Yup, something is better than nothing. Even when that something is mediocre. The bright side is, Nintendo has historically been very wary about getting involved in online stuff, so maybe seeing even the crappy DS service be successful will convince them that online play is really worth getting involved in.
That's definitely part of it, but as I tried to explain in my earlier comment, I don't think that that attitude was as widespread as people pretended it was, and much of that attitude that did exist was formed basically in retaliation to the criticism that PC users tended to dish out. It's sort of a chicken and egg problem. Each side snickered about the other, and the general animosity grew to an almost religious fervor. Now it's less of a big deal in general, Windows is much improved, Apple is healthy and growing, and we've all got the linux weenies to make fun of;)
I won't argue that the iPod is at least 50% image, especially with the younger crowd. But the mac enthusiasm really was born from an appreciation of a quality computer experience. The hip factor of the iPod might be bleeding over to macs now, I don't really pay that much attention any more.
I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I never saw myself as smarter or better than everyone else because I had a Mac on my desk at home. I considered myself lucky that my mom decided to buy one for whatever reason. What a found most frustrating was that PC users were quick to hassle me about my decision, yet completely unwilling to give a mac a fair chance to prove itself. If they were just indifferent, that's their perogative, but an indifferent person wouldn't have spent the effort to tell me why my computer was a piece of crap. That sort of thing was confusing and annoying, and with our beloved computer company going through some tough times financially and maybe ideologically(I don't like using that word here, but can't think of better right now), it just seemed like the mean ol' windows users were picking on us cause they liked being bullies. They shouldn't have been surprised that people fought back a little.
Agreed. Back in Apple's darker days, it wasn't easy to be a mac user. I didn't go out of my way to try and force Apple on people, but if someone asked, I'd try to explain to them why I prefered macs over PC's. It was rare, however, for anyone even mildly computer savvy to just ask. Windows users were often hostile towards those "mac things", even if they had little knowledge of them.
The mac community got a reputation as a bunch of elitest assholes, while that was only true of a very small portion of mac users. I'm not sure the mac side really started that fight. But if we were all elitests, why would we have been trying to bring every day people into the fold? The intentions, as far as I can tell, were to A)Educate people about an alternative to DOS/Windows, and B)Keep Apple in business so that we'd still have that alternative in the future.
Why have Windows users historically been so judgemental of Mac users? The prevailing thought among the mac community was that they were secretly jealous, or unwilling to admit that they were had bought into a big monopoly that, in the end, resulted in crappy computing. I think it's more like the mindset that makes people with pickup trucks put decals of Calvin pissing on other truck manufacturer's logos. Computers were quite expensive back in the day, and people tend to defend such significant purchases. Now that computers are everywhere and cheaper, having one isn't such a big deal, so most people have mellowed out a bit.
But yeah, MAC OS RULES! WINDOWS IS FOR JACKASSES! MICHAEL DELL CAN SUCK MY ASS! I'M GOING TO CHANGE MY LAST NAME TO JOBS AND NAME MY FIRST KID STEVE! WOOOOO!
Spend twenty years designing (mostly)quality computers, develop an operating system and a multitude of other software apps that are highly regarded by just about everyone, and maybe in your free time create a portable music player and an online store that gets the ball rolling on a new form of media distribution.
Then, perhaps, a website primarily for computer nerds might feel compelled to talk about your ad.
The IP folks are certainly being unreasonable, but you're being unreasonable in the opposite direction. The internet has grown and evolved at a pace far beyond anything else of its scale in human history. The so called "information age" is moving at a speed that makes the industrial revolution look like it took eons.
And the neat thing is, there's still plenty of potential in it, and progress continues at this rapid rate. Thinking about what the internet could have been is pretty useless, because there's still lots of opportunity to shape it into what you want. Why are you looking back at it like some 90 year old man who never accomplished his big goals in life. The internet is closer to a little kid, just learning how to interact with the world, with a whole bunch of possibilities to explore.
Lamenting that people are trying to make money off of it is silly as well, because anyone with any sense of history will see that the two things that best drive progress are war and greed. The internet did not take off in the 90's in spite of businesses coming aboard, it took off precisely because businesses were so interested in it. Are there some people out there who are putting their own greed in front of "progress" in a way that might not be beneficial to the rest of us? Sure, but that doesn't mean that we're failing as a whole.
The utopia that you imagine where all information is free is nothing more than an unreasonable fantasy, because discovering, creating, compiling, organizing, and distributing that information requires resources and effort, and not many people can afford to work for free. Information does not, on its own, automatically transcend culture, politics, and language. It'd take a whole lot of effort to make all that work.
I don't think many people in the renaissance were going around offering their services for no charge. Things may have been simpler back then, but people still had to buy food to eat, and clothes to wear. The renaissance was not some golden age where everyone floated around care-free and discussed philosophy and art all day. Today's technology and things like the internet are at least as big a deal as anything that happened during the renaissance. If the changes aren't as apparent to you, consider the relative timescales involved, as well as your own pessimistic attitude towards right now.
While it might come up once in a while, I don't think this is going to be as big of a problem as you're making it out to be. How many games will be available on both? Probably not that many. While backwards combatibility is nice, I don't think it's a major force for driving console sales. People are more interested in the new games. Then there's the fact that although the DS has two screens, those two screens still only add up to to maybe 20 square inches of display, which can't hold much detail or complexity compared to the sorts of TV's that you can buy now.
Oh, and don't forget that you'll likely be able to get both a Wii and a DS Lite for cheaper than just a PS3.
I understand your point, but I think it's simplifying things a bit. In a good game, the interface isn't just something applied over the gameplay, it's an integral part of it. In Civ III, you have to click a bazillion times because you're controlling so many different units at a fairly specific level. While you might be able to replace the clicking with something else (gestures, keyboard commands), you can't really remove that interaction without it becoming a different kind of game. In the example of Civilization, you'd basically be dumbing down the game in order to get a wider market appeal. That sounds good at first, but there's more to consider. You'd piss off a lot of the series' older fans, who enjoy the complexities of the game. You'd likely get blasted for it by the gaming media. You'd generate a lot of negative publicity for it, and seriously damage a franchise that already has a lot of built-in market. While you might make up for that with a bunch of new to Civilization buyers, you're still taking a risk.
Then there's the whole question of whether or not that's the kind of game the developer wants to make. While they certainly can't be completely oblivious to market and financial realities, I'd imagine that developers working on something that they want to create and care about would generally result in a better game, even if that game doesn't appeal to everyone.
Uhhh...are people buying the game and having fun? If so, then I think it's safe to say that the number of clicks is just fine.
If it's too many clicks for you personally, then maybe you should go play a different game. I know it's hard to believe, but you as an individual are not the intended market for every developer out there.
Actually, it keeps the gold farmers in check to a point, by keeping the real-world value of isk pretty steady, and not all that profitable. Plus it keeps CCP in the loop, so they get a cut of it, and also letting them keep an eye on how that market is going. There's a demand for this service, and if CCP doesn't create the supply, someone else will. I think most MMO's are going to start operating this way.
Also, ISK is pretty easy to come by, there are probably hundreds of in-game corps that move billions of ISK each day, and there are many individuals with that level of funds as well. There are also other game mechanics which make buying isk only so useful. Once you start getting into larger amounts (1 billion+), there's only so much you can do with more money. A lot of the projects that that sort of ISK can fund requires significant social connections/organization, and if you're spending that sort of time on the game, then you'll probalby have plenty of ISK coming in anyways.
Not really. The most you can punsish someone would be consistently trying to blow up their stuff quickly so they don't have any fun, or maybe trying to isolate them socially. But there's enough space/people in the EVE universe to make both of those infeasible, and even if you could accomplish them enough to annoy the person, they could always just leave and go play WoW or something instead.
That would get rid of the person maybe (they could always create a new-anonymous character and get him/her the money), but that still wouldn't get anyone their money back.
For any one individual, just buying a house somewhere else isn't such a big deal, but you need to realize the scope of what happened. There were thousands and thousands of homes destroyed. And thousands and thousands of businesses destroyed. And in the surrounding parishes of New Orleans, there are hundreds of thousands of people who rely on the economics of the city for their well being. You can't just move that number of people around willy-nilly and expect it to work out. You'd really have to move the entire city. Let's look at why that wouldn't work.
Besides the fact that moving 30-50 miles upstream would require abandoning large parts of the city that were not destroyed, including neighborhoods as historic and culturally rich as any that you'll find in this country, there's a lot of practical reasons. Like the billions and billions of dollars worth of still useable infrastructure and buildings that would have to be rebuilt. Or the fact that there is still a giant port that New Orleans operates around and which exists where it does for some strategic value. Or simply the fact that you'd have to find somewhere else to put the city. Any location that makes sense for a city of the size of New Orleans already has a city built on it.
People live(d) in New Orleans for a number of reasons. One of those reasons are as simple as having been born here and not having the resources to leave. Heck, some people didn't even have the money to evacuate for a few days for the storm. Some of the other of the other reasons why people might live here range from social factors, to economic, to cultural, to sentimental. A whole bunch of things that are not easily duplicated elsewhere.
Anyone who's paid attention to history knows that Los Angeles is going to get hit by a big earthquake again in the coming years/decades. All of florida gets wrecked by hurricanes pretty regularly if you look at things at that time scale. It's only a matter of time before someone blows up part of New York again. The super-volcano at Yellowstone national park is already 30,000 years over-due for a massive eruption that will destroy half the country. I guess we're a nation of dumbasses.
Parts of New Orleans should not be rebuilt. Besides being unsafe, the city will not financially be able to support the infrastructure that the old footprint required. The pre-storm population could hardly support the upkeep of the existing infrastructure, even if everyone came back tomorrow, there wouldn't be the money to repair/rebuild it all.
The unfortunate reality, as you've noted, is that the parts least reasonable to rebuild were overall inhabited by low-income residents. But either way, the best solution is not to rebuild all of the old neighborhoods, but to carefully rebuild in the more favorable areas, while still allowing anyone who wants to return to the city. They might not be able to live where they used to, but enough of the population isn't returning that there should be plenty of space for those who do want to come back. That is not an easy thing to work out, and the city's current political structure does not have the vision or the willpower to take on that task, so who knows if it will actually happen.
Of course, the opinions of the residents of what should happen widely vary. But surprisingly, many of the lower-income folks understand that their old neighborhoods are gone, and that trying to rebuild them is not the best course. I've heard a story about two adjacent neighborhood groups hiring their own planners and coming up with a plan to revert one of the neighborhoods back to wetland, and condense the residents into the other. Both sides had generally agreed to the plan. But their local council person said no, defiently repeating that all of New Orleans will be rebuilt.
I don't remember what my point was. So I guess I'll just make up a new one. The local government dropped the ball. The federal government dropped the ball. The city plods on because the citizens love New Orleans. But the future is not particularly bright for the city.
I second this. Come visit here. Go and have your fun in the french quarter, but make sure to take the time to go see some of the devestation. It's worse than you think it is. Hopefully seeing it will remind you that there are a bunch of human beings who lost a whole lot and could really use some more help. But even if it doesn't bring out your compassion, it should stir a little anger in you. Think back to what you saw on CNN, of the government's response, of how FEMA dealt with the crisis. And then remember that this is the same government that has spent billions and billions of dollars on Homeland security and FEMA to prepare our country for terrorist attacks. And then wonder where all of that money must have gone, when they found themselves completely unable to offer decent assistance for a storm that they knew about for days in advance.
Fixing New Orleans' levees would be a bargin compared to the money DHS is wasting.
New Orleans is where it is for some significant historical reasons, a big one being its position at the shortest distance from the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. Contrary to popular belief, New Orleans does not all exist below sea level. The original parts of the city were generally built on higher parts, natural levees created by the Mississippi, and are above sea level. These parts of the city did not flood during Katrina, but did have some significant wind damage.
Now, you could make an argument that the federal government should have never gotten involved in building levees to protect the area. But the fact of the matter is, decades ago, the feds decided that New Orleans had value to the country that made it worth investing in. In its distant past, New Orleans was one of the largest cities in the country. In its more recent past, it experienced an oil boom, and there was significant investment. The federal government decided to put the Army Corp of Engineers in charge of designing and building the levees. Whether or not you think they were right to do that doesn't seem to me to have any relevance decades later. Whatever their reasons for doing so were, the feds promised to protect us from hurricanes, and approximately a year ago, they failed to live up to that promise.
Many months after the storm, the Corps produced a report in which they basically admitted that the bulk of the flooding in New Orleans was due to their levees/canal walls failing, and that the levees failed because of combinations of design flaws, poor construction, and lack of maintanence. Then there's the whole way that the administration did its best to delay and stonewall this report until New Orleans was out of most of the country's mind, not to mention the entirely craptastic job they did of helping the city right after the storm.
So what would have happened if the federal government had never agreed to be in charge of the levees? I don't know. What sort of flood protection system would New Orleans/Lousiana have built on their own? Would so many houses have been built in places that ended up under 8' of water a year ago? It's hard to say. But if that is what had happened, then your argument might carry some weight with me. As it is, the federal government is directly responsible for much of the damage here, and they have a responsibility to help us rebuild our lives.
I will not argue with you that our local government's performance has been less than spectacular. But that doesn't change the fact that a large number of american citizens have lost much through no fault of their own, and the majority of what we've gotten from our highest form of government is empty promises.
You're underinformed, and if you understood what the city and port of new orleans and the rest of southern louisiana provided the rest of the country, perhaps your selfishness would cause you to reverse your opinion.
A huge amount of oil, seafood, and other cargo all move through the local ports. The wetlands of southern louisiana are incredibly productive in terms of biology and seafood, despite the fact that they've been destroyed by the carelessness of the energy industry. Southern Louisiana has suffered mightily from the "progress" that the growth of the USA has demanded from the oil companies. The federal government did not build the levees to protect our shoreline, they built it to try to duplicate the protection that those wetlands provided us with before they let industry destroy it.
A lot of us gulf coast residents are sick and tired of a large number of Americans turning their backs on their fellow citizens, trying to convinces themselves that we somehow deserved it, in order to clear their consciences of their failure to help their fellow man. We're sick and tired of people like you who don't really know a damn thing about this area telling us how worthless it is, and whining about a couple dozen billion dollars for a government that spends hundreds of billions without blinking an eye.
Come down here and drive through some of the neighborhoods, talk to people who lost everythign through no fault of their own, see how hard many of us are working to rebuild our homes, and then tell us that we're not worth helping.
The sad reality of politics is that the label of "Republican" and "Democrat" are less about ideas or attitudes towards government, and more about groups of people that work together in order to gain and/or maintain power.
The Republicans were the first to internalize that, and that's one of the big reasons why they've been so succesful in the past few elections. They put aside their differences as far as how they'll actually govern, and instead have focused on appearing consistent and organized in order to win votes.
The Democratic party overall has been somewhat resistant to commit entirely towards that sort of politics, but they're starting to come around. Will this shift for them help them govern better if they do take control of the government? No, but it's really the only choice they have to fight the Republican media/campaign machine. If you read the bigger liberal blogs, a lot of them have basically come to the same conclusion. Even if the people the Democratic party makes its candidates aren't what you'd consider ideal or even good, just disrupting the current powers that be is important enough to support the party.
I don't identify with either party very strongly, even though I'd rate my views as centrist, leaning a little towards the left. The Democrats as a party do not particularly appeal to me, but I don't see any good way to fight the system from the outside. It really is a choice for the less of two evils, and that's a crappy position for a voter to be in, but that's how the world works. I'm not ready to give up completely on that ever changing, but I don't see that change happening in the near future, so my best bet is to engage the system and try to minimize its damage best I can while it exists.
The majority of text on architectural drawings is generally in CAPS, for reasons both historic and practial. On my work computer, caps lock is probably on the majority of the time.
True, but it doesn't seem to me that some of the way they deal with lag in those sorts of games will work as well with SSB. While CS is fast paced, there's actually a pretty small number of things a player can do at any one time, and the players are generally far enough apart that small amounts of lag aren't noticeable. For example, firing a machine gun at someone 20 yards away, a split-second of lag might make it look like you're aiming right at someone when you shot, but the distance and general inaccuracy of those guns causes less of a problem because of the distance to the target. Not to mention that the target isn't going to try to react to the bullet and block it in that split-second.
I don't know, I'm not a programmer, so maybe I'm wrong. But a SSBM fight is just a constant stream of insanity and hectic-ness, where you're reacting to everythign that's happening at once. While every FPS that I've played has its crazy moments, but seldom gets as borederline unmanagable for me as a player as SSBM feels 95% of the time. Lag annoys me in Battlefield or Tribes, but I can deal with it. I just feel like anything that made SSBM less responsive would make me give up in a hurry.
The only problem I see is that SSBM is going to so vulnerable to lag/latency issues. Everything happens so damn quickly, two machines cannot afford to get the least bit out of sync without the players noticing that something is wrong.
Not that it's entirely hopeless, and that nintendo shouldn't try. I just don't think people should let their expectations get too high, because there's likely going to be a whole lot of internet that Nintendo has no control over in between any two arbitrary Wii consoles.
I guess the ultimate question is, Are they making any money off of it? I don't know the answer to that. The next question is, are they taking MS' Xbox approach, where version 1 is basically to gain a foothold and credibility, so that with version 2 they can make some real money.
I don't know. There was a ton of hype for the PSP, and terms like Gameboy killer were definitely getting tossed around. Sometimes Sony seems to buy into their own hype, so I wonder if they didn't really think that they were going to waltz all over Nintendo in the portable market just like they did with the PS2.
Not to mention the UMD failure. While it's not entirely the same thing, that experience doesn't bode particularly well for their PS3/Bluray plans.
That was a good number of years, and a no-longer-existing monopoly ago. Nintendo really seems to be making a lot of the right moves as of late. They know that they have to earn their money now, they can't just dictate why people are going to give them money, or force unfavorable terms on developers. They've also had some employee turn-over over the decades, so hopefully they've purged most of that arrogant mindset.
While I'm not naive enough to think that the bottom line isn't Nintendo's biggest concern, their recent history, combined with what they've shown about their future leads me to forgive them their past wrongs. If they manage to pull together an 85% marketshare this next-gen somehow, and then start being assholes about it, my feelings will quickly change. But I don't see that happening, so I'm not too worried.
As for how it will really pan out, I hope Sony loses big, because they really could use the sort of humbling that Nintendo has already been through. Sony has basically gotten a draw(at best) with the PSP vs. the DS, and they still don't seem to have learned anything from it. Sometimes it takes a complete stomping to make people really reflect on the decisions they've been making. And even if the PS3 completely bombed, Nintendo and MS would still have each other to keep them reasonably honest.
Why do people insist on making things more complicated than they need to be. There are droves of hardcore mac fans who salivate over things like OSX updates. Demand. A bunch of copies were distributed to a bunch of developers following WWDC. Supply.
Wherever there is a supply and a demand, people will get a hold of those things. Apple didn't have to have some super secret plan to leak a version onto the internet. They know full well as soon as they let a copy out of their "labs" that they've basically lost control of it.
Do they mind the publicity? Probably not. Did they expect this to happen? Definitely. Was this leak the clumination of some behind the scenes planning? Nope. Why would Apple waste their time with something like that when there's an approximately 100% chance that one of the developers will leak a copy?
Yeah, basically what these people are doing, at best, is making up nerdy sports. Their pacman game is modified Tag, which I've enjoyed since childhood. Only you play it in a big city, making it significantly more difficult to set up and execute, but good for a goofy new story the first time it happens.
If you're that desperate for things to do, and you don't mind physical activity, there's already hundreds of sports to try. Most of which already have developed and sensible rules, well designed and reasonably safe equipment available specifically for them, and often times a number of organizations dedicated to setting up games/matches and educating people new to the sport. While doing something goofy once in a while is fun, it's not likely to become more than a publicity stunt.
The PSP is, in many ways, a portable PS2. Porting a big mass of games over to it would be cheap and easy, and would provide decent revenue for very little cost. EA (and many other publishers) has a large library of PS2 games sitting around.
The DS has, in general, found success with new and different games, owing to it's dual screens/touch screen. Porting is still possible, but you're pulling from the N64 at best, and competing with a lot of innovative stuff.
I don't know if EA really cares who wins, but just looking at the economics of it all, they'd probably prefer to have a bigger potential market for the PSP.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, something is better than nothing. Even when that something is mediocre. The bright side is, Nintendo has historically been very wary about getting involved in online stuff, so maybe seeing even the crappy DS service be successful will convince them that online play is really worth getting involved in.
That's definitely part of it, but as I tried to explain in my earlier comment, I don't think that that attitude was as widespread as people pretended it was, and much of that attitude that did exist was formed basically in retaliation to the criticism that PC users tended to dish out. It's sort of a chicken and egg problem. Each side snickered about the other, and the general animosity grew to an almost religious fervor. Now it's less of a big deal in general, Windows is much improved, Apple is healthy and growing, and we've all got the linux weenies to make fun of ;)
I won't argue that the iPod is at least 50% image, especially with the younger crowd. But the mac enthusiasm really was born from an appreciation of a quality computer experience. The hip factor of the iPod might be bleeding over to macs now, I don't really pay that much attention any more.
I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I never saw myself as smarter or better than everyone else because I had a Mac on my desk at home. I considered myself lucky that my mom decided to buy one for whatever reason. What a found most frustrating was that PC users were quick to hassle me about my decision, yet completely unwilling to give a mac a fair chance to prove itself. If they were just indifferent, that's their perogative, but an indifferent person wouldn't have spent the effort to tell me why my computer was a piece of crap. That sort of thing was confusing and annoying, and with our beloved computer company going through some tough times financially and maybe ideologically(I don't like using that word here, but can't think of better right now), it just seemed like the mean ol' windows users were picking on us cause they liked being bullies. They shouldn't have been surprised that people fought back a little.
Agreed. Back in Apple's darker days, it wasn't easy to be a mac user. I didn't go out of my way to try and force Apple on people, but if someone asked, I'd try to explain to them why I prefered macs over PC's. It was rare, however, for anyone even mildly computer savvy to just ask. Windows users were often hostile towards those "mac things", even if they had little knowledge of them.
The mac community got a reputation as a bunch of elitest assholes, while that was only true of a very small portion of mac users. I'm not sure the mac side really started that fight. But if we were all elitests, why would we have been trying to bring every day people into the fold? The intentions, as far as I can tell, were to A)Educate people about an alternative to DOS/Windows, and B)Keep Apple in business so that we'd still have that alternative in the future.
Why have Windows users historically been so judgemental of Mac users? The prevailing thought among the mac community was that they were secretly jealous, or unwilling to admit that they were had bought into a big monopoly that, in the end, resulted in crappy computing. I think it's more like the mindset that makes people with pickup trucks put decals of Calvin pissing on other truck manufacturer's logos. Computers were quite expensive back in the day, and people tend to defend such significant purchases. Now that computers are everywhere and cheaper, having one isn't such a big deal, so most people have mellowed out a bit.
But yeah, MAC OS RULES! WINDOWS IS FOR JACKASSES! MICHAEL DELL CAN SUCK MY ASS! I'M GOING TO CHANGE MY LAST NAME TO JOBS AND NAME MY FIRST KID STEVE! WOOOOO!
Spend twenty years designing (mostly)quality computers, develop an operating system and a multitude of other software apps that are highly regarded by just about everyone, and maybe in your free time create a portable music player and an online store that gets the ball rolling on a new form of media distribution.
Then, perhaps, a website primarily for computer nerds might feel compelled to talk about your ad.
The IP folks are certainly being unreasonable, but you're being unreasonable in the opposite direction. The internet has grown and evolved at a pace far beyond anything else of its scale in human history. The so called "information age" is moving at a speed that makes the industrial revolution look like it took eons.
And the neat thing is, there's still plenty of potential in it, and progress continues at this rapid rate. Thinking about what the internet could have been is pretty useless, because there's still lots of opportunity to shape it into what you want. Why are you looking back at it like some 90 year old man who never accomplished his big goals in life. The internet is closer to a little kid, just learning how to interact with the world, with a whole bunch of possibilities to explore.
Lamenting that people are trying to make money off of it is silly as well, because anyone with any sense of history will see that the two things that best drive progress are war and greed. The internet did not take off in the 90's in spite of businesses coming aboard, it took off precisely because businesses were so interested in it. Are there some people out there who are putting their own greed in front of "progress" in a way that might not be beneficial to the rest of us? Sure, but that doesn't mean that we're failing as a whole.
The utopia that you imagine where all information is free is nothing more than an unreasonable fantasy, because discovering, creating, compiling, organizing, and distributing that information requires resources and effort, and not many people can afford to work for free. Information does not, on its own, automatically transcend culture, politics, and language. It'd take a whole lot of effort to make all that work.
I don't think many people in the renaissance were going around offering their services for no charge. Things may have been simpler back then, but people still had to buy food to eat, and clothes to wear. The renaissance was not some golden age where everyone floated around care-free and discussed philosophy and art all day. Today's technology and things like the internet are at least as big a deal as anything that happened during the renaissance. If the changes aren't as apparent to you, consider the relative timescales involved, as well as your own pessimistic attitude towards right now.
While it might come up once in a while, I don't think this is going to be as big of a problem as you're making it out to be. How many games will be available on both? Probably not that many. While backwards combatibility is nice, I don't think it's a major force for driving console sales. People are more interested in the new games. Then there's the fact that although the DS has two screens, those two screens still only add up to to maybe 20 square inches of display, which can't hold much detail or complexity compared to the sorts of TV's that you can buy now.
Oh, and don't forget that you'll likely be able to get both a Wii and a DS Lite for cheaper than just a PS3.
I understand your point, but I think it's simplifying things a bit. In a good game, the interface isn't just something applied over the gameplay, it's an integral part of it. In Civ III, you have to click a bazillion times because you're controlling so many different units at a fairly specific level. While you might be able to replace the clicking with something else (gestures, keyboard commands), you can't really remove that interaction without it becoming a different kind of game. In the example of Civilization, you'd basically be dumbing down the game in order to get a wider market appeal. That sounds good at first, but there's more to consider. You'd piss off a lot of the series' older fans, who enjoy the complexities of the game. You'd likely get blasted for it by the gaming media. You'd generate a lot of negative publicity for it, and seriously damage a franchise that already has a lot of built-in market. While you might make up for that with a bunch of new to Civilization buyers, you're still taking a risk.
Then there's the whole question of whether or not that's the kind of game the developer wants to make. While they certainly can't be completely oblivious to market and financial realities, I'd imagine that developers working on something that they want to create and care about would generally result in a better game, even if that game doesn't appeal to everyone.
Uhhh...are people buying the game and having fun? If so, then I think it's safe to say that the number of clicks is just fine.
If it's too many clicks for you personally, then maybe you should go play a different game. I know it's hard to believe, but you as an individual are not the intended market for every developer out there.
Actually, it keeps the gold farmers in check to a point, by keeping the real-world value of isk pretty steady, and not all that profitable. Plus it keeps CCP in the loop, so they get a cut of it, and also letting them keep an eye on how that market is going. There's a demand for this service, and if CCP doesn't create the supply, someone else will. I think most MMO's are going to start operating this way.
Also, ISK is pretty easy to come by, there are probably hundreds of in-game corps that move billions of ISK each day, and there are many individuals with that level of funds as well. There are also other game mechanics which make buying isk only so useful. Once you start getting into larger amounts (1 billion+), there's only so much you can do with more money. A lot of the projects that that sort of ISK can fund requires significant social connections/organization, and if you're spending that sort of time on the game, then you'll probalby have plenty of ISK coming in anyways.
Not really. The most you can punsish someone would be consistently trying to blow up their stuff quickly so they don't have any fun, or maybe trying to isolate them socially. But there's enough space/people in the EVE universe to make both of those infeasible, and even if you could accomplish them enough to annoy the person, they could always just leave and go play WoW or something instead.
That would get rid of the person maybe (they could always create a new-anonymous character and get him/her the money), but that still wouldn't get anyone their money back.
For any one individual, just buying a house somewhere else isn't such a big deal, but you need to realize the scope of what happened. There were thousands and thousands of homes destroyed. And thousands and thousands of businesses destroyed. And in the surrounding parishes of New Orleans, there are hundreds of thousands of people who rely on the economics of the city for their well being. You can't just move that number of people around willy-nilly and expect it to work out. You'd really have to move the entire city. Let's look at why that wouldn't work.
Besides the fact that moving 30-50 miles upstream would require abandoning large parts of the city that were not destroyed, including neighborhoods as historic and culturally rich as any that you'll find in this country, there's a lot of practical reasons. Like the billions and billions of dollars worth of still useable infrastructure and buildings that would have to be rebuilt. Or the fact that there is still a giant port that New Orleans operates around and which exists where it does for some strategic value. Or simply the fact that you'd have to find somewhere else to put the city. Any location that makes sense for a city of the size of New Orleans already has a city built on it.
People live(d) in New Orleans for a number of reasons. One of those reasons are as simple as having been born here and not having the resources to leave. Heck, some people didn't even have the money to evacuate for a few days for the storm. Some of the other of the other reasons why people might live here range from social factors, to economic, to cultural, to sentimental. A whole bunch of things that are not easily duplicated elsewhere.
Anyone who's paid attention to history knows that Los Angeles is going to get hit by a big earthquake again in the coming years/decades. All of florida gets wrecked by hurricanes pretty regularly if you look at things at that time scale. It's only a matter of time before someone blows up part of New York again. The super-volcano at Yellowstone national park is already 30,000 years over-due for a massive eruption that will destroy half the country. I guess we're a nation of dumbasses.
Parts of New Orleans should not be rebuilt. Besides being unsafe, the city will not financially be able to support the infrastructure that the old footprint required. The pre-storm population could hardly support the upkeep of the existing infrastructure, even if everyone came back tomorrow, there wouldn't be the money to repair/rebuild it all.
The unfortunate reality, as you've noted, is that the parts least reasonable to rebuild were overall inhabited by low-income residents. But either way, the best solution is not to rebuild all of the old neighborhoods, but to carefully rebuild in the more favorable areas, while still allowing anyone who wants to return to the city. They might not be able to live where they used to, but enough of the population isn't returning that there should be plenty of space for those who do want to come back. That is not an easy thing to work out, and the city's current political structure does not have the vision or the willpower to take on that task, so who knows if it will actually happen.
Of course, the opinions of the residents of what should happen widely vary. But surprisingly, many of the lower-income folks understand that their old neighborhoods are gone, and that trying to rebuild them is not the best course. I've heard a story about two adjacent neighborhood groups hiring their own planners and coming up with a plan to revert one of the neighborhoods back to wetland, and condense the residents into the other. Both sides had generally agreed to the plan. But their local council person said no, defiently repeating that all of New Orleans will be rebuilt.
I don't remember what my point was. So I guess I'll just make up a new one. The local government dropped the ball. The federal government dropped the ball. The city plods on because the citizens love New Orleans. But the future is not particularly bright for the city.
I second this. Come visit here. Go and have your fun in the french quarter, but make sure to take the time to go see some of the devestation. It's worse than you think it is. Hopefully seeing it will remind you that there are a bunch of human beings who lost a whole lot and could really use some more help. But even if it doesn't bring out your compassion, it should stir a little anger in you. Think back to what you saw on CNN, of the government's response, of how FEMA dealt with the crisis. And then remember that this is the same government that has spent billions and billions of dollars on Homeland security and FEMA to prepare our country for terrorist attacks. And then wonder where all of that money must have gone, when they found themselves completely unable to offer decent assistance for a storm that they knew about for days in advance.
Fixing New Orleans' levees would be a bargin compared to the money DHS is wasting.
New Orleans is where it is for some significant historical reasons, a big one being its position at the shortest distance from the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. Contrary to popular belief, New Orleans does not all exist below sea level. The original parts of the city were generally built on higher parts, natural levees created by the Mississippi, and are above sea level. These parts of the city did not flood during Katrina, but did have some significant wind damage.
Now, you could make an argument that the federal government should have never gotten involved in building levees to protect the area. But the fact of the matter is, decades ago, the feds decided that New Orleans had value to the country that made it worth investing in. In its distant past, New Orleans was one of the largest cities in the country. In its more recent past, it experienced an oil boom, and there was significant investment. The federal government decided to put the Army Corp of Engineers in charge of designing and building the levees. Whether or not you think they were right to do that doesn't seem to me to have any relevance decades later. Whatever their reasons for doing so were, the feds promised to protect us from hurricanes, and approximately a year ago, they failed to live up to that promise.
Many months after the storm, the Corps produced a report in which they basically admitted that the bulk of the flooding in New Orleans was due to their levees/canal walls failing, and that the levees failed because of combinations of design flaws, poor construction, and lack of maintanence. Then there's the whole way that the administration did its best to delay and stonewall this report until New Orleans was out of most of the country's mind, not to mention the entirely craptastic job they did of helping the city right after the storm.
So what would have happened if the federal government had never agreed to be in charge of the levees? I don't know. What sort of flood protection system would New Orleans/Lousiana have built on their own? Would so many houses have been built in places that ended up under 8' of water a year ago? It's hard to say. But if that is what had happened, then your argument might carry some weight with me. As it is, the federal government is directly responsible for much of the damage here, and they have a responsibility to help us rebuild our lives.
I will not argue with you that our local government's performance has been less than spectacular. But that doesn't change the fact that a large number of american citizens have lost much through no fault of their own, and the majority of what we've gotten from our highest form of government is empty promises.
You're underinformed, and if you understood what the city and port of new orleans and the rest of southern louisiana provided the rest of the country, perhaps your selfishness would cause you to reverse your opinion.
A huge amount of oil, seafood, and other cargo all move through the local ports. The wetlands of southern louisiana are incredibly productive in terms of biology and seafood, despite the fact that they've been destroyed by the carelessness of the energy industry. Southern Louisiana has suffered mightily from the "progress" that the growth of the USA has demanded from the oil companies. The federal government did not build the levees to protect our shoreline, they built it to try to duplicate the protection that those wetlands provided us with before they let industry destroy it.
A lot of us gulf coast residents are sick and tired of a large number of Americans turning their backs on their fellow citizens, trying to convinces themselves that we somehow deserved it, in order to clear their consciences of their failure to help their fellow man. We're sick and tired of people like you who don't really know a damn thing about this area telling us how worthless it is, and whining about a couple dozen billion dollars for a government that spends hundreds of billions without blinking an eye.
Come down here and drive through some of the neighborhoods, talk to people who lost everythign through no fault of their own, see how hard many of us are working to rebuild our homes, and then tell us that we're not worth helping.
The sad reality of politics is that the label of "Republican" and "Democrat" are less about ideas or attitudes towards government, and more about groups of people that work together in order to gain and/or maintain power.
The Republicans were the first to internalize that, and that's one of the big reasons why they've been so succesful in the past few elections. They put aside their differences as far as how they'll actually govern, and instead have focused on appearing consistent and organized in order to win votes.
The Democratic party overall has been somewhat resistant to commit entirely towards that sort of politics, but they're starting to come around. Will this shift for them help them govern better if they do take control of the government? No, but it's really the only choice they have to fight the Republican media/campaign machine. If you read the bigger liberal blogs, a lot of them have basically come to the same conclusion. Even if the people the Democratic party makes its candidates aren't what you'd consider ideal or even good, just disrupting the current powers that be is important enough to support the party.
I don't identify with either party very strongly, even though I'd rate my views as centrist, leaning a little towards the left. The Democrats as a party do not particularly appeal to me, but I don't see any good way to fight the system from the outside. It really is a choice for the less of two evils, and that's a crappy position for a voter to be in, but that's how the world works. I'm not ready to give up completely on that ever changing, but I don't see that change happening in the near future, so my best bet is to engage the system and try to minimize its damage best I can while it exists.
The majority of text on architectural drawings is generally in CAPS, for reasons both historic and practial. On my work computer, caps lock is probably on the majority of the time.
Do you not watch what's appearing on the screen as you're typing it? You shouldn't get too far if you're paying attention.
True, but it doesn't seem to me that some of the way they deal with lag in those sorts of games will work as well with SSB. While CS is fast paced, there's actually a pretty small number of things a player can do at any one time, and the players are generally far enough apart that small amounts of lag aren't noticeable. For example, firing a machine gun at someone 20 yards away, a split-second of lag might make it look like you're aiming right at someone when you shot, but the distance and general inaccuracy of those guns causes less of a problem because of the distance to the target. Not to mention that the target isn't going to try to react to the bullet and block it in that split-second.
I don't know, I'm not a programmer, so maybe I'm wrong. But a SSBM fight is just a constant stream of insanity and hectic-ness, where you're reacting to everythign that's happening at once. While every FPS that I've played has its crazy moments, but seldom gets as borederline unmanagable for me as a player as SSBM feels 95% of the time. Lag annoys me in Battlefield or Tribes, but I can deal with it. I just feel like anything that made SSBM less responsive would make me give up in a hurry.
The only problem I see is that SSBM is going to so vulnerable to lag/latency issues. Everything happens so damn quickly, two machines cannot afford to get the least bit out of sync without the players noticing that something is wrong.
Not that it's entirely hopeless, and that nintendo shouldn't try. I just don't think people should let their expectations get too high, because there's likely going to be a whole lot of internet that Nintendo has no control over in between any two arbitrary Wii consoles.
I guess the ultimate question is, Are they making any money off of it? I don't know the answer to that. The next question is, are they taking MS' Xbox approach, where version 1 is basically to gain a foothold and credibility, so that with version 2 they can make some real money.
I don't know. There was a ton of hype for the PSP, and terms like Gameboy killer were definitely getting tossed around. Sometimes Sony seems to buy into their own hype, so I wonder if they didn't really think that they were going to waltz all over Nintendo in the portable market just like they did with the PS2.
Not to mention the UMD failure. While it's not entirely the same thing, that experience doesn't bode particularly well for their PS3/Bluray plans.
That was a good number of years, and a no-longer-existing monopoly ago. Nintendo really seems to be making a lot of the right moves as of late. They know that they have to earn their money now, they can't just dictate why people are going to give them money, or force unfavorable terms on developers. They've also had some employee turn-over over the decades, so hopefully they've purged most of that arrogant mindset.
While I'm not naive enough to think that the bottom line isn't Nintendo's biggest concern, their recent history, combined with what they've shown about their future leads me to forgive them their past wrongs. If they manage to pull together an 85% marketshare this next-gen somehow, and then start being assholes about it, my feelings will quickly change. But I don't see that happening, so I'm not too worried.
As for how it will really pan out, I hope Sony loses big, because they really could use the sort of humbling that Nintendo has already been through. Sony has basically gotten a draw(at best) with the PSP vs. the DS, and they still don't seem to have learned anything from it. Sometimes it takes a complete stomping to make people really reflect on the decisions they've been making. And even if the PS3 completely bombed, Nintendo and MS would still have each other to keep them reasonably honest.
Why do people insist on making things more complicated than they need to be. There are droves of hardcore mac fans who salivate over things like OSX updates. Demand. A bunch of copies were distributed to a bunch of developers following WWDC. Supply.
Wherever there is a supply and a demand, people will get a hold of those things. Apple didn't have to have some super secret plan to leak a version onto the internet. They know full well as soon as they let a copy out of their "labs" that they've basically lost control of it.
Do they mind the publicity? Probably not. Did they expect this to happen? Definitely. Was this leak the clumination of some behind the scenes planning? Nope. Why would Apple waste their time with something like that when there's an approximately 100% chance that one of the developers will leak a copy?
Yeah, basically what these people are doing, at best, is making up nerdy sports. Their pacman game is modified Tag, which I've enjoyed since childhood. Only you play it in a big city, making it significantly more difficult to set up and execute, but good for a goofy new story the first time it happens.
If you're that desperate for things to do, and you don't mind physical activity, there's already hundreds of sports to try. Most of which already have developed and sensible rules, well designed and reasonably safe equipment available specifically for them, and often times a number of organizations dedicated to setting up games/matches and educating people new to the sport. While doing something goofy once in a while is fun, it's not likely to become more than a publicity stunt.
The PSP is, in many ways, a portable PS2. Porting a big mass of games over to it would be cheap and easy, and would provide decent revenue for very little cost. EA (and many other publishers) has a large library of PS2 games sitting around.
The DS has, in general, found success with new and different games, owing to it's dual screens/touch screen. Porting is still possible, but you're pulling from the N64 at best, and competing with a lot of innovative stuff.
I don't know if EA really cares who wins, but just looking at the economics of it all, they'd probably prefer to have a bigger potential market for the PSP.