, especially when we are children. Those on the introverted side need to understand that it's not much use to be able to think if you can't also communicate and work with others. Those on the extroverted side need to be taught that there is a time when you need to sit down, shut up and listen. Most workplaces aren't going to be willing to indulge extreme behaviours on either side.
Group projects and collaborative work are, at best, tools that should be used in only limited roles in the classroom (albeit with wider scope at college level in some subjects). But that's mostly because of the potential for cheating or for some kids to coast by on the efforts of others.
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Personally, I'm of the view that Activision has just paid rather too much money to acquire a developer whose value has already passed its peak. A lot of these mobile developers tend to get big on the basis of one or two apps that "go viral" but then struggle to follow up on initial successes. The mobile gaming market is so over-crowded that producing the next big-hit is a complete crapshoot. Nobody's come up with a formula that works; the Next Big Thing is as likely to be a so-bad-it's-funny Flappy Bird game from some guy in his bedroom as it is to be a carefully crafted and marketed sequel to the Last Big Thing.
That said, I'm not surprised that Activision is looking to diversify. For a long time, it has been dependant upon two big cash cows; World of Warcraft and Call of Duty. Both of those have passed their peak.
World of Warcraft's subscriber numbers have fallen a long way since their peak in the late-Lich King/early Cataclysm era. It's down at around 5 million subscribers now, down from a peak of over 12 million (and Activision/Blizzard have just announced they're going to stop reporting subscriber numbers). 5 million is still a huge user-base for a subscriber-MMO, but they are on a fast downward trend and likely to lose the "world's biggest subscriber MMO" crown soon.
Call of Duty, meanwhile, has also fallen a long way from its sales peak. The peak was achieved in 2011, with 26.5 million sales of Modern Warfare 3. 2012's Black Ops 2 managed an only-slightly-lower 24.4 million, but things went into serious decline after that. 2013's Ghosts sold 16.5 million copies, which Activision blamed at the time on the game coming out during a transition in console generations (the fact that it was a poor game even by Call of Duty standards probably didn't help either). It never reported final numbers for 2014's Advanced Warfare, but did indicate that after 3 months on sale, numbers were "27% lower than Ghosts at a similar point in time", which would indicate that it probably eventually landed somewhere in the 12-13 million sales range.
Now, don't get me wrong, both World of Warcraft and Call of Duty are still spectacularly successful franchises (breaking over 10 million sales is something most AAA developers can only dream of, let along over 20 million). But they are far and away the most important jewels in Activision's crown and if they are in decline, that gives the company a problem.
On that basis, it's not surprising to see them take a punt on something like King (even though I think this was the wrong punt to take).
My school had some systems that ran on it in the mid-90s. It also, after the member of staff who brought it in left, had nobody who knew how to use it. Our IT "teachers" were elderly Catholic priests teaching from a series of worksheets that basically had step-by-step instructions on "how to save a document in Word" and so on. There were no dedicated IT support staff, only an off-site support contractor.
I ended up teaching myself to use it and doing a few admin-type jobs for the school, in exchange for a tacit agreement that I'd be excused from the pathetic IT "lessons" and, once I moved into the 6th Form (ages 16-18 for non-UK readers) from Religious Education. Pretty good deal, although I've never used an OS/2 system since I graduated.
Hate to break it to you, but even as a fully signed up supporter of the green team, I have to admit their driver-bloat situation is no better. It's around 170mb for a set of Nvidia drivers these days, most of which is for their ludicrously over-engineered "Geforce Experience" crap. Oh, plus all of the Nvidia Shield intergration, which I'm sure is of huge interest to both of the people who've bought a Shield tablet.
There are valid reasons to go for an Nvidia card - heat, power consumption, general stability - but a lack of driver-bloat sadly isn't one of them.
Yeah, tell me about it.
Back in 2004, I moved into a new rental apartment. The previous occupant, it transpired, had skipped out owing a whole load of money to major retailers.
Now, at no point did I get any of this on my credit record (though I did buy copies of my reports), but what I got for about 3 years after that point was a constant stream of letters and calls (roughly 50/50 human/robocall) to the landline. Some of these were extremely threatening. On one occasion, I had to take a day off work because they had threatened to send collection agents to the address on a particular date and I didn't want to come home and find my door broken down and my stuff removed (I waited in all day - nobody showed up).
Things have gotten a little better here in the UK - there's now slightly tighter regulation of debt collectors which would have curtailed the worst of this. But it's still a shady industry.
The problem is that there is money to be made in continuing to pick at the scab, rather than letting it heal. If you're running an online news/opinion outlet, then stories on issues like this are guaranteed page-views and ad-views. Hell, if you get a flamewar going in the comments section, then you've got hundreds of people refreshing the page constantly (more adviews), posting fresh replies, then going back to refreshing the page to watch for people following up on their posts. Meanwhile, an informative news article or insightful news piece on a less informative topic will get people to read once, maybe post once and then move on.
If you're running a real-world event, then panels like these are guaranteed to get publicity, and cancelling them gets you even more publicity (and I would bet a substantial sum of money that at least some of the threats made towards events like this over the last year or two have been "false flag" operations for just this purpose).
You are right that letting the issue be starved of the oxygen of publicity for a while would be the best thing for all concerned. Unfortunately, there's too much cash to be made by feeding the beast.
I think a big factor here is whether the choice relates to a luxury or a necessity. And to be clear, I'm going to stretch the definition of "necessity" slightly, to include things such as pension plans. In fact, the words "luxury" and "necessity" aren't really quite the right ones here, but I can't think of better ones.
When it comes to necessities, what we generally want is security. We want to find something that works for us fairly quickly and to then have the mental security that comes from being able to stick with it. This is why so few people switch banks or utility providers, even though they could often save money by doing so. Being bombarded with options when buying something you need (rather than something you want) is stressful. You'll be likely to fixate more on the downsides of making the wrong choice rather than the upsides of making the right choice.
When it comes to luxuries, on the other hand, we tend to like choice. If we can afford high end food products, we like to be able to choose from lots of different varieties. If we're buying a luxury car, we want to be able to pick and choose options. Having choices makes us excited about our shiny new purchase.
The complicating factor here is that the line between necessities and luxuries isn't static and won't be the same for everybody. If you have a lot of disposable income, you will probably approach your food-shop as though you're shopping for luxuries. If you're struggling to make ends meet, you will be firmly in necessity mode (I've been in both camps).
It's not even all about income. I can illustrate this with a comparison between myself and my mother. We both actually have fairly similar levels of disposable income, but our interests and priorities are very different.
I'm a big PC user; I enjoy gaming on a high end PC. I bought a full new PC recently. Deciding I couldn't be bothered with a self-build this time, I looked around for UK-based vendors who would allow me to customise my build extensively before they put it together. I took time to do my research, picked out the case, the motherboard, the CPU, the RAM, the graphics card and all the rest. And yes, I quite enjoyed this. I chose the vendor I did largely because they offered me this degree of control, rather than an off the peg system.
My mother, by contrast, does not like PCs. She needs one, but she doesn't like that fact and doesn't treat it as anything more than a tool. When her old laptop died and she needed a replacement, she found the degree of choice available first confusing and then infuriating. We eventually solved it after I looked around for 3 acceptable options and narrowed the choice down to those for her ("this one costs a bit more but has a bigger screen, that one costs a bit less but might be a bit slow to start up").
Flip things around to the last time we bought new sofas; I spent an afternoon browsing online for something that was about the right size, reasonably cheap and not a horrible colour clash for my living room. My mother spent a month and a half of weekends walking around show-rooms and comparing textile samples.
We each believe that the other is completely mad. But what it really comes down to is a value judgement over "luxury" vs "necessity" and how that impacts on your approach to choice.
Prices vary a lot around the country. At the upper end, you're looking at £30 per hour-long lesson, with most people requiring 10-15 lessons before they're ready for the test. It's a further £75 per practical test - and more than half of people will require more than one test. There's a lower fee as well for the theory test you have to take before the practical test. The pass rate for that is over 50% and it is pretty easy, so there's no excuse for failing that one.
I think that in most parts of the UK, you're looking at maybe £500-£600 on average. In London, where everything costs more, maybe add another £200 to that.
If this seems high, remember that the UK's ratio of cars to mile of road is higher than any other country in the world. We have high speed limits and very busy roads, so it's inevitable that we set a higher bar to get a driving license. My experience of UK drivers vs US drivers (and I go to the US several every year and hire a car every time I'm there) is that UK drivers are more aggressive and impatient, but also more disciplined. I see some shocking lane-changing behaviors in the US that would be very rare indeed in the UK, but UK drivers are very quick to express their displeasure with anybody who violates road etiquette.
Another factor here is that the "enthusiast PC gamer", long a major consumer of large hard drives, is moving rapidly onto SSDs.
Too many recent games; Watch_Dogs, Dragon Age: Inquisition and, Far Cry 4, to name some of the most serious offenders, have suffered from in-game stutter when running from mechanical drives. The trend towards open-world gaming and higher resolution textures that's picked up speed since the introduction of the PS4 and Xbox One (which remain the main target-platforms for most games) has shone a light on asset streaming and drive-access speeds on PC, which had previously only been an issue when it came to load-times.
Gamers are starting to realise that there's no point spending thousands of dollars on motherboard, CPU, RAM and graphics card, only to hobble game-performance by running from a cheap mechanical drive.
Large cities have large populations. Just over 90% of the UK population lives in urban areas, with almost 15% in London. Other European and Asian countries are following similar trends, at various paces. Most people travel to work in the rush hour.
What I selected might be a worst case scenario, but it is a common worst case scenario. If anything, the US is more of a fringe-case, because so many of its cities are so poorly supported by public transport.
He... should... go to a driving instructor.
The way it works in the UK at least (and many other European countries), most people who learn to drive do so via lessons from a paid instructor (this isn't a legal requirement in the UK, but it is widely acknowledged as the best way to learn). The instructor will provide the car for both the lessons and the practical test (there's also a written test that must be passed before you can take the practical test). There are specific insurance packages for professional driving instructors that facilitate this.
The UK, it should be noted, has some of the world's toughest requirements to get a driving license and the practical tests, particularly if you live in a major city (you take the test on local roads) can be tough (veteran drivers who are required to re-take them following a disqualification sometimes struggle). But "not owning a car" is no impediment here to getting a driving license and for most people, getting their license comes before owning a car.
Entirely depends on location. I live in an outer London suburb and can be at my workplace by train in 50 minutes door to door. That's a 20 minute train journey (factoring in a couple of minutes wait-time on the platform), plus 15 minutes walk at either end. The equivalent car journey, which I've done a handful of times (though I don't currently own a car) is around 110 minutes in the morning peak, given London congestion and the need to walk from the nearest (expensive) public car parking to my office.
I've had a handful of occasions over the last 5 years, usually when needing either to make a very-early-morning (pre-5AM) journey or buying a large electrical item, that I've needed a car. That's what taxi and car-hire firms are for.
With London property prices, owning a car is a daft move unless you absolutely need to (for family reasons or due to a disability). I wouldn't have been able to afford the deposit/mortgage for my current place on the salary I was on at the time if I had owned a car and been paying all the costs associated with it (plus I had the benefit of managing to buy during a brief dip in the market). Most other European cities are not quite so extreme as London (I gather Tokyo is the same, though), but most of the big ones are moving the same direction.
Apologies - you're correct. I allowed myself to get stuck back at the WW2-level for tanks there. Warships, however, do still fire explosive shells, as do land-based ballistic artillery pieces.
Yes - though not at the level of the one in TFA and probably, for the foreseeable future, only in the realm of large naval guns (and possibly - slightly further down the line - guns mounted on tanks or large aircraft).
With a traditional naval or tank shell, much of the damage comes from the explosive contents of the shell (which tend to be quite sophisticated in their design these days). The downside of this is that the ship or tank ends up carrying a substantial quantity of explosive material, just waiting to be set off. Magazine explosion is a particular danger for ships.
Railguns, by contrast, fire inert slugs. The damage comes from the (much) higher velocity at which the slug is fired, which translates into much higher kinetic energy transfer on impact. This means that the ammunition tends to be smaller (so you can carry more of it) and safer. The higher velocity also has significant potential benefits in terms of accuracy.
The US Navy is currently conducting real-world tests of railguns on ships and there has been a lot of progress over the last few years. The challenges include the high power requirement and the need to replace rails regularly (due to the extreme stresses associated with each firing), which can substantially harm rate of fire.
Practical handheld railguns which offer significant benefits over existing firearms are still a long way off (if, indeed, they ever happen). The one in TFA has a muzzle velocity which is at the low end of the range for a "traditional" firearm, with significantly lower convenience (and some quite worrying looking safety issues).
Isn't this going to be incredibly nausea-inducing to use? My understanding of what's needed for a "pleasant" VR experience in terms of resolution, image quality and framerate does not align with my experience of most PSP games.
Now sure, you can use emulation to upscale the resolution and - in some cases - increase the framerate. But that's not going to get around boarder issues with PSP games in general.
First of all, a good number of PSP games tied the game's logic to framerate (Square-Enix games in particular), so unlocking framerates via emulation can cause some very odd effects. If you've tried the PC version of the first Dark Souls with a third party mod to remove the 30fps cap, you'll have seen something similar (animations becoming de-synchronised from actions and so on).
Second, a lot of PSP 3d games had very short draw distances and used heavy fogging and blur effects to disguise this. That's not too bad on a small screen, but it starts to look fairly unpleasant if you output the video to a monitor or TV, let alone a VR headset
And finally, the fact that the PSP only had a single analogue stick means that in many 3d games, camera controls were put either on the face or shoulder buttons. These are digital, not analogue inputs, so there is basically only one speed at which the player can rotate the camera. Take a look at the home-console versions of Final Fantasy Type-0 (which are ports of a PSP game with higher resolution art assets but few other changes) if you want to see how jarring this is even on a television and twin-stick controller. That's going to be seriously unpleasant in VR.
Yeah, well, the same could be said for sports, and look at all the crap that's accumulated around those.
There's money involved in eSports now, both in terms of the prize money, the sponsorship cash and in terms of the associated gambling scene. Where there's money on offer (particularly though not exclusively through gambling), there will be people trying to get their hands on that money via illegitimate means.
There's always been an ugly side to "professional gaming". I was running a Counter-Strike league back in 2002-3 with no cash prizes (though you could win a year's server rental) and was already seeing early signs of that ugly side. We had teams throwing a tantrum over every loss, and crucially over how losses were reported, because of the impact it would have on "potential sponsors". In some cases, these complaints were coming from teams who I, as an only-slightly-above-average player (I was always more of an organiser than a player) could have beaten 5 vs 1 without breaking a sweat.
If all of the stuff associated with professional gaming annoys you (like it does me), then the best thing to do is ignore it. The misbehaviour, match fixing and general whining isn't going to go away; chances are, it's only going to get worse. But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter very much for the average gamer. There are a small number of developers who pitch their games at the eSports market (and even some of those, like Blizzard, don't exclusively focus on it), but the rest of the industry mostly ignores it due to high risks and poor commercial returns for developers in most cases.
I agree with your first line. Your second, however, just demonstrates that you haven't actually read Atlas Shrugged. That's not uncommon; I can't, off the top of my head, think of another book which more people claim to have read without ever having done so. I read it a couple of years ago - I make a point, once a year, of reading something completely outside of my usual comfort zone, and Alas Shrugged got its turn.
Altas Shrugged has a number of passages on the "proper" role of the state, which include: national security, upholding law and order, protecting property rights and acting as the final enforcement body for contracts. This is why, for instance, the pirate character never attacks military ships (because they are a legitimate use of state power).
Atlas Shrugged is a more complex book than is generally understood, but that complexity tends to get lost in any kind of discussion of it. It has many weaknesses, in particular:
- It has a black-and-white world view which admits very few shades of gray.
- It ignores or brushes over a number of issues which don't sit neatly with the author's world-view (such as the role of international trade and warfare).
- Its dialogue can, at times, be incredibly stilted.
- The 100+ page speech by John Galt near the end of the book is an absolute slog to read and completely breaks the narrative flow just as the plot is reaching its climax (and is also unnecessary as it just repeats points that have already been made).
- Its obsession with the Gold Standard has aged badly.
- Every single passage relating to romance and sex is completely cringeworthy.
That said, it also has some real strengths:
- It is in some respects (though not all), remarkably prophetic, particularly in terms of the uncanny accuracy with which it predicts Bolivarian socialism in Central and South America and the current Eurozone crisis (albeit with the timing out by a couple of decades).
- It's also pretty damned prophetic about General Motors and Detroit (albeit via their lightly-fictionalised incarnations).
- It can be remarkably visually evocative, with some amazingly good descriptive passages about its cityscapes and railways.
- It has a few brilliant passages, particularly towards the end of the novel (and especially the final flight over New York as the lights go out) which stand alongside the best dystopian fiction.
- Stilted dialogue aside, it has some very strongly drawn characters.
Making the book the core of your personal philosophy is a bad idea. It's written from a pretty extreme political position and is occasionally pretty detached from reality. But nor is it some kind of horrific atrocity. Unfortunately, knee-jerk condemnation of it on the basis of little actual knowledge of it has become a fairly popular form of virtue signalling.
This is going to depend a lot on the form of dementia. If you'll forgive a horrible over-simplification, the big question is whether you are dealing with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) or with one of the progressive forms, of which Alzheimer's and Vascular Dementia are the most common varieties. I've had one grandparent with MCI and another with Vascular Dementia and they require very different responses.
If you're dealing with MCI (and it is the most common form of dementia), then some kind of technological solution might get you somewhere, depending on how comfortable your relative is with technology. MCI tends to advance slowly and the symptoms could remain mild for years to come. A device that gives a few easily-recognised prompts might help.
If you are dealing with one of the progressive forms of dementia, then forget it. With Alzheimer's and Vascular Dementia, the symptoms will progress rapidly and viciously. Your relative's current state, where he is basically coherent but forgetful, will not last long. His personality will rapidly change and, over time, he will appear to withdraw into himself completely (though you will potentially pass through stages along the way where he wanders and becomes depressed or even aggressive). Within a year or two, he is going to require full-time nursing assistance for even basic bodily functions and he will increasingly not even recognise close family members. There are some interim steps you can take to manage your relative's quality of life in the early-to-mid stages, but clever technological tricks are not likely to play a role.
Vascular Dementia took about 3 years from diagnosis (so probably 4-5 years after initial symptoms) to turn my granddad into what was basically a hollow shell. The progression is not the same in every case; while the usual pattern is for short term memory to go first, the point we realised my granddad had something more than MCI was when his long term memory was damaged fairly suddenly and he lost all recollection of everything before the age of 20 or so (including the fact that he had grown up in Ireland and only moved to England in his late-teens).
You might already have done this and just not thought to mention it in the article you submitted, but I would suggest that your first step should be to seek a diagnosis. Only once you have that can you begin to think about how best to manage things and whether technology has a role to play.
I know, but with Microsoft's apparent determination to explicitly place different value on different users this time around (eg. on the ability to defer upgrades), I was wondering whether there was any kind of differentiation between "free upgrade" and "purchased OEM license" Win10 Pro users.
Nothing would surprise me any more.
I think it means "years of relative economic stability".
Don't forget that perceptions of economic (in)stability tend to affect political discourse more than any other factor. The 1984 Miner's Strike and the Iraq War excite a lot of emotion in some quarters, but don't forget that Thatcher and Blair respectively went on to win elections after both of them.
The declines of the 1979-1997 Conservative Government and the 1997-2010 Labour Governments almost certainly had more to do with a combination of general fatigue and factors that threatened economic stability (Black Monday and Europe for the former, the 2007 financial crash for the latter).
On this basis, the speeches were actually well tuned to what the majority seem to have been concerned about.
For the moment, at least, you can turn this off. Indeed, you can turn off more of the Windows 10 start menu nastiness than is initially apparent and get back to something fairly civilised without third party addons. For now.
In its current form, it's not completely catastrophic even if you don't disable it. It's significantly less intrusive than the advertising you get on the top-level menus on the PS4, Wii-U and, in particular, Xbox One.
The worry, of course, is about the slippery slope. Look at how advertising has flooded over the menus on the Xbox series:
- Basically absent on the original Xbox and the first-gen Xbox 360 UI.
- Present but subdued on the second-gen 360 UI.
- Completely dominant on the third-gen 360 UI (at the cost of useful navigation features that were present in the second-gen).
- A major presence on the Xbox One.
Actually, now I'm wondering whether my ability to disable the advertising in Win10 has been because I'm both on Professional rather than Home and on an OEM license purchased with a new PC rather than a free upgrade. Anybody applied this patch on the Home edition or a free upgrade yet?
It's also not fantastic in the top-end home user Alienware line. And by "not fantastic", I mean "terrible unless you fork out a fortune for the top-end package, on top of a PC price which already has a huge mark-up". Plus they make it as difficult as possible to fix certain hardware issues with their machines yourself.
Helped with a friend's Aurora R4 which had a dodgy PSU. In most cases, you'd expect replacing a PSU to be a bit of a pain, but not a show-stopper. Except (for the R4 at least), Alienware use a bespoke PSU which is pretty much integral to the case and whose dimensions mean that most off-the-shelf third-party PSUs won't fit. If you don't have the top-end support package, good luck trying to get them to do anything about it.
Replacing the thing requires going to Ebay for an allegedly-working second-hand like-for-like replacement PSU, followed by a very challenging replacement job. Ended up wishing I'd just bought a replacement case and transplanted the PC guts over.
Yes, yes and a million times yes.
What we've seen over the last 18 months or so is a trend from storage drive speed being almost irrelevant in terms of game performance (aside from loading-times), towards it becoming one of the most critical factors. I'm guessing that, as you suggest, it is caused by a combination of the move towards more "open world" games, and an increase in the detail-level, and hence size, of game-assets.
The first game I'm aware of where it was a serious issue was Watch_Dogs. You'll recall that the PC version of that game took quite the hammering at launch. Not just because the game was rubbish (although it was), but because a lot of players were experiencing severe in-game stutter. In fact, I noticed it myself when I first installed the game. While it was ok on the indoor on-foot sequences, the moment I started moving around the open-world city, particularly in a car, it was stuttering constantly. Then I noticed that the timing of the stutter was perfectly in-sync with the activity of my disk-access light. So I reinstalled the game on my solid state drive and, surprise surprise, the stutter was completely eliminated.
There have been a large number of games since then which have been affected to varying degrees. Particular culprits include:
Dragon Age: Inquistion (infrequent but very severe periods of stutter when moving across invisible transition-points when running from a mechanical drive).
Far Cry 4 (at the lower end of severity, but stutter noticeable when opening doors or entering vehicles while running from a mechanical drive).
Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (mild stutter and long texture-loading delays when running from a mechanical drive - for some reason much more noticeable than in Borderlands 2, which used the same engine).
The Witcher 3 (mild but noticeable stutter when moving at speed on horseback, particularly around towns/villages, when running from a mechanical drive).
Pillars of Eternity (yes, even in a top-down 2D RPG, there's stutter after issuing some commands, particularly for spells whose visual effects need to be loaded, when running from a mechanical drive).
Batman: Arkham Knight (the original unpatched release essentially unplayable due to severe stutter when running from a mechanical drive).
I suspect that poor optimisation is also a factor in some of these cases. After all, the console versions mostly avoid this stutter, despite the fact that they contain fairly slow and crusty mechanical drives. Irritatingly, some of the performance-comparison sites out there, particularly the (formerly excellent) Eurogamer Digital Foundry don't do drive speed comparisons and seem to use SSDs by default, so they don't pick up these issues.
There are still a few major releases that appear to run well from mechanical drives on PC; Shadows of Mordor and Metal Gear Solid 5, despite being open-world games, don't seem to have particular stuttering issues. But we're getting to the point now where if you want a decent experience in PC games, having a solid state drive (and preferably a large one) is as important as having a decent graphics card.
Because that would encourage the spread of an "act first, apologise later" mentality. If the breaches committed by SkyPan were severe and endangered safety, then the simple fact that they have now altered their behaviour should not excuse them from penalties in respect of their earlier breaches.
This is true in any area of law, but is particularly true in safety-critical areas. It only takes one drone getting sucked into a jet engine to endanger or end the lives of hundreds of people. What you absolutely do not want are companies or individuals thinking that they'll do something outside of the current rules (potentially profiting from it) for as long as they can get away with it, knowing that they will be able to wriggle off the hook with an apology and a promise to be better behaved in future when they get caught.
Few people are fully introverted or extroverted and they shouldn't be encouraged to think of themselves as such. TFA makes a few reasonable points, but I can't help but feel that it is founded upon a false premise. A premise which stems from the way in which people misuse the results of Myers-Briggs and other similar personality-tests.
Running through the article is a belief that people must, in both education and the workplace, be allowed to work in the manner that best fits their personality types. That's not how the world works.
On Myers-Briggs, I show up as a mild-to-moderate introvert. I match some of the descriptors for "introvert" pretty well, but not others. However, what I've always been clear about is that this is not an "excuse" for anything.
Myers-Briggs and the like should be more about enabling the individual being tested to understand how they might need to change their own actions and behaviours to compensate for inbuilt tendencies; not to give them a list of demands for how the world should change to suit them. I found it a fairly useful exercise; I've been able to apply it at work to both play to strengths and compensate for weaknesses. But it's not an excuse.
Back at school, some of my most effective teachers were those who, as I now realise, understood my introvert tendencies and knew how to encourage me to stretch myself beyond what I was comfortable with. We all need that from time to time, especially when we are children. Those on the introverted side need to understand that it's not much use to be able to think if you can't also communicate and work with others. Those on the extroverted side need to be taught that there is a time when you need to sit down, shut up and listen. Most workplaces aren't going to be willing to indulge extreme behaviours on either side.
Group projects and collaborative work are, at best, tools that should be used in only limited roles in the classroom (albeit with wider scope at college level in some subjects). But that's mostly because of the potential for cheating or for some kids to coast by on the efforts of others.
This sounds like something ripped right from the BOFH stories...