I was just thinking about how this idea that environmental conditions can affect a child's gender predilections, and therefore probably their sexual orientation, would be offensive to the typical religious fundamentalist's stance on homosexuality as a choice. And now you're bringing up this experiment with chimps, the results of which are significant in relation to humans only when one accepts the idea of evolution.
It's just fascinating to think that maybe one day science will flat out, brute force trample over this ridiculous idea in the minds of these people that homosexuality is a choice and therefore an abomination and we can all just get on with our lives. That is, if the biosphere isn't turned completely female from pollution and life dies out entirely. Which would also be pretty funny really.
So if we all move to simple client apps and micro consoles, no longer upgrading our machines ourselves, then who will be driving high-end graphics innovations? With no market for PC graphics cards or even for cards in new consoles then who pays ATI / Nvidia to continue developing new technology? I suppose the responsibility then falls to game developers? Will they need to push new graphics innovation nearly as hard as the current market where large companies are constantly competing to upstage each other visually?
Sony has officially touted the Playstation 3 generation as a 10 year affair. The following quote from then SCEA president Hirai (he stepped down not long ago didn't he?) is especially interesting in light of any possible significant trend of unsupported console failures:
"We're not going to ask the consumers to suddenly buy another PlayStation console in five years' time and basically have their investment go by the wayside,"
He's referring of course to obsolescence, but if the machine can't even physically survive it's term of technological relevance that's quite an embarrassing quote.
I'm generally a pretty language-agnostic or even crass kind of guy. I curse like a sailor. But for the love of god can we please stop with the "bending over" and "lubing up" talk when discussing what are really very trivial matters such as retailer dishonesty? It's pretty lame to bilk your customers and nobody really deserves to be treated like that, but it's in no way close to being sodomized. It really isn't. This sort of hyperbole is bordering on a level of absurdity that nearly rivals Godwin's law.
Retailers try to make as much money as they can and a sucker is born every minute. Unscrupulous retail will continue indefinitely with or without the presence of KY jelly or callipygian pruriency. Save the buttfucking talk for big things like federal malfeasance, or I dunno sports fanaticism.
They've always had the sci-fi crowd. The people who know that James Cameron did more than Titanic (and that using Titanic as his reference is kind of silly) will already have all the reason they need to go. Even those bitching about it here will be there on day 1. So why even go after them? Why not target those people that really liked Titanic and maybe thought Aliens and T2 were too violent/scary.
Personally I would have said from the director of The Abyss, but sadly that movie isn't quite as universally beloved as it damned well should be.
What exactly is copyrighted? The textures? Replace them with your own. The Mesh? How can you even say it came from Spore? Seems to me with a few small changes you have yourself a model with which you can do anything you want. If Spore isn't a modelling application now, it's at least a modelling cookbook of sorts. A starting point. And now I might finally be interested in it.
Yea no. That's better than say Disney and their offensive attempts at disabling parts of your remote during their previews, but it's still a far cry from ideal.
Remember when DVDs first came out? You could watch previews, if you actively looked for them on the disc. They were often sequestered in the special features menu. Which is ideal because trailers for future movies have a shelf life of a month or two. Whereas the movie you purchased is meant to last for years. That was the whole point of buying it in the first place. Once DVDs got a foothold in the market companies began forcing previews down your throat. They don't care that you really like this movie and intend on watching it multiple times over the years. They just want to make sure you see the new product they have coming out.
The new product which, if you're at all of discerning taste, is likely to be garbage. Garbage that parades around in front of you again and again each time you try to play your beloved movie. Anymore I just rip movies to my media server immediately after I get them. Then the next time I want to play the movie, it just starts. It starts up and I'm just there, in the movie. The whole point of the exercise in the first place. Every once in a while I just place the disc in the tray and play it the old fashioned way. And often I'm amazed how much useless bullshit I have to flip through to get to the fucking meat.
You can call it nitpicking. It's a very small amount of your time they're wasting. Any particular instance of it is insignificant. But think about the aggregate amount of time and energy wasted on such things over the course of the lifetimes of all consumers. For something that moves as fast as the modern world does, those little moments are more precious than people tend to realize. Especially when it is something that ultimately benefits neither party (spent, worthlessly old advertising). I paid you. Stop fucking with me and let me enjoy my purchase.
I noticed that too. Unless you have a real problem with gays I don't know how you could have read that part as anything but intolerant. I almost wanted a copy of it. It's that sort of thing, like segregation, you know you'll just look back on and think wow how primitive times were. Hopefully anyway.
Consequently, if you wait until the last minute for early voting, you'll be in a long line.
Just wanted to say that we arrived 20 minutes after the place opened on Sunday, and ended up waiting 3.5 hours to vote. Florida here. Apparently more early voters turned out than ever before. I guess they just weren't prepared for such interest.
At least we got indoors before the rain, though it was kind of inspiring to see a block of people standing around with umbrellas for hours just to cast their votes.
Here, here. The PixelJunk games are honestly quite sublime. Whoever can play Eden and not get totally sucked in, I cry for your wilted inner child.
PixelJunk's next game is supposed to be a dungeon crawler, a genre of game I have traditionally cared nothing for, but since it's PixelJunk I'm actually quite intrigued.
This is not inherently bad if the original game was any good. Nobody was really bitching about Doom II. Making multiple games with what is essentially the same engine + a few tweaks is a good way to spread out the cost of R&D. It's also nice not to wait years between games from your favorite developers.
Of course it depends on the genre too. Madden's yearly release schedule is made all the more ridiculous by the fact that basing it on the game of pro football doesn't leave a whole lot of room for wildly different content or rule changes between outings.
It's a good point, and also kind of a shame it's only for Quake 3. Here's hoping it opens up in the future, as it could be pretty awesome to develop 3D games for browsers with full 3D acceleration and support for joysticks/peripherals.
While games in Flash have come a long way, Adobe hasn't seemed very interested in including such game specific features to its plugin, which is a shame considering the penetration of Flash. If id can get this out there and installed on a significant amount of browsers it could really turn into something special for online web gaming.
Again, opening it up to be a more general purpose plugin would be most desirable, but even just doing Quake3 mods is pretty powerful. Just off the top of my head there have been racing, platform, and strategy games made within the Quake engine. All very different genres than Quake. Though from TFA it seems like they nailed everything down tight, at least for the time being. We'll see.
Actually, thanks to XBMC my original XBox has quite possibly gotten the most use I've ever gotten out of a game console. Maybe they're sore at what real innovation can do with their hardware.
And to be honest, if the 360 weren't so completely unreliable, I might have bought one just for the chance of an XBMC360 happening down the line.
Everyone should be thanking MS for jumping into the console market. Whether you like the XBox or not, the competition has made the market better.
I strongly disagree. This has been the hardest console purchase decision I've ever had. Before this gen it was never really a question of which console to buy (or more frustratingly which model). Each system had it's perks. I had a Genesis and a Super Nintendo. I had a Playstation and a Nintendo 64 (the Saturn was rubbish). I had an XBox and a PS2 (sorry Nintendo, the Gamecube was so under supported).
This gen I keep going back and forth. Do I buy a PS3? Is blu-ray worth a shit? I don't have an HDTV yet. It is nice to be able to swap out that HDD for a non-proprietary drive. Oh no, no rumble. Hey it can play xvid now. Awe, now it's just limited software emulation of backwards compatibility. Hmm, another new model, I can barely keep track anymore. Awe, now they're making the systems with no backwards compatibility anymore:( Hmm is it really that hard to develop games for?
Should I buy an XBox 360? God that's a dumb name, were they really pissing their pants that much about being called XBox2 when the PS3 came out? Are we really going to play XBox720/1040/1400? What is this company really thinking? Hey look at all those hardware failures. Sounds risky. Hmm, but people say it's got some good games. Which model do I buy? Hmm all the cheaper ones seem to be hiding their costs in additional hardware you'll have to buy. That's stupid. Wow, that HDD price is flat out rape. Hmm it does seem to have a lot of momentum with people. But they dropped support for my original XBox like instantaneously, that still stings a bit. Are they already talking about the next XBox. Wtf! Live looks pretty good though. Wow wait why would I pay for that? Haven't they seen Steam for the PC (which is free and pretty similarly featured)? And there's ads everywhere even though I'm paying for it? Fuck guys, pick one or the other. XBLA looks pretty cool. Lots of neat games. Damn that's some stupid DRM they have built into it. Not like the PS3 is completely open, but man I hate supporting such broken DRM in a product. Hey look, price drops around the corner. I still have to buy all those stupid accessories (HDD, wi-fi), which are kinda necessary for me anyway.
A lot of this is due to new technology. And so are the higher prices. But the unsure presentation and splintering of the systems into different models is just folly. Man there are too many models to choose from. On Sony's part this was just hubris. For MS it seems more like desperation (like the number thing in their name). Both are issues of brand and not product, and each product is really suffering under this infatuation with brand building. I'm here to play games, not to join a fanboy club. And again with the higher price, people become so invested with their purchase they become fanboys. Hey thanks for that addition to the console world guys.
I have a Wii. It was a no-brainer frankly. And it's a fun console. I don't regret it and I feel it's earned the money I've spent on it already.
For the meatier games, I think I'll eventually go with the PS3, once they get that Dual Shock 3 in there (sixaxis can blow). I'm not going to repeatedly send in a 360 for repairs. I've never had to do that with any of my consoles. After 2+ years MS hasn't got the RRoD problem under control?
As far as I'm concerned, the major thing MS has contributed to gaming, besides popularizing online play (for the dumb ape types who couldn't figure it out for the 15 years it's been hugely popular in PC gaming), is the dubious achievement of really lowering the bar on hardware reliability. I still kind of blame the consumers on that one. C'mon people, demand better quality products or we're just going to keep getting hasn't-left-beta, still-born trash. And MS will gladly sell it to you. Maybe Sony next time...
I've always suspected the RRoD "fiasco" is really just an elaborate copy-protection technique. What better way to prevent your users from modding their consoles than continuously forcing them to mail their consoles back to you...
I recently watched the documentary Manda Bala about the political corruption and kidnapping rampant in Brazil. There was a man interviewed who was so interested in this technology he said he would in fact get 2 implants in case the first was somehow removed. While I have no real grasp of this man's day to day reality I find such an enthusiasm for being chipped by the government alarming.
I do recall people complaining that the Dreamcast had pretty dismal third-party support. In fact Midway was the only other company from whom I remember owning a great deal of DC titles. Maybe a few Capcom titles as well. Which was fitting really, as between those two and SEGA, the Dreamcast was basically an arcade in your home.
Still maybe it wouldn't have died so soon if it had had a more expansive and diversified software library. Will we be saying the same about the Wii in a year?
Not to just be contrary, but I didn't much like that one. It was just too slow. I realize this was a concious part of the design, but I really thing it would have benefitted from a quicker more responsive character. A more Mario approach. That said, it was the best original Wiiware title I've come across. Which isn't saying too much unfortunately.
Slashdot Mirror
I was just thinking about how this idea that environmental conditions can affect a child's gender predilections, and therefore probably their sexual orientation, would be offensive to the typical religious fundamentalist's stance on homosexuality as a choice. And now you're bringing up this experiment with chimps, the results of which are significant in relation to humans only when one accepts the idea of evolution.
It's just fascinating to think that maybe one day science will flat out, brute force trample over this ridiculous idea in the minds of these people that homosexuality is a choice and therefore an abomination and we can all just get on with our lives. That is, if the biosphere isn't turned completely female from pollution and life dies out entirely. Which would also be pretty funny really.
So if we all move to simple client apps and micro consoles, no longer upgrading our machines ourselves, then who will be driving high-end graphics innovations? With no market for PC graphics cards or even for cards in new consoles then who pays ATI / Nvidia to continue developing new technology? I suppose the responsibility then falls to game developers? Will they need to push new graphics innovation nearly as hard as the current market where large companies are constantly competing to upstage each other visually?
There are a number of sources of evidence that many top executives today have little scruples and perhaps less intelligence.
You don't think the recent worldwide financial collapse began from the bottom up do you?
"We're not going to ask the consumers to suddenly buy another PlayStation console in five years' time and basically have their investment go by the wayside,"
He's referring of course to obsolescence, but if the machine can't even physically survive it's term of technological relevance that's quite an embarrassing quote.
I'm generally a pretty language-agnostic or even crass kind of guy. I curse like a sailor. But for the love of god can we please stop with the "bending over" and "lubing up" talk when discussing what are really very trivial matters such as retailer dishonesty? It's pretty lame to bilk your customers and nobody really deserves to be treated like that, but it's in no way close to being sodomized. It really isn't. This sort of hyperbole is bordering on a level of absurdity that nearly rivals Godwin's law.
Retailers try to make as much money as they can and a sucker is born every minute. Unscrupulous retail will continue indefinitely with or without the presence of KY jelly or callipygian pruriency. Save the buttfucking talk for big things like federal malfeasance, or I dunno sports fanaticism.
Good article. Interesting read. But fuck the premise. Frequency was awesome!
They've always had the sci-fi crowd. The people who know that James Cameron did more than Titanic (and that using Titanic as his reference is kind of silly) will already have all the reason they need to go. Even those bitching about it here will be there on day 1. So why even go after them? Why not target those people that really liked Titanic and maybe thought Aliens and T2 were too violent/scary.
Personally I would have said from the director of The Abyss, but sadly that movie isn't quite as universally beloved as it damned well should be.
What exactly is copyrighted? The textures? Replace them with your own. The Mesh? How can you even say it came from Spore? Seems to me with a few small changes you have yourself a model with which you can do anything you want. If Spore isn't a modelling application now, it's at least a modelling cookbook of sorts. A starting point. And now I might finally be interested in it.
Only on /. would someone feel the need to defend the Sun.
Perhaps, but you certainly can't argue the correlation of these terms.
I mean, are you going to tell me that
Rails and Merb Ruby Web Frameworks Merge
makes relatively any more sense to the uninitiated? Granted, I only know about Long Tail theory from previous /. posts.
Yea no. That's better than say Disney and their offensive attempts at disabling parts of your remote during their previews, but it's still a far cry from ideal.
Remember when DVDs first came out? You could watch previews, if you actively looked for them on the disc. They were often sequestered in the special features menu. Which is ideal because trailers for future movies have a shelf life of a month or two. Whereas the movie you purchased is meant to last for years. That was the whole point of buying it in the first place. Once DVDs got a foothold in the market companies began forcing previews down your throat. They don't care that you really like this movie and intend on watching it multiple times over the years. They just want to make sure you see the new product they have coming out.
The new product which, if you're at all of discerning taste, is likely to be garbage. Garbage that parades around in front of you again and again each time you try to play your beloved movie. Anymore I just rip movies to my media server immediately after I get them. Then the next time I want to play the movie, it just starts. It starts up and I'm just there, in the movie. The whole point of the exercise in the first place. Every once in a while I just place the disc in the tray and play it the old fashioned way. And often I'm amazed how much useless bullshit I have to flip through to get to the fucking meat.
You can call it nitpicking. It's a very small amount of your time they're wasting. Any particular instance of it is insignificant. But think about the aggregate amount of time and energy wasted on such things over the course of the lifetimes of all consumers. For something that moves as fast as the modern world does, those little moments are more precious than people tend to realize. Especially when it is something that ultimately benefits neither party (spent, worthlessly old advertising). I paid you. Stop fucking with me and let me enjoy my purchase.
I noticed that too. Unless you have a real problem with gays I don't know how you could have read that part as anything but intolerant. I almost wanted a copy of it. It's that sort of thing, like segregation, you know you'll just look back on and think wow how primitive times were. Hopefully anyway.
Consequently, if you wait until the last minute for early voting, you'll be in a long line.
Just wanted to say that we arrived 20 minutes after the place opened on Sunday, and ended up waiting 3.5 hours to vote. Florida here. Apparently more early voters turned out than ever before. I guess they just weren't prepared for such interest.
At least we got indoors before the rain, though it was kind of inspiring to see a block of people standing around with umbrellas for hours just to cast their votes.
Here, here. The PixelJunk games are honestly quite sublime. Whoever can play Eden and not get totally sucked in, I cry for your wilted inner child.
PixelJunk's next game is supposed to be a dungeon crawler, a genre of game I have traditionally cared nothing for, but since it's PixelJunk I'm actually quite intrigued.
but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon.
Wow, that's expensive...
This is not inherently bad if the original game was any good. Nobody was really bitching about Doom II. Making multiple games with what is essentially the same engine + a few tweaks is a good way to spread out the cost of R&D. It's also nice not to wait years between games from your favorite developers.
Of course it depends on the genre too. Madden's yearly release schedule is made all the more ridiculous by the fact that basing it on the game of pro football doesn't leave a whole lot of room for wildly different content or rule changes between outings.
It's a good point, and also kind of a shame it's only for Quake 3. Here's hoping it opens up in the future, as it could be pretty awesome to develop 3D games for browsers with full 3D acceleration and support for joysticks/peripherals.
While games in Flash have come a long way, Adobe hasn't seemed very interested in including such game specific features to its plugin, which is a shame considering the penetration of Flash. If id can get this out there and installed on a significant amount of browsers it could really turn into something special for online web gaming.
Again, opening it up to be a more general purpose plugin would be most desirable, but even just doing Quake3 mods is pretty powerful. Just off the top of my head there have been racing, platform, and strategy games made within the Quake engine. All very different genres than Quake. Though from TFA it seems like they nailed everything down tight, at least for the time being. We'll see.
Actually, thanks to XBMC my original XBox has quite possibly gotten the most use I've ever gotten out of a game console. Maybe they're sore at what real innovation can do with their hardware.
And to be honest, if the 360 weren't so completely unreliable, I might have bought one just for the chance of an XBMC360 happening down the line.
Everyone should be thanking MS for jumping into the console market. Whether you like the XBox or not, the competition has made the market better.
I strongly disagree. This has been the hardest console purchase decision I've ever had. Before this gen it was never really a question of which console to buy (or more frustratingly which model). Each system had it's perks. I had a Genesis and a Super Nintendo. I had a Playstation and a Nintendo 64 (the Saturn was rubbish). I had an XBox and a PS2 (sorry Nintendo, the Gamecube was so under supported).
This gen I keep going back and forth. Do I buy a PS3? Is blu-ray worth a shit? I don't have an HDTV yet. It is nice to be able to swap out that HDD for a non-proprietary drive. Oh no, no rumble. Hey it can play xvid now. Awe, now it's just limited software emulation of backwards compatibility. Hmm, another new model, I can barely keep track anymore. Awe, now they're making the systems with no backwards compatibility anymore:( Hmm is it really that hard to develop games for?
Should I buy an XBox 360? God that's a dumb name, were they really pissing their pants that much about being called XBox2 when the PS3 came out? Are we really going to play XBox720/1040/1400? What is this company really thinking? Hey look at all those hardware failures. Sounds risky. Hmm, but people say it's got some good games. Which model do I buy? Hmm all the cheaper ones seem to be hiding their costs in additional hardware you'll have to buy. That's stupid. Wow, that HDD price is flat out rape. Hmm it does seem to have a lot of momentum with people. But they dropped support for my original XBox like instantaneously, that still stings a bit. Are they already talking about the next XBox. Wtf! Live looks pretty good though. Wow wait why would I pay for that? Haven't they seen Steam for the PC (which is free and pretty similarly featured)? And there's ads everywhere even though I'm paying for it? Fuck guys, pick one or the other. XBLA looks pretty cool. Lots of neat games. Damn that's some stupid DRM they have built into it. Not like the PS3 is completely open, but man I hate supporting such broken DRM in a product. Hey look, price drops around the corner. I still have to buy all those stupid accessories (HDD, wi-fi), which are kinda necessary for me anyway.
A lot of this is due to new technology. And so are the higher prices. But the unsure presentation and splintering of the systems into different models is just folly. Man there are too many models to choose from. On Sony's part this was just hubris. For MS it seems more like desperation (like the number thing in their name). Both are issues of brand and not product, and each product is really suffering under this infatuation with brand building. I'm here to play games, not to join a fanboy club. And again with the higher price, people become so invested with their purchase they become fanboys. Hey thanks for that addition to the console world guys.
I have a Wii. It was a no-brainer frankly. And it's a fun console. I don't regret it and I feel it's earned the money I've spent on it already.
For the meatier games, I think I'll eventually go with the PS3, once they get that Dual Shock 3 in there (sixaxis can blow). I'm not going to repeatedly send in a 360 for repairs. I've never had to do that with any of my consoles. After 2+ years MS hasn't got the RRoD problem under control?
As far as I'm concerned, the major thing MS has contributed to gaming, besides popularizing online play (for the dumb ape types who couldn't figure it out for the 15 years it's been hugely popular in PC gaming), is the dubious achievement of really lowering the bar on hardware reliability. I still kind of blame the consumers on that one. C'mon people, demand better quality products or we're just going to keep getting hasn't-left-beta, still-born trash. And MS will gladly sell it to you. Maybe Sony next time...
I've always suspected the RRoD "fiasco" is really just an elaborate copy-protection technique. What better way to prevent your users from modding their consoles than continuously forcing them to mail their consoles back to you...
I recently watched the documentary Manda Bala about the political corruption and kidnapping rampant in Brazil. There was a man interviewed who was so interested in this technology he said he would in fact get 2 implants in case the first was somehow removed. While I have no real grasp of this man's day to day reality I find such an enthusiasm for being chipped by the government alarming.
Dude, even my chick calls chicks "chick." Chill out "bro."
I do recall people complaining that the Dreamcast had pretty dismal third-party support. In fact Midway was the only other company from whom I remember owning a great deal of DC titles. Maybe a few Capcom titles as well. Which was fitting really, as between those two and SEGA, the Dreamcast was basically an arcade in your home.
Still maybe it wouldn't have died so soon if it had had a more expansive and diversified software library. Will we be saying the same about the Wii in a year?
Not to just be contrary, but I didn't much like that one. It was just too slow. I realize this was a concious part of the design, but I really thing it would have benefitted from a quicker more responsive character. A more Mario approach. That said, it was the best original Wiiware title I've come across. Which isn't saying too much unfortunately.