"It's a good thing I didn't grow up with your definitions of "boring" and "cool". Your statement that math is important is laudable but it is deeply contaminated by the addenda that it is also hard and boring."
You have to understand that for most many kids it is a boring subject because they can't see the relevance of it in their daily lives, even though they know it's important for certain jobs, many kids simply wont' learn to love learning about math if it is not handled well by who-ever's teaching it. I'm absolutely sure math education is handled badly in many places (from my own experience).
Now it's not that math is necessarily boring but it IS how it is taught that gives kids the perception that math is hard and boring.
Trust me on this one I'd argue with you that current mathematicians and mathematics teachers have not approached the teaching math correclty in many regards, I know this because I had to go about learning certain how to observe the world first using more basic principles before one even gets to symbolic computation.
I know because I came across debates and alternative framings of mathematics in my travels such as:
There are many ways to frame mathematical concepts in better ways that give one a better conceptual foundation on how to observe and conceive mathematically before one even does any kind of computation.
Take myself for instance: Most of my thought is entirely visual, i.e. geometric, graphic.
My weakness is juggling symbols, therefore I have a preference for visualizing numbers as objects interacting physically to understand something.
Things like graphs, charts, shapes, models, figures are better fit then teaching raw equations out of a textbook for me, this is why I had such a frustrating time with mathematics.
I'm currently doing original research and hope to compile it into a book so others can see that math is much deeper then anyone has yet thought of.
I respect those in the profession and do not deny their great achievements and contributions but they do not have a monopoly on the truth about mathematics or how something can be seen radically differently from how matehmatics has been tradtionally structured.
"I kid of course, but your concise use of grammar, punctuation, etc indicates that your traditional education was not a total waste as you seem to paint it."
I disagree, traditional education basically sucks the life out of kids. When we are kids there are a lot of cool things we want to do but we don't know how to go about doing them. I would have loved to have learned to program by someone leading us through the construction of small simple games and telling us why the hard boring stuff (like math) is important, kids want to accomlish their dreams and once they realize it takes hard stuff they will 1) Discipline themselves to do it (because they want to accomplish that cool goal) or 2) They will find an area more to their liking.
There are those who have the persistance to work hard and there are those kids who don't, we do a disservice to the kids with big goals and dreams and not nurtering them.
What I wouldn't give for someone like John carmack to write a book about learning to write small 2D games, etc, with feedback from those who had to learn the hardway (i.e. have insight on how to teacn and structure a lesson in terms of capturing kids interest).
Kids want to learn stuff we just suck the joy out of learning because we don't give them cool things to work on that teach teh lesson that -- cool things require lots of hard boring stuff to accomplish but the end result is awesome.
Now if we can ramp up this boring stuff by taking cool complex stuff and giving them access to chunks of stuff they can handle (i.e. take animation of cool things that blowup like say a car in burnout, and allow them to tweak matehmatical values to see the results they get)
They can start seeing a direct feedback relationship between what they are learning and doing cool stuff.
But that's the whole point. You see for many people... knowledge of facts cannot be disconnected into discrete areas of knowledge disconnected from one another.
People want an overarching story and purpose for their lives. Everything I said in my previous post shows you don't understand people's desire for purpose and higher unified meaning in life at all.
"And it reminded me of how some who should know better do so very little to help the religious understand science"
You don't get it, I've realized the same thing you have and after my many years of polite discussion with people *they will not change*. They have predecided their need for god, if it wasn't christianity it would be whatever else was available.
Either people have a desire for truth or they have a desire for IDENTITY. Religious people who believe in god according to our ancestors sacred text *need identity*, the ones that come out of religion on their own are the ones who've always doubted somewhere in the backs of their minds that it was always false and put up a pretense to get along to save themselves the suffering of being the odd one out of their communities. I know because I've been through it.
People have a deep seated need to believe their is some higher purpose in life and if one is to take science at face value, the worldview it forms is pretty bleak... you only have a few options
You have: Endless recurrence (of ultimatley we find out existence is eternal), things are constantly created and destroyed in and endless cycle of universal expansion and collapse.
Or science finds out no matter what we do the universe will one day end finally killing everything in it and the universe will 'end' once and for all.
Science can be depressing in that while it may give us hope it also shows us just how powerless we are over nature and that there are large destructive forces in the universe that may well always be beyond our power to manipulate or control that will make all our striving for nothing.
There's a joke about elephants having the biggest brains but having never engaged in civilization - it's because they've calculated it all and that it's all pointless in the end.
"Most people love their graphics, even if they'll then claim 'gameplay' is important on some survey"
Graphics is a part of gameplay. They are not seperate, hence we call them VIDEO games and not "games mechanics that can't be seen", a game mechanic that is, control, animation systems and visual feedback are all tied together. You can't divorce them from one another in many games without losing something.
The video aspect of a game has always mattered. It's not that graphics DONT matter, it's that graphics have to have a certain standard before one considers it worth playing vs all the other games you could be playing or else the game itself has to compensate in the gameplay department. Remember every game has to compete with every other game released that one could be playing since the dawn of video games, there are lots of old commercial retro games that are STILL competitive in today's environment, truth is many developers suck at making games... that's the real problem.
Take Sins of a solare empire or galactic civilizations 2, two ugly'ish games by all accounts but a game I play now and then over other more graphically pretty games.
Graphical prettyness cannot compensate for lack of depth in genres like Civ4 and alpha centarui and other games in that vein.
It also assumes that gamers know what actually is necessary for a games success. Much of what causes a game to be a success is many times NON OBVIOUS.
A word like "Gameplay" is too deep and nuanced and changes from game to game, just like how do you capture the "Feel", control and sense of speed in a racing game?
Or what about the fluid battle mechanics of god of war compared to other clunkier games?
Truth is one study is not definitive and I'd trust hardcore gamers before I trust pointificating researchers on what makes a successful game, since the elite among the hardcore play types of games and have refined gaming tastes and are also into analysis of what makes fun, they attempt to pick apart games and can usually tell you in a review right away what's wrong and they always usually post the harshest most realistic scores for games. Instead of uninformed pablum that passes for the gamers without a gaming history going back into the NES era or even further back.
... because making software is time consuming and hardwork and doesn't pay the bills.
The reason commercial software is preferred to free software is that commercial software is still better then free.
That and linux can't run windows apps perfectly, I would move to linux if it
1) had the same shell as say windows xp 2) was faster in performance then windows (i.e. games had higher framerates under linux and there was no bullshit compatability, things "just worked".
The best free software has a lot of great ideas but the problem is that software takes too much work and time from these guys lives without any compensation, they can't compete because
1) They usually over-estimate their coding skills 2) They code for themselves NOT for users
When making any program you're coding for that "motherfucker" the public, therefore you can't make a program for coders, you have to make a program for users, ease of use.
In the early days of video editing software, almost all video editing software was complicated for what joe user needed it for, finally for profit companies came to the rescue, companies like ULEAD for instance.
Take a lot of the pain of video editing out of video editing for the average user who just wants to mash up videos, cut paste, etc.
Open source guys obviously don't use or are unaware of how to do things better, when any company or person hits on the "magic user interface formla" you have to copy it and make it even better for the user if there is room for improvement.
The thing is good software design is hard and time consuming for the output you get over time spent, it literally takes years to figure out how to build good software, since developing good software is extremely labour intensive.
"Is all of that really so much easier than attracting customers by having the best product at the best price point?"
The problem is customers are stupid and undiscriminating twits, who will say one thing but do another. There's a difference between what someone thinks they want or says they want and what they actually end up doing. Kind of like how most people believe they are above average intelligence. I agree that to some extent a great product at a great price will sell but it's not always the case. Take the x86 cpu's for instance, there are certain products that are "black boxes" to end users and end users only care about the software, the best hardware in teh world is irrelevant to most people without great software be it entertainment or otherwise they want to use.
This is why console companies can sell crappy hardware and push the software envelope. The PS2 was totally inferior platform for games and it ended winning the console race because 'it was good enough' and thats where developers focused their energies when making games. If developers had abandoned the PS2 for the cube or xbox, the PS2 would have died but the PS1 took advantage of Nintendo's big mistake with the n64 and the limited cartridge based storage and it's clock cleaned.
MP3 players are a case in point, there were better players with more functionality and whatnot but most people are simple minded twits and things like style or image (ipod) can win out over substance. ipod was "good enough", there is a point where people will buy whatever is good enough, but this also has a tendency for companies to target or exploit this averageness or mediocrity, and this is why many products tend towards mediocrity as a whole (see: films like trasnformers 2).
Also see this article on the "good enough" revolution:
It has a point in that targeting peoples price points for simple to use mediocre products (like video cameras for making home movies, etc). But this goes to prove the adage - profit gives way to medicority, things like planned obselescene, trying to find cheaper (less longer lasting) components for things reducing their durability and whatnot.
"The way I see it, if we pass strong pro-privacy laws that take such data-mining off the table entirely, and companies are instead forced to, y'know, actually be competitive,"
Laws are irrelevant against insiders with lots of money, if you are well off go check out private investigators and see what kind of shit they can find on you despite so called "privacy laws". There are guys that can come up with shit that will surprise the living fuck out of you.
Knowledge about people is a commodity like any other, privacy laws cannot stop the end of privacy since to exist in the world one can deduce your actions through economic transactions and computer camera tracking (i.e. whenever you walk into a store your habits aren't just being taped for anti theft measures, this shit is studied for how to best exploit subconscious processes or flaws in human minds to get them to buy stuff).
Companies with enough cash and political currency basically get to do whatever they damn well please, those that can't get away with it are those without sufficient financial or political currency.
"Private should mean no disclosure, not anonymized disclosure, not aggregate disclosure, just plain no disclosure period."
The profit motive and privacy are at odds, trying to make the most money and sell the most stuff means you want to know everything about everyone so that you can one up you competitors, it's a race to the bottom. Ideals in the real world always submit to the pragmatic concerns of making money in a capitalist society.
The public domain from "content creators" (read: Greedy swill who want perpetual revenue off of a finite amount of work). The real issue is that IP is a gold mine for IP owners, this is why you have things like patent trolling and trademark issues.
Information should not be able to be "owned" by anyone and this whole cult of ownership is the problem, no "content creator" has a right to profit period, copyrights were to ENCOURAGE the production of works, not the suffocation of creativity as it is now.
All copyrights/IP for entertainment should have fixed 10 year limits, for special cases or industries (drugs, science, tech, etc) stuff would have to be worked out, but as it stands IP is increasingly authoritarian it gives monopoly and rent seeking behaviour legitmacy.
I think intellectual property is more trouble then it's worth and the economic model (profot model) is a failure when considering information is always derivative and the same archetypes and concepts will be reinvented and come up over and over again.
People inventing/discovering the same thing in different places on their own, yet copyright/IP fucks all that up enormously.
All IP works should be co-owned by society itself, none of this individual owner crap, if you create a work I buy (such as a game) I have a right as a member of society to the source code assets to be stored in a library somewhere so when it expires I can modify/update it as I will.
IP isn't IP because property is not property when someone elses buys a copy of it, the "IP owner" can tell the "IP renter" what he can and cannot do with Intellectual property he paid for but doesn't "own".
Consumers need some kind of protection and ownership rights over all IP they buy, so they can force the things they funded into public domain after a fixed period of time since right now, companies and "creators" are the most abusive mofo's on the planet.
"It is a waste of money and of resources to include a cable if people don't need it."
Actully third parties already produce cheaper cables I got a cable (forget the company, madcatz?) that is a single cable with hookups for the PS2, xbox and gamecube all one one cable and I bought two of them. Oh here it is:
I don't know why they just don't include one cable with all three types of hookups on them. It makes life a lot easier, you think with them subsidizing the hardware they could subsidize a univeral cable that works.
"It's a shame, because I think that for many students, these kinds of programs could provide an education as good or better than a traditional classroom for a much lower price. But until there is a good reason to take the final transcript seriously,"
You could have them take a hardcore many day exam @ an accredited university. It's not that online courses don't work it's that you only get out of them what you put into them, those going for marks are missing the point. The great thing about online learning is dialogue, criticism and discussion for those who are serious about learning.
"- Make the game challenging. Make it 'hard' without actually even having be hard. But give the gamer a sense of accomplishment. You don't do this by making him have to shoot 30.000 of identical aliens btw"
"I have seen the end of supersonic passenger aircraft (for the time being, with no resumption in sight)."
This had to do with economies of scale, the idea that technology has no limits is a bit disturbing sometimes I think people here think technology is MAGICAL, all technologies ultimately have to submit to the laws of physics and economic viability.
Things like supersonic passenger aircraft were shown not to be economically viable yet.
The idea that technology "regresses" is a bit of a misnomer, what happens is that some key technology or scientific advance has not yet happened to make such technologies economically viable just yet.
"If I make a backup copy of a UMD game I purchased, it can never be anything remotely resembling theft........ Of course we could make the argument that since we bought the original liscenses to old games we don't have to pay for them again when they become available (i.e. once you buy a liscense it can't be revoked).
The fair use case you mention is an excellent example of hypocrisy of the industry itself when it comes to old games they re-release but to whom the customer already owns the license to access it. Ironically enough "piracy" is justified in this case if we are to take the "license" seriously (I already bought the license to play x game x years ago, you re-release it, I still have the license, etc).
... many modern games are mediocre Sometimes I wish they need to lay off the marketing and pour that money into the game and giving devs more time to work on it.
"For some reason we seem determined to systematically destroy all places that are sources of food. Intention doesn't usually seem to have anything to do with it, it seems to be a consequence of system design principles that we ignore (consciously...they aren't invisible, just unnoticed)."
That reason is capitalism + specialization (the plus is important) which requires constant growth (buying/selling) and expansion.
The for profit system + specialization (where people no longer can provide their own food clothing). Requires things must be bought and sold constantly in order to keep the economy moving along.
John adams noted this a while back:
Adams worried that a businessman might have financial interests that conflicted with republican duty; indeed, he was especially suspicious of banks. He decided that history taught that "the Spirit of Commerce . . . is incompatible with that purity of Heart, and Greatness of soul which is necessary for a happy Republic." But so much of that spirit of commerce had infected America. In New England, Adams noted, "even the Farmers and Tradesmen are addicted to Commerce." As a result, there was "a great Danger that a Republican Government would be very factious and turbulent there."
Oh no doubt about it I agree but the problem is that human beings didn't stick to a universal standard of pronunciation, they always make special rules for new words or a minority of words.
plough should be PLOW
donor could be doughnor if there was some standard for spelling (to signify how the vowel is pronounced) either that and do away with using special pronunciation rules/spellings to begin with, but a lot of this is seen in many languages and I'm sure most human beings "just wing it".
I agree that some english words should definitely be spelled how they are pronounced, it would also help if we didn't use single words for different things but I have a feeling this too (one word, multiple meanings) has something to do with saving space and sharing meanings/relationships that apply to a wide range of words unconsciously on the neurological level.
"You mention some good points; however, regarding the reading speed issue, the best way to improve reading speed is simply to do it often"
No doubt about it but there are limits imposed by working memory and the like, as you saw in my post I made unconscious errors like omitted words or had the wrong ones, notice the word misretrieval in my sentence:
""They" I will often time "the"'
That should have read "[when I mean to type] "They" I will often TYPE "the""... but notice my mind pulled TIME and sent the motor information for the word time because they both start with T and are stored neurologically close to one another all this happens unconsciously and you don't realize it until afterword and sometimes not at all.
You should check out some books on advances in neurological science, go read some papers/books on common errors and learning, once I started I began to lay off spelling errors/mistakes, etc made in posts online and whatnot.
Alot of our anger is really misplaced (due to ignorance) since most thought is unconscious and they are discovering a heck of a lot of errors/gaps and blindness. Check out change blindness here:
This could be applied to a lot of phenomenon where we go to re-read our post or check our post for errors find some but miss others, even though we DID look for mistakes.
... truth is BASE 10 should have never been used for computers from the start. The storage hardware manufacturers just wanted to lie to make their products look better then they are (as per usual in business).
Hardware manufacturers being close to computer sciences really should have known better. By keeping the standard and just publishing both BASE2 and BASE10 just like how where I live we have english AND french words on packaging.
"You simple can't just "Turn it off" which is what many people are fearing. "
You wouldn't need to turn it off only screw with DNS servers for most of the population. I can tell you what a pain in the ass it is not to have DNS servers working properly, for most people who are internet illiterate screwing with the internet DNS would work at various places because most people don't know what DNS is or how to change it.
Mediocrity is a function of not being able to spend all ones resources on ones pet project.
Lets face it the way capitalism works assures us that infinite resources cannot be dedicated to any product and one must have a large enough population who shares the same interest in quality that you do and have enough money to pay for them for such products to take off.
Lastly, mediocre products are a sign of the lack of intelligence and powers of discrimination of most of the population.
Slashdot Mirror
"It's a good thing I didn't grow up with your definitions of "boring" and "cool". Your statement that math is important is laudable but it is deeply contaminated by the addenda that it is also hard and boring."
You have to understand that for most many kids it is a boring subject because they can't see the relevance of it in their daily lives, even though they know it's important for certain jobs, many kids simply wont' learn to love learning about math if it is not handled well by who-ever's teaching it. I'm absolutely sure math education is handled badly in many places (from my own experience).
Now it's not that math is necessarily boring but it IS how it is taught that gives kids the perception that math is hard and boring.
Trust me on this one I'd argue with you that current mathematicians and mathematics teachers have not approached the teaching math correclty in many regards, I know this because I had to go about learning certain how to observe the world first using more basic principles before one even gets to symbolic computation.
I know because I came across debates and alternative framings of mathematics in my travels such as:
http://www.symmetryperfect.com/
Youd' never learn in school that you were taught math was only one group of men's way of viewing mathematics.
Also check out Mayan numerals here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayan_numerals
There are many ways to frame mathematical concepts in better ways that give one a better conceptual foundation on how to observe and conceive mathematically before one even does any kind of computation.
Take myself for instance: Most of my thought is entirely visual, i.e. geometric, graphic.
My weakness is juggling symbols, therefore I have a preference for visualizing numbers as objects interacting physically to understand something.
Things like graphs, charts, shapes, models, figures are better fit then teaching raw equations out of a textbook for me, this is why I had such a frustrating time with mathematics.
I'm currently doing original research and hope to compile it into a book so others can see that math is much deeper then anyone has yet thought of.
I respect those in the profession and do not deny their great achievements and contributions but they do not have a monopoly on the truth about mathematics or how something can be seen radically differently from how matehmatics has been tradtionally structured.
I wonder if they'd be open to posting lectures as well as coursework online, that would be a boon for people that don't live in the area.
I would have so went for something like that when I was a kid, but that was pre-interent days.
"I kid of course, but your concise use of grammar, punctuation, etc indicates that your traditional education was not a total waste as you seem to paint it."
I disagree, traditional education basically sucks the life out of kids. When we are kids there are a lot of cool things we want to do but we don't know how to go about doing them. I would have loved to have learned to program by someone leading us through the construction of small simple games and telling us why the hard boring stuff (like math) is important, kids want to accomlish their dreams and once they realize it takes hard stuff they will 1) Discipline themselves to do it (because they want to accomplish that cool goal) or 2) They will find an area more to their liking.
There are those who have the persistance to work hard and there are those kids who don't, we do a disservice to the kids with big goals and dreams and not nurtering them.
What I wouldn't give for someone like John carmack to write a book about learning to write small 2D games, etc, with feedback from those who had to learn the hardway (i.e. have insight on how to teacn and structure a lesson in terms of capturing kids interest).
Kids want to learn stuff we just suck the joy out of learning because we don't give them cool things to work on that teach teh lesson that -- cool things require lots of hard boring stuff to accomplish but the end result is awesome.
Now if we can ramp up this boring stuff by taking cool complex stuff and giving them access to chunks of stuff they can handle (i.e. take animation of cool things that blowup like say a car in burnout, and allow them to tweak matehmatical values to see the results they get)
They can start seeing a direct feedback relationship between what they are learning and doing cool stuff.
"Science simply doesn't address those; "
But that's the whole point. You see for many people... knowledge of facts cannot be disconnected into discrete areas of knowledge disconnected from one another.
People want an overarching story and purpose for their lives. Everything I said in my previous post shows you don't understand people's desire for purpose and higher unified meaning in life at all.
"And it reminded me of how some who should know better do so very little to help the religious understand science"
You don't get it, I've realized the same thing you have and after my many years of polite discussion with people *they will not change*. They have predecided their need for god, if it wasn't christianity it would be whatever else was available.
Either people have a desire for truth or they have a desire for IDENTITY. Religious people who believe in god according to our ancestors sacred text *need identity*, the ones that come out of religion on their own are the ones who've always doubted somewhere in the backs of their minds that it was always false and put up a pretense to get along to save themselves the suffering of being the odd one out of their communities. I know because I've been through it.
People have a deep seated need to believe their is some higher purpose in life and if one is to take science at face value, the worldview it forms is pretty bleak... you only have a few options
You have: Endless recurrence (of ultimatley we find out existence is eternal), things are constantly created and destroyed in and endless cycle of universal expansion and collapse.
Or science finds out no matter what we do the universe will one day end finally killing everything in it and the universe will 'end' once and for all.
Science can be depressing in that while it may give us hope it also shows us just how powerless we are over nature and that there are large destructive forces in the universe that may well always be beyond our power to manipulate or control that will make all our striving for nothing.
There's a joke about elephants having the biggest brains but having never engaged in civilization - it's because they've calculated it all and that it's all pointless in the end.
"Most people love their graphics, even if they'll then claim 'gameplay' is important on some survey"
Graphics is a part of gameplay. They are not seperate, hence we call them VIDEO games and not "games mechanics that can't be seen", a game mechanic that is, control, animation systems and visual feedback are all tied together. You can't divorce them from one another in many games without losing something.
The video aspect of a game has always mattered. It's not that graphics DONT matter, it's that graphics have to have a certain standard before one considers it worth playing vs all the other games you could be playing or else the game itself has to compensate in the gameplay department. Remember every game has to compete with every other game released that one could be playing since the dawn of video games, there are lots of old commercial retro games that are STILL competitive in today's environment, truth is many developers suck at making games... that's the real problem.
Take Sins of a solare empire or galactic civilizations 2, two ugly'ish games by all accounts but a game I play now and then over other more graphically pretty games.
Graphical prettyness cannot compensate for lack of depth in genres like Civ4 and alpha centarui and other games in that vein.
It also assumes that gamers know what actually is necessary for a games success. Much of what causes a game to be a success is many times NON OBVIOUS.
A word like "Gameplay" is too deep and nuanced and changes from game to game, just like how do you capture the "Feel", control and sense of speed in a racing game?
Or what about the fluid battle mechanics of god of war compared to other clunkier games?
Truth is one study is not definitive and I'd trust hardcore gamers before I trust pointificating researchers on what makes a successful game, since the elite among the hardcore play types of games and have refined gaming tastes and are also into analysis of what makes fun, they attempt to pick apart games and can usually tell you in a review right away what's wrong and they always usually post the harshest most realistic scores for games. Instead of uninformed pablum that passes for the gamers without a gaming history going back into the NES era or even further back.
... because making software is time consuming and hardwork and doesn't pay the bills.
The reason commercial software is preferred to free software is that commercial software is still better then free.
That and linux can't run windows apps perfectly, I would move to linux if it
1) had the same shell as say windows xp
2) was faster in performance then windows (i.e. games had higher framerates under linux and there was no bullshit compatability, things "just worked".
The best free software has a lot of great ideas but the problem is that software takes too much work and time from these guys lives without any compensation, they can't compete because
1) They usually over-estimate their coding skills
2) They code for themselves NOT for users
When making any program you're coding for that "motherfucker" the public, therefore you can't make a program for coders, you have to make a program for users, ease of use.
In the early days of video editing software, almost all video editing software was complicated for what joe user needed it for, finally for profit companies came to the rescue, companies like ULEAD for instance.
Take a lot of the pain of video editing out of video editing for the average user who just wants to mash up videos, cut paste, etc.
http://www.ulead.com/
Open source guys obviously don't use or are unaware of how to do things better, when any company or person hits on the "magic user interface formla" you have to copy it and make it even better for the user if there is room for improvement.
The thing is good software design is hard and time consuming for the output you get over time spent, it literally takes years to figure out how to build good software, since developing good software is extremely labour intensive.
"Is all of that really so much easier than attracting customers by having the best product at the best price point?"
The problem is customers are stupid and undiscriminating twits, who will say one thing but do another. There's a difference between what someone thinks they want or says they want and what they actually end up doing. Kind of like how most people believe they are above average intelligence. I agree that to some extent a great product at a great price will sell but it's not always the case. Take the x86 cpu's for instance, there are certain products that are "black boxes" to end users and end users only care about the software, the best hardware in teh world is irrelevant to most people without great software be it entertainment or otherwise they want to use.
This is why console companies can sell crappy hardware and push the software envelope. The PS2 was totally inferior platform for games and it ended winning the console race because 'it was good enough' and thats where developers focused their energies when making games. If developers had abandoned the PS2 for the cube or xbox, the PS2 would have died but the PS1 took advantage of Nintendo's big mistake with the n64 and the limited cartridge based storage and it's clock cleaned.
MP3 players are a case in point, there were better players with more functionality and whatnot but most people are simple minded twits and things like style or image (ipod) can win out over substance. ipod was "good enough", there is a point where people will buy whatever is good enough, but this also has a tendency for companies to target or exploit this averageness or mediocrity, and this is why many products tend towards mediocrity as a whole (see: films like trasnformers 2).
Also see this article on the "good enough" revolution:
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/magazine/17-09/ff_goodenough
It has a point in that targeting peoples price points for simple to use mediocre products (like video cameras for making home movies, etc). But this goes to prove the adage - profit gives way to medicority, things like planned obselescene, trying to find cheaper (less longer lasting) components for things reducing their durability and whatnot.
"The way I see it, if we pass strong pro-privacy laws that take such data-mining off the table entirely, and companies are instead forced to, y'know, actually be competitive,"
Laws are irrelevant against insiders with lots of money, if you are well off go check out private investigators and see what kind of shit they can find on you despite so called "privacy laws". There are guys that can come up with shit that will surprise the living fuck out of you.
Knowledge about people is a commodity like any other, privacy laws cannot stop the end of privacy since to exist in the world one can deduce your actions through economic transactions and computer camera tracking (i.e. whenever you walk into a store your habits aren't just being taped for anti theft measures, this shit is studied for how to best exploit subconscious processes or flaws in human minds to get them to buy stuff).
Companies with enough cash and political currency basically get to do whatever they damn well please, those that can't get away with it are those without sufficient financial or political currency.
"Private should mean no disclosure, not anonymized disclosure, not aggregate disclosure, just plain no disclosure period."
The profit motive and privacy are at odds, trying to make the most money and sell the most stuff means you want to know everything about everyone so that you can one up you competitors, it's a race to the bottom. Ideals in the real world always submit to the pragmatic concerns of making money in a capitalist society.
"Who are the people that need protecting?"
The public domain from "content creators" (read: Greedy swill who want perpetual revenue off of a finite amount of work). The real issue is that IP is a gold mine for IP owners, this is why you have things like patent trolling and trademark issues.
Information should not be able to be "owned" by anyone and this whole cult of ownership is the problem, no "content creator" has a right to profit period, copyrights were to ENCOURAGE the production of works, not the suffocation of creativity as it is now.
All copyrights/IP for entertainment should have fixed 10 year limits, for special cases or industries (drugs, science, tech, etc) stuff would have to be worked out, but as it stands IP is increasingly authoritarian it gives monopoly and rent seeking behaviour legitmacy.
I think intellectual property is more trouble then it's worth and the economic model (profot model) is a failure when considering information is always derivative and the same archetypes and concepts will be reinvented and come up over and over again.
People inventing/discovering the same thing in different places on their own, yet copyright/IP fucks all that up enormously.
All IP works should be co-owned by society itself, none of this individual owner crap, if you create a work I buy (such as a game) I have a right as a member of society to the source code assets to be stored in a library somewhere so when it expires I can modify/update it as I will.
IP isn't IP because property is not property when someone elses buys a copy of it, the "IP owner" can tell the "IP renter" what he can and cannot do with Intellectual property he paid for but doesn't "own".
Consumers need some kind of protection and ownership rights over all IP they buy, so they can force the things they funded into public domain after a fixed period of time since right now, companies and "creators" are the most abusive mofo's on the planet.
"It is a waste of money and of resources to include a cable if people don't need it."
Actully third parties already produce cheaper cables I got a cable (forget the company, madcatz?) that is a single cable with hookups for the PS2, xbox and gamecube all one one cable and I bought two of them. Oh here it is:
http://www.madcatz.com/productinfo.asp?page=14&GSProd=2825&GSCat=9&CategoryImg=UNIVERSAL
I don't know why they just don't include one cable with all three types of hookups on them. It makes life a lot easier, you think with them subsidizing the hardware they could subsidize a univeral cable that works.
"It's a shame, because I think that for many students, these kinds of programs could provide an education as good or better than a traditional classroom for a much lower price. But until there is a good reason to take the final transcript seriously,"
You could have them take a hardcore many day exam @ an accredited university. It's not that online courses don't work it's that you only get out of them what you put into them, those going for marks are missing the point. The great thing about online learning is dialogue, criticism and discussion for those who are serious about learning.
"- Make the game challenging. Make it 'hard' without actually even having be hard. But give the gamer a sense of accomplishment. You don't do this by making him have to shoot 30.000 of identical aliens btw"
See: Serious sam : The First encounter
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/serioussamthefirstencounter/index.html
One of the best games since Doom / Doom 2. Sometimes there is a LOT to be said for simple over the top arcade game style.
Still one of my all time favorite games.
"I have seen the end of supersonic passenger aircraft (for the time being, with no resumption in sight)."
This had to do with economies of scale, the idea that technology has no limits is a bit disturbing sometimes I think people here think technology is MAGICAL, all technologies ultimately have to submit to the laws of physics and economic viability.
Things like supersonic passenger aircraft were shown not to be economically viable yet.
The idea that technology "regresses" is a bit of a misnomer, what happens is that some key technology or scientific advance has not yet happened to make such technologies economically viable just yet.
"If I make a backup copy of a UMD game I purchased, it can never be anything remotely resembling theft.... .... Of course we could make the argument that since we bought the original liscenses to old games we don't have to pay for them again when they become available (i.e. once you buy a liscense it can't be revoked).
The fair use case you mention is an excellent example of hypocrisy of the industry itself when it comes to old games they re-release but to whom the customer already owns the license to access it. Ironically enough "piracy" is justified in this case if we are to take the "license" seriously (I already bought the license to play x game x years ago, you re-release it, I still have the license, etc).
... many modern games are mediocre Sometimes I wish they need to lay off the marketing and pour that money into the game and giving devs more time to work on it.
"incentive to get your money's worth is lowest when you're spending someone else's money for someone else."
But this does not mean the decider (meaning the population or the private sector) have the intelligence of how to spend their money (see: Bailout).
The best and the brightest fucked up the most.
"For some reason we seem determined to systematically destroy all places that are sources of food. Intention doesn't usually seem to have anything to do with it, it seems to be a consequence of system design principles that we ignore (consciously...they aren't invisible, just unnoticed)."
That reason is capitalism + specialization (the plus is important) which requires constant growth (buying/selling) and expansion.
The for profit system + specialization (where people no longer can provide their own food clothing). Requires things must be bought and sold constantly in order to keep the economy moving along.
John adams noted this a while back:
Adams worried that a businessman might have financial interests that conflicted with republican duty; indeed, he was especially suspicious of banks. He decided that history taught that "the Spirit of Commerce . . . is incompatible with that purity of Heart, and Greatness of soul which is necessary for a happy Republic." But so much of that spirit of commerce had infected America. In New England, Adams noted, "even the Farmers and Tradesmen are addicted to Commerce." As a result, there was "a great Danger that a Republican Government would be very factious and turbulent there."
"But computer scientists aren't using a Base 2 system."
From wikipedia: "The binary numeral system, or base-2 number system represents numeric values using two symbols, usually 0 and 1"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_numeral_system
Oh no doubt about it I agree but the problem is that human beings didn't stick to a universal standard of pronunciation, they always make special rules for new words or a minority of words.
plough should be PLOW
donor could be doughnor if there was some standard for spelling (to signify how the vowel is pronounced) either that and do away with using special pronunciation rules/spellings to begin with, but a lot of this is seen in many languages and I'm sure most human beings "just wing it".
I agree that some english words should definitely be spelled how they are pronounced, it would also help if we didn't use single words for different things but I have a feeling this too (one word, multiple meanings) has something to do with saving space and sharing meanings/relationships that apply to a wide range of words unconsciously on the neurological level.
"You mention some good points; however, regarding the reading speed issue, the best way to improve reading speed is simply to do it often"
No doubt about it but there are limits imposed by working memory and the like, as you saw in my post I made unconscious errors like omitted words or had the wrong ones, notice the word misretrieval in my sentence:
""They" I will often time "the"'
That should have read "[when I mean to type] "They" I will often TYPE "the"" ... but notice my mind pulled TIME and sent the motor information for the word time because they both start with T and are stored neurologically close to one another all this happens unconsciously and you don't realize it until afterword and sometimes not at all.
You should check out some books on advances in neurological science, go read some papers/books on common errors and learning, once I started I began to lay off spelling errors/mistakes, etc made in posts online and whatnot.
Alot of our anger is really misplaced (due to ignorance) since most thought is unconscious and they are discovering a heck of a lot of errors/gaps and blindness. Check out change blindness here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38XO7ac9eSs
This could be applied to a lot of phenomenon where we go to re-read our post or check our post for errors find some but miss others, even though we DID look for mistakes.
... truth is BASE 10 should have never been used for computers from the start. The storage hardware manufacturers just wanted to lie to make their products look better then they are (as per usual in business).
Hardware manufacturers being close to computer sciences really should have known better. By keeping the standard and just publishing both BASE2 and BASE10 just like how where I live we have english AND french words on packaging.
"You simple can't just "Turn it off" which is what many people are fearing. "
You wouldn't need to turn it off only screw with DNS servers for most of the population. I can tell you what a pain in the ass it is not to have DNS servers working properly, for most people who are internet illiterate screwing with the internet DNS would work at various places because most people don't know what DNS is or how to change it.
Mediocrity is a function of not being able to spend all ones resources on ones pet project.
Lets face it the way capitalism works assures us that infinite resources cannot be dedicated to any product and one must have a large enough population who shares the same interest in quality that you do and have enough money to pay for them for such products to take off.
Lastly, mediocre products are a sign of the lack of intelligence and powers of discrimination of most of the population.