It's a sad world we live in, that in the presence of scientific breakthroughs and ingenuity, one of the first thoughts that arises is of the fighting that surrounds that part of the world. I suppose Yom Kippur is a surprisingly appropriate time for reflection on that though.

Actually, I find that the mashing buttons to kill the baddies falls squarely on the Wii, while beer drinking FPS tournaments are 360's big thing, and heavily priced bizarre gameplay falls in the ps3 arena.

Regardless, the biggest issue seems to me to be basic economics. What is the cost of your entertainment. I've been interested in picking up a next gen console since the wii came out. I've played all three extensively, and at the moment, their price point is nearly identical. But for me to get one game out of a system, I need to drop about $300 for the base system WITHOUT any games, and $50 for a relatively old game (Mario Galaxy is still $50, 3 years in). With high quality games like Braid coming out on steam for $5-$20 the comparable initial drop of $20 to start playing and $350 to start playing is an obvious choice. Needless to say, despite the fact I've typically enjoyed console gaming for years, the higher price point for individual games combined with the cost of the systems (which haven't dropped to levels that I feel the purchase is justified), makes people who share this opinion swing away from them.

I still haven't swung toward cellphone games, because generally, across the board, I haven't found many of them that are on par with games from the super nintendo. Tetris maybe, but I haven't found a good solid push for thought provoking games for a cell. The biggest challenge for me is that the cost of old classics is finally pushing up into the current 'new game' price point that I have no interest in.

I'm mostly hoping this commentary will shed some light on the mindset of a, possibly atypical, non-hard-core gamer.

Never has the concept of the facepalm applied so well...

Why would you even go there ffx.

I would say it's fair if you are charged less for the game, or if in some way the in game advertisement improves the game play.

For example, what would a modern day racing game be without any advertisement at all. It wouldn't feel authentic, now would it. I'm not talking about games like F-Zero with futuristic cars, etc, but the ones that are supposed to feel like the Indy 500.

99% of games couldn't make the argument that the in game advertisement adds to the game.

On the other hand, if the company is covering a service, and you're paying for the software, it's also potentially legit. For instance, how much bandwidth does battlenet consume annually? Who pays for that? When was the last time you personally bought a copy of starcraft? I could see in game ads supporting game communities as perfectly legitimate.

Power Paper has been producing printable battery tech for YEARS

http://www.powerpaper.com/home.php

Surprisingly, they've taken it into the cosmetics business.

Who wants to find another wheel we can reinvent.

I don't buy it.

I think it's important to note the WoW effect. In 3rd person games, you will often see a large number of players taking on female characters regardless of their gender. There's a combination of "who would you want to be" in the game and "who do you want to look at." Also, weighting by sales invalidates the results. Are they figuring in the buying population as well? If 70% of games are sold to white males who are 18-24, I would not be surprised to see a correlation. They need to introduce a counter weighting to reduce the effect of the buying population consuming games where they can play as someone they relate to.

How about Brian Greene?
http://www.amazon.com/Elegant-Universe-Brian-Greene/dp/B001IDLCNM/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1247549920&sr=8-2

I found his writing to be pretty clear, light reading for quantum and relativistic introductions.

His examples are well thought out and simple enough for an intelligent twelve year old to understand (Kudos if you catch the reference).

Until Jaunty with KDE, the Vista of Ubuntu.

Not happy with the amount of work it's going to take to revert THAT.

Microwave radio

If you don't include microwave, the cap is around 400MHz. If you include it the cap is 40GHz.

I don't count IR as radio, but your 400THz limit does.

Nice trolling.

For the sake of the grandparent post, 400THz is approximately the frequency of red/IR light (It's close, but lower frequency than the Xnm=XTHz green light band). The number is a little off (2-4 orders of magnitude), putting the upper limit of the frequency band known as radio around 400MHz (FM), unless you include Microwave radiation as a radio wave subset (I've seen some that do), which ups it to closer to 40GHz.

Here's a site for quick ref:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_radiation/

And a pretty picture:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EM_spectrum.svg/

Never hurts to correct an error, but it can to stomp on someone who made it.
I recommend providing links to sources and avoiding grammer nazisms.
Also, we don't need additional proof that John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory is true.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/

Here's the kicker...

In the US, there are still channels transmitted via radio waves.

In Ireland, are there?

Would a radio count if there were?

For example, and I'm not sure if this is true everywhere, attempting to log onto a comcast broadband connection with IP6 enabled on a windows adapter has failed me every time. This was not true when I attempted the same on Time Warner or Cable vision networks. If major parts of the internet backbone still need to support it, it may be a while before it really gets to a self sustainable level.

to actually get something valuable from the article, look up the words kinesthesia or proprioception. Apply beyond the limited frame of reference of a person's own being.

The way I've seen it, C++ would be the way to go, particularly if you force exposure to namespaces and the precompiler.

Java basically amounts to a really clean API over C++ with some minor nuance differences. C doesn't expose you
to object oriented programming, which although will give you a better understanding of memory manip, will not
give you the experience a typical company will hope you've exposed yourself to.

C# is another step away from C++ and is likely not too bad to pick up as an extension off it.

As for topics to consider, really look into the weirdness that unions introduce (playing with floating point numbers
on a bit level is a good way to get into this). Figure out how to deal with collections, including an overview of
the differences between search and sort algorithms. You don't need to know how to write them as much as how to
select one or figure out how to write them when you need to. Cover synchronization on multiprocessor architectures.
Get a VERY good feel for inheritance and UML. It sucks to learn and the tools for it are usually quite painful to
play with, but the time it can save in the end when working in a team of 10 on 100,000 lines of mixed languages is
remarkable.

Remember that working on a piece of code that is 100k lines or more is going to take you months to get used to, will
be too large for you to think about in its entirety unless you've been working on it since the beginning and have
forgone anything resembling a social life, and will also be complex and challenging and possibly very fun.

You should get used to version control. Try RCS, not because it's the latest and greatest, but because you're likely
to see it. CVS is newer (old) and more likely to be the incumbent tech at an arbitrary company. Subversion is great
and if you get into a place that uses that, you should be quite happy. I've also seen perforce and a couple others.
Cultural choice, and it's dependent on the size of the code and how many engineers drive decisions at a high level.
It also depends on how often the company picks up new projects.

For an idea of what I do, my primary language of choice is AVR assembly. I like playing close to hardware in bit gritty
RISC architectures. From there, it's C (smaller file sizes than C++ by far unless you're crafty), C++, Java.

Java makes for a very nice prototyping language, and it encourages some commenting and coding practices in a way I can
approve of, even if its "we'll take care of it" view of memory management is something I don't quite agree with.

Otherwise, good luck!