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When I see Schroedinger's joke, a comment that both is and isn't a joke depending on how it's read, I try to make Schroedinger's reply. If the parent comment wasn't a joke, as in the case of my cousin's laptop that has a habit of overheating, my comment is helpful. If it was, my comment is a joke too. KingRobot is perceptive.

Indeed, the obvious/oblivious confusion that the GP refers to, assuming it's not just a typo, is called a malapropism. The use of manifest in the sentence "While it is officially a textbook, it is manifest in its suggested retail price of $102.00" is, I suspect, a simple case of "I do not think it means what you think it means."

I hope you enjoyed today's installment of Snarky Pedantry on Language from a Stranger on the Internet.

Gaming is a special category for several reasons. Far more people enjoy listening to music or watching movies than playing video games, or at least video games deeper than free SWF games on Newgrounds/Kongregate and 99 cent iPhone/iPad games. This means far more people are likely to buy the equipment than for playing such games. People may have bought a TV for sports, news, or political talk shows, and the leap from watching those to watching scripted series and movies is small. I can't think of any counterpart in gaming to a TV channel's "lead-out" after a television event anticipated to have extremely high ratings. Furthermore, it takes a lot more esoteric knowledge to create even the simplest video game than to create simple music or to shoot and edit a short film, so there isn't as much chance that one will discover gaming as a medium through appreciating (or at least pretending to appreciate) the "refrigerator quality" work that a family member has created.

To be honest, people who called themselves "the cloud" were the pets.com of the post-dot-bomb era. "The cloud" existed before it became a buzzword, and it will continue to exist afterwards for the use cases where it makes sense.

Get out! Get out now! This post is coming from inside The Cloud!

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BeamMeUpScotty

The better example anyway would be how long either FB or a real book is remembered compared to movie lines, since most people get their entertainment through movies more than books. Here let me throw out a few and I bet most of you will be able to fill in the blanks..

" I've had it with these motherfucking... "And I shall strike down with great vengeance and furious anger.." "Houston we've got.."But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question:.."

Now I bet a hell of a lot of you, even if you haven't seen the movies those lines are from in several years if at all, could fill in the blank instantly without a bit of trouble. The simple fact is most books? Don't really have great quotable parts that stick in your head and while some tweeting twittering FB shitting crap might last for a little while I bet that's not saying anything about how good or memorable the tweets are but how lame the new writers are in the post twilight era. But if you want quotable, if you want long term retention even years after it was last saw nothing comes close to a well written movie. Hell why do you think links to this site should come with warnings about how its a black hole of time suckage? Because we have all seen so many movies and shows we know all the tropes, just not the names for 'em.The truly memorable just isn't in the written word anymore, its on the screen. Game of riddles anyone?

If we're going with modified movie quotes, I would've thought the obvious one was: "That's no data center!"

Look elsewhere in the Star Wars universe...

You have the desert planet, the ice planet, the forest moon, the city planet...

Every planet has one damn definable feature. What's so absurd about it when Star Wars is nothing BUT a Planet of Hats type setting?

Knowing how to drop a precision F-strike at the appropriate time is one thing. Indiscriminately carpeting the place with cluster F-bombs is a waste of perfectly good shock ammunition.

Not to mention just plain bad fucking grammar.

Knowing how to drop a precision F-strike at the appropriate time is one thing. Indiscriminately carpeting the place with cluster F-bombs is a waste of perfectly good shock ammunition.

Not to mention just plain bad fucking grammar.

"Two students enter their first year at the academy. One wants to be a storm trooper, the other a Rebel pilot;

And together, they fight crime!

Not just 1 but 2 links to tvtropes...you are really trying to eat up everyone's time aren't you?

Well, they are links to adjacent tropes, and together are intended to clarify how subtlety or lack thereof can be applied to cussing... and besides, if you're here you have time begging to be eaten up.

Pages on various wiki sites often contain valuable insight, even if it does tend to result in too much time sunk in a random wiki walk.

Let him cuss.

Knowing how to drop a precision F-strike at the appropriate time is one thing. Indiscriminately carpeting the place with cluster F-bombs is a waste of perfectly good shock ammunition.

Let him cuss.

Knowing how to drop a precision F-strike at the appropriate time is one thing. Indiscriminately carpeting the place with cluster F-bombs is a waste of perfectly good shock ammunition.

That's why demo discs and eventually demo downloads via PSN became commonplace.

I'm aware of these. But demo downloads help the case for open platforms as much as they help the case for closed platforms. In either case, the market has changed since 1984.

They simply don't want every basement dweller who thinks he's the next Shigeru Miyamoto putting his unimaginative crap without a graphics person or music composer on their system. [...] unless you're part of a team, you're not ready.

I'm aware that by myself, I'm not ready to compete with AAA games. But it appears to take experience to get experience, and I'm trying to find a good way to begin. I imagine that getting someone to fly me out to Seattle will require building a portfolio on at least some platform. How should a programmer with a draft design document organize a team to make a game for a portfolio in order to get a job offer from the establishment?

They want pro-level stuff.

What harm does it do, specifically, to make amateur games available? The harm was easier to see in the retail era when including one game on a shelf meant another game got left off, when reviews were in magazines that cost money, and when it wasn't as easy to get a taste of a particular game risk-free. The market has changed since then: reviews are on ad-supported or fan-run web sites, and players can try the demo for a game on an open platform before buying.

Sure IOS/Androidand XBLIG have lower barriers but have you SEEN the games....most of them aren't even up to PSone or PSP standards.

I haven't seen XBLIG just yet, but I have seen a bit of the mobile selection. True, there's a lot of obvious 90 percent, but not everything is crap. Nor does a retraux art style necessarily equal crap; not all people buying "snack size" games require scope and graphical detail comparable to a PlayStation disc game. Otherwise, the alleged Metal Storm knockoff with C64-esque graphics known as VVVVVV wouldn't have sold. Perhaps playing on grown-up gamers' nostalgia for the atmosphere of third and fourth generation games is a good way for a new developer to build experience. And if the concern is end users' perception of the effort needed to find a diamond in the rough, that's what free demos and third-party review sites are for.

It's a haven for two guys in a garage to release a ton of derivative me-too crap.

It's not as if the established studios don't engage in the same me-too practices, just with bigger production values and bigger marketing budgets. The market hasn't exactly changed. There's Call of Duty, Call of Duty by another name, Call of Duty by another name, sequels to Call of Duty, the other parallel franchise also called Call of Duty... One thing I've learned is that violent first-person shooters are a played-out genre.

And piracy is rampant!

I've read that playing infringing copies was fairly easy with the double swap trick on the PlayStation and the knife trick on the PlayStation 2, but they still won their respective generations. It's not that all players pay; it's that enough players pay to make an attractive return on investment. Some developers have realized this and returned to the free-trial model or even making most of the game free except for a few cosmetic items. Ultimately, as Gabe N. pointed out, widespread use of infringing copies is a service problem.

those who could afford it jumped ot the C64 (and other computers) but there were plenty who couldn't. (Remember, a full c64 system cost the dquivalent of a few thousand dollars) Then the NES hit and it was cheaper than the C64

I can accep

GIven the same decent marketing, a bad app will still not be successful, whilst a good app will be.

Is this more true of apps than of, for example, movies? I was under the impression that several critically acclaimed movies still didn't make a profit.

Good apps predominantly get good reviews

But how does an app get in front of a widely followed reviewer in the first place?

So you're recommending making it essentially a roman à clef , changing only the names and flags. Are you trying to say Apple won't see through this?

While it lasted, Rusty and Co. (TVTropes) was consistently funny and had good art. The lawyers took it offline because of too many D&D references, particularly the author selling a plush doll of his Rusty character. I'm giving it extra credit for the YRO issue.

My runners-up for best overall comic would include Unsounded (first mentioned here -- mod up that comment if you agree), Gunnerkrigg Court (mentioned here), Magellan, Widdershins, and KiLA iLO.

And if nobody's mentioned it yet, TopWebComics is a site listing what webcomics are popular. Anybody can vote through a really simple captcha; you don't need to log in or anything.

For *funniest* web comic, Rusty and Co. made me laugh more than anything else. Runners-up are DMFA, Moron County, EGS, and Sluggy.

For *best art*, I would say it's A Redtail's Dream with Unsounded and Dresden Codak competing for second place, and a dark horse candidacy by Cucumber Quest for its uniquely cute art.

For the web comic *most relevant to me* as a reluctant hero space alien mad scientist vampire elf magical-sex-change victim, it's really hard to find a web comic that speaks to me, you know?

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet." (Juliet)

So what's in a game? The subject has been discussed by folks far more eloquent and persuasive than I; but hey, this is Slashdot so what the hell. In some ways trying to define what 'game' means is akin to defining art; grasping at the wind. I think you're pretty close to the mark with your latter definition, although as sibling posters suggest the win condition is not necessary, and the concept of winning itself has been toyed with as a mechanism (see UnwinnableByDesign). "Fun" is hardly a necessity either, witness RPG grinds, for example. And how 'fun' would Contra be without UUDDLRLRBA?

That leaves "simulated environment", which I think approaches the heart fo the matter. Games (not just video games here) are a simulacrum, an approximation of a scenario. Some are more complex than others - Snakes and Ladders versus Dwarf Fortress or MilSim-du-jour - but all distill a scenario/environment into a set of rules. Fun and winning are usually part of the arrangement, but not by necessity.

Sibling post hit the mark too in saying that a significant proportion of gaming is there as a vehicle for storytelling. It's easy to be cynical as there are some bad stories out there. But there is good storytelling too, if that's your thing. Planescape: Torment* has a particular focus on story; and there are times where the line between 'game' and 'interactive story' are pretty heavily blurred. Dear Esther is an example which PA Report recommends quite highly:

Dear Esther is a $10 PC [note: currently on sale on Steam for £1.74 for the next two hours at time of writing] experience that toys with the concepts that make, or don’t make, a game. You are a man exploring a deserted island, and every so often you’ll trigger a voice over that helps to explain what you’re doing there and describes other characters you never see. It’s a desolate, lonely game that funnels you into one specific ending that’s impossible to escape. It takes around 90 minutes to finish, depending on how much of the island you choose to explore.

At the end of a day if someone creates something that is a representation of something with at least some semblance of interaction, and calls it a game I'm quite happy to believe them until proven otherwise.

*Planescape was recently discussed on /. and it was mentioned that GOG had it for ten bucks, which was nifty. Now they've discounted it to five bucks, which is at least twice as nifty by my calculations.

Do I infer correctly?

No.

Haha, it's your right to be as laconic as you wish. However, it doesn't really grant any insight. I'm left to infer that you are okay with the government having your personal information (e.g. name, address, demographics, income records, etc) and are *not* okay with the government likely recording the entirety of everyone's electronic communications. What's your personal cutoff in terms of comfort with the government? What's your perspective on data tracking schemes like this: DEA wants to scan all license plates on Utah's 'drug corridor'?

Can you think of a reason why the other people on the road with you might have a compelling interest to have some connection between a car rolling down the highway and the owner's address?

What, to assist stalkers? To allow a person to track down the home of someone who cut them off in traffic accidentally? Haha, if you're probing for a "law enforcement" angle response, I'm unconvinced having home address information is necessary data. For example, hit and run accidents are already a felony and the police often solve these crimes without license plate data.

Besides, I don't believe the automobile/owner home address link is being so forcefully established for that reason (ie. it's welcomed, but is a side effect): they are building the national Real ID system and want confirmed home addresses for everyone within their database. Because driving/car ownership is a practically-essential aspect of life in the US (save for within the densest of urban areas), they are assured of a high level of population compliance in obtaining the data.

How about a more neutral example: are you comfortable with the government requiring banks to know/record your home address and report it on demand? Opening a bank account or brokerage account requires essentially the same level of proof of domicile that the DMV requires now. I can't really think of a "hit and run" type possible justification for linking domicile to financial accounts.

You know, if you looked at that link about the Census then you saw the scanned images of a few of documents prepared by the Census department that were used by the FBI to round up the Japanese. My reaction was, "Wow, someone had to type all that out. Things are so much more efficient now." I would prefer it if we, as a society, didn't make this easier.

I appreciate your responses; I understand we are unlikely to agree, but I do wish to understand the philosophy of others and share my own. It's far too simplistic to write off those with a different perspective via a caricature of their position.

Rule 34 called. It disagrees. (NSFW+ I did not click that link to validate the reference. Feel free to scrub your own eyes out yourself.)

Games that are impossibly difficult unless you pay to unlock special powers.

Impossibly? In the NES era, you had to pay for Contra and Battletoads, and then you had to pay extra for Game Genie. There's a reason that above-average difficulty is called Nintendo hard.

We do not even pretend to be impartial now?

The title obviously should be

> Greenspun: Windows 8: a 'Christmas Gift For Someone You Hate'

But that kind of thinking can lead to Colon Cancer.

anybody who has one can develop for it

Which I'm told will lead to over 90 percent of releases being crap, just like on Android and iOS. The North American video game market went into a recession in 1983 because too many companies were making crappy video games. When introducing the NES in the fourth quarter of 1985, Nintendo needed some way to reassure toy retailers that 90 percent of shelf space wouldn't be occupied by exactly what Theodore Sturgeon predicted, and the lockout chip was Nintendo's way of doing this.

On the one hand, Ouya has no disc slot and is thus not limited by physical shelf space. On the other hand, it's still limited by screen space above the fold of the list of games in each genre.

Back when Episode 1 was released on DVD, one of the behind the scenes things had George Lucas saying that "Jar-jar is the key to all this" or something like that.

That's because Jar-Jar is actually Darth Plagueis, Sidious's master and Anakin's father. It's revealed in the Limited Remastered Extended Edition. Which is Fridge Brilliance, really: why does Anakin act so akwardly? He doesn't, really, it just seems that way because he's half alien and so half his body language goes whoosh over our heads. Portraying the inhumanity so well is actually quite ingenious work by Hayden Christensen.

Episodes 7-9 will be all about Jar-Jar/Darth Plagueis, the real Big Bad of the series, resurfacing and getting serious. "Meesa think yoosa gonna die now."

Third, I'd be interested to see how video games are substantially different from movies and TV series in this respect. The film Song of the South (1946) was briefly available on LaserDisc in some markets. It has not since been rereleased on DVD or Blu-ray anywhere, allegedly because of a change in prevailing moral values among viewers.

Not really counter to your argument, but Song of the South was released outside the US, at least in the VHS days. I remember a promo for it on my Aladdin or Lion King tape bought in the UK when I was but a wee boy :)

There's no reason to ever take a game off the market.

I can think of three.

First, the upstream licensor of the game may offer only a time-limited license. The DVD releases of Daria and WKRP in Cincinnati were delayed for a long time because they had to figure out how to replace all the music that was licensed only for the original broadcast, not for home videos to be produced later. There's a reason Nintendo couldn't just start selling GoldenEye 007 on Virtual Console on day 1 of the Wii Shop Channel: it'd need a new contract with EON. And by the time that was negotiated, they ended up doing an enhanced remake instead. Likewise, Tetris DS was discontinued two years after release because The Tetris Company didn't want to flood the market with Tetris products.

That ties into the second reason: cannibalization. If you have too many of your own older products on the market, they compete with your newer products. If you just released Mario Party 7, would you want Mario Party 4, Mario Party 5, and Mario Party 6 to be on shelves? Worse, studies such as one done with clock widgets in GNOME show that where there are too many choices, a lot of people choose "none of the above" and walk out with nothing.

Third, I'd be interested to see how video games are substantially different from movies and TV series in this respect. The film Song of the South (1946) was briefly available on LaserDisc in some markets. It has not since been rereleased on DVD or Blu-ray anywhere, allegedly because of a change in prevailing moral values among viewers.

has the 10-foot UI capability of Windows and Steam improved to the point where one can use VGA out through a scan converter as a media PC's primary UI?

There are adapters out there that will convert HDMI or DVI to S-Video

I'm aware of these adapters. SewellDirect.com sells them, for example. However, the whole reason why general computer use moved away from TVs in the first place was that the 480i resolution of S-Video makes general computer use difficult, as most PC applications are not optimized for such a low-density display.

In the advanced search on store.steampowered.com, I failed to figure out how to filter for games that include full support for multiple controllers.

As far as Steam goes you'd probably have to use the website

I was using the website.

Look up "passing arguments to Steam"

For one thing, the only Google result for that exact phrase is this page which appears not nearly relevant. Removing the quote marks brought me to this page, which likewise mentions nothing about search. But I'm probably being "far far too literal" again. I tried steam search filter multiplayer and found a recently posted request for enhancement for this very feature, which sort of rules out the feature already being present in Steam search. In any case, how would the average end user discover how to pass in the right filters to Steam or Google?

for an HTPC [Windows 8's Start Screen] gives you a bright easy to read target to hit so frankly for that particular niche its not bad

You have a point there. The modern UI works on Windows 8 for the same reason it works on Xbox 360 (apart from two-thirds of the tile space on the 360 being taken by advertisements).

But Steam works, all the games on Steam don't seem to be bothered by metro

Do all the games on Steam have a "10-foot" user interface that can be read from far away or on a 480i S-Video monitor?

If it sounds like I'm trolling, that's certainly not my intent. I'm just trying to present the alleged barriers to firmly establishing the PC as the fourth console. Some other Slashdot users stick to their claims that 1. the complexity of connecting and maintaining a PC is unsuitable for the majority of living rooms apart from a slim minority of geeks, 2. there exist video game genres that don't work well on a PC, phone, or tablet, and 3. for this reason, these genres are unsuitable for independent developers. By relaying their arguments to you, a staunch fan of living-room PCs, the goal is that the answers will lead me to counterarguments to organize by the next discussion.

One Slashdot regular maintains that paying one's dues to the establishment is the only viable way to get an idea out to the public in the form of a video game, and console makers' requirement for previous experience is the only way to vet games for quality and prevent a repeat of the 1983 crash (for which see Wikipedia and TV Tropes). He maintains that part of paying such dues involves moving to Austin, Boston, Seattle, or Silicon Valley, just as stage actors need to move to Broadway and screen actors need to move to Hollywood. So I humored him and asked him for tips on rearranging my life so that I can work for the establishment, and in this post he said that if I have

Now the other side needs to start using guided missiles that pretend like they're going to miss, but switch targets at the last second.

So in other words, the other side needs to learn to robotech its missiles.

Here. But don't click on the links (beyond this one) or you'll spend the rest of your day doing nothing else.

Of course. To anyone that actually cares about this metals are fantastic. They are plentiful, they're durable enough to last as long as you want them to (and through additional applications, i.e. reuse), and when you're done, they're some of the most easily sorted and recycled materials around. (They even decay, to an extent, as pointed out by another.)

But remember that's not what 'green' is about these days. It's not _really_ about doing things in, shall we say, a responsible manner. Instead, it's really a back-to-basics/nature movement where people feel that humans are pushing too hard, lost their connection with nature, etc and it's time to use that tech to bring us full circle (if you can excuse the hyperbolic trope reference). It's why you see things like "biodegradable" spec'ed over things like 'durable and reusable'... they want to see servers that they can mulch and grow a flower on rather than ones that will last decades only to be returned to industry and not nature.

Lame meme is lame

I like the current logo too, but a temporary change like this is just good fun.

Should it be a Google doodle every single day, or on holidays, or on every /. editor's birthday? No, because that's a different style. Leave that to Google. But once in a great while to celebrate a special occasion (or meaningless milestone), it's fine.

Well, actually, for the irony part, it could be somewhat valid due to this idea that idiots can't catch colds.

Online mutliplayer is better because I'm not 13 years old

If all games were made just for adults, then all games would probably be rated M for money. True, Call of Duty series and Grand Theft Auto series have proved that M rated games can make money. But E, E10+, and T rated games are still made, and to me, this demonstrates that parents buying games for after-school kid gamers to play are still an important part of the video game market.

The only problem: all kinds of video games already do that. Their civilians, though, tend to be the sort of complete moron you get saddled with in escort quests, that think if you're in the middle of a shootout, the absolute most fun thing to do would be to jump right into the middle of it and wave their arms around. That makes for decidedly annoying gameplay. See also: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfFun

(I'm not arguing against your premise, mind, just its usual implementation.)

Your observation is, in fact, a trope: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PeoplesRepublicOfTyranny

You should familiarize yourself with the Rule of Funny.

Repeating an inappropriate internet meme does not mean that you are being funny.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DontExplainTheJoke

You should familiarize yourself with the Rule of Funny.

And maybe that's the real damning point. Reiser was arrogant enough to murder, but not clever enough to get away with it. I'm not sure I want a system-level software product of a mentality like that. The phrase "too clever by half" comes to mind... clever enough to attempt something dangerous to my files, but not clever enough to actually make it succeed.

Cooling would be an issue because you have no air to carry away heat (at least at the LPs, you could build a big heat pipe into the moon). The only reasonable cooling would occur through radiant emittance, and that takes a LONG time to cool things down, and any kind of electrical activity would counteract that without a problem. Sorry, but scifi has lied to you, the cold isn't a problem in space, because the vacuum is very, very insulating.

Well, yeah. That's why Leverage is so much fun - after hearing him say that, they set up the guy to commit a bunch of crimes, and think he committed several others, including faking that he killed a guy. Cue ironic echo: "if you or I kill someone, we go to prison? Pretty sure you just killed that guy." (He goes to prison.) Of course, they committed a bunch of crimes in the process, but hey, they're the good guys, they can get away with it* (what with it being fiction and all).

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HeroInsurance

The proper context is Judge Deborah Knott.

It's just another instantiation of the "Surrounded by idiots" meme: the villian will only have incompetent minions and henchmen.

You're absolutely right. Only Muslims go on killing rampages.

And since no true Scotsman would do such a thing, it must be all the fault of foreigners.

Me? I blame Mick Jones for everything.

I am not familiar with UK laws at the time, but it seems unlikely this was the fastest way of dealing with the problem. It sounds nice when told that way, but one could just as easily state that a third party discovery request would be a known stalemate, yet it was chosen over going directly to the people in charge of regulating imports, drugs, and/or murder and let them deal with it.

In other words, a third party request from police or other Executive players would have likely been granted quickly.

This sounds like one of those TV Tropes where the main character thinks they are the only person who can solve the problem. In fact it might be more likely an example of Idiot Plot. But it might sound rude if I were to assert that to be true, so I merely leave it as a possibility.

Come to think of it, you're right (other than the fact that a billion dollar fine would bankrupt Mark Shuttleworth).

Since Apple already demonstrated its ability to win a judgement against shifty, inscrutable Orientals, now it can pit an American jury against an Evil Englishman.

Note: Shuttleworth is actually from S. Africa, but that's probably close enough for a jury.

Come to think of it, you're right (other than the fact that a billion dollar fine would bankrupt Mark Shuttleworth).

Since Apple already demonstrated its ability to win a judgement against shifty, inscrutable Orientals, now it can pit an American jury against an Evil Englishman.

Note: Shuttleworth is actually from S. Africa, but that's probably close enough for a jury.

"Spiritual Licensee" http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/YMMV/Homeworld