Moores law renders it irrelevant, IMO. Okay, so ther might be setbacks for a while, and the market may remain stationary, but with computer power doubling every 12 months it doesn't matter. This is what I predict:
1) In ten years all games will be written in Java. Computers will be fast enough to handle it, and this will render porting problems obsolete.
I think there should be some sort of Moore's Law for 3D Graphics that will account for the fact that as computers become faster artists will always find a way to bog them down with more and more stuff. So I don't see this happening for a while. Not to mention my doubt of Java to be the language to do it.
2)The market will be bigger, as China and India will be superpowers. This will render the crowded marketplace idea obsolete.
Hasn't this been predicted for every market for like a thousand years? Besides, you think they'll PAY for their copies of games?
3)The film industry will be no more, as it will be subsumed into the games industry. This will bring gaming to the mainstream.
Exciting times are ahead, my friends.
Yeah, uh, no. Movies are going to be around forever. Hell, we still have OPERA for christ's sake. Not to mention theatre, mimes, rock concerts... etc.
We need a return to a government that is limited in its scope and structure; protects all innocent life; protects liberty, not suppresses it; and allows the free pursuance of happiness, not regulation of it. In the spirit of the Declaration of Independence it is time to remove power from that 'faraway' government in Washington, D.C. and return it to the people, states and local communities.
---
The Constitution Party will uphold the right of states and localities to restrict access to drugs and to enforce such restrictions in appropriate cases with application of the death penalty. We support legislation to stop the flow of illegal drugs into the United States from foreign sources. As a matter of self-defense, retaliatory policies including embargoes, sanctions, and tariffs, should be considered.
---
All teaching is related to basic assumptions about God and man. Education as a whole, therefore, cannot be separated from religious faith. The law of our Creator assigns the authority and responsibility of educating children to their parents. Education should be free from all federal government subsidies, including vouchers, tax incentives, and loans, except with respect to veterans.
---
The message of Christian charity is fundamentally at odds with the concept of welfare maintenance as a right. In many cases, welfare provisions by the Federal government are not only misdirected, but morally destructive. It is the intended purpose of civil government to safeguard life, liberty and property -- not to redistribute wealth. Such redistribution is contrary to the Biblical command against theft.
Some lines taken from the Constitution Party web page. They should help answer your last question. If America was run by these wacky christians i'd move to Tibet.
I just went to one of Nader's speeches at the Key Arena in Seattle on Saturday.. The place was about 75% filled as far as I could tell. Everyone there paid $10 to attend the event, on a Saturday night. Alot of young people (i'm 21) and alot of old people. To me, this is just incredible. The Democrats and the Republicans can't PAY people to go to their events. No one CARES about what they have to say because everyone knows everything they say is bullshit. I'm not even that much of a hard-core lefty, but i'm definetly voting green this year. For those of you considering voting green, don't be disuaded by the fools who tell you that a vote for nader is a vote for bush. If Nader gets enough votes this year, the green party gets matching funding for next year's campaign. And, I believe he would even stand a chance if he were to get on the debates. Take Jesse Ventura, for instance. He was around 8% in the polls before he started debating and won. He won because you could tell he wasn't full of crap like every other politician.
Why didn't MP3.com start a SEPERATE business for my.mp3.com? Wouldn't it have made alot more sense, considering that what they were doing was very questionable legally, and they KNEW that there would be some legal battle over what they were doing. All the damages accrued on behalf of my.mp3.com is going to pull down mp3.com, which is a great service. Could they have legally formed a seperate company that would have done the same thing but not effect the financial status of mp3.com should it all go down like it has? Is this going to bankrupt mp3.com? bah.
My understanding was that Beam-It software only provided MP3's for CD's users already had. It confirmed the users' ownership by having them place the CD's in and verify the serial number.
It's much more secure than that. It would check different sections of the cd and compare it to what they had in their database. Heck of a lot better than just checking a serial number. If it checked random sections, which i think it did, you would have no way of hacking it as far as i can tell. You would have to have the cd for it to work, for at least a few minutes.
-WG
That's like walking up to a cop, asking him "Guess if I have a gun or not?" and expecting him to walk away. I agree. You really are an idiot.
It's more like a cop walking up to YOU randomly and guessing that you have a gun. Who's the idiot?
Protesting is not necessarily making a complete asshole out of yourself, especially to cops who are trying to do a job, and a difficult one at that. If you want to protest, and be an effective protester, you have to target the people you intend to affect directly.
Do you think you're winning any friends in the police department? They think you're a thug. Do you think you're winning any friends from people who live in that area? Heck no. Now the cops are down on them too, because you have to be a jerk.
Personally, I think you got off lightly.
Got off lucky? From what? Walking down the street and wearing questionable clothing? Do you think he was trying to be friends with the police? Who do you think he was protesting against? As far as I can tell, police harrassment was what he was protesting.
...it had a cd player/ripper with it. I'd love to buy a new cd, go to the car and have it copied and saved to my car's hard-drive while driving home listening to it. Then I just leave the cd at home and listen to it whenever i want while the car has it too.
-WG
Any computer manufacturer who relies on, tries to obtain, or pushes for recognition on the basis of a novel looking CASE is in trouble. Do you know why? Because it's what's inside the case that matters.
It's a good think you aren't in marketing. I know ALOT of people who bought an iMAC just because of what it looks like. And almost ANY retail store in seattle that wants to look hip has an iMac sitting on the front desk. Looks matter, looks sell.
I fail to see how a kid who looks at porn on the internet is going to be 'damaged.' Porn isn't and shouldn't be marketed for kids, as well they shouldn't be encouraged or forced to look at pornography. But any kid who is smart enough and curious enough to find himself some porn is going to be all right. Forcing libraries to use filtering software is stupid. A.Costs money we don't need to spend to protect kids from nothing. Any reasonable person can recognize that porn is not something that you're supposed to be looking at while in the library, school, or any other public place. It's just not socially acceptable to get your wanks in public so it's really not a problem. And oh yeah, B. Any type of censorship is bad.
But to stay on topic, when it comes to video-game violence, I've always been an advocate of more realism. I think that it's the lack of realism in violent media that is potentially harmful. Take for instance Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. Kids who watch this show think they can punch, kick, and throw people around without having any harmful effects. They don't realize that punching someone in the face can cause PERMANENT damage, and could possibly kill someone. Have you been kicked or hit by some kid who was way into MMPR? Sure. Ever been shot by a bazooka by a doom player? hmm... I doubt it. I say, the gorier, more realistic, disgusting it gets - the better. I say push the realism up to the extreme or keep the violence abstract (i.e. Mario brothers - jumping on top of mushrooms and such) Just don't confuse kids into thinking they can get away with violent acts without some kind of consequence.
Ugh. We see 4 screenshots from these guys that all look like ass. Gah! Any monkey with a digital camera can slop a blurry photo of a face onto a 3d model but it takes an artist to make it look good. (I should know, being a character modeler/painter at a game company.) The models are badly proportioned, mapped horribly, and the faces just look blurry and dumb. AvatarMe thinks that they'll incubate "25% of US households within 6 years?" Gimme a break. -WG
What i've heard, and what makes alot of sense to me is that the reason they're doing the real-time myst is just to use it as a test bed for their upcoming game that's codenamed 'mudpie.' Sounds like a good idea to me, test out their new technology and make a boatload of money at the same time.... people WILL buy it. Hell, i probably will just for nostalgia reasons. -WG
Wow. I feel old. I have no doubt that within a decade, it will be hard to even remember what life was like before the ubiquitous "http://...". It will be like trying to imagine life without telephones. Sure, people will read about it, but they won't really "get" it. Even if they grew up "pre-web".
Oh man, the internet does not change our lives very much at all! Compare the internet revolution to that of when the automobile was invented. The internet and computers are just small fries compared to what cars has done to world culture. Imagine what it would have been like to grow up "pre-car" -WG
The stuff is amazing, a company in Israel has the patent on the stuff otherwise I imagine it would be everywhere. Anything you can do with neon you can do with this stuff (although it doesn't last forever) I think that Macintosh should start putting it in their I-Macs. I could see it used in phones, glove compartments, monkeys, everywhere!
If you really want to see this stuff in action go to burning man this summer! People go crazy with it. woo hoo! -WG
If I remember the idea correctly, the reason it took Kubrick so long is because he wanted to use one actor from childhood through adult, and was actually filming the kid growing up in the movie...as he grew up in real life. I wondered whether that was urban legend, or what, but if he's been working on the movie for almost 20 years, it sounds very plausible.
42 Up is the latest in a series of films on a group of people that have had documentaries on their lives every 7 years(or multiples of). They started the series when they were 7, 7-Up being the first. -WG
I haven't had so much fun with a movie in a long time! Between me and my friends who went and saw it, it's been all we talked about. We talk about all the different ways we can stop people from going to the movie, registering nomissiontomars.com, writing warnings on dryerase boards at work etc. Some of my favorite things about the movie were:
Thank god NASA had the forsight to bring Dr. Pepper (In handy zero-G baggies).
The amazing synthesized voice of from the computers. I think the sound guy was just having a field day, inviting his stoned roomate from collage over to the studio to help out.
NOTHING BEATS THIS: There's some sort of test made by aliens that we have to pass to make sure we're human by transmitting a signal containing the code for a complete human dna ('hey, that looks human!') So what do they do?????? THEY SEND A ROBOT!!!!!! WOOO HOOOOO!!!!!!! Best eight dollars i ever spent!!!!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!! -WG
An unscrupulous marketer could correlate musical preferences with other lifestyle choices and use this for targeted advertisement. MP3.com's pri-vacy policy 5 does not offer strong guarantees against this kind of behavior, and the ability to opt-out is at the bottom of the user-preferences page - something that most users will never do.
Oh I doubt it. Most people who are going to be using this service are most likely going to be like the people who read slashdot. We have high speed internet access and are at least a little technically inclined. I've opted out, as I always do when I give anyoned my email address... -WG
I had a history of film class where my instructor made a lot of claims against Thomas Edison.. in fact he regarded Edison as 'The Evil One.' I trust the guy, but i still wonder how much of what he said was true.... so here are a few things that he said:
Thomas Edison did NOT invent almost any of the things he got credit for. He merely owned the patent. Apparently he ambitiously recruited talented, brilliant engineers out of college and they were the ones who invented most of the things he got credit for.
When edison made his nickelodeon and the movie camera (his was the black mahria[sp?], a huge mammoth of a machine) he didn't want movies to work like they do today. He wanted everyone who wanted to watch movies pay their nickel and look in the nickelodeon in order to watch it. One at a time. He didn't want a crowd of people to be able to watch a movie all at once, after all, you couldn't necessarily make them all pay. Along came the lumieres. There camera was small and portable. It was a brilliant machine that could be used as a camera, a projector, and duplicator for film. According to my instructor, when a lumiere camera showed up in america edison (if i remeber correctly) sent his pinkerton boys out to ruff up the guys with the camera and to more or less steal it claiming patent on the device. A couple of brothers from the south figured out how to make movies that were longer than 50' (film used to break after that length, they made a system that would allow them to film as long as they liked.) Anyway, they patented their camera and moved up to new york to make and show movies. Edison, since he couldn't patent the camera, then patented the projector with their method and bullied the brothers with his pinkerton boys. So, they took off to california (hollywood!) to get as far away as possible from Edison. Apparently that's why Hollywood is the movie capitol of the world.
Anyway, I doubt i recounted much of what i got in the film history class perfectly but that is more or less the picture I got from it. I just want to know if anyone else has learned the same thing and where they learned it because i wanted to read into it more. -WG
Aren't you contradicting yourself. If it has too many random elements it possibly can't be too repetitive.
Consider hoeing beets... An huge field, filled with beets and weeds. No one on earth is gonna want to walk up and down up and down those rows of beets hoeing out the weeds. No machine can possibly take care of this situation. There's an event with too many random events and is extremely repetitive. -WG
Slashdot Mirror
How about one of those USB keychain thingies?
Oh my god! Subsidized time is coming true!
David Foster Wallace is a friggin genius.
Moores law renders it irrelevant, IMO. Okay, so ther might be setbacks for a while, and the market may remain stationary, but with computer power doubling every 12 months it doesn't matter. This is what I predict:
1) In ten years all games will be written in Java. Computers will be fast enough to handle it, and this will render porting problems obsolete.
I think there should be some sort of Moore's Law for 3D Graphics that will account for the fact that as computers become faster artists will always find a way to bog them down with more and more stuff. So I don't see this happening for a while. Not to mention my doubt of Java to be the language to do it.
2)The market will be bigger, as China and India will be superpowers. This will render the crowded marketplace idea obsolete.
Hasn't this been predicted for every market for like a thousand years? Besides, you think they'll PAY for their copies of games?
3)The film industry will be no more, as it will be subsumed into the games industry. This will bring gaming to the mainstream. Exciting times are ahead, my friends.
Yeah, uh, no. Movies are going to be around forever. Hell, we still have OPERA for christ's sake. Not to mention theatre, mimes, rock concerts... etc.
I love it. If only it would play widescreen dvds or mpegs!
We need a return to a government that is limited in its scope and structure; protects all innocent life; protects liberty, not suppresses it; and allows the free pursuance of happiness, not regulation of it. In the spirit of the Declaration of Independence it is time to remove power from that 'faraway' government in Washington, D.C. and return it to the people, states and local communities.
---
The Constitution Party will uphold the right of states and localities to restrict access to drugs and to enforce such restrictions in appropriate cases with application of the death penalty. We support legislation to stop the flow of illegal drugs into the United States from foreign sources. As a matter of self-defense, retaliatory policies including embargoes, sanctions, and tariffs, should be considered.
---
All teaching is related to basic assumptions about God and man. Education as a whole, therefore, cannot be separated from religious faith. The law of our Creator assigns the authority and responsibility of educating children to their parents. Education should be free from all federal government subsidies, including vouchers, tax incentives, and loans, except with respect to veterans.
---
The message of Christian charity is fundamentally at odds with the concept of welfare maintenance as a right. In many cases, welfare provisions by the Federal government are not only misdirected, but morally destructive. It is the intended purpose of civil government to safeguard life, liberty and property -- not to redistribute wealth. Such redistribution is contrary to the Biblical command against theft.
Some lines taken from the Constitution Party web page. They should help answer your last question. If America was run by these wacky christians i'd move to Tibet.
"America, I smoke marijuana every chance I get."
I just went to one of Nader's speeches at the Key Arena in Seattle on Saturday.. The place was about 75% filled as far as I could tell. Everyone there paid $10 to attend the event, on a Saturday night. Alot of young people (i'm 21) and alot of old people. To me, this is just incredible. The Democrats and the Republicans can't PAY people to go to their events. No one CARES about what they have to say because everyone knows everything they say is bullshit. I'm not even that much of a hard-core lefty, but i'm definetly voting green this year. For those of you considering voting green, don't be disuaded by the fools who tell you that a vote for nader is a vote for bush. If Nader gets enough votes this year, the green party gets matching funding for next year's campaign. And, I believe he would even stand a chance if he were to get on the debates. Take Jesse Ventura, for instance. He was around 8% in the polls before he started debating and won. He won because you could tell he wasn't full of crap like every other politician.
-WG
Why didn't MP3.com start a SEPERATE business for my.mp3.com? Wouldn't it have made alot more sense, considering that what they were doing was very questionable legally, and they KNEW that there would be some legal battle over what they were doing. All the damages accrued on behalf of my.mp3.com is going to pull down mp3.com, which is a great service. Could they have legally formed a seperate company that would have done the same thing but not effect the financial status of mp3.com should it all go down like it has? Is this going to bankrupt mp3.com? bah.
-WG
My understanding was that Beam-It software only provided MP3's for CD's users already had. It confirmed the users' ownership by having them place the CD's in and verify the serial number.
It's much more secure than that. It would check different sections of the cd and compare it to what they had in their database. Heck of a lot better than just checking a serial number. If it checked random sections, which i think it did, you would have no way of hacking it as far as i can tell. You would have to have the cd for it to work, for at least a few minutes.
-WG
We can't win if we look like the bad guys
Maybe a DeCSS tie would be in order?
-WG
That's like walking up to a cop, asking him "Guess if I have a gun or not?" and expecting him to walk away. I agree. You really are an idiot.
It's more like a cop walking up to YOU randomly and guessing that you have a gun. Who's the idiot?
Protesting is not necessarily making a complete asshole out of yourself, especially to cops who are trying to do a job, and a difficult one at that. If you want to protest, and be an effective protester, you have to target the people you intend to affect directly.
Do you think you're winning any friends in the police department? They think you're a thug. Do you think you're winning any friends from people who live in that area? Heck no. Now the cops are down on them too, because you have to be a jerk.
Personally, I think you got off lightly.
Got off lucky? From what? Walking down the street and wearing questionable clothing? Do you think he was trying to be friends with the police? Who do you think he was protesting against? As far as I can tell, police harrassment was what he was protesting.
...it had a cd player/ripper with it. I'd love to buy a new cd, go to the car and have it copied and saved to my car's hard-drive while driving home listening to it. Then I just leave the cd at home and listen to it whenever i want while the car has it too.
-WG
Any computer manufacturer who relies on, tries to obtain, or pushes for recognition on the basis of a novel looking CASE is in trouble. Do you know why? Because it's what's inside the case that matters.
It's a good think you aren't in marketing. I know ALOT of people who bought an iMAC just because of what it looks like. And almost ANY retail store in seattle that wants to look hip has an iMac sitting on the front desk. Looks matter, looks sell.
I fail to see how a kid who looks at porn on the internet is going to be 'damaged.' Porn isn't and shouldn't be marketed for kids, as well they shouldn't be encouraged or forced to look at pornography. But any kid who is smart enough and curious enough to find himself some porn is going to be all right. Forcing libraries to use filtering software is stupid. A.Costs money we don't need to spend to protect kids from nothing. Any reasonable person can recognize that porn is not something that you're supposed to be looking at while in the library, school, or any other public place. It's just not socially acceptable to get your wanks in public so it's really not a problem. And oh yeah, B. Any type of censorship is bad.
But to stay on topic, when it comes to video-game violence, I've always been an advocate of more realism. I think that it's the lack of realism in violent media that is potentially harmful. Take for instance Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. Kids who watch this show think they can punch, kick, and throw people around without having any harmful effects. They don't realize that punching someone in the face can cause PERMANENT damage, and could possibly kill someone. Have you been kicked or hit by some kid who was way into MMPR? Sure. Ever been shot by a bazooka by a doom player? hmm... I doubt it. I say, the gorier, more realistic, disgusting it gets - the better. I say push the realism up to the extreme or keep the violence abstract (i.e. Mario brothers - jumping on top of mushrooms and such) Just don't confuse kids into thinking they can get away with violent acts without some kind of consequence.
Ugh. We see 4 screenshots from these guys that all look like ass. Gah! Any monkey with a digital camera can slop a blurry photo of a face onto a 3d model but it takes an artist to make it look good. (I should know, being a character modeler/painter at a game company.) The models are badly proportioned, mapped horribly, and the faces just look blurry and dumb. AvatarMe thinks that they'll incubate "25% of US households within 6 years?" Gimme a break.
-WG
What i've heard, and what makes alot of sense to me is that the reason they're doing the real-time myst is just to use it as a test bed for their upcoming game that's codenamed 'mudpie.' Sounds like a good idea to me, test out their new technology and make a boatload of money at the same time.... people WILL buy it. Hell, i probably will just for nostalgia reasons.
-WG
Wheee!!!
Well, I picked up killmomanddad@waveamerica.com
Wow. I feel old. I have no doubt that within a decade, it will be hard to even remember what life was like before the ubiquitous "http://...". It will be like trying to imagine life without telephones. Sure, people will read about it, but they won't really "get" it. Even if they grew up "pre-web".
Oh man, the internet does not change our lives very much at all! Compare the internet revolution to that of when the automobile was invented. The internet and computers are just small fries compared to what cars has done to world culture. Imagine what it would have been like to grow up "pre-car"
-WG
Dear lord! How many times can I say "stuff" in a paragraph?!?
Stuffstuffstuffstuffstuffstuff
-WG
Get electroluminescent wire in spools at www.funhouseproductions.com
The stuff is amazing, a company in Israel has the patent on the stuff otherwise I imagine it would be everywhere. Anything you can do with neon you can do with this stuff (although it doesn't last forever) I think that Macintosh should start putting it in their I-Macs. I could see it used in phones, glove compartments, monkeys, everywhere!
If you really want to see this stuff in action go to burning man this summer! People go crazy with it. woo hoo!
-WG
If I remember the idea correctly, the reason it took Kubrick so long is because he wanted to use one actor from childhood through adult, and was actually filming the kid growing up in the movie...as he grew up in real life. I wondered whether that was urban legend, or what, but if he's been working on the movie for almost 20 years, it sounds very plausible.
42 Up is the latest in a series of films on a group of people that have had documentaries on their lives every 7 years(or multiples of). They started the series when they were 7, 7-Up being the first.
-WG
I haven't had so much fun with a movie in a long time! Between me and my friends who went and saw it, it's been all we talked about. We talk about all the different ways we can stop people from going to the movie, registering nomissiontomars.com, writing warnings on dryerase boards at work etc. Some of my favorite things about the movie were:
Thank god NASA had the forsight to bring Dr. Pepper (In handy zero-G baggies).
The amazing synthesized voice of from the computers. I think the sound guy was just having a field day, inviting his stoned roomate from collage over to the studio to help out.
NOTHING BEATS THIS: There's some sort of test made by aliens that we have to pass to make sure we're human by transmitting a signal containing the code for a complete human dna ('hey, that looks human!') So what do they do??????
THEY SEND A ROBOT!!!!!! WOOO HOOOOO!!!!!!!
Best eight dollars i ever spent!!!!!!!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!!
-WG
An unscrupulous marketer could correlate musical preferences with other lifestyle choices and use this for targeted advertisement. MP3.com's pri-vacy policy 5 does not offer strong guarantees against this kind of behavior, and the ability to opt-out is at the bottom of the user-preferences page - something that most users will never do.
Oh I doubt it. Most people who are going to be using this service are most likely going to be like the people who read slashdot. We have high speed internet access and are at least a little technically inclined. I've opted out, as I always do when I give anyoned my email address... -WG
I had a history of film class where my instructor made a lot of claims against Thomas Edison.. in fact he regarded Edison as 'The Evil One.' I trust the guy, but i still wonder how much of what he said was true.... so here are a few things that he said:
Thomas Edison did NOT invent almost any of the things he got credit for. He merely owned the patent. Apparently he ambitiously recruited talented, brilliant engineers out of college and they were the ones who invented most of the things he got credit for.
When edison made his nickelodeon and the movie camera (his was the black mahria[sp?], a huge mammoth of a machine) he didn't want movies to work like they do today. He wanted everyone who wanted to watch movies pay their nickel and look in the nickelodeon in order to watch it. One at a time. He didn't want a crowd of people to be able to watch a movie all at once, after all, you couldn't necessarily make them all pay. Along came the lumieres. There camera was small and portable. It was a brilliant machine that could be used as a camera, a projector, and duplicator for film. According to my instructor, when a lumiere camera showed up in america edison (if i remeber correctly) sent his pinkerton boys out to ruff up the guys with the camera and to more or less steal it claiming patent on the device. A couple of brothers from the south figured out how to make movies that were longer than 50' (film used to break after that length, they made a system that would allow them to film as long as they liked.) Anyway, they patented their camera and moved up to new york to make and show movies. Edison, since he couldn't patent the camera, then patented the projector with their method and bullied the brothers with his pinkerton boys. So, they took off to california (hollywood!) to get as far away as possible from Edison. Apparently that's why Hollywood is the movie capitol of the world.
Anyway, I doubt i recounted much of what i got in the film history class perfectly but that is more or less the picture I got from it. I just want to know if anyone else has learned the same thing and where they learned it because i wanted to read into it more. -WG
(e) A sneaky P.R. move by Microsoft to get free advertisement for a future product.
-WG
Aren't you contradicting yourself. If it has too many random elements it possibly can't be too repetitive.
Consider hoeing beets... An huge field, filled with beets and weeds. No one on earth is gonna want to walk up and down up and down those rows of beets hoeing out the weeds. No machine can possibly take care of this situation. There's an event with too many random events and is extremely repetitive.
-WG