The difference is that I have accepted my place in life,
and ye shall forever be downtrodden as a result.
While I understand what you're trying to say to the parent and even, to an extent, agree with you the other side of the argument is that if you don't learn to accept where you are in life then you can never be content. I would imagine the parent is probably referring to having found a place in life that they are happy with. That's kind of an important bit of wisdom since for many people being at the "top" doesn't lead to happiness.
For an example I'm at the top of my game, but not at the top of earnings. Still, I make plenty of money, have no problem paying bills, buy anything I want, and do whatever I want (within reason). I don't let people walk over me but I don't need to walk over them, either. I find most people would be a lot happier if they'd take a few moments to realize that they don't actually want to be at "the top," it's just our media machine that blasts you with that.
Of course I could be wrong, I don't know for certain, none of us do. Maybe the parent's just a slacker.
I second the above. I work at a rather successful game company and on Windows we target, no joke, Win98. We make family friendly games and our target is, as you might have guessed, the entire family. Since most people aren't hardcore their systems are average on years old hardware at best, and while many families have hand-me-down boxes and laptops now those are running *even* older hardware. If our games run like crap on someone's ancient box they won't blame the box, they'll blame us, and then not play our games.
So yeah, we could *totally* make use of "the shiny" but to grow our user base that's just not something we can afford. It's how everything's going...id software's id tech 5 is scalable, Unreal Engine 3 is surprisingly scalable, Unity can target mobile platforms AND desktops, it's everywhere. I'm glad that some companies are dedicated to using "the shiny" but as we've all seen it's gameplay that matters, not graphics, and typically when you pump up one the other suffers.
Why? Gamers aren't morons and only morons buy Windows 8 and gaming companies want customers.
Really? Tell me, how many people buy Madden every year again? Oh, or the next Call of Duty: Whatever, it's Another One? Let's not even get into the sheer volume of gamers that claim Linux blows for "real" gaming...while they're on Linux dedicated servers. Gamers indeed can be morons.
I work at a game company and we do about once a week, once every 24 hours for hotfixes. We can't really do sooner for several reasons but the foremost is that players want to play our games and they can't do that if we're bringing the servers down. We use some heavy automation (and always getting heavier. Currently transitioning from in-house + bash scripts to bash scripts + git + Puppet) which acts as a force multiplier for your teams.
However, PLEASE be careful when doing automation and sending builds quicker. Not everything has to be automated and many times the issue is not getting the software out fast enough it's instead getting the STABLE software out fast enough. Nobody's gonna die if you take an extra hour to explain to another team what you've done to make sure it all makes sense to everybody (and if you're in a company where that DOES matter I'd recommend leaving it...that level of stress isn't good for your heart). Automating a complex system is a long, arduous, and minefield-laden task that's going to have some screw-ups and rethinks along the way.
My personal opinion is that you should use Puppet/cfengine/chef/whatever-you-like to not only help out with continuous configuration management but *also* as a means of codifying knowledge at various steps in the process. Don't just have one team do your automation, have everyone get in on it and get familiar. From my experience this has been easiest with Puppet due to its syntax and modules (aka I can hand off a module to the programmer team, they can punch it up, then I run it and if I want to know how it works Puppet will tell me everything I want to know). You get everyone speaking the same language, working on the process together this way which works as a sanity check and as a knowledge repository (you know, just in case god forbid your admin gets hit by a bus or your low level grunts win the lottery).
and now had enough cash I didn't need to work and could actually enjoy games as a player rather than as a developer.
Personally, as a player-turned-developer, I find it difficult to enjoy games past a certain point without the opportunity to participate in their creation.
Agreed. Only a cynical person would view not working on games as freedom. I absolutely love working on games, playing them, and sharing them.
Wouldn't this be wholly dependent on the distribution channel? I mean if you're going through Spotify and they're not paying you but beans, or iTunes isn't exactly working out, couldn't you...you know...use *another* service? The cost of reproducing the songs is nil given that it's already in a digital format, so it doesn't hurt to shop around.
I know they don't have a lot of popular support (last time I checked anyway) but what about services like Ubuntu One and Magnatune? Especially on the latter the payout model's pretty simple and straightforward. You could also say, "fuck it," and just put your stuff out on YouTube/ThePirateBay/Facebook/Google+/Wherever for free, with links to your event calendar for shows and something like Magnatune if they want to support you otherwise, maybe even a Cafepress/similar site for swag.
I'm not saying it's all the artists' fault mind you, industry execs are some evil filth, but they're not exactly lacking in options.
You might not have been aware of this but there are entire profitable websites dedicated to fornicating overweight people. Sounds like a dream job for anyone who visits those sites.
Yeah I think ms has been making some good products recently, but it can't get over the cloud of its past crap. Win7 is really good. Office 2010 and 2011 are really good. Ie9 is really good. Bing is really good. I'mm a Mac and iPad user at home, but I'm really impresse d by their recent work
O RLY? Windows 7 still has a hard limit on network devices (8 by default, 14 maximum) citation. And Office 2010? Fire up Outlook, make a rule that places a copy of every sent message into an archive located in a network drive. Shut down Outlook. Disconnect the network drive. Fire up Outlook. Watch it shit the bed as it doesn't know how to handle not being able to access an archive, even though it can still chat with Exchange.
And those are just two quite common ones right off the top of my head, not even digging into the slew of other embarassments like how Win7 still doesn't support the very concept of a virtual desktop or window edge resistance for manual placement, mysteriously dropping network connections whenever it feels like it, Excel 2010 not supporting multiple open instances of spreadsheets onscreen concurrently (How DARE you want to look at two spreadsheets side-by-side! Go back to LibreOffice!), and a long host of other bullshit.
Win7's a toy and so's Office. When they move past the 90's I'll be happy for them, but "impressed" is something I reserve for Linux and OS X. If it works for some people I'm happy for them, use the tool that works for you, but don't try to say their work is anything better than mediocre.
"Mom and Pop" military was the Minute Man militia, they'll lose every time against a mechanized military backed by a large corporate industrial structure.
Really? I'm sure all our wonderful folks killed by roadside bombs, improvised explosives, and guerilla tactics will be very happy to hear that'd never happen. Oh, shit, right...
Something that comes to mind is a line from, "Sin City." Roughly, "it's about lying. Lie a lot, and lie BIG and everyone will start to go along with it," (don't crucify me, it's not exact, haven't watched it in awhile).
At least in America there's another interesting experiment to "prove" this. Walk into a room of your average peers and say, "Americans have the best," where that something is completely absurd. Such as, "Americans have the best Internet service." Watch as most of the time everyone just sort of nods their head and agrees sagely to whatever moronic bullshit just tumbled out of your mouth.
They, the People, don't feel the government's presence or get pissed off with it because they're lied to on a scale I don't think we've ever seen before. You've got an absolute NEVER ENDING stream of media bombarding the hell out of every last man, woman, and child saying, "America's great! We're doing better than ever! Everyone else sucks! Don't worry, you're not alone, we're all in it together and tomorrow's gonna be amazing!"
But it's just a lie. In the face of such insanity there is no defense. Wrong becomes right, black becomes white, poor becomes rich, and the People are tricked into thinking the same bad decisions they've made before are the best choices they've ever made.
So tell me, if piracy is acceptable if you're poor, why isn't piracy acceptable if you simply don't feel like paying? Why should someone who DOES have money be required to pay for something that people who don't have money get for free? What possible incentive is there to be honest when there is no consequence for dishonesty?
Why should ANYONE have to pay for movies, music, books or software?
Corollary: Why should only SOME people have to pay for movies, music, books or software?
Corollary^2: Why should anyone get PAID for making movies, music, books or software?
Conclusion: Actors, musicians, authors and programmers are worthless, as are their works.
That's not reducto ad absurdum. That's the exact model (and conclusion) that media and software pirates advocate and promote.
I'd say following this line of thought *all* things created are worthless (after all, if it can be created once it should be able to be done so again). If that's the case then it'd be impossible create any wealth. If that was the case, there'd be no need for money since everyone could have everything.
Much as I'd like to argue against this as a Good Thing (tm) I can't really think of any "good" reason why anyone would actually want to encourage a society where the only motivation is to climb tooth and nail on top of everyone you perceive as worth "less" than you. Of course it'd be complete chaos, but if that was such a problem then it's arguing that instead of people being able to rationally work together that they have to put other people down and clamber over their worthless corpses.
But I dunno, I don't think I'm really trained for that sort of debate. Perhaps someone more enlightened could fill me in.
Ah, young idealism, trying to be the Debian. I was there, once. It is true that it's better to have open-source drivers, but you need a stable, open, documented hardware platform. PCs are, Android is neither.
You will spend your entire life rebuilding "plumbing" after which the hardware you've built it for is long dead while its descendents -- you cannot support. A life where you didn't actually build anything useful, the next iPhone nor next game-changing piece of software-engineering, but just ran in a mouse-wheel.
Reality is we just have to bend-over a little and suck up buying new hardware; accept the respective new binary blobs. Just try to stay above it. CyanogenMod is doing a good job there.
You're absolutely right, no good will ever come of trying to replicate and eventually surpass closed-source efforts. I'm definitely glad nobody ever decided to reverse-engineer UNIX or even implement his own version of of it. I mean that'd just be craziness!
Hey the Win7 start menu is great, I wish all OSes had something like it. You just type to search instead of having to navigate a big tree of submenus. Most Linux DEs have some kind of app search (like Gnome 2's Alt-F2), that's the closest thing they have to it, although Gnome 3 is coming out with a Win7-like menu.
KDE4's default kickoff launcher and Lancelot launchers have done this since 4.0. Hit the hotkey combo for the kicker or click on it and start typing.
Personally I find KDE4's default launcher the best when I need to use a launcher. Reason why is because for the life of me I can't figure out how in the hell Win7's launcher hierarchy is done. I'm sure it probably makes sense to someone, just not me. KDE's makes a lot of sense to me, so when I DON'T know what I want I can explore what's installed quickly. When I DO know what I want, I just type. Simple, clean, effective, and flexibile.
If society doesn't want to change who are you to tell it it should? Society is people , not mindless robots.
Not to sound like a tool but there's a difference? People en masse seem to gravitate towards a "hive mind" that most easily resonates with their pre-existing beliefs. They only break from it for a significant period of time if what they're being told VASTLY and JARRINGLY goes against what they already believe.
We build entire networks of systems this way using configuration management tools and they behave the exact same way. All the dumb machines spin up an agent (like puppet or CFengine), ask the master what they're supposed to be doing, the master tells them, and they pull themselves back into alignment with the master plan.
At least from where I'm standing society *is* a bunch of mindless robots that already have a configuration management agent installed called, "the media." The only way to steer the configuration of it is to be an administrator, and in this case the only administrators are the lobby groups with shedloads of cash, able to tell society what it's supposed to be doing.
But seriously, their R&D department do some pretty cool stuff. Even though MS manage to churn out nine-nines of crap products, occasionally they still come out with something awesome that they manage to get to market (think Kinect).
The problem with that idea is that Kinect was a 90%+ finished product when they bought it.
That's strange, isn't this EXACTLY the sort of thing people praise Apple for? I mean hell, two weeks ago that's exactly what I heard journalists waxing poetic about with Steve Jobs.
At my current employer who shall remain nameless for the time being we do an absolute metric shitload of image and video processing in Java for the US government. There's definitely some issues that continually need ironing out but you can usually get Java to do whatever it is you want if you don't mind spending enough time with it. We also have started using some C# but that's only to replace some positively ancient Access applications and then is probably going to promptly get thrown in the toilet.
One of the nice things about Java is that it's relatively powerful AND flexible. Now personally I loathe Java for many reasons but even I can't argue that it's become very effective. We could do more work in Ruby and Python but that would mean performance losses that we cannot accept and market support that we cannot accept either. We could do more work in C/C++, Fortran, or similar for the heavy lifting but if you've already got the bulk of the application written in Java it's not *that* hard to make the Java code fast enough to work for our purposes (fast, but not realtime fast). Plus your knowledge pool with your developers stays specialized and high (bad for their careers, but if they don't care then by all means bleed 'em dry I suppose...not that I agree).
Out of curiosity, isn't this exactly the sort of thing you're supposed to be doing with Puppet/CFengine/Chef/Bcfg2? I mean, to keep things running smoothly in a system you're looking to manage its configuration. If the city is a system then why not just create a "node" for each building, street, and so forth and use one of the aforementioned tools to manage it? I can't even imagine it'd be too hard, especially with Puppet due to its modular nature. Something I'm missing?
The better hardware you have the more you can benefit from high skill. High level console play has too much randomness because the players are bottlenecked by the controller/autoaim/low fps/small fov/etc. High level PC play often ends in very one-sided matches where small skill differences can be decisive. It's the difference between casual and hardcore play.
If I'm reading this right there's MORE randomness because the players are all using the SAME controller/autoaim/fps/fov. Yeah, that makes sense.
Talk to id about why Doom 3 multiplayer tanked. I'll give you a hint, players discovered they could simply turn off shadows thereby nullifying the ability to hide.
The unfortunate consequence of megatexturing is that nobody will be able to make custom maps for this. Carmack talked about needing an expensive server with 192GiB of RAM to compile the maps.
The technology is really impressive, but I can't imagine it being worth this. id has always been very friendly to the map/mod community—they're the last company I'd have expected this from.
A couple of years ago at QuakeCon John Carmack actually talked a bit about this and it's not at all surprising. He talked about how the problem for the mapping/modding community is that the games are so massively complex now it's nearly impossible to make anything of note without a software development team of your own. And he's right. Go back to the days of Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, and Quake and you've got HUGE volumes of mods, maps, and so forth. You could actually bang out a fairly interesting little map for Doom in an afternoon, then tweak it the following day.
Now fast forward to something like Far Cry or Doom 3. Modding these with anything even HALFWAY to the degree of those older games is nearly impossible. Replacing models with your own requires huge expenditures of time, talent, and skills that most people flat-out don't have (when's the last time you built a 3D rendered model on par with a character from Gears of War?). Instead, John saw that cell phones and other smaller games were where all the creativity was going. After all, pulling down the Android Dev kit is free, banging out a little game or modding someone else's isn't too terribly difficult by comparison and you've got a lot of examples to go off of.
Where John is seeing the "modding/mapping" community going is starting small. You start with smaller modifications, indie games, and other such things. When these are popular enough you attract more people and can start working on larger projects. Eventually you roll this up into a larger group that IS capable of modding the complicated titles in a tractable period of time (or just start your own studio, like with Splash Damage).
But hey, that's just what the man said. I think he's right and I think he knows a lot more about the topic than I do, but it's just his opinion. I guess they could be willingly spurning communities en masse as well. Which reminds me, id Tech 4 is due to be released open source soon...
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The difference is that I have accepted my place in life,
and ye shall forever be downtrodden as a result.
While I understand what you're trying to say to the parent and even, to an extent, agree with you the other side of the argument is that if you don't learn to accept where you are in life then you can never be content. I would imagine the parent is probably referring to having found a place in life that they are happy with. That's kind of an important bit of wisdom since for many people being at the "top" doesn't lead to happiness.
For an example I'm at the top of my game, but not at the top of earnings. Still, I make plenty of money, have no problem paying bills, buy anything I want, and do whatever I want (within reason). I don't let people walk over me but I don't need to walk over them, either. I find most people would be a lot happier if they'd take a few moments to realize that they don't actually want to be at "the top," it's just our media machine that blasts you with that.
Of course I could be wrong, I don't know for certain, none of us do. Maybe the parent's just a slacker.
I second the above. I work at a rather successful game company and on Windows we target, no joke, Win98. We make family friendly games and our target is, as you might have guessed, the entire family. Since most people aren't hardcore their systems are average on years old hardware at best, and while many families have hand-me-down boxes and laptops now those are running *even* older hardware. If our games run like crap on someone's ancient box they won't blame the box, they'll blame us, and then not play our games.
So yeah, we could *totally* make use of "the shiny" but to grow our user base that's just not something we can afford. It's how everything's going...id software's id tech 5 is scalable, Unreal Engine 3 is surprisingly scalable, Unity can target mobile platforms AND desktops, it's everywhere. I'm glad that some companies are dedicated to using "the shiny" but as we've all seen it's gameplay that matters, not graphics, and typically when you pump up one the other suffers.
and we won't have to put up with this anymore.
Why? Gamers aren't morons and only morons buy Windows 8 and gaming companies want customers.
Really? Tell me, how many people buy Madden every year again? Oh, or the next Call of Duty: Whatever, it's Another One? Let's not even get into the sheer volume of gamers that claim Linux blows for "real" gaming...while they're on Linux dedicated servers. Gamers indeed can be morons.
I work at a game company and we do about once a week, once every 24 hours for hotfixes. We can't really do sooner for several reasons but the foremost is that players want to play our games and they can't do that if we're bringing the servers down. We use some heavy automation (and always getting heavier. Currently transitioning from in-house + bash scripts to bash scripts + git + Puppet) which acts as a force multiplier for your teams.
However, PLEASE be careful when doing automation and sending builds quicker. Not everything has to be automated and many times the issue is not getting the software out fast enough it's instead getting the STABLE software out fast enough. Nobody's gonna die if you take an extra hour to explain to another team what you've done to make sure it all makes sense to everybody (and if you're in a company where that DOES matter I'd recommend leaving it...that level of stress isn't good for your heart). Automating a complex system is a long, arduous, and minefield-laden task that's going to have some screw-ups and rethinks along the way.
My personal opinion is that you should use Puppet/cfengine/chef/whatever-you-like to not only help out with continuous configuration management but *also* as a means of codifying knowledge at various steps in the process. Don't just have one team do your automation, have everyone get in on it and get familiar. From my experience this has been easiest with Puppet due to its syntax and modules (aka I can hand off a module to the programmer team, they can punch it up, then I run it and if I want to know how it works Puppet will tell me everything I want to know). You get everyone speaking the same language, working on the process together this way which works as a sanity check and as a knowledge repository (you know, just in case god forbid your admin gets hit by a bus or your low level grunts win the lottery).
No, I certainly did not want KOTOR with co-op. I want to be the protagonist of the story. That can't happen in multiplayer RPGs.
I'm supposing you never played Guild Wars.
and now had enough cash I didn't need to work and could actually enjoy games as a player rather than as a developer.
Personally, as a player-turned-developer, I find it difficult to enjoy games past a certain point without the opportunity to participate in their creation.
Agreed. Only a cynical person would view not working on games as freedom. I absolutely love working on games, playing them, and sharing them.
Wouldn't this be wholly dependent on the distribution channel? I mean if you're going through Spotify and they're not paying you but beans, or iTunes isn't exactly working out, couldn't you...you know...use *another* service? The cost of reproducing the songs is nil given that it's already in a digital format, so it doesn't hurt to shop around. I know they don't have a lot of popular support (last time I checked anyway) but what about services like Ubuntu One and Magnatune? Especially on the latter the payout model's pretty simple and straightforward. You could also say, "fuck it," and just put your stuff out on YouTube/ThePirateBay/Facebook/Google+/Wherever for free, with links to your event calendar for shows and something like Magnatune if they want to support you otherwise, maybe even a Cafepress/similar site for swag. I'm not saying it's all the artists' fault mind you, industry execs are some evil filth, but they're not exactly lacking in options.
You might not have been aware of this but there are entire profitable websites dedicated to fornicating overweight people. Sounds like a dream job for anyone who visits those sites.
I don't have any mod points, but I want to say thank you. Parent should most definitely get modded up insightful.
Yeah I think ms has been making some good products recently, but it can't get over the cloud of its past crap. Win7 is really good. Office 2010 and 2011 are really good. Ie9 is really good. Bing is really good. I'mm a Mac and iPad user at home, but I'm really impresse d by their recent work
O RLY? Windows 7 still has a hard limit on network devices (8 by default, 14 maximum) citation. And Office 2010? Fire up Outlook, make a rule that places a copy of every sent message into an archive located in a network drive. Shut down Outlook. Disconnect the network drive. Fire up Outlook. Watch it shit the bed as it doesn't know how to handle not being able to access an archive, even though it can still chat with Exchange.
And those are just two quite common ones right off the top of my head, not even digging into the slew of other embarassments like how Win7 still doesn't support the very concept of a virtual desktop or window edge resistance for manual placement, mysteriously dropping network connections whenever it feels like it, Excel 2010 not supporting multiple open instances of spreadsheets onscreen concurrently (How DARE you want to look at two spreadsheets side-by-side! Go back to LibreOffice!), and a long host of other bullshit.
Win7's a toy and so's Office. When they move past the 90's I'll be happy for them, but "impressed" is something I reserve for Linux and OS X. If it works for some people I'm happy for them, use the tool that works for you, but don't try to say their work is anything better than mediocre.
"Mom and Pop" military was the Minute Man militia, they'll lose every time against a mechanized military backed by a large corporate industrial structure.
Really? I'm sure all our wonderful folks killed by roadside bombs, improvised explosives, and guerilla tactics will be very happy to hear that'd never happen. Oh, shit, right...
Something that comes to mind is a line from, "Sin City." Roughly, "it's about lying. Lie a lot, and lie BIG and everyone will start to go along with it," (don't crucify me, it's not exact, haven't watched it in awhile).
," where that something is completely absurd. Such as, "Americans have the best Internet service." Watch as most of the time everyone just sort of nods their head and agrees sagely to whatever moronic bullshit just tumbled out of your mouth.
At least in America there's another interesting experiment to "prove" this. Walk into a room of your average peers and say, "Americans have the best
They, the People, don't feel the government's presence or get pissed off with it because they're lied to on a scale I don't think we've ever seen before. You've got an absolute NEVER ENDING stream of media bombarding the hell out of every last man, woman, and child saying, "America's great! We're doing better than ever! Everyone else sucks! Don't worry, you're not alone, we're all in it together and tomorrow's gonna be amazing!"
But it's just a lie. In the face of such insanity there is no defense. Wrong becomes right, black becomes white, poor becomes rich, and the People are tricked into thinking the same bad decisions they've made before are the best choices they've ever made.
So tell me, if piracy is acceptable if you're poor, why isn't piracy acceptable if you simply don't feel like paying? Why should someone who DOES have money be required to pay for something that people who don't have money get for free? What possible incentive is there to be honest when there is no consequence for dishonesty?
Why should ANYONE have to pay for movies, music, books or software? Corollary: Why should only SOME people have to pay for movies, music, books or software? Corollary^2: Why should anyone get PAID for making movies, music, books or software? Conclusion: Actors, musicians, authors and programmers are worthless, as are their works.
That's not reducto ad absurdum. That's the exact model (and conclusion) that media and software pirates advocate and promote.
I'd say following this line of thought *all* things created are worthless (after all, if it can be created once it should be able to be done so again). If that's the case then it'd be impossible create any wealth. If that was the case, there'd be no need for money since everyone could have everything.
Much as I'd like to argue against this as a Good Thing (tm) I can't really think of any "good" reason why anyone would actually want to encourage a society where the only motivation is to climb tooth and nail on top of everyone you perceive as worth "less" than you. Of course it'd be complete chaos, but if that was such a problem then it's arguing that instead of people being able to rationally work together that they have to put other people down and clamber over their worthless corpses.
But I dunno, I don't think I'm really trained for that sort of debate. Perhaps someone more enlightened could fill me in.
Ah, young idealism, trying to be the Debian. I was there, once. It is true that it's better to have open-source drivers, but you need a stable, open, documented hardware platform. PCs are, Android is neither.
You will spend your entire life rebuilding "plumbing" after which the hardware you've built it for is long dead while its descendents -- you cannot support. A life where you didn't actually build anything useful, the next iPhone nor next game-changing piece of software-engineering, but just ran in a mouse-wheel.
Reality is we just have to bend-over a little and suck up buying new hardware; accept the respective new binary blobs. Just try to stay above it. CyanogenMod is doing a good job there.
You're absolutely right, no good will ever come of trying to replicate and eventually surpass closed-source efforts. I'm definitely glad nobody ever decided to reverse-engineer UNIX or even implement his own version of of it. I mean that'd just be craziness!
three or four cars? embellish much?
At least around D.C./Northern VA/Southern MD that's an understatement, not an embellishment.
Hey the Win7 start menu is great, I wish all OSes had something like it. You just type to search instead of having to navigate a big tree of submenus. Most Linux DEs have some kind of app search (like Gnome 2's Alt-F2), that's the closest thing they have to it, although Gnome 3 is coming out with a Win7-like menu.
KDE4's default kickoff launcher and Lancelot launchers have done this since 4.0. Hit the hotkey combo for the kicker or click on it and start typing.
Personally I find KDE4's default launcher the best when I need to use a launcher. Reason why is because for the life of me I can't figure out how in the hell Win7's launcher hierarchy is done. I'm sure it probably makes sense to someone, just not me. KDE's makes a lot of sense to me, so when I DON'T know what I want I can explore what's installed quickly. When I DO know what I want, I just type. Simple, clean, effective, and flexibile.
If society doesn't want to change who are you to tell it it should? Society is people , not mindless robots.
Not to sound like a tool but there's a difference? People en masse seem to gravitate towards a "hive mind" that most easily resonates with their pre-existing beliefs. They only break from it for a significant period of time if what they're being told VASTLY and JARRINGLY goes against what they already believe.
We build entire networks of systems this way using configuration management tools and they behave the exact same way. All the dumb machines spin up an agent (like puppet or CFengine), ask the master what they're supposed to be doing, the master tells them, and they pull themselves back into alignment with the master plan.
At least from where I'm standing society *is* a bunch of mindless robots that already have a configuration management agent installed called, "the media." The only way to steer the configuration of it is to be an administrator, and in this case the only administrators are the lobby groups with shedloads of cash, able to tell society what it's supposed to be doing.
But I don't know, I could be wrong.
They're not traveling slower in this new experiment, neutrinos from further into the future just lapped the time-space continuum. :P
Undoing moderation. Sorry about that.
But seriously, their R&D department do some pretty cool stuff. Even though MS manage to churn out nine-nines of crap products, occasionally they still come out with something awesome that they manage to get to market (think Kinect).
The problem with that idea is that Kinect was a 90%+ finished product when they bought it.
That's strange, isn't this EXACTLY the sort of thing people praise Apple for? I mean hell, two weeks ago that's exactly what I heard journalists waxing poetic about with Steve Jobs.
Citations please.
here and here
At my current employer who shall remain nameless for the time being we do an absolute metric shitload of image and video processing in Java for the US government. There's definitely some issues that continually need ironing out but you can usually get Java to do whatever it is you want if you don't mind spending enough time with it. We also have started using some C# but that's only to replace some positively ancient Access applications and then is probably going to promptly get thrown in the toilet.
One of the nice things about Java is that it's relatively powerful AND flexible. Now personally I loathe Java for many reasons but even I can't argue that it's become very effective. We could do more work in Ruby and Python but that would mean performance losses that we cannot accept and market support that we cannot accept either. We could do more work in C/C++, Fortran, or similar for the heavy lifting but if you've already got the bulk of the application written in Java it's not *that* hard to make the Java code fast enough to work for our purposes (fast, but not realtime fast). Plus your knowledge pool with your developers stays specialized and high (bad for their careers, but if they don't care then by all means bleed 'em dry I suppose...not that I agree).
Out of curiosity, isn't this exactly the sort of thing you're supposed to be doing with Puppet/CFengine/Chef/Bcfg2? I mean, to keep things running smoothly in a system you're looking to manage its configuration. If the city is a system then why not just create a "node" for each building, street, and so forth and use one of the aforementioned tools to manage it? I can't even imagine it'd be too hard, especially with Puppet due to its modular nature. Something I'm missing?
The better hardware you have the more you can benefit from high skill. High level console play has too much randomness because the players are bottlenecked by the controller/autoaim/low fps/small fov/etc. High level PC play often ends in very one-sided matches where small skill differences can be decisive. It's the difference between casual and hardcore play.
If I'm reading this right there's MORE randomness because the players are all using the SAME controller/autoaim/fps/fov. Yeah, that makes sense.
Talk to id about why Doom 3 multiplayer tanked. I'll give you a hint, players discovered they could simply turn off shadows thereby nullifying the ability to hide.
Isnt Portal the best example of such a method?
No, Vanquish. Personal preference, naturally. ;)
The unfortunate consequence of megatexturing is that nobody will be able to make custom maps for this. Carmack talked about needing an expensive server with 192GiB of RAM to compile the maps.
The technology is really impressive, but I can't imagine it being worth this. id has always been very friendly to the map/mod community—they're the last company I'd have expected this from.
A couple of years ago at QuakeCon John Carmack actually talked a bit about this and it's not at all surprising. He talked about how the problem for the mapping/modding community is that the games are so massively complex now it's nearly impossible to make anything of note without a software development team of your own. And he's right. Go back to the days of Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, and Quake and you've got HUGE volumes of mods, maps, and so forth. You could actually bang out a fairly interesting little map for Doom in an afternoon, then tweak it the following day.
Now fast forward to something like Far Cry or Doom 3. Modding these with anything even HALFWAY to the degree of those older games is nearly impossible. Replacing models with your own requires huge expenditures of time, talent, and skills that most people flat-out don't have (when's the last time you built a 3D rendered model on par with a character from Gears of War?). Instead, John saw that cell phones and other smaller games were where all the creativity was going. After all, pulling down the Android Dev kit is free, banging out a little game or modding someone else's isn't too terribly difficult by comparison and you've got a lot of examples to go off of.
Where John is seeing the "modding/mapping" community going is starting small. You start with smaller modifications, indie games, and other such things. When these are popular enough you attract more people and can start working on larger projects. Eventually you roll this up into a larger group that IS capable of modding the complicated titles in a tractable period of time (or just start your own studio, like with Splash Damage).
But hey, that's just what the man said. I think he's right and I think he knows a lot more about the topic than I do, but it's just his opinion. I guess they could be willingly spurning communities en masse as well. Which reminds me, id Tech 4 is due to be released open source soon...