[kw-pm] Social Meeting a success.

[Arguile]

On Sun, 2002-12-22 at 06:12, lloyd carr wrote:
> So it was Matt who was investigating Perl.
> Do you think he will be out to future meetings?

Yes, and yes. In fact he said he stayed up until 4:00am that
night/morning playing around with Perl. =P (I'll make sure he joins the
list)

> 
> Good article, when I was a kid I played with those plastic army men,
> things have come a long way! BTW did anyone else see the show, I think it
> was on CNN, where the American military is tweaking game software to use
> as training simulators. The Navy guy they interviewed said "The game
> industry spends billions on developement". Remember when the military
> spent the billions on military technology and some of that showed up
> later in the civilian sector, now it's the other way around?!
> 
Yes, in fact they're being used for recruitment from the public sector
as well.

'America's Army' is a set of two games that set about "luring" (I'm sure
the army has a euphimism for it) teens into recruiting by depicting the
"exciting" aspects of military life.

My favourite comment by one soldier who reviewed it was something along
the lines of "If they wanted to accurately depict army life, they should
have made a boot polishing and waiting simulator. They don't call it
boot camp for nothing." I can't find the original quote but the
following two articles give some insight.

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/DailyNews/wargames021031.html
http://pc.ign.com/articles/361/361145p1.html




Training simulators are increasingly being constructed of off-the-shelf
consumer parts in an effort to cut costs. I can't seem to find the
research project home page of one US university that was commisioned to
explore just this issue, but if I do I'll forward it on.