Do you think we would have achieved one-tenth the scientific advancements that we have if the military had been in charge of the space program? That's how Russia does it. Ask how many men they've put on the moon, or how many rovers they've put on Mars.
On top of that, the brass hats would have classified everything they discovered, just because that's their institutional mindset.
This has nothing to do with excessive amounts of $$. There are functions that fit well between your defined lines. I consider those lines quite blurred to the tech-minded.
If you don't have at least 4 "entertainment devices" then you must throw everything you can away (tv's/monitors, dvd/tape/cd players, console systems, older computers). I also never let a friend through an old computer away I can use. I take all their laptop hard drives...
Let me assure you from the vantage point of 19 years in the game industry that neither you nor I am the target audience for this gear. Consoles are designed for Joe the Plumber and his children. Joe's PC is in his den and he does his company's books on it, and maybe plays a game or two if he can find any that will run on it. His console is either in the living room or the kid's bedroom. He would have no use whatsoever for his friends' outdated laptop hard drives.
This is the problem with Slashdot readers who post, "Not true! I always [something with respect to consumer electronics]", when in fact Slashdot readers are extremely atypical. You might as well be discussing the ordinary driver's skills among a group of Formula 1 drivers. Their anecdotes are irrelevant.
There will always be consoles and PCs because Joe doesn't want to do his books in the living room. That's really all there is to it.
... to keep them from finding my collection of iguana bestiality videos. They can convict me of refusing to hand over the key, but they can't convict me of possession of the videos -- nor can they ever gain access to them.
Failure to cooperate with the police gets you a MUCH lighter sentence than a sex offense, and you don't go on the sex offenders' register.
Lousy place for it if the goal is to have 8 or 10 people around all chugging brews and talking smack and giving each other the high five while they play Madden. What you've done is reduced the usability of your console.
You've got one of each in two separate places, because you've got enough money to pay for four different entertainment devices. That's nice for you, but it's not merger, it's sprawl. The goal of convergence is to try to get it all in one single box, and I still don't think that's going to happen.
You're ignoring my point. The PC is on a desk. The console is in the living room. They are different places set up in different ways. You cannot merge them.
The PC is optimized for one person to use at a distance of maybe 0.5 m. It sits on a desk. It is a lousy multi-player device.
The console is optimized for multiple people to use at a distance of 2 m. It sits in the living room. It is an excellent multi-player device, and, even if equipped with a keyboard and mouse, a highly inconvenient personal computer.
This is in addition to the cost reasons already cited.
Keep them on an innocuous USB flash device (like the ThinkGeek flash drive in a LEGO brick) that's in your pocket any time you're not using the computer. When your computer is taken, destroy the device. You lose your data, but it is NOT accessible no matter what they do to you, and there's no issue of refusing to reveal the password.
So, for that matter, is much military activity. Most games provide entertainment, not a simulation of life.
All a game needs to do is be honest about the level of accuracy offered. It's not a question of "right" or "wrong," but a question of which target audience you're aiming for.
Wars will not be about actually slaughtering people, but hurting their feelings. Nice thing about that is that it doesn't damage the infrastructure so much.
What's wrong with the world can largely be attributed to the usual things: Chinese, Russian, and American policy on a wide variety of subjects, plus petty-minded xenophobia that keeps the Hutus and Tutsis, or Palestinians and Israelis, at each others' throats. Nothing to do with how we teach computer science, I assure you.
... in this article he's insisting that a carpenter has to be a physicist before he should be allowed to build a house. (Yes, that's arguing from analogy -- deal with it.)
The fact is that the world needs a hell of a lot of running code in a hurry. Millions of lines of it. We don't have the luxury of treating a realtime airline-pricing-optimization manager as a lovely formal system that we can write out in pencil. We have to get it up and running, then fix bugs and add features as time permits, because of a phenomenon that Dijkstra doesn't take into account: IT'S NEEDED *NOW*.
I also think he's being unfair by suggesting that modern educational institutions are anything like as hidebound as medieval ones. First, medieval universities were not intended for inquiry in the first place; they were intended to prepare young men for the priesthood -- i.e. to teach them doctrine, which was not subject to inquiry. No institution except maybe a seminary is as restrictive as that these days. Second, it doesn't seem to have occurred to him that learning by analogy is how people learn *effectively.* He may decry teaching children about arithmetic by using apples because it's not a formal system, but a five-year-old doesn't have enough knowledge to know what a formal system IS. Starting a five-year-old with Principia Mathematica is just pointless. And your basic coding grunt who wants to build websites doesn't need to be taught JavaScript as a formal system either.
... then the rest of this sentence will NOT be "only outlaws will have firewalls," because that would be stupid. Rather, it will be rapid on-demand login and logout from the Internet, so that your system is only ON the Internet at moments at which it is sending data or intentionally receiving it. At other times it's just disconnected.
However, because the press usually get wrong any story on a subject that I know something about, I have a feeling they've got this wrong too. I wonder what is *really* being planned.
Do the top 5% really pay 80% of the income, inheritance, corporation, property, sales, liquor, and road excise taxes (tires, gasoline), as well as import duties? I doubt it.
... as Down's syndrome people seldom reproduce, no, we're not doing damage to the gene pool.
Some interesting questions might be asked about the ability of Down's syndrome sufferers to look after themselves after their parents have died, and who does it if they can't. I don't know the answers, though.
Just as we needed a certain piece of regulation called the Bill of Rights to prevent the powerful from abusing the weak, so we need other forms of regulation to prevent the rich from abusing the not-rich. Maximum freedom is indistinguishable from anarchy.
In the future many games will be distributed electronically on a pay-to-play service model requiring a unique serial number, verified online, that is valid for a limited period of time. Even if you make a copy, it'll be worthless after the serial number expires.
There won't be such a thing as a "used game." Or indeed a game that you "buy" at all.
No, I don't, and it's nothing to do with politics.
on
Ender in Exile
·
· Score: 1
I read it. Two-dimensional characters and a ridiculously unbelievable twist at the end.
Learning how to game a simulation does NOT win you a war. Gaming a simulation only reveals the weaknesses in the simulation; it has nothing to do with the war.
Standards must have been a whole lot lower for Hugos in those days.
I'd love to ditch my laptop and replace it with an XO just for the cool-value at conferences, but I need to give presentations. Any way to get SVGA out of it?
Slashdot Mirror
Do you think we would have achieved one-tenth the scientific advancements that we have if the military had been in charge of the space program? That's how Russia does it. Ask how many men they've put on the moon, or how many rovers they've put on Mars.
On top of that, the brass hats would have classified everything they discovered, just because that's their institutional mindset.
Keep the space program civil!
This has nothing to do with excessive amounts of $$. There are functions that fit well between your defined lines. I consider those lines quite blurred to the tech-minded.
If you don't have at least 4 "entertainment devices" then you must throw everything you can away (tv's/monitors, dvd/tape/cd players, console systems, older computers). I also never let a friend through an old computer away I can use. I take all their laptop hard drives...
Let me assure you from the vantage point of 19 years in the game industry that neither you nor I am the target audience for this gear. Consoles are designed for Joe the Plumber and his children. Joe's PC is in his den and he does his company's books on it, and maybe plays a game or two if he can find any that will run on it. His console is either in the living room or the kid's bedroom. He would have no use whatsoever for his friends' outdated laptop hard drives.
This is the problem with Slashdot readers who post, "Not true! I always [something with respect to consumer electronics]", when in fact Slashdot readers are extremely atypical. You might as well be discussing the ordinary driver's skills among a group of Formula 1 drivers. Their anecdotes are irrelevant.
There will always be consoles and PCs because Joe doesn't want to do his books in the living room. That's really all there is to it.
... to keep them from finding my collection of iguana bestiality videos. They can convict me of refusing to hand over the key, but they can't convict me of possession of the videos -- nor can they ever gain access to them.
Failure to cooperate with the police gets you a MUCH lighter sentence than a sex offense, and you don't go on the sex offenders' register.
Lousy place for it if the goal is to have 8 or 10 people around all chugging brews and talking smack and giving each other the high five while they play Madden. What you've done is reduced the usability of your console.
You've got one of each in two separate places, because you've got enough money to pay for four different entertainment devices. That's nice for you, but it's not merger, it's sprawl. The goal of convergence is to try to get it all in one single box, and I still don't think that's going to happen.
You're ignoring my point. The PC is on a desk. The console is in the living room. They are different places set up in different ways. You cannot merge them.
The PC is optimized for one person to use at a distance of maybe 0.5 m. It sits on a desk. It is a lousy multi-player device.
The console is optimized for multiple people to use at a distance of 2 m. It sits in the living room. It is an excellent multi-player device, and, even if equipped with a keyboard and mouse, a highly inconvenient personal computer.
This is in addition to the cost reasons already cited.
Keep them on an innocuous USB flash device (like the ThinkGeek flash drive in a LEGO brick) that's in your pocket any time you're not using the computer. When your computer is taken, destroy the device. You lose your data, but it is NOT accessible no matter what they do to you, and there's no issue of refusing to reveal the password.
How he got to be the UK's top cyber-cop, I can't imagine. He was probably promoted to the position by people who heard that he had once used an ATM.
So, for that matter, is much military activity. Most games provide entertainment, not a simulation of life. All a game needs to do is be honest about the level of accuracy offered. It's not a question of "right" or "wrong," but a question of which target audience you're aiming for.
Wars will not be about actually slaughtering people, but hurting their feelings. Nice thing about that is that it doesn't damage the infrastructure so much.
Is it somehow different from a software tricycle or a software bikini wax?
"Software program" is redundant and the sign of a journalist with his head up his ass.
I'll decide what content I do or don't want, thank you, and implement suitable filters on my own machine. My ISP can't read my mind.
What's wrong with the world can largely be attributed to the usual things: Chinese, Russian, and American policy on a wide variety of subjects, plus petty-minded xenophobia that keeps the Hutus and Tutsis, or Palestinians and Israelis, at each others' throats. Nothing to do with how we teach computer science, I assure you.
The fact is that the world needs a hell of a lot of running code in a hurry. Millions of lines of it. We don't have the luxury of treating a realtime airline-pricing-optimization manager as a lovely formal system that we can write out in pencil. We have to get it up and running, then fix bugs and add features as time permits, because of a phenomenon that Dijkstra doesn't take into account: IT'S NEEDED *NOW*.
I also think he's being unfair by suggesting that modern educational institutions are anything like as hidebound as medieval ones. First, medieval universities were not intended for inquiry in the first place; they were intended to prepare young men for the priesthood -- i.e. to teach them doctrine, which was not subject to inquiry. No institution except maybe a seminary is as restrictive as that these days. Second, it doesn't seem to have occurred to him that learning by analogy is how people learn *effectively.* He may decry teaching children about arithmetic by using apples because it's not a formal system, but a five-year-old doesn't have enough knowledge to know what a formal system IS. Starting a five-year-old with Principia Mathematica is just pointless. And your basic coding grunt who wants to build websites doesn't need to be taught JavaScript as a formal system either.
However, because the press usually get wrong any story on a subject that I know something about, I have a feeling they've got this wrong too. I wonder what is *really* being planned.
Do the top 5% really pay 80% of the income, inheritance, corporation, property, sales, liquor, and road excise taxes (tires, gasoline), as well as import duties? I doubt it.
One word: cancer.
The human body is clear proof that God is an idiot.
... as Down's syndrome people seldom reproduce, no, we're not doing damage to the gene pool.
Some interesting questions might be asked about the ability of Down's syndrome sufferers to look after themselves after their parents have died, and who does it if they can't. I don't know the answers, though.
Just as we needed a certain piece of regulation called the Bill of Rights to prevent the powerful from abusing the weak, so we need other forms of regulation to prevent the rich from abusing the not-rich. Maximum freedom is indistinguishable from anarchy.
But what if you had to spend 50c a day to play? You'd never miss it, and it's a WAY better deal than the arcades.
In the future many games will be distributed electronically on a pay-to-play service model requiring a unique serial number, verified online, that is valid for a limited period of time. Even if you make a copy, it'll be worthless after the serial number expires.
There won't be such a thing as a "used game." Or indeed a game that you "buy" at all.
I read it. Two-dimensional characters and a ridiculously unbelievable twist at the end.
Learning how to game a simulation does NOT win you a war. Gaming a simulation only reveals the weaknesses in the simulation; it has nothing to do with the war.
Standards must have been a whole lot lower for Hugos in those days.
An acronym alone doesn't tell me much.
I'd love to ditch my laptop and replace it with an XO just for the cool-value at conferences, but I need to give presentations. Any way to get SVGA out of it?