ja2ke

It is absolutely not a Common Core hit piece! The teacher talks about how providing context (teaching!) allowed Common Core material to provide a very worthwhile lesson.

"If we are to truly make progress in getting our students to understand the concepts presented in the Common Core to the depth intended we must help them learn to stop looking for a right answer and start looking for a right reason."

Talking to a lot of teachers it is often not the provided Core material that is the issue, but not having enough time to actually provide the structure and context to help the kids internalize why any of it is important. It's also not a surprise that is the case, given that at least where I live (California) the school year is measurably shorter and class sizes are measurably bigger than they were when I was in the same grades.

Twitch.tv has offered this service for ages, but maybe it started offering it after splitting from the Justin codebase?

Third announcement has got to be a controller of some type. The O + O probably = dual analog sticks and a d pad, or some other dual-thumb input controls. There's no way Valve is going to announce a living room platform and then give away the most visible part (the controller) to Microsoft's wired Xbox 360 controller (currently the standard bearer for PC controllers despite being from a console).

I think the issue here is that off-duty police officers speed aggressively with the knowledge that, if caught, they will be almost certainly let off the hook due to their job. That makes the situation completely different than people with any other "just a job" job.

It's usually what makes the game actually feel good to play.

I've heard looking at the first person movement code for Valve's games will make you wish for your own death, but stripping out the weird stuff which looks ideologically wrong just makes the game play worse.

The word "tweet" to refer to a post. A bird as the logo! Twitter started as barely more than a faceless service, and most of what is "Twitter" as a brand came from its users and developers.

Not that there isn't precedent for their model. I remember being fascinated to read that the Big Mac and Ronald McDonald both came from local franchise restaurants, not corporate HQ. It's just a frustrating position to take. It feels short sighted.

A really cool fried who suddenly shows up for lunch in a suit, then eventually stops calling you. Your mom reads about them in a magazine and excitedly tells you what they're up to for a few years, then you stop hearing about them.

I think we're just going to see a rise in more "architectural" styled development renderings, over fully polished marketing-style imagery. I welcome that.

It's brand diluting all the same, though. I guess they (probably correctly) see that they are doing a lot of things right with online purchases/downloads that other places aren't, but part of what I think they are doing right is having and keeping focus. Of course, people said the same thing when Amazon stopped just selling books, and that worked out alright for them.

This will dilute the hell out of what I actually use Steam for -- video games.

The Steam front page, though it may seem a little sloppy or insane, is extremely successful at pointing me to games I am interested in, at a cheap price. It's going to get weird, and very nebulous, if a copy of Adobe Premiere is up there in the hot picks slider along with Assassin's Creed 3.

"Dropbox Pro now comes in flavors of 100 and 200 GB, but at the price of the original 50 and 100 GB plans." I don't know what's complicated about this. It reads like new pricing = old pricing with 2x the storage. Am I missing something, too?

Yep, most "consumer-level" end users would prefer to not be asked. I'm probably a bad nerd, but it's even true of me. When I go to my parents house for some holiday or another, I used to meticulously check everything on my mom's computer to make sure it was working well. Now I basically just jam on the manual software update button for everything she has installed that doesn't autoupdate, because she's too afraid or inconvenienced by the manual update button. Everything else, though, is just managing itself and she doesn't notice.

They've always been at least "Applications" on the Mac, which is probably where the NeXTSTEP team got the file extension. On DOS/Windows it was and still is "Executable," though people are starting to casually use "App" everywhere.

Amnesia is fantastic example of using gameplay mechanics and rules to create mood.

Amnesia wants to use its interlocking game systems to make you feel afraid: You stay sane longer in the light. You have a limited amount of lamp oil with which to create light. Monsters make you insane (and kill you). Monsters can see you better in the light. Monsters make you go insane more quickly if you look directly at them (in the style of Lovecraft, gazing on things you should not see rend your mind).

The end result of this is a pretty wonderful set of rule balancing where, upon seeing a monster, the player immediately douses their lamp and hides in a dark corner staring at the wall, slowly going insane from a horror they cannot look at, knowing that looking at it will make them go truly mad, and turning on light for comfort will bring them a swift death.

It helps that on the art side, the visuals and audio are all built around creating and enhancing the mood, of course, but it's rare that there are a bunch of interlocking systems which can shape your behavior in a way that's that harmonious with an expected emotional output, a mood, tone, etc.

The game is rough around the edges and definitely created by a small team, but what it achieves is pretty rare.

If you are starting a new Kickstarter campaign http://www.kicktraq.com/ may be a useful research tool. They're fairly new so their data doesn't go back too far but what's there is a good resource.

True. I'd also not be drinking water, using a parking space, or any of the other office facilities, and if I shut down my PC I'd be using less electricity.

I'd of course still be receiving benefits and taking up space on the mail server, and my desk would sit there unused.

Same. I think about that too often.

If I could just set my "Friends" circle to be the default function of the Home button (something I've wanted dating back to my first 5 minutes using the service) I would probably actually use Google+.

"Home" being "EVERYTHING" is just a disaster. I want to see what the people I actually personally care about are up to first and foremost, and then I want to browse around to what the rest of the Internet is doing. Instead, everything is shoved down my throat all the time.

I love Sol Food and eat there all the time. It's one of my favorite restaurants in the bay area. I would give it 5 stars in a second.

That's the other problem with this whole thing, I guess. Yelp's content is basicallu 100% subjective.

Four friends and I were using free basecamp to track a personal free-time project we are working to turn into something more. That's five people on free Basecamp, not making any money (in fact spending out of pocket), but it's at times been an invaluable resource. Just, for our scale, not $20+ a year invaluable.

I'm fine with Basecamp Next being "not for me" right now because of that, but that doesn't mean I'm not a little disappointed.

I only have meetings like that when working somewhere which has a discrete marketing department.

Same. I don't like each and every proposed solution that all the recent email clients have, but I live a life which, like it or not, involves a hell of a lot of email. So against all odds, seeing people trying to seriously tackle email from different angles is exciting.

Given that there's no smugness in Portland, that makes sense.

I read somewhere that the writers rooms of Daily Show and Colbert rarely cross, at least day to day. I believe they deliberately keep them separate to keep them tonally unique, even though it sometimes results in both shows covering the same topic, and even occasionally making the same joke.

(Sorry for no source on that.)

I don't think the unique input methods brought on by a multitouch glass display has limited the desirability to game developers... 3-4 years ago that could have been a concern, but the huge iOS games market has shown that to not be the case. We're getting unique, tremendously well-selling experiences on touch/mobile devices with great regularity. Major publishers and indies are churning out games for these devices, all without a keyboard, mouse, or controller required to play.

It's true that you can't play every genre of game on an iPad, but it's also been true for years that not every genre of PC game would play well on a mainline TV console (traditional adventure games, strategy games, and anything with a lot of diverse/unique user input or complex underlying systems tends to fail on a 360 controller/living room couch situation), and not every GameBoy/DS game would work well there either.

That aside, personally as a gamer I'm glad that there are game systems out there with nearly mutually exclusive input methods, because it prevents lazy ports, and lazy ports generally, basically, suck to play.

Theaters which "do it right" (bright projection, good sound, more varied programming, anti-talking/texting policies) also tend to show fewer ads before a screening.

The problem across the board really seems to boil down to "megaplex chains are bad for movies." There are a lot of specific line items but they all end up sharing the common denominator of "this wasn't a problem until the rise of big box multiplex theaters."

The parent post was about journalists, not about journalistic entities, unless I did miss something.

I think the Internet revealed that the common denominator is not where you work (a newsroom, your bedroom) but that you're good at your job. That's all.

The dwindling great news organizations are like a good university -- you have amazing resources at your disposal, you are surrounded by peers who hold you to a very high standard -- so by that measure traditional journalists lucky enough to work at a place which still provides that infrastructure have a leg up. Internet journalism at its best has proven that that what those institutions offer at their height are merely great tools to get the job done, but they don't at all define what the job is. The medium, and even the resources available, don't make a good journalist. They can help, sure, but what makes a good journalist is being a good journalist.

Its a lame and simple point to be making, but it was a direct reply to the parent post.

---

To really get dicey... The parent post argued that the Internet has shown that everybody can be a journalist. I really strongly disagree, but I guess that's because it boils down to an argument about "what is a journalist." If "journalism" to you is "telling someone what you saw," then yes we are all journalists, Tweeting about our sandwiches! Imparting information concisely to your audience, fact checking, treating the information you're handed not as the end of the job --as information to be straight-up regurgitated-- but instead as the beginning --facts to confirm, stories to investigate, quotes to react to-- is the stuff that matters to me when the word "journalist" is applied to someone. That is a real, complicated thing that few want to do, and even fewer are good at, let alone "everybody."

Anybody can copy and paste a press release, anybody can provide a tip on what's happening around them spatially, but not everybody can be bothered to follow it up and make sense of it. Journalism is taking a ton of information, coupling it with original research, and synthesizing it down to something people can understand. You don't need a newsroom for that, nor does being on the Internet magically make you better at it. That's all I'm saying!

I hope that was sarcasm. The Internet has shown that people don't have to work in a newsroom to be a journalist, but it's also highlighted the fact that being a journalist of any note or quality requires the same combination of skill and training and work of any profession. It's really really easy to suck at it, but it's an intangible enough thing that a lot of people don't realize a) that it's something you can suck at, b) that they might suck at it.

If the encyclopedia world's equivalent of Linus Torvalds was vetting Wikipedia entries I don't think there would be as much of an issue.

If college or Canadian football started doing it and fans responded extremely positively and started asking for/expecting it elsewhere, that could force the NFL's hand a bit. The XFL's crazy wire camera rigs almost immediately made their way into the NFL, so there's at least a little precedent.