There seems to be a corrolation between Slashdot posters and incompetent teachers. According to NCES the national average for teachers salaries is $56,069. Given all of the Slashdot posters who claim they are, they are related to, and know teachers making less than $25k a year, you might have to consider that your dad just might have been lying to you.
Either yo count teachers pay by the year, or you count it by the hour. Talking about their yearly salary, and then switching to hourly by calling the 3 months of a 'layoff' is simply lying. If we count teacher's salaries by the hour, they are in the top 75% of earners in the country.
[Citation]
Every salary study I have ever seen has confirmed that $80k for public school teachers. You do know that when they say "Average" salary, that means that there is as much money above that line as below it, right?
This is correct. It is why I have always argued that 'Software Bloat' is not a problem. $10,000 spent on optimizing a piece of code is a worse investment than spending $2000 on writing another piece of 'bloated' code that optimizes your business and makes you $10,000s more in profit. All the while having the steady march of hardware development both make all of the code faster, as well as reduce the value of any previous optimizations.
If and when we hit a wall on hardware speed, then we can spend the next few decades on optimization.
You seem to be obsessing over the fact that there are currently no standards for key bindings on certain platforms. This is an issue of yesterday and today. If someone comes out with an Android console, or there is a push to make tablets into television connected consoles, all it would take is two or three popular games to declare a particular layout to be "Standard", and everyone will fall in line. In a year or two, the problem of inconsistent button layouts will be a distant memory.
They all allow directional control, and they all have a button[1]. That means that they all can use the gamepad to navigate a menu to get to the configuration. Heck, you don't really even need a button. As long as it has directional control, it can get to the configuration menu.
While old controllers still work as stated above, it is irrelevant whether old controllers are configured the same or not. Old controllers have different layouts. That is a fact that nothing can change. You can either throw your hands up and say "There is no standerd yesterday, so there might as well be no standard in the future.", or you can say, we have one popular layout today that we can standardize on. Any controller with a different layout can live with the fact that it will have to be configured, and new controllers should use the standard layout going forward.
You seem to be making the subject far more difficult than it is. Your trying to solve the past. That won't happen. You just have to set a plan to stop repeating bad habits.
It doesn't matter what if a Wii is cheaper. He is buying what his kids actually want to play. There was a time that this was Xbox 360, but it isn't anymore.
I'm with you. I also find it funny how the console fps gamers think of themselves as 'hard core' gamers and speak derogatorily of the new wave of 'casual' gamers. They don't realize that there was a time that they and their favorite genre was the 'casual' gamers/games. The reality is that tablet/phone gaming is a new market, and for the same reason that Solitaire was the single most played game ever on Windows, tablet/phone games will have vastly more users than the older markets.
If you are what is currently considered a 'hard core' gamer, all you can hope for is that enough publishers will see the value in your part of the market to keep making games. That they don't all bail on your genre for the quick bucks of the new wave of 'casual' games.
I have used the WiiMote on my Nexus 7. (and phone, but the phone is too small of a screen for that kind of use) I just downloaded an app and every game that supported gamepads worked. I understand it is the same for the PS3 controllers.
While no one does this yet, there is no reason that tablets cannot use external controllers. I have played games on my Nexus 7 using a WiiMote. It worked pretty well. While I have not done it, plenty of people use PS3 controllers on their tablets. Push the screen up to a TV and you have a tablet that is a replacement for a console.
Developers need to just decide on a standard keybinding by HIDD button number (The XBox 360 controllers would be fine). Then support configuration for 'non-standard' controller layouts. If the software developers consistently supported a specific button layout, the controller manufacturers would very quickly move to putting the buttons in the same places.
I expect the Wii U's Achilles heal will be the fact that it only supports one tablet. By only supporting one tablet, Nintendo is signaling that they don't consider the Wii to be a multi-player device. They expect people to play by themselves or online with strangers.
I have never understood why Adobe never added gamepad support to Flash. Given the vast library of games available for Flash, it seems like it would have been a natural addition.
It is attitudes like yours that would have every game made be a FPS. After all, why would any PC gamer every want any other kind of game when there was a time that they bashed consoles for not having them.
Having every game be exactly the same engine with different skins makes for a very sad gaming world.
Do you take the same stance with all forms of entertainment? Do you ask a girl out to a movie, and then tell her that she can go when it suits her schedule, and you will go when it suits yours? If she lives closer to a different theater, do you tell her to go to the theater near her house, you go to the one near your house, and call it a date?
Sure, there are the rare cases. Generally, it is just that people are getting terrible educations and the paper mill schools (that includes the 'real' colleges) are just passing them through.
Making sure that there was a bluetooth sliding keyboard case that for their phones would have been an even bigger differentiator. I want to see an Android phone maker that takes accessories serious. Currently every single one of them treats accessories as an after thought. This is the one area that Apple is vastly ahead of Android. Until the iPhone 5, you could buy an iPhone accessory, and it would generally work smoothly with every iPhone and iPod Touch on the market. Many of them would also work smoothly with the iPad. It is the consistency of form factor that allows things like the iCade to be offered for Apple products.
Give me an android phone with good specs, runs stock android, has physical dimensions/connectors that allow it to be easily popped into accessories, and a commitment to providing future phones that will work with the same accessories.
That isn't true. We just do a lot more useless abstractions that people used to do. I'm pretty sure things like using a target or bail of hay as an abstraction for a rabbit or enemy so that you could get better at shooting a bow was pretty common historically.
I don't entirely disagree with you, but people and possibly the IQ tests fail to measure the knowledge lost. You give the example of the drive through being mythical 150 years ago. Today, the idea of taking a cow, some 'weeds' from a field, tomatoes and some cucumbers and turning those into a cheeseburger seems just as mythical to a very large segment of society.
Idiocy is not just fiction. It is a commentary on modern society and a (exaggerated) prediction of many ill effects that the writer believes will happen given our current trend. Dismissing Idiocracy because it is fiction is just as bad as dismissing a statement because it used a metaphore. Both are making a point, and both are fictitious.
Given the educational level of many people I see leaving high school and even college, I am going to have to disagree with you. It is common for students to get credit for classes that they have not gained competency in.
Battlestar Galactica is a terrible example. From the first episode on, it was a mishmash of poor lazy writing. It looked like the writing was done by a staff who sat around and said "What would be edgy" and threw it in whether it was good or not. It is the Marlyn Manson of TV.
Hear is a hint. If a show has to steal characters from Voyager, the show is crap.
Slashdot Mirror
There seems to be a corrolation between Slashdot posters and incompetent teachers. According to NCES the national average for teachers salaries is $56,069. Given all of the Slashdot posters who claim they are, they are related to, and know teachers making less than $25k a year, you might have to consider that your dad just might have been lying to you.
Either yo count teachers pay by the year, or you count it by the hour. Talking about their yearly salary, and then switching to hourly by calling the 3 months of a 'layoff' is simply lying. If we count teacher's salaries by the hour, they are in the top 75% of earners in the country.
[Citation] Every salary study I have ever seen has confirmed that $80k for public school teachers. You do know that when they say "Average" salary, that means that there is as much money above that line as below it, right?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure Hitler would have been against that.
This is correct. It is why I have always argued that 'Software Bloat' is not a problem. $10,000 spent on optimizing a piece of code is a worse investment than spending $2000 on writing another piece of 'bloated' code that optimizes your business and makes you $10,000s more in profit. All the while having the steady march of hardware development both make all of the code faster, as well as reduce the value of any previous optimizations.
If and when we hit a wall on hardware speed, then we can spend the next few decades on optimization.
Fair enough.
You seem to be obsessing over the fact that there are currently no standards for key bindings on certain platforms. This is an issue of yesterday and today. If someone comes out with an Android console, or there is a push to make tablets into television connected consoles, all it would take is two or three popular games to declare a particular layout to be "Standard", and everyone will fall in line. In a year or two, the problem of inconsistent button layouts will be a distant memory.
They all allow directional control, and they all have a button[1]. That means that they all can use the gamepad to navigate a menu to get to the configuration. Heck, you don't really even need a button. As long as it has directional control, it can get to the configuration menu.
While old controllers still work as stated above, it is irrelevant whether old controllers are configured the same or not. Old controllers have different layouts. That is a fact that nothing can change. You can either throw your hands up and say "There is no standerd yesterday, so there might as well be no standard in the future.", or you can say, we have one popular layout today that we can standardize on. Any controller with a different layout can live with the fact that it will have to be configured, and new controllers should use the standard layout going forward.
You seem to be making the subject far more difficult than it is. Your trying to solve the past. That won't happen. You just have to set a plan to stop repeating bad habits.
It doesn't matter what if a Wii is cheaper. He is buying what his kids actually want to play. There was a time that this was Xbox 360, but it isn't anymore.
I'm with you. I also find it funny how the console fps gamers think of themselves as 'hard core' gamers and speak derogatorily of the new wave of 'casual' gamers. They don't realize that there was a time that they and their favorite genre was the 'casual' gamers/games. The reality is that tablet/phone gaming is a new market, and for the same reason that Solitaire was the single most played game ever on Windows, tablet/phone games will have vastly more users than the older markets.
If you are what is currently considered a 'hard core' gamer, all you can hope for is that enough publishers will see the value in your part of the market to keep making games. That they don't all bail on your genre for the quick bucks of the new wave of 'casual' games.
I'm still waiting for the 30" 1:1 ratio tablet to come out and replace the board game market.
I have used the WiiMote on my Nexus 7. (and phone, but the phone is too small of a screen for that kind of use) I just downloaded an app and every game that supported gamepads worked. I understand it is the same for the PS3 controllers.
While no one does this yet, there is no reason that tablets cannot use external controllers. I have played games on my Nexus 7 using a WiiMote. It worked pretty well. While I have not done it, plenty of people use PS3 controllers on their tablets. Push the screen up to a TV and you have a tablet that is a replacement for a console.
Developers need to just decide on a standard keybinding by HIDD button number (The XBox 360 controllers would be fine). Then support configuration for 'non-standard' controller layouts. If the software developers consistently supported a specific button layout, the controller manufacturers would very quickly move to putting the buttons in the same places.
I expect the Wii U's Achilles heal will be the fact that it only supports one tablet. By only supporting one tablet, Nintendo is signaling that they don't consider the Wii to be a multi-player device. They expect people to play by themselves or online with strangers.
I have never understood why Adobe never added gamepad support to Flash. Given the vast library of games available for Flash, it seems like it would have been a natural addition.
It is attitudes like yours that would have every game made be a FPS. After all, why would any PC gamer every want any other kind of game when there was a time that they bashed consoles for not having them.
Having every game be exactly the same engine with different skins makes for a very sad gaming world.
Do you take the same stance with all forms of entertainment? Do you ask a girl out to a movie, and then tell her that she can go when it suits her schedule, and you will go when it suits yours? If she lives closer to a different theater, do you tell her to go to the theater near her house, you go to the one near your house, and call it a date?
Sure, there are the rare cases. Generally, it is just that people are getting terrible educations and the paper mill schools (that includes the 'real' colleges) are just passing them through.
Making sure that there was a bluetooth sliding keyboard case that for their phones would have been an even bigger differentiator. I want to see an Android phone maker that takes accessories serious. Currently every single one of them treats accessories as an after thought. This is the one area that Apple is vastly ahead of Android. Until the iPhone 5, you could buy an iPhone accessory, and it would generally work smoothly with every iPhone and iPod Touch on the market. Many of them would also work smoothly with the iPad. It is the consistency of form factor that allows things like the iCade to be offered for Apple products.
Give me an android phone with good specs, runs stock android, has physical dimensions/connectors that allow it to be easily popped into accessories, and a commitment to providing future phones that will work with the same accessories.
That isn't true. We just do a lot more useless abstractions that people used to do. I'm pretty sure things like using a target or bail of hay as an abstraction for a rabbit or enemy so that you could get better at shooting a bow was pretty common historically.
I don't entirely disagree with you, but people and possibly the IQ tests fail to measure the knowledge lost. You give the example of the drive through being mythical 150 years ago. Today, the idea of taking a cow, some 'weeds' from a field, tomatoes and some cucumbers and turning those into a cheeseburger seems just as mythical to a very large segment of society.
Idiocy is not just fiction. It is a commentary on modern society and a (exaggerated) prediction of many ill effects that the writer believes will happen given our current trend. Dismissing Idiocracy because it is fiction is just as bad as dismissing a statement because it used a metaphore. Both are making a point, and both are fictitious.
Given the educational level of many people I see leaving high school and even college, I am going to have to disagree with you. It is common for students to get credit for classes that they have not gained competency in.
How do you think they get the 'mental age' of that equation?
Battlestar Galactica is a terrible example. From the first episode on, it was a mishmash of poor lazy writing. It looked like the writing was done by a staff who sat around and said "What would be edgy" and threw it in whether it was good or not. It is the Marlyn Manson of TV.
Hear is a hint. If a show has to steal characters from Voyager, the show is crap.