There are about a million websites, charities, government initiatives worldwide aiming to teach kids to program. It's the essence of what drove the production of the Raspberry Pi. Plug most of the obvious names into Google and you'll see they've already been taken - in fact several I looked for have been taken, lapsed, then acquired by spam or trojan operators. coderdojo isn't a bad name, though it doesn't really speak to teaching children, and is somewhat similar to codeacademy.
You'll be able to buy a Wii Mini for $99 soon if rumours are true, and you can get a $99 Xbox 360 with loads of strings attached. The price point is meaningless. Brand is everything. There are already dozens of handheld Android gaming devices available for peanuts but none of them has reached any kind of critical mass. The Dingoo A320, a proprietary non-Android device (which can run Linux), has sold over a million units and is a big deal still in handheld emulation circles - I doubt even a fraction of the Slashdot crowd has heard of it.
I hope the Ouya backers eventually get their consoles, but a mass market Android console is going to be a moving target. Next year a rival to Ouya comes out that plays all that year's hot new games and takes advantage of whatever developments there have been in Android. And the same thing the year after that and the year after that. Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony spend billions promoting their consoles, losing money hand over fist for a couple of years and making it back in the long run. Well, Nintendo not so much but even they dig themselves a hole with their advertising budget even if they're selling at profit right from the outset.
Actually if you'd get your head out of that pop dichotomy there, you'd realize reality is what it is. it is not 'positive' or 'negative.' Everyone has different expectations and some are harder to please than others. People who label hard to please people as 'negative', are really the insecure ones because they let others' judgements affect their own perceptions.
Can't say I understand why you're being so mean with your response, but you're ignoring what he said and making an entirely separate point. What he said was perfectly correct. People, all people, are hard-wired to react more strongly to negative views than to positive ones. It's how insular cultures develop through self-selection bias because people don't like to hear that they're doing something wrong, and at the other end of the spectrum it's why nobody is sure how to react if you run into a room and tell them everything is fine, whereas running in shouting FIRE has a more pronounced effect.
The space sim is a really hard sell (unless it's that one mission from Halo: Reach) and frankly, even with a joystick, games of this sort can be notoriously difficult. Companies only really want to make games that are like other games or sequels to previous ones since it's more of a business now than a genuine love for games (unless you're "indie").
The X series of games trundles on year after year though I don't think they'll ever have a blockbuster hit. There's also the Evochron series, but it's even more niche. Then of course there's Miner Wars 2081 though it's determined to bill itself as Descent's closest relative. Like the article you linked to suggests, any modern Space Sim is going to have to be 100% playable with mouse and keyboard, the way Freelancer was because the joystick just isn't standard for PC gamers any longer.
Do you consider it abuse to not teach kids about Newton's laws of motion
If someone decided that Newton's Laws of Motion were caused by pixie dust and rainbows, and demanded that that is how it should be taught, then yes. Yes, it would be abuse to teach lies about it. Whether or not kids should learn Newtonian physics isn't even up for debate, is it? Do some kids in the US not learn that?
Yeah. You've missed the point, man. Atheists have no big guy hovering over their head telling them right from wrong. They already know right from wrong. Religious sorts need to be threatened left and right or apparently they'll succumb to sin at the drop of a hat. It must be tough for religious people to only stay good through fear, and not through ethics. I guess one requires thought, empathy and understanding while the other only requires fear.
Is there some sort of charity I can give to that allows Christians to shed their fear and become naturally good people?
France? FRANCE? If anyone was defeated more and raped to buggery left and right it was Britain. How dare you suggest that France has been conquered more often. When we got our act together we also conquered more, had a bigger empire and, most importantly, embraced it better. France may have the banlieues but we would have no culture or food worth talking about without the gift of our adopted sons and daughters. For all the troubles we have with racism, it's still a small thing to address in comparison to the gift we have from a real multi-cultural society.
You've misunderstood. The problem isn't falling populations. Falling populations aren't a problem. We are, arguably, running out of resources. The problem is having an economy that demands constant growth, an entire philosophical need for it, in fact. The US almost always manages to post impressive growth figures year in, year out, to the extent that it's a disaster if growth isn't 3-4% even during a recession. Immigration tends to provide a large chunk of that growth.
I think we basically agree but you're reacting to something different to what I would.
The US is built on a fantasy, and that fantasy requires substantial, at least 3-5 per cent per year, growth or the market gets concerned. Immigration and population growth in general goes a long way to providing that growth. When the home team starts to slacken off it becomes a cause for concern.
None of this makes the US a worse or less desirable place to live. In fact, you wouldn't want to live in the US after a hundred years of 5-6% population growth per year. It's good that things calm down and expected that GDP will slow down also.
Short term this will mean that a bunch of US companies will have their chickens come home to roost and stock prices will fall in certain cases because illusionary projected profits will never happen.
If you replace the one dollar bill with a scorpion then it's going to shake up most high street transactions. How much is that? $8.99? Here's ten bucks and keep the change...
Blizzard doesn't really use DRM. It just ties every game to Battle.Net which is entirely different
I think your perception of DRM is wrong. Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 will not run if you aren't logged in to you BN account. It's not just a case of the games being LINKED to a BattleNet account, you have to be logged in to BattleNet to play the games. That is precisely DRM.
Probably fair to say that in the case of the article PC enthusiast translates much the same way you'd say muscle car enthusiast vs car owner. Most car owners will care about the performance of their car to one degree or another, but muscle/performance car enthusiasts actually get their hands dirty swapping out parts and upgrading as money becomes available.
If the Bitcoin economy approaches anything like a fraction of the GDP of Somalia then we're in trouble. I don't think lack of Bitcoin is going to be a major headache in the grand scheme of things.
You're conflating economies and currencies there. Also, there's nothing stopping a "third party" Government ruling that bitcoin is illegal. It's largely off the legislative table the same way it's off most people's radar. Once it gets noticed it could easily get put up on the same shelf as file-sharing and hacking. Or if you prefer a historical example it could be made illegal the exact same way gold-hoarding has been declared illegal in the past. What? Who would do anything so tyrannical as forbid the possession of more than a small amount of gold? USA, baby
And this is not even considering how vulnerable to exchange rates an artificial currency is. Like banks which exist on collective goodwill, fairy dust and rainbows, an artificial currency has nothing backing it. Faith in a real currency is, to an extent, faith in the actual country backing that currency. Real currencies can collapse when the economic situation in the issuing country enters crisis, whereas an artificial currency is going to be an order of magnitude more vulnerable to rumours and sentiment. An actual effective hack of the peer to peer system will render Bitcoin valueless.
Some people's idea of fun is to look at art. You're making the mistake of assuming everyone is the same. You might like Psychonauts, say, a colourful platformer with a wacky story and some quite challenging puzzle jumping. I might enjoy the Walking Dead game which is little more that an interactive movie interspersed with some quick time style events. We both have fun from our game of choice, but may hate playing the other game. We have many points of similarity, but also many differences. Also, I am a basset hound.
I think you're doing a good job of showcasing that gameplay, like art, is in the eye of the beholder. From your point of view gameplay is missing compared to older games. From my point of view, and I say this as someone who died a million times playing Jet Set Willy, the gameplay was missing from the older games. I actually WANT easier games where I can stroll through them, see everything, collect everything and then move on having felt I got my money's worth. Basically I want a game that rewards perseverance without demanding skill. I skew older on the gamer age chart, but I'm trending towards the norm.
Super Mario World used about half a dozen buttons and was, to an extent, a skinner box that drummed patterns into your head. I appreciate that you have every right to think that it has better gameplay than, say, Darksiders 2, but I really can't share that opinion.
Are you insane? You really think that is reasonable?
Would you still have a job if that happened to you, and you were innocent? How about a family?
God.
Okay, Napoleon, calm down. Would I still have a job if I was sentenced to life in jail? No. I'm going with no here. I may still have a family, probably a guy from Brooklyn with a lot more chest hair than me who likes to cuddle.
If I set fire to your house and it cost a hundred grand to put right, but I was doing it because something something annoyed me, that'd be okay? You're making the mistake that hacking is a victimless crime, that costs nothing to put right. If I blow up a bank, kill a bunch of hostages and hi-jack a plane during my robbery, the fault isn't with the bank's security. I'm being a dick.
There aren't two million murderers or rapists in US prisons. Most US citizens in clink are there for drug offences where there is no victim but the inmate.
Also MS Office amounts propably to a third of daily software usage by the average office drone. The other two thirds is custom stuff they propably also didn't get training for. And the reamining quarter is time wasters like Solitaire.
Difficult to argue with that math, and keep a straight face.
Open Source software programs like Open or Libre Office and Google Docs in particular deal with Microsoft's proprietary data formats better than Microsoft does. Good luck getting your five year old Office installation to read the latest version from MS. Meanwhile Google et al can cope with it fine. Perhaps not perfectly, but fine. The lesson here isn't that using non-MS software gives a less than perfect experience, it's that using MS software encourages a less than perfect experience. 99% of users demand little or nothing more than MS was offering in the 90s, but they're forced to upgrade because otherwise they can't read the files they're getting from that work colleague with the new PC.
The compliance tracking costs alone would not have been trivial for that many MS systems.
Most people won't understand what you mean. Basically once your business is on Microsoft's radar they will assume you are using a complete suite of Microsoft products and if you aren't licensed for what they think you are probably using they'll send you a letter asking to prove what licenses you do hold. This costs money, be it your own time or as usually happens some IT contractors time. In the EU/UK the whole thing is pretty shady, but if you don't comply you risk having it escalated to legal threats. Before you say it, having a day in court is not what most businesses want, particularly small businesses where every hand is essential and where that day in court represents legal fees and lost revenue. You're not going to get that back.
I've avoided using MS products for years. Some stuff I can't avoid. I have no financials/stock control software with local support that runs on anything but MS server software. You can run everything on the server and side-step Windows licenses on the desktop, but pay about the same for the CAL, or whatever they call it now. I hope what Munich is doing catches on. If you're a home user or a mega-corporation you have the choice to by-pass Microsoft and use open source software. Both these markets are served. If you're an SME you're using Microsoft.
If content creators embedded graphics and text in the article I'd be fine with that. I don't expect to tear pages out of a magazine before I read it and those suckers are full of ads. The problem is, as you ably stated, the animated crap. I've had access to ad-skipping on TV for around a decade. I can not watch TV advertisements. I will leave a room and rest my fevered brow against an exterior wall before I'll watch one. Unless I hear about a clever ad then I'll trawl Youtube until I find it. So, in summary, make better ads.
The last thing anyone in the EU wants is a legal system similar to the USA. We'd have to build ten times as many prisons. We have NO money.
The "Prisoner Defence", ie "I am not a number, I am a free man" is a grand idea but it's hard to avoid contributory negligence. So, if you had a car and you let anyone borrow it regardless of whether they had insurance or even a driving license then you'd be committing a crime. If you pay for an internet connection and you are equally lax about how it's used then you should also be held responsible. I don't understand how anyone has a problem with this. Say you have a legally held firearm and just leave it on your lawn. That's okay, is it?
It's possible to spoof IP addresses, but currently EU law requires for a record to be kept of what you're doing with your Internet connection at the ISP level. This is as much a tool to prove innocence as it is a hammer to smite the sinner.
Slashdot Mirror
There are about a million websites, charities, government initiatives worldwide aiming to teach kids to program. It's the essence of what drove the production of the Raspberry Pi. Plug most of the obvious names into Google and you'll see they've already been taken - in fact several I looked for have been taken, lapsed, then acquired by spam or trojan operators. coderdojo isn't a bad name, though it doesn't really speak to teaching children, and is somewhat similar to codeacademy.
You'll be able to buy a Wii Mini for $99 soon if rumours are true, and you can get a $99 Xbox 360 with loads of strings attached. The price point is meaningless. Brand is everything. There are already dozens of handheld Android gaming devices available for peanuts but none of them has reached any kind of critical mass. The Dingoo A320, a proprietary non-Android device (which can run Linux), has sold over a million units and is a big deal still in handheld emulation circles - I doubt even a fraction of the Slashdot crowd has heard of it.
I hope the Ouya backers eventually get their consoles, but a mass market Android console is going to be a moving target. Next year a rival to Ouya comes out that plays all that year's hot new games and takes advantage of whatever developments there have been in Android. And the same thing the year after that and the year after that. Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony spend billions promoting their consoles, losing money hand over fist for a couple of years and making it back in the long run. Well, Nintendo not so much but even they dig themselves a hole with their advertising budget even if they're selling at profit right from the outset.
Actually if you'd get your head out of that pop dichotomy there, you'd realize reality is what it is. it is not 'positive' or 'negative.' Everyone has different expectations and some are harder to please than others. People who label hard to please people as 'negative', are really the insecure ones because they let others' judgements affect their own perceptions.
Can't say I understand why you're being so mean with your response, but you're ignoring what he said and making an entirely separate point. What he said was perfectly correct. People, all people, are hard-wired to react more strongly to negative views than to positive ones. It's how insular cultures develop through self-selection bias because people don't like to hear that they're doing something wrong, and at the other end of the spectrum it's why nobody is sure how to react if you run into a room and tell them everything is fine, whereas running in shouting FIRE has a more pronounced effect.
The space sim is a really hard sell (unless it's that one mission from Halo: Reach) and frankly, even with a joystick, games of this sort can be notoriously difficult. Companies only really want to make games that are like other games or sequels to previous ones since it's more of a business now than a genuine love for games (unless you're "indie").
The X series of games trundles on year after year though I don't think they'll ever have a blockbuster hit. There's also the Evochron series, but it's even more niche. Then of course there's Miner Wars 2081 though it's determined to bill itself as Descent's closest relative. Like the article you linked to suggests, any modern Space Sim is going to have to be 100% playable with mouse and keyboard, the way Freelancer was because the joystick just isn't standard for PC gamers any longer.
Do you consider it abuse to not teach kids about Newton's laws of motion
If someone decided that Newton's Laws of Motion were caused by pixie dust and rainbows, and demanded that that is how it should be taught, then yes. Yes, it would be abuse to teach lies about it. Whether or not kids should learn Newtonian physics isn't even up for debate, is it? Do some kids in the US not learn that?
Yeah. You've missed the point, man. Atheists have no big guy hovering over their head telling them right from wrong. They already know right from wrong. Religious sorts need to be threatened left and right or apparently they'll succumb to sin at the drop of a hat. It must be tough for religious people to only stay good through fear, and not through ethics. I guess one requires thought, empathy and understanding while the other only requires fear.
Is there some sort of charity I can give to that allows Christians to shed their fear and become naturally good people?
France? FRANCE? If anyone was defeated more and raped to buggery left and right it was Britain. How dare you suggest that France has been conquered more often. When we got our act together we also conquered more, had a bigger empire and, most importantly, embraced it better. France may have the banlieues but we would have no culture or food worth talking about without the gift of our adopted sons and daughters. For all the troubles we have with racism, it's still a small thing to address in comparison to the gift we have from a real multi-cultural society.
You've misunderstood. The problem isn't falling populations. Falling populations aren't a problem. We are, arguably, running out of resources. The problem is having an economy that demands constant growth, an entire philosophical need for it, in fact. The US almost always manages to post impressive growth figures year in, year out, to the extent that it's a disaster if growth isn't 3-4% even during a recession. Immigration tends to provide a large chunk of that growth.
I think we basically agree but you're reacting to something different to what I would.
The US is built on a fantasy, and that fantasy requires substantial, at least 3-5 per cent per year, growth or the market gets concerned. Immigration and population growth in general goes a long way to providing that growth. When the home team starts to slacken off it becomes a cause for concern.
None of this makes the US a worse or less desirable place to live. In fact, you wouldn't want to live in the US after a hundred years of 5-6% population growth per year. It's good that things calm down and expected that GDP will slow down also.
Short term this will mean that a bunch of US companies will have their chickens come home to roost and stock prices will fall in certain cases because illusionary projected profits will never happen.
If you replace the one dollar bill with a scorpion then it's going to shake up most high street transactions. How much is that? $8.99? Here's ten bucks and keep the change...
Blizzard doesn't really use DRM. It just ties every game to Battle.Net which is entirely different
I think your perception of DRM is wrong. Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 will not run if you aren't logged in to you BN account. It's not just a case of the games being LINKED to a BattleNet account, you have to be logged in to BattleNet to play the games. That is precisely DRM.
Probably fair to say that in the case of the article PC enthusiast translates much the same way you'd say muscle car enthusiast vs car owner. Most car owners will care about the performance of their car to one degree or another, but muscle/performance car enthusiasts actually get their hands dirty swapping out parts and upgrading as money becomes available.
Yeah. A 1%er will be someone with 1% of a whole Bitcoin.
If the Bitcoin economy approaches anything like a fraction of the GDP of Somalia then we're in trouble. I don't think lack of Bitcoin is going to be a major headache in the grand scheme of things.
You're conflating economies and currencies there. Also, there's nothing stopping a "third party" Government ruling that bitcoin is illegal. It's largely off the legislative table the same way it's off most people's radar. Once it gets noticed it could easily get put up on the same shelf as file-sharing and hacking. Or if you prefer a historical example it could be made illegal the exact same way gold-hoarding has been declared illegal in the past. What? Who would do anything so tyrannical as forbid the possession of more than a small amount of gold? USA, baby
And this is not even considering how vulnerable to exchange rates an artificial currency is. Like banks which exist on collective goodwill, fairy dust and rainbows, an artificial currency has nothing backing it. Faith in a real currency is, to an extent, faith in the actual country backing that currency. Real currencies can collapse when the economic situation in the issuing country enters crisis, whereas an artificial currency is going to be an order of magnitude more vulnerable to rumours and sentiment. An actual effective hack of the peer to peer system will render Bitcoin valueless.
Some people's idea of fun is to look at art. You're making the mistake of assuming everyone is the same. You might like Psychonauts, say, a colourful platformer with a wacky story and some quite challenging puzzle jumping. I might enjoy the Walking Dead game which is little more that an interactive movie interspersed with some quick time style events. We both have fun from our game of choice, but may hate playing the other game. We have many points of similarity, but also many differences. Also, I am a basset hound.
I think you're doing a good job of showcasing that gameplay, like art, is in the eye of the beholder. From your point of view gameplay is missing compared to older games. From my point of view, and I say this as someone who died a million times playing Jet Set Willy, the gameplay was missing from the older games. I actually WANT easier games where I can stroll through them, see everything, collect everything and then move on having felt I got my money's worth. Basically I want a game that rewards perseverance without demanding skill. I skew older on the gamer age chart, but I'm trending towards the norm.
Super Mario World used about half a dozen buttons and was, to an extent, a skinner box that drummed patterns into your head. I appreciate that you have every right to think that it has better gameplay than, say, Darksiders 2, but I really can't share that opinion.
Also, lawyers charge by the hour.
Are you insane? You really think that is reasonable? Would you still have a job if that happened to you, and you were innocent? How about a family? God.
Okay, Napoleon, calm down. Would I still have a job if I was sentenced to life in jail? No. I'm going with no here. I may still have a family, probably a guy from Brooklyn with a lot more chest hair than me who likes to cuddle.
If I set fire to your house and it cost a hundred grand to put right, but I was doing it because something something annoyed me, that'd be okay? You're making the mistake that hacking is a victimless crime, that costs nothing to put right. If I blow up a bank, kill a bunch of hostages and hi-jack a plane during my robbery, the fault isn't with the bank's security. I'm being a dick.
Unless the Culture War involve throwing Petri dishes at scientists, I have no interest in it.
There aren't two million murderers or rapists in US prisons. Most US citizens in clink are there for drug offences where there is no victim but the inmate.
Also MS Office amounts propably to a third of daily software usage by the average office drone. The other two thirds is custom stuff they propably also didn't get training for. And the reamining quarter is time wasters like Solitaire.
Difficult to argue with that math, and keep a straight face.
Open Source software programs like Open or Libre Office and Google Docs in particular deal with Microsoft's proprietary data formats better than Microsoft does. Good luck getting your five year old Office installation to read the latest version from MS. Meanwhile Google et al can cope with it fine. Perhaps not perfectly, but fine. The lesson here isn't that using non-MS software gives a less than perfect experience, it's that using MS software encourages a less than perfect experience. 99% of users demand little or nothing more than MS was offering in the 90s, but they're forced to upgrade because otherwise they can't read the files they're getting from that work colleague with the new PC.
The compliance tracking costs alone would not have been trivial for that many MS systems.
Most people won't understand what you mean. Basically once your business is on Microsoft's radar they will assume you are using a complete suite of Microsoft products and if you aren't licensed for what they think you are probably using they'll send you a letter asking to prove what licenses you do hold. This costs money, be it your own time or as usually happens some IT contractors time. In the EU/UK the whole thing is pretty shady, but if you don't comply you risk having it escalated to legal threats. Before you say it, having a day in court is not what most businesses want, particularly small businesses where every hand is essential and where that day in court represents legal fees and lost revenue. You're not going to get that back.
I've avoided using MS products for years. Some stuff I can't avoid. I have no financials/stock control software with local support that runs on anything but MS server software. You can run everything on the server and side-step Windows licenses on the desktop, but pay about the same for the CAL, or whatever they call it now. I hope what Munich is doing catches on. If you're a home user or a mega-corporation you have the choice to by-pass Microsoft and use open source software. Both these markets are served. If you're an SME you're using Microsoft.
If content creators embedded graphics and text in the article I'd be fine with that. I don't expect to tear pages out of a magazine before I read it and those suckers are full of ads. The problem is, as you ably stated, the animated crap. I've had access to ad-skipping on TV for around a decade. I can not watch TV advertisements. I will leave a room and rest my fevered brow against an exterior wall before I'll watch one. Unless I hear about a clever ad then I'll trawl Youtube until I find it. So, in summary, make better ads.
The last thing anyone in the EU wants is a legal system similar to the USA. We'd have to build ten times as many prisons. We have NO money.
The "Prisoner Defence", ie "I am not a number, I am a free man" is a grand idea but it's hard to avoid contributory negligence. So, if you had a car and you let anyone borrow it regardless of whether they had insurance or even a driving license then you'd be committing a crime. If you pay for an internet connection and you are equally lax about how it's used then you should also be held responsible. I don't understand how anyone has a problem with this. Say you have a legally held firearm and just leave it on your lawn. That's okay, is it?
It's possible to spoof IP addresses, but currently EU law requires for a record to be kept of what you're doing with your Internet connection at the ISP level. This is as much a tool to prove innocence as it is a hammer to smite the sinner.