Most people (see: Users, Windows), don't want to give up usability for security.
Which is why, unless they are a hardcore PC gamer or a Windows developer, they should use OSX on a Mac.
Why don't you buy an eMac, then? It would cost as much as you're willing to spend.
This is what is so bizzare about the marketplace. This product that you've wanted is out there. You just don't want it in the eMac box.
Answers to frequently mentioned complaints
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Apple Releases Mac Mini
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Nearly every complaint about the Mac Mini can be explained away by the general modularity of Macs which tend to be far more external than PCs. On my desk I have a Dell Winbox and a G5. I've had the G5 for a year now. Not one OS crash or failure or reboot. And now the only reason I run the PC is for soulseek. I will never go back to Windows, ever.
1) 2 USB ports. What do you do after mouse / keyboard and you want to plug in a printer?
A USB HUB. I can't believe people on/. have complained about this. Also, the standard Mac keyboard has two USB plugs.
2) No Audio In - external firewire devices, which have been mentioned in many other posts with links, are readily available. If you're serious about gargeband you won't want a crappy minijack audio in anyway. You'll want a breakout box with a 1/4 or optical line in.
3) No Optical Audio out - again the reverse of the above.
4) Harddrive space, not enough for today's digital media. Same as an Ipod.
Again, external firewire drives, which are very important to the Mac in general. I use my G5 primarily for heavy duty HD editing. Guess what I use for storage? No SCSI or Raid array - an off the shelf LaCie Terabyte external Firewire 800 drive. I took it out of the box, plugged it in, copied files over from the SATA drive that came with the system, and within 15 minutes my setup was complete with now a terabyte to work with. Hell, you could plug one of them into a Mac Mini if you had that much porn to archive and were going to hack the thing to be a video server.
5) What hardware you're getting for that price.
You're also getting OSX and iLife '05. I skipped iLife 04, but I am rushing out the day '05 hits, because it is just incredible what you're getting for 79$. That cost is part of the Mini Mac.
Ultimately it's not even about the hardware. Granted I'm spoiled with a dual G5 processor, but when push comes to shove what made me fall in love with my Mac wasn't the sheer power of my system - it was the OS environment, the software, the interface, the stability, the lack of virus and spyware and adware and malware.
That to me is easily worth $500, which is why this is a product that should be for two ends of the market. Clueless newbies who expect - rightly so - that things should work, and hardcore techies who can now afford to keep a second box. What I think you'll find is that under Jobs' second tenure the Mac has become a device for your life, and it's all to do with the exceptional software made for it.
Most of us here shell out at least 1000 for a good PC system even if we build from scratch cause that's often the price for the best thing out there. Wouldn't you gladly pay $500 extra if you knew that WinXP would never crash, never present.DLL nightmares, pick up viruses in everything from cursor settings to email, et. al... For a base $500 you can have a computer that does that and so much more.
6) No DVD Burner. Not enough RAM.
You can add Ram without violating the warranty yourself. Apple is charging way too much for it. And you can add a Superdrive for about $100 if I recall right. Giving you the option to burn DVDs. This I believe is a cost everyone should upgrade to, especially once they see the ease of iMovie and iDVD.
7) No VGA / S VIdeo out
Well it comes with a DVI to VGA adapater - if you're hooking up to an HDTV then use DVI for the love of god. And you can get a SVIdeo out for 19$
Did you also remember this is fanless and whisper quiet and smaller than a lunchbox? That they've liberated you from having to pair up with their overpriced (but absolutely phenonmenal) displays?
Every bit of commentary I've seen about this computer has completely missed the point or just been rife with ignorance. Every single major gripe is addressable, and the price point is absoutely amazing, again, for the software. Most of the readers here do get it - they can afford to have one to play with, and I wouldn't be surpri
I hate to say this, because I believe information should be free, essentially, without limitations; even defense intelligence.
But it is completely understandable why Apple has no choice but to try and keep things like this secret, especially when they release new product info at the same time as quarterly results.
Last year I worked for a big corporation that made one of the most successful "products" of the year, not situated far from Apple.
Rumors of something that would impact stocks spread. Very easily. Due to my low on the totem pole training status I got to witness a lot of private, fly on the wall conversations between very big and powerful individuals who would ignore me until they needed something. I got to listen and eavesdrop a lot on a world that I had no experience or idea about.
When it came to the matter of any sort of announcement such as this which will impact a company's stock price, you have no idea how terrified corporate execs have become of turning into the next Martha Stewart. They have basically been briefed on this by the government. Do something out of line. And we will make an example of you.... That's the word they've received.
They don't have a choice except to try and institute litigation in such a proceeding because they have to make a public claim and display for shutting down any information whcih might give the appearance of stock manipulation. Apple stock shot up in the days before the expo because of the rumors at ThinkSecret. Period.
This has become one of the top paranoia inducing issues amongst executive staff.
The funny thing is; it's all because the Bush admin is trying to cover up the soft pedaling they did on Enron so it looks like they are responsible in going after big corporate crime. They put a message out to high profile companies. And now as a result they have to be very, very careful with any information regarding announcements that would affect stocks.
This is not a defense of a severe lawsuit, but an explanation for corporate mentality and the further reasons why it seems so severe; in some respects the current business environment has fostered this era in.
Geeks consistently get Gibson wrong...
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Pattern Recognition
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· Score: 4, Interesting
For the past three books the same criticisms have been levelled at Gibson's latest book by the geek cognescenti here at Slashdot. It gets pretty boring. I think the problem is Gibson's fustion of noir and attitude to computers gave socially inept people who did not generally have a badass bone in them some kind of feeling that they did; when that became less interesting to him, because it wasn't really even on the money for the most part, most geeks became bored.
Here's some rebuttal to some of those criticisms:
The usage of Sept. 11th makes perfect, absolute sense. I'd like to understand why a poster above refers to the book as speculative fiction. Although marketed as such there is nary a piece of technology nor a futuristic setting to suggest that P.R. is even a work of science fiction, despite being marketed as such by the publisher. If you've worked in filmmaking or advertising on a Transoceanic basis in the past year, this book reads more believable than anything out there.
I think it's obvious that Gibson has taken the central themes in all of his books and reformed them into this and set it in the present day because there's no longer a need to push it forward. The perception of time is a constant underlying theme in Gibson's work, and this one deals with the immediate and what's in fashion because it dominates our day to day living. September 11th is immediate and cannot be ignored, and ultimately the book is about any human search, no matter the time or place, for meaning in a sea of information that is incomprehensible due to its complexity. P.R. does not offer any easy answers or political commentary on Sept. 11th, only a raw sort of need to understand and contextualize something that horrific into a person's life.
That fits into the broader idea of the book, the old Gibson standby of someone trying to track down an artist. The footageheads who trawl the web and dissect and bisect the pieces of anonymous footage are really doing what humans have always done in culture; once again, searching for meaning where there is none.
If anyone can point me to a book which captures the sensation of what it's like to be part of an online community or to communicate with friends daily, globally and immediately; please offer suggestions. That's what P.R. nails.
Best exchange I ever saw on a movie related messageboard some years ago:
"Dude, the Crow 2 is so fake. The guy drives his motorcycle through a concrete highway barrier. No way at that speed on a two wheeled vehicle would he smash through that."
Followup:
"It's a movie about a GUY WHO DIED AND CAME BACK TO LIFE and you're worried about realism?"
The reason I say that (and I thought this was newsworthy) is because Lucas' actions and the public perception he attempts to display are so out of wack. On the one hand he's attempting a damage control campaign to placate fans by claiming that their criticisms of The Phantom Menace have been taken on board, while at the same time dissing them. From a recent Time cover story:
Lucas blames the anti-Jar Jar sentiment on "37-year-old guys who spend all their time on the Internet. But you have to remember that when we did The Empire Strikes Back, some people hated C-3PO. When we did Jedi, they just loathed the Ewoks. There was no Internet to jazz it up, but there was the same conversation. Fans are very opinionated, and that's good. But I can't make a movie for fans." Nonetheless, Jar Jar has a far less prominent role this time. In movie theaters you will hear a cheer from Binks-ophobes when, as he launches into an anecdote, Padme cursorily cuts him off.
Lucas is continually at the forefront of discussing how liberating digital technologies will be to filmmakers; the problem is his actions belie a complete ignorance and arrogance that denies there can be any other effect than making it cheaper for him to make his films in his own weird way. He seems to be totally unaware of the effect the universe he created has had on millions of imaginations; or if he is, he wants to control that in a manner that suits him. Thus fandom is a thing which can be used to promotional effect and to make his hardcore constitiuency feel that he adores them... But when he slips in caveats to a contest that he's controlling in order to limit how that can be expressed he's really saying, "You can use those new technologies, just as long as you don't do it how I want you to." He's opened up a can of worms and seems totally oblivious that he's done so.
I'm a paid, working filmmaker. My first film is coming out this fall. I would never make a fan fiction film; I prefer to make my own. But I do feel that as cultural artifacts (and in my opinion very cheesy ones at that) some of the fan made Star Wars films are impressive enough and show such hard work with limited resources that they deserve some genuine praise and are sterling examples of exactly what doors digital filmmaking are going to open.
God, if I had a dollar for every genuine working filmmaker I know of my generation who wasn't influenced or their imagination fired by the original Star Wars, I'd be funding my own damn movies. Under those auspices I believe that given the line Lucas likes to spout he ought to pay attention to them. After all, he continually revises the continuity of his own universe when it suits his franchises and spin offs into other media to make more money. He allowed and has even admitted to letting the marketing tie ins to The Phantom Menace run rampant. Read this even better Newsweek story. Does Lucas play through all the video games made from his Empire to ensure quality control of continuity? I seriously doubt it. In other words, it's fine to do this as long as he's making some money off of it, or it's unenforceable since he lost the Starballz suit.
I'm also going to join in and state that this was the stupidest thing/. has done in awhile. X Files isn't airing for another goddamn half an hour and you blow it right there in the headline.
And furthermore, tell Jon Katz that it's "spoiler warning" not "spoilage" and stop having him mention the evils of Time Warner AOL when he sold the rights to your story to New Line Films - owned by them.
In fact, slashdot's entire cultural coverge is pretty weak and needs an overhaul.
I'm currently editing a documentary. 100+ hours of footage. It's mind numbing, anal, pedantic work just going through the footage as opposed to editing it. Believe me, none of you want to see what's being thrown away. Editing exists for a reason because a) it's the essential unique trait of film / tv as a medium and b) analogs about context in code rarely ever apply to editing, a process which is intuitive, decisive, and essential. If you believe in releasing all your rushes or footage then you essentially are saying you don't have anything to say, because by essence you're not defining what your point is.
Look closely at the Army's own webpage with their little picture of what the armor suit might look like...
He's holding a Pulse Rifle from Aliens!
I think it's really weird that a filmmaker decides to make a film that's a metaphor for Vietnam in which superior technology is beaten by an organic enemy; an obvious moral. But now the Army wants those Pulse Rifles.
Have any of you seen pictures of the OICW? It's the Army's latest attempt at a replacement infantry rifle for the aging M16 (A rifle which when first made, had a plastic stock stamped with Mattel's logo because they were manufacturing the plastic parts). I swear, the people in charge of defining the equipment a future soldier will be wearing must sit around all day and watch Aliens over and over and over...
I saw some recent footage of a new integrated networking system for mobile soldiers. All these soldiers are checking their PDAs and typing into their wristpad. In some way I can understand the advantage of having access to all that information, but time and again history has proven that soldier's overreliant on technology get their asses bit.
This year may also have been penultimate proof that the gaming industry is in a really stagnant rut when it comes to the culture of development. My buddies working in games bitched more, got paid less, were laid off more often or had to leave due to disputes with moronic producers and overfunded designers than ever before, and every word I heard pushed one simple fact (with the exception of coders who always seem to be allright). Creating games has become a true massmarket medium - unfortunately it is also almost entirely about money now and for most in the industry has nothing to do with vision or fun.
I expect with this news for that trend to continue further - more middle management and inflated budgets or ship dates that are unrealistic. Because gaming is becoming all about the Benjamins...
And speaking of $6.9 billion dollars of PC gaming software sales - considering that the best games hardly sold at all, that means a shitload of Deer Hunter and Sims games were sold last year.
Great points all, but missing out on what it really means. The Japanese games market is stagnant right now, but the fact is the real killer AAA 1 million shipping console games almost always come from Japan.
The real problem is that MS is going to flood the console market with lazy PS2 ports, and games developed by fledgling PC development houses. Console gaming and PC gaming are two totally seperate beasts, psychologically, aesthetically, and in terms of what they deliver to the home audience.
Sony's real genius was in marketing the PS family to 18-24 year olds - they're the ones who created what we now call casual gamers, the wide installed user base who only purchase big event titles and franchises that are known. People looking for a thumb candy fix, and not a tactical simulation of group dynamics in a shooter environment. For better or worse, this completely changed the market for games and how successful a title can be.
I'd like someone to name for me an American videogame character who resonates in pop culture as deeply as Mario or Lara Croft or Solid Snake. American game development has never excelled at these concepts, rather excelling at heavy titles. Japanese designers seem to understand the aesthetic of creating knowable characters and the simplicity of console interfaces and games.
What failure in Japan means is no future Metal Gear or Final Fantasy for Xbox. That's what will kill the system.
And we're also forgettting Europe, one of the fastest growing games markets. Having lived over there with friends who worked in games, let me offer this as a warning to any console creator in future: Never, ever, ever, ship a console in Europe that doesn't have a name brand soccer title with licensed players. At least they got this right.
In fact, the more I think of Xbox the more it reminds me of Dreamcast. Hell, they even managed to rip off the controller and make it worse. Two many crappy titles that confuse the consumer when groundbreaking titles appear on the system, and a lack of AAA third party titles that are known franchises.
And yes, I own an Xbox and a PS2. It's a very powerful machine with great capabilities. And the number one biggest thing they did wrong - the controllers. They're enough to convince me to forget the machine. As much as I like Halo, it's a PC game and it shows. Imagine playing that over the Net right now, coop, in a resolution I choose, rather than on a dodgy split screen, and with a mouse to aim no less. That's the Xbox's biggest problem. The best title is a PC game, and it shows.
How my friend had his hotmail acct hacked...
on
Hotmail Hacked
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· Score: 2, Insightful
His girlfriend knows all his information, like zip code and location, so she clicks on forgot my password. Having passed that, his security question was: "What's my sister's name?" That wasn't too hard.
Needless to say, once she got in and had a look at his e lover's correspondence, the four year relationship ended quickly.
Chris Morris is a total genius... More on him...
on
Roasting Sacred Cows
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· Score: 5, Informative
Chris Morris is the man behind the show, and as an American living in the UK, I can only say that he is the greatest satirist currently residing on the planet. It's impossible to describe in words just how effective he is at using the medium to parody itself. If you're interested, or have a knee jerk reaction to what was done, then you can only go to Cookd and Bombd to read more news articles about him and download more examples of his work, including all the episodes of Brass Eye.
His career has one constant trajectory: get a job somewhere, do something insanely brilliant, get fired, move on to the next one. He got his start as a proper news reporter, but used his genius for tape splicing to insert words like "bonobo" into politicians speeches, and filled a studio with slowly leaking helium.
From there he did a radio show which became the BBC show The Day Today, which offered surreal news stories combined with the best parody of news reportage as stands in the Western world I've ever seen. His vaguely threatening goodnight, the use of insane graphics and pounding music... But then he got Brass Eye.
In the UK, humor and sex aren't as big a deal as violence, and you'd be amazed at what's shown on television here compared to the US. Before Brass Eye was even aired it became a news story, as several celebrities and politicians complained to the commisioning network, Channel 4, that he had gone too far.
During the height of Ecstacy hysteria in the UK, he had gotten politicans and celebrities to denounce the evils of a dangerous new drug ruining our children, called CAKE. As in, "We must ban cake." He did it so brilliantly that one of the Members of Parliament who he recorded denouncing cake ("which affects the part of the brain known as Shatner's Bassoon, which affects perception of time - cake is a made up drug, made up of chemicals") asked questions about it in Parliament. The then head of Channel 4 tried to get Morris to tone down the show's vitriol and abuse of celebrities. In the Science on Trial episode he had several UK celebrities talking about the dangers of "heavy electricity" which was killing people in the Far East. So Morris put a subliminal message in the final episode, calling his boss a cunt, which led to statements that he would never work for Channel 4 again. He returned to radio.
Until this year, when changes at Channel 4 led to a rebroadcast of the series and the commisioning of the new one off special on pedophilia. He had a famous London radio DJ stating that pedophiles had more genes in common with crabs than you or I, and there's no evidence for it, but it's a scientific fact! It went on. The result was instant, knee jerk tabloid hysteria, I think best represented in this picture. What you should know is that earlier this year, thanks to a name and shame campaign a major UK tabloid did on paedophiles, a paedatrician was attacked by an angry mob and had her car firebombed. A few days after airing of the programme, several politicans got in on the act, admitting they hadn't seen the show. One of them is even blind!
But thankfully the British public have shown their sense of good humor and more calls of support were received on Channel 4's complaints line then actual complaints, so the entire issue is now being hushed up.
I think what really grates about Morris is that he deigned to show that you cannot trust any of the mainstream media you partake of, that celebrity endorsements count for nothing. My favorite moment on the paedophilia special was a presenter for the BBC's technology show stating that internet padeophiles can use penis shaped sound waves to molest children. I think it's far more frightening to the public to know that those people that put a comforting, sickly gloss on the world as it is today are patently full of shit. The result of Morris' work may be greater than any piece of culture I've had all year, because it's made me question everything. I can no longer watch the news without laughing and being shocked by the idiocy and dramatics of it all. For that he deserves to be knighted.
The group TIGHAR, which is in charge of this expedition, has had success with retrieving lost or buried planes of historical significance in the past. Though they may never find anything on Nikamuoro the reason they've chosen to focus on this island in particular is because:
a) Like many rational people, their studies of history prove that most of the conspiracy stories are bunkum.
b) Anecdotal historical evidence from natives continually points out to a plane like hers crashing near the island that was visible in a lagoon for awhile, and around the time of her disappearance.
c) The recovery in a previous expedition of artifacts such as a shoe and labels from food cans produced around the time of her disappearance.
d) A British research ship which a few years later took the bones of a "European woman" from the island, and the logbook and anecdotal evidence of such.
e) In terms of Navigation, and her position near her disappearance, Nikamuoro is a lot more probably than Saipan.
This group would not be raising $400k just for naught - they are trying to be thorough and rational... Perhaps this sometimes is clouded by the evangelical zeal they have by which they want to find the wrecked plane... Because at the very least it would finish off the ridiculous stories that transform her into some martyr. Let's not forget that Earhart was a devoted pacifist who worked as a nurse while in her teens on WWI soldiers returned home, and she was doubly progressive in teaching and looking after non white children at around the same time. TIGHAR may not find anything, but at least their search respects Earhart as opposed to using her for silly theories about how she was a spy for the US government. Let's not forget that it became inscribed in stone that her navigator Noonan was a tempestuous alcoholic due to one volume of biography that never attributed the knowledge of such - and subsequent research in later years was never able to find the man as incomptent at his job.
Admittedly, yes, Van Gogh was a post impressionist, but expressionism derives directly from himself and Gaugin to a large degree (and perhaps even Japanese watercolor).
As for my interpretation of "the true meaning of the artist" - whether or not I agree with the concept of all art needing some intangible, metaphysical, or even spiritual explanation that is derived from the ego of the artist (which I don't necessarily) - Van Gogh has become a cause celebre for the artist whose life was as important as their work. It's part of the reason for the ridiculous prices associated with his work. His letters to his brother established him as a figure after his death, and a cursory read would reveal that there were specific personal and deterministic notions in his endeavours. It may be trite to yourself, but it drives the ridiculous art market today, and many would say that it began with Van Gogh. Van Gogh's work is part and parcel with his life, interminably, for better or for worse - it is impossible to seperate him from his time and its technology and image processing capabilities.
And I do stand corrected on what's different about this work and what it's for (imagine using texture by numbers to generate landscapes for computer games rather than storing the textures). I will stand by the fact that when it comes to mimicking an artist's strokes the material will only ever be as good as a) what's fed into it and b) a pale imitation, good for only some FX gag I expect to see in some music video and then vanish.
This is interesting and all well and good, but ultimately where it fails is that the produced image is entirely dependent on the original photograph's perception of the world. A reproduction of an image through halide crystal activation, which is enough for human memory and recognizance, but it lacks the true meaning of the artist. Van Gogh never used contrast or flat lighting as exhibited in the source pictures, and he often burst highlights with striking colors that may not have been actually present to his eye. It's what seperates him from a Turner - not just his brush stroke or how thick he worked in paint but how he saw the world. It's pretty churlish to adopt the first real expressionist painter (who deliberately attempted to paint their perception of the world rather than reproduce it) as an example of this algorithim, as the resultant images show that without an interpretation or perception this is pretty useless stuff. All I see here is a souped up photoshop filter.
If one were to actually study the production, history, and words of those who worked on 2001, there is more than enough anecdotal evidence to purport that consistently throughout the production Kubrick made decisions with the pretense of engendering ambiguity, discussion, and interpretation.
I recently had the chance to see a new 70mm print of 2001 in London, and apart from being completely enraptured and shocked at how much power this film still has... I was ultimately stunned by how unconventional the film is in its sense of ambiguity. For instance, upon its release no explanation was offered for HAL's insanity. Thanks to Clarke, we have an explanation, but as the original film runs and was released no explanation was ever offered.
Instead of searching for semiotic signals in the ether, one must realize that Kubrick set out in pre production with initial solid ideas. For example, that cut that proceeds from the bone to the first object floating in space - that object is an orbital nuclear weapons platform. The original ending for 2001 would have the Starchild detonating all the satellites. As for the alien presence in the film, Kubrick shot several tests using all manner of visualization (to the exasperation of the crew) to attempt to film "aliens", but ultimately settled on never showing them.
The greatest proof I can give is the following statement, made by Kubrick himself, and I think it pretty much says it all, and the author of the aforementioned book should, as well.
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"I would not think of quarreling with your interpretation nor offering any other, as I have found it always the best policy to allow the film to speak for itself."
Michael Foale, the British astronaut who was on board Mir when it was rammed by the supply ship, was saying (if I remember correctly) back in 1999 that one of the biggest problems with the ISS would be that many critical components were going to be based on Mir technology, which just wasn't up to engineering specifics. I even think he pointed to the CO2 scrubber system specifically; anyone interested in an alternate take on this should try the book written by his father, Colin Foale, called Waystation to the Stars in the UK. The book offers an interesting evaluation of what the ISS faces when considered by an occupant of the same underfunded and ancient technologies.
As far as whinging about NASA goes, the problem is multifaceted: reduced spending, wayward spending, political interests beefing up programs for Congressional approval only because of the amount of pork they'd bring to their constituents (and thereby putting price tags so high that they get shelved).
But it's best that we're not cynical about this. Try and recall the technologies we got humans to the moon with, how antiquated and retrogade it is to us now. The ISS could stay up, and people will surivive - just look at what Shackelton went through in the Antarctic - as long as we don't cave into easy cynicism and humor. And why not? Because if this program fails, so will all other future multinational space efforts - and the result will be that someday someone's going to plant an AOL / Time Warner flag on Mars by the time we get there.
Rubbish - but the industry is still in trouble
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Gaming Crash up Ahead
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· Score: 2
Neither here nor there - there is no possible way to compare the Atari 2600 to today's gaming culture; with its queues outside stores at midnight, sellout platform launches, massmarket acceptance of gaming as a lifestyle, the incredible - nay, staggering - proliferation of online gaming, the elevation of videogame characters to truly iconic levels, and yes, even the improved visuals which maintain accessibility to the most naive of consumers. There term gamer does not apply to japanese import buying - PC upgrading for a new title people out there. Gamer refers to everyone who frequents a Target, for that matter. For that matter, all the doomsayers seem to forget that last year games were more profitable than movies... That's staggering.
Recently all this talk has been made about the PC dying as a games platform - well nearly all the companies I've seen abandon the PC for pastures X Box were not the game makers I look out for or expect great things from. So a badly licensed substandard kid's product won't ship on PC, but Deus Ex 2 will. Boo fucking hoo. The PC will also continue to innovate in the online realm before the consoles do for several more years.
As far as a gaming crash is concerned, ask EA or Square or Sony how much they think they're going to lose in the next few years. Very, very little.
This is no reason for hope, however. Massmarket acceptance and the pure visual quality of titles released today will insure gaming continues - albeit in a sea of licensed, substandard, boring hogwash. More WWF games, more bad movie ports, another EA Fifa 2001 September edition. The gaming business is no longer what it once was, a playground of innovation and boundary pushing and an attempt to create a genuine new art form. Now it is all about the money, bottom line. That's what's depressing. True, there will be the odd rose buried in the mountain of shit - but unfortunately this article has it all wrong. That mountain of shit is worth a lot of money, and people are going to fork over cash for a piece of that shit, and keep doing it. What the article should've said is that we need a gaming crash to rejuvanate it creatively.
Totally tragedy and travesty was that game. Sure, it bombs along on those specs you've listed, but it runs worse and looks worse on my p3 933 merely because I have a GeForce 2 card. While we won't go into that, basically what we have here is an unfinished game.
Though we'll probably never know the real story as to why this game shipped so unfinished and with the rudest tech support of all time; what really galls is that no one who worked at OSI at the time seemed to remember what a legacy this game series was. It's where Warren Spector cut some of his teeth on computer gaming.
For me, as a player, it was - and perhaps now in hindsight rather silly, but for someone young - a moral experience. The Ultima series with it's continual history and small scale ethical conflicts taught me over the space of a few years that ethics and morals were never easy, and there was no simple solution to any large conflict. In their own crude way they reminded me of similar games in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game or the book in The Diamond Age.
It's what makes it so infuriating, that a game that taught me so many principles sacrificed them at the last minute to the nastiness of today's game's industry.
Most of us couldn't sit down and code that game engine, draw the graphics, animate the models, program the AI, make the maps, etc.
Oh yeah, tell that to the makers of Counter Strike, or Gunman Chronicles. Both are amateur efforts created by teams on the Internet who with 1/1000th of John Romero's $40 million and 1/4th the amount of time he had, have made games that are more playabe, better looking, and more professional.
In fact, general reaction to Daikatana seemed to be that it merely represented a poor mod, and with the quality of mods out there, such as Counter-Strike now being played more online than Q3A and UT - that isn't saying very much at all.
When it comes right down to it, Daikatana's ultimate failure is the amount of money thrown at someone for their track record. That money will not teach someone to be a true, innovative designer, nor will it teach them the skills necessary to run a large team in modern game development. Hopefully this ridiculousness in the industry is over, and the next time someone gets $40 mil for a game it's Warren Spector.
Re:ENOUGH ALREADY... Least important reason to vot
on
Should You Vote?
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· Score: 2
Yeah, misinformed. I grew up in Washington State, where we once had plenty of fish, too. Plenty of people who worked in the salmon industry. Now look at us. We ask for Alaskan salmon in our resturaunts in Seattle.
And I did not say it was a national monument - what I said was that the next president could declare the area one, preventing it from development. Living in Alaska, you've forgotten how destroyed a state can become through neglect of its environmental resources.
Also, as someone who grew up in Washington State, I can't forget the pipeline fire that evaporated the majority of a river in Bellingham a few years ago.
Don't get me wrong. I believe that people ought to eat fish, and maybe hunt, even. Hell, nothing pisses me off more than the organic food movement, which is stifling genetically modified food research which would be of enormous benefit to those starving in the third world. However, I also believe that mismanagement and human ignorance gets in the way of how to properly handle these issues.
And the real problem with our dependence on oil has nothing to do with where it is. It's the economic and cultural system in the US which has the highways flooded with people alone in their SUVs commuting two hours a day while the carpool lane is clear. A new commuter rail system has been started in Tacoma with the capacity to carry 2000 people on every train. About 600 use it. Meanwhile we have some of the worst traffic in the entire U.S.
Growing up, however, Washington state was a beautiful place. That's all changing, and you'll be pissed off too when they strip mine Alaska.
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Most people (see: Users, Windows), don't want to give up usability for security. Which is why, unless they are a hardcore PC gamer or a Windows developer, they should use OSX on a Mac.
Why don't you buy an eMac, then? It would cost as much as you're willing to spend.
This is what is so bizzare about the marketplace. This product that you've wanted is out there. You just don't want it in the eMac box.
Nearly every complaint about the Mac Mini can be explained away by the general modularity of Macs which tend to be far more external than PCs. On my desk I have a Dell Winbox and a G5. I've had the G5 for a year now. Not one OS crash or failure or reboot. And now the only reason I run the PC is for soulseek. I will never go back to Windows, ever.
/. have complained about this. Also, the standard Mac keyboard has two USB plugs.
.DLL nightmares, pick up viruses in everything from cursor settings to email, et. al... For a base $500 you can have a computer that does that and so much more.
1) 2 USB ports. What do you do after mouse / keyboard and you want to plug in a printer?
A USB HUB. I can't believe people on
2) No Audio In - external firewire devices, which have been mentioned in many other posts with links, are readily available. If you're serious about gargeband you won't want a crappy minijack audio in anyway. You'll want a breakout box with a 1/4 or optical line in.
3) No Optical Audio out - again the reverse of the above.
4) Harddrive space, not enough for today's digital media. Same as an Ipod.
Again, external firewire drives, which are very important to the Mac in general. I use my G5 primarily for heavy duty HD editing. Guess what I use for storage? No SCSI or Raid array - an off the shelf LaCie Terabyte external Firewire 800 drive. I took it out of the box, plugged it in, copied files over from the SATA drive that came with the system, and within 15 minutes my setup was complete with now a terabyte to work with. Hell, you could plug one of them into a Mac Mini if you had that much porn to archive and were going to hack the thing to be a video server.
5) What hardware you're getting for that price.
You're also getting OSX and iLife '05. I skipped iLife 04, but I am rushing out the day '05 hits, because it is just incredible what you're getting for 79$. That cost is part of the Mini Mac.
Ultimately it's not even about the hardware. Granted I'm spoiled with a dual G5 processor, but when push comes to shove what made me fall in love with my Mac wasn't the sheer power of my system - it was the OS environment, the software, the interface, the stability, the lack of virus and spyware and adware and malware.
That to me is easily worth $500, which is why this is a product that should be for two ends of the market. Clueless newbies who expect - rightly so - that things should work, and hardcore techies who can now afford to keep a second box. What I think you'll find is that under Jobs' second tenure the Mac has become a device for your life, and it's all to do with the exceptional software made for it.
Most of us here shell out at least 1000 for a good PC system even if we build from scratch cause that's often the price for the best thing out there. Wouldn't you gladly pay $500 extra if you knew that WinXP would never crash, never present
6) No DVD Burner. Not enough RAM.
You can add Ram without violating the warranty yourself. Apple is charging way too much for it. And you can add a Superdrive for about $100 if I recall right. Giving you the option to burn DVDs. This I believe is a cost everyone should upgrade to, especially once they see the ease of iMovie and iDVD.
7) No VGA / S VIdeo out
Well it comes with a DVI to VGA adapater - if you're hooking up to an HDTV then use DVI for the love of god. And you can get a SVIdeo out for 19$
Did you also remember this is fanless and whisper quiet and smaller than a lunchbox? That they've liberated you from having to pair up with their overpriced (but absolutely phenonmenal) displays?
Every bit of commentary I've seen about this computer has completely missed the point or just been rife with ignorance. Every single major gripe is addressable, and the price point is absoutely amazing, again, for the software. Most of the readers here do get it - they can afford to have one to play with, and I wouldn't be surpri
I hate to say this, because I believe information should be free, essentially, without limitations; even defense intelligence.
But it is completely understandable why Apple has no choice but to try and keep things like this secret, especially when they release new product info at the same time as quarterly results.
Last year I worked for a big corporation that made one of the most successful "products" of the year, not situated far from Apple.
Rumors of something that would impact stocks spread. Very easily. Due to my low on the totem pole training status I got to witness a lot of private, fly on the wall conversations between very big and powerful individuals who would ignore me until they needed something. I got to listen and eavesdrop a lot on a world that I had no experience or idea about.
When it came to the matter of any sort of announcement such as this which will impact a company's stock price, you have no idea how terrified corporate execs have become of turning into the next Martha Stewart. They have basically been briefed on this by the government. Do something out of line. And we will make an example of you.... That's the word they've received.
They don't have a choice except to try and institute litigation in such a proceeding because they have to make a public claim and display for shutting down any information whcih might give the appearance of stock manipulation. Apple stock shot up in the days before the expo because of the rumors at ThinkSecret. Period.
This has become one of the top paranoia inducing issues amongst executive staff.
The funny thing is; it's all because the Bush admin is trying to cover up the soft pedaling they did on Enron so it looks like they are responsible in going after big corporate crime. They put a message out to high profile companies. And now as a result they have to be very, very careful with any information regarding announcements that would affect stocks.
This is not a defense of a severe lawsuit, but an explanation for corporate mentality and the further reasons why it seems so severe; in some respects the current business environment has fostered this era in.
For the past three books the same criticisms have been levelled at Gibson's latest book by the geek cognescenti here at Slashdot. It gets pretty boring. I think the problem is Gibson's fustion of noir and attitude to computers gave socially inept people who did not generally have a badass bone in them some kind of feeling that they did; when that became less interesting to him, because it wasn't really even on the money for the most part, most geeks became bored.
Here's some rebuttal to some of those criticisms:
The usage of Sept. 11th makes perfect, absolute sense. I'd like to understand why a poster above refers to the book as speculative fiction. Although marketed as such there is nary a piece of technology nor a futuristic setting to suggest that P.R. is even a work of science fiction, despite being marketed as such by the publisher. If you've worked in filmmaking or advertising on a Transoceanic basis in the past year, this book reads more believable than anything out there.
I think it's obvious that Gibson has taken the central themes in all of his books and reformed them into this and set it in the present day because there's no longer a need to push it forward. The perception of time is a constant underlying theme in Gibson's work, and this one deals with the immediate and what's in fashion because it dominates our day to day living. September 11th is immediate and cannot be ignored, and ultimately the book is about any human search, no matter the time or place, for meaning in a sea of information that is incomprehensible due to its complexity. P.R. does not offer any easy answers or political commentary on Sept. 11th, only a raw sort of need to understand and contextualize something that horrific into a person's life.
That fits into the broader idea of the book, the old Gibson standby of someone trying to track down an artist. The footageheads who trawl the web and dissect and bisect the pieces of anonymous footage are really doing what humans have always done in culture; once again, searching for meaning where there is none.
If anyone can point me to a book which captures the sensation of what it's like to be part of an online community or to communicate with friends daily, globally and immediately; please offer suggestions. That's what P.R. nails.
When he whores out every track on the album to advertise everything from chocolates to cars.
Best exchange I ever saw on a movie related messageboard some years ago:
"Dude, the Crow 2 is so fake. The guy drives his motorcycle through a concrete highway barrier. No way at that speed on a two wheeled vehicle would he smash through that."
Followup:
"It's a movie about a GUY WHO DIED AND CAME BACK TO LIFE and you're worried about realism?"
The reason I say that (and I thought this was newsworthy) is because Lucas' actions and the public perception he attempts to display are so out of wack. On the one hand he's attempting a damage control campaign to placate fans by claiming that their criticisms of The Phantom Menace have been taken on board, while at the same time dissing them. From a recent Time cover story:
Lucas blames the anti-Jar Jar sentiment on "37-year-old guys who spend all their time on the Internet. But you have to remember that when we did The Empire Strikes Back, some people hated C-3PO. When we did Jedi, they just loathed the Ewoks. There was no Internet to jazz it up, but there was the same conversation. Fans are very opinionated, and that's good. But I can't make a movie for fans." Nonetheless, Jar Jar has a far less prominent role this time. In movie theaters you will hear a cheer from Binks-ophobes when, as he launches into an anecdote, Padme cursorily cuts him off.
Lucas is continually at the forefront of discussing how liberating digital technologies will be to filmmakers; the problem is his actions belie a complete ignorance and arrogance that denies there can be any other effect than making it cheaper for him to make his films in his own weird way. He seems to be totally unaware of the effect the universe he created has had on millions of imaginations; or if he is, he wants to control that in a manner that suits him. Thus fandom is a thing which can be used to promotional effect and to make his hardcore constitiuency feel that he adores them... But when he slips in caveats to a contest that he's controlling in order to limit how that can be expressed he's really saying, "You can use those new technologies, just as long as you don't do it how I want you to." He's opened up a can of worms and seems totally oblivious that he's done so.
I'm a paid, working filmmaker. My first film is coming out this fall. I would never make a fan fiction film; I prefer to make my own. But I do feel that as cultural artifacts (and in my opinion very cheesy ones at that) some of the fan made Star Wars films are impressive enough and show such hard work with limited resources that they deserve some genuine praise and are sterling examples of exactly what doors digital filmmaking are going to open.
God, if I had a dollar for every genuine working filmmaker I know of my generation who wasn't influenced or their imagination fired by the original Star Wars, I'd be funding my own damn movies. Under those auspices I believe that given the line Lucas likes to spout he ought to pay attention to them. After all, he continually revises the continuity of his own universe when it suits his franchises and spin offs into other media to make more money. He allowed and has even admitted to letting the marketing tie ins to The Phantom Menace run rampant. Read this even better Newsweek story. Does Lucas play through all the video games made from his Empire to ensure quality control of continuity? I seriously doubt it. In other words, it's fine to do this as long as he's making some money off of it, or it's unenforceable since he lost the Starballz suit.
I'm also going to join in and state that this was the stupidest thing /. has done in awhile. X Files isn't airing for another goddamn half an hour and you blow it right there in the headline.
And furthermore, tell Jon Katz that it's "spoiler warning" not "spoilage" and stop having him mention the evils of Time Warner AOL when he sold the rights to your story to New Line Films - owned by them.
In fact, slashdot's entire cultural coverge is pretty weak and needs an overhaul.
I'm currently editing a documentary. 100+ hours of footage. It's mind numbing, anal, pedantic work just going through the footage as opposed to editing it. Believe me, none of you want to see what's being thrown away. Editing exists for a reason because a) it's the essential unique trait of film / tv as a medium and b) analogs about context in code rarely ever apply to editing, a process which is intuitive, decisive, and essential. If you believe in releasing all your rushes or footage then you essentially are saying you don't have anything to say, because by essence you're not defining what your point is.
Look closely at the Army's own webpage with their little picture of what the armor suit might look like...
He's holding a Pulse Rifle from Aliens!
I think it's really weird that a filmmaker decides to make a film that's a metaphor for Vietnam in which superior technology is beaten by an organic enemy; an obvious moral. But now the Army wants those Pulse Rifles.
Have any of you seen pictures of the OICW? It's the Army's latest attempt at a replacement infantry rifle for the aging M16 (A rifle which when first made, had a plastic stock stamped with Mattel's logo because they were manufacturing the plastic parts). I swear, the people in charge of defining the equipment a future soldier will be wearing must sit around all day and watch Aliens over and over and over...
I saw some recent footage of a new integrated networking system for mobile soldiers. All these soldiers are checking their PDAs and typing into their wristpad. In some way I can understand the advantage of having access to all that information, but time and again history has proven that soldier's overreliant on technology get their asses bit.
This year may also have been penultimate proof that the gaming industry is in a really stagnant rut when it comes to the culture of development. My buddies working in games bitched more, got paid less, were laid off more often or had to leave due to disputes with moronic producers and overfunded designers than ever before, and every word I heard pushed one simple fact (with the exception of coders who always seem to be allright). Creating games has become a true massmarket medium - unfortunately it is also almost entirely about money now and for most in the industry has nothing to do with vision or fun.
I expect with this news for that trend to continue further - more middle management and inflated budgets or ship dates that are unrealistic. Because gaming is becoming all about the Benjamins...
And speaking of $6.9 billion dollars of PC gaming software sales - considering that the best games hardly sold at all, that means a shitload of Deer Hunter and Sims games were sold last year.
Great points all, but missing out on what it really means. The Japanese games market is stagnant right now, but the fact is the real killer AAA 1 million shipping console games almost always come from Japan.
The real problem is that MS is going to flood the console market with lazy PS2 ports, and games developed by fledgling PC development houses. Console gaming and PC gaming are two totally seperate beasts, psychologically, aesthetically, and in terms of what they deliver to the home audience.
Sony's real genius was in marketing the PS family to 18-24 year olds - they're the ones who created what we now call casual gamers, the wide installed user base who only purchase big event titles and franchises that are known. People looking for a thumb candy fix, and not a tactical simulation of group dynamics in a shooter environment. For better or worse, this completely changed the market for games and how successful a title can be.
I'd like someone to name for me an American videogame character who resonates in pop culture as deeply as Mario or Lara Croft or Solid Snake. American game development has never excelled at these concepts, rather excelling at heavy titles. Japanese designers seem to understand the aesthetic of creating knowable characters and the simplicity of console interfaces and games.
What failure in Japan means is no future Metal Gear or Final Fantasy for Xbox. That's what will kill the system.
And we're also forgettting Europe, one of the fastest growing games markets. Having lived over there with friends who worked in games, let me offer this as a warning to any console creator in future: Never, ever, ever, ship a console in Europe that doesn't have a name brand soccer title with licensed players. At least they got this right.
In fact, the more I think of Xbox the more it reminds me of Dreamcast. Hell, they even managed to rip off the controller and make it worse. Two many crappy titles that confuse the consumer when groundbreaking titles appear on the system, and a lack of AAA third party titles that are known franchises.
And yes, I own an Xbox and a PS2. It's a very powerful machine with great capabilities. And the number one biggest thing they did wrong - the controllers. They're enough to convince me to forget the machine. As much as I like Halo, it's a PC game and it shows. Imagine playing that over the Net right now, coop, in a resolution I choose, rather than on a dodgy split screen, and with a mouse to aim no less. That's the Xbox's biggest problem. The best title is a PC game, and it shows.
His girlfriend knows all his information, like zip code and location, so she clicks on forgot my password. Having passed that, his security question was: "What's my sister's name?" That wasn't too hard.
Needless to say, once she got in and had a look at his e lover's correspondence, the four year relationship ended quickly.
From there he did a radio show which became the BBC show The Day Today, which offered surreal news stories combined with the best parody of news reportage as stands in the Western world I've ever seen. His vaguely threatening goodnight, the use of insane graphics and pounding music... But then he got Brass Eye.
In the UK, humor and sex aren't as big a deal as violence, and you'd be amazed at what's shown on television here compared to the US. Before Brass Eye was even aired it became a news story, as several celebrities and politicians complained to the commisioning network, Channel 4, that he had gone too far.
During the height of Ecstacy hysteria in the UK, he had gotten politicans and celebrities to denounce the evils of a dangerous new drug ruining our children, called CAKE. As in, "We must ban cake." He did it so brilliantly that one of the Members of Parliament who he recorded denouncing cake ("which affects the part of the brain known as Shatner's Bassoon, which affects perception of time - cake is a made up drug, made up of chemicals") asked questions about it in Parliament. The then head of Channel 4 tried to get Morris to tone down the show's vitriol and abuse of celebrities. In the Science on Trial episode he had several UK celebrities talking about the dangers of "heavy electricity" which was killing people in the Far East. So Morris put a subliminal message in the final episode, calling his boss a cunt, which led to statements that he would never work for Channel 4 again. He returned to radio.
Until this year, when changes at Channel 4 led to a rebroadcast of the series and the commisioning of the new one off special on pedophilia. He had a famous London radio DJ stating that pedophiles had more genes in common with crabs than you or I, and there's no evidence for it, but it's a scientific fact! It went on. The result was instant, knee jerk tabloid hysteria, I think best represented in this picture. What you should know is that earlier this year, thanks to a name and shame campaign a major UK tabloid did on paedophiles, a paedatrician was attacked by an angry mob and had her car firebombed. A few days after airing of the programme, several politicans got in on the act, admitting they hadn't seen the show. One of them is even blind!
But thankfully the British public have shown their sense of good humor and more calls of support were received on Channel 4's complaints line then actual complaints, so the entire issue is now being hushed up.
I think what really grates about Morris is that he deigned to show that you cannot trust any of the mainstream media you partake of, that celebrity endorsements count for nothing. My favorite moment on the paedophilia special was a presenter for the BBC's technology show stating that internet padeophiles can use penis shaped sound waves to molest children. I think it's far more frightening to the public to know that those people that put a comforting, sickly gloss on the world as it is today are patently full of shit. The result of Morris' work may be greater than any piece of culture I've had all year, because it's made me question everything. I can no longer watch the news without laughing and being shocked by the idiocy and dramatics of it all. For that he deserves to be knighted.
b) Anecdotal historical evidence from natives continually points out to a plane like hers crashing near the island that was visible in a lagoon for awhile, and around the time of her disappearance.
c) The recovery in a previous expedition of artifacts such as a shoe and labels from food cans produced around the time of her disappearance.
d) A British research ship which a few years later took the bones of a "European woman" from the island, and the logbook and anecdotal evidence of such.
e) In terms of Navigation, and her position near her disappearance, Nikamuoro is a lot more probably than Saipan.
This group would not be raising $400k just for naught - they are trying to be thorough and rational... Perhaps this sometimes is clouded by the evangelical zeal they have by which they want to find the wrecked plane... Because at the very least it would finish off the ridiculous stories that transform her into some martyr. Let's not forget that Earhart was a devoted pacifist who worked as a nurse while in her teens on WWI soldiers returned home, and she was doubly progressive in teaching and looking after non white children at around the same time. TIGHAR may not find anything, but at least their search respects Earhart as opposed to using her for silly theories about how she was a spy for the US government. Let's not forget that it became inscribed in stone that her navigator Noonan was a tempestuous alcoholic due to one volume of biography that never attributed the knowledge of such - and subsequent research in later years was never able to find the man as incomptent at his job.
As for my interpretation of "the true meaning of the artist" - whether or not I agree with the concept of all art needing some intangible, metaphysical, or even spiritual explanation that is derived from the ego of the artist (which I don't necessarily) - Van Gogh has become a cause celebre for the artist whose life was as important as their work. It's part of the reason for the ridiculous prices associated with his work. His letters to his brother established him as a figure after his death, and a cursory read would reveal that there were specific personal and deterministic notions in his endeavours. It may be trite to yourself, but it drives the ridiculous art market today, and many would say that it began with Van Gogh. Van Gogh's work is part and parcel with his life, interminably, for better or for worse - it is impossible to seperate him from his time and its technology and image processing capabilities.
And I do stand corrected on what's different about this work and what it's for (imagine using texture by numbers to generate landscapes for computer games rather than storing the textures). I will stand by the fact that when it comes to mimicking an artist's strokes the material will only ever be as good as a) what's fed into it and b) a pale imitation, good for only some FX gag I expect to see in some music video and then vanish.
This is interesting and all well and good, but ultimately where it fails is that the produced image is entirely dependent on the original photograph's perception of the world. A reproduction of an image through halide crystal activation, which is enough for human memory and recognizance, but it lacks the true meaning of the artist. Van Gogh never used contrast or flat lighting as exhibited in the source pictures, and he often burst highlights with striking colors that may not have been actually present to his eye. It's what seperates him from a Turner - not just his brush stroke or how thick he worked in paint but how he saw the world. It's pretty churlish to adopt the first real expressionist painter (who deliberately attempted to paint their perception of the world rather than reproduce it) as an example of this algorithim, as the resultant images show that without an interpretation or perception this is pretty useless stuff. All I see here is a souped up photoshop filter.
If one were to actually study the production, history, and words of those who worked on 2001, there is more than enough anecdotal evidence to purport that consistently throughout the production Kubrick made decisions with the pretense of engendering ambiguity, discussion, and interpretation.
I recently had the chance to see a new 70mm print of 2001 in London, and apart from being completely enraptured and shocked at how much power this film still has... I was ultimately stunned by how unconventional the film is in its sense of ambiguity. For instance, upon its release no explanation was offered for HAL's insanity. Thanks to Clarke, we have an explanation, but as the original film runs and was released no explanation was ever offered.
Instead of searching for semiotic signals in the ether, one must realize that Kubrick set out in pre production with initial solid ideas. For example, that cut that proceeds from the bone to the first object floating in space - that object is an orbital nuclear weapons platform. The original ending for 2001 would have the Starchild detonating all the satellites. As for the alien presence in the film, Kubrick shot several tests using all manner of visualization (to the exasperation of the crew) to attempt to film "aliens", but ultimately settled on never showing them.
The greatest proof I can give is the following statement, made by Kubrick himself, and I think it pretty much says it all, and the author of the aforementioned book should, as well.
."I would not think of quarreling with your interpretation nor offering any other, as I have found it always the best policy to allow the film to speak for itself."
As far as whinging about NASA goes, the problem is multifaceted: reduced spending, wayward spending, political interests beefing up programs for Congressional approval only because of the amount of pork they'd bring to their constituents (and thereby putting price tags so high that they get shelved).
But it's best that we're not cynical about this. Try and recall the technologies we got humans to the moon with, how antiquated and retrogade it is to us now. The ISS could stay up, and people will surivive - just look at what Shackelton went through in the Antarctic - as long as we don't cave into easy cynicism and humor. And why not? Because if this program fails, so will all other future multinational space efforts - and the result will be that someday someone's going to plant an AOL / Time Warner flag on Mars by the time we get there.
Recently all this talk has been made about the PC dying as a games platform - well nearly all the companies I've seen abandon the PC for pastures X Box were not the game makers I look out for or expect great things from. So a badly licensed substandard kid's product won't ship on PC, but Deus Ex 2 will. Boo fucking hoo. The PC will also continue to innovate in the online realm before the consoles do for several more years.
As far as a gaming crash is concerned, ask EA or Square or Sony how much they think they're going to lose in the next few years. Very, very little.
This is no reason for hope, however. Massmarket acceptance and the pure visual quality of titles released today will insure gaming continues - albeit in a sea of licensed, substandard, boring hogwash. More WWF games, more bad movie ports, another EA Fifa 2001 September edition. The gaming business is no longer what it once was, a playground of innovation and boundary pushing and an attempt to create a genuine new art form. Now it is all about the money, bottom line. That's what's depressing. True, there will be the odd rose buried in the mountain of shit - but unfortunately this article has it all wrong. That mountain of shit is worth a lot of money, and people are going to fork over cash for a piece of that shit, and keep doing it. What the article should've said is that we need a gaming crash to rejuvanate it creatively.
Though we'll probably never know the real story as to why this game shipped so unfinished and with the rudest tech support of all time; what really galls is that no one who worked at OSI at the time seemed to remember what a legacy this game series was. It's where Warren Spector cut some of his teeth on computer gaming.
For me, as a player, it was - and perhaps now in hindsight rather silly, but for someone young - a moral experience. The Ultima series with it's continual history and small scale ethical conflicts taught me over the space of a few years that ethics and morals were never easy, and there was no simple solution to any large conflict. In their own crude way they reminded me of similar games in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game or the book in The Diamond Age.
It's what makes it so infuriating, that a game that taught me so many principles sacrificed them at the last minute to the nastiness of today's game's industry.
Oh yeah, tell that to the makers of Counter Strike, or Gunman Chronicles. Both are amateur efforts created by teams on the Internet who with 1/1000th of John Romero's $40 million and 1/4th the amount of time he had, have made games that are more playabe, better looking, and more professional.
In fact, general reaction to Daikatana seemed to be that it merely represented a poor mod, and with the quality of mods out there, such as Counter-Strike now being played more online than Q3A and UT - that isn't saying very much at all.
When it comes right down to it, Daikatana's ultimate failure is the amount of money thrown at someone for their track record. That money will not teach someone to be a true, innovative designer, nor will it teach them the skills necessary to run a large team in modern game development. Hopefully this ridiculousness in the industry is over, and the next time someone gets $40 mil for a game it's Warren Spector.
And I did not say it was a national monument - what I said was that the next president could declare the area one, preventing it from development. Living in Alaska, you've forgotten how destroyed a state can become through neglect of its environmental resources.
Also, as someone who grew up in Washington State, I can't forget the pipeline fire that evaporated the majority of a river in Bellingham a few years ago.
Don't get me wrong. I believe that people ought to eat fish, and maybe hunt, even. Hell, nothing pisses me off more than the organic food movement, which is stifling genetically modified food research which would be of enormous benefit to those starving in the third world. However, I also believe that mismanagement and human ignorance gets in the way of how to properly handle these issues.
And the real problem with our dependence on oil has nothing to do with where it is. It's the economic and cultural system in the US which has the highways flooded with people alone in their SUVs commuting two hours a day while the carpool lane is clear. A new commuter rail system has been started in Tacoma with the capacity to carry 2000 people on every train. About 600 use it. Meanwhile we have some of the worst traffic in the entire U.S.
Growing up, however, Washington state was a beautiful place. That's all changing, and you'll be pissed off too when they strip mine Alaska.