2,503 karma · joined March 30, 2008
If your believer is aware that the strongest alternative to their belief that there is a dragon in the garage is that there is no dragon, they will tailor their explanations to your perspective. That doesn't prove they share your perspective deep down if they could just admit it to themselves, it just means they understand you.
I think it's clear that this is the future Google wants. If they occasionally have to hand over documents to the government, that's just the price of optimizing the lattes for the rest of us. If you don't like personal information lying in the hands of third party corporations and powerful officials, you have a first world problem.
What I am waiting for is a foundation focused on privacy. Our digital lives should be no one's rummage sale. The foundation would create software to make social networking truly controllable and private. No ability to read my private messages, no mandate to make money from me, no personalization, no backdoors.
We haven't hit the scaling limits of computation and are unlikely to for some time. But the scaling limit of a human is fixed at sixty minutes per hour.
Dear Esther is a first person explorer that plays with narrative in an interesting way.
Thomas Was Alone is a platformer about a rectangle named Thomas and his quadrilateral friends. They become self aware. Story narrated in a great British accent. Lovely short-form game.
Proteus is a first person explorer where the soundtrack mirrors the landscape. It has a lo fi beauty.
Hotline Miami is a very violent, very tightly designed kill em up. It is the meatiest of the five I've played.
Little Inferno is a graphically beautiful comment on skinner boxes and recent trends in game design.
My son's on to Shaun the Sheep, Phineas & Ferb, and sundry others...
That makes my gaming experiences very different from someone playing 2560xwhatever with all settings on Ultra. Maybe I don't know what I'm missing. But I tend to emphasize gameplay over shinies.
Along those lines, Monaco is fabulous.
One thing this game teaches you is that much of the world is rural.
My parents are totally good at this game. With no external aids, they got a location in Mallorca to within 50 meters.
I think you can get better at this game over time. I have seen my scores creeping up. Recognizing and sounding out languages will help a lot too.
Time to calm down.
Is this FUD? The point of DMCA anti-circumvention is that it makes a crime out of things that were otherwise legal, not tack on charges to things that are illegal for other reasons.
FTFA:
"- It amends Section 1201 to make it clear that it is completely legal to "circumvent" if there is no copyright infringement.
"- It legalizes tools and services that enable circumvention as long as they are intended for non-infringing uses.
"- It changes Copyright Law to specify that unlocking cell phones is not copyright infringement."
Or you could read the text the bill adds to DMCA:
It is not a violation of this section to use, manu- 8 facture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise 9 traffic in any technology, product, service, device, compo- 10 nent, or part thereof that is primarily designed or pro- 11 duced for the purpose of facilitating noninfringing uses of 12 works protected under this title by circumventing a tech- 13 nological measure that effectively controls access to that 14 work, unless it is the intent of the person that uses, manu- 15 factures, imports, offers to the public, provides, or traffics 16 in the technology, product, service, device, component, or 17 part to infringe copyright or to facilitate the infringement 18 of a copyright.’’.
emphasis added by me.
We are living in a Golden Age. I dropped maybe $10 on Minecraft back in Alpha. We are buying desert island games for the price of a latte.
I think I bought To the Moon for $3. Maybe $5. And the next time it went on sale I bought it 5 times to give away copies.
Or Binding of Isaac, I think I paid 1.25 for my first copy. And I am closing in on 300 hours there.
Price is no longer a discriminator for great games. You can plop down $5 and get Steam keys for 5 to 8 games. If even one of them has good reviews, you can afford to take a risk on the rest. I was tempted by my conditioning (sponsored by modern retail) to say that the other games in the bundle are practically free.
So a good strategy to find your best new games is wait for the bundle, buy 10, cherish 1. If you can stand not to play on release day, you will gain a lot of solid gold and an enormous backlog. If you're going in with eyes wide open, it's a win win for players and developers.
Fixed point is another way to get at it, although it requires your listener to know what that is.
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=1241...
The real problem was that they had a fixed exchange rate between the ingame currency and loyalty points. If the loyalty point formula asymptotically approached a max, this would have been a non-issue.
The real lesson is about the naive approach to forex.
You could also take a lesson about "optimizing the wrong thing". In machine learning it comes from telling the learning system to optimize a means rather than an end, frequently with hilarious consequences. See also paperclip maximizer.
Also, the ping pong game (and 100 pin bowling) in Wii Sports Resort is probably worth the money for the whole disc, which is another way to get the dongle.
Or you can take, in contrast, Like Spinning Plates by Radiohead. The music was recorded backwards, then run forwards. Thom Yorke learned the backwards melody, which gives the lyrics a clipped, alien quality. When they perform this song live, they use significantly different instrumentation.
Is the album performance fake? No, it's impossible to do in any other way.
There are many more examples I know, including bands that aren't worth a D live and bands that just record their live performances in the studio and call it a record. For me, hearing an album that is hard to perform live is a thrill, can't wait to hear what the band does with it.
Beyond that, what can you say? If marriage is wrong for you personally, all the statistics in the world wouldn't and shouldn't convince you otherwise. Your not wanting to get married might be correlated with your being on the wrong side of those statistics.
If marriage is right for you, I doubt this kind of article is how you would find out.
A better article would have listed pros and cons. For instance, pro: the pool of candidates is larger when you're younger; con: the pool of candidates is better when it's smaller. Or whatever is really going on under the numbers. That would be interesting to know.
I work at a big co on the west coast and we have had developers in India, hired by the company's India arm, on some projects.
There are coordination issues because it's exactly halfway around the world, especially if a project requires collaboration with another department. Projects sent overseas need to be well-defined and self-contained to get a good result. This alone could cause you to shy away from hiring in other time zones.
Expectations and the engineering culture are different in the two countries. I have worked with India developers who produced work that was worse in terms of depth, quality, and maintainability than the same project later taken up in the US. I do not have an anthropological explanation, and the developers from India I've worked with stateside didn't have the same issues. /fireproof
More experience and tech muscle is concentrated in the US team. How about this: if you were highly skilled and experienced, as a rule you would have moved to the US for the greater opportunity and the big bucks. There's a positive feedback loop here, because banging together lots of skilled workers creates more opportunity and attractive companies, creating more motivation to come, and so on.
This is a story about a finely crafted work of art being influenced by a commercial market.
Not everything on the site is a "how to succeed in business without really trying" morality play, linkbait product announcement, or self-help column. The guideline is "stuff that is interesting" and it's intentionally vague.
Just let it roll, like water off a duck's back.
My son and I watched DuckTales together for the first time this year. I was pretty disappointed that the discs stopped before the last season, although I did feel the earlier shows were more atmospheric and classic.
I had massive deja vu for every single frame of the GizmoDuck 5-parter. We must have taped it and I must have seen it many many times.
The other thing I really love about this show is that it's so sweet. The characters really mess up and have feelings and make important choices. Scrooge many times walks away from money for family and friends and is better off for it (he gets the money in the end too but that's not the chewy center).
On the family multiplayer server, I made sky houses out of giant mushrooms and bone dust. I made a hockey arena in the snow. I laid roads out of gravel (wood for bridges) that stretch for days of in-game time. There are waystations that you reach just as night is falling. We made a monster trap that drops tons of resources next to a powered railroad track, so you can get in a cart, whiz by monsters, after which they burn in lava, then their byproducts fall down a waterfall. I made an underwater dome out of glass.
My son loves this game and we play it together.
But there is also a special beauty when playing alone. You are marooned on a planet the size of earth. You have the power to keep yourself safe by your own efforts. You can explore vast caves to find treasure. You can light areas with torches to create zones of safety. You can grow crops and breed animals to feed yourself. You can look at the sunset through windows at your beach house, then go to bed. This is all with the tragic realization that virtually no one will appreciate your efforts (and in the game), so whatever experience or meaning you derive from it is for you alone. The world is by turns bleak, elegiac, beautiful.
Lately I've been playing hardcore mode, which gives you only one life to live and deletes the world when you die. It is easy to starve, so the first few days are scrambling just to get to a subsistent existence. It's hard even for veterans, and it turns up all that tragic stuff to 11.
There is in-game programming that people have used to make adders and ROMs and clocks. There are notes that you can use to make music (my doorbells play Raiders of the Lost Ark). You can make secret doors that open with pistons.
And that's all in the base game! Modders have had an endless field day with this game. It's now a game that contains other games, contains multitudes.
Pros: lots of disciplines to get involved, obvious ways for ordinary people to take part (monitoring and reducing home energy use), and a regulatory environment that is in need of reform (tragedy of the commons for pollution, carbon market). And obviously, a dire, human-race affecting need.
The big problem with this article is cherrypicking examples. Even though it contains a list of 120 game companies (yes, tl) that folded between 2006 and 2012, it doesn't set them in context. How many companies are there of which these are a subset? How does this failure rate compare with historical norms? How big are these companies really? Other lists of large budgets, large layoffs, large numbers of units required to break even make similar non-points.
The larger point is that game art is expensive. Will Wright was making the same point with Spore, I would say. The art was so expensive he outsourced it to the cheapest laborers he could find, players. It turned out the tools were better than the game itself; nevertheless I think you have to feel he was on to something.
There is not going to be an asset apocalypse in a world with a Minecraft mod API (Real Soon Now), the Steam Workshops, and procedural generation. Unless you mean the kind of disaster that kills off dinosaurs.
Is AAA gaming unsustainable? Of course it depends on what you mean by AAA. But I think the big studios have an eye on their wallet at all times. They make big games because at the end of the day they are profitable on the average. There is just a wide variance. If a smaller studio has all its money on black on its AAA title, you might wish them luck, but not be completely surprised when their success is raked away.
The AAA titles that succeed do so through solid gameplay. That is unlikely to change no matter how shiny they become.