This seems so ridiculous, that I wonder whether this is was purposefully done to force people to reform patent laws. Sometimes you need to utterly break something before people will notice that it was broken to start with. This is the most benign interpretation I can see as otherwise, it seems to be lacking in sense.
Bill Gates has been making himself a bit more high profile in the education movement so this is no surprise really. Back in February, he went to a conference with governers from the 50 states to discuss education:
Though I am not a Bill Gates fan, he has a valid point, and more importantly, he has the power & money to actually do something about it beyond just talk. While I have little doubt that he wouldn't mind expanding MS's market share, I do not think Gates is disingenuous in his efforts. Anything/anyone that advocates a good look at our public education is a good thing (and I dont mean talking about vouchers), so lets not let the anti-MS attitudes overwhelm the basic good that can come out of his efforts.
I was just wondering as the article wasnt clear on this (and indeed, perhaps this is a part of the very issue at stake), are commentators considered journalists? Commentators include Rush Limbaught, Al Franken, Rhandi Rhodes, Sean Hannity, and so on. These people usually are re-diseminating already released news and offering their own opinions on it. A majority of bloggers pretty much fall into this catagory; they are merely commenting on existing news with varying degrees of intelligence. The line starts blurring when bloggers are able to discover a story (Rathergate, and so on), and produce original research & material before other media outlets. So where do the commentators stand in this and where do bloggers stand in relation to them? What about Drudge, is he a journalist? There are plenty of time's hes disseminated atleast partially false information in order to be the first to break it.
I fully support a blogger press since it lacks many of the external pressures (so far anyway) that make the mainstream media less likely to dig in particularly political areas in relation to their job security. Thus stories can be broken that would otherwise go unnoticed; by the same token, there is a burden of responsibility on journalists that shouldnt let them squander rights. I do not see that burden in most bloggers as most bloggers are overtly political & partisan, almost painfully so at times. As one poster, whos a journalist said, in this regard I'll perhaps be satisfied if a blogger is willing to goto jail to stand up for this right. Otherwise, it seems unearned. Then again, it seems sad & dangerous to have to go that far to earn a civil right... I welcome any insights.
I agree with your initial points, especially about the complexity of balancing; a lot of factors, each of which affects the whole and as such needs to be adjusted carefully and thoughtfully. However, your final paragraph is a bit pretentious as unfortunately the article that started this off states:
The team has kindly offered to take some time out of their extremely busy schedules to answer questions.
Source: Original Article
I do not expect developers to go out of their way to explain to fans or whoever what they do, to answer questions and so on, as like you said, we'd rather they spend that time developing. However, when one offers to go ahead and do such a thing, I think its somewhat insulting to then give them canned answers when clearly what they wanted was something more than that. Otherwise just say, 'Sorry we are too busy with WoW, but the team appreciates your interest.' Slashdot editors say, 'Well folks, we talked to the WoW team and they were busy, maybe next time' and everyone goes home and plays video games.
So perhaps your towering superiority is a bit misplaced and should in fact be reinvested elsewhere. "Oh, wait.... this is Slashdot. Nevermind"; indeed, join the party of the arrogant yourself since you are in the know unlike everyone else. We can stand side by side being arrogant assholes to each other, just don't bothering differentiating yourself from anyone else since we're no better.
I saw this and first thought, "Good" since I'd rather Peter Jackson do something a bit more original like a Hobbit movie since theres something to the original content in the first place. Halo was a fun game and all, but seriously, much like a Doom movie, what are you really left with? Thin plot (better than Doom, but lets face it, science fiction books covered Halo's territory about 20 - 30 years previously and did it a lot better) with a whole lot of gun fire & explosions. Not to say this isnt entertaining but really, seems unneeded with the abundant availability of action movies.
That rolls into my real comment: frig Halo, why not take a real step and make a Ringworld movie? You already have a symbol that everyone recognizes (the Halo), and you could easily market it as 'the thing that inspired Halo'. Right there, you've got the serious scifi geeks and the Halo fanboys in 1 scoop. I admit Ringworld would need to be 'spiced' up a tiny bit to keep watchers attention since the book was more of an exploration of a world rather than a character-centric story. But even there, you have excellent character diversity: the puppeteer, the human male & female, and the feline-like Kzin. Just have writers improve upon the dialogue & create more character interest without ignoring the fact that its really the Ringworld that is the true focus. I do not consider Ringworld to be my favorite science fiction stories or even really high up on that list, but really, if Slashdot is going to talk about making a movie about a game based on a book, we might as well skip all the mainstreaming and go straight back to the source. Who knows, we may even get a decent movie out of it.
Definitely an intriguing idea especially in light of Rockstars sad behavior after this became public, in which they did everything but accept responsibility for including the material in question. That then gives moral crusaders some pretty convincing ammo to use against game developers & publishers. 'Hey look, they cant even take responsibility for including the content let alone properly policing it! We need more government oversight & regulations...' you know the drill. For Rockstars and indeed all game developers sakes, lets hope this was nothing more than some developers having a bit of fun on their own time.
Rockstar really made their bed with this one, and now they are going to have to sleep in it. Originally I blew this off as a bunch of prudes getting steamed over some mods for a game, but now its been shown that this is a built in 'feature'. I'd like to defend Rockstar, but really cannot as it is affording them special treatment at the expense of other people.
The video game industry & audience has been VERY good to Rockstar; they've enjoyed massive sales & popularity, and at this point 4 sequels to an originally top-down perspective game centered around driving, stealing, and violence. And, with greater popularity comes greater inspection of the product by those who do not like it and wish for it to be banned. Given that GTA is a homing-beacon target for 'family values' type groups, it seems utterly retarded to package a sex game into it without informing the game raters, and then act surprised when players uncover it, then lie about the nature of it, and *wham* you just gave those 'family values' groups all the ammo they need to actually ACT and not just TALK about regulating video games further. My feeling is summarized such that while I do not think Rockstar intentionally tried to screw us this way, they have inadvertantly abused their success in such a way that it will hurt everyone else a great deal more than it will hurt them due to an anti-sex backlash amongst lobbying groups. Remember, with great power comes great responsiblity; with great success built upon the fellow shoulders of your video game colleages, comes the responsibility to not do things that will make it harder for your colleages to do their jobs in their comparatively smaller successes.
And for the record, the Hot Coffee 'game' is entertaining once for the gimmick & shock value, but otherwise is as interesting as Virtual Valerie and definitely not worth the price that Rockstar is going to pay in the end at the hands of moral crusaders.
I can give a crap that its Top 40, Top 10 Classic Rock, or whatever; if the music was Led Zeppelin or something else not originally produced for video games, it does not matter: it is not original video game music, so dressing these awards up in this guise is a simple marketing plot. Much like the Oscars publically tries to recognize parts of production that you normally do not see a face for, I feel this should be the same for video games and should attempt to recognize some of those artists out there that are producing an original product for these games but we never get to see outside of perhaps an interview or game credit. Having 'pop' but original video game music would be a vast improvement to this marketing charade as atleast the contestants would be real.
As some other posters indicated, this is not about linux being faster but more so since when it comes to cluster systems, linux has a couple advantages: low/no cost for licensing, open development environment thus easy & low-cost to work with to create further tools, stability, and customizability.
These are the main factors, but this does not apply to anything but the rendering clusters. The actual artist-driven work is still for the most part performed on Windows systems due to the cost of hardware, availability of highend video cards & drivers, and a wider install base. Maya running on Win32 is the largest segment of the 3D users, and this is not set to change unless Apple starts getting serious and gets highend video card makers to support OSX. For small scenes, the cards that come with G5 workstations are not bad, but once you start doing more complex scenes, it becomes a slideshow.
In the end, this is not really news as this conversion has been going on for the last several years, especially since Maya was ported to linux. But, regardless, it's good news all around as it means a user does not need access to an expensive SGI system to get familiar with cluster rendering systems and lowers the overall entrance barriers to people learning.
Lets not get too overly excited until we actually play these games as several times in the past, games that were hyped as super-innovative have turned out to be not-so innovative after all. Fable comes to mind: definitely entertaining to play, but not quite what was promised. Then there's Master of Orion 3: innovation-gone-wrong. I hope these games live up to their promises, but its the end product that counts.
It would be interesting to see game developers post a small table consisting of a list of functions promised in the press-releases, interviews,.plans, etc (note that this only applies to the publicity-related activities, and not internal company dialogue) and then a check next to each feature that was actually implimented. Shooting for the stars is all and good, but do not expect me to pay when you tell me you're shooting for the stars, but land on the moon.
I do not really agree that games are becoming more complex, but I am also one of those gamers who enjoys complex games, so my standard of judgement is probably not that of your average consumer. Barring that however, a somewhat new trend (new in that I am seeing it used well in modern games) is the ability to select the complexity & difficulty you play the game at. A great example of this is a rather recent game called Silent Hunter III, which is a WWII u-boat game.
I had always found subsim games interesting, but was always put off by the fact that they often required you to have an existing knowledge of submarine terms, the mechanics and so on, and given the complexity of submarine combat, this would result in me not playing the game again due to fustration. Enter Silent Hunter III which allows a player like myself to choose how realistic I wish to play the game. At first I played at the most unrealistic level with unlimited oxygen, unlimited fuel, automatic targeting, etc etc, and let the game AI deal with most of the ship management. This allowed me to focus on ship interception strategy & get a firmer grip on whats important when playing. Then slowly, I enabled the realism options as I became more confident & knowledgable about the gameplay. I still do not play at a true realism level as I do not personally find it too incredibly fun, especially since I am not quite that good yet, but the game succeeds wonderfully at scaling to a player's level of knowledge. As well, if I find the motions of sighting, configuring, etc a torpedo attack, I can relegate the task to the AI, and focus just on navigation, ever having to deal with torpedo details. Same for sonar, radar, deck guns, and so on. You can play the game the way you like.
It is this type of choose-your-own-complexity-and-gameplay-style that I'd like to see more in games beyond just 'Easy, Medium, Hard' (though most games need only this), especially in the more complex games that require micromanagement. Rome Total War was great in this aspect; you could let the AI manage your cities building queues & recruitment and just focus on combat. Or you could do the opposite purely manage resources & territory aquisition and just let the AI fight the battles for you. In this manner, both a Civ fan and a Command & Conquer fan would both enjoy the game in a seperate way.
Both of these games, Rome Total War, and Silent Hunter III are fairly complex games but each is great in that I do not have to be a Roman historian or a U-Boat expert to play & enjoy the games; and better still, those experts can play the game and love it too in their own way.
While the science in scifi books is often interesting, I find whats actually interesting is not the actual technology but its effect on society. To this end, I find writers like Philip K Dick intriging as he examines not so much actual techologies but what type of societies would create such technologies, where they may start to lead us, etc. To that end, I dont think making your science more realistic will nessessarily make any type of improvement to the genre if the content & philosophical ideas were not all built upon as well. As far as 'science fiction [being] the opiate of the geek masses', well to me thats a trolling statement and as another poster said, a way for some scifi fans to feel superior to other fans; someone else can come along and call those people idiots since they don't read Ayn Rand or Shakespeare, and they too would be wrong.
The author's statement that FTL travel never being possible is rather arrogant given our limited understanding of the universe; for one that's crying so loudly for real science in scifi, those are some pretty absolutist statements on something thats very much not absolute.
My only issue with Macs and 3D is that no company that I know of has released a high end 3D developmental video card such as the Wildcats, FireGLs, or Quadro's for the Mac as of yet, which prevents them from entering the high-end 3D market. I worked in a studio using Maya with both G5s and Opteron workstations, and while the G5s were plenty fast for a majority of tasks, when it came to the more complex scenes with large meshes, textures and such, there was a marked difference in the response-time of Maya, only since the Opteron systems had Quadro's. Otherwise, the systems were essentially the same in performance. Once Apple gets some serious higher end video card support they can offer competition in that market.
For the poster's purposes however, I doubt they will experience these limitations.
While this is not un-expected, I really do hope that Jackson adopts a style that suits The Hobbit as the atmosphere in 'Lord of the Ringss' is much more serious than that in The Hobbit. What is enjoyable about The Hobbit as a book is that it has a much more fairy tale, easy-going quality than the epic that is LOTR; it is well suited for children, (for whom Tolkien originally wrote for anyway, his own children specifically). It's only at the end of The Hobbit that you really begin to see the type of writing that is present in LOTR, and the final battle of The Hobbit is the most action-filled scene in the book. I just hope Jackson does not merely use the same exact atmosphere from LOTR 'because it works', and instead considers that The Hobbit is not merely a prelude to LOTR, but its own seperate story & unique tone.
Funnily enough, I used to think like this but then I went out and talked more with Europeans and came to a (ultimtely unsurprising) conclusion: people are mostly the same everywhere, and stupidity is pretty well distributed! I can carry the same topic of conversation with a redneck from Texas and an America-hating european, and the the one thing they both share is a perpensity for making sweeping generalizations about the other; for this reason, I reject them both. For every European that had some relevant, intelligent thing to say about America, 4 others would spout stuff I would rank no better than the redneck who shouts, GOD BLESS AMERICA, ITS OUR WAY OR THE HIGHWAY! This is the case in America, and its the case elsewhere; thus is the nature of humanity. People tend to make massive generalizations (see, I just made a couple myself) and use them to justify their opinions. In conclusion, just remember that people are people, regardless of their country, religion, race, or sexuality. Once you forget this, you are no better than the 'unwashed masses' that you scorn.
This is not to say critisim is unfounded or unwanted, if anything I love a good debate about how nations conduct themselves, but do everyone a favor and leave your sweeping generalizations at home. Additionally, your contempt for your fellow Americans is somewhat amusing as unless you live in a wooden shack in the middle of no where, hunt/gather your food, sew your own clothing, and reject all modern technology (in short, be 100% self-effecient), your mere existence contributes to the very system you lament; such is the paradox of the societies we claim to be disgusted by.
I doubt anyone has an intention of setting up 'free' broadband here; what I dont understand is your outright hostility towards a group of people who wants to do this and all agree on the costs.
No one said anything about free broadband, you assumed that, additionally if a companies have been unwilling to invest in setting up broadband in an area, why shouldnt residents take matters into their own hands? This bill is simply a way for cable companies to ensure if they are lazy, they dont need to worry about anything rocking the boat. These community run ideas shouldnt scare any half-way decent broadband company as clearly they should have the upper hand in running costs, equipment, and so on. Why legislate it if the costs in the end will be higher? If anything, let people see why these systems dont work if theyre so bad that no one bothers with them again. Legislation is not the answer here its just insurance for cable companies, nothing more.
Get over your selfishness, you do not deserve free broadband, especially when it has to come from someone else's income.
Get over your self-rightiousness, its a bit over the top.
I think we've all seen what happens when developers have big egos and major arrogance problems; Daikatana pretty much examplifies the end result in my opinion. Between the hype, the ridiculous claims and bragging, you would have thought the team was headed up by a bunch of teenagers. The end result was sad as we all know, with even the installation of the game being buggy as all hell. Another example of 'Im too good for everyone' mindset is Derek Smart. While his gameplay ideas are pretty cool and definitely worth striving for in my opinion, the attitude he brings to the table is absolutely horrendus. Again, this attitude is seen in the quality of the Battlecruiser games. I have never gotten a battlecruiser game to not crash to the desktop onload, so why all this attitude & arrogance when the product doesn't justify it?
I am interpretting burn out relative to the comparison to rock artists; a lot of these guys burned out cause they got too into drugs, promiscuious sex, and in general started making stupid decisions in arrogance. The results ranged from destroying their careers to going bankrupt, and from needing to goto a rehabilitation facility to death.
I think its nice that game developers can have a bit of a public status, but the moment they let it go to their heads, they deserve their fall because it usually means an inferior product for the real fans who got them there in the first place.
And as far as real job burnout goes, its no different than anything else in the entertainment industry. It moves fast, the deadlines are quick, and if you don't keep up, don't expect anyone else to wait up because you've already been left for dead.
This entire study is flawed simply because the author is using math to justify his conclusion, but his variables are all meaningless and arbitrary.
If he had instead wrote a simple script for his IRC client that would get a list of channels and randomly join say 10 of them with atleast say 10 people in them, then he could start citing numbers as his test cases would have been random, possibly. But the fact is, he completely ignores that the number of small channels is massively larger than the number of gigantic channels, and generally speaking in these smaller channels is where genuine conversation takes place.
Try having a genuine conversation on a channel with 200 - 300 people, the chances are its like talking in a storm and your words are lost in the chaos. All the channels I personally go on have at maximum 50 - 80 people, but on average closer to 20, rarely in which all people are active. Out of all our interactions, only a small percentage of them would be deemed illegal. This 99.9% number might as well have been made up before the author even started the 'experiment', which was really not much of an experiment but more like fitting the test to match the desired results.
You are spot on and have stated the most basic yet fundamentally important (but overlooked) thing when trying to understand other humans. I think something a lot of people forget at times is that people are people and always will be people. This may seem simple, stupid, or quaint, but I've found it helps explain things when you're intent on viewing a group/person as something thats something other than human. Generally speaking, people do things for reasons, human reasons, and theres a decent chance that if you were put in similar circumstances, you would find yourself reacting similarly. This naturally does not apply to all things, but as a general rule, its good to remember when you find yourself trying to figure out why people do the things they do.
As for this article, I find it rather ridiculous given that as of the end of 2003, nearly 100 million units total had been sold of ps2s, xboxes, and gamecubes. This includes people who may have bought multiple systems, but yea, lets say 50 million people, a majority of them in Japan, Europe and the USA. Thats bigger than the total populations of most countries in the EU; safe to say that video games have been mainstream since after the PS1 emerged several years ago and this is ignoring computer gaming. This article may have been relevant back then.
I have been reading the comments thus so far and am surprised that no one has hit upon this. In fact, this is very purpose of changing your MAC address of your modem. A certain cable ISP around here, their national network is setup such that a user with a MAC address in one part of the country can duplicate their MAC address onto another cable modem and go else where in the country (to another subnet of the ISP), and thus gain free service merely by hooking their cable modem up to a line with their cable TV service.
I know someone who has done this, and it works rather effectively. In this case, it is due to the way the ISP has structured their network, so that having duplicate MAC addresses will only work so long as the modem is placed on another subnet. A group of guys online have been doing this for a while, a little while after people figured out how to uncap their modems.
I've tried Z-Brush as well as watched the demo videos on their site. Simply put, the software gets amazing results in a small amount of time. However, the downside is that you have to completely rethink the modeling process and forget what you know in a certain respect. For example, in Z-Brush, there is no Z-axis for the 'camera'. In fact, there is no camera at all. This fact alone makes the software alien in its approach compared to the packages most of us use. Personally, I did not get too far with Z-Brush as I have not had enough time nor fully understood its approach. However, I highly recommend all modelers give it a shot to see how useful it could be in experienced hands.
I would disagree that the entire series is genial as I found the books that came after the original, Gateway, to be weaker by comparison to the book that started it all. In a certain respect, though we all wanted to learn about the Heechee, I almost regret how much Pohl 'gives away' in the last couple books. There was a certain atmosphere brought to the book with the mystery that surrounded the Heechee technology, and this was lost in the later books. I will say however that by normal standards the later books were still good and I definitely enjoyed them, though less than the first.
I am a fan of the Evil Dead movies, but there is something I do not understand about this remake. We have Evil Dead I which was a poor attempt at a serious horror movie, then we have Evil Dead II which was a much better, non-serious attempt at a horror movie with more character to it, which ended up being fairly hilarious on purpose. Army of Darkness follows along the same ideas as Evil Dead II with the mixture of 'horror' and comedy.
So then is this remake going to attempt to rectify the first movie's 'error', and make an actual scary Evil Dead movie, or are they going to remake the first movie in the spirt of Evil Dead II & Army of Darkness?
Do movie sequels come out because of "new features?" Does Toy Story 2 merely upgrade the rendering of Toy Story?
The comparison of movies to games in this case is a poor one, since the entire point of a movie is to tell a story or give a perspective on an issue. If you remove this, you are left with something highly abstract, and frankly, most likely something that no one will waste their time watching.
That being said, I find myself these days becoming more and more annoyed by games that sell soley upon their stories and but little gameplay improvements. Final Fantasy comes to mind in this regard. Some genres, such as the adventure genre, depend upon a story to drive the gameplay since often theres little else except puzzles; my favorite adventure games utilize the puzzles to drive the story, but with few exceptions, almost all these games are interactive fiction, Final Fantasy as well. I have no issue with IF, I still enjoy playing a good text based IF game that come out of the yearly contests, but it gets a bit tedious after a while when developers could be doing more interesting things with game development.
When all is said and done, the games I have enjoyed the most often had so-so to decent stories, but fantastic gameplay in that I could often replay the game many times with different results each time. I am a huge reader and naturally love a great story and while its great if a game has a good story, Id rather it have great gameplay instead. And realistically speaking, 90% of 'great' game stories are mediocre by comparison to their book equivalents. Halo's little twists are interesting, but say compared to Hyperion, it doesnt even hold a candle to it. Combined with the fact that the games with the best stories are little more than interactive fiction, I am left saying, 'Whats the point? Why not just read a superior book and leave the incredible storytelling to books/movies'. This is not to say that I think games shouldnt have stories, but until they take advantage of their interactive nature to truly make the stories dynamic (Morrowind could be said to loosely be an attempt at this with its open-endedness), Id rather they stick to bringing me gameplay that last more than 1 play-through.
This reminded me of another report done by the same group regarding misperceptions people had based upon their source of news, most notibly Fox News:
"The polling, conducted by the Program on International Policy (PIPA) at the University of Maryland and Knowledge Networks, also reveals that the frequency of these misperceptions varies significantly according to individuals' primary source of news. Those who primarily watch Fox News are significantly more likely to have misperceptions, while those who primarily listen to NPR or watch PBS are significantly less likely."
While these reports should not be correlated without further study, its rather indicative of how the public is misinformed by certain parts of the media; though I will admit that it does swing both ways for both liberals and conservatives, but Fox takes it to another level when it comes to TV news.
Slashdot Mirror
This seems so ridiculous, that I wonder whether this is was purposefully done to force people to reform patent laws. Sometimes you need to utterly break something before people will notice that it was broken to start with. This is the most benign interpretation I can see as otherwise, it seems to be lacking in sense.
Bill Gates has been making himself a bit more high profile in the education movement so this is no surprise really. Back in February, he went to a conference with governers from the 50 states to discuss education:
"America's high schools are obsolete..." - Bill Gates
Though I am not a Bill Gates fan, he has a valid point, and more importantly, he has the power & money to actually do something about it beyond just talk. While I have little doubt that he wouldn't mind expanding MS's market share, I do not think Gates is disingenuous in his efforts. Anything/anyone that advocates a good look at our public education is a good thing (and I dont mean talking about vouchers), so lets not let the anti-MS attitudes overwhelm the basic good that can come out of his efforts.
I was just wondering as the article wasnt clear on this (and indeed, perhaps this is a part of the very issue at stake), are commentators considered journalists? Commentators include Rush Limbaught, Al Franken, Rhandi Rhodes, Sean Hannity, and so on. These people usually are re-diseminating already released news and offering their own opinions on it. A majority of bloggers pretty much fall into this catagory; they are merely commenting on existing news with varying degrees of intelligence. The line starts blurring when bloggers are able to discover a story (Rathergate, and so on), and produce original research & material before other media outlets. So where do the commentators stand in this and where do bloggers stand in relation to them? What about Drudge, is he a journalist? There are plenty of time's hes disseminated atleast partially false information in order to be the first to break it. I fully support a blogger press since it lacks many of the external pressures (so far anyway) that make the mainstream media less likely to dig in particularly political areas in relation to their job security. Thus stories can be broken that would otherwise go unnoticed; by the same token, there is a burden of responsibility on journalists that shouldnt let them squander rights. I do not see that burden in most bloggers as most bloggers are overtly political & partisan, almost painfully so at times. As one poster, whos a journalist said, in this regard I'll perhaps be satisfied if a blogger is willing to goto jail to stand up for this right. Otherwise, it seems unearned. Then again, it seems sad & dangerous to have to go that far to earn a civil right... I welcome any insights.
I agree with your initial points, especially about the complexity of balancing; a lot of factors, each of which affects the whole and as such needs to be adjusted carefully and thoughtfully. However, your final paragraph is a bit pretentious as unfortunately the article that started this off states:
The team has kindly offered to take some time out of their extremely busy schedules to answer questions.
Source: Original Article
I do not expect developers to go out of their way to explain to fans or whoever what they do, to answer questions and so on, as like you said, we'd rather they spend that time developing. However, when one offers to go ahead and do such a thing, I think its somewhat insulting to then give them canned answers when clearly what they wanted was something more than that. Otherwise just say, 'Sorry we are too busy with WoW, but the team appreciates your interest.' Slashdot editors say, 'Well folks, we talked to the WoW team and they were busy, maybe next time' and everyone goes home and plays video games.
So perhaps your towering superiority is a bit misplaced and should in fact be reinvested elsewhere. "Oh, wait.... this is Slashdot. Nevermind"; indeed, join the party of the arrogant yourself since you are in the know unlike everyone else. We can stand side by side being arrogant assholes to each other, just don't bothering differentiating yourself from anyone else since we're no better.
I saw this and first thought, "Good" since I'd rather Peter Jackson do something a bit more original like a Hobbit movie since theres something to the original content in the first place. Halo was a fun game and all, but seriously, much like a Doom movie, what are you really left with? Thin plot (better than Doom, but lets face it, science fiction books covered Halo's territory about 20 - 30 years previously and did it a lot better) with a whole lot of gun fire & explosions. Not to say this isnt entertaining but really, seems unneeded with the abundant availability of action movies.
That rolls into my real comment: frig Halo, why not take a real step and make a Ringworld movie? You already have a symbol that everyone recognizes (the Halo), and you could easily market it as 'the thing that inspired Halo'. Right there, you've got the serious scifi geeks and the Halo fanboys in 1 scoop. I admit Ringworld would need to be 'spiced' up a tiny bit to keep watchers attention since the book was more of an exploration of a world rather than a character-centric story. But even there, you have excellent character diversity: the puppeteer, the human male & female, and the feline-like Kzin. Just have writers improve upon the dialogue & create more character interest without ignoring the fact that its really the Ringworld that is the true focus. I do not consider Ringworld to be my favorite science fiction stories or even really high up on that list, but really, if Slashdot is going to talk about making a movie about a game based on a book, we might as well skip all the mainstreaming and go straight back to the source. Who knows, we may even get a decent movie out of it.
Definitely an intriguing idea especially in light of Rockstars sad behavior after this became public, in which they did everything but accept responsibility for including the material in question. That then gives moral crusaders some pretty convincing ammo to use against game developers & publishers. 'Hey look, they cant even take responsibility for including the content let alone properly policing it! We need more government oversight & regulations...' you know the drill. For Rockstars and indeed all game developers sakes, lets hope this was nothing more than some developers having a bit of fun on their own time.
Rockstar really made their bed with this one, and now they are going to have to sleep in it. Originally I blew this off as a bunch of prudes getting steamed over some mods for a game, but now its been shown that this is a built in 'feature'. I'd like to defend Rockstar, but really cannot as it is affording them special treatment at the expense of other people.
The video game industry & audience has been VERY good to Rockstar; they've enjoyed massive sales & popularity, and at this point 4 sequels to an originally top-down perspective game centered around driving, stealing, and violence. And, with greater popularity comes greater inspection of the product by those who do not like it and wish for it to be banned. Given that GTA is a homing-beacon target for 'family values' type groups, it seems utterly retarded to package a sex game into it without informing the game raters, and then act surprised when players uncover it, then lie about the nature of it, and *wham* you just gave those 'family values' groups all the ammo they need to actually ACT and not just TALK about regulating video games further. My feeling is summarized such that while I do not think Rockstar intentionally tried to screw us this way, they have inadvertantly abused their success in such a way that it will hurt everyone else a great deal more than it will hurt them due to an anti-sex backlash amongst lobbying groups. Remember, with great power comes great responsiblity; with great success built upon the fellow shoulders of your video game colleages, comes the responsibility to not do things that will make it harder for your colleages to do their jobs in their comparatively smaller successes.
And for the record, the Hot Coffee 'game' is entertaining once for the gimmick & shock value, but otherwise is as interesting as Virtual Valerie and definitely not worth the price that Rockstar is going to pay in the end at the hands of moral crusaders.
I can give a crap that its Top 40, Top 10 Classic Rock, or whatever; if the music was Led Zeppelin or something else not originally produced for video games, it does not matter: it is not original video game music, so dressing these awards up in this guise is a simple marketing plot. Much like the Oscars publically tries to recognize parts of production that you normally do not see a face for, I feel this should be the same for video games and should attempt to recognize some of those artists out there that are producing an original product for these games but we never get to see outside of perhaps an interview or game credit. Having 'pop' but original video game music would be a vast improvement to this marketing charade as atleast the contestants would be real.
As some other posters indicated, this is not about linux being faster but more so since when it comes to cluster systems, linux has a couple advantages: low/no cost for licensing, open development environment thus easy & low-cost to work with to create further tools, stability, and customizability.
These are the main factors, but this does not apply to anything but the rendering clusters. The actual artist-driven work is still for the most part performed on Windows systems due to the cost of hardware, availability of highend video cards & drivers, and a wider install base. Maya running on Win32 is the largest segment of the 3D users, and this is not set to change unless Apple starts getting serious and gets highend video card makers to support OSX. For small scenes, the cards that come with G5 workstations are not bad, but once you start doing more complex scenes, it becomes a slideshow.
In the end, this is not really news as this conversion has been going on for the last several years, especially since Maya was ported to linux. But, regardless, it's good news all around as it means a user does not need access to an expensive SGI system to get familiar with cluster rendering systems and lowers the overall entrance barriers to people learning.
Lets not get too overly excited until we actually play these games as several times in the past, games that were hyped as super-innovative have turned out to be not-so innovative after all. Fable comes to mind: definitely entertaining to play, but not quite what was promised. Then there's Master of Orion 3: innovation-gone-wrong. I hope these games live up to their promises, but its the end product that counts.
.plans, etc (note that this only applies to the publicity-related activities, and not internal company dialogue) and then a check next to each feature that was actually implimented. Shooting for the stars is all and good, but do not expect me to pay when you tell me you're shooting for the stars, but land on the moon.
It would be interesting to see game developers post a small table consisting of a list of functions promised in the press-releases, interviews,
I do not really agree that games are becoming more complex, but I am also one of those gamers who enjoys complex games, so my standard of judgement is probably not that of your average consumer. Barring that however, a somewhat new trend (new in that I am seeing it used well in modern games) is the ability to select the complexity & difficulty you play the game at. A great example of this is a rather recent game called Silent Hunter III, which is a WWII u-boat game.
I had always found subsim games interesting, but was always put off by the fact that they often required you to have an existing knowledge of submarine terms, the mechanics and so on, and given the complexity of submarine combat, this would result in me not playing the game again due to fustration. Enter Silent Hunter III which allows a player like myself to choose how realistic I wish to play the game. At first I played at the most unrealistic level with unlimited oxygen, unlimited fuel, automatic targeting, etc etc, and let the game AI deal with most of the ship management. This allowed me to focus on ship interception strategy & get a firmer grip on whats important when playing. Then slowly, I enabled the realism options as I became more confident & knowledgable about the gameplay. I still do not play at a true realism level as I do not personally find it too incredibly fun, especially since I am not quite that good yet, but the game succeeds wonderfully at scaling to a player's level of knowledge. As well, if I find the motions of sighting, configuring, etc a torpedo attack, I can relegate the task to the AI, and focus just on navigation, ever having to deal with torpedo details. Same for sonar, radar, deck guns, and so on. You can play the game the way you like.
It is this type of choose-your-own-complexity-and-gameplay-style that I'd like to see more in games beyond just 'Easy, Medium, Hard' (though most games need only this), especially in the more complex games that require micromanagement. Rome Total War was great in this aspect; you could let the AI manage your cities building queues & recruitment and just focus on combat. Or you could do the opposite purely manage resources & territory aquisition and just let the AI fight the battles for you. In this manner, both a Civ fan and a Command & Conquer fan would both enjoy the game in a seperate way.
Both of these games, Rome Total War, and Silent Hunter III are fairly complex games but each is great in that I do not have to be a Roman historian or a U-Boat expert to play & enjoy the games; and better still, those experts can play the game and love it too in their own way.
While the science in scifi books is often interesting, I find whats actually interesting is not the actual technology but its effect on society. To this end, I find writers like Philip K Dick intriging as he examines not so much actual techologies but what type of societies would create such technologies, where they may start to lead us, etc. To that end, I dont think making your science more realistic will nessessarily make any type of improvement to the genre if the content & philosophical ideas were not all built upon as well. As far as 'science fiction [being] the opiate of the geek masses', well to me thats a trolling statement and as another poster said, a way for some scifi fans to feel superior to other fans; someone else can come along and call those people idiots since they don't read Ayn Rand or Shakespeare, and they too would be wrong.
The author's statement that FTL travel never being possible is rather arrogant given our limited understanding of the universe; for one that's crying so loudly for real science in scifi, those are some pretty absolutist statements on something thats very much not absolute.
My only issue with Macs and 3D is that no company that I know of has released a high end 3D developmental video card such as the Wildcats, FireGLs, or Quadro's for the Mac as of yet, which prevents them from entering the high-end 3D market. I worked in a studio using Maya with both G5s and Opteron workstations, and while the G5s were plenty fast for a majority of tasks, when it came to the more complex scenes with large meshes, textures and such, there was a marked difference in the response-time of Maya, only since the Opteron systems had Quadro's. Otherwise, the systems were essentially the same in performance. Once Apple gets some serious higher end video card support they can offer competition in that market.
For the poster's purposes however, I doubt they will experience these limitations.
While this is not un-expected, I really do hope that Jackson adopts a style that suits The Hobbit as the atmosphere in 'Lord of the Ringss' is much more serious than that in The Hobbit. What is enjoyable about The Hobbit as a book is that it has a much more fairy tale, easy-going quality than the epic that is LOTR; it is well suited for children, (for whom Tolkien originally wrote for anyway, his own children specifically). It's only at the end of The Hobbit that you really begin to see the type of writing that is present in LOTR, and the final battle of The Hobbit is the most action-filled scene in the book. I just hope Jackson does not merely use the same exact atmosphere from LOTR 'because it works', and instead considers that The Hobbit is not merely a prelude to LOTR, but its own seperate story & unique tone.
Funnily enough, I used to think like this but then I went out and talked more with Europeans and came to a (ultimtely unsurprising) conclusion: people are mostly the same everywhere, and stupidity is pretty well distributed! I can carry the same topic of conversation with a redneck from Texas and an America-hating european, and the the one thing they both share is a perpensity for making sweeping generalizations about the other; for this reason, I reject them both. For every European that had some relevant, intelligent thing to say about America, 4 others would spout stuff I would rank no better than the redneck who shouts, GOD BLESS AMERICA, ITS OUR WAY OR THE HIGHWAY! This is the case in America, and its the case elsewhere; thus is the nature of humanity. People tend to make massive generalizations (see, I just made a couple myself) and use them to justify their opinions. In conclusion, just remember that people are people, regardless of their country, religion, race, or sexuality. Once you forget this, you are no better than the 'unwashed masses' that you scorn.
This is not to say critisim is unfounded or unwanted, if anything I love a good debate about how nations conduct themselves, but do everyone a favor and leave your sweeping generalizations at home. Additionally, your contempt for your fellow Americans is somewhat amusing as unless you live in a wooden shack in the middle of no where, hunt/gather your food, sew your own clothing, and reject all modern technology (in short, be 100% self-effecient), your mere existence contributes to the very system you lament; such is the paradox of the societies we claim to be disgusted by.
I doubt anyone has an intention of setting up 'free' broadband here; what I dont understand is your outright hostility towards a group of people who wants to do this and all agree on the costs.
No one said anything about free broadband, you assumed that, additionally if a companies have been unwilling to invest in setting up broadband in an area, why shouldnt residents take matters into their own hands? This bill is simply a way for cable companies to ensure if they are lazy, they dont need to worry about anything rocking the boat. These community run ideas shouldnt scare any half-way decent broadband company as clearly they should have the upper hand in running costs, equipment, and so on. Why legislate it if the costs in the end will be higher? If anything, let people see why these systems dont work if theyre so bad that no one bothers with them again. Legislation is not the answer here its just insurance for cable companies, nothing more.
Get over your selfishness, you do not deserve free broadband, especially when it has to come from someone else's income.
Get over your self-rightiousness, its a bit over the top.
I think we've all seen what happens when developers have big egos and major arrogance problems; Daikatana pretty much examplifies the end result in my opinion. Between the hype, the ridiculous claims and bragging, you would have thought the team was headed up by a bunch of teenagers. The end result was sad as we all know, with even the installation of the game being buggy as all hell. Another example of 'Im too good for everyone' mindset is Derek Smart. While his gameplay ideas are pretty cool and definitely worth striving for in my opinion, the attitude he brings to the table is absolutely horrendus. Again, this attitude is seen in the quality of the Battlecruiser games. I have never gotten a battlecruiser game to not crash to the desktop onload, so why all this attitude & arrogance when the product doesn't justify it?
I am interpretting burn out relative to the comparison to rock artists; a lot of these guys burned out cause they got too into drugs, promiscuious sex, and in general started making stupid decisions in arrogance. The results ranged from destroying their careers to going bankrupt, and from needing to goto a rehabilitation facility to death.
I think its nice that game developers can have a bit of a public status, but the moment they let it go to their heads, they deserve their fall because it usually means an inferior product for the real fans who got them there in the first place.
And as far as real job burnout goes, its no different than anything else in the entertainment industry. It moves fast, the deadlines are quick, and if you don't keep up, don't expect anyone else to wait up because you've already been left for dead.
This entire study is flawed simply because the author is using math to justify his conclusion, but his variables are all meaningless and arbitrary.
If he had instead wrote a simple script for his IRC client that would get a list of channels and randomly join say 10 of them with atleast say 10 people in them, then he could start citing numbers as his test cases would have been random, possibly. But the fact is, he completely ignores that the number of small channels is massively larger than the number of gigantic channels, and generally speaking in these smaller channels is where genuine conversation takes place.
Try having a genuine conversation on a channel with 200 - 300 people, the chances are its like talking in a storm and your words are lost in the chaos. All the channels I personally go on have at maximum 50 - 80 people, but on average closer to 20, rarely in which all people are active. Out of all our interactions, only a small percentage of them would be deemed illegal. This 99.9% number might as well have been made up before the author even started the 'experiment', which was really not much of an experiment but more like fitting the test to match the desired results.
You are spot on and have stated the most basic yet fundamentally important (but overlooked) thing when trying to understand other humans. I think something a lot of people forget at times is that people are people and always will be people. This may seem simple, stupid, or quaint, but I've found it helps explain things when you're intent on viewing a group/person as something thats something other than human. Generally speaking, people do things for reasons, human reasons, and theres a decent chance that if you were put in similar circumstances, you would find yourself reacting similarly. This naturally does not apply to all things, but as a general rule, its good to remember when you find yourself trying to figure out why people do the things they do.
As for this article, I find it rather ridiculous given that as of the end of 2003, nearly 100 million units total had been sold of ps2s, xboxes, and gamecubes. This includes people who may have bought multiple systems, but yea, lets say 50 million people, a majority of them in Japan, Europe and the USA. Thats bigger than the total populations of most countries in the EU; safe to say that video games have been mainstream since after the PS1 emerged several years ago and this is ignoring computer gaming. This article may have been relevant back then.
I have been reading the comments thus so far and am surprised that no one has hit upon this. In fact, this is very purpose of changing your MAC address of your modem. A certain cable ISP around here, their national network is setup such that a user with a MAC address in one part of the country can duplicate their MAC address onto another cable modem and go else where in the country (to another subnet of the ISP), and thus gain free service merely by hooking their cable modem up to a line with their cable TV service.
I know someone who has done this, and it works rather effectively. In this case, it is due to the way the ISP has structured their network, so that having duplicate MAC addresses will only work so long as the modem is placed on another subnet. A group of guys online have been doing this for a while, a little while after people figured out how to uncap their modems.
I've tried Z-Brush as well as watched the demo videos on their site. Simply put, the software gets amazing results in a small amount of time. However, the downside is that you have to completely rethink the modeling process and forget what you know in a certain respect. For example, in Z-Brush, there is no Z-axis for the 'camera'. In fact, there is no camera at all. This fact alone makes the software alien in its approach compared to the packages most of us use. Personally, I did not get too far with Z-Brush as I have not had enough time nor fully understood its approach. However, I highly recommend all modelers give it a shot to see how useful it could be in experienced hands.
I would disagree that the entire series is genial as I found the books that came after the original, Gateway, to be weaker by comparison to the book that started it all. In a certain respect, though we all wanted to learn about the Heechee, I almost regret how much Pohl 'gives away' in the last couple books. There was a certain atmosphere brought to the book with the mystery that surrounded the Heechee technology, and this was lost in the later books. I will say however that by normal standards the later books were still good and I definitely enjoyed them, though less than the first.
I am a fan of the Evil Dead movies, but there is something I do not understand about this remake. We have Evil Dead I which was a poor attempt at a serious horror movie, then we have Evil Dead II which was a much better, non-serious attempt at a horror movie with more character to it, which ended up being fairly hilarious on purpose. Army of Darkness follows along the same ideas as Evil Dead II with the mixture of 'horror' and comedy.
So then is this remake going to attempt to rectify the first movie's 'error', and make an actual scary Evil Dead movie, or are they going to remake the first movie in the spirt of Evil Dead II & Army of Darkness?
The comparison of movies to games in this case is a poor one, since the entire point of a movie is to tell a story or give a perspective on an issue. If you remove this, you are left with something highly abstract, and frankly, most likely something that no one will waste their time watching.
That being said, I find myself these days becoming more and more annoyed by games that sell soley upon their stories and but little gameplay improvements. Final Fantasy comes to mind in this regard. Some genres, such as the adventure genre, depend upon a story to drive the gameplay since often theres little else except puzzles; my favorite adventure games utilize the puzzles to drive the story, but with few exceptions, almost all these games are interactive fiction, Final Fantasy as well. I have no issue with IF, I still enjoy playing a good text based IF game that come out of the yearly contests, but it gets a bit tedious after a while when developers could be doing more interesting things with game development.
When all is said and done, the games I have enjoyed the most often had so-so to decent stories, but fantastic gameplay in that I could often replay the game many times with different results each time. I am a huge reader and naturally love a great story and while its great if a game has a good story, Id rather it have great gameplay instead. And realistically speaking, 90% of 'great' game stories are mediocre by comparison to their book equivalents. Halo's little twists are interesting, but say compared to Hyperion, it doesnt even hold a candle to it. Combined with the fact that the games with the best stories are little more than interactive fiction, I am left saying, 'Whats the point? Why not just read a superior book and leave the incredible storytelling to books/movies'. This is not to say that I think games shouldnt have stories, but until they take advantage of their interactive nature to truly make the stories dynamic (Morrowind could be said to loosely be an attempt at this with its open-endedness), Id rather they stick to bringing me gameplay that last more than 1 play-through.
This reminded me of another report done by the same group regarding misperceptions people had based upon their source of news, most notibly Fox News:
2 _03_Press.pdf
"The polling, conducted by the Program on International Policy (PIPA) at the University of Maryland and Knowledge Networks, also reveals that the frequency of these misperceptions varies significantly according to individuals' primary source of news. Those who primarily watch Fox News are significantly more likely to have misperceptions, while those who primarily listen to NPR or watch PBS are significantly less likely."
Source: http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/100403F.shtml
The original source document (PDF):
http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Iraq/Media_10_0
While these reports should not be correlated without further study, its rather indicative of how the public is misinformed by certain parts of the media; though I will admit that it does swing both ways for both liberals and conservatives, but Fox takes it to another level when it comes to TV news.