Yeah, I don't think N.Korea's population is actually getting fooled by the propaganda either. I mean, when your babies are starving to death and your whole family is skin and bones, seeing a posters everywhere of your plump, obese great leader telling you how great your life is doesn't really inspire loyalty or confidence.
I wonder how laser weapons would change the nature of smallarms combat. I've heard that most of the shots are fired to suppress the enemy so that you can maneuver. With a silent and invisible laser beam, the missed shots might not put the same fear of death into the enemy as the crack and zip of a bullet that almost took your life. If a squad can't intimidate the enemy into not shooting and getting back down into cover, wouldn't they just end up pinned down?
I guess people have already talked death about all the limitations a laser rifle would have... so what is the long term vision for how a laser weapon would provide a benefit in small arms combat? Could it fire more accurately at longer ranges and still carry enough killing power? Or perhaps the lack of recoil would help it kill enemies more effectively while other bullet-based weapons provide covering fire?
Every button and input zone has been placed based on frequency of use, precision required and ergonomic comfort. There are a total of sixteen buttons on the Steam Controller. Half of them are accessible to the player without requiring thumbs to be lifted from the trackpads, including two on the back. All controls and buttons have been placed symmetrically, making left or right handedness switchable via a software config checkbox."
To that end, nearly all AAA shooters attempt to address fine aim control using "magnetic" crosshairs. Sensitivity on the sticks start with a base acceleration and top speed. But if you intersect a target with the crosshairs, a "soft-lock" engages where the crosshairs are partially dragged along in the general direction that the target moves, while sensitivity is temporarily reduced to allow for finer control of where you target. Crosshair sensitivity is commonly reduced when aiming-down-sights as well. In effect, the idea of having a broad movement and a fine movement control is being addressed contextually by the game. This requires a lot of refinement specific to each game, and resulting in some really really shitty controls in the earlier years of console shooters. They've improved considerably since then, and the general concept of how to apply soft-lock aiming has become common knowledge among dev studios.
This is important because the vast majority of development hours will be directed towards analog-stick based control for xbox and playstation releases. This means that when PC versions are released, developers can piggy-back this aim tuning for steam's controller as well, since it was already produced for the console version.
To that end, FPS game controller layouts typically don't map the fire button to the click-in of the right stick, precisely because you lose precision during click-in. Typically they use a non-thumb button like the right trigger for firing to avoid jostling the thumb position. They also require only very light pressure to trigger firing for the same reason.
Can't really imagine the click-in of the trackpad has having too wide a range of functionality, because of shifting during click-in. It might be limited to 8-way directionality on the left side? One of my concerns with the right side is that it seems the entire surface will click-in, which means you can't hit for example, top quadrant,and left quadrant (X+Y on an xbox360 controller) simultaneously. If they were to simply map the upper left area as X+Y there might be too many accidental inputs.
If I could give Valve some feedback, I'd like those concentric circle ridges to also have an overlaid "X" ridge to show the borders of the top/bottom/left/right quadrants as well as show an exact location for intermediate directions directly under the ridges of the "X". That might return the possibly of functional X+Y button combinations using this device.
"This haptic capability provides a vital channel of information to the player - delivering in-game information about speed, boundaries, thresholds, textures, action confirmations, or any other events about which game designers want players to be aware. It is a higher-bandwidth haptic information channel than exists in any other consumer product that we know of.
As a parlour trick they can even play audio waveforms and function as speakers."
Important difference here is that you have tactile feedback on your thumbs position relative to the center.
Furthermore, since the surface is clickable, it can be customized to only register input upon click-in...like a D-pad! On the right side of the controller, the trackpad 4 quadrants can function as a replacement XYBA. Mappings which are traditionally assigned to clicking a stick in, can be moved to the back of the controller.
I am cautiously optimistic about the design of this controller, it all hinges upon the execution of these ideas and the quality of construction. If nothing else, it would be a better way to play FPS and RTS games since it replaces relative input (i.e stick position relative to cetner), with absolute input (the input starts and stops in sync with the start and stop of the thumb movement).
Instead of constant movement towards a target, and having to time the release of the stick with the time of interception, you move until matched with the target and then stop moving, akin to a mouse input. I have not seen trackpad sensitivity that can sufficiently replace mouse input, but Valve is claiming to have reached unprecedented levels of trackpad precision. Really can't judge the capability of this controller until real-world feedback comes in, but at least conceptually, I can see this being a step-up from the controller input already popularized on Xbox and PS platforms.
Corporate accounting doesn't call the shots, accounting tells managements the results of the shots that have been called. Finance takes accounting's results, evaluates and extrapolates, and makes plans for the future. Somewhere between management and finance, decisions get made. Ya got the wrong guy.
The only companies that get run by accountants are accounting companies.
I had posted awhile ago asking what the disadvantage would be in using a similar approach based on 1 second intervals.
The response I had gotten is that while some financial market activity is based on information on the real world, a lot of it is based on information on the financial market itself. In other words, a company sees other companies freaking out over say, an event, like a change in a CEO, and selling, so the company will want to join the others and sell sell sell before they get left behind. This can steamroll into a long disastrous run on that stock. The price of the stock flashes downward until it hits the bottom that some of the companies feel is still worthwhile. Then that price starts to drift upward. Other companies see the stock turning and buy buy buy.
What is the REAL increase/decrease that should be associated with the change in the CEO? There really isn't any way to measure that. Instead the "wisdom" of the crowds drifts up and down until finally, in aggregate, the market settles down on a decision about the best approximation of the price impact.
Now, if trading is delayed, we'll still have increase/decrease cycles like that, and they won't be nearly as sharp since people will have more time to think and process the real world information received about the change in leadership. However, there really is no concrete way to know how the price of a stock should change because of the change in leadership, the only way to price that out is to let the market feel out it's "mood" and let the up/down shock work itself out and settle on a conclusion. Delaying the trading reduces the magnitude of the shock, but also lengthens that shock period out. Thus, the speed at which markets process information about the economy is slowed down. In the milliseconds of HFT, regular joes processing trades daily or monthly don't have to worry as much about the brief shock of volatility since they have a much longer holding period, during which the shocks have already worked themselves out.
Not a great argument in my opinion, and I didn't see any supporting study (a very difficult thing to experiment on!), but it was an answer to my question on how someone might want to defend HFT. I hope I represented that argument properly.
I do trust Valve, but the parent brings up an important point.
The difference between a PC and a console isn't hardware, it's about control. The hardware and interfaces will all change over time, but the real distinction is who gets to say what happens on the platform. For PCs, users control the environment. For consoles, a company is controlling the environment. There are benefits to users owning the environment, and benefits to a company controlling the environment.
The SteamMachine appears to be a weird hybrid between the two ends of the spectrum, and seems to be giving up the most significant advantages of both ends unless this starts to drive some major changes in game development.
The probability adjusted value of a $1 dollar ticket to get a 100mil payout with a 1 in 175mil chance of winning is 100 is a little over 57 cents.
Why pay $1 to get $0.57 back?
Lottery tickets and gambling in general is mainly about buying hope. You lose a little money, but get a little temporary hope in the meantime that you get to enjoy until the results come in. Nothing wrong with a little entertainment as long as you know what you're paying for it.
On the other hand, the recent powerball lottery with a $2 ticket, and a 400mil payout has a little under $2.29 payout. A positive return...assuming you welcome taking on the level of risk involved to sink enough money to realize the desired outcome. But it's not crazy to buy a ticket or two when the jackpot is that high.
Check out "The Witness", an upcoming by Jonathan Blow (known for Braid).
It's a single person on a beautiful uninhabited island, you walk around calming exploring and solving puzzles from a first-person perspective. The puzzles as a whole tell a larger story through the perspectives gained by each.
When I was kid, games were not as realistic as they are today, but with that being said, I didn't play games to revel in violence. It was mostly about power fantasy, overcoming challenges, and mapping and defeating abstract systems. In the vast majority of games, violence is simply the substrate through which those ideas came through. Games with limited depictions of violence don't bother me too badly since they're easily forgotten and largely ignored by the player after the first couple repetitions.
I do take issue with some story elements though. Anyone who has been playing GTA games should know that banging hookers is just a momentary distraction in dozens of hours of gameplay that have nothing to do with that activity. But as the parent poster pointed out, people in GTA games are tremendously shitty people, and the player should have enough world experience to have some greater perspective over the underlying cynicism that pervades the world of Rockstar games. Similarly, I'm not going to let a kid watch a show like Niptuck, , 24, or Breaking Bad. Anti-heroes can be interesting to watch, but I don't want a kid's worldview shaped from the outlook of anti-heroes.
People can be shitty. This is true. People can also be shockingly good. People are usually both shitty and good in varying degrees. In my years as a teenager through my years as a young adult, I had too much cynicism, too much pessimism. I had ideas about what the world was, and I was wrong. I'm probably still wrong today as an adult, but at least I've learned enough to realize that. I would like to protect my kid from sinking large amounts of time into a game with such negative themes at least until he's old enough to compartmentalize that world properly, or see the satire in it. Teenagers are at high risk for taking on a jaded look at the world, I'm not going to help that happen to mine.
I don't have a hard and fast rules about when my kid will get to play what games. I'm a gamer who knows where to find enough information to make judgement calls as each case comes up. I also know that there are a ton of awesome games a kid can be playing instead of games that force the question of whether or not your kid should be playing it.
I think the more important take-away from discussions on appropriate videogame usage is that parents should ensure the proper context is set for what their kids play (and how much they get to play).
The chart you're linking shows 5 continuous years of significant loss, followed by 5 years of continuous profits that have been working that total lifetime loss down, even in the face of the billion+ impact from having to reserve for warranty claim costs.
Given a_nonamiss's suggestion that MS might be trying to duplicate the loss-leading strategy used with the Xbox line (in which a large loss is taken up front to establish a market foothold from which losses can be recovered and and eventually present-value discounted returns can be obtained that justify the loss), the chart you're linking is showing that their loss-leading strategy appears to be working.
Meanwhile, MS has over 40billion of current assets in excess of current liabilities, it seems that they can handily absorb the losses taken thus far to try to reap returns later.
Especially considering the added benefit of breaking breaking into the livingroom with the Xbox opens up added opportunities to sell media, provide cross-platform interactions between Windows/Xbox/Windows Phone/etc. It seems that the Xbox strategy has worked pretty well. Even more importantly, their other revenue streams have been weakening and their lifespans are being questioned. Establishing a revenue stream with a positive outlook is particularly important while their other revenue streams are declining.
With regard to the Xbox One? They've gotten their asses kicked in the media hype, but the practical impact is minimal in the long term. PS3 was heavily panned for being expensive and not having worthwhile games at launch. Over that console's lifespan its image and sales have recovered. From a higher-level perspective, the Xbox One appears to be comprised of PC hardware. Same goes for the PS3. This makes PC/XB1/PS3 multi-platforms games much much easier for developers to ship out, essentially showing the XB1 with competitive HW parity in the console market, with added stability due to nigh guaranteed multi-platform releases even if they fuck up their sales pitch on the console. In short, the worst case I see for the XB1 is a shallower profit trend, but at this point they can simply "coast" with just feature-matching at this point and still be pulling in profit, particularly since their primary competitor, the PS3 is run by a company which is relatively cash-starved, and Nintendo has declined to compete for those same customers with the Wii, and may continue to do so with the Wii U.
"The combination of North Korea’s long economic decline and enhanced U.S. and South Korean military capabilities has diminished the ability of North Korea to launch a successful invasion of South Korea. Nonetheless, the KPA retains the ability to inflict heavy casualties and collateral damage, largely through the use of massed long-range artillery. In effect, Pyongyang’s most credible conventional threat is to devastate Seoul (and a good portion of South Korea) rather than to seize and hold it."
NK's army is mostly an aging joke. Big, but obsolete and poorly maintained and supplied. If military action were to begin, the large volume of artillery already aimed at Seoul would kick off in a short-range storm of shells. Given the disrepute given to their condition, many of those pieces will fail, but given the vast number of pieces, it will still amount to a large amount of damage before they can be stopped. Seoul won't be "wiped out", but a lot of civilians will be hurt or killed in that opening hour of conflict. It would be followed by NK being crushed since NK's military is heavily outclassed by both SK and the US presence.
The problem has always been south korean civilians held hostage by those guns. The missiles and nukes aren't a significant threat (right now).
The real difference between a console and PC has nothing to do with hardware.
It's about control. If you control the environment the games run in, it's a PC. If someone else controls the environment, it's a console.
The result is that consoles have consistent environments and regulation, and the benefit of having a target spec for developers to design towards.
PCs are multi-purpose, and can run mods. They also add a wide variety of potential hardware configs that developers will need to test against.
But the actual size/shape/hardware of the device has nothing to do with whether it's a PC or a console. All of those things will change over the years. In the end, It's about control.
Given that the US school system still has lackluster performance despite spending more per student than countries that are getting superior results, it seems there's more to the problem than insufficient funding (though funding is certainly an issue for many areas).
I think that the community culture is extremely important. In asian countries (like my wife's), the kids with the highest grades are seen as superstars, not nerds. Athletics has a much lower emphasis in comparison to academics. In my highschool (in the US), kids who frequently raised their hands were seen as "teacher's pets" and discouraged from doing so. If the student body as a whole doesn't want to get good grades, it becomes much harder to motivate an individual to break out from the pack, especially given the extremely powerful desire for kids to make social connections and find a way to fit in.
In my school , though "honors"/AP students might be pressured to get good grades by their parents, they also formed their own clique that competed against each other for the best grades in each class. The goal was not to pass with "good enough" average grades, but to get the best grades. When scores came out, we'd ask each other what we got so that we could establish a pecking order, and it felt incredibly rewarding to come out on top, or to at least beat the friend who usually had a higher score than you did. When tests were coming up, we'd form study groups, and work together on projects. If the general student body shared the same kind of group-pressure to succeed in academics, individual students may perform much better. Among the general student body, I very frequently heard comments to the effect of, "I did ok on the test, I got a C+", or people bragging, "Haha, I only studied like an hour for the test". Shouldn't these be considered shameful things to reveal? It showed their mindset with regard to school. School was just something they endured to get by through the year, not a place where they could compete.
If you can find a way to get the kids themselves to care about their grades, the money spent on education will be leveraged to a much greater extent.
I think in private schools, you see a pooling of kids with higher parental involvement(as implicated by the parent's willingness to spend more for a potentially better education), and this higher pressure at home may help shape the individual and collective attitudes of the kids in the school. Though the article's writer is terrible at communicating the idea, I think there could be a valuable concept underlying the writer's nonsense, i.e: Get public school parents to help develop a private-school's education culture within the public school.
That is exactly the point that I'm making. I had already pointed this out in the first post you replied to.
1) The police say bombs were involved in the searches.
2) The couple doesn't say that. They were shopping for pressure cookers, not researching how to turn one into a bomb.
The police have incentive to cover their asses by saying "bomb" was included in the couple's search history. But the couple is saying that "pressure cookers" and backpacks" were searched for, and any reference to bombs is an inference that other people had made.
That "fine article" is paraphrasing other sites, which are paraphrasing other sites. They're claiming the searches were for pressure cooker bombs based on statement from the police, which conflicts with that of the couple, but their slapdash editor didn't even notice.
1) Suffolk county police claim the wife searched for pressure cooker bombs, and the husband searched for backpacks.
2) According to the wife, she was shopping for pressure cookers, and the husband was shopping for backpacks.
The important detail missing is that the couple wasn't searching for bombs. It appears the police added the word "bombs" to cover up their amateur-hour faux pas so that an investigation sounds reasonable.
Now, perhaps the wife is just bullshitting people to say that she wasn't researching how to build a pressure cooker bomb, but I find it far more likely that she was shopping for a pressure cooker (a common activity), than researching how to build a pressure cooker bomb (an uncommon activity), and all parties involved concede that the wife wasn't actually doing anything that should give cause for concern.
The formulas in question are laid out in this link.
I took calc I, calc II, and linear algebra in college so I have a literate, but nonetheless layman's understanding of math.
The problem with explaining these subjects through formulas is that though I recognize the syntax being used, there are a WHOLE LOT of variables presented, with minimal explanation of what each variable represents. Where an explanation is given, it is primarily a link to an underlying wikipedia article because the explanation of what that variable represents is a non-trivial undertaking. But I'm not trying to say that the wiki articles are bad.
It's a complex topic, and there's only so many details you can shave off of a subject until you lose important details and start to misrepresent the mechanics. The wiki article is aiming at an accurate technical explanation, with layers of depth for those who have the time, while a newspaper article needs to communicate a concept to those who have very little time (if they actually had time, they would be doing some real study on the matter rather than just skimming a newspaper article).
The newspaper article and the detailed wiki article serve two different goals and should be taken in conjunction with one another. The newspaper article gives just enough information to entice a reader to learn more, at which point the wiki article can step in (or any other more detailed resource).
Bottom line: No, I don't think more math and formulas should be used in popular press. Complex math has upper limits of simplification, and the goal of public press articles is to foster curiosity through concise communication.
Ugh, well I'll admit that if nothing else, seeing that video of the soldier and the knife taught me that videogames have not desensitized me to violence.
I would have lost my shit on the spot. Man, just imagining myself floating out there on a spacewalk 200 miles above the earth, and feeling water on my head that isn't supposed be there...*shudder*. Just being up there is a spectacular balancing act of hundreds of special-purpose technologies that nearly all result in a horrible horrible death should they go wrong, finding even the slightest thing going wrong would freak me out.
5'10, nexus 7 fits in my dress slacks too (but as mentioned in another post, I keep it in a sling-bag)
I too chose the 5-inch S4, because it's the upper limit of how far my thumb can reach across a screen when holding the device in 1 hand. If I want a bigger screen, I'd get more screen space, but I'd sacrifice one-hand usability. If I'm giving up one-hand usability, I had better get a good amount of screen space to make up for it, so a 6-7 inch screen makes more sense to me than the Note II's 5.5inch screen.
I carry a man-purse (shoulder-bag) whereever I go. Makes it easy to bring gum, phone, keys, tablet, headphones, pen, multi-tool, workpass, forms/coupons, and wallet wherever I go. I like having this stuff with me, and the man-purse is a practical way of doing it rather than just walking around running into situations where I wish I had been carrying ______ with me.
Keeps me from having lumpy pockets, allowing for a clear view of my glorious posterior. Buddies made some jokes at first, but it blew over pretty quick. Ladies never even bring it up unless they want to compliment it. It's even more practical these days for carrying extra stuff when we take my son out somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I don't think N.Korea's population is actually getting fooled by the propaganda either. I mean, when your babies are starving to death and your whole family is skin and bones, seeing a posters everywhere of your plump, obese great leader telling you how great your life is doesn't really inspire loyalty or confidence.
I wonder how laser weapons would change the nature of smallarms combat. I've heard that most of the shots are fired to suppress the enemy so that you can maneuver. With a silent and invisible laser beam, the missed shots might not put the same fear of death into the enemy as the crack and zip of a bullet that almost took your life. If a squad can't intimidate the enemy into not shooting and getting back down into cover, wouldn't they just end up pinned down?
I guess people have already talked death about all the limitations a laser rifle would have... so what is the long term vision for how a laser weapon would provide a benefit in small arms combat? Could it fire more accurately at longer ranges and still carry enough killing power? Or perhaps the lack of recoil would help it kill enemies more effectively while other bullet-based weapons provide covering fire?
No need for third-party involvement there:
"Buttons
Every button and input zone has been placed based on frequency of use, precision required and ergonomic comfort. There are a total of sixteen buttons on the Steam Controller. Half of them are accessible to the player without requiring thumbs to be lifted from the trackpads, including two on the back. All controls and buttons have been placed symmetrically, making left or right handedness switchable via a software config checkbox."
http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/SteamController/
To that end, nearly all AAA shooters attempt to address fine aim control using "magnetic" crosshairs. Sensitivity on the sticks start with a base acceleration and top speed. But if you intersect a target with the crosshairs, a "soft-lock" engages where the crosshairs are partially dragged along in the general direction that the target moves, while sensitivity is temporarily reduced to allow for finer control of where you target. Crosshair sensitivity is commonly reduced when aiming-down-sights as well. In effect, the idea of having a broad movement and a fine movement control is being addressed contextually by the game. This requires a lot of refinement specific to each game, and resulting in some really really shitty controls in the earlier years of console shooters. They've improved considerably since then, and the general concept of how to apply soft-lock aiming has become common knowledge among dev studios.
This is important because the vast majority of development hours will be directed towards analog-stick based control for xbox and playstation releases. This means that when PC versions are released, developers can piggy-back this aim tuning for steam's controller as well, since it was already produced for the console version.
To that end, FPS game controller layouts typically don't map the fire button to the click-in of the right stick, precisely because you lose precision during click-in. Typically they use a non-thumb button like the right trigger for firing to avoid jostling the thumb position. They also require only very light pressure to trigger firing for the same reason.
Can't really imagine the click-in of the trackpad has having too wide a range of functionality, because of shifting during click-in. It might be limited to 8-way directionality on the left side? One of my concerns with the right side is that it seems the entire surface will click-in, which means you can't hit for example, top quadrant,and left quadrant (X+Y on an xbox360 controller) simultaneously. If they were to simply map the upper left area as X+Y there might be too many accidental inputs.
If I could give Valve some feedback, I'd like those concentric circle ridges to also have an overlaid "X" ridge to show the borders of the top/bottom/left/right quadrants as well as show an exact location for intermediate directions directly under the ridges of the "X". That might return the possibly of functional X+Y button combinations using this device.
Actually, they can be speakers:
"This haptic capability provides a vital channel of information to the player - delivering in-game information about speed, boundaries, thresholds, textures, action confirmations, or any other events about which game designers want players to be aware. It is a higher-bandwidth haptic information channel than exists in any other consumer product that we know of.
As a parlour trick they can even play audio waveforms and function as speakers."
Important difference here is that you have tactile feedback on your thumbs position relative to the center.
Furthermore, since the surface is clickable, it can be customized to only register input upon click-in...like a D-pad! On the right side of the controller, the trackpad 4 quadrants can function as a replacement XYBA. Mappings which are traditionally assigned to clicking a stick in, can be moved to the back of the controller.
I am cautiously optimistic about the design of this controller, it all hinges upon the execution of these ideas and the quality of construction. If nothing else, it would be a better way to play FPS and RTS games since it replaces relative input (i.e stick position relative to cetner), with absolute input (the input starts and stops in sync with the start and stop of the thumb movement).
Instead of constant movement towards a target, and having to time the release of the stick with the time of interception, you move until matched with the target and then stop moving, akin to a mouse input. I have not seen trackpad sensitivity that can sufficiently replace mouse input, but Valve is claiming to have reached unprecedented levels of trackpad precision. Really can't judge the capability of this controller until real-world feedback comes in, but at least conceptually, I can see this being a step-up from the controller input already popularized on Xbox and PS platforms.
Corporate accounting doesn't call the shots, accounting tells managements the results of the shots that have been called. Finance takes accounting's results, evaluates and extrapolates, and makes plans for the future. Somewhere between management and finance, decisions get made. Ya got the wrong guy.
The only companies that get run by accountants are accounting companies.
I had posted awhile ago asking what the disadvantage would be in using a similar approach based on 1 second intervals.
The response I had gotten is that while some financial market activity is based on information on the real world, a lot of it is based on information on the financial market itself. In other words, a company sees other companies freaking out over say, an event, like a change in a CEO, and selling, so the company will want to join the others and sell sell sell before they get left behind. This can steamroll into a long disastrous run on that stock. The price of the stock flashes downward until it hits the bottom that some of the companies feel is still worthwhile. Then that price starts to drift upward. Other companies see the stock turning and buy buy buy.
What is the REAL increase/decrease that should be associated with the change in the CEO? There really isn't any way to measure that. Instead the "wisdom" of the crowds drifts up and down until finally, in aggregate, the market settles down on a decision about the best approximation of the price impact.
Now, if trading is delayed, we'll still have increase/decrease cycles like that, and they won't be nearly as sharp since people will have more time to think and process the real world information received about the change in leadership. However, there really is no concrete way to know how the price of a stock should change because of the change in leadership, the only way to price that out is to let the market feel out it's "mood" and let the up/down shock work itself out and settle on a conclusion. Delaying the trading reduces the magnitude of the shock, but also lengthens that shock period out. Thus, the speed at which markets process information about the economy is slowed down. In the milliseconds of HFT, regular joes processing trades daily or monthly don't have to worry as much about the brief shock of volatility since they have a much longer holding period, during which the shocks have already worked themselves out.
Not a great argument in my opinion, and I didn't see any supporting study (a very difficult thing to experiment on!), but it was an answer to my question on how someone might want to defend HFT. I hope I represented that argument properly.
I do trust Valve, but the parent brings up an important point.
The difference between a PC and a console isn't hardware, it's about control. The hardware and interfaces will all change over time, but the real distinction is who gets to say what happens on the platform. For PCs, users control the environment. For consoles, a company is controlling the environment. There are benefits to users owning the environment, and benefits to a company controlling the environment.
The SteamMachine appears to be a weird hybrid between the two ends of the spectrum, and seems to be giving up the most significant advantages of both ends unless this starts to drive some major changes in game development.
The probability adjusted value of a $1 dollar ticket to get a 100mil payout with a 1 in 175mil chance of winning is 100 is a little over 57 cents.
Why pay $1 to get $0.57 back?
Lottery tickets and gambling in general is mainly about buying hope. You lose a little money, but get a little temporary hope in the meantime that you get to enjoy until the results come in. Nothing wrong with a little entertainment as long as you know what you're paying for it.
On the other hand, the recent powerball lottery with a $2 ticket, and a 400mil payout has a little under $2.29 payout. A positive return...assuming you welcome taking on the level of risk involved to sink enough money to realize the desired outcome. But it's not crazy to buy a ticket or two when the jackpot is that high.
Check out "The Witness", an upcoming by Jonathan Blow (known for Braid).
It's a single person on a beautiful uninhabited island, you walk around calming exploring and solving puzzles from a first-person perspective. The puzzles as a whole tell a larger story through the perspectives gained by each.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witness_(2014_video_game)
Look up some youtube vids of the demos shown at PAX. Games like this are Myst's legacy.
Why didn't Myst change the face of gaming? It's just not a popular formula. But it's ok to cater to a niche if you do it well.
Parent poster is on to something.
When I was kid, games were not as realistic as they are today, but with that being said, I didn't play games to revel in violence. It was mostly about power fantasy, overcoming challenges, and mapping and defeating abstract systems. In the vast majority of games, violence is simply the substrate through which those ideas came through. Games with limited depictions of violence don't bother me too badly since they're easily forgotten and largely ignored by the player after the first couple repetitions.
I do take issue with some story elements though. Anyone who has been playing GTA games should know that banging hookers is just a momentary distraction in dozens of hours of gameplay that have nothing to do with that activity. But as the parent poster pointed out, people in GTA games are tremendously shitty people, and the player should have enough world experience to have some greater perspective over the underlying cynicism that pervades the world of Rockstar games. Similarly, I'm not going to let a kid watch a show like Niptuck, , 24, or Breaking Bad. Anti-heroes can be interesting to watch, but I don't want a kid's worldview shaped from the outlook of anti-heroes.
People can be shitty. This is true. People can also be shockingly good. People are usually both shitty and good in varying degrees. In my years as a teenager through my years as a young adult, I had too much cynicism, too much pessimism. I had ideas about what the world was, and I was wrong. I'm probably still wrong today as an adult, but at least I've learned enough to realize that. I would like to protect my kid from sinking large amounts of time into a game with such negative themes at least until he's old enough to compartmentalize that world properly, or see the satire in it. Teenagers are at high risk for taking on a jaded look at the world, I'm not going to help that happen to mine.
I don't have a hard and fast rules about when my kid will get to play what games. I'm a gamer who knows where to find enough information to make judgement calls as each case comes up. I also know that there are a ton of awesome games a kid can be playing instead of games that force the question of whether or not your kid should be playing it.
I think the more important take-away from discussions on appropriate videogame usage is that parents should ensure the proper context is set for what their kids play (and how much they get to play).
The chart you're linking shows 5 continuous years of significant loss, followed by 5 years of continuous profits that have been working that total lifetime loss down, even in the face of the billion+ impact from having to reserve for warranty claim costs.
Given a_nonamiss's suggestion that MS might be trying to duplicate the loss-leading strategy used with the Xbox line (in which a large loss is taken up front to establish a market foothold from which losses can be recovered and and eventually present-value discounted returns can be obtained that justify the loss), the chart you're linking is showing that their loss-leading strategy appears to be working.
Meanwhile, MS has over 40billion of current assets in excess of current liabilities, it seems that they can handily absorb the losses taken thus far to try to reap returns later.
Especially considering the added benefit of breaking breaking into the livingroom with the Xbox opens up added opportunities to sell media, provide cross-platform interactions between Windows/Xbox/Windows Phone/etc. It seems that the Xbox strategy has worked pretty well. Even more importantly, their other revenue streams have been weakening and their lifespans are being questioned. Establishing a revenue stream with a positive outlook is particularly important while their other revenue streams are declining.
With regard to the Xbox One? They've gotten their asses kicked in the media hype, but the practical impact is minimal in the long term. PS3 was heavily panned for being expensive and not having worthwhile games at launch. Over that console's lifespan its image and sales have recovered. From a higher-level perspective, the Xbox One appears to be comprised of PC hardware. Same goes for the PS3. This makes PC/XB1/PS3 multi-platforms games much much easier for developers to ship out, essentially showing the XB1 with competitive HW parity in the console market, with added stability due to nigh guaranteed multi-platform releases even if they fuck up their sales pitch on the console. In short, the worst case I see for the XB1 is a shallower profit trend, but at this point they can simply "coast" with just feature-matching at this point and still be pulling in profit, particularly since their primary competitor, the PS3 is run by a company which is relatively cash-starved, and Nintendo has declined to compete for those same customers with the Wii, and may continue to do so with the Wii U.
http://www.businessinsider.com/map-of-the-day-how-north-korea-could-destroy-seoul-in-two-hours-2010-5?op=1
http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/pub771.pdf
"The combination of North Korea’s long economic
decline and enhanced U.S. and South Korean military
capabilities has diminished the ability of North
Korea to launch a successful invasion of South Korea.
Nonetheless, the KPA retains the ability to inflict heavy
casualties and collateral damage, largely through
the use of massed long-range artillery. In effect,
Pyongyang’s most credible conventional threat is to
devastate Seoul (and a good portion of South Korea)
rather than to seize and hold it."
NK's army is mostly an aging joke. Big, but obsolete and poorly maintained and supplied. If military action were to begin, the large volume of artillery already aimed at Seoul would kick off in a short-range storm of shells. Given the disrepute given to their condition, many of those pieces will fail, but given the vast number of pieces, it will still amount to a large amount of damage before they can be stopped. Seoul won't be "wiped out", but a lot of civilians will be hurt or killed in that opening hour of conflict. It would be followed by NK being crushed since NK's military is heavily outclassed by both SK and the US presence.
The problem has always been south korean civilians held hostage by those guns. The missiles and nukes aren't a significant threat (right now).
The real difference between a console and PC has nothing to do with hardware.
It's about control. If you control the environment the games run in, it's a PC. If someone else controls the environment, it's a console.
The result is that consoles have consistent environments and regulation, and the benefit of having a target spec for developers to design towards.
PCs are multi-purpose, and can run mods. They also add a wide variety of potential hardware configs that developers will need to test against.
But the actual size/shape/hardware of the device has nothing to do with whether it's a PC or a console. All of those things will change over the years. In the end, It's about control.
Given that the US school system still has lackluster performance despite spending more per student than countries that are getting superior results, it seems there's more to the problem than insufficient funding (though funding is certainly an issue for many areas).
I think that the community culture is extremely important. In asian countries (like my wife's), the kids with the highest grades are seen as superstars, not nerds. Athletics has a much lower emphasis in comparison to academics. In my highschool (in the US), kids who frequently raised their hands were seen as "teacher's pets" and discouraged from doing so. If the student body as a whole doesn't want to get good grades, it becomes much harder to motivate an individual to break out from the pack, especially given the extremely powerful desire for kids to make social connections and find a way to fit in.
In my school , though "honors"/AP students might be pressured to get good grades by their parents, they also formed their own clique that competed against each other for the best grades in each class. The goal was not to pass with "good enough" average grades, but to get the best grades. When scores came out, we'd ask each other what we got so that we could establish a pecking order, and it felt incredibly rewarding to come out on top, or to at least beat the friend who usually had a higher score than you did. When tests were coming up, we'd form study groups, and work together on projects. If the general student body shared the same kind of group-pressure to succeed in academics, individual students may perform much better. Among the general student body, I very frequently heard comments to the effect of, "I did ok on the test, I got a C+", or people bragging, "Haha, I only studied like an hour for the test". Shouldn't these be considered shameful things to reveal? It showed their mindset with regard to school. School was just something they endured to get by through the year, not a place where they could compete.
If you can find a way to get the kids themselves to care about their grades, the money spent on education will be leveraged to a much greater extent.
I think in private schools, you see a pooling of kids with higher parental involvement(as implicated by the parent's willingness to spend more for a potentially better education), and this higher pressure at home may help shape the individual and collective attitudes of the kids in the school. Though the article's writer is terrible at communicating the idea, I think there could be a valuable concept underlying the writer's nonsense, i.e: Get public school parents to help develop a private-school's education culture within the public school.
That is exactly the point that I'm making. I had already pointed this out in the first post you replied to.
1) The police say bombs were involved in the searches.
2) The couple doesn't say that. They were shopping for pressure cookers, not researching how to turn one into a bomb.
The police have incentive to cover their asses by saying "bomb" was included in the couple's search history. But the couple is saying that "pressure cookers" and backpacks" were searched for, and any reference to bombs is an inference that other people had made.
That "fine article" is paraphrasing other sites, which are paraphrasing other sites. They're claiming the searches were for pressure cooker bombs based on statement from the police, which conflicts with that of the couple, but their slapdash editor didn't even notice.
This is the site owned by the wife, where she explains from her perspective: https://medium.com/something-like-falling/2e7d13e54724
This is the original breaking story from Gizmodo that Wired is just paraphrasing:
http://whitenoise.gizmodo.com/yes-the-fbi-is-tracking-americans-google-searches-981986667
Key points you're missing:
1) Suffolk county police claim the wife searched for pressure cooker bombs, and the husband searched for backpacks.
2) According to the wife, she was shopping for pressure cookers, and the husband was shopping for backpacks.
The important detail missing is that the couple wasn't searching for bombs. It appears the police added the word "bombs" to cover up their amateur-hour faux pas so that an investigation sounds reasonable.
Now, perhaps the wife is just bullshitting people to say that she wasn't researching how to build a pressure cooker bomb, but I find it far more likely that she was shopping for a pressure cooker (a common activity), than researching how to build a pressure cooker bomb (an uncommon activity), and all parties involved concede that the wife wasn't actually doing anything that should give cause for concern.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle
The formulas in question are laid out in this link.
I took calc I, calc II, and linear algebra in college so I have a literate, but nonetheless layman's understanding of math.
The problem with explaining these subjects through formulas is that though I recognize the syntax being used, there are a WHOLE LOT of variables presented, with minimal explanation of what each variable represents. Where an explanation is given, it is primarily a link to an underlying wikipedia article because the explanation of what that variable represents is a non-trivial undertaking. But I'm not trying to say that the wiki articles are bad.
It's a complex topic, and there's only so many details you can shave off of a subject until you lose important details and start to misrepresent the mechanics. The wiki article is aiming at an accurate technical explanation, with layers of depth for those who have the time, while a newspaper article needs to communicate a concept to those who have very little time (if they actually had time, they would be doing some real study on the matter rather than just skimming a newspaper article).
The newspaper article and the detailed wiki article serve two different goals and should be taken in conjunction with one another. The newspaper article gives just enough information to entice a reader to learn more, at which point the wiki article can step in (or any other more detailed resource).
Bottom line: No, I don't think more math and formulas should be used in popular press. Complex math has upper limits of simplification, and the goal of public press articles is to foster curiosity through concise communication.
Ugh, well I'll admit that if nothing else, seeing that video of the soldier and the knife taught me that videogames have not desensitized me to violence.
I would have lost my shit on the spot. Man, just imagining myself floating out there on a spacewalk 200 miles above the earth, and feeling water on my head that isn't supposed be there...*shudder*. Just being up there is a spectacular balancing act of hundreds of special-purpose technologies that nearly all result in a horrible horrible death should they go wrong, finding even the slightest thing going wrong would freak me out.
Calls to mind the trailer for Alfonso Cuaron's (director for Children of Men) new movie "Gravity":
http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi2518132249?ref_=tt_pv_vi_1
5'10, nexus 7 fits in my dress slacks too (but as mentioned in another post, I keep it in a sling-bag)
I too chose the 5-inch S4, because it's the upper limit of how far my thumb can reach across a screen when holding the device in 1 hand. If I want a bigger screen, I'd get more screen space, but I'd sacrifice one-hand usability. If I'm giving up one-hand usability, I had better get a good amount of screen space to make up for it, so a 6-7 inch screen makes more sense to me than the Note II's 5.5inch screen.
I carry a man-purse (shoulder-bag) whereever I go. Makes it easy to bring gum, phone, keys, tablet, headphones, pen, multi-tool, workpass, forms/coupons, and wallet wherever I go. I like having this stuff with me, and the man-purse is a practical way of doing it rather than just walking around running into situations where I wish I had been carrying ______ with me.
Keeps me from having lumpy pockets, allowing for a clear view of my glorious posterior. Buddies made some jokes at first, but it blew over pretty quick. Ladies never even bring it up unless they want to compliment it. It's even more practical these days for carrying extra stuff when we take my son out somewhere.