> Programming is not like playing a musical instrument, it is not something that you have to have a genetic disposition for.
As someone who is stumbling through the basics of programming and learning guitar, I can tell you that the secret to success in both is practice and putting in the time. There are very few activities that you cannot become good at with sufficient time and resources.
The thing is, there has to be some genetic/early developmental disposition. I "got" programming the first time I tried. 5 years on I'm still fumbling my way through beginner guitar.
I don't know if there is or if there is not any disposition or genetic element but if it applies to one, it applies to the other. There are people who, even with effort, fail to "get" programming (or, more specifically, the logical concepts behind it) in the same way that you're struggling with the physical aspects of the guitar.
I've had to do quite a lot of DIY as a home owner but I still feel as useless and incompetent as I did years ago. The difference between DIY, though, and programming is that the average joe doesn't have to program whereas I still have to do house repairs.. :-)
Yeah that's the point I'm trying to make I think - I get programming when others don't (even without practice, the practice just made me a lot better). And as much practice as I give it I don't get much further with guitar.
P.S: I can't help but think the "death of.." articles are just to get page views with sensational titles and articles, mind you thats been the standard for newspapers since before the net.
Well... there's a reason Quake-like fast-paced games are not popular on consoles. Sure - I have no problems playing slower games like Deus Ex on a controller, but for typical multiplayer FPSes that wouldn't work. Essentially you just learn now much you move the mouse to do a 180 turn and you have it in muscule memory. The moment you move the mouse, you start turning. With controllers where you actually control the acceleration of the movement, that experience is much worse. You simply cannot make a precise turn around on the spot without a lot of training. On top of that you're usually limited to the specific number of buttons unfortunately.
Of course you won't notice most of those issues on the console games... because they're designed so that you don't need more than N buttons, they're not as fast as promode quake, they add other elements to shift the idea from the raw fps (multiplayer q1/q3-pm being prime examples probably) to a goal based game, team play, etc.
I agree that mouse/keyboard is better for first-person shooters, but FPS games are still wildly popular on consoles. Halo and Call of Duty are the biggest examples.
Actually for the longest time console games relied heavily on auto-aim features to actually make the online games competitive.
I play both between console and desktop and whilst I find console play more fun, I do find I'm far better at desktop. In Unreal Tournament I was known for my crazy Ion Canon bombings (alternate fire several times and then hit each one with a regular fire to make them explode from well across the map), this transferred over to Halo where I was known for my carbine headshots at similar crazy range... on Xbox I'm now known for shotgun and melee because the aiming fucking sucks, still generally lead on a server though so I can't complain too much!
Does anyone know of an FPS multiplayer game that users can play from both a PC and consoles? It would be interesting to see the outcome .. and I know where my money will be.
Unreal Tournament 2004 got up to 5 CDs and Half Life 2 I'm sure had seven. Apart from that, I've never seen anything even approaching what you guys are saying about old windows OS installs.
A lot of the questions students have could be answered by fellow peers. I know blackboard is a well hated program but (at least at my university) it has a forum for each course that students often use to ask questions or exercise their knowledge for their peer's benefit. Maybe we don't need to get more lecturers so much as encourage students to ask each other questions.
This was a good thing my university did in first-year physics -- we had one hour a week of problem sessions where we were forced to work through a bunch of questions in groups of four. This made sure everybody was basically on the same page vis a vis the basics.
I don't know if it would work once you got beyond first year and into the more difficult material.
I personally find SMS far to expensive for the amount of information I can communicate using it. Texting is last resort, I much prefer to call someone or attempt to contact them on steam or facebook IM.
The increased interest from facebook might be due to a kind of social obligation. Whereas when you use HN or Twitter to find links you have no obligation and less reward to stay on the page an actually read the content.
Someone who is reading a link that a friend has sent them is expected to read it, otherwise the friend may be unimpressed or you might not have anything to talk about. Plus, there is the added incentive of impressing or gaining a connect to the friend or appearing interested in your crush/gf's interests.
On HN and reddit, my only interest is whether I want to learn something or make myself laugh.
If Lenin had said "the internet will cause great cultural and geopolitical change" would you scoff and ignore him because you think of him as a bad person? Of course not.
The same applies to Trotsky, if you read that wiki page you will see Trotsky's idea is actually pretty damn good.
This is why we should be eating off small plates at home and buying the small donuts instead of the regular sized one. You get more satisfaction for the same sized meal or equivalent satisfaction for a smaller one.
I admit to using smaller forks and smaller plates when I'm grabbing a quick meal for in front of the PC - makes the food look larger, and it's easier to handle, too.
So that's how they make chicken nuggets! That looks suspiciously like pink ice cream.
So they use ammonia to kill all the nasties. The real issue is whether that ammonia ends up in you in large enough quantities to stress your liver and kidneys. Its not enough to say "dangerous stuff used to kill potentially dangerous microbes in our food" you need to show that enough of it is getting into our bodies to actually be a problem. Ammonia is a natural metabolic waste product so we're well adapted to dealing with it already(by pissing and sweating it out as urea).
It should be noted that the are a lot more things other than the genome and connectome. There's countless epigenetic factors, the extended phenotype, and there's some evidence that inheritance can occur through the proteome through prions (the helpful kind) - at least in yeast.
I'm fairly sure this is just scratching the surface of all the ways that "codes" and initial conditions define you.
As someone who is stumbling through the basics of programming and learning guitar, I can tell you that the secret to success in both is practice and putting in the time. There are very few activities that you cannot become good at with sufficient time and resources.