Wow, Slashdotters, ask a simple question, get a hundred flames in response. Yes, I know he should have seen it coming, but hopefully he'll be able to locate some decent information in the midst of most of your garbage. Go flame about something actually controversial for Pete's sake.

Data Modeling and Database Design (amazon.com) by Umanath and Scamell - Excellent resource that covers several levels of data modelling, including conceptual schemas and logical schemas as well as normalization, relational algebra and quality/efficient SQL design.

Your argument backfires here. You just claimed that medium doesn't determine art. Put another way, (as others here have said) the medium itself is not art (to the other writer above, the pencil and the watermelon are not art, it is their combination that is the art). Similarly, video games themselves are not art. Not because they have objectives, but because what makes a video game a video game is not art. Put another way, books are not art (they are blocks of paper stained with ink), but literature is. Once again, as you said above, art is defined by the aesthetic experience. It is not only the medium, but what you experience through the medium that defines art. This is not to say that art is completely internal. It is to say that art is the combination of the paint on the canvas or the shape of the statue, combined with your experience of it. And a "good" video game can be deemed as such only by the quality of experience (aesthetic only being one of them) you get out of it. All that being said, that is all just philosophical precision stuff. As for Ebert - he's just bitter. From my definition, film isn't art either (but individual movies/ photographs combined with your aesthetic experiences of them can be).

Heh, Seems to me like a lot of the people on here are coming from highly disparate development environments. Limited Memory and CPU's are old school to people who have jobs at new firms writing Java or .Net web applications. There are people, on the other hand who are still writing for transaction processing systems that are 20 years old. You bet your ass they need to optimize and know sorting algorithms backward and forwards. And of course, everything in between. Flame flame flame. It's like the people here can't conceive of different circumstances where the other programming paradigm works/exists. I will say that the new programmers don't know enough, but the new programs and ide's do handle a lot for them very efficiently. Great when it works. Stupid when it doesn't

Important to note that the only part of the video that looks completely normal is the behavior of the head, the arms, the breathing of the torso-essentially everything done by the actual human. I'd be surprised if you felt absolutely no (at least confusion if not revulsion) watching the video. The face was interesting to me, but I was blown away by how realistic the hair looked, how realistic the arm movements--until I realized that that was all still a regular human being. Then, when I focused in on the face alone, it simply looked animated, and if not disgusting, at least completely out of place.

I think the general feeling, even if it isn't an all-out feeling of disgust, is one that things are...not...right. Ultimately, I think this is a pretty bad example, though, since Emily is touted as being "not real" but in fact the majority of the body language--the stuff we are tuned into almost subconsciously--is still human. I think if this video skips by any general feeling of revulsion, disgust, or out of place-ness, it is specifically because there are still physical human elements in it.