Believe it or not, games can combine the excitement of real-time play with the careful strategy of turn based. I'm thinking specifically of the not widely popular Fallout: Tactics which I had a great time playing. You had the option to play combat in turn-based mode as well as real time. Thus, if you are a jittery click freak you can play in real time and if you're the plodding super general you can pick and choose every shot. You get a wider variety of players that way because your interface is customizable.
I guess my point is two fold: Fallout is awesome and we need more games like it. And game designers need to put more thought into how the player is interacting with the world. A little choice goes a long way.
I for one would not have anything against that. Drunk driving kills.
I for one would not mind being killed by a drunk driver if it saved our right* to privacy and freedom of speech. No officer needs to hear what I'm saying to see that I'm swerving or chugging from a tall silver can at every stoplight.
*: The word "right" in this context is used to convey that it is ethically and morally right that we should have privacy and freedom of speech, not that we have a guaranteed Right as established by government and upheld/squashed by the courts.
Hm, and all this time I thought it was other people's cell phones that were bugging me. I never even stopped to think it could be my own. Thanks Slashdot!
Let's just remember folks: this is Australia we're talking about. This is the same country that lets its employees disappear for months at a time with no penalty. When someone says they'll be there at 10:00, they mean between 10:30 and 12:00. Corporate America is a little more strict, s all you Americans better think twice before getting your sex on.
Okay granted it was a little silly to title this thing "the Intelligent Robot", but there is something interesting to take from the project. Check out the Discovery Channel clip on YouTube (posted above somewhere) if you haven't already. Now notice how quickly the kids buy into the idea that they're talking to a robot. This makes me wonder: if a truly autonomous, human-like, interactive robot were created tomorrow, would society accept it to the point where one winds up in every home (I dunno, doing the laundry or something) or would we reject it as just too creepy?
I must admit that I'm always intrigued by the fact that we tend to want to create robots in our own image. Now if that doesn't say something about society, I don't know what does.
Well I'm not sure if the use of mathematics counts strictly as "formal methods", but software development should be based in mathematical reasoning as well: algorithmic study is math, and so is Big O notation. Both of these are vital to software engineering, if perhaps less than universally practiced.
And let's also take a moment to appreciate the fact that just because you're a coder doesn't make you a software engineer. Similarly, I can build a bridge over an irrigation ditch out of two-by-fours and duct tape, but that doesn't make me a civil engineer. The parallel being, a coder and a software engineer may both get the job done but 9 out of 10 times the engineer will do it better, faster, prettier, more reliably, and will yield a product that can be maintained.
Actually, there was no LoTR! It was invented by Peter Jackson and the false memory of reading the books (even the idea of Tolkien himself!) was implanted in your mind by subliminal messages in the advertisements for the movies.
Let's just take a moment to step back and remember that the world isn't as simple as Google vs. Microsoft: Octagon Cagematch. It's tempting to compare two big companies that do stuff with computers, but there just isn't enough market overlap to relate Google's business to Microsoft's business at such a high level. I'm no expert, but just look at where there is direct competition: there's the search engine thing (let's face it, Google won that battle: it doesn't matter if you think Google is the best search or not, "googling" is now part of society's vernacular and nothing is more powerful than that), and hopefully soon there'll be the online office thing. But I wouldn't say that these are quite enough to say Google's success is Microsoft's failure. Not yet, anyway.
All he wants to be able to do is have a nice design for his website. This should be simple.
Why should designing web pages be simple? As a web developer, I have spent a lot of time learning the skill set that it takes to create nice-looking, cross-browser-compatible sites. Currently, that skill set makes me a valuable employee. If every jackdawed fool and his grandma can make a super cool site with little-to-no effort, I suddenly become a very not valuable employee.
Why are you trying to put me out of a job?! Complex CSS implementations are a form of beauraucracy and beauraucracy creates jobs. Why do you think government was invented?
But more seriously, no one said all this web stuff was going to be easy, now did they? And it was said earlier that it's pretty simple just to slap up some decent-looking HTML for those pictures of your vacation to Florida if you don't try to make it look like a web-equivalent of the Louvre. Isn't that enough for you?
Oh and I can't resist this one... heehee.
As a professional web developer, I rarely am meet with issues that...
I imagine the conversation in the Senate building went like this:
*Setting: a Wednesday afternoon.*
Sen. Stevens- "You, staff monkey, did you send me that watchamacallit-mail about the intronetter?"
Staff Monkey- "(Shit! He caught me! Wait, gotta think of a way out of this.) Oh uh -- yeah. Yeah, I sent it last Friday."
Sen. Stevens- "Well it's Wednesday and I haven't gotten it in my Outlock Mailerbox."
Staff Monkey- "Oh well -- you know there's these -- these internet tubes. Stuff gets jammed in 'em. And uhh -- you know all those movies people are downloading -- that's probably your problem, Senator. (Whew, dodged a bullet there. Now to go back to my office to send that email.)"
Slashdot Mirror
Believe it or not, games can combine the excitement of real-time play with the careful strategy of turn based. I'm thinking specifically of the not widely popular Fallout: Tactics which I had a great time playing. You had the option to play combat in turn-based mode as well as real time. Thus, if you are a jittery click freak you can play in real time and if you're the plodding super general you can pick and choose every shot. You get a wider variety of players that way because your interface is customizable.
I guess my point is two fold: Fallout is awesome and we need more games like it. And game designers need to put more thought into how the player is interacting with the world. A little choice goes a long way.
We all know the best way to scorn someone is to compare them to the French. Well done article!
I for one would not mind being killed by a drunk driver if it saved our right* to privacy and freedom of speech. No officer needs to hear what I'm saying to see that I'm swerving or chugging from a tall silver can at every stoplight.
*: The word "right" in this context is used to convey that it is ethically and morally right that we should have privacy and freedom of speech, not that we have a guaranteed Right as established by government and upheld/squashed by the courts.
Hm, and all this time I thought it was other people's cell phones that were bugging me. I never even stopped to think it could be my own. Thanks Slashdot!
Let's just remember folks: this is Australia we're talking about. This is the same country that lets its employees disappear for months at a time with no penalty. When someone says they'll be there at 10:00, they mean between 10:30 and 12:00. Corporate America is a little more strict, s all you Americans better think twice before getting your sex on.
I WANT MY VELVET SERGEY!
Okay granted it was a little silly to title this thing "the Intelligent Robot", but there is something interesting to take from the project. Check out the Discovery Channel clip on YouTube (posted above somewhere) if you haven't already. Now notice how quickly the kids buy into the idea that they're talking to a robot. This makes me wonder: if a truly autonomous, human-like, interactive robot were created tomorrow, would society accept it to the point where one winds up in every home (I dunno, doing the laundry or something) or would we reject it as just too creepy?
I must admit that I'm always intrigued by the fact that we tend to want to create robots in our own image. Now if that doesn't say something about society, I don't know what does.
Well I'm not sure if the use of mathematics counts strictly as "formal methods", but software development should be based in mathematical reasoning as well: algorithmic study is math, and so is Big O notation. Both of these are vital to software engineering, if perhaps less than universally practiced. And let's also take a moment to appreciate the fact that just because you're a coder doesn't make you a software engineer. Similarly, I can build a bridge over an irrigation ditch out of two-by-fours and duct tape, but that doesn't make me a civil engineer. The parallel being, a coder and a software engineer may both get the job done but 9 out of 10 times the engineer will do it better, faster, prettier, more reliably, and will yield a product that can be maintained.
Actually, there was no LoTR! It was invented by Peter Jackson and the false memory of reading the books (even the idea of Tolkien himself!) was implanted in your mind by subliminal messages in the advertisements for the movies.
Search your feelings, you know it to be true.
Let's just take a moment to step back and remember that the world isn't as simple as Google vs. Microsoft: Octagon Cagematch. It's tempting to compare two big companies that do stuff with computers, but there just isn't enough market overlap to relate Google's business to Microsoft's business at such a high level. I'm no expert, but just look at where there is direct competition: there's the search engine thing (let's face it, Google won that battle: it doesn't matter if you think Google is the best search or not, "googling" is now part of society's vernacular and nothing is more powerful than that), and hopefully soon there'll be the online office thing. But I wouldn't say that these are quite enough to say Google's success is Microsoft's failure. Not yet, anyway.
Why are you trying to put me out of a job?! Complex CSS implementations are a form of beauraucracy and beauraucracy creates jobs. Why do you think government was invented?
But more seriously, no one said all this web stuff was going to be easy, now did they? And it was said earlier that it's pretty simple just to slap up some decent-looking HTML for those pictures of your vacation to Florida if you don't try to make it look like a web-equivalent of the Louvre. Isn't that enough for you?
Oh and I can't resist this one... heehee. Am meet... he is a professional web developer!
I imagine the conversation in the Senate building went like this:
*Setting: a Wednesday afternoon.*
Sen. Stevens- "You, staff monkey, did you send me that watchamacallit-mail about the intronetter?"
Staff Monkey- "(Shit! He caught me! Wait, gotta think of a way out of this.) Oh uh -- yeah. Yeah, I sent it last Friday."
Sen. Stevens- "Well it's Wednesday and I haven't gotten it in my Outlock Mailerbox."
Staff Monkey- "Oh well -- you know there's these -- these internet tubes. Stuff gets jammed in 'em. And uhh -- you know all those movies people are downloading -- that's probably your problem, Senator. (Whew, dodged a bullet there. Now to go back to my office to send that email.)"
The End.