Why do people keep wanting to babble on about this idiocy? I want them to keep quiet about it - if you have to be a UFO-nut, I am certainly not interested in it.
Sheesh, ACC offered my this planet for a nice quiet vacation, but everywhere I see people babbling about UFOs...
I considered this, but have seen so many people being serious about things like that...
>...reading about serious subjects are often seen as the pastime of snobs and elitists.
Ah, understood. My apologies to you. May I add that anybody who sees reading about serious subjects as a snob/elitist pastime may be considered seriously mentally underpowered. Which would also explain intelligent people being considered 'elitist'.
Ever wrote a book? Know how darn proud you feel when you walk through a bookshop and watch people sit there, reading your book?
As for reading... hell, it's one of the best ways to learn there is. It's also a typical occupation of intelligent people. I've met a heck of a lot of people in very many countries. Every single smart one had a *lot* of books. Every single one. Haven't met many dumb people with a lot of books.
The very idea that, instead of reading, we should be playing some educational game is so ridiculous that I never expected to hear about it in seriousness...
Well, no - they didn't simply ignore the verdict. They paid people. Lots of them. Without the receiver showing the sum in his tax papers. Which is why they have so very little troubles in the US.
Well, while that keyboard does look rather nice, I find that these IBM keyboards are - to this day - the only ones I use. I couldn't damage one like this...
Yeeees, okay, I'm an Old Fart. But since about '82, this is the keyboard I've been working with. The quality is amazing, spilling coffee over it will not damage it, it always, always, always works, it has a very pleasant hard feel to it, very definite feedback, and a lack of these moronic Windows-Keys which are always in my way. I take the keys off once a year to clean the whole thing (no big effort at all), and it looks like new afterwards. This is also the opportunity to see the very high quality: the bending springs design was an excellent idea.
My keyboard at work (I have several, one for each PC, and several backups - none have failed yet, but just to be sure...) is from 1989. No print fading at all, works perfectly - still looks brand new. Compare that to whatever other keyboards you've been using. Modern keyboards apparently only need to last a few years, and they're a lot cheaper to build.
Yes, it's noisier than a modern keyboard. I don't mind, and my cow-workers get used to it;)
Oh, and if you're interested: some shops have old versions, and eBay has them as well. No need to spend $100 on a new one (still being built by another company) - I paid about $10 for each of mine.
No, ladies and gentlemen, not lack of trust of Google (I do trust them, strangely enough). Lack of trust to the USA gouverment.
I consider Googles idea a good one - but with one flaw: you place all your data on the net. You think that's okay? It's not, and I'll give you an example why:
Recently, two kids (16 and 17 years) photographed themselves while having sex. Then she sent the pictures from her PC to his PC, via email. Nothing else - a single email, no info to anybody else. The state brought them to court: producing and distributing child pornography.
Not only is the idea behind this absolutely ridiculous (but we're used to hearing things like this from the US), but the state refused to say where they got that data from. You can't tell me that they were sniffing the two kids PC because, well, they were expected to be terrorists. Thus we can assume that they scan data over the net. Probably yours, too. Would you trust your [company|private business] data to your state?
Um... tell me, do you honestly believe that the USA will even make it to the moon? "...President Bush's plans for manned voyages to the Moon and Mars, but how there was no funding created for this purpose."
Look, I make the following prediction: President Bush talks about Moon and Mars to get votes and seem technological. No money will be forthcoming to actually DO these projects. On the contrary, NASA will be receiving more cuts. In the end, both projects will have to be dropped. Simple.
Want to bet? In all seriousness, I'm willing to accept a bet for, say, a nice french champagne, together with some good swiss choclate. Time: three years.
A friend of mine loves rats. As pets. And actually, they're a lot more friendly than you might think (rats, not friends;) The main problem, however, is cancer. The current breeds of rat pets (the same used by laboratories) have a very high chance of getting cancer.
Thus, no matter what you test or what you feed your rats, they will eventually die of cancer. Therefore the question is: do the rats fed the new stuff die sooner than the other ones? If they do, well, then your new stuff has a good chance of causing cancer in rats, and thus possibly humans.
Re:Economics of interstellar travel
on
Interstellar Ark
·
· Score: 1
Easy.
Let's use 10% of the money to USA spends in a single year on its warfare profiteering. This would be more than sufficient to reach another star.
Well, I'm a lot like you: thirtysomething, no degree. Been teaching artificial brains how to think since 1984, commercially since '86 (hey, that's over a querter of a century!;)
I'd say you could try joining a remote university, i.e. doing everything from home via mail. You can use the evenings to work yourself all the way up to a Ph.D. (looks nice on a card, and you'll feel good about it). A 'real' university, while great fun, would cost you a heck of a lot of money - even if you do it here in Germany, where it's (nearly) free. And you'd have to work in the evenings just to earn your rent and food...
Me, I'd advise against it. If you really are bored in the evenings, do what I do: code something interesting. Maybe it's only interesting for you, maybe other people will like it, maybe you'll even become stinking rich - who knows? But you won't be bored:)
Strange - but every few years (months, by now?) we hear this again: no more original games possible, nobody wants them, waaaah!
Yes, creating/selling original games is difficult. This has several reasons:
It must be original instead of yet another Elf-Bashes-Monsters or Space-Hero-Shoots-Monsters.
Familiar games tend to sell better - not just to customers, but to financers.
Like most new ideas, most original games are flops. Their ideas simply don't 'click' with the players. Often enough they have a small, fanatical fan-club, but this doesn't make enough money, especially when the financers insisted on huge loads of fancy graphics and whatever, pushing up the number of people needed to create this.
However, every now and then an original game comes out. And is a huge success. And has so many followers (coders and users) that this type of game soon becomes familiar again. Where do you think all the familiar games came from? Thin air?
But this doesn't happen often. You need very good, very original people. And seeing how most companies work (loads of average programmers (cheaper), concentrate on pretty graphics, large bureaucrazies) this explains *why* it happens so seldomly. They do not want to take risks.
Watch this space! In (at most) a year or so, we'll have this question again: "Where O Where Are The Original Games?"
Well, I'm a bit unhappy that it's happening in my lifetime, but at least I'm not living in the USA anymore.
Read some history, ladies and gentlemen. Over the years there were quite a few world powers you'd never think of today: Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and so on. These were countries of POWER. They ruled the world. And after a collapse, they're now very friendly tourist destinations with lovely countrysides and nice people - who don't get on the nerves of their neighbors.
The state collapse always followed the same pattern. And you can see the exact same thing happening in the USA now. Read it up, you nonbelievers;)
Personally, I like the USA citizens - at least the ones I met while I lived there for a while. It's the state which is running itself into the ground, and which will collapse relatively soon. I'm sure the country will turn into a beautiful destination for tourist travels; it'll just take a few years.
Apparently, the main difference between XP and Vista is the very massive DRM management system. Somehow, they appear to have written a tightly closed and secured system (against you, the user and owner) to appease the movie market - which is about an order of magnitude smaller than the computer game market alone. So now we have an OS which gets in your way, slows down your hardware, has horrific functionality to make sure you have trouble with playing movies - and has nothing really new.
Come to think of it, what does XP do so much better than Win2000? Personally, I use my Windows installation to play games - which works very well in W2000. Why would I need to go through the costs and effort to upgrade to XP, let alone Vista? I do some programming on Windows (Delphi) - works just as well in W2K as in XP or even Vista. I do some writing (LaTeX, PalmOS PDA - no MS-Word needed, thanks), and surf about (Firefox, Windows or Linux).
So, why is everybody yelling about Vista? My system works great for me as it is (and yes, I play the latest games enthusiastically) - why upgrade it? What are the advantages of the upgrade?
"...interrogation methods which are tantamount to torture..."
Please, no PC here. These methods *are* torture, plain and simple. Highly effective, ethically disgusting, strategically useless (as the people will say absolutely anything you want to hear). Torture. Official torture. By the state. Your state.
Well, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't...
My guess is that there are plenty of Just-Sometimes-Players who will appreciate paying quite a bit less for a game, and who don't mind receiving less play-time in the process. Personally, I don't think I'll be interested in episodic gaming; but I bet that it'll create a niche of its own.
I also bet that there are going to be some very massive failures:)
No. It merely wants to control you. And is not at all interested in treating you as a solid citizen. I'll remind you of your comment in a year or two...
Remember the game "Settlers II"? Glorious 2D, great fun. Since the follow-ups (Settlers III and IV) simply flopped, they now re-created Settlers II. In 3D.
Sure the graphics look nice - but suddenly, you don't have the overview anymore. 3D means that you *don't* see everything, that this path there is hidden by the nicely detailed 3D trees, that you keep having to rotate around... nice being able to zoom in, but WHAT FOR?
Bah. Some game concepts work well in 3D. Others simply work better in 2D.
My, sir, what an interesting way you have of expressing your discontent. I am sure it reflects on other large parts of your life as well.
You wrote that "That game probably has zero models over 300 polys.", which could be interpreted as meaning: "This game does not have enough polys, ergo the models used do not look good enough". Which is why I was intrigued to see if you find this particularly important. I know many people who do, and I thought responding to your post would show me yet another viewpoint.
Instead, it showed me a nobody who seems quite incapable of polite conversation.
Had you demonstrated an even semi-interesting point of view, I would have asked you to continue this discussion via email. Since, however, you do not seem capable of holding an intelligent opinion, much less know how to argue in a polite manner, I will see this as a moot point.
I don't know. I do know that the graphics are very nice indeed. The UI is excellent, and the game is great fun, very well worth its price. I enjoy it a lot. And since it also lacks copyprotection, I don't have to get a new patch every time an update comes out.
So you feel that a game using models with many many many polygons are better, simply because they use more polygons? Just because their models look that little bit better? I don't. I prefere content, AI, UI, fun and major replayability. Super-duper-extra-fancy-requiring-major-cards graphics don't rock my boat.
No. It is not okay AT ALL. Personally, I hate advertisements. A system connecting to an ad server to update that crap is not acceptable (I don't allow foreign code to contact outside systems from my PC), an old game showing completely outdated advertisements is also rubbish.
So game development is getting too expensive? Well maybe your company is simply too large and bureaucratic? What about Introversion (Uplink, Defcon, Darwinia), for example? Or the chaps who created Space Ranger (Excalibur Publishing)? Very nice games, and very small companies. Plenty more like that. Take-Two is not facing financial ruin unless they add this stuff - they simply wish to up their profits: have us PAY for advertisements (don't try to tell me the games will be cheaper - they won't be).
Well, I am also going to vote with my wallet. I hereby declare that I will not buy any (any!) game which contains advertisements. Hell, I don't have a TV due to the advertising garbage (which is perhaps why I haven't gotten as used to it yet as many people apparently have), you think I want to see this crap on my PC?
Looks like these games have become, well, uncasual.
I do not know how much Introversion spent on its very nice casual games 'Defcon' or 'Uplink', but I'm pretty sure it wasn't $700,000. Personally, I wrote the PC version of the 1984 Mac-Hit 'ChipWits', and it didn't cost me a cent (just some time).
What's wrong with the companies claiming to write casual software? Grown too much? Too much bureaucracy? Too expensive managers? Too many people?
Slashdot Mirror
Why do people keep wanting to babble on about this idiocy? I want them to keep quiet about it - if you have to be a UFO-nut, I am certainly not interested in it.
Sheesh, ACC offered my this planet for a nice quiet vacation, but everywhere I see people babbling about UFOs...
> I wasn't being serious.
...reading about serious subjects are often seen as the pastime of snobs and elitists.
I considered this, but have seen so many people being serious about things like that...
>
Ah, understood. My apologies to you.
May I add that anybody who sees reading about serious subjects as a snob/elitist pastime may be considered seriously mentally underpowered. Which would also explain intelligent people being considered 'elitist'.
>Reading and writing are *so* passe, but...
Ouch.
Ever wrote a book? Know how darn proud you feel when you walk through a bookshop and watch people sit there, reading your book?
As for reading... hell, it's one of the best ways to learn there is. It's also a typical occupation of intelligent people.
I've met a heck of a lot of people in very many countries. Every single smart one had a *lot* of books. Every single one.
Haven't met many dumb people with a lot of books.
The very idea that, instead of reading, we should be playing some educational game is so ridiculous that I never expected to hear about it in seriousness...
Well, no - they didn't simply ignore the verdict.
They paid people. Lots of them. Without the receiver showing the sum in his tax papers.
Which is why they have so very little troubles in the US.
>Some people deserve to be on those lists.
Well, approximately 95% of them don't. And I can accept a 5% failure rate.
Well, while that keyboard does look rather nice, I find that these IBM keyboards are - to this day - the only ones I use. I couldn't damage one like this...
;)
Yeeees, okay, I'm an Old Fart.
But since about '82, this is the keyboard I've been working with. The quality is amazing, spilling coffee over it will not damage it, it always, always, always works, it has a very pleasant hard feel to it, very definite feedback, and a lack of these moronic Windows-Keys which are always in my way.
I take the keys off once a year to clean the whole thing (no big effort at all), and it looks like new afterwards. This is also the opportunity to see the very high quality: the bending springs design was an excellent idea.
My keyboard at work (I have several, one for each PC, and several backups - none have failed yet, but just to be sure...) is from 1989. No print fading at all, works perfectly - still looks brand new. Compare that to whatever other keyboards you've been using. Modern keyboards apparently only need to last a few years, and they're a lot cheaper to build.
Yes, it's noisier than a modern keyboard. I don't mind, and my cow-workers get used to it
Oh, and if you're interested: some shops have old versions, and eBay has them as well. No need to spend $100 on a new one (still being built by another company) - I paid about $10 for each of mine.
No, ladies and gentlemen, not lack of trust of Google (I do trust them, strangely enough).
Lack of trust to the USA gouverment.
I consider Googles idea a good one - but with one flaw: you place all your data on the net.
You think that's okay? It's not, and I'll give you an example why:
Recently, two kids (16 and 17 years) photographed themselves while having sex. Then she sent the pictures from her PC to his PC, via email. Nothing else - a single email, no info to anybody else.
The state brought them to court: producing and distributing child pornography.
Not only is the idea behind this absolutely ridiculous (but we're used to hearing things like this from the US), but the state refused to say where they got that data from.
You can't tell me that they were sniffing the two kids PC because, well, they were expected to be terrorists. Thus we can assume that they scan data over the net. Probably yours, too. Would you trust your [company|private business] data to your state?
I wouldn't.
Um... tell me, do you honestly believe that the USA will even make it to the moon?
"...President Bush's plans for manned voyages to the Moon and Mars, but how there was no funding created for this purpose."
Look, I make the following prediction: President Bush talks about Moon and Mars to get votes and seem technological. No money will be forthcoming to actually DO these projects. On the contrary, NASA will be receiving more cuts.
In the end, both projects will have to be dropped.
Simple.
Want to bet? In all seriousness, I'm willing to accept a bet for, say, a nice french champagne, together with some good swiss choclate. Time: three years.
Actually - it does :)
;)
A friend of mine loves rats. As pets. And actually, they're a lot more friendly than you might think (rats, not friends
The main problem, however, is cancer. The current breeds of rat pets (the same used by laboratories) have a very high chance of getting cancer.
Thus, no matter what you test or what you feed your rats, they will eventually die of cancer.
Therefore the question is: do the rats fed the new stuff die sooner than the other ones? If they do, well, then your new stuff has a good chance of causing cancer in rats, and thus possibly humans.
Easy.
Let's use 10% of the money to USA spends in a single year on its warfare profiteering.
This would be more than sufficient to reach another star.
Yes, sorry, am rather tired.
;)
Together with the 'querter' of a century I actually meant "since '81, commercially since '84"...
So it *is* > a querter of a cantury...
Well, I'm a lot like you: thirtysomething, no degree. Been teaching artificial brains how to think since 1984, commercially since '86 (hey, that's over a querter of a century! ;)
:)
I'd say you could try joining a remote university, i.e. doing everything from home via mail. You can use the evenings to work yourself all the way up to a Ph.D. (looks nice on a card, and you'll feel good about it).
A 'real' university, while great fun, would cost you a heck of a lot of money - even if you do it here in Germany, where it's (nearly) free. And you'd have to work in the evenings just to earn your rent and food...
Me, I'd advise against it. If you really are bored in the evenings, do what I do: code something interesting. Maybe it's only interesting for you, maybe other people will like it, maybe you'll even become stinking rich - who knows? But you won't be bored
Strange - but every few years (months, by now?) we hear this again: no more original games possible, nobody wants them, waaaah!
Yes, creating/selling original games is difficult. This has several reasons:
It must be original instead of yet another Elf-Bashes-Monsters or Space-Hero-Shoots-Monsters.
Familiar games tend to sell better - not just to customers, but to financers.
Like most new ideas, most original games are flops. Their ideas simply don't 'click' with the players. Often enough they have a small, fanatical fan-club, but this doesn't make enough money, especially when the financers insisted on huge loads of fancy graphics and whatever, pushing up the number of people needed to create this.
However, every now and then an original game comes out. And is a huge success. And has so many followers (coders and users) that this type of game soon becomes familiar again. Where do you think all the familiar games came from? Thin air?
But this doesn't happen often. You need very good, very original people. And seeing how most companies work (loads of average programmers (cheaper), concentrate on pretty graphics, large bureaucrazies) this explains *why* it happens so seldomly. They do not want to take risks.
Watch this space! In (at most) a year or so, we'll have this question again: "Where O Where Are The Original Games?"
...mention both 'bionics' and 'cats', and you'll have an enormous cloud of geeks following your every step.
Well, I'm a bit unhappy that it's happening in my lifetime, but at least I'm not living in the USA anymore.
;)
Read some history, ladies and gentlemen. Over the years there were quite a few world powers you'd never think of today: Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and so on. These were countries of POWER. They ruled the world.
And after a collapse, they're now very friendly tourist destinations with lovely countrysides and nice people - who don't get on the nerves of their neighbors.
The state collapse always followed the same pattern. And you can see the exact same thing happening in the USA now. Read it up, you nonbelievers
Personally, I like the USA citizens - at least the ones I met while I lived there for a while. It's the state which is running itself into the ground, and which will collapse relatively soon.
I'm sure the country will turn into a beautiful destination for tourist travels; it'll just take a few years.
Apparently, the main difference between XP and Vista is the very massive DRM management system.
Somehow, they appear to have written a tightly closed and secured system (against you, the user and owner) to appease the movie market - which is about an order of magnitude smaller than the computer game market alone.
So now we have an OS which gets in your way, slows down your hardware, has horrific functionality to make sure you have trouble with playing movies - and has nothing really new.
Come to think of it, what does XP do so much better than Win2000? Personally, I use my Windows installation to play games - which works very well in W2000. Why would I need to go through the costs and effort to upgrade to XP, let alone Vista?
I do some programming on Windows (Delphi) - works just as well in W2K as in XP or even Vista. I do some writing (LaTeX, PalmOS PDA - no MS-Word needed, thanks), and surf about (Firefox, Windows or Linux).
So, why is everybody yelling about Vista? My system works great for me as it is (and yes, I play the latest games enthusiastically) - why upgrade it? What are the advantages of the upgrade?
"...interrogation methods which are tantamount to torture..."
Please, no PC here.
These methods *are* torture, plain and simple. Highly effective, ethically disgusting, strategically useless (as the people will say absolutely anything you want to hear).
Torture. Official torture. By the state. Your state.
Well, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't...
:)
My guess is that there are plenty of Just-Sometimes-Players who will appreciate paying quite a bit less for a game, and who don't mind receiving less play-time in the process.
Personally, I don't think I'll be interested in episodic gaming; but I bet that it'll create a niche of its own.
I also bet that there are going to be some very massive failures
> Don't be silly, government is not after you
No. It merely wants to control you. And is not at all interested in treating you as a solid citizen.
I'll remind you of your comment in a year or two...
Remember the game "Settlers II"? Glorious 2D, great fun.
Since the follow-ups (Settlers III and IV) simply flopped, they now re-created Settlers II. In 3D.
Sure the graphics look nice - but suddenly, you don't have the overview anymore. 3D means that you *don't* see everything, that this path there is hidden by the nicely detailed 3D trees, that you keep having to rotate around... nice being able to zoom in, but WHAT FOR?
Bah.
Some game concepts work well in 3D. Others simply work better in 2D.
...of the first thing I read when I looked at the heading, bone-tired: cumSore.
Mhm.
My, sir, what an interesting way you have of expressing your discontent. I am sure it reflects on other large parts of your life as well.
You wrote that "That game probably has zero models over 300 polys.", which could be interpreted as meaning: "This game does not have enough polys, ergo the models used do not look good enough". Which is why I was intrigued to see if you find this particularly important.
I know many people who do, and I thought responding to your post would show me yet another viewpoint.
Instead, it showed me a nobody who seems quite incapable of polite conversation.
Had you demonstrated an even semi-interesting point of view, I would have asked you to continue this discussion via email. Since, however, you do not seem capable of holding an intelligent opinion, much less know how to argue in a polite manner, I will see this as a moot point.
Enjoy your life.
Only 300 polys?
I don't know. I do know that the graphics are very nice indeed. The UI is excellent, and the game is great fun, very well worth its price. I enjoy it a lot. And since it also lacks copyprotection, I don't have to get a new patch every time an update comes out.
So you feel that a game using models with many many many polygons are better, simply because they use more polygons? Just because their models look that little bit better?
I don't. I prefere content, AI, UI, fun and major replayability. Super-duper-extra-fancy-requiring-major-cards graphics don't rock my boat.
No.
It is not okay AT ALL. Personally, I hate advertisements. A system connecting to an ad server to update that crap is not acceptable (I don't allow foreign code to contact outside systems from my PC), an old game showing completely outdated advertisements is also rubbish.
So game development is getting too expensive? Well maybe your company is simply too large and bureaucratic? What about Introversion (Uplink, Defcon, Darwinia), for example? Or the chaps who created Space Ranger (Excalibur Publishing)? Very nice games, and very small companies. Plenty more like that.
Take-Two is not facing financial ruin unless they add this stuff - they simply wish to up their profits: have us PAY for advertisements (don't try to tell me the games will be cheaper - they won't be).
Well, I am also going to vote with my wallet. I hereby declare that I will not buy any (any!) game which contains advertisements.
Hell, I don't have a TV due to the advertising garbage (which is perhaps why I haven't gotten as used to it yet as many people apparently have), you think I want to see this crap on my PC?
Looks like these games have become, well, uncasual.
,)
I do not know how much Introversion spent on its very nice casual games 'Defcon' or 'Uplink', but I'm pretty sure it wasn't $700,000.
Personally, I wrote the PC version of the 1984 Mac-Hit 'ChipWits', and it didn't cost me a cent (just some time).
What's wrong with the companies claiming to write casual software? Grown too much? Too much bureaucracy? Too expensive managers? Too many people?
Ciao,
Klaus
PS: PC ChipWits: http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/ (no, it doesn't cost a cent, yes I'm advertising it here for feedback