Calm down there buddy. I'm not talking about replicating reality. I'm just talking about making a game easier to relate to, and to help the gamer work their way into that suspension of disbelief.
Every game does not need to try to recreate the world exactly, but on the other side of the coin, every game does not need to create an entirely different universe with all new laws of physics and biology and history and so forth.
There's certainly places where drawing from reality to help you make a game makes sense. I play games to take a break from my reality. Sure, I technically could jump in a car and race with a bunch of insane people through Tokyo, but it's not particularly feasible, legal, or intelligent. So instead I play a game. But it's nice if that game features vehicles and physics that are somewhat familiar to me and my actual driving experience.
The job of the game designer is deciding where to make those compromises, and where to expend the resources to match reality well. Perhaps in my previous comment, my ammunition example didn't make sense, or you're just of a different opinion. I'll attempt to explain it again. In Doom, I remember running around a room shooting a bunch of imps. They generally dropped with one or two shots. I also remember strafing back and forth shooting a giant monster a bunch of times until it died. I found that part of the game to be far less fun and satisfying than dealing with a horde of creatures that were individually easier to defeat. Maybe I'm wrong about why I preferred that style of gameplay, but I think it's because shooting the same big thing a whole bunch of times while it just stands there until it suddenly dies seems silly. And I think a lot of game developers have come to the same conclusion, and so games tend to favor enemies that drop with fewer shots, which leads to ammo being less available to increase the challenge and balance out the game.
All that being said, I don't think it's the realism in games that necessarily is important, but more that they've got at least a foundation in some sort of consistent universe, allowing the gamer to ease into the game's reality. An example that I would give is all of Nintendo's Mario games. They've been developing the Mario Universe for so long and through so many games, that they've created a reality that makes intuitive sense to me as a gamer, because I've been exposed to it for so long. Riding around in a go-kart and throwing turtle shells at people is entirely random, yet I didn't give it a second thought when I picked up Mario Kart. Each Mario game adds a little more to the Mushroom Kingdom, but still has a huge library of "history" to draw from to create gameplay/artwork/music/etc. Blizzard has done the same thing with Warcraft. WoW has a ton of stuff going on in it, with a lot of different characters/races/locations, but a lot of the general backstory made sense to gamers, because they'd learned it in past games (and it's also based on a lot of typical fantasy storylines).
Starting a new franchise is great, but to do so, you have to either create everything from scratch, or borrow some elements from reality, in order to give gamers a way to connect to the characters/storyline/gameplay/whatever. An exception might be really abstract games like Tetris. I could probably write more, but I'm leaving work now.
Awww, the world isn't perfect, so it must be worse than ever before.
Humanity has a ways to go, no doubt. We might not even figure it all out ever. I don't know.
But the fact that much of the progress still lies ahead of us, it's still inspiring to me to look back and see the progress that has been made. A much higher percentage of the earth's population has their basic needs taken care of than ever before. The general trend in governments has been towards democracy. With globalization, outsourcing, and mass production, even more people are getting the opportunity to have a job beyond subsistance farming.
A lot of the old problems still persist, and we're starting to face new problems as well. But I fail to see how someone can say that humanity was better off 1000 years ago.
I fail to see how human life has become less important. In fact, I see the opposite happening. First off, there's the big things, like slavery. Slavery has been a constant throughout human history, but it's much less common now.
A few hundred years ago, in Europe they probably couldn't build guillotines fast enough. Many of those countries have already abandoned capital punishment.
As for surveillance, 1000 years ago they couldn't imagine the technology that is available today. Surveillance consisted of sneaking in and watching. You're making a silly comparison there. Who knows what they'd think of it.
I think it's sort of an attempt to bring the game closer to reality(even though the whole premise is fantasy). The reality is that guns, and many other weapons, they're very effective in killing things. Six blasts from a shotgun at close range will kill/incapacitate just about anything. Even if you couldn't kill a T-rex with a 9mm, a few shots to the leg would probably get it to back off. Having big monsters that just sit there and tank round after round is sort of absurd and boring, no matter how much ammo you have. And so defeating enemies requires less ammunition, and so the ammunition becomes sparse, in order to create some challenge.
And it also balances out some less realistic abilities you tend to get. Like being able to run around carrying ten weapons just as fast as you could run around with only a pistol at the beginning of the game. Or just being able to carry ten weapons in the first place.
I am a college educated professional. My career is very very unlikely to provide me with $150k per year by my early thirties, no matter how hard I work.
150k per year seems pretty damn nice to me. That would not make you solidly middle class. You don't have to be a billionaire to be considered wealthy. The average household income in this country is closer to 50k per year.
It's all about getting in with a corporation that will help newbies out. If you do decide to try it out, my character in game in named Shawnaroo, look me up, and I'll help you get started a little easier.
There are MMO games that attempt solve some of those problems, with various degrees of success. But more than that, the MMO format provides for a lot of opportunities for designers and gamers. Everyone loves to bitch and moan about how the games are stagnant and more of the same, and for the most part that's true, but MMO's have been a bit of an exception, appearing in a lot of forms with a lot of ideas.
I like playing video games with a few of my good friends too. Sadly, most of my friends have fairly busy schedules, and it's not easy for us all to agree upon a time to play. But in a game with 15,000 people on it, it's not hard to find someone to talk to/cooperate with/compete against/etc. A game with 100,000+ people can get to the point where it can have a basically player run economy, an economy in which I can create for myself a place that I might not be able to obtain in the real world. And doing things we can't do in reality is one of the reasons we play games. The challenge of organizing large numbers of people, especially over something basically anonymous like the internet, that appeals to some people, and MMO's give them a way to try that out.
Not all MMO's are great, just like regular games. And maybe they don't appeal to you personally, that's fine. But if you look at them a little differently than you see more traditional games, you might see some really cool possibilities. And as time goes on and the developers figure more of it out, hopefully your reasons for staying away will become better solved problems.
EVE Online is a free download, and you can even get a two-week trial. It's got a lot of complexity in it however, so you'd need well beyond two weeks to even start to explore it. But yeah, internet spaceships. Awesome.
You should probably try to play a few more DS games. I'd suggest starting with Kirby Canvas Curse and Trauma Center, two games with gameplay that could not be implemented without the DS' touchscreen.
All I got from that statement is that it's too tiring to use for continous sword fighting type movements. In my never humble opinion, the pointing ability of the controller is far more interesting than the ability to swing it around.
Yeah, but the thing is, the controller and the games will be strongly inter-related. Like the unique hardware on the DS has allowed a bunch of really popular games to be developed for it, so Nintendo is banking on the Wii's controller to lead to a bunch of unique games. And the DS shows that consumers are interested in new types of games. And that there are developers out there willing to explore these new types.
The controller isn't some aesthetic afterthought. It's the core of the system. It is, in many ways, the DS translated to a living room. They can't afford to ship everyone a 40" touch screen, so they've got this technology that turns your regular TV into something quite similar. Not exactly the same, but most of the differences open up other neat opportunities for control styles.
The controller will sell a lot of Wii's, especially to us game nerds. But in the end, it'll come down to the games. The thing is, the Wii controller and Wii games are going to be intertwined to a degree beyond what you're used to. And as others have noted, even if the other console manufacturers roll their own version of the Wii remote, it will be inconsequential in this upcoming generation, unless they send a pile of free remotes to everyone. Otherwise only a small percentage of the userbase will buy the remotes, and so the market won't attract developers, because there won't be a sufficient amount of money to be made.
Alright, I think I get what you're saying. I guess that's a valid concern. I imagine that Nintendo's response would be along the lines of most of their new games being designed for more casual playing, not really expecting you to sit in one place for an hour at a time.
Not that that's a perfect answer. I guess you'll just have to wait for a lull in the game to reseat yourself, or pause it or something.
I've got a PS2, a gamecube, and an Xbox, and I can think of very few games where you can be particularly succesful with just one hand on the controller. You might be able to aim in shoot for a couple seconds in Halo while you scratch your nose, but you can't really play the game with one hand.
I guess I'm not really sure what you're talking about. The Wii remote won't weight 40 pounds. You won't need both hands to lift it. You'll be able to move it just as easily with one hand as with two. Sure, you might not be able to press all the buttons at once with just one hand, but how is that different from any of the other console controllers?
You can probably come up with some scenarios where it could get sketchy, a game requiring a lot of buttons on the remote and at the same time requiring big, quick, sweeping movements by both hands. That could get old real quick. But lets give the average game designer a little credit, and assume that most developers would realize that that's a problem, even before they begin play testing.
If you only want the classic console interface, both Sony and Microsoft will be happy to sell you some hardware.
I don't know if you're trying to be sarcastic or what, but at least for MacOS 9, it really was beyond repair. Apple tried a number of times, and ended up with a number of failed projects.
What worked for them with OSX was basically scrapping everything before and starting over. They saved themselves a lot of time by borrowing a lot from unix and nextOS, and reproduced some of the aspects of OS9. A layer of backwards compatibility was sort of hacked over the new OS, but it wasn't integrated into the new, it was really its own thing.
Apple succesfully did what MS needs to do. They made a clean break with the past, knowing that although it might cause some problems up front, in the long run, it'd be for the best.
It's a much more daunting task for MS, no doubt. The installed base of users, developers, and software is much larger than what Apple was dealing with. But then again, MS has much more resources than Apple, and I'm sure they have plenty of brilliant engineers. If the management will bite the bullet and accept that they need to start over, they could get it done.
Oh, and from what I've read, the mozilla project of today has very little in common with the netscape of old.
It can be useful to remember that the US had its share of horrid working conditions back when the industrial economy was getting going. Exploiting labor is not some new occurance brought upon by globalization. It's just a normal step on the ladder to economic growth.
Not to say that it's all good. No billion dollar corporations should be making people work in unsafe conditions, regardless of what country they're in. But saying that a company is evil because they're having their good manufactured by people working for 60 cents an hour is a little short sighted if you aren't aware of the circumstances. There are places where 60 cents an hour is a decent wage, otherwise those jobs wouldn't be filled.
The other argument is that since globalization is driving a lot of this outsourcing, that the profit produced ends up leaving the country of all the workers, where in the industrial age, it tended to stay local, because the factories were owned by local rich people instead of multinational corporations. That might be true to a degree, but the losses to that are likely outweighed by the sheer scale of manufacturing that goes on nowadays.
So yeah, in the long term, it'll probably leave the world in a better place than it was before.
I've always sort of considered the pursuit of knowledge and the amazing things out there waiting to be discovered to be a sort of reward from God, given to us to encourage the use of our minds and reason and natural curiosity. The sorts of stories that make up things like the Bible basically served the same role at an earlier time in human history. It is there to start the discussion, and to hopefully point the discussion in a useful direction.
According to some people, the Bible tells us that the earth is around 6000 years old and that the universe did not exist before humanity. Science tells us that the universe has existed for around 14 billions years, stretches well beyond our imaginations can really comprehend, and is full of a history of amazingly powerful events and sequences.
Neither of those options contradicts the existance of a God, but I for one, am far more impressed by and interested in the second option.
although you quoted it, right there at the top of your reply, you seemed to then completely forget about the "on consumers" part of what I said. I don't know much about how Sony deals with developers, that's not my business.
That said, a quick search for Sony in the/. archives will show you plenty of examples of blatantly consumer unfriendly decisions that they've made.
I don't care how many of your buddies are making games for the PS3. We've got other options if we decide to take our money somewhere else because we don't want to support one company. Sony can push around younger kids, because they don't care and they're probably spending their parents' money. But as the average age of gamers increase, the average gamer is going to put more thought into their purchases, and remember if/when they get screwed over.
The PS2 is an awesome system, and Sony rightfully has sold them by the truckload. But they seem to be doing their best to undo any goodwill that their video games department might have earned them. And their current attitude, telling us how privileged we should feel to have the opportunity to spend $600 on their new console, I don't think most of us are impressed by that.
Will there be good games for the PS3? Most likely. Will Sony sell a lot of them? Probably. Will Sony dominate this generation like they did the last? I'm not so sure about that. Would it be a bad thing if they don't? For Sony, sure, but probably not for consumers.
But yeah, the point is, you ignored my whole point in my original comment. But thanks for trying.
Right on. Back in the day, Nintendo ruled the market, and they knew it. They took advantage of their market dominance and tried to force unfriendly terms on developers and competitors. The eventual fallout from this was one of the major reasons why Sony was able to sneak in and steal a large part of the market from Nintendo. It's taken a while for Nintendo to figure it out, but they've definitely taken a new look at their position in the video game world, and as a result we've got a handheld with a lot of new/interesting possibilities, and an upcoming console that does some new stuff as well.
Sony is the next in line. They're going through basically the same cycle(although they seem more willing to force the unfriendly terms on consumers in plainly obvious ways than Nintendo ever was). A bloody nose in the next round of the console wars might take Sony down a notch or two, and remind them that we don't have to buy whatever they tell us.
I would hope that there are enough people on/. with a solid enough grasp of technology to be less impressed with market numbers, and instead be able to actually see what a company has contributed. At least when ranking them in terms of a top dog in tech.
Google has done some cool stuff, no doubt, but their contributions to the tech world are a mere blip on a timeline that has IBM footprints all over it. Not that that's Google's fault, they're a relatively new company, we'll have to wait and see how long they remain relevant for.
MS certainly is a top dog, although one can argue over the value of some of their contributions, everyone else definately pays attention to what they're doing. I don't think the average techie is particularly concerned with HP's upcoming ideas/products. But I will agree with the article summary on one point, their logo is definitely blue. Good catch on that one.
That's an unrealistic worry. If all the labels that exist today went totally DRM tomorrow, it would be a matter of days before new companies sprang up to fill the market of providing un-DRM'ed media. Even if the RIAA got dozens of laws passed to try and stop it.
Many different drugs are highly illegal, and their production and physical nature makes distributing much more complicated than digital files. Yet there's still plenty of market for them, because the demand is there.
Wherever there is demand, capitalism will find a way. No matter how hard anyone tries to control information, it's just too easy for us to share it now. We'd have to live in a society controlled to a level approaching what I hear North Korea is supposed to be like before they could stop us from sharing music, and if that was the case, hard-to-copy music would be the least of our worries.
SL can easily take more than 3 users per sim(server), it just averages out to that because there are so many sims in the SL world.
That's not to say that it doesn't have problems. More than a bunch of people standing around, the bigger problems come with complex scripted objects dragging down the sim. You may only have 6 people on that particular server, but there still easily be 4000 scripts running in all the different objects laying around.
Not to mention that the clientside stuff can get pretty bad too. SL has graphics that could be called "dated" at best, and it's still hard to get decent frame rates. It's sometimes hard to tell whether the lag is on your side, on the server, or a mix at times; but there's no arguing that it's often quite bad.
The welcome area often has 40+ people in it, and it's generally slow. People tend not to congregate into groups any larger than that because the lag quickly takes the fun out of it. And if you really want to be mischievous, there are plenty of easier ways than gathering a large group of people. Abusing the object scripting and causing trouble is not uncommon.
You're just making an assumption about me. I happen to be a mild WWII buff, and I'm very fascinated by the Nazi weaponry technology. Despite the fact that a lot of it was developed by Nazi's. And a lot of US scientists and engineers were impressed with it as well, as captured V2's formed the basis of America's space efforts.
On a slightly more relevant note, one of my best friends is a pretty hardcore conservative, while my leanings are definately more liberal. Yet we still manage to have friendly discussions about politics, and even agree on a lot of things.
The only type of person I would judge based on who they are, rather than the strength of their argument, would be clowns. I don't care what those freaky bastards say, they're all evil to the greatest degree imaginable.
It's not about protecting the status quo. The status quo is already a bunch of well entrenched monopolies running most of the networks. It's about the people running those monopolies still being greedy, and trying to squeeze even more money out of their privledged position.
The fact that it will stomp on start up web companies and whatnot is incidental for the telcos. Collateral damage in a war for profit, unfortunate, but not worth stopping for.
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Calm down there buddy. I'm not talking about replicating reality. I'm just talking about making a game easier to relate to, and to help the gamer work their way into that suspension of disbelief.
Every game does not need to try to recreate the world exactly, but on the other side of the coin, every game does not need to create an entirely different universe with all new laws of physics and biology and history and so forth.
There's certainly places where drawing from reality to help you make a game makes sense. I play games to take a break from my reality. Sure, I technically could jump in a car and race with a bunch of insane people through Tokyo, but it's not particularly feasible, legal, or intelligent. So instead I play a game. But it's nice if that game features vehicles and physics that are somewhat familiar to me and my actual driving experience.
The job of the game designer is deciding where to make those compromises, and where to expend the resources to match reality well. Perhaps in my previous comment, my ammunition example didn't make sense, or you're just of a different opinion. I'll attempt to explain it again. In Doom, I remember running around a room shooting a bunch of imps. They generally dropped with one or two shots. I also remember strafing back and forth shooting a giant monster a bunch of times until it died. I found that part of the game to be far less fun and satisfying than dealing with a horde of creatures that were individually easier to defeat. Maybe I'm wrong about why I preferred that style of gameplay, but I think it's because shooting the same big thing a whole bunch of times while it just stands there until it suddenly dies seems silly. And I think a lot of game developers have come to the same conclusion, and so games tend to favor enemies that drop with fewer shots, which leads to ammo being less available to increase the challenge and balance out the game.
All that being said, I don't think it's the realism in games that necessarily is important, but more that they've got at least a foundation in some sort of consistent universe, allowing the gamer to ease into the game's reality. An example that I would give is all of Nintendo's Mario games. They've been developing the Mario Universe for so long and through so many games, that they've created a reality that makes intuitive sense to me as a gamer, because I've been exposed to it for so long. Riding around in a go-kart and throwing turtle shells at people is entirely random, yet I didn't give it a second thought when I picked up Mario Kart. Each Mario game adds a little more to the Mushroom Kingdom, but still has a huge library of "history" to draw from to create gameplay/artwork/music/etc. Blizzard has done the same thing with Warcraft. WoW has a ton of stuff going on in it, with a lot of different characters/races/locations, but a lot of the general backstory made sense to gamers, because they'd learned it in past games (and it's also based on a lot of typical fantasy storylines).
Starting a new franchise is great, but to do so, you have to either create everything from scratch, or borrow some elements from reality, in order to give gamers a way to connect to the characters/storyline/gameplay/whatever. An exception might be really abstract games like Tetris. I could probably write more, but I'm leaving work now.
Awww, the world isn't perfect, so it must be worse than ever before.
Humanity has a ways to go, no doubt. We might not even figure it all out ever. I don't know.
But the fact that much of the progress still lies ahead of us, it's still inspiring to me to look back and see the progress that has been made. A much higher percentage of the earth's population has their basic needs taken care of than ever before. The general trend in governments has been towards democracy. With globalization, outsourcing, and mass production, even more people are getting the opportunity to have a job beyond subsistance farming.
A lot of the old problems still persist, and we're starting to face new problems as well. But I fail to see how someone can say that humanity was better off 1000 years ago.
I fail to see how human life has become less important. In fact, I see the opposite happening. First off, there's the big things, like slavery. Slavery has been a constant throughout human history, but it's much less common now.
A few hundred years ago, in Europe they probably couldn't build guillotines fast enough. Many of those countries have already abandoned capital punishment.
As for surveillance, 1000 years ago they couldn't imagine the technology that is available today. Surveillance consisted of sneaking in and watching. You're making a silly comparison there. Who knows what they'd think of it.
I think it's sort of an attempt to bring the game closer to reality(even though the whole premise is fantasy). The reality is that guns, and many other weapons, they're very effective in killing things. Six blasts from a shotgun at close range will kill/incapacitate just about anything. Even if you couldn't kill a T-rex with a 9mm, a few shots to the leg would probably get it to back off. Having big monsters that just sit there and tank round after round is sort of absurd and boring, no matter how much ammo you have. And so defeating enemies requires less ammunition, and so the ammunition becomes sparse, in order to create some challenge.
And it also balances out some less realistic abilities you tend to get. Like being able to run around carrying ten weapons just as fast as you could run around with only a pistol at the beginning of the game. Or just being able to carry ten weapons in the first place.
Median. Yes. That is the proper term. My mistake.
I am a college educated professional. My career is very very unlikely to provide me with $150k per year by my early thirties, no matter how hard I work.
150k per year seems pretty damn nice to me. That would not make you solidly middle class. You don't have to be a billionaire to be considered wealthy. The average household income in this country is closer to 50k per year.
It's all about getting in with a corporation that will help newbies out. If you do decide to try it out, my character in game in named Shawnaroo, look me up, and I'll help you get started a little easier.
There are MMO games that attempt solve some of those problems, with various degrees of success. But more than that, the MMO format provides for a lot of opportunities for designers and gamers. Everyone loves to bitch and moan about how the games are stagnant and more of the same, and for the most part that's true, but MMO's have been a bit of an exception, appearing in a lot of forms with a lot of ideas.
I like playing video games with a few of my good friends too. Sadly, most of my friends have fairly busy schedules, and it's not easy for us all to agree upon a time to play. But in a game with 15,000 people on it, it's not hard to find someone to talk to/cooperate with/compete against/etc. A game with 100,000+ people can get to the point where it can have a basically player run economy, an economy in which I can create for myself a place that I might not be able to obtain in the real world. And doing things we can't do in reality is one of the reasons we play games. The challenge of organizing large numbers of people, especially over something basically anonymous like the internet, that appeals to some people, and MMO's give them a way to try that out.
Not all MMO's are great, just like regular games. And maybe they don't appeal to you personally, that's fine. But if you look at them a little differently than you see more traditional games, you might see some really cool possibilities. And as time goes on and the developers figure more of it out, hopefully your reasons for staying away will become better solved problems.
EVE Online is a free download, and you can even get a two-week trial. It's got a lot of complexity in it however, so you'd need well beyond two weeks to even start to explore it. But yeah, internet spaceships. Awesome.
You should probably try to play a few more DS games. I'd suggest starting with Kirby Canvas Curse and Trauma Center, two games with gameplay that could not be implemented without the DS' touchscreen.
All I got from that statement is that it's too tiring to use for continous sword fighting type movements. In my never humble opinion, the pointing ability of the controller is far more interesting than the ability to swing it around.
Yeah, but the thing is, the controller and the games will be strongly inter-related. Like the unique hardware on the DS has allowed a bunch of really popular games to be developed for it, so Nintendo is banking on the Wii's controller to lead to a bunch of unique games. And the DS shows that consumers are interested in new types of games. And that there are developers out there willing to explore these new types.
The controller isn't some aesthetic afterthought. It's the core of the system. It is, in many ways, the DS translated to a living room. They can't afford to ship everyone a 40" touch screen, so they've got this technology that turns your regular TV into something quite similar. Not exactly the same, but most of the differences open up other neat opportunities for control styles.
The controller will sell a lot of Wii's, especially to us game nerds. But in the end, it'll come down to the games. The thing is, the Wii controller and Wii games are going to be intertwined to a degree beyond what you're used to. And as others have noted, even if the other console manufacturers roll their own version of the Wii remote, it will be inconsequential in this upcoming generation, unless they send a pile of free remotes to everyone. Otherwise only a small percentage of the userbase will buy the remotes, and so the market won't attract developers, because there won't be a sufficient amount of money to be made.
Alright, I think I get what you're saying. I guess that's a valid concern. I imagine that Nintendo's response would be along the lines of most of their new games being designed for more casual playing, not really expecting you to sit in one place for an hour at a time.
Not that that's a perfect answer. I guess you'll just have to wait for a lull in the game to reseat yourself, or pause it or something.
I've got a PS2, a gamecube, and an Xbox, and I can think of very few games where you can be particularly succesful with just one hand on the controller. You might be able to aim in shoot for a couple seconds in Halo while you scratch your nose, but you can't really play the game with one hand.
I guess I'm not really sure what you're talking about. The Wii remote won't weight 40 pounds. You won't need both hands to lift it. You'll be able to move it just as easily with one hand as with two. Sure, you might not be able to press all the buttons at once with just one hand, but how is that different from any of the other console controllers?
You can probably come up with some scenarios where it could get sketchy, a game requiring a lot of buttons on the remote and at the same time requiring big, quick, sweeping movements by both hands. That could get old real quick. But lets give the average game designer a little credit, and assume that most developers would realize that that's a problem, even before they begin play testing.
If you only want the classic console interface, both Sony and Microsoft will be happy to sell you some hardware.
I don't know if you're trying to be sarcastic or what, but at least for MacOS 9, it really was beyond repair. Apple tried a number of times, and ended up with a number of failed projects.
What worked for them with OSX was basically scrapping everything before and starting over. They saved themselves a lot of time by borrowing a lot from unix and nextOS, and reproduced some of the aspects of OS9. A layer of backwards compatibility was sort of hacked over the new OS, but it wasn't integrated into the new, it was really its own thing.
Apple succesfully did what MS needs to do. They made a clean break with the past, knowing that although it might cause some problems up front, in the long run, it'd be for the best.
It's a much more daunting task for MS, no doubt. The installed base of users, developers, and software is much larger than what Apple was dealing with. But then again, MS has much more resources than Apple, and I'm sure they have plenty of brilliant engineers. If the management will bite the bullet and accept that they need to start over, they could get it done.
Oh, and from what I've read, the mozilla project of today has very little in common with the netscape of old.
It can be useful to remember that the US had its share of horrid working conditions back when the industrial economy was getting going. Exploiting labor is not some new occurance brought upon by globalization. It's just a normal step on the ladder to economic growth.
Not to say that it's all good. No billion dollar corporations should be making people work in unsafe conditions, regardless of what country they're in. But saying that a company is evil because they're having their good manufactured by people working for 60 cents an hour is a little short sighted if you aren't aware of the circumstances. There are places where 60 cents an hour is a decent wage, otherwise those jobs wouldn't be filled.
The other argument is that since globalization is driving a lot of this outsourcing, that the profit produced ends up leaving the country of all the workers, where in the industrial age, it tended to stay local, because the factories were owned by local rich people instead of multinational corporations. That might be true to a degree, but the losses to that are likely outweighed by the sheer scale of manufacturing that goes on nowadays.
So yeah, in the long term, it'll probably leave the world in a better place than it was before.
I've always sort of considered the pursuit of knowledge and the amazing things out there waiting to be discovered to be a sort of reward from God, given to us to encourage the use of our minds and reason and natural curiosity. The sorts of stories that make up things like the Bible basically served the same role at an earlier time in human history. It is there to start the discussion, and to hopefully point the discussion in a useful direction.
According to some people, the Bible tells us that the earth is around 6000 years old and that the universe did not exist before humanity. Science tells us that the universe has existed for around 14 billions years, stretches well beyond our imaginations can really comprehend, and is full of a history of amazingly powerful events and sequences.
Neither of those options contradicts the existance of a God, but I for one, am far more impressed by and interested in the second option.
although you quoted it, right there at the top of your reply, you seemed to then completely forget about the "on consumers" part of what I said. I don't know much about how Sony deals with developers, that's not my business.
/. archives will show you plenty of examples of blatantly consumer unfriendly decisions that they've made.
That said, a quick search for Sony in the
I don't care how many of your buddies are making games for the PS3. We've got other options if we decide to take our money somewhere else because we don't want to support one company. Sony can push around younger kids, because they don't care and they're probably spending their parents' money. But as the average age of gamers increase, the average gamer is going to put more thought into their purchases, and remember if/when they get screwed over.
The PS2 is an awesome system, and Sony rightfully has sold them by the truckload. But they seem to be doing their best to undo any goodwill that their video games department might have earned them. And their current attitude, telling us how privileged we should feel to have the opportunity to spend $600 on their new console, I don't think most of us are impressed by that.
Will there be good games for the PS3? Most likely. Will Sony sell a lot of them? Probably. Will Sony dominate this generation like they did the last? I'm not so sure about that. Would it be a bad thing if they don't? For Sony, sure, but probably not for consumers.
But yeah, the point is, you ignored my whole point in my original comment. But thanks for trying.
Right on. Back in the day, Nintendo ruled the market, and they knew it. They took advantage of their market dominance and tried to force unfriendly terms on developers and competitors. The eventual fallout from this was one of the major reasons why Sony was able to sneak in and steal a large part of the market from Nintendo. It's taken a while for Nintendo to figure it out, but they've definitely taken a new look at their position in the video game world, and as a result we've got a handheld with a lot of new/interesting possibilities, and an upcoming console that does some new stuff as well.
Sony is the next in line. They're going through basically the same cycle(although they seem more willing to force the unfriendly terms on consumers in plainly obvious ways than Nintendo ever was). A bloody nose in the next round of the console wars might take Sony down a notch or two, and remind them that we don't have to buy whatever they tell us.
I would hope that there are enough people on /. with a solid enough grasp of technology to be less impressed with market numbers, and instead be able to actually see what a company has contributed. At least when ranking them in terms of a top dog in tech.
Google has done some cool stuff, no doubt, but their contributions to the tech world are a mere blip on a timeline that has IBM footprints all over it. Not that that's Google's fault, they're a relatively new company, we'll have to wait and see how long they remain relevant for.
MS certainly is a top dog, although one can argue over the value of some of their contributions, everyone else definately pays attention to what they're doing. I don't think the average techie is particularly concerned with HP's upcoming ideas/products. But I will agree with the article summary on one point, their logo is definitely blue. Good catch on that one.
Thank God I live in the south, where it rarely gets down to absolute zero.
That's an unrealistic worry. If all the labels that exist today went totally DRM tomorrow, it would be a matter of days before new companies sprang up to fill the market of providing un-DRM'ed media. Even if the RIAA got dozens of laws passed to try and stop it.
Many different drugs are highly illegal, and their production and physical nature makes distributing much more complicated than digital files. Yet there's still plenty of market for them, because the demand is there.
Wherever there is demand, capitalism will find a way. No matter how hard anyone tries to control information, it's just too easy for us to share it now. We'd have to live in a society controlled to a level approaching what I hear North Korea is supposed to be like before they could stop us from sharing music, and if that was the case, hard-to-copy music would be the least of our worries.
SL can easily take more than 3 users per sim(server), it just averages out to that because there are so many sims in the SL world.
That's not to say that it doesn't have problems. More than a bunch of people standing around, the bigger problems come with complex scripted objects dragging down the sim. You may only have 6 people on that particular server, but there still easily be 4000 scripts running in all the different objects laying around.
Not to mention that the clientside stuff can get pretty bad too. SL has graphics that could be called "dated" at best, and it's still hard to get decent frame rates. It's sometimes hard to tell whether the lag is on your side, on the server, or a mix at times; but there's no arguing that it's often quite bad.
The welcome area often has 40+ people in it, and it's generally slow. People tend not to congregate into groups any larger than that because the lag quickly takes the fun out of it. And if you really want to be mischievous, there are plenty of easier ways than gathering a large group of people. Abusing the object scripting and causing trouble is not uncommon.
You're just making an assumption about me. I happen to be a mild WWII buff, and I'm very fascinated by the Nazi weaponry technology. Despite the fact that a lot of it was developed by Nazi's. And a lot of US scientists and engineers were impressed with it as well, as captured V2's formed the basis of America's space efforts.
On a slightly more relevant note, one of my best friends is a pretty hardcore conservative, while my leanings are definately more liberal. Yet we still manage to have friendly discussions about politics, and even agree on a lot of things.
The only type of person I would judge based on who they are, rather than the strength of their argument, would be clowns. I don't care what those freaky bastards say, they're all evil to the greatest degree imaginable.
It's not about protecting the status quo. The status quo is already a bunch of well entrenched monopolies running most of the networks. It's about the people running those monopolies still being greedy, and trying to squeeze even more money out of their privledged position.
The fact that it will stomp on start up web companies and whatnot is incidental for the telcos. Collateral damage in a war for profit, unfortunate, but not worth stopping for.