This in itself was surprising because he often deployed changes without checking in code. We tried many times to tell him never to do that.
At the risk of stating the obvious: this should be impossible. Your deployment path should go through your version control system, not exist in parallel with it.
How do you respond to someone like that?
Peer reviewed code is a good start. Not hierarchical necessarily, just make sure that whenever somebody codes something it gets read by at least one other person before it's deployed.
Further to which, even people who disagree with some or all of their position should welcome anything that promotes discussion of copyright law in general.
Personally I don't find copyright law to be quite as broken as Rick Falkvinge does, but I certainly don't think it's ideal with either my consumer or my content producer hat on. Areas of law like this don't just fix themselves if we all ignore them. The pressure to analyze, redesign and then pass the relevant legislation has to come from somewhere.
You know 100% if your version is older or newer than another version.
Which you do with any versioning scheme unless you have branches. Date-based versioning doesn't describe branches at all! Also doesn't allow for major and minor versions or for alpha or beta designations, which makes it harder to decide what to install and when to upgrade.
No, of course not. Indeed, the article writer is obviously not a webgame player at all. I have no idea why they bothered to write it. The recommended games appear to have been chosen almost as randomly as the categories.
Don't just copy to the data to some cheap CD either.
Make sure you have at least one offsite backup (not hard to do - remote disk space is cheap) and at least one backup you maintain manually (so that a serious problem with your backup software cannot leave you unable to access your data).
There's obviously a rather large demographic that doesn't care about "the hardware."
Yeah, that would be me. I don't care about the hardware.
Unfortunately game development companies and games publishers don't seem to agree with me. So games are going to come out which I will be unable to play without a 360 or a PS3 even though the gameplay would be perfectly possible on a Wii. That's why I'll likely end up buying one of the other two sooner or later.
Although there are strict bounds on how good you can make the energy loss due to the Landauer Principle. If we want to make really cool computers (both literally and metaphorically) we'll probably have to use stuff like Fredkin Gates.
If the girl is 6 years old then I guess she should be learning to read by now don't you think so?
And indeed the post says she is beginning to read. The process of learning takes a while. Certainly games will provide motivation, but in my experience (I have two six year olds myself) kids do not lack motivation to read anyway.
If you give a child a game where the language comprehension needed is beyond them their experience with it will be frustrating. The first thing that will happen is that they won't want to play it unless you're helping (which will be seldom unless you're a parent with an unusual amount of free time). On top of that - and more seriously - they may start to associate the need to read things with frustration and unhappiness. This is bad. A child's early experience of reading should be as positive as possible.
I agree with you that games are a great way to teach kids, but I think the first part of that is choosing the right games. And I think the original post is right that avoiding inaccessible language is an important part of that.
There's also the fact that the games market does not feature pure competition. For example, if I am trying to choose between two games and I like the gameplay of Game A better but it requires a subscription fee for online play which Game B doesn't then I can't win. I'm still free to buy or not buy each product. However, in order to protest against the online play subscription I then have to buy Game B (or nothing) instead. This sends a misleading signal to the market. Ideally what I want is to be able to buy a version of Game A for a higher fixed cost but no monthly fee, but such a product is not offered by anyone.
But this becomes very complicated. Asking the user to create modes from thousands of features is ridiculous.
Isn't the answer to this simply to have sensible defaults pre-set? The power users will figure everything out. For everyone else, start them off with a static solution that's been pre-designed to be easily comprehensible.
There's a world of difference between being found the loser at the end of the game, and spending the last hour of it twiddling your thumbs while the rest of the players continue to duke it out.
Although it's a matter of opinion which is worse. Personally I don't like having to play another half hour of a game I have already effectively lost. I'd rather go and make a coffee, browse the web a bit or read a book.
Worse still, defeated players remaining in a game often get to be kingmakers. Fine if there's some valid reason to pick one winner over another (such as hurting the player who ruined your chances earlier) but otherwise the exact opposite of social fun.
On top of which there's the issue of documentation.
If I turned an engine I'd written over to someone else with next to no documentation, they very probably wouldn't be able to use it effectively. Scale this up to something as state-of-the-art and tough to use as Epic provide and it's a showstopping problem.
This is a difficult discussion to pursue, because Magic itself is quite broken in this respect. However, the problem will occur in some form in any game of this type.
Consider any pair of decks. Played only against each other, one of them is better in the sense that it wins over half of all matches played between the two. Therefore all that any CCG can ever achieve is a situation where a "metagame" arises in which the deck you choose depends upon which deck you think your opponent has chosen.
You might think deck diversity could therefore be achieved by simply having a metagame with a large number of (viable) decks in it, but this is not really the case. Why? Because there is no incentive to innovate a new deck in contention for a metagame place unless it will actually result in a higher win percentage than all established decks at the point at which you introduce it. This bar is set pretty low for the third deck in a given metagame, is sometimes viable for the fourth, but gets increasingly impractical after that.
Yes, it is very likely true to say that in real examples of CCGs the metagames are smaller than they could be with better design, but really not by very much. Compare this to "Sealed Deck" formats where if you play ten matches in the same tournament you will face ten profoundly different decks. No Constructed (the term for a format where players freely build decks) metagame for any CCG will ever look like that. Even if it should in theory (unlikely), the tendency of players to copy known reliable decks will prevent it.
If rare staking matters more than skill then the game is broken.
Yes, assuming what we're talking about is victory percentages. But one of the properties one might want in a CCG is diversity of gameplay. If everyone has access to the same cards then the "everyone's deck is different" aspect is lost.
Magic the Gathering players often play "Limited" games to get around this problem in which each player may use cards only from a small number of (freshly opened) card packs or take turns to choose cards from a freshly opened pack. These workarounds are somewhat effective, but tend to introduce unwanted randomness.
Problem one is how best to train your smartest students.
Problem two is what happens to the line technicians when you automate their jobs. Because realistically they're not all going to be moving to research-level tasks. Most of them won't be anything like smart enough.
Slashdot Mirror
This in itself was surprising because he often deployed changes without checking in code. We tried many times to tell him never to do that.
At the risk of stating the obvious: this should be impossible. Your deployment path should go through your version control system, not exist in parallel with it.
How do you respond to someone like that?
Peer reviewed code is a good start. Not hierarchical necessarily, just make sure that whenever somebody codes something it gets read by at least one other person before it's deployed.
Further to which, even people who disagree with some or all of their position should welcome anything that promotes discussion of copyright law in general.
Personally I don't find copyright law to be quite as broken as Rick Falkvinge does, but I certainly don't think it's ideal with either my consumer or my content producer hat on. Areas of law like this don't just fix themselves if we all ignore them. The pressure to analyze, redesign and then pass the relevant legislation has to come from somewhere.
You know 100% if your version is older or newer than another version.
Which you do with any versioning scheme unless you have branches. Date-based versioning doesn't describe branches at all! Also doesn't allow for major and minor versions or for alpha or beta designations, which makes it harder to decide what to install and when to upgrade.
Those are the best free web games out there?
No, of course not. Indeed, the article writer is obviously not a webgame player at all. I have no idea why they bothered to write it. The recommended games appear to have been chosen almost as randomly as the categories.
Don't just copy to the data to some cheap CD either. Make sure you have at least one offsite backup (not hard to do - remote disk space is cheap) and at least one backup you maintain manually (so that a serious problem with your backup software cannot leave you unable to access your data).
unless DoD have promised to only target unshiny bad guys
Their next planned innovation is a giant orbital beadblaster capable of applying matte texturing to any surface from 30000ft.
There's obviously a rather large demographic that doesn't care about "the hardware."
Yeah, that would be me. I don't care about the hardware.
Unfortunately game development companies and games publishers don't seem to agree with me. So games are going to come out which I will be unable to play without a 360 or a PS3 even though the gameplay would be perfectly possible on a Wii. That's why I'll likely end up buying one of the other two sooner or later.
Source?
(And that goes for the post you were responding to as well.)
Although there are strict bounds on how good you can make the energy loss due to the Landauer Principle. If we want to make really cool computers (both literally and metaphorically) we'll probably have to use stuff like Fredkin Gates.
Oh, come on... they just want advertisements hits too!
Yeah, and he just wants the karma for the automatic +5 Informative, so it's all good.
If the girl is 6 years old then I guess she should be learning to read by now don't you think so?
And indeed the post says she is beginning to read. The process of learning takes a while. Certainly games will provide motivation, but in my experience (I have two six year olds myself) kids do not lack motivation to read anyway.
If you give a child a game where the language comprehension needed is beyond them their experience with it will be frustrating. The first thing that will happen is that they won't want to play it unless you're helping (which will be seldom unless you're a parent with an unusual amount of free time). On top of that - and more seriously - they may start to associate the need to read things with frustration and unhappiness. This is bad. A child's early experience of reading should be as positive as possible.
I agree with you that games are a great way to teach kids, but I think the first part of that is choosing the right games. And I think the original post is right that avoiding inaccessible language is an important part of that.
It a controversial issue, since GameSpot claim the PS3 version performs better whilst IGN say exactly the opposite. (Having played neither version I have no idea who is correct.)
What? Look, the whole point of the ESRB is that they play these kinds of games so we don't have to.
See also: TiVos, electric monks.
Is it just me or are all the clips now inaccessible?
many only play for a small portion of the time their kids are gaming
I know I do, because my kids spend more time gaming in a day than my total free time. I find it hard to believe this is unusual.
There's also the fact that the games market does not feature pure competition. For example, if I am trying to choose between two games and I like the gameplay of Game A better but it requires a subscription fee for online play which Game B doesn't then I can't win. I'm still free to buy or not buy each product. However, in order to protest against the online play subscription I then have to buy Game B (or nothing) instead. This sends a misleading signal to the market. Ideally what I want is to be able to buy a version of Game A for a higher fixed cost but no monthly fee, but such a product is not offered by anyone.
But this becomes very complicated. Asking the user to create modes from thousands of features is ridiculous.
Isn't the answer to this simply to have sensible defaults pre-set? The power users will figure everything out. For everyone else, start them off with a static solution that's been pre-designed to be easily comprehensible.
There's a world of difference between being found the loser at the end of the game, and spending the last hour of it twiddling your thumbs while the rest of the players continue to duke it out.
Although it's a matter of opinion which is worse. Personally I don't like having to play another half hour of a game I have already effectively lost. I'd rather go and make a coffee, browse the web a bit or read a book.
Worse still, defeated players remaining in a game often get to be kingmakers. Fine if there's some valid reason to pick one winner over another (such as hurting the player who ruined your chances earlier) but otherwise the exact opposite of social fun.
On top of which there's the issue of documentation.
If I turned an engine I'd written over to someone else with next to no documentation, they very probably wouldn't be able to use it effectively. Scale this up to something as state-of-the-art and tough to use as Epic provide and it's a showstopping problem.
Not remotely. I'm assuming perfect play!
No, not necessarily.
This is a difficult discussion to pursue, because Magic itself is quite broken in this respect. However, the problem will occur in some form in any game of this type.
Consider any pair of decks. Played only against each other, one of them is better in the sense that it wins over half of all matches played between the two. Therefore all that any CCG can ever achieve is a situation where a "metagame" arises in which the deck you choose depends upon which deck you think your opponent has chosen.
You might think deck diversity could therefore be achieved by simply having a metagame with a large number of (viable) decks in it, but this is not really the case. Why? Because there is no incentive to innovate a new deck in contention for a metagame place unless it will actually result in a higher win percentage than all established decks at the point at which you introduce it. This bar is set pretty low for the third deck in a given metagame, is sometimes viable for the fourth, but gets increasingly impractical after that.
Yes, it is very likely true to say that in real examples of CCGs the metagames are smaller than they could be with better design, but really not by very much. Compare this to "Sealed Deck" formats where if you play ten matches in the same tournament you will face ten profoundly different decks. No Constructed (the term for a format where players freely build decks) metagame for any CCG will ever look like that. Even if it should in theory (unlikely), the tendency of players to copy known reliable decks will prevent it.
If rare staking matters more than skill then the game is broken.
Yes, assuming what we're talking about is victory percentages. But one of the properties one might want in a CCG is diversity of gameplay. If everyone has access to the same cards then the "everyone's deck is different" aspect is lost.
Magic the Gathering players often play "Limited" games to get around this problem in which each player may use cards only from a small number of (freshly opened) card packs or take turns to choose cards from a freshly opened pack. These workarounds are somewhat effective, but tend to introduce unwanted randomness.
is it possible that a world containing religious people is actually a "better" society than a world full of atheists?
This would be "better" in the same sense as "brave" and "new", I assume?
If they balance the races that will hardly be a faithful reproduction of GW's games!
There are two problems which exist in parallel.
Problem one is how best to train your smartest students.
Problem two is what happens to the line technicians when you automate their jobs. Because realistically they're not all going to be moving to research-level tasks. Most of them won't be anything like smart enough.