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Comment Re:And yet only one idiot has this problem. (Score 1) 394

And before being so aggressive, I'd suggest reading up on basic statistics. It could very well be that the percentage of incidents to number of cars is higher for the Tesla, but a single event is never statistically significant.

Note that this isn't to say there isn't a problem. It just means that a single event is not enough to draw a conclusion either way.

Comment Re:where's the fun in that? (Score 1) 704

The current wild west that is video games, where people use the cover of anonymity to act like complete assholes, tends to put things out of character, not in. There's nothing quite as in character as having a supposedly top tier soldier from some elite secret force start screeching obscenities with the voice of a 12 year old while teabagging the corpse of the ally he just shot for no reason, right?

Comment Re:Let me guess... (Score 1) 107

Another (perhaps even more important) reason is that the Xbox 360 ran on a derivative of DirectX 9. Most games were ported over from consoles, which made it much easier to go from the 360 to DX9 than to recode for DX10. Didn't help that DX10 was a huge step from DX9 with a complete rewrite of most of the API, so it took years for game developers to port their engines over.

Comment Re:Of course it's going to exacerbate inequality. (Score 1) 529

This.

If we truly wanted to give kids the best possible education (as opposed to just fulfilling what we consider a societal obligation with minimal effort and cost), each student would have their own tailored curriculum. Note that I don't mean by this that a student who doesn't like history never will do history; that'd be putting blinkers on students. It should be about following their rate of learning at every step of the way, adapting as they mature, and attempting to explain in different ways if they don't understand until one clicks. I don't think anyone (besides perhaps some extreme cases of disabilities) is unable to learn at the very least high school level stuff, it's just that the current "one size fits all" approach fits, well, nobody. In attempting to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one.

And the funny thing is? Doing so would also resolve the paradox between meritocracy and equality. If everyone has their own tailored curriculum, then smart students are treated no differently than anyone else.

Comment Re:no practical knowledge in the industry at big u (Score 1) 295

This, so much this. A lot of students get quite the scare when they realize that, gasp, a computer science degree is largely about doing science. While we do have introductory programming courses here, they're mostly seen as giving students the basic toolkit with which they will do their actual degree, a bit like how a physics degree has a few introductory pure math courses. Many courses I've taken don't even have programming at all in them, and some of those were very enjoyable at that!

In the end, the ones who realized that a comp sci degree isn't about learning programming tend to be those who do best at programming. I've met students who'd never used C++ and picked it up in a matter of hours. Perhaps they didn't have as much refinement as someone who's been doing it for 10+ years, but they understood that you can easily transfer high-level notions (ie. the focus of a comp sci degree) to any language.

Perhaps the pitfall of this is for the mediocre students, who don't realize this. They tend to have difficulty adjusting to another language than the one they were taught with.

Comment Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio? (Score 1) 377

That's sadly a byproduct of how game engines are developed, I'm afraid. For the most part, game engines originate from graphics engine (so just graphics and then stuff tacked onto it), which means the vast majority of programmers working on the engine will be either generalist programmers or graphics programmers. In both cases, it's unlikely that they'll know how to deal with audio in any real capacity (I know I don't), so they'll use the same model that graphics uses: pushing commands.

Now, I'm sure that the larger devs have dedicated sound engineers, but I'm not sure just how much leeway they have with designing (and most likely, scrapping and completely redoing) the sound engine. It's also likely that their bosses will come from either a managerial background or a generalist programming or graphics programming background. Game development could use more specialists and needs to give them the flexibility they need.

Comment Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio? (Score 1) 377

Not saying that they're absolutely right, but there are a few elements to keep in mind:
-While playing back a single FLAC (or another lossless format) isn't too expensive, games aren't music players. When you have 128 FLACs playing back at the same time, the dynamics change.
-The game's minimum spec includes dual-core CPUs. You can't dedicate an entire core to sound in that situation, yet I doubt they wanted to specifically code their engine to behave differently for dual-cores.

Now, I also heard that their sound assets were particularly inefficient (ie. repeated sounds, looping sounds being repeated multiple times in the track, etc.), so that might also account for some of the size.

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