I agree with your hypothesis, but there is also the other unfortunate side of that coin. Children are told that if they try, they will succeed at anything. It is an idea that sounds good on paper, and people would be horrified to hear a parent tell a child that "they can't", but bad sounding or not, it is true. Unfortunately, we see social promotion within our education system to the point that basic arithmetic is needing to be taught in colleges.
Again, I am not disagreeing with you. I am making the point that being smart is both a matter of genetics and environment. How the two play together is important to note when having these conversations.
Crappy sitcoms were notorious for trying to make themselves relevant at the end of their run by 'tackling tough issues'. The Different Strokes pedophilia episodes were exactly that. They were Gary Colman's shark to jump.
Having known a lot of 'Unschoolers'. I have come to the conclusion that the biggest factor in people learning to read is how often they are presented with words, and whether their is an actual reward to knowing them. Of all the unschoolers I have interacted with (20 to 30 of them), 100% of them could read by the age of 12. Now, I think 12 is a really late time to learn to read, but these were kids with parents who had a clear stance of not teaching their kids to read. Many of them learned to read much sooner than that. About 8 seemed to be the norm. We can make lots of theories on why the learned to read and those in 1839 England couldn't. Mine fall into a few areas:
1. There were just fewer words around. If a kid sees a giant 'M' on a sign in front of every McDonalds they pass (and they will pass a lot), they almost can't help but get the idea that 'M' is the starting sound of McDonalds. Children in modern first world countries are constantly bombarded with the written word. They almost can't help but learn to read.
2. All of their peers can read. Just like a kid will learn to ride a bike if all of their friends are riding bikes; a kid will learn to read if all of their friends are learning to read.
3. Many of the modern first world activities that kids want to do make learning to read the path of least resistance. It is less work to know how to read, and most people are inherently lazy. It is way harder to find out all of the Easter eggs and cheats in Minecraft or Left for Dead if you don't know how to read. If you learn to read, you are more likely to beat your opponent in the video game you are playing.
While I am not a fan of public schools for kids who's parents want them to have a good education, the public schools do set a bar for when 2 and 3 happen. This pushes the pressures for those kids who's parents won't make sure they are educated to learn to read from ~8 down to ~5 or 6.
I see that all of the time. While we homeschool our son, may of his friends are in public school. When they come over, they are unable to play simple games with him like 'math bingo'. A little while back, he had a friend over who had passed the second grade. (It was summer) The two of them were playing math bingo. The girl was doing fine with all of her addition. She could whip out the answers until she was presented with '13 + 0'. The poor girl couldn't figure it out. This left absolutely no question in my mind that the school had in fact NOT taught her how to do addition at all. They had just given her a chart to memorize, and she didn't understand what the numbers actually meant.
I see this kind of problem, even in the teachers themselves. Then many of them that do understand the problems just go along with the program because that is "how all the other teachers do it".
That is one reason that I homeschool. You are right that if the kid does his school work in a different way than what the teacher knows, it will likely cause confusion as the teacher will not know how to help the child in class. Unfortunately, huge portions of our education system teaches things in convoluted ways. Often the teachers don't actually know the subject because they were taught in a convoluted way, and are just following the the steps without understanding why they are doing what they are doing.
By homeschooling, no matter what way I show my child, it is the same way that he learns as 'school'.
The problem is that what were once legitimate colleges are turning into paper mills. We are seeing people coming out of college with no better than a high school education. That paper mill diploma is being use by businesses as an indication that the less educated person is a better job candidate than the person who got his education when he was supposed to.
Just as the lowering of the bar in public education has made the high school diploma a meaningless piece of paper, the lowering of the bar at colleges is doing the same.
I'm not convinced that most of the people entering colleges with a jr. high/middle school education are really leaving those colleges much better educated than when they entered. If you didn't learn basic arithmetic in the first 13 years of school, it isn't likely that you will in year 14-18.
When I said "button numbers" I wasn't referring to numbers printed on the device, but the button numbers assigned via the HIDD.
If a dialog came up the the first time the game loaded and detected a gamepad plugged in, I don't think it would be too much as long as it was a one time event. The key is a 10-foot interface, and the ability to configure the game via the gamepad itself. Oh, and the ability to exit the game using the gamepad.
If your games became popular, it also wouldn't hurt to try and do a bit of networking with other developers to try and develop a standard. I'm sure it is too much for me to hope for, but I would love it if developers could standardize on a file format/file location for button mapping. Just as you can map your controller one time in a console emulator and it will work in all games running on that emulator, it would be nice if you could configure your gamepad in one place on the PC, and other PC games could reference it so that they would already be configured.
I looked at your site, and I noticed that most of the testing you have done was with classic controller to usb adapters. With these, you just have to accept that they will be fiddly. There is nothing you as a software developer can do about it. With the actual PC controllers, both of them had button 1 and 2 accessible, as well as a direction control. This means that you can make sane settings for the controllers, and if users don't like it, they can make the changes without having to resort to a keyboard or mouse. The important thing is that everything can be done via the gamepad through the OS's HIDD. I personally buy Logitech controllers, but if you chose to use the controller layout of the 360 controller, it wouldn't be the end of the world for a user like me because as long as you gave gamepad access to redefine the buttons, I could use my Logitech controller to configure the layout. The best experience requires both the hardware and the software developers to do their part.
The biggest part as a software developer that you do is making sure that for gamepad style games, all functions can be accessed via the gamepad with the remapping using low numbered buttons. The user might have to press every button to find out which one is button 1, but button one will always be there.
Now that you mention the Retrode, I remember seeing it when it was in the early development stages. It looked like a neat device, and I just never got back to looking for it since then.
It sounds like your interest is less in PC gaming in general, but more specific to emulation. For emulators, the controller setup is not nearly as much of a problem. The reason is that it can be set up once, and every game under that system will use the exact same configuration. What does seem to be missing with emulators is a 'console/arcade' mode. Virtually all of the emulators have load screens that are designed for a WIMP interface. It is kind of strange given that once the game is loaded, almost every one of them expects a controller. It would be nice if they would include a menu that was gamepad controllable in the emulator itself. You can look at any of the emulator packs that have been released on consoles for an example of what I am talking about.
That or the fact that MS search was so bad for so long that most people won't bother to go back and try it again. Not to mention the aversion many people have to MS because of other past bad behavior.
There is no reason that a phone could not be attached just as securely as any other device. I have a child, and have never felt that dread. Before he was 3 I just kept a good eye on him, and by the time he turned three, we just made sure he had a phone on him AND kept an eye on him.
Why? Any tracking device you could get is going to cost as much as a phone, and will require some kind of data plan anyway. You gain nothing by leaving out the phone part, but you lose the ability for the child to call you if you get separated. It isn't that people can't read posts in the context of the thread. It is that you would rather tell yourself that the person isn't responding in context than realize you missed something obvious.
The lack of standard buttons is one of the problems with PC gaming. PC gamepads have all of the buttons numbered. I haven't done an audit, but I would suspect that an awful lot of the gamepads use the same numbered buttons for what would be start, select, a,b,x,y. If you went with the Xbox controller configuration, you would probably be fine. You definitly should not try to prevent other gamepads. Use the Windows APIs and just read the button presses that have been passed from the HIDD.
From there, you just use the directional pad which is going to be the same on all controllers, and then use button 1 and 2 as select and cancel. Even a USB Atari 2600 http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/29/atari-style-usb-joystick-sports-built-in-emulator/ will have a 1 button. By defaulting to this, configuration will not be necessary for most controllers, and any that need configuration can be done using the controller itself. You don't need to force the configuration as long as it can be reached via the controller.
Yes. I broke out the mouse to set up the emulator. It is unfortunate that I had to, but on the bright side, I set it up once, and it works with all SNES games the same. Per game configuration isn't necessary.
I have not tried Mario Paint or Yoshi's Safari, although I believe Snes9x supports them.
I have used a device called the "Romulator". It has been more than a few years since I dumped the roms, but the unit supported SNES and Genesis. I don't know what people are using today. I don't think there is any way at this time to make a large scale business with devices that download rom images from SNES carts without having legal troubles. I always thought it would be cool if someone released a device that let you plug in a real cart for use with emulators directly though.
Wow. You are a pretty hard core racist. I have never met a single white person who owned a slave. You haven't either. Even if either of us had, you lumping all of the people from a race into a group, and attributing the actions of a few people to everyone in the race is the textbook definition of racist.
Lots of kids can read at three. Mine had no problem. Just because your children couldn't read until they were 5 or 6 doesn't mean that others can't. If his kid is a genius, playing games on Windows 8 is a perfectly fine activity. Just because a kid is smart is no reason to crush the child out of them.
That is only a problem if you only get one chance to teach your kids all of their life lessons. Your kid not having their phone is not likely going to be a huge problem the first time. It isn't likely going to be a problem the 100th time. When you take their phone away, you don't have to take it away forever, so you don't need a tall tower with the doors bricked closed.
Yes. The loss of a $100 device is a bummer. The loss of my child is completely, over top, unacceptable. If you make a reasonable risk analysis of the situation, your question is kind of silly.
I have found that it isn't that the early twenty-somethings are wrong. It is that after having kids, most people get lazy and rationalize why they are not doing the things that they knew was the wrong thing. Instead of admitting their failures and fixing them, they blame the kids.
All of the ideas that I had about parenting when I was in my early twenties and even in my teens has panned out almost 100% as I expected. Now that I have children of my own, my view that the majority of problems that parents have with their kids are problems generated by the parents has only been confirmed.
So, I say, all you 20 somethings... Make your opinions heard. You do not need kids of your own to see the obvious. In fact, not having kids is just as likely to make you objective. While having kids just might make you too close to the situation to see it clearly.
I started giving my kid a phone when were at large events at 3, and he had his own smartphone at 4. He has never had a problem with using and taking care of the phone. Sure he was 3 and not 2, but small children take care of things the way that their parents teach them to take care of things. If you are real worried about it, you start them with a cheap dumb phone. You can get those free at this point. You could probably get an old smartphone free if you asked around among friends and family.
It isn't like there is much to know. The kid just does the same thing that they would do if their shoes stolen. You don't deny your kid everything that could be stolen do you?
As for losing it, that is the primary reason that I have tracking on all of my families phones. Every one of us has used the feature.
I would. The problem with a lot of PC based games is that even when they shouldn't need a keyboard or mouse, they do anyway for something stupid like clicking start or for closing down. I run XBMC on a PC for my HTPC. I can set up a SNES emulator to run from XBMC so that nothing is needed but the regular remote control and a Logitech wireless gamepad. It works pretty darn smooth. Unfortunately, actual PC games just don't integrate as well. Many of them don't even have gamepad controls when they could. Every game ends up in a job of mapping gamepad buttons to keyboard keys to kludge in a way to play them.
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I agree with your hypothesis, but there is also the other unfortunate side of that coin. Children are told that if they try, they will succeed at anything. It is an idea that sounds good on paper, and people would be horrified to hear a parent tell a child that "they can't", but bad sounding or not, it is true. Unfortunately, we see social promotion within our education system to the point that basic arithmetic is needing to be taught in colleges.
Again, I am not disagreeing with you. I am making the point that being smart is both a matter of genetics and environment. How the two play together is important to note when having these conversations.
Crappy sitcoms were notorious for trying to make themselves relevant at the end of their run by 'tackling tough issues'. The Different Strokes pedophilia episodes were exactly that. They were Gary Colman's shark to jump.
Having known a lot of 'Unschoolers'. I have come to the conclusion that the biggest factor in people learning to read is how often they are presented with words, and whether their is an actual reward to knowing them. Of all the unschoolers I have interacted with (20 to 30 of them), 100% of them could read by the age of 12. Now, I think 12 is a really late time to learn to read, but these were kids with parents who had a clear stance of not teaching their kids to read. Many of them learned to read much sooner than that. About 8 seemed to be the norm. We can make lots of theories on why the learned to read and those in 1839 England couldn't. Mine fall into a few areas:
1. There were just fewer words around. If a kid sees a giant 'M' on a sign in front of every McDonalds they pass (and they will pass a lot), they almost can't help but get the idea that 'M' is the starting sound of McDonalds. Children in modern first world countries are constantly bombarded with the written word. They almost can't help but learn to read.
2. All of their peers can read. Just like a kid will learn to ride a bike if all of their friends are riding bikes; a kid will learn to read if all of their friends are learning to read.
3. Many of the modern first world activities that kids want to do make learning to read the path of least resistance. It is less work to know how to read, and most people are inherently lazy. It is way harder to find out all of the Easter eggs and cheats in Minecraft or Left for Dead if you don't know how to read. If you learn to read, you are more likely to beat your opponent in the video game you are playing.
While I am not a fan of public schools for kids who's parents want them to have a good education, the public schools do set a bar for when 2 and 3 happen. This pushes the pressures for those kids who's parents won't make sure they are educated to learn to read from ~8 down to ~5 or 6.
I see that all of the time. While we homeschool our son, may of his friends are in public school. When they come over, they are unable to play simple games with him like 'math bingo'. A little while back, he had a friend over who had passed the second grade. (It was summer) The two of them were playing math bingo. The girl was doing fine with all of her addition. She could whip out the answers until she was presented with '13 + 0'. The poor girl couldn't figure it out. This left absolutely no question in my mind that the school had in fact NOT taught her how to do addition at all. They had just given her a chart to memorize, and she didn't understand what the numbers actually meant.
I see this kind of problem, even in the teachers themselves. Then many of them that do understand the problems just go along with the program because that is "how all the other teachers do it".
That is one reason that I homeschool. You are right that if the kid does his school work in a different way than what the teacher knows, it will likely cause confusion as the teacher will not know how to help the child in class. Unfortunately, huge portions of our education system teaches things in convoluted ways. Often the teachers don't actually know the subject because they were taught in a convoluted way, and are just following the the steps without understanding why they are doing what they are doing.
By homeschooling, no matter what way I show my child, it is the same way that he learns as 'school'.
The problem is that what were once legitimate colleges are turning into paper mills. We are seeing people coming out of college with no better than a high school education. That paper mill diploma is being use by businesses as an indication that the less educated person is a better job candidate than the person who got his education when he was supposed to.
Just as the lowering of the bar in public education has made the high school diploma a meaningless piece of paper, the lowering of the bar at colleges is doing the same.
I'm not convinced that most of the people entering colleges with a jr. high/middle school education are really leaving those colleges much better educated than when they entered. If you didn't learn basic arithmetic in the first 13 years of school, it isn't likely that you will in year 14-18.
When has that kind of entertainment not been popular? You have basically describe popular entertainment .... but on a TV.
When I said "button numbers" I wasn't referring to numbers printed on the device, but the button numbers assigned via the HIDD.
If a dialog came up the the first time the game loaded and detected a gamepad plugged in, I don't think it would be too much as long as it was a one time event. The key is a 10-foot interface, and the ability to configure the game via the gamepad itself. Oh, and the ability to exit the game using the gamepad.
If your games became popular, it also wouldn't hurt to try and do a bit of networking with other developers to try and develop a standard. I'm sure it is too much for me to hope for, but I would love it if developers could standardize on a file format/file location for button mapping. Just as you can map your controller one time in a console emulator and it will work in all games running on that emulator, it would be nice if you could configure your gamepad in one place on the PC, and other PC games could reference it so that they would already be configured.
I looked at your site, and I noticed that most of the testing you have done was with classic controller to usb adapters. With these, you just have to accept that they will be fiddly. There is nothing you as a software developer can do about it. With the actual PC controllers, both of them had button 1 and 2 accessible, as well as a direction control. This means that you can make sane settings for the controllers, and if users don't like it, they can make the changes without having to resort to a keyboard or mouse. The important thing is that everything can be done via the gamepad through the OS's HIDD. I personally buy Logitech controllers, but if you chose to use the controller layout of the 360 controller, it wouldn't be the end of the world for a user like me because as long as you gave gamepad access to redefine the buttons, I could use my Logitech controller to configure the layout. The best experience requires both the hardware and the software developers to do their part.
The biggest part as a software developer that you do is making sure that for gamepad style games, all functions can be accessed via the gamepad with the remapping using low numbered buttons. The user might have to press every button to find out which one is button 1, but button one will always be there.
Now that you mention the Retrode, I remember seeing it when it was in the early development stages. It looked like a neat device, and I just never got back to looking for it since then.
It sounds like your interest is less in PC gaming in general, but more specific to emulation. For emulators, the controller setup is not nearly as much of a problem. The reason is that it can be set up once, and every game under that system will use the exact same configuration. What does seem to be missing with emulators is a 'console/arcade' mode. Virtually all of the emulators have load screens that are designed for a WIMP interface. It is kind of strange given that once the game is loaded, almost every one of them expects a controller. It would be nice if they would include a menu that was gamepad controllable in the emulator itself. You can look at any of the emulator packs that have been released on consoles for an example of what I am talking about.
That or the fact that MS search was so bad for so long that most people won't bother to go back and try it again. Not to mention the aversion many people have to MS because of other past bad behavior.
I guess we know how well your kids take care of things.
One is verifiable real. The other is not.
There is no reason that a phone could not be attached just as securely as any other device. I have a child, and have never felt that dread. Before he was 3 I just kept a good eye on him, and by the time he turned three, we just made sure he had a phone on him AND kept an eye on him.
Why? Any tracking device you could get is going to cost as much as a phone, and will require some kind of data plan anyway. You gain nothing by leaving out the phone part, but you lose the ability for the child to call you if you get separated. It isn't that people can't read posts in the context of the thread. It is that you would rather tell yourself that the person isn't responding in context than realize you missed something obvious.
The lack of standard buttons is one of the problems with PC gaming. PC gamepads have all of the buttons numbered. I haven't done an audit, but I would suspect that an awful lot of the gamepads use the same numbered buttons for what would be start, select, a,b,x,y. If you went with the Xbox controller configuration, you would probably be fine. You definitly should not try to prevent other gamepads. Use the Windows APIs and just read the button presses that have been passed from the HIDD.
From there, you just use the directional pad which is going to be the same on all controllers, and then use button 1 and 2 as select and cancel. Even a USB Atari 2600 http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/29/atari-style-usb-joystick-sports-built-in-emulator/ will have a 1 button. By defaulting to this, configuration will not be necessary for most controllers, and any that need configuration can be done using the controller itself. You don't need to force the configuration as long as it can be reached via the controller.
Yes. I broke out the mouse to set up the emulator. It is unfortunate that I had to, but on the bright side, I set it up once, and it works with all SNES games the same. Per game configuration isn't necessary.
I have not tried Mario Paint or Yoshi's Safari, although I believe Snes9x supports them.
I have used a device called the "Romulator". It has been more than a few years since I dumped the roms, but the unit supported SNES and Genesis. I don't know what people are using today. I don't think there is any way at this time to make a large scale business with devices that download rom images from SNES carts without having legal troubles. I always thought it would be cool if someone released a device that let you plug in a real cart for use with emulators directly though.
Wow. You are a pretty hard core racist. I have never met a single white person who owned a slave. You haven't either. Even if either of us had, you lumping all of the people from a race into a group, and attributing the actions of a few people to everyone in the race is the textbook definition of racist.
Lots of kids can read at three. Mine had no problem. Just because your children couldn't read until they were 5 or 6 doesn't mean that others can't. If his kid is a genius, playing games on Windows 8 is a perfectly fine activity. Just because a kid is smart is no reason to crush the child out of them.
It is kind of disturbing how our modern society now finds it acceptable to keep your child on a leash and keep your dog off of one.
That is only a problem if you only get one chance to teach your kids all of their life lessons. Your kid not having their phone is not likely going to be a huge problem the first time. It isn't likely going to be a problem the 100th time. When you take their phone away, you don't have to take it away forever, so you don't need a tall tower with the doors bricked closed.
Yes. The loss of a $100 device is a bummer. The loss of my child is completely, over top, unacceptable. If you make a reasonable risk analysis of the situation, your question is kind of silly.
I have found that it isn't that the early twenty-somethings are wrong. It is that after having kids, most people get lazy and rationalize why they are not doing the things that they knew was the wrong thing. Instead of admitting their failures and fixing them, they blame the kids.
All of the ideas that I had about parenting when I was in my early twenties and even in my teens has panned out almost 100% as I expected. Now that I have children of my own, my view that the majority of problems that parents have with their kids are problems generated by the parents has only been confirmed.
So, I say, all you 20 somethings... Make your opinions heard. You do not need kids of your own to see the obvious. In fact, not having kids is just as likely to make you objective. While having kids just might make you too close to the situation to see it clearly.
I started giving my kid a phone when were at large events at 3, and he had his own smartphone at 4. He has never had a problem with using and taking care of the phone. Sure he was 3 and not 2, but small children take care of things the way that their parents teach them to take care of things. If you are real worried about it, you start them with a cheap dumb phone. You can get those free at this point. You could probably get an old smartphone free if you asked around among friends and family.
It isn't like there is much to know. The kid just does the same thing that they would do if their shoes stolen. You don't deny your kid everything that could be stolen do you?
As for losing it, that is the primary reason that I have tracking on all of my families phones. Every one of us has used the feature.
I would. The problem with a lot of PC based games is that even when they shouldn't need a keyboard or mouse, they do anyway for something stupid like clicking start or for closing down. I run XBMC on a PC for my HTPC. I can set up a SNES emulator to run from XBMC so that nothing is needed but the regular remote control and a Logitech wireless gamepad. It works pretty darn smooth. Unfortunately, actual PC games just don't integrate as well. Many of them don't even have gamepad controls when they could. Every game ends up in a job of mapping gamepad buttons to keyboard keys to kludge in a way to play them.
No kidding. I am using XBMC on a Raspberry Pi right now because the Xbox was hacked.