Wired News: Army Game Proves U.S. Cant Lose

Well… I guess it could be seen as a recruitment tool… but then, who would it be targeted at? and would these people be the recruits that the army is looking for?

The average gamer who plays army games still is quite young and has the attention span of a ferret on crack. If this is the demographic that they are going after then they are probably right on target.

Their original game that was used as a ‘recruitment tool’ was way better… it is called America’s Army, it has two human teams pitted against each other, and players can actually learn from their mistakes, whereas the AI in this new game does not (apparently).

Still… they spent 1.5 million dollars (US) on this, and that ain’t too bad if they get a couple recruits per hundred downloads.

Me? I am going to stick with America’s Army.

Ok… so markers are assholes. They go through the assignments with the minimal effort that they can put into it. It is evident that they do this.

I got my Operating Systems assignment back and this was made very clear to me. There were comments on it such as “Needs more comments”, and then later “It should only be 2″. The combination of these two amused me because on the line where it said that “It should only be 2″ there was a comment explaining why it wasn’t 2… Nice.

On that question I lost 1 point for not putting comments in the code even though on every line it was quite obvoius what was going on, to make sure that it wasn’t just me who understood the code, I gave it to my friend (an arts major) and she could tell me exactly what was going on at any line that I pointed to. I am a firm believer in the fact that if the code is written properly there do not need to be a whole bunch of comments. If you name a function stringToInt… what else could be going on really? I managed to argue my mark up 1 point for that part as the marker realised that he was being an ass (I guess…).

The other problem I had was on the last question of the assignment. There was supposed to be a proof of some sort. The marker asked the professor how to mark this part, and the teacher gave him some guidelines to go by. This gave the marker free reign to just throw marks on the page without actually thinking about it. He then protested that he ‘couldn’t understand the proof’ when I said that my proof was right. It was pretty evident that the proof was lost on him and that he didn’t understand it, nor had he made any effort to do so. Way to go the extra mile there buddy.

Don’t you just love the web 2.0? I don’t even need to touch MS Office anymore, not that I have used it for a long long time (I use Portable Open Office). There are software suites out there now that are all web based. Granted it doesn’t have everything that one needs in an office suite (equation editing being an important thing) but that can be mimicked using pictures. I really recommend using Zoho Virtual Office as an alternative to other office programs. It will become even more useful as Vista looms just on the horizon making all your stuff soon to be obsolete (so run off and download linux!)

Social bookmarking, everyone should do it, not everyone does. If one wants to get into it but cannot you cannot make up your mind as to which one you want to use, you can sign up for a while bunch. If you do that however, how will you post a site to them all at once? There is an answer to that: OnlyWire.

It probably has the most useful bookmark tool of all of them, better than just de.licio.us, or mag.nolia. This is because it doesn’t try to be anything except a site to save bookmarks of the sites that you are looking at. It does not store the links, it does not pick up the hundreds or thousands of words that you use to bookmark things, it just gives you a simple little save javascript based on what you enter for the sites that you want to use and what page you are on. The only problem is that you don’t get recommended tags. This can either be a blessing or a curse, as you don’t have to look at the ridiculous numbers of tags that others have used, but you have to think of the ones that you would use yourself. Hope you can think of descriptive names…