I'm glad you disagree but in that remark I was dancing around the main issue: We have a huge problems birthed by the economic social order we have chosen to implement along with other disruptive technologies that lead to jobless and which make the bulk of humanity superfluous economically.
"By rewarding the most dedicated students and workers for putting in excessive hours, we only breed pathological attitudes about work."
The problem is we have deep problems with our ethos as a society because we have become so habituated to being driven by commercial principles: Work, Commerce, conspicuous consumption and Money.
Yet these same principles magically don't apply when kids go to school (work). Kids should get PAID to go to school, think about it, you're going to work for 13 (+2-4, etc years) of university and you're not getting paid a DIME for all that work you're doing, nor being reward for good marks. That's slavery my friend and it's socially sanctioned at that. It's no wonder kids are so jaded about school, they are forced to work for nothing and put into classes with people they may or may not get along with that will effect how their mind is shaped during critical stages of their life.
The real problem with school is a reflection of the economic model of society. Schools are there to control the flow of jobs into the market, the truth is many students could do many well paying jobs, so you need a way to create artificial barriers between "professionals" and "the skill-less".
"think that many schools and colleges are simply not challenging the creativity of the stu0dents."
Screw creativity, students are over worked enough as it is. They want to live their life and have free time, not be slaves of corporate capital like many of their parents. It's all about 1) money and 2) having more free time.
Being lazy is a VIRTUE, look at all the work-a-holic related problems with modern society, I'd proudly proclaim on a T-Shirt in my off ours that "I'm a lazy bastard", lazy meaning - I want to spend my time how I wish and not how society thinks I should spend it.
People cheat because they know that:
1) Much of what people (businesses, "teachers", etc) think you should learn is useless bullshit that will NEVER apply to your life (i.e. witness the college dropouts who went on to success because they were driven). Many papers I wrote in university were TOTAL BULLSHIT and yet I was passed with straight 90's.
2) You can't force students to learn shit presented in a dull way like many professors do. Students are hard to make self actualized as it is, if anything school beats curiosity and self-learning out of most people because they are forced to learn a lot of extraneous stuff so that school teachers have something to do with their time and won't lose their jobs. The truth is many educated people are superfluous (supply vs demand). As proven by offshoring, white collar jobs are the next to go.
I'd say most people hate school and only put up with it to pickup whatever skills will apply while rightly culling the rest so they can simply enjoy a half-decent standard of living and escape absolute poverty.
3) School's create distorted perceptions of who is able and who is not, I call this "professional dependency syndrome", the truth is what if the professionals suck? What if the whole system is fucked and everyone in their mother is mindlessly parroting their useless opinions as arguments, but people accept it because it's mutually agreed upon bullshit?
Game designers or teams go unrecognized, and it's TEAMS not just "designers". Designers are good for vision, but the most recent Nintendo's games on the cube and even TWP prove that Nintendo or it's development teams are losing touch with gaming.
1) Wind waker and TWP, both games that could have been much better 2) The tragedy that was Starfox assault since Nintendo desperately farmed it out (bad decision), most likely killing the franchise even more then it did with the re-badged dinosaur planet.
Miyamoto is over-rated, he let really bad design decisions go in wind waker and other projects. I'm hesitant to ascribe the success of any game to one person when I know that the blood and sweat of teams and programmers and artists are what glue the experience together...
People with:
1) Vision 2) Skill 3) Insane work ethic 4) Time and money to finish the game
That's what makes games ladies and gentlemen, games are enormous undertakings now-a-days, I do not envy anyone creating games while I do hate companies milking their products with expansions or cutting content to make a deadline. When you're flush with cash (epic, iD, etc) you should not be on "sacred" deadlines. IMO while gaming is a business, you're never going to push the genre forward without someone like
"I think it would be interesting to know about applications where the source code has been lost. To me, it would seem that running an app where no one has the source code implies zero vendor support."
The real problem is that companies should be required by law to open their source, intellectual property laws and all the other jargon actually hold back many good old programs and games from being updated, if the ethos of the culture wasn't so commercially and morally barbaric, much of the older software would be updated and maintained by the community of people who have invested in that software. Consumers (i.e. investors) should have rights to the source since they *invested* in the product when a company 1) Goes defunct or 2) Legimate barriers to running software (i.e. new OS, etc) get in the way of running the old application. No one on earth would tolerate it if their car just suddenly stopped working with a new upgraded part. But frequently thats exactly what happens with computers. The truth is the demographics of the world currently are not technologically savvy citizenry, they are little more then greedy barbaric monkeys playing with technology.
There is so many good things that could come if we just set free and required companies to release their source for their programs since... many programs are so huge it would take a lot of time to update them (i.e. serious community effort just to understand wtf is going on in a program).
Piracy, right... more like too many games, and too many mediocre games at that. The truth is there is simply way too many games for the market to support @ 50+ dollars a pop, then add in MMO's with their subscriptions and everything else and you have perfect storm. Next many games offer nothing new, why should gamers buy games that are simply upgraded rehashes? Game developers only have themselves to blame in their quest of chasing their expensive technolust tastes. The truth is the game industry is the cause of their lack of profit... let's see where the game industry went wrong...
1) While the game market has expanded, it hasn't expanded to keep up with development costs of high fidelity graphics that the industry is chasing.
2) Game industry did itself in, gamers do not control where money is invested, nor what it produces, gamers do not control any of the financial aspects of where money is spent in development (graphics vs. gameplay).
3) Capitalism and designing a good game do not always mix well, with it rubs up against the economic model of society. The more time you spend working on a game 99% of the time the better it will be, if you're independently wealthy or have connections like certain figures in the game industry you can take your sweet time. But the drive for short-term profit over long-term gains has been an emerging problem in the game industry since the PS2, Xbox and Gamecube.
The whole industry right now is suffering since gameplay is getting stale and more games sell based on graphics then gameplay. I was never sure that the game industries model was very stable in many respects. It's built on the whims of a customer base which is not only difficult to understand but is just too diverse to pigeonhole with terms like "hardcore gamer" vs "casual gamer", next add in the mad rush for profits and you get a glut of mediocre games. I wouldn't be surprised of gaming slows down (Tanks) for a bit in the future but as long as their are fresh bodies without gaming experience (new kids being born) they may just be able to keep getting away with rehash city.
"But that couldn't possibly be related to poor science education, could it?"
Could it possibly be that that American children have enormous populations with a strong christian heritage? Note that before modern science *everyone* was to some extent religious, in fact religion was the dominant explanation for why things were the way they were before darwin. Evolution seemed like a non-explanation before the tools were available to extrapolate the earth's great age which did a lot to upend most religions. It was the age of the universe and the earth that upended religion, not biological evolution.
Trauma theory explains religion as well: Slavery and exploitation has been a part of human history for a long time, Marx saw religion as a feature of capitalism, and to some extent it is a feature of the stress put on people in the economic system. But the reason why people believe is because the death instinct is so strong, the whole reason religion was invented was to counteract teh painfully depressing realization that: You are going to die. You can dress it up with feelings of being jewed before humanity invented life extension technology or what have you, but that sum's up a big reason why people believe. If "sacred text" X's god offered you a pat on the back and a bag of chips would anyone follow that god?
No matter how you slice it some people will never believe in something the can't see or witness for themselves (ironically) that goes against their genetically determined instincts. I wouldn't be surprised if it was found out genetically that they have strong psychological predisposition towards god belief and it just takes the form of Christianity since that is the geographic religion.
... Memorable encounters with enemies and NPC's are. The truth is what made Halo so great was how you could interact with the enemies in the game and how the enemy was made to seem "alive", like how they spoke in their own language and how the little guys spoke english like "Grenade!!" when you tossed a grenade at them, and the crazy things they'd do you when you stuck a grenade on them. Next A.I. is a huge topic, things as simple and mind numbingly dumb (to the gamer) as pathfinding are made needlessly complex, I'm especially annoyed by supreme commanders decision not to make friendly units pass through other friendlies, the pathfinding is at times so cumbersome a lot of time is wasted, it holds back the player. A.I. should never frustate the player experience (unless its in terms of difficulty/challenge settings). Next, A.I. Cannot be divorced from other elements of the game: Like animations, how models interact with one another, etc. After all A.I. is the glue
One of the reasons supreme commander hasn't lived up to the hype is you can't move the camera to enjoy the battle like is seen in the video's. Take the best games... like Halo and God of War, what do they have in common?
1) Interactivity with the enemies (i.e. grabbing, throwing, stabbing, etc, YOU CHOOSE how an enemy dies, i.e. throw, vs slice in half, etc) 2) Great animation and cinematography camera work.
So it's not about making A.I. Complicated, many real intelligent thins are "stupid" (obey rules) that give rise to complex behavior.
Gutless or too distracted by TV, video games and all the other forms of what basically amounts to a kind of fun-a-holism and escapism, a form of denial of the horrible state of things.
It also vulgar, there are people suffocating economically in our society, to think of the money that's being wasted on a fucking toy makes me sick, that people allow themselves to be dominated by rich people and absorb their ideology, when 90% of them will never ever be rich and the hyper competitive ideology is against their own interests.
"I said it before, and I'll say it again. If you buy this card, then you deserve Everything You Deserve To Get(tm)."
The truth is shit like this should never be allowed to be released in the market, too many fraudulent greedy capitalists are to blame for a lot of mediocre products that take advantage of peoples ignorance.
Speak for yourself buddy. Email and IM are enormous boons to keeping in contact and making friends who share common interests across the world, what is slashdot if not a giant email discussion list in the form of a bulletin board?
The real problem I believe is that email isn't personal enough and good videocamera's integrated into computers for "email" the next big thing is vloging or "vlogging" if someone finally made a workable video phone with optional image broadcast with a decent display and ratio adjuster, that just worked everywhere. It would sell, believe you me.
"In my personal experience, classrooms that were structured were one of the best methods for me. In the end though, the best way to learn is to practice, which may be why the structure of the classroom was most effective for me."
I think classroom structure is good, but at the same time it stifles the mind. My most effective learning and reasoning was learned once I left school and university and simply was allowed to browse what interested me on the internet, and weigh and measure things myself instead of being told what is good and what isn't, by some school admiinstration or hidden authority figures who write curriculum's and textbooks.
Presentation of data matters, there is no universal way to communicate clearly and effectively to all people, and this is part of the reason the school system fails our children, I learned this from my many years of combing the internet for data. How one person describes something will only be understood easily by a certain group of people, you could re-write what the person has said and clear it up, go into more precise detail to make it more clear and accurate for someone else. Experts tend to compress enormous amounts of conceptual data into fewer words which makes teaching someone from scratch difficult: Just because you're an expert does not mean you'll make a good teacher... I've learned that language and visualizing data properly is the critical issue in education, how a person builds and constructs his understanding is wholly dependent upon the shape of the data itself, and the shape of the data must be allowed to be perturbed and re-written into different versions and flavors of the descriptions given to each individual student as much as possible, the internet and wikipedia like software allow for this mass-automatic ease of manipulation, and also forcing the student into real world situations where he has to use what he has learned to come up with his own solutions and conclusions.
Too much emphasis is placed on grading kids over a set period of time, instead of letting kids learn at their own pace, I know many kids who are slow but absolutely brilliant, but their brilliant thoughts take longer to coalesce in their minds. School tries to force kids to think at the pace of the system or economy, and thats where our society does the most damage: Rush rush rush, money money money. Kids may have shitty marks or middling IQ's but they are sharp as a knife when it comes to observing and understanding what is going on around them.
The internet has made me learn more from discussions and access to both non-traditionally and traditionally smart people I never had in my schools and universities. I was taught to think so rigidly and inflexibly about many things. I exposed myself to other veins of thought far away from western academia. The focus on precision and "objective science" and hard accuracy is all well and good but at the same time it's also blinding, you try to be overly accurate or go too in depth into the basics, before anything is believed or trusted and nothing ever gets understood or done on the whole. People today suffer from anal retentive addiction to "objectivity" or over-analysis with some mixture of science thrown in, as if someones personal experiences counted for nothing, and the only thing that mattered were studies done by "scientists" of varying degrees quality done far away from other people in the real world who live in a variety of different contexts divorced from what a single group of people study and measure.
Take economics for instance: It's not very complicated to understand assuming you don't have a propagandist who wishes to distort the publics understanding of economics. Money is nothing more then energy, a supply that the government controls within any economy to prevent run-away effects and over-consumption of limited resources. But ultimately at the same time it also causes social problems because people no longer own the means of production and therefore the are forced to "compete" against a collecti
"My DS is happy with being a little machine for games. It doesn't want to run my life, and I think a lot of casual-to-moderate gamers don't really want their console to become an online/entertainment hub. The games are the thing."
I think you illustrate a problem though: That brilliant people have to limit their designs and trim options to fit a mediocre, workaholic time constrained culture. Downloading a patch, or signing up for a game is hardly wanting to "run your life". The fact is you choose which games you play or you don't, no video game business has the power to make your choices for you in terms of how far you go.
"...even a year doing tools in Graphing calculator basic will teach appreciation for not wasting cycles doing everything the lazy way, 'cause sure, you usiung strcat doesn't slow the system in a noticable way, but when half the processes running are using it, and using it in "hotspots" suddenly you need a new machine because it's just not fast enough."
This is exactly why some knowledge of assembly and the basics is important, small performance enhancements on functions that will be replicated and used many times in the same processes and also in multiple programs saves a lot of performance. It's the same as reducing just a bit the amount of electricity one uses by simply turning off a light, but you add up all those little choices across a growing population and you start seeing enormous efficiency gains from that one adjustment to the efficiency of commonly used functions.
"Maybe, except that not many assembly programmers can make faster code than a C compiler anyway. It's no use being a mediocre assembly programmer."
A mediocre assembly programmer can become better with practice. Also there is simply doing something for you to better understand the hardware you are dealing with. In my mind the more you understand the underlying hardware the better equipped you are as a programmer, even if you are a "mediocre" one, the knowledge and tool itself is still indispensable when you need it. The thing about assembly in my mind is that its foundational knowledge is indispensable when you need it, like any language assembly is a knowledge and tool that is to be used where its needed. That's why it exists, until the full automation of problem solving by artificial means (i.e. AI or what have you), assembly in my opinion is very useful, and I'm sure windows contains quite a bit of assembly where it's needed in terms of speeding up responsive times of different aspects of the GUI.
"I'm assuming they're referring to using the built-in Windows Image Acquisition service for scanning and whatever the appropriate fax service is. In which case, I won't miss it. Chances are your scanner or fax/modem has drivers and/or software which handles all of this without using the less-functional built-in Windows abilities..."
The truth is many scanners still exist who's drivers are not updated anymore and Windows image acquisition service was the only way to scan things. I thought itwas a godsend for me, I have a perfectly usable scanner for OCR and other grunt work who's native software is no longer updated nor supported by it's parent company. I wish there was a law for discontinued products forcing companies to open source all software and related drivers, since it's a royal PITA to have stuff just stop working because an upgrade has made it "incompatible" or introduced show-stopper bugs. I speak from experience, I have an older scanner that does not work properly (i.e. the software works and then literally stops working) on windows XP because the scanner was released before XP came out.
"At the end of an hour-long show, I finally hit "stop" on the DVD recorder. In earlier, shorter tests it took about 30 seconds to write out the information for that hour. This time, it failed for some reason.
End result: the whole hour of recording was lost.
All the other nice features that would've come with recording to DVD were flushed right down the drain, for the simple reason the damn thing can't even guarantee that what I recorded would, in the end, actually be available to play back!"
That's why you go buy a hard disk recorder or one that takes flash and you wont have these problems. The fact is they should NEVER have invented "DVD Recorders" (i.e. in the vein of camcorders, etc). The problem my friend is that you bought a crappy invention. You would not have had that prob with a Hard disk recorder.
"What's _really_ missing is the _big_ picture, not cutesy representations of what the current function does. The problem isn't telling that a "for" is a loop, and frankly anyone who needs cutesy animations to realize it's a loop can go back to MacDonalds. What's missing is all that other stuff that this loop triggers, some of it burried under 20 levels of calls within calls."
Lol I just used that as a simple example, what I'm thinking about goes far beyond that one example. You're taking that example as the substance of what's in my head... of course it isn't or I wouldn't be talking with researchers at IBM now would I? hah.
"And finally here's a funny thought for you: the usual "bah, I could be such a great programmer if someone gave me a paint program instead of making me think" argument tends to always come back to the same example: electronic circuits. The argument goes, "see, if they can design an electronic circuit with all those funny symbols for transistors and diodes, the same can apply to programs." The funny part is that even electronics only uses those for really small circuits. If you think that, say, your CPU was drawn like that, square miles of symbols, you'd actually be wrong. It's basically designed like a program, by the numbers. Go figure."
Ahh but you're missing the point though, visual output of the programs is to help define mathematical functions in a real world way, and also to track how data moves through a loop and how data behaves in terms of SEEING IT VISUALLY, understanding its motion. Many complex bugs or memory leaks would be easily solved if you could "See the leak" or automate it's detection visually. Say you design some function or software component that has a real world physical-object counterpart in terms of how it behaves, etc (and many do). The truth is, if you could build programs like you would build the plumbing infrastructure of a city, it would make programming that much easier. Next much of what I'm proposing would could for the most part only be done on supercomputers at first anyway or programs of a smaller scale, but it would help the industry enormously. If you could go beyond the code. Math is nothing more then the abstract description and measurement of geometric shapes, their values and transformations in the real world, and not just "physical" shapes either, data-shapes, the shape of a sound, the value gradient or hue of a color, the feel of a surface and it's texture, monetary value (money as units of energy) --- all this is experienced by human minds as data-shapes. The whole experience of the world takes place in your mind, its not existing "out there", it's existing "in there" (in your head), your body is the signal receiver and data processor and the world is the transmitter. If your mind did not function you would have no experience of the word "out there".
I've been talking to some researchers at IBM and they think my ideas have a lot of merit, in other words: They know what I'm saying is true, the tools are the main barrier to better software engineering practices, because the current tools do not bring or help us clarify our understanding of what is actually happening and how code behaves properly.
Think about how real world objects behave and how easy it is even for non-technical people to be abstracted from how they work (i.e. they can use the tools without knowing how to design or maintain them for instance, i.e. windows, etc). The cool thing about software is that you can make any tool you want and make it behave in any fashion you want as long as you 1) Have the horsepower 2) Smarts and 3) The memory capacity. 4) Make a good human-to-machine interface.
And I do think you are wrong: Sure designing programs with millions of lines can't use "simple diagrams", my point is to design, invent new systems that help elucidate and clarify what is going on within a program that can be represented in visual chunks and seen an analyzed by different groups who know nothing of the code but because of the new invented visual way to represent what is happening they can understand "what is wrong" much easier, just like say an old time watchmaker can spot problems in complicated time piece at a glance due to partly his experience, but more so because he can actualy "see" the problem and knows what to look for. That my friend is the main problem with "software engineering" today. Maintainable and scalable code isn't "hard to design", if you had the right tools, horsepower and systems to help you understand WTF is going on with someone elses code at a glance, and not needing to de-jargify it as many people currently n
"I believe that games would do better to become more 'movie-esque' than vice versa"
While games becoming "movie-esque" is good and necessary for some games, there is also going overboard like RPG's currently do. Final fantasy 12 for instance, is not my idea of good gaming. The game recieved rave reviews but all you did in the game was navigate and watch a bunch of dumb stuff. You were not even "in" the game, it was basically an navigation simulator. I do not play games to to just walk around and not be able to make choices about how and which movements I use to interact with my environment in a positive way. Now imagine if they automated a game like Gradius V or Ikaruga and you see the problems of basically passivizing games into movies rendered on a CPU. Not my idea of "gaming".
More and more games are being dumbed down to the point of the game being a movie rendered in 3D on a computer with little to no interactivity. The great things about games is the interactivity. Show me how making Civilziation 4 for instance more "movie-esque" would make Civ 4 even more addictive or a better game? Or may be tetris just isn't "movie-esque" enough? The truth is the more graphical emphasis you place on a game the more money, resources and risk you expose yourself too. After all if you take away the meat of a game, at some point people are going to become bored and drop gaming entirely since games stopped being games.
The funny thing is: a program of 1000 lines, you can hold completely in your head. You don't even need test cases to tell you what you'll break by changing this or that, but even that's ok, because you won't have to change anything ever in an assignment. Plus, the scope is always simple enough so it either works or it doesn't, and you can manually prove one or the other in 5 minutes. (E.g., if your assignment is a heap sort, wth, you can just type in some numbers and see if they come out sorted. Why would you bother with a unit test for that?) You don't even need a good architecture or clear interfaces, because again, you'll never have to re-discover what it does or ever have to change it. It's always by definition write-only, so it's OK to write write-only code. Even 10,000 lines, if you're reasonably smart, you can do it. And that's already more code than in _any_ college assignement ever.
Move on to the real life and a 1,000,000 line project (which is actually a small one), and all the cool write-only hacks and the "it'll be manually tested at the end anyway" mentality you learned in college become a liability. You have to actually unlearn all the write-only habits that college taught you, and learn how to actually produce quality code.
The problem is programming tools are in the dark ages, you shouldn't have to remember lines of code, or even be able to read someone elses jargon code and try to figure out what it represents in how it actually works. The symbolic codespace is holding us back is stuck in arcane symbolic space when programming entities really need to be visualized and solidified into functional geometric objects that can be rendered and seen as "real objects" (as one would see a gear in a machine in the real world) within the compiler and tools of the language itself. In my opinion this is why software engineering is "more art then science" it's because you're trying to create great works with tools that haven't improved very much, its like trying to build a modern CPU with "hammers and nails", or the tools they used to make the very first CPU's.
That is the problem, most computer languages today are quite literally trapped by mathematical and symbolic terrorists and that is why "programming is so arcane" it's because the tools are jargified (i.e. prone to jargon and not real world definitions). It's stuck in the abstract, just remember mathematics is the abstractilization of the visual world we live in. So programming and tools should focus on the reverse: They should be the virtualization of the abstract into a visual model, or visual world. To coin a new phrase:: Digital Infophysics.
Programming large projects wouldn't be so difficult if the tools to engineer the actual info-physical components of a project could be rendered visually, animated in 3D, and could be walked through in real-time like you would in a game rendering say a city street or substructure of a city.
"The real problem with the H1B program is that it exports a bunch of knowledge for no good reason. The bright folks who want to come here should be encouraged to stay, not to stay for a while."
I doubt they'd want to when they can go home and get more out of the money they were paid in america, cost of living in america = too high. For someone who was brought in on an H1B, these people aren't stupid.
It's a damned if you do, damned if your don't issue. There are so many things about people that other people should know before they get involved. IMHO privacy for the most part is abused for people to hide their more evil intentions and generally being assholes, in some domain, economically, business, etc.
I sure as hell would like to know about all the professional dealings of lawyers to assess just who and what types of persons they are because of the power they wield and general bullshit that goes on in the legal field.
"it requires being knowledgeable in the theories of education also."
I'd say it also requires a good understanding of why "education" (forced skill adoption) is required in the first place. Everyones emphasis is on "education" (i.e. workplace training). Lots of education is in fact wonderful, but isn't profitable. What counts most in our society is what gets one the most profits unfortunately, and what gets you the most money isn't necessarily "educative", your mind becomes stamped out and molded to a certain degree and becomes very rigid if you are not wise enough to see the perspective "bubble" people get trapped in. This is why not all experts would make great teachers, in my opinion, if teachers learned from the "students that failed" we would learn more then many experts on how to teach.
Albert einstein had it correct: If you cannot clearly communicate your thoughts and explain principles behind the things you know, you are next to useless.
What is lost on many experts is the AXIS (vector) of translation, they use concepts that are not "complicated" but way too compressed i.e. they compress many ideas strung together into shorter and shorter words, leaving less meat about what they are talking about to non-colleagues, or people that are not in the same field of study, etc.
I own all my highschool textbooks and a textbook should allow any student to learn and go through the class on his own even without a teacher, many textbooks are not written at all in a correct, clear, and concise (clearly conceptualized) language from taking a beginner all the way through to next level.
C++ when I first started out was a big mystery because of the odd nature of it's syntax, then I picked up c++ primer plus and he opened the floodgates and I started understanding things immediately because he goes through and explains many of the things you need to know about the language itself before you even begin! So many "how to" books fail in that regard enormously.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad you disagree but in that remark I was dancing around the main issue: We have a huge problems birthed by the economic social order we have chosen to implement along with other disruptive technologies that lead to jobless and which make the bulk of humanity superfluous economically.
"By rewarding the most dedicated students and workers for putting in excessive hours, we only breed pathological attitudes about work."
The problem is we have deep problems with our ethos as a society because we have become so habituated to being driven by commercial principles: Work, Commerce, conspicuous consumption and Money.
Yet these same principles magically don't apply when kids go to school (work). Kids should get PAID to go to school, think about it, you're going to work for 13 (+2-4, etc years) of university and you're not getting paid a DIME for all that work you're doing, nor being reward for good marks. That's slavery my friend and it's socially sanctioned at that. It's no wonder kids are so jaded about school, they are forced to work for nothing and put into classes with people they may or may not get along with that will effect how their mind is shaped during critical stages of their life.
The real problem with school is a reflection of the economic model of society. Schools are there to control the flow of jobs into the market, the truth is many students could do many well paying jobs, so you need a way to create artificial barriers between "professionals" and "the skill-less".
"think that many schools and colleges are simply not challenging the creativity of the stu0dents."
Screw creativity, students are over worked enough as it is. They want to live their life and have free time, not be slaves of corporate capital like many of their parents. It's all about 1) money and 2) having more free time.
Being lazy is a VIRTUE, look at all the work-a-holic related problems with modern society, I'd proudly proclaim on a T-Shirt in my off ours that "I'm a lazy bastard", lazy meaning - I want to spend my time how I wish and not how society thinks I should spend it.
People cheat because they know that:
1) Much of what people (businesses, "teachers", etc) think you should learn is useless bullshit that will NEVER apply to your life (i.e. witness the college dropouts who went on to success because they were driven). Many papers I wrote in university were TOTAL BULLSHIT and yet I was passed with straight 90's.
2) You can't force students to learn shit presented in a dull way like many professors do. Students are hard to make self actualized as it is, if anything school beats curiosity and self-learning out of most people because they are forced to learn a lot of extraneous stuff so that school teachers have something to do with their time and won't lose their jobs. The truth is many educated people are superfluous (supply vs demand). As proven by offshoring, white collar jobs are the next to go.
I'd say most people hate school and only put up with it to pickup whatever skills will apply while rightly culling the rest so they can simply enjoy a half-decent standard of living and escape absolute poverty.
3) School's create distorted perceptions of who is able and who is not, I call this "professional dependency syndrome", the truth is what if the professionals suck? What if the whole system is fucked and everyone in their mother is mindlessly parroting their useless opinions as arguments, but people accept it because it's mutually agreed upon bullshit?
Game designers or teams go unrecognized, and it's TEAMS not just "designers". Designers are good for vision, but the most recent Nintendo's games on the cube and even TWP prove that Nintendo or it's development teams are losing touch with gaming.
1) Wind waker and TWP, both games that could have been much better
2) The tragedy that was Starfox assault since Nintendo desperately farmed it out (bad decision), most likely killing the franchise even more then it did with the re-badged dinosaur planet.
Miyamoto is over-rated, he let really bad design decisions go in wind waker and other projects. I'm hesitant to ascribe the success of any game to one person when I know that the blood and sweat of teams and programmers and artists are what glue the experience together...
People with:
1) Vision
2) Skill
3) Insane work ethic
4) Time and money to finish the game
That's what makes games ladies and gentlemen, games are enormous undertakings now-a-days, I do not envy anyone creating games while I do hate companies milking their products with expansions or cutting content to make a deadline. When you're flush with cash (epic, iD, etc) you should not be on "sacred" deadlines. IMO while gaming is a business, you're never going to push the genre forward without someone like
"I think it would be interesting to know about applications where the source code has been lost. To me, it would seem that running an app where no one has the source code implies zero vendor support."
The real problem is that companies should be required by law to open their source, intellectual property laws and all the other jargon actually hold back many good old programs and games from being updated, if the ethos of the culture wasn't so commercially and morally barbaric, much of the older software would be updated and maintained by the community of people who have invested in that software. Consumers (i.e. investors) should have rights to the source since they *invested* in the product when a company 1) Goes defunct or 2) Legimate barriers to running software (i.e. new OS, etc) get in the way of running the old application. No one on earth would tolerate it if their car just suddenly stopped working with a new upgraded part. But frequently thats exactly what happens with computers. The truth is the demographics of the world currently are not technologically savvy citizenry, they are little more then greedy barbaric monkeys playing with technology.
There is so many good things that could come if we just set free and required companies to release their source for their programs since... many programs are so huge it would take a lot of time to update them (i.e. serious community effort just to understand wtf is going on in a program).
Piracy, right... more like too many games, and too many mediocre games at that. The truth is there is simply way too many games for the market to support @ 50+ dollars a pop, then add in MMO's with their subscriptions and everything else and you have perfect storm. Next many games offer nothing new, why should gamers buy games that are simply upgraded rehashes? Game developers only have themselves to blame in their quest of chasing their expensive technolust tastes. The truth is the game industry is the cause of their lack of profit... let's see where the game industry went wrong...
1) While the game market has expanded, it hasn't expanded to keep up with development costs of high fidelity graphics that the industry is chasing.
2) Game industry did itself in, gamers do not control where money is invested, nor what it produces, gamers do not control any of the financial aspects of where money is spent in development (graphics vs. gameplay).
3) Capitalism and designing a good game do not always mix well, with it rubs up against the economic model of society. The more time you spend working on a game 99% of the time the better it will be, if you're independently wealthy or have connections like certain figures in the game industry you can take your sweet time. But the drive for short-term profit over long-term gains has been an emerging problem in the game industry since the PS2, Xbox and Gamecube.
The whole industry right now is suffering since gameplay is getting stale and more games sell based on graphics then gameplay. I was never sure that the game industries model was very stable in many respects. It's built on the whims of a customer base which is not only difficult to understand but is just too diverse to pigeonhole with terms like "hardcore gamer" vs "casual gamer", next add in the mad rush for profits and you get a glut of mediocre games. I wouldn't be surprised of gaming slows down (Tanks) for a bit in the future but as long as their are fresh bodies without gaming experience (new kids being born) they may just be able to keep getting away with rehash city.
"But that couldn't possibly be related to poor science education, could it?"
Could it possibly be that that American children have enormous populations with a strong christian heritage? Note that before modern science *everyone* was to some extent religious, in fact religion was the dominant explanation for why things were the way they were before darwin. Evolution seemed like a non-explanation before the tools were available to extrapolate the earth's great age which did a lot to upend most religions. It was the age of the universe and the earth that upended religion, not biological evolution.
Trauma theory explains religion as well: Slavery and exploitation has been a part of human history for a long time, Marx saw religion as a feature of capitalism, and to some extent it is a feature of the stress put on people in the economic system. But the reason why people believe is because the death instinct is so strong, the whole reason religion was invented was to counteract teh painfully depressing realization that: You are going to die. You can dress it up with feelings of being jewed before humanity invented life extension technology or what have you, but that sum's up a big reason why people believe. If "sacred text" X's god offered you a pat on the back and a bag of chips would anyone follow that god?
No matter how you slice it some people will never believe in something the can't see or witness for themselves (ironically) that goes against their genetically determined instincts. I wouldn't be surprised if it was found out genetically that they have strong psychological predisposition towards god belief and it just takes the form of Christianity since that is the geographic religion.
... Memorable encounters with enemies and NPC's are. The truth is what made Halo so great was how you could interact with the enemies in the game and how the enemy was made to seem "alive", like how they spoke in their own language and how the little guys spoke english like "Grenade!!" when you tossed a grenade at them, and the crazy things they'd do you when you stuck a grenade on them. Next A.I. is a huge topic, things as simple and mind numbingly dumb (to the gamer) as pathfinding are made needlessly complex, I'm especially annoyed by supreme commanders decision not to make friendly units pass through other friendlies, the pathfinding is at times so cumbersome a lot of time is wasted, it holds back the player. A.I. should never frustate the player experience (unless its in terms of difficulty/challenge settings). Next, A.I. Cannot be divorced from other elements of the game: Like animations, how models interact with one another, etc. After all A.I. is the glue
One of the reasons supreme commander hasn't lived up to the hype is you can't move the camera to enjoy the battle like is seen in the video's. Take the best games... like Halo and God of War, what do they have in common?
1) Interactivity with the enemies (i.e. grabbing, throwing, stabbing, etc, YOU CHOOSE how an enemy dies, i.e. throw, vs slice in half, etc)
2) Great animation and cinematography camera work.
So it's not about making A.I. Complicated, many real intelligent thins are "stupid" (obey rules) that give rise to complex behavior.
"Gut-less new generation of protestors"
Gutless or too distracted by TV, video games and all the other forms of what basically amounts to a kind of fun-a-holism and escapism, a form of denial of the horrible state of things.
"Anyway, this is Hedonism for the richest. "
It also vulgar, there are people suffocating economically in our society, to think of the money that's being wasted on a fucking toy makes me sick, that people allow themselves to be dominated by rich people and absorb their ideology, when 90% of them will never ever be rich and the hyper competitive ideology is against their own interests.
"I said it before, and I'll say it again. If you buy this card, then you deserve Everything You Deserve To Get(tm)."
The truth is shit like this should never be allowed to be released in the market, too many fraudulent greedy capitalists are to blame for a lot of mediocre products that take advantage of peoples ignorance.
"Email has failed"
Speak for yourself buddy. Email and IM are enormous boons to keeping in contact and making friends who share common interests across the world, what is slashdot if not a giant email discussion list in the form of a bulletin board?
The real problem I believe is that email isn't personal enough and good videocamera's integrated into computers for "email" the next big thing is vloging or "vlogging" if someone finally made a workable video phone with optional image broadcast with a decent display and ratio adjuster, that just worked everywhere. It would sell, believe you me.
"In my personal experience, classrooms that were structured were one of the best methods for me. In the end though, the best way to learn is to practice, which may be why the structure of the classroom was most effective for me."
I think classroom structure is good, but at the same time it stifles the mind. My most effective learning and reasoning was learned once I left school and university and simply was allowed to browse what interested me on the internet, and weigh and measure things myself instead of being told what is good and what isn't, by some school admiinstration or hidden authority figures who write curriculum's and textbooks.
Presentation of data matters, there is no universal way to communicate clearly and effectively to all people, and this is part of the reason the school system fails our children, I learned this from my many years of combing the internet for data. How one person describes something will only be understood easily by a certain group of people, you could re-write what the person has said and clear it up, go into more precise detail to make it more clear and accurate for someone else. Experts tend to compress enormous amounts of conceptual data into fewer words which makes teaching someone from scratch difficult: Just because you're an expert does not mean you'll make a good teacher... I've learned that language and visualizing data properly is the critical issue in education, how a person builds and constructs his understanding is wholly dependent upon the shape of the data itself, and the shape of the data must be allowed to be perturbed and re-written into different versions and flavors of the descriptions given to each individual student as much as possible, the internet and wikipedia like software allow for this mass-automatic ease of manipulation, and also forcing the student into real world situations where he has to use what he has learned to come up with his own solutions and conclusions.
Too much emphasis is placed on grading kids over a set period of time, instead of letting kids learn at their own pace, I know many kids who are slow but absolutely brilliant, but their brilliant thoughts take longer to coalesce in their minds. School tries to force kids to think at the pace of the system or economy, and thats where our society does the most damage: Rush rush rush, money money money. Kids may have shitty marks or middling IQ's but they are sharp as a knife when it comes to observing and understanding what is going on around them.
The internet has made me learn more from discussions and access to both non-traditionally and traditionally smart people I never had in my schools and universities. I was taught to think so rigidly and inflexibly about many things. I exposed myself to other veins of thought far away from western academia. The focus on precision and "objective science" and hard accuracy is all well and good but at the same time it's also blinding, you try to be overly accurate or go too in depth into the basics, before anything is believed or trusted and nothing ever gets understood or done on the whole. People today suffer from anal retentive addiction to "objectivity" or over-analysis with some mixture of science thrown in, as if someones personal experiences counted for nothing, and the only thing that mattered were studies done by "scientists" of varying degrees quality done far away from other people in the real world who live in a variety of different contexts divorced from what a single group of people study and measure.
Take economics for instance: It's not very complicated to understand assuming you don't have a propagandist who wishes to distort the publics understanding of economics. Money is nothing more then energy, a supply that the government controls within any economy to prevent run-away effects and over-consumption of limited resources. But ultimately at the same time it also causes social problems because people no longer own the means of production and therefore the are forced to "compete" against a collecti
"My DS is happy with being a little machine for games. It doesn't want to run my life, and I think a lot of casual-to-moderate gamers don't really want their console to become an online/entertainment hub. The games are the thing."
I think you illustrate a problem though: That brilliant people have to limit their designs and trim options to fit a mediocre, workaholic time constrained culture. Downloading a patch, or signing up for a game is hardly wanting to "run your life". The fact is you choose which games you play or you don't, no video game business has the power to make your choices for you in terms of how far you go.
"...even a year doing tools in Graphing calculator basic will teach appreciation for not wasting cycles doing everything the lazy way, 'cause sure, you usiung strcat doesn't slow the system in a noticable way, but when half the processes running are using it, and using it in "hotspots" suddenly you need a new machine because it's just not fast enough."
This is exactly why some knowledge of assembly and the basics is important, small performance enhancements on functions that will be replicated and used many times in the same processes and also in multiple programs saves a lot of performance. It's the same as reducing just a bit the amount of electricity one uses by simply turning off a light, but you add up all those little choices across a growing population and you start seeing enormous efficiency gains from that one adjustment to the efficiency of commonly used functions.
"Maybe, except that not many assembly programmers can make faster code than a C compiler anyway. It's no use being a mediocre assembly programmer."
A mediocre assembly programmer can become better with practice. Also there is simply doing something for you to better understand the hardware you are dealing with. In my mind the more you understand the underlying hardware the better equipped you are as a programmer, even if you are a "mediocre" one, the knowledge and tool itself is still indispensable when you need it. The thing about assembly in my mind is that its foundational knowledge is indispensable when you need it, like any language assembly is a knowledge and tool that is to be used where its needed. That's why it exists, until the full automation of problem solving by artificial means (i.e. AI or what have you), assembly in my opinion is very useful, and I'm sure windows contains quite a bit of assembly where it's needed in terms of speeding up responsive times of different aspects of the GUI.
"I'm assuming they're referring to using the built-in Windows Image Acquisition service for scanning and whatever the appropriate fax service is. In which case, I won't miss it. Chances are your scanner or fax/modem has drivers and/or software which handles all of this without using the less-functional built-in Windows abilities..."
The truth is many scanners still exist who's drivers are not updated anymore and Windows image acquisition service was the only way to scan things. I thought itwas a godsend for me, I have a perfectly usable scanner for OCR and other grunt work who's native software is no longer updated nor supported by it's parent company. I wish there was a law for discontinued products forcing companies to open source all software and related drivers, since it's a royal PITA to have stuff just stop working because an upgrade has made it "incompatible" or introduced show-stopper bugs. I speak from experience, I have an older scanner that does not work properly (i.e. the software works and then literally stops working) on windows XP because the scanner was released before XP came out.
"At the end of an hour-long show, I finally hit "stop" on the DVD recorder. In earlier, shorter tests it took about 30 seconds to write out the information for that hour. This time, it failed for some reason.
End result: the whole hour of recording was lost.
All the other nice features that would've come with recording to DVD were flushed right down the drain, for the simple reason the damn thing can't even guarantee that what I recorded would, in the end, actually be available to play back!"
That's why you go buy a hard disk recorder or one that takes flash and you wont have these problems. The fact is they should NEVER have invented "DVD Recorders" (i.e. in the vein of camcorders, etc). The problem my friend is that you bought a crappy invention. You would not have had that prob with a Hard disk recorder.
"What's _really_ missing is the _big_ picture, not cutesy representations of what the current function does. The problem isn't telling that a "for" is a loop, and frankly anyone who needs cutesy animations to realize it's a loop can go back to MacDonalds. What's missing is all that other stuff that this loop triggers, some of it burried under 20 levels of calls within calls."
Lol I just used that as a simple example, what I'm thinking about goes far beyond that one example. You're taking that example as the substance of what's in my head... of course it isn't or I wouldn't be talking with researchers at IBM now would I? hah.
Ahh but you're missing the point though, visual output of the programs is to help define mathematical functions in a real world way, and also to track how data moves through a loop and how data behaves in terms of SEEING IT VISUALLY, understanding its motion. Many complex bugs or memory leaks would be easily solved if you could "See the leak" or automate it's detection visually. Say you design some function or software component that has a real world physical-object counterpart in terms of how it behaves, etc (and many do). The truth is, if you could build programs like you would build the plumbing infrastructure of a city, it would make programming that much easier. Next much of what I'm proposing would could for the most part only be done on supercomputers at first anyway or programs of a smaller scale, but it would help the industry enormously. If you could go beyond the code. Math is nothing more then the abstract description and measurement of geometric shapes, their values and transformations in the real world, and not just "physical" shapes either, data-shapes, the shape of a sound, the value gradient or hue of a color, the feel of a surface and it's texture, monetary value (money as units of energy) --- all this is experienced by human minds as data-shapes. The whole experience of the world takes place in your mind, its not existing "out there", it's existing "in there" (in your head), your body is the signal receiver and data processor and the world is the transmitter. If your mind did not function you would have no experience of the word "out there".
I've been talking to some researchers at IBM and they think my ideas have a lot of merit, in other words: They know what I'm saying is true, the tools are the main barrier to better software engineering practices, because the current tools do not bring or help us clarify our understanding of what is actually happening and how code behaves properly.
Think about how real world objects behave and how easy it is even for non-technical people to be abstracted from how they work (i.e. they can use the tools without knowing how to design or maintain them for instance, i.e. windows, etc). The cool thing about software is that you can make any tool you want and make it behave in any fashion you want as long as you 1) Have the horsepower 2) Smarts and 3) The memory capacity. 4) Make a good human-to-machine interface.
And I do think you are wrong: Sure designing programs with millions of lines can't use "simple diagrams", my point is to design, invent new systems that help elucidate and clarify what is going on within a program that can be represented in visual chunks and seen an analyzed by different groups who know nothing of the code but because of the new invented visual way to represent what is happening they can understand "what is wrong" much easier, just like say an old time watchmaker can spot problems in complicated time piece at a glance due to partly his experience, but more so because he can actualy "see" the problem and knows what to look for. That my friend is the main problem with "software engineering" today. Maintainable and scalable code isn't "hard to design", if you had the right tools, horsepower and systems to help you understand WTF is going on with someone elses code at a glance, and not needing to de-jargify it as many people currently n
"I believe that games would do better to become more 'movie-esque' than vice versa"
While games becoming "movie-esque" is good and necessary for some games, there is also going overboard like RPG's currently do. Final fantasy 12 for instance, is not my idea of good gaming. The game recieved rave reviews but all you did in the game was navigate and watch a bunch of dumb stuff. You were not even "in" the game, it was basically an navigation simulator. I do not play games to to just walk around and not be able to make choices about how and which movements I use to interact with my environment in a positive way. Now imagine if they automated a game like Gradius V or Ikaruga and you see the problems of basically passivizing games into movies rendered on a CPU. Not my idea of "gaming".
More and more games are being dumbed down to the point of the game being a movie rendered in 3D on a computer with little to no interactivity. The great things about games is the interactivity. Show me how making Civilziation 4 for instance more "movie-esque" would make Civ 4 even more addictive or a better game? Or may be tetris just isn't "movie-esque" enough? The truth is the more graphical emphasis you place on a game the more money, resources and risk you expose yourself too. After all if you take away the meat of a game, at some point people are going to become bored and drop gaming entirely since games stopped being games.
The problem is programming tools are in the dark ages, you shouldn't have to remember lines of code, or even be able to read someone elses jargon code and try to figure out what it represents in how it actually works. The symbolic codespace is holding us back is stuck in arcane symbolic space when programming entities really need to be visualized and solidified into functional geometric objects that can be rendered and seen as "real objects" (as one would see a gear in a machine in the real world) within the compiler and tools of the language itself. In my opinion this is why software engineering is "more art then science" it's because you're trying to create great works with tools that haven't improved very much, its like trying to build a modern CPU with "hammers and nails", or the tools they used to make the very first CPU's.
That is the problem, most computer languages today are quite literally trapped by mathematical and symbolic terrorists and that is why "programming is so arcane" it's because the tools are jargified (i.e. prone to jargon and not real world definitions). It's stuck in the abstract, just remember mathematics is the abstractilization of the visual world we live in. So programming and tools should focus on the reverse: They should be the virtualization of the abstract into a visual model, or visual world. To coin a new phrase:: Digital Infophysics. Programming large projects wouldn't be so difficult if the tools to engineer the actual info-physical components of a project could be rendered visually, animated in 3D, and could be walked through in real-time like you would in a game rendering say a city street or substructure of a city.
An interesting post on bookofhook here -- http://www.bookofhook.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=80 4
"The real problem with the H1B program is that it exports a bunch of knowledge for no good reason. The bright folks who want to come here should be encouraged to stay, not to stay for a while."
I doubt they'd want to when they can go home and get more out of the money they were paid in america, cost of living in america = too high. For someone who was brought in on an H1B, these people aren't stupid.
It's a damned if you do, damned if your don't issue. There are so many things about people that other people should know before they get involved. IMHO privacy for the most part is abused for people to hide their more evil intentions and generally being assholes, in some domain, economically, business, etc.
I sure as hell would like to know about all the professional dealings of lawyers to assess just who and what types of persons they are because of the power they wield and general bullshit that goes on in the legal field.
"it requires being knowledgeable in the theories of education also."
I'd say it also requires a good understanding of why "education" (forced skill adoption) is required in the first place. Everyones emphasis is on "education" (i.e. workplace training). Lots of education is in fact wonderful, but isn't profitable. What counts most in our society is what gets one the most profits unfortunately, and what gets you the most money isn't necessarily "educative", your mind becomes stamped out and molded to a certain degree and becomes very rigid if you are not wise enough to see the perspective "bubble" people get trapped in. This is why not all experts would make great teachers, in my opinion, if teachers learned from the "students that failed" we would learn more then many experts on how to teach.
Albert einstein had it correct: If you cannot clearly communicate your thoughts and explain principles behind the things you know, you are next to useless.
What is lost on many experts is the AXIS (vector) of translation, they use concepts that are not "complicated" but way too compressed i.e. they compress many ideas strung together into shorter and shorter words, leaving less meat about what they are talking about to non-colleagues, or people that are not in the same field of study, etc.
I own all my highschool textbooks and a textbook should allow any student to learn and go through the class on his own even without a teacher, many textbooks are not written at all in a correct, clear, and concise (clearly conceptualized) language from taking a beginner all the way through to next level.
C++ when I first started out was a big mystery because of the odd nature of it's syntax, then I picked up c++ primer plus and he opened the floodgates and I started understanding things immediately because he goes through and explains many of the things you need to know about the language itself before you even begin! So many "how to" books fail in that regard enormously.
"Pay should be based on qualifications and performance, not experience."
Let me put it another way: Pay should be passed on performance AND experience, tested and updated every so often.
Qualifications don't mean all that, I've seen too many "paper" teachers, who are excellent STUDENTS but poor TEACHERS.