Making facts irrelevant and decreasing the burden of memorizing can have negative effects on creativity.
In order to synthesize new ideas we often need to hold many 'facts' in our head in order to generate the connections between these facts. if our memory capacity shrinks due to the availability of information on the internet, our ability think about deep and complex problems with many issues may also deteriorate.
Each person picks their favorite mathematician and has to get people to figure out who they are without being obvious...
Discuss period issues, personal life, major theorums.....
but mostly just get high and have a good time. Put on some tunes and groove.
If i'm on a website that i like, i'll often click on ads to increase the chances that the site will survive .
Southparkstudios is a recent example of this. trey and matt have put the entire volume of their south park work online (and some fun games.... there is a mario kart like racing game) in an ad supported way. They went out on a limb and i think they should get some back.
What i would really like to see though is some paypal micropayment system where i could pay them to play the shows ad free. I wonder how much they actually make from a single episode?
Depending on where you live, there are many schools that are great and cheap.
Texas, California, New York, NJ, MI,... all have good state systems.
It probably isn't worth it to go to MIT or Caltech if there is a good state school that you can go to and you will have to borrow the money (because your parents make too much).
If you have any interest in going to grad school, THAT is when you go to MIT or wherever, because in grad school you don't pay, the school pays! And it is more impressive to have a phd from MIT than an undergrad degree from MIT.
but if you believe "sales" really takes hard work, you most likely don't really care about serving your customers' needs, just closing the sale - Which means I would neither work for/with you nor buy from you. This is an extremely naive view. People, including your customers, are not purely rational. A good sales person understands his customer and puts the product in their terms. i'm not talking about selling people things they don't need, i'm talking about a customer who is deciding between two (or more) valid options. So in that way sales people have a valuable skill - communicating the features and benefits of a product that are relevant to the customer - that a brilliant engineer might lack.
That said, i think that sales people are paid too much in comparison to the people who actually make a product. And that corporate executives should get paid zero dollars if the company loses money under their watch.
Video games are definitely NOT going the way of the comic book.
I agree with many posts in this thread that like any medium, vgs can be high or low brow.
But I see the future of video games as taking us towards living in alternate worlds. We might visit these worlds for education, for discussion, for sex, for sport, for distraction, etc..... Consider 2nd life and eve online and other mmorgs. Are they art? Not *fine* art. Are they low brow? Like real life, these mmorgs contain players that are just there to pass the time, and others who are there for deeper pursuits.
In that way, i think the analogy with film is limited. Film can be high or low brow, but it is passive. It can lead to interesting discussion, but generally not with the film maker. Video games, more and more, are simulated realities. The more future technology allows full immersion (touch, smell, taste) in video games the more they will be like life and less like film. Presumably these same technologies will push into film as well, making film immersive but still passive.
what is 'willpower'? it is a philisophical concept. there is no rock-solid scientific evidence that we even have will. But let's say for arguments sake that 'willpower' is the ability to act out our concious desires.
Then, what is empirically true is that for whatever reason addictive substances trump the individuals willpower. Part of the reason, is that part of your brain wants to play WoW, even if another part doesn't. If you actually want to smoke or drink or play WoW then it isn't a problem of lack of willpower.
If you feel like you don't want to play (you don't enjoy it, and you want to quit) but you are still playing, it means that the part of your brain that you conciously experience wants to quit, but another part of your brain (possibly the amygdala) which you don't have concious access to, is controlling your behavior.
This is why people say that it isn't about willpower. In addiction, the part of your brain that is controlling your behavior is not easily accessed conciously.
This is really hard to understand for someone who has never experienced real addiction. Consider yourself lucky if you fall into this category.
24 hours in 2 weeks in nothing.
I finished metal gear on the playstation in one sitting (21 hours) (yes, i was wearing diapers;)
Splinter Cell was worse than crack for me. I was a week overdue on an assignment and all i could think about was Splinter Cell, so to get it out of my system i finished it in a 14 hour session.
worse than crack.
I worked for a software consulting company that won a large ($3 Million) contract to created a client-server package with a Java Applet as the client. The main selling feature of this was that it was platform neutral since the customer had a base of macs and PCs. Then we started coding the gui and the GUI stuff would always break on Macs and it would only work with the microsoft java plug-in, not the sun java plug-in in certain browsers. In the end, my company essentially forced the customer to abandon their Macs.
I quit before the lawsuit.
Slashdot Mirror
In order to synthesize new ideas we often need to hold many 'facts' in our head in order to generate the connections between these facts. if our memory capacity shrinks due to the availability of information on the internet, our ability think about deep and complex problems with many issues may also deteriorate.
Each person picks their favorite mathematician and has to get people to figure out who they are without being obvious... Discuss period issues, personal life, major theorums..... but mostly just get high and have a good time. Put on some tunes and groove.
If i'm on a website that i like, i'll often click on ads to increase the chances that the site will survive .
Southparkstudios is a recent example of this. trey and matt have put the entire volume of their south park work online (and some fun games.... there is a mario kart like racing game) in an ad supported way. They went out on a limb and i think they should get some back.
What i would really like to see though is some paypal micropayment system where i could pay them to play the shows ad free. I wonder how much they actually make from a single episode?
Depending on where you live, there are many schools that are great and cheap. Texas, California, New York, NJ, MI, ... all have good state systems.
It probably isn't worth it to go to MIT or Caltech if there is a good state school that you can go to and you will have to borrow the money (because your parents make too much).
If you have any interest in going to grad school, THAT is when you go to MIT or wherever, because in grad school you don't pay, the school pays! And it is more impressive to have a phd from MIT than an undergrad degree from MIT.
takes hard work, you most likely don't really care about serving
your customers' needs, just closing the sale - Which means I would
neither work for/with you nor buy from you. This is an extremely naive view.
People, including your customers, are not purely rational. A good sales person understands his customer and puts the product in their terms. i'm not talking about selling people things they don't need, i'm talking about a customer who is deciding between two (or more) valid options. So in that way sales people have a valuable skill - communicating the features and benefits of a product that are relevant to the customer - that a brilliant engineer might lack.
That said, i think that sales people are paid too much in comparison to the people who actually make a product. And that corporate executives should get paid zero dollars if the company loses money under their watch.
Video games are definitely NOT going the way of the comic book. I agree with many posts in this thread that like any medium, vgs can be high or low brow. But I see the future of video games as taking us towards living in alternate worlds. We might visit these worlds for education, for discussion, for sex, for sport, for distraction, etc..... Consider 2nd life and eve online and other mmorgs. Are they art? Not *fine* art. Are they low brow? Like real life, these mmorgs contain players that are just there to pass the time, and others who are there for deeper pursuits. In that way, i think the analogy with film is limited. Film can be high or low brow, but it is passive. It can lead to interesting discussion, but generally not with the film maker. Video games, more and more, are simulated realities. The more future technology allows full immersion (touch, smell, taste) in video games the more they will be like life and less like film. Presumably these same technologies will push into film as well, making film immersive but still passive.
Then, what is empirically true is that for whatever reason addictive substances trump the individuals willpower. Part of the reason, is that part of your brain wants to play WoW, even if another part doesn't. If you actually want to smoke or drink or play WoW then it isn't a problem of lack of willpower.
If you feel like you don't want to play (you don't enjoy it, and you want to quit) but you are still playing, it means that the part of your brain that you conciously experience wants to quit, but another part of your brain (possibly the amygdala) which you don't have concious access to, is controlling your behavior.
This is why people say that it isn't about willpower. In addiction, the part of your brain that is controlling your behavior is not easily accessed conciously.
This is really hard to understand for someone who has never experienced real addiction. Consider yourself lucky if you fall into this category.
I submitted the introduction to my phd thesis (in behavioral neuroscience). And it only got a 22.9% chance of being authentic. Their algorithm sucks.
24 hours in 2 weeks in nothing. I finished metal gear on the playstation in one sitting (21 hours) (yes, i was wearing diapers ;)
Splinter Cell was worse than crack for me. I was a week overdue on an assignment and all i could think about was Splinter Cell, so to get it out of my system i finished it in a 14 hour session.
worse than crack.
I worked for a software consulting company that won a large ($3 Million) contract to created a client-server package with a Java Applet as the client. The main selling feature of this was that it was platform neutral since the customer had a base of macs and PCs. Then we started coding the gui and the GUI stuff would always break on Macs and it would only work with the microsoft java plug-in, not the sun java plug-in in certain browsers. In the end, my company essentially forced the customer to abandon their Macs. I quit before the lawsuit.
check out config.trim_on_minimize it works wonders on firefox and thunderbird.