more like "while you were arguing i've rebuilt my kernel, written my own drivers so now i can plug in my digital camera, and written a script to sort through my family photos, because i haven't got any software like iPhoto to do it all for me. but that's fun because i enjoy rebuilding my machine, and writing perl! maybe if i get some downtime i'll try to get my soundcard working. again."
if you want to pander to stereotypes:)
we have this in the UK. it doesn't work.
on
More A's, More Pay
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· Score: 2, Informative
in the UK, we have "league tables" of A-level and GCSE results (the exams you take before attending university, and two years previously respectively, for those not familiar with them). these are published nationally every year.
this has lead to a race of "dumbing down" of examinations. while the exams are not set by the schools, there are several examination boards for each subject, and the schools can pick and choose which ones to set. the schools want higher results, obviously, so they gravitate towards the easier curriculums and examinations. the exam boards try to create the easiest courses they can while still operating within their guidelines (i'm not sure how their regulation works), as the more popular they are, the more money they earn. it's worth noting if you get an A-level in Geography, for instance, it is just that, not an A-level in Geography from xxxx exam board.
continue this for 15 years, and you end up with vast numbers of students passing. consult http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/2193169.stm for some statistics. this only covers until 2002, it's continued to rise - 96.2% of entrants passed in 2005. the problem is in effect at the top of the scale too, somewhere around 20% of entrants achieve the top grade, an A or A*. universities are ending up being unable to discern top candidates, and complain about A-grade students lacking skills they used to arrive with in the past. they are considering bringing in their own examinations to grade students' aptitude, a move that would completely undermine A-levels.
qualifications are meant to sort the top candidates from everyone else, they are elitist by nature. they are not meant to be all-inclusive "gold star for everyone who takes part" affairs where all but the dumbest 4% are awarded a qualification. aiming for higher pass rates shifts the standard down for everybody, and, perhaps most importantly, challenges the best candidates less, leaving them behind their counterparts in other countries who get pushed harder.
They decided to go to launch with an insanely popular device - this popularity mostly of their own devising, see endless hype over the last months/years - with a woefully small number of units.
So that they can get the "PS3s sell out in 2 hours" headlines. So they get press coverage like this about people auctioning them. So the PS3 pricetag doesn't look so bad compared to the $1000 or more it sells for on Ebay. Hell, it's "only" $500, must be a good deal, right?:)
I fully accept they may have had shortages of components or other manufacturing issues. However, the launch date and the amount of stock they had available was *entirely* under their control (As Europe has found out - they've pushed that back far enough). They could have pushed the launch back a month and had half a million units available to launch. But, they would have missed out on the media frenzy.
The deceitful activities going on by the businessmen mentioned in the article is a logical response to this sort of launch. By no means am I condoning this behaviour, but it's naive to think that Sony didn't reckon this would happen - they *wanted* it to happen. They don't care if Joe Gamer gets his machine, they care about it becoming an object of frenzied desire and generating newspaper column inches.
it's like magic: the gathering, without the real cards. it's like World of Warcraft where buying gold is *part of the game* it's like second life, err, with runes instead of Sim-style crack.
Who gets off on these sorts of games where you can buy your success? Where how good you are is measured in how much cash you're will to spend proving it. And all it proves you have income to burn on it.
I could see something like this being fun if you could only gain cards by swapping with a player who you've defeated, but ick, this whole buying improvements thing makes my skin crawl. Can anyone put a spin on it that makes it actually seem appealing or a good idea?
please read any of the other threads in this post that deal with the engineering, psychoacoustic and other issues behind the quality of vinyl, i can't be bothered to get into that again:)
What astonishes me is this belief that DJs (or club promoters) care one iota about proper sound quality in a club environment - have you been to one lately?:) you're not going to hear the nuances in the music you get on a quality home system, it's about volume and pushing out a lot of bass. listen to one at a reasonable level and you'll realise even the high-end club systems are about those priorities (and with good reason, who wants to sit around concentrating on listening to music in a *club*?)
the medium being played is certainly not going to affect that, whether it's vinyl, cd or even mp3 (used by many high-profile djs with final scratch and other software these days, which i won't go into as others have answered the "why use vinyl" question enough)
in terms of vinyl quality i was referring to commercial releases, particularly at the start of and during vinyl's decline. pick up anything from the late 80s on a major label and you'll cringe.
i'm aware of niche labels using heavy, high-quality vinyl on their releases (and have many myself, for that matter), but it's not exactly mainstream.
I was not referring to the output of record players being unable to reproduce bass, but rather that the original signal is altered with the bass massively toned down in the grooves, to facilitate writing to vinyl - the player then compensates by (supposedly) reversing that transfromation. but in an age where we seem fussy about the slightest amount of sound deformation, the vinyl mastering process is a huge, huge kludge. let alone all the differences a variety of players introduce during that process.
vinyl may sound better - better is subjective. however, cd is more accurate. high-quality digital is even more accurate than that - i'll be the first to agree that 44kHz encoding starts to mash up signals above 15kHz.
- Vinyl has a higher noise floor than CD. even on the best players. - Modern day vinyl quality is *abysmal*. thin and cheap. - Trying to fit a modern-day album onto vinyl drastically compresses the grooves. Albums aren't 35 minutes anymore, they're commonly 40-50 minutes. - Vinyl can't replicate certain sounds. Try an out-of-phase bass signal across both channels, the needle would pop out of the groove. - Think vinyl has a more "natural" sound? Then you're wilfully ignorant of the drastic equalisation mashing that is necessary to embed music on a record - the bottom end has to be all but removed, which the player then puts back in. Think any player gets it right? Or indeed the same as any other player?
There are many reasons to like vinyl, sound quality is not one of them.
I remember hearing that the American releases of games by large publishing companies often have tweaked gameplay to make them slightly "easier" to play (or conversely, making american games harder when exporting them), generally tolerances on timing, accuracy required and so forth. This does make sense, however, as historically European and Japanese gamers have had a good 20 years of fiendishly difficult platformers as their game of choice, where having to restart a level or indeed the game is a frequent occurence, and requires a great deal of dexterity and skill to play to completion - American games of the same era usually just took some perseverance, they weren't raised with the same ethic of skill needed. This is reflected in today's games industry where there is a larger American presence - anything from quake to gta 3, it doesn't take raw speed and skill to complete the game, but the later levels are more a challenge to strategy than anything else.
This isn't the only concession to culture games have made, it often goes the other way as well. For instance, it is considered unacceptable in Japan to see the protagonist actually die, you generally blink and stop, or fall off the screen, or something like that. Games have been modified to reflect this when shipping to that market as well, to appeal more to the demographic, which is equivalent to tailoring a game to a perceived demographic's skill in that area.
you make a valid point, but programs like this aren't about making the job seem more appealing to the minority as a whole. it just lowers the bar for the minority, so more of them are eligible. the problem with doing so (aside from the obvious discrimination) is it reduces the overall ability of candidates, if mediocre women are allowed positions at the expense of smart men, white over black, black over white, or whatever.
what's wrong with giving a position to the best candidate for the job, regardless of gender, race, or any other demographic factor?
marginalised? you know that the gamecube, a 5 year old machine, still outsells the Xbox *360* in Japan?
just because your friends dont have them (and hey, it IS five years old) doesn't mean there aren't stacks of people out there who still have them, and still buy them.
what if your car has a poorly-designed driving interface that can be remotely invoked and make your car drive itself of the cliff? who would you expect to fix it in this case, and should they charge you for it?
FPSes are like Arnie/Sly Stallone movies. And how intelligent are the cannonfodder/meatshields in those situations?
It's not about having a battle of wits in field strategy, it's about chewing gum and kicking ass. Possibly having run out of gum a while earlier.
I agree with you wholeheartedly that the sort of game you describe would be incredibly interesting, challenging and fun to play. I think that level of thinking required would make it unpopular, a lot of people want to play something mindless and slaughterful. Like watching Commando or a Chuck Norris movie or something.
Sounds like you had some really boring roleplaying, though, and possibly a terrible GM.
Not at all, I'm glad to say the RP sessions were wonderful fun, both from a purely social point of view, and also in playing the games. For what it's worth, we mostly played WFRP and AD&D 1st Ed (yes, this was a long while ago) but played around with many other systems including Shadowrun and Paranoia.
Most of our players were good Roleplayers, both able to get into character convincingly and add that extra dimension to the game, but also fast and inventive thinkers who entertained each other with their witticisms. And annoyed the GM to no end by continuously thinking up new things to do.
As for the "formalness" of the worlds, that really depends on the players and the GM. What's the modifier for turning over a table during a bar fight and using it as cover? What happens if an opponent in heavy steel armor crashes into the front of table? What if an acrobat leaps over the table and pins you against it? What if a mage sets the table on fire? I don't know what game you were playing, but these situations happened often in our role-playing and there were no hard and fast rules for them. The DM had to come up with rules and we collaborated to make a great session.
Ah, but that is the formality exactly - when one of those situations happens, the GM formalises it - it's a Dexterity roll at -4, it's a Save vs Fire, and so on and so forth. Players can get a formal idea of what they can do, because they know that their Dexterity is low, or so on and so forth. Not only does it allow the players to excel in areas where they may not do so in Real Life, but it gives them a solid grasp of what their strengths and weaknesses are.
Going back to the players, most of these people, though obviously witty, funny, intelligent and inventive, were shy and retiring in real life. They needed the comfort zone of the game in order to loosen up, to feel confident. As someone else posted in reply below, they were no less witty while walking through school as they were while gaming, but could they come up with the confidence to talk to a pretty girl, or to be outgoing in a group situation? Invariably not. It sounds like you went through the same situation too, that gaming has "taught" you how to extrovert, as I'm glad to say it helped me with as well.
the social aspects of roleplaying are far less dynamic than real social interactions, because they are so much more controlled. you understand what your fellows are driving towards, the dialogue and situations are often cliched, or at least familiar, and there is less at stake, less responsibility, socially - if you make a jackass of yourself you can just claim you're roleplaying, and you already know that the people you're playing with are of a like mind to yourself, especially given the intelligent nature of a "game" such as RP.
there are less unknowns, less uncertainties - and this is what is usually a problem for the socially inept - lack of confidence because of lack of certainty, which is what comes across as nerdishness.
add into this the familiarity with the subject matter through books, films, and more recently computer RPG games, and the (to the mainstream) hurdle of a fantasy world is a non-event. the other aspect, which certainly will appeal to the mathematically design minded (not to mention the neurotic obsessive-compulsive detail freaks) is the range of stats, rules - *formal* descriptors of how the world interacts. if someone chucks a baseball at you, it's not down to something an unsporty nerd has little practice/familiarity with (ie catching it with his hands), but rather something quantifiable and determinate, stats, modifiers and a dice roll.
this may sound harsh, particularly as i'm a programmer and have been a roleplayer quite extensively myself, but in our heads we're all great actors, witty people, conversationalists, sometimes we just need to find the right outlet for it to come out in.
OS X already *does* all that. why bother doing it again, just so little zealots can say it "runs on linux"?
(open sourceness aside, something 95% of mainstream users will care little about, as long as it's open enough (like OS X) that people can write apps for it)
Google does take new things and make them a lot better (search, email, usenet) for general users, but it does not go into a strong, mature and heavily-dominated area it has no expertise in.
Slashdot Mirror
yeah right.
:)
more like "while you were arguing i've rebuilt my kernel, written my own drivers so now i can plug in my digital camera, and written a script to sort through my family photos, because i haven't got any software like iPhoto to do it all for me. but that's fun because i enjoy rebuilding my machine, and writing perl! maybe if i get some downtime i'll try to get my soundcard working. again."
if you want to pander to stereotypes
in the UK, we have "league tables" of A-level and GCSE results (the exams you take before attending university, and two years previously respectively, for those not familiar with them). these are published nationally every year.
this has lead to a race of "dumbing down" of examinations. while the exams are not set by the schools, there are several examination boards for each subject, and the schools can pick and choose which ones to set. the schools want higher results, obviously, so they gravitate towards the easier curriculums and examinations. the exam boards try to create the easiest courses they can while still operating within their guidelines (i'm not sure how their regulation works), as the more popular they are, the more money they earn. it's worth noting if you get an A-level in Geography, for instance, it is just that, not an A-level in Geography from xxxx exam board.
continue this for 15 years, and you end up with vast numbers of students passing. consult http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/2193169.stm for some statistics. this only covers until 2002, it's continued to rise - 96.2% of entrants passed in 2005. the problem is in effect at the top of the scale too, somewhere around 20% of entrants achieve the top grade, an A or A*. universities are ending up being unable to discern top candidates, and complain about A-grade students lacking skills they used to arrive with in the past. they are considering bringing in their own examinations to grade students' aptitude, a move that would completely undermine A-levels.
qualifications are meant to sort the top candidates from everyone else, they are elitist by nature. they are not meant to be all-inclusive "gold star for everyone who takes part" affairs where all but the dumbest 4% are awarded a qualification. aiming for higher pass rates shifts the standard down for everybody, and, perhaps most importantly, challenges the best candidates less, leaving them behind their counterparts in other countries who get pushed harder.
They decided to go to launch with an insanely popular device - this popularity mostly of their own devising, see endless hype over the last months/years - with a woefully small number of units.
:)
So that they can get the "PS3s sell out in 2 hours" headlines.
So they get press coverage like this about people auctioning them.
So the PS3 pricetag doesn't look so bad compared to the $1000 or more it sells for on Ebay. Hell, it's "only" $500, must be a good deal, right?
I fully accept they may have had shortages of components or other manufacturing issues. However, the launch date and the amount of stock they had available was *entirely* under their control (As Europe has found out - they've pushed that back far enough). They could have pushed the launch back a month and had half a million units available to launch. But, they would have missed out on the media frenzy.
The deceitful activities going on by the businessmen mentioned in the article is a logical response to this sort of launch. By no means am I condoning this behaviour, but it's naive to think that Sony didn't reckon this would happen - they *wanted* it to happen. They don't care if Joe Gamer gets his machine, they care about it becoming an object of frenzied desire and generating newspaper column inches.
so the more you pay, the more powerful you are.
it's like magic: the gathering, without the real cards.
it's like World of Warcraft where buying gold is *part of the game*
it's like second life, err, with runes instead of Sim-style crack.
Who gets off on these sorts of games where you can buy your success? Where how good you are is measured in how much cash you're will to spend proving it. And all it proves you have income to burn on it.
I could see something like this being fun if you could only gain cards by swapping with a player who you've defeated, but ick, this whole buying improvements thing makes my skin crawl. Can anyone put a spin on it that makes it actually seem appealing or a good idea?
please read any of the other threads in this post that deal with the engineering, psychoacoustic and other issues behind the quality of vinyl, i can't be bothered to get into that again :)
What astonishes me is this belief that DJs (or club promoters) care one iota about proper sound quality in a club environment - have you been to one lately? :) you're not going to hear the nuances in the music you get on a quality home system, it's about volume and pushing out a lot of bass. listen to one at a reasonable level and you'll realise even the high-end club systems are about those priorities (and with good reason, who wants to sit around concentrating on listening to music in a *club*?)
the medium being played is certainly not going to affect that, whether it's vinyl, cd or even mp3 (used by many high-profile djs with final scratch and other software these days, which i won't go into as others have answered the "why use vinyl" question enough)
in terms of vinyl quality i was referring to commercial releases, particularly at the start of and during vinyl's decline. pick up anything from the late 80s on a major label and you'll cringe.
i'm aware of niche labels using heavy, high-quality vinyl on their releases (and have many myself, for that matter), but it's not exactly mainstream.
I was not referring to the output of record players being unable to reproduce bass, but rather that the original signal is altered with the bass massively toned down in the grooves, to facilitate writing to vinyl - the player then compensates by (supposedly) reversing that transfromation. but in an age where we seem fussy about the slightest amount of sound deformation, the vinyl mastering process is a huge, huge kludge. let alone all the differences a variety of players introduce during that process.
vinyl may sound better - better is subjective. however, cd is more accurate. high-quality digital is even more accurate than that - i'll be the first to agree that 44kHz encoding starts to mash up signals above 15kHz.
If you spent the same amount on a CD player and a decent preamp, you'll get the same audio quality results. :)
- Vinyl has a higher noise floor than CD. even on the best players.
- Modern day vinyl quality is *abysmal*. thin and cheap.
- Trying to fit a modern-day album onto vinyl drastically compresses the grooves. Albums aren't 35 minutes anymore, they're commonly 40-50 minutes.
- Vinyl can't replicate certain sounds. Try an out-of-phase bass signal across both channels, the needle would pop out of the groove.
- Think vinyl has a more "natural" sound? Then you're wilfully ignorant of the drastic equalisation mashing that is necessary to embed music on a record - the bottom end has to be all but removed, which the player then puts back in. Think any player gets it right? Or indeed the same as any other player?
There are many reasons to like vinyl, sound quality is not one of them.
that question is totally irrelevant. i hope you don't honestly think the microsoft cares one jot about anyone who isn't running windows?
luckily for them, that's like 98% of their target market.
I remember hearing that the American releases of games by large publishing companies often have tweaked gameplay to make them slightly "easier" to play (or conversely, making american games harder when exporting them), generally tolerances on timing, accuracy required and so forth. This does make sense, however, as historically European and Japanese gamers have had a good 20 years of fiendishly difficult platformers as their game of choice, where having to restart a level or indeed the game is a frequent occurence, and requires a great deal of dexterity and skill to play to completion - American games of the same era usually just took some perseverance, they weren't raised with the same ethic of skill needed. This is reflected in today's games industry where there is a larger American presence - anything from quake to gta 3, it doesn't take raw speed and skill to complete the game, but the later levels are more a challenge to strategy than anything else.
This isn't the only concession to culture games have made, it often goes the other way as well. For instance, it is considered unacceptable in Japan to see the protagonist actually die, you generally blink and stop, or fall off the screen, or something like that. Games have been modified to reflect this when shipping to that market as well, to appeal more to the demographic, which is equivalent to tailoring a game to a perceived demographic's skill in that area.
you make a valid point, but programs like this aren't about making the job seem more appealing to the minority as a whole. it just lowers the bar for the minority, so more of them are eligible. the problem with doing so (aside from the obvious discrimination) is it reduces the overall ability of candidates, if mediocre women are allowed positions at the expense of smart men, white over black, black over white, or whatever.
what's wrong with giving a position to the best candidate for the job, regardless of gender, race, or any other demographic factor?
marginalised? you know that the gamecube, a 5 year old machine, still outsells the Xbox *360* in Japan?
just because your friends dont have them (and hey, it IS five years old) doesn't mean there aren't stacks of people out there who still have them, and still buy them.
what if your car has a poorly-designed driving interface that can be remotely invoked and make your car drive itself of the cliff? who would you expect to fix it in this case, and should they charge you for it?
when did disney write a good story, as opposed to taking something from history and paraphrasing it in a PC-way?
anything vaguely original they've ever tried to write has been ridiculously bad quality.
Worse interface. Less tracks than iTunes. Lame.
Simple is good. Bling Bling is bad. I personally choose enlightenment.
You just literally made me choke on my breakfast. Bad!
Well, choke laughing, so it's not all bad.
FPSes are like Arnie/Sly Stallone movies. And how intelligent are the cannonfodder/meatshields in those situations?
It's not about having a battle of wits in field strategy, it's about chewing gum and kicking ass. Possibly having run out of gum a while earlier.
I agree with you wholeheartedly that the sort of game you describe would be incredibly interesting, challenging and fun to play. I think that level of thinking required would make it unpopular, a lot of people want to play something mindless and slaughterful. Like watching Commando or a Chuck Norris movie or something.
Sounds like you had some really boring roleplaying, though, and possibly a terrible GM.
Not at all, I'm glad to say the RP sessions were wonderful fun, both from a purely social point of view, and also in playing the games. For what it's worth, we mostly played WFRP and AD&D 1st Ed (yes, this was a long while ago) but played around with many other systems including Shadowrun and Paranoia.
Most of our players were good Roleplayers, both able to get into character convincingly and add that extra dimension to the game, but also fast and inventive thinkers who entertained each other with their witticisms. And annoyed the GM to no end by continuously thinking up new things to do.
As for the "formalness" of the worlds, that really depends on the players and the GM. What's the modifier for turning over a table during a bar fight and using it as cover? What happens if an opponent in heavy steel armor crashes into the front of table? What if an acrobat leaps over the table and pins you against it? What if a mage sets the table on fire? I don't know what game you were playing, but these situations happened often in our role-playing and there were no hard and fast rules for them. The DM had to come up with rules and we collaborated to make a great session.
Ah, but that is the formality exactly - when one of those situations happens, the GM formalises it - it's a Dexterity roll at -4, it's a Save vs Fire, and so on and so forth. Players can get a formal idea of what they can do, because they know that their Dexterity is low, or so on and so forth. Not only does it allow the players to excel in areas where they may not do so in Real Life, but it gives them a solid grasp of what their strengths and weaknesses are.
Going back to the players, most of these people, though obviously witty, funny, intelligent and inventive, were shy and retiring in real life. They needed the comfort zone of the game in order to loosen up, to feel confident. As someone else posted in reply below, they were no less witty while walking through school as they were while gaming, but could they come up with the confidence to talk to a pretty girl, or to be outgoing in a group situation? Invariably not. It sounds like you went through the same situation too, that gaming has "taught" you how to extrovert, as I'm glad to say it helped me with as well.
if you leave that machine on your lap for a while, you will.
on the flipside, i understand it'll smell like grilled pork.
mmmm. pork.
the social aspects of roleplaying are far less dynamic than real social interactions, because they are so much more controlled. you understand what your fellows are driving towards, the dialogue and situations are often cliched, or at least familiar, and there is less at stake, less responsibility, socially - if you make a jackass of yourself you can just claim you're roleplaying, and you already know that the people you're playing with are of a like mind to yourself, especially given the intelligent nature of a "game" such as RP.
there are less unknowns, less uncertainties - and this is what is usually a problem for the socially inept - lack of confidence because of lack of certainty, which is what comes across as nerdishness.
add into this the familiarity with the subject matter through books, films, and more recently computer RPG games, and the (to the mainstream) hurdle of a fantasy world is a non-event. the other aspect, which certainly will appeal to the mathematically design minded (not to mention the neurotic obsessive-compulsive detail freaks) is the range of stats, rules - *formal* descriptors of how the world interacts. if someone chucks a baseball at you, it's not down to something an unsporty nerd has little practice/familiarity with (ie catching it with his hands), but rather something quantifiable and determinate, stats, modifiers and a dice roll.
this may sound harsh, particularly as i'm a programmer and have been a roleplayer quite extensively myself, but in our heads we're all great actors, witty people, conversationalists, sometimes we just need to find the right outlet for it to come out in.
oops, slashdot mangles the URL. just follow the original one above and look at December 6th, 1998 :)
and go figure, SEVEN YEARS AGO they were posting about http://www.slashdot.org/">Java being open source or not...
plus ca change...
OS X already *does* all that. why bother doing it again, just so little zealots can say it "runs on linux"?
(open sourceness aside, something 95% of mainstream users will care little about, as long as it's open enough (like OS X) that people can write apps for it)
Google does take new things and make them a lot better (search, email, usenet) for general users, but it does not go into a strong, mature and heavily-dominated area it has no expertise in.