Second Life is two things basically. On one hand it is a sandbox for people who want to build/create/script/model/texture/whatever. But for a lot of other people, it's just a really fancy chat client. One where you are represented to other people by your customizable avatar. I think most people end up somewhere between the two extremes, it's fun to dabble in making your own clothes or whatever, and you'll learn faster and probably have more fun if you're at least a little bit social.
The neat thing about SL is that you get both of those aspects in one package, so you can sort of float between them at your lesiure. Then add in the fact that a basic, yet very capable SL account is free, and they've ended up with a decently sized userbase, and a solid in-game economy.
I couldn't stand the thought of being without internet in any part of my house, so I had a seperate DSL line hooked up to every room in the place. A short time later, a friend tried to explain to me the concept of hubs and switches, but I was too drunk on the internet to understand.
The $400 per month fees are terrible, but at least I have plenty of bandwidth.
I think it's fair to say that a very large portion of the material on YouTube was uploaded by people who did not have the legal right to sign away full ownership rights to the videos they uploaded.
They can claim whatever rights they want, and I can upload as many clips from The Lion King as I feel like, but I don't think Disney would agree that YouTube now owns the rights to their movie.
Oh, it's certainly not worthless. It might even be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It just seems to me like whoever's calling the shots over there at YouTube appears to be blinded by greed, and should realize how quickly they could lose a whole lot of their value.
The bulk of YouTube's value is based on content that they did not create, nor do they have any claim to. The bulk of their value was built by their customers. Yet they could sell all of that for a huge chunk of money, and not have to share it with all those random people who contributed. That seems like a pretty damn good deal to me, and they're taking a risk by asking for even more.
The bottom could fall out really quickly, and they could end up losing out on a lot of cash.
Well, yeah, there are some. You might be able to write a database and a front end to sell a million different items like Amazon.com does, but can you buy the warehouses to store all those goods, negotiate with all those manufacturers, and hire and organize all the people to stuff that stuff into boxes and send it off?
You can probably write a backend to organize and display breaking news stories, but can you organize, motivate, and edit for a large group of journalists out trying to discover new information?
It's less about what a website's servers do when you request a page, and more about the information/content/resources that those servers are drawing from. My point about YouTube is that there's nothing special about their content, it's not exclusive, they don't own it, and they're entirely reliant on their customers for it. It's a nice business model when you can get your customers to do most of your work for you, but you have to keep in mind that people are generally fickle.
True, but the strange thing about YouTube is that they don't own the majority of the content. Regular people upload stuff for whatever reasons they have, and much of what we've seen in the past with all the P2P networks and such leads me to believe that those same reasons will motivate people to upload again if another site offers a better experience.
YouTube has the content, but it's not exclusive content. They've certainly got a leg up on the competition, but they don't have any sort of lock-in.
I'm not really sure what a competitor would have to offer to make themselves significantly more appealing for uploaders, but it could happen, and if it did, in a matter of months a new site could easily build a rival cache of user-contributed content.
The thing is, the only thing that YouTube has that really isn't trivial to duplicate is mindshare. There's no incredible technology there. It's a decent service, and takes advantage of increases in bandwidth and the amount of digitized content out there, but the only thing that makes it significantly different from any potential competitors is the number of people who've heard of it.
Now, having that mindshare and brand recognition is certainly worth something, but YouTube itself is a prime example of why that's not as important as they think it is. YouTube grew out of nothing so incredibly fast, as have many other big websites, and there's no guarantee that its marketshare will last. If something better comes along, it will be trivial for the populace to move on to that and all but forget about YouTube.
When/if that happens, what is the owner of YouTube left with? A pile of servers full of a bunch of inactive accounts and a crapload of content that they don't actually own. It seems pretty damn risky to spend 1.5 billion dollars on. With that kind of money and a little determination, I'd imagine you could create quite a few impressive YouTube competitors, and maybe come up with something better.
They wouldn't necessarily have to be harder to fight, maybe just more intelligent about other things. One of the cool things about a game like GTA3 is all the random pedestrians milling about. They're a nice touch, but they're very limited in what activities they do, and having them do more complex actions would help make the game more immersive, as well as add the possibility for the devs to add more goofy stuff.
Any halfway-decent urban planner/architect is well aware of views. If they don't mention them, it's because leaving them out of the discussion serves their interests(or the interests of their client). That hotel might be destroying the view for a whole bunch of existing houses, but the people renting rooms in that hotel when it's finished will be willing to pay a good chunk of change more each night for the view that they'll be getting.
While it often happens that way, there are still places where a well organized citizen group can make a difference. I live in a small city with around 2000 households, and a highrise condo project has been held up for a long time due to vocal and organized resistance from people living here. The local government would certainly appreciate the extra tax revenue if the condos came into existence, but they're likely concerned that giving the project the green light would be very detrimental to their future re-election chances.
I guess the bigger problem is that in larger communities/cities, it's hard to get a big enough organization of citizens to really worry the politicians about the number of voters that they'll be upsetting. And that's because it's often difficult and time consuming for the average person to get involved in a debate like that. Hopefully, having an available and easy to use tool like Google Earth will help more ordinary people be better educated about their towns, and be more pro-active about it.
I haven't. Perhaps I should steal back my PS2 from my fiancee's brother.
I do have fond memories of the "pedestrian repulsificator" from Carmageddon 2. The physics weren't particularly good, but if a giant spring coming out of your car and sending a pedestrian into a nearby building doesn't make you smile, then you shouldn't bother getting out of bed.
Re:Lemme break it down for you...
on
Will the Wii Work?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
After watching that video, forget the lightsaber. I want to use the Wii controller to fling people around and smash them into things, not to swing around swords.
It sounds to me that it's not entirely general purpose, just a recognizing of the fact that optimizing for the sorts of operations that graphics have benefitted from can easily be shifted to some other specific applications.
So that there are, for example, some specific common database operations that could be significantly more efficient with some optimized hardware. It's just that there's not necessarily a big enough market to design, test, produce, and sell cards designed just for that and make a profit. So instead, you just sort of piggyback all of that on top of all the existing graphics card technology, and you get most of the benefit for a fraction of the cost.
Basically, no one is going to start a company that produces "database" cards and stay in business. But if ATI can squeeze that functionality into their next generation of graphics cards, they'll probably sell a few more units of something they were going to produce anyways, and the database admins of the world might be a little happier.
Yeah, well if so the joke is on him, because the reality is that the real world is full of just as much bullshit as college, plus a huge extra helping of responsibility added in.
I was completely ready to be done with school when I graduated, and now just a few years into my career, I often find myself longing for my college days. I enjoy my job, I have friends, I have plenty of money, some fun hobbies; but I miss being in school. I miss the incredible amount of activity going on on campus 24/7. I miss meeting a bunch of new people at the beginning of each semester. I miss a bunch of my friends that moved away after graduating.
I guess the point is, although universities certainly aren't perfect, there's very few things about them that aren't also present in the business/corporate/real world. If college isn't one of the best times of your life, then your priorities are out of whack, because college is one of those places where you have so much freedom to set your own priorities.
18-34 seems like a fairly useless demographic segment for something like video games. At 26 I'm not even halfway through that group, and since 18 my life has been through a whole bunch of big changes, my gaming habits included.
High school to college to graduation to getting a job to getting married soon. And I'll likely end up with some kids before 34. I can't imagine that my habits and tastes in regards to video games are usefully similar to those of an average 18 year old or 34 year old.
There's still technical improvements to be made, I'm not expecting this plateau to necessarily be permenent. But like you said, what is starting to happen is that the visuals have advanced far enough that there are other parts of gaming that are a bigger hinderance to immersiveness, physics and AI being the two big ones. Basically, photo-realistic quality rendering is not particularly useful for most games if objects and "creatures" within the game are not moving and acting beliveably.
I think it'll be less that graphics will stagnate, and more that developer priorities will shift. And hopefully the rest of the gameplay will be brought up to the high bar that graphics have already set. There's no technical reason why they can't all improve at the same time, but I think the realities of the marketplace, advertising, and hype and such tends to dictate one particular focus at a time.
Physics is likely to be the next big one, now that computers are tending to have an extra processor/core in them, and because it seems to be an easier problem to solve than AI.
A couple things will happen in the near future to help video game development out of its general rut.
First is digital distribution will become the prominent way of getting games out. Everyone will get used to it, it'll cut out a lot of the middlemen producers, it's a win/win.
Second, as graphics begin to plateau, the selection of available toolsets and engines will start to catch up and mature, they'll become easier to use, the cost of those tools will drop.
Things have always functioned like this on a small scale in the PC world with shareware and the like, but as the size and complexity of games increased so quickly, it was hard for smaller developers to keep up, not to mention that bandwidth restrictions made it hard for gamers to download large games. But the bandwidth issue is less of a problem now, and the modding scene has provided people with low cost tools for making games for the PC. Console manufacturers are starting to take notice of this, and Microsoft has already begun to work the community of smaller developers into Xbox Live. Nintendo has mentioned similar things for the Wii. I'd expect it to become a bigger part of console gaming with the next next-gen.
A few weeks won't really be enough time to tell, because Nintendo won't be able to ship out the systems fast enough in that time frame. Every console launch is like that (except the xbox in Japan).
The DS sold well at launch and was hard to find, even though there weren't that many great games available for it for a while. It was only months later, when better games started coming out, that the system really gained momentum. And then the DS lite made things even crazier.
The Wii might be a smash hit right out of the gate, beyond all the fanboys picking it up. But I wouldn't be surprised if in general it starts out a little slow, but then ramps up as more interesting games get released. Especially if Nintendo is really going after the non-gamer market. They aren't going to buy a system based on hype, but eventually they'll see something at a Wii kiosk at Target that will catch their eye, and maybe try it and enjoy it enough to purchase one.
Every casino I've ever seen has been private property. Just because they generally welcome the public to come in and spend money doesn't mean they couldn't suddenly decide to kick them all out.
The only problem with bundling it would be that you'd really need a bunch of controllers to play it to its full potential. Throwing three extra controllers in would've made the console significantly more expensive.
Re:power consumption? power consumption?
on
The Wii Takes NYC
·
· Score: 1
As we continue to shove electronics into everything and anything that someone can imagine, all those little bits of energy being used will start to add up. One of the neat things about science and technology is that it continually builds on itself, so any progress made towards energy conservation is a good thing.
While the total energy of all the Wii's in the world might never add up to a statistically meaningful amount, computers and electronics as a whole are a significant and growing factor, and I welcome any research that improves the situation.
And on a more personal note, you need to chill out. Maybe instead of freaking out over one point I made out of many, you could just be appreciative that a few people took the time to answer your question, a question that you probably asked without bothering to think about yourself first. The fact that you ignored my other answers, as well as didn't respond to any of the other commenters who answered leaves me to believe that you were just trolling for someone to mention energy consumption so that you could rant about it, and use analogies about grade school.
Go outside more, goofball.
Re:power consumption? power consumption?
on
The Wii Takes NYC
·
· Score: 1
Well in a larger sense, you may have noticed the consistent climb in energy prices over the past few years, and recognize the fact that that trend is likely to continue for many years, and that energy conservation is going to become a serious reality much sooner than we like to admit.
But on a more immediate level, the console is smaller, quieter(doesn't need big/loud fans), and cheaper. All three of those appeal to me.
And on a more imaginative level, Nintendo is one step closer to cramming all that hardware into a portable system, if they ever decide to do it. While I don't imagine that the Wiimote would translate well to a portable console, much software code and programming knowledge/experience could probably be transferred.
Sony ranted about how the PSP was a lot like a portable PS2. I don't see them shoving a PS3 into a portable anytime soon. The Wii hardware I can imagine doing so much more easily.
Yeah, I fail to see how this "gamble" is any more a reality for the Wii than for any other console. I guess technically they might be giving up a single game sale at console purchase time. But when you look at the hundreds of millions of games that get sold, that's a minor sacrifice. Not to mention that the fact that their console is a good bit cheaper than the competition, so buying an extra game or two along with the Wii box should be easier for consumers to justify.
Slashdot Mirror
Second Life is two things basically. On one hand it is a sandbox for people who want to build/create/script/model/texture/whatever. But for a lot of other people, it's just a really fancy chat client. One where you are represented to other people by your customizable avatar. I think most people end up somewhere between the two extremes, it's fun to dabble in making your own clothes or whatever, and you'll learn faster and probably have more fun if you're at least a little bit social.
The neat thing about SL is that you get both of those aspects in one package, so you can sort of float between them at your lesiure. Then add in the fact that a basic, yet very capable SL account is free, and they've ended up with a decently sized userbase, and a solid in-game economy.
I couldn't stand the thought of being without internet in any part of my house, so I had a seperate DSL line hooked up to every room in the place. A short time later, a friend tried to explain to me the concept of hubs and switches, but I was too drunk on the internet to understand.
The $400 per month fees are terrible, but at least I have plenty of bandwidth.
I think it's fair to say that a very large portion of the material on YouTube was uploaded by people who did not have the legal right to sign away full ownership rights to the videos they uploaded.
They can claim whatever rights they want, and I can upload as many clips from The Lion King as I feel like, but I don't think Disney would agree that YouTube now owns the rights to their movie.
Oh, it's certainly not worthless. It might even be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It just seems to me like whoever's calling the shots over there at YouTube appears to be blinded by greed, and should realize how quickly they could lose a whole lot of their value.
The bulk of YouTube's value is based on content that they did not create, nor do they have any claim to. The bulk of their value was built by their customers. Yet they could sell all of that for a huge chunk of money, and not have to share it with all those random people who contributed. That seems like a pretty damn good deal to me, and they're taking a risk by asking for even more.
The bottom could fall out really quickly, and they could end up losing out on a lot of cash.
Well, yeah, there are some. You might be able to write a database and a front end to sell a million different items like Amazon.com does, but can you buy the warehouses to store all those goods, negotiate with all those manufacturers, and hire and organize all the people to stuff that stuff into boxes and send it off?
You can probably write a backend to organize and display breaking news stories, but can you organize, motivate, and edit for a large group of journalists out trying to discover new information?
It's less about what a website's servers do when you request a page, and more about the information/content/resources that those servers are drawing from. My point about YouTube is that there's nothing special about their content, it's not exclusive, they don't own it, and they're entirely reliant on their customers for it. It's a nice business model when you can get your customers to do most of your work for you, but you have to keep in mind that people are generally fickle.
True, but the strange thing about YouTube is that they don't own the majority of the content. Regular people upload stuff for whatever reasons they have, and much of what we've seen in the past with all the P2P networks and such leads me to believe that those same reasons will motivate people to upload again if another site offers a better experience.
YouTube has the content, but it's not exclusive content. They've certainly got a leg up on the competition, but they don't have any sort of lock-in.
I'm not really sure what a competitor would have to offer to make themselves significantly more appealing for uploaders, but it could happen, and if it did, in a matter of months a new site could easily build a rival cache of user-contributed content.
The thing is, the only thing that YouTube has that really isn't trivial to duplicate is mindshare. There's no incredible technology there. It's a decent service, and takes advantage of increases in bandwidth and the amount of digitized content out there, but the only thing that makes it significantly different from any potential competitors is the number of people who've heard of it.
Now, having that mindshare and brand recognition is certainly worth something, but YouTube itself is a prime example of why that's not as important as they think it is. YouTube grew out of nothing so incredibly fast, as have many other big websites, and there's no guarantee that its marketshare will last. If something better comes along, it will be trivial for the populace to move on to that and all but forget about YouTube.
When/if that happens, what is the owner of YouTube left with? A pile of servers full of a bunch of inactive accounts and a crapload of content that they don't actually own. It seems pretty damn risky to spend 1.5 billion dollars on. With that kind of money and a little determination, I'd imagine you could create quite a few impressive YouTube competitors, and maybe come up with something better.
They wouldn't necessarily have to be harder to fight, maybe just more intelligent about other things. One of the cool things about a game like GTA3 is all the random pedestrians milling about. They're a nice touch, but they're very limited in what activities they do, and having them do more complex actions would help make the game more immersive, as well as add the possibility for the devs to add more goofy stuff.
Any halfway-decent urban planner/architect is well aware of views. If they don't mention them, it's because leaving them out of the discussion serves their interests(or the interests of their client). That hotel might be destroying the view for a whole bunch of existing houses, but the people renting rooms in that hotel when it's finished will be willing to pay a good chunk of change more each night for the view that they'll be getting.
While it often happens that way, there are still places where a well organized citizen group can make a difference. I live in a small city with around 2000 households, and a highrise condo project has been held up for a long time due to vocal and organized resistance from people living here. The local government would certainly appreciate the extra tax revenue if the condos came into existence, but they're likely concerned that giving the project the green light would be very detrimental to their future re-election chances.
I guess the bigger problem is that in larger communities/cities, it's hard to get a big enough organization of citizens to really worry the politicians about the number of voters that they'll be upsetting. And that's because it's often difficult and time consuming for the average person to get involved in a debate like that. Hopefully, having an available and easy to use tool like Google Earth will help more ordinary people be better educated about their towns, and be more pro-active about it.
I haven't. Perhaps I should steal back my PS2 from my fiancee's brother.
I do have fond memories of the "pedestrian repulsificator" from Carmageddon 2. The physics weren't particularly good, but if a giant spring coming out of your car and sending a pedestrian into a nearby building doesn't make you smile, then you shouldn't bother getting out of bed.
After watching that video, forget the lightsaber. I want to use the Wii controller to fling people around and smash them into things, not to swing around swords.
It sounds to me that it's not entirely general purpose, just a recognizing of the fact that optimizing for the sorts of operations that graphics have benefitted from can easily be shifted to some other specific applications.
So that there are, for example, some specific common database operations that could be significantly more efficient with some optimized hardware. It's just that there's not necessarily a big enough market to design, test, produce, and sell cards designed just for that and make a profit. So instead, you just sort of piggyback all of that on top of all the existing graphics card technology, and you get most of the benefit for a fraction of the cost.
Basically, no one is going to start a company that produces "database" cards and stay in business. But if ATI can squeeze that functionality into their next generation of graphics cards, they'll probably sell a few more units of something they were going to produce anyways, and the database admins of the world might be a little happier.
Yeah, well if so the joke is on him, because the reality is that the real world is full of just as much bullshit as college, plus a huge extra helping of responsibility added in.
I was completely ready to be done with school when I graduated, and now just a few years into my career, I often find myself longing for my college days. I enjoy my job, I have friends, I have plenty of money, some fun hobbies; but I miss being in school. I miss the incredible amount of activity going on on campus 24/7. I miss meeting a bunch of new people at the beginning of each semester. I miss a bunch of my friends that moved away after graduating.
I guess the point is, although universities certainly aren't perfect, there's very few things about them that aren't also present in the business/corporate/real world. If college isn't one of the best times of your life, then your priorities are out of whack, because college is one of those places where you have so much freedom to set your own priorities.
18-34 seems like a fairly useless demographic segment for something like video games. At 26 I'm not even halfway through that group, and since 18 my life has been through a whole bunch of big changes, my gaming habits included.
High school to college to graduation to getting a job to getting married soon. And I'll likely end up with some kids before 34. I can't imagine that my habits and tastes in regards to video games are usefully similar to those of an average 18 year old or 34 year old.
There's still technical improvements to be made, I'm not expecting this plateau to necessarily be permenent. But like you said, what is starting to happen is that the visuals have advanced far enough that there are other parts of gaming that are a bigger hinderance to immersiveness, physics and AI being the two big ones. Basically, photo-realistic quality rendering is not particularly useful for most games if objects and "creatures" within the game are not moving and acting beliveably.
I think it'll be less that graphics will stagnate, and more that developer priorities will shift. And hopefully the rest of the gameplay will be brought up to the high bar that graphics have already set. There's no technical reason why they can't all improve at the same time, but I think the realities of the marketplace, advertising, and hype and such tends to dictate one particular focus at a time.
Physics is likely to be the next big one, now that computers are tending to have an extra processor/core in them, and because it seems to be an easier problem to solve than AI.
A couple things will happen in the near future to help video game development out of its general rut.
First is digital distribution will become the prominent way of getting games out. Everyone will get used to it, it'll cut out a lot of the middlemen producers, it's a win/win.
Second, as graphics begin to plateau, the selection of available toolsets and engines will start to catch up and mature, they'll become easier to use, the cost of those tools will drop.
Things have always functioned like this on a small scale in the PC world with shareware and the like, but as the size and complexity of games increased so quickly, it was hard for smaller developers to keep up, not to mention that bandwidth restrictions made it hard for gamers to download large games. But the bandwidth issue is less of a problem now, and the modding scene has provided people with low cost tools for making games for the PC. Console manufacturers are starting to take notice of this, and Microsoft has already begun to work the community of smaller developers into Xbox Live. Nintendo has mentioned similar things for the Wii. I'd expect it to become a bigger part of console gaming with the next next-gen.
Hey FUCK YOU! I'll CRAM YOUR KUDOS RIGHT UP YOUR ASS! I'VE KILLED EVERYONE ELSE WHO'S DARED TO OPPOSE ME, AND YOU'RE NO DIFFERENT!
:(
umm.... NOOB!
please don't take my internet license away. I'll be defensive and stubborn from now on, I promise.
Fair enough.
A few weeks won't really be enough time to tell, because Nintendo won't be able to ship out the systems fast enough in that time frame. Every console launch is like that (except the xbox in Japan).
The DS sold well at launch and was hard to find, even though there weren't that many great games available for it for a while. It was only months later, when better games started coming out, that the system really gained momentum. And then the DS lite made things even crazier.
The Wii might be a smash hit right out of the gate, beyond all the fanboys picking it up. But I wouldn't be surprised if in general it starts out a little slow, but then ramps up as more interesting games get released. Especially if Nintendo is really going after the non-gamer market. They aren't going to buy a system based on hype, but eventually they'll see something at a Wii kiosk at Target that will catch their eye, and maybe try it and enjoy it enough to purchase one.
Every casino I've ever seen has been private property. Just because they generally welcome the public to come in and spend money doesn't mean they couldn't suddenly decide to kick them all out.
The only problem with bundling it would be that you'd really need a bunch of controllers to play it to its full potential. Throwing three extra controllers in would've made the console significantly more expensive.
As we continue to shove electronics into everything and anything that someone can imagine, all those little bits of energy being used will start to add up. One of the neat things about science and technology is that it continually builds on itself, so any progress made towards energy conservation is a good thing.
While the total energy of all the Wii's in the world might never add up to a statistically meaningful amount, computers and electronics as a whole are a significant and growing factor, and I welcome any research that improves the situation.
And on a more personal note, you need to chill out. Maybe instead of freaking out over one point I made out of many, you could just be appreciative that a few people took the time to answer your question, a question that you probably asked without bothering to think about yourself first. The fact that you ignored my other answers, as well as didn't respond to any of the other commenters who answered leaves me to believe that you were just trolling for someone to mention energy consumption so that you could rant about it, and use analogies about grade school.
Go outside more, goofball.
Well in a larger sense, you may have noticed the consistent climb in energy prices over the past few years, and recognize the fact that that trend is likely to continue for many years, and that energy conservation is going to become a serious reality much sooner than we like to admit.
But on a more immediate level, the console is smaller, quieter(doesn't need big/loud fans), and cheaper. All three of those appeal to me.
And on a more imaginative level, Nintendo is one step closer to cramming all that hardware into a portable system, if they ever decide to do it. While I don't imagine that the Wiimote would translate well to a portable console, much software code and programming knowledge/experience could probably be transferred.
Sony ranted about how the PSP was a lot like a portable PS2. I don't see them shoving a PS3 into a portable anytime soon. The Wii hardware I can imagine doing so much more easily.
Yeah, I fail to see how this "gamble" is any more a reality for the Wii than for any other console. I guess technically they might be giving up a single game sale at console purchase time. But when you look at the hundreds of millions of games that get sold, that's a minor sacrifice. Not to mention that the fact that their console is a good bit cheaper than the competition, so buying an extra game or two along with the Wii box should be easier for consumers to justify.