True. For just web browsing and email for a non-techie, Linux is pretty close.
Wow! Talk about damning with faint praise. Linux is pretty close to a state where a non-techie can run 2 applications?!?
Everyone I know who tries to use Linux (usually Ubuntu) for their desktop invariably tells me brief stories about how proud they are that they've gotten some aspect of it working correctly. (Some aspect that would just work on OS X or Windows.) Linux still has a long way to go.
I hope this doesn't sound condescending, but this is exactly what I mean by "people don't understand oversight".
We voted in another group of fat cats who will just strengthen the government, a government "by the people, for the people" who ignore the people.
The current government has not been strengthening the government. While they have expanded the legal headroom for the government to abuse power, the government itself is as weak as it has been in a long time.
A weak government isn't one that doesn't pass any laws and doesn't spend taxes, it's a government that doesn't do anything well. It burns through money with poor effect.
Look at Katrina, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Those are big examples of money spent with poor effect. The government can't accomplish its goals even when everyone agrees on the goals.
Oversight has a strong tradition dating back to at least World War 2. It's esimated that Congress saved the government $15 billion on WWII by investigating how money was spent. Comparing how much money is saved by making sure that things are running properly against how much it costs to run the actual Congress reveals that Congressional oversight is hugely cost effective (in addition to safeguarding us against abuses by the Executive!)
Our current situation domestically and in the world is the direct result of a weak government. How do you like it?
The Republican majority has never understood or respected Congress. They literally believe that it should do as little as possible. That's what they came into power on in 1994. Immediately they cut oversight hearings in 1/2 (Yes, they only spent 1/2 as much time doing oversight of the Clinton administration as the Democratic Congress), and it has been on a downward trend to oblivion ever since. They spent 10x as much time investigating Clinton's Christmas Card mailing list as they did Abu Ghrab.
This is because Republicans have always viewed Congressional hearings as merely a club to attack the other party with when they are truly essential to a well running government. A lot of our problems would have been avoided if they had kept fulfilling that role, but they are phobic about saying anything bad about other Republicans. Let's just hope that there are enough old hands in Congress that can remember how this is supposed to work!
That's a strawman; a PS3 is more than a graphics card.
I would have been more inclined to agree with you when they were still overestimating the capabilities of the Cell processor and planning to do the graphics with that alone. When they fell back to an Nvidia solution their graphical architecture became much more mundane while the total system architecture got more complex.
I'm not saying that the PS3 isn't still a worthwhile purchase for whatever reasons, but that this is a concrete example of how Sony has fallen behind the technology curve this generation because of their extended delays in launching the system.
I know it's unfashionable to pile on Sony anymore, but for the PS2 and XBox there was a 3-6 month window before PC graphics caught up. I do believe that is what drove some of the early adapters, that something so powerful wasn't available in any other form.
The Nvidia card that is said to be equivalent to the one in the PS3 is the 7900, which was launched in March.
The PS3 has been delayed so much that they are now launching AFTER the graphics card that they are equivalent to has been superseded. That's not a good thing when you're selling your console at a premium.
You just bought a lower-quality version of the audio tracks compared to what you would have had with a used CD. That is the great iTunes ruse.
Albums off of iTunes are cheaper than most physical CD purchases and they're always more convenient. It's called a trade-off, not a ruse. You might not want to make that trade-off, but a lot of other people do.
Is it because Google fumbled around trying to implement some sort of open-standards solution while YouTube built up a userbase with the corporate controlled but much more user friendly Flash format? (Egad, it even uses patented video codecs that Macromedia licensed!)
We didn't even steal the concept of rounders and turn it into baseball. Baseball really is a British invention. The idea that it is American (and "America's past-time") was just a marketing ploy by Spalding to sell althletic equipment.
BTW, My city was used as the control for the origional flouride treatments in the early 1900's Only retarted morons are afraid of the Flouride in water.
I've always thought a resistance to floridation was unfounded, but my two brothers and I grew up in a town without it and none of us has ever had a single cavity. A few of my friends I grew up with also didn't have any. Certainly we weren't a cavity free town, but how does this compare to places with Floridation? Do no kids there get cavities?
Our hometown actually tried to floridate the water again in the late 1990's and they rejected it again. I didn't follow the debate then as I no longer lived there, so I don't know if conspiracy theories played a role in their decision to reject it.
The growing ubiquity of Flash for video shows one of the strengths of closed-source software, namely that they can license patented technology and deploy it widely.
If an open source project tried to license the same video compression algorithms how much would it cost? (It'd basically be the last software license the patent holder would ever sell.) Who would pay? (If your response is "death to software patents" you're missing the point.)
My memory on this is a little fuzzy on this and I can't find the old web pages, but before the original Matrix came out I seem to remember the Corona Coming Attractions website lising it as being based on a Shadowrun novel. Anyone else remember this or am I just delusional?
This is why the typical model in Asia is to give away the client software and charge for subscriptions. Piracy destroys the economic foundation of our high-production stand-alone mass media.
It's hitting PC games first because PC gamers are by definition going to have better access to pirated software.
DRM is actually the best hope if we want to keep having the same sort of entertainment that we can get now, unless the culture changes to shun pirates and piracy. I'd bet DRM is the reason that Square/Enix is looking into creating their own hardware.
I don't like DRM or subscription services, but when the government can't/won't enforce the laws and the people don't respect them it's inevitable.
At least in an expo setting, you had to walk by the small guys to get to the big guys.
Not really. The big publishers were all in the main hall which you could get to from the parking garage without getting anywhere near the smaller halls. The small guys were off to the side and somewhat hidden.
Indeed, I would think this would be awesome for this small publishers. In some ways it levels the playing field. The question is how much will it cost small publishers to take part in the new E3? Word has it that some old E3 budgets were in the area of $75 million. I'd guess that it's going to be much more affordable.
Silpheed was a few simple polygon spaceships in front of a pre-rendered movie background, does it count?
I limited my list to games that included the action/reaction gameplay that defined the FMV genre. However, if I had to include Silpheed I'd modify the list thusly:
1) TimeGal - The death animations were so cute! 2) Road Avenger - It almost feels like you're really driving! 3) Dragon's Lair - Retro gaming on the Sega CD! 3.5) Silpheed - Bitchin' Spaceships! 4) Night Trap - Dana Plato FTW (RIP) 5) Sewer Shark - It's very very bad
1) TimeGal - The death animations were so cute! 2) Road Avenger - It almost feels like you're really driving! 3) Dragon's Lair - Retro gaming on the Sega CD! 4) Night Trap - Dana Plato FTW (RIP) 5) Sewer Shark - It's very very bad
Game diversity tends to be a side effect of a large install base rather than the cause of it.
The Dreamcast had a good set of quality games in a large number of genres, including games that were experimental at the time like Seaman and Samba De Amigo. (Presaging games like Nintendogs and Guitar Hero.) We all remember how the Dreamcast died, in a cloud of PS2 hype.
The PS2 now has the largest diversity of games for the simple reason that there is a large market for them. Of the last gen it's supposed to be the most difficult to program for and it's the least powerful, but those considerations are minor when you have such a huge install base.
I think the game industry is tripping over itself trying to understand casual games. The state of the industry has been relativly stagnant for so long that we struggle to put names to games that don't fit within our genre headings. Because they don't appeal to a self described "Hardcore" audience we've reflexivly named them "Casual".
It's similar to the rise of Alternative music in the 90's. It didn't sound like 80's rock or metal so we had to come up with a new name for it. Then we slowly realized that musical culture was changing and this wasn't just a new genre - the publics notion of the sound of rock was changing. The idea of Alternative became less and less useful as everything was given that label. I think the same thing is happening in games, and the implications make me optimistic about the future.
Exactly. The people who are upset that E3 is being changed are the people who made it untenable in the first place. E3 was intended to be an important business event, not the GenCon for video games that it has become.
The necessity of being a media circus has thrown the cost-benefit equation of E3 way off track. As a business event it was becoming less and less valuable because of the increasingly non-industry attendance, as a media event it was becoming less and less valuable because of the proliferation of other media channels (thanks Internet!), and it was continually getting more expensive. This change is good.
It's much easier to make something good and desired in the first place, unfortunatly doing that is very hard.
I have no idea why Amazon thinks they're uniquely positioned to do this, it sounds like panic and confusion to me. If it works and they make buckets of cash and/or beautiful art then they're geniuses and all is forgiven, but it right now it just looks like they've lost focus.
They don't play every game they rate?
on
The 64% Violent Pacman
·
· Score: 3, Informative
they don't play every game they rate? !??
My understanding is that they don't play any game they rate.
Have things changed? Their description seems a little off. I'll highlight what they seem to get wrong in the quote from the article below.
Instead of having members of the ESRB sit down and play the games in order to decide a rating, developers must submit a written report of everything the game includes. They must also compile a video that is representative of the content a gamer will find in the game when they purchase it at the store. Additionally, the game is played by a number of people who are unaffiliated to the game industry, and who then recommend the game's rating. All three elements, as well as others, are taken into consideration when the rating is assigned.
For the first highlight, it's a little misleading, "representative of the content a gamer will find" makes it sound like a representitive cross-section of the content. So, for a game like Animal Crossing you would expect hours of gathering fruit and catching fish. But actually the footage is of selected acts and elements (there is a list) and of those acts or elements carried out the the greatest degree present anywhere in the game. So, for Animal Crossing you would have footage of the character getting bitten by Tarantulas and Scorpions, showing the greatest degree of violence in the game.
They make a point of saying that they don't care about the context of the event, because a parent glancing over at the screen won't care either.
This system is why Rockstar is liable in the eyes of the ESRB for not disclosing the content on the disc - they shipped those animation paths, models,et al. They provided footage that was supposed to show the greatest degree of sexuality on the disc and it was probably just kissing and a bouncing car. It doesn't matter that it required a hack to access because the ESRB doesn't care how the shipped content is played, they just care about the content.
For the second point, "the game is played by a number of people who are unaffiliated to the game industry" -- maybe I just don't remember the process correctly and maybe it's changed, but I don't think that you ever send the ESRB actual code. After all, a lot of games recieve their ratings before they're complete.
Slashdot Mirror
True. For just web browsing and email for a non-techie, Linux is pretty close.
Wow! Talk about damning with faint praise. Linux is pretty close to a state where a non-techie can run 2 applications?!?
Everyone I know who tries to use Linux (usually Ubuntu) for their desktop invariably tells me brief stories about how proud they are that they've gotten some aspect of it working correctly. (Some aspect that would just work on OS X or Windows.) Linux still has a long way to go.
they can also make a profit by selling a combination of PS3 games and Blu-Ray movies.
They said the same thing about the PSP and UMD. Lets hope for Sony's sake it works out better this time!
I hope this doesn't sound condescending, but this is exactly what I mean by "people don't understand oversight".
We voted in another group of fat cats who will just strengthen the government, a government "by the people, for the people" who ignore the people.
The current government has not been strengthening the government. While they have expanded the legal headroom for the government to abuse power, the government itself is as weak as it has been in a long time.
A weak government isn't one that doesn't pass any laws and doesn't spend taxes, it's a government that doesn't do anything well. It burns through money with poor effect.
Look at Katrina, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Those are big examples of money spent with poor effect. The government can't accomplish its goals even when everyone agrees on the goals.
Oversight has a strong tradition dating back to at least World War 2. It's esimated that Congress saved the government $15 billion on WWII by investigating how money was spent. Comparing how much money is saved by making sure that things are running properly against how much it costs to run the actual Congress reveals that Congressional oversight is hugely cost effective (in addition to safeguarding us against abuses by the Executive!)
Our current situation domestically and in the world is the direct result of a weak government. How do you like it?
The Republican majority has never understood or respected Congress. They literally believe that it should do as little as possible. That's what they came into power on in 1994. Immediately they cut oversight hearings in 1/2 (Yes, they only spent 1/2 as much time doing oversight of the Clinton administration as the Democratic Congress), and it has been on a downward trend to oblivion ever since. They spent 10x as much time investigating Clinton's Christmas Card mailing list as they did Abu Ghrab.
This is because Republicans have always viewed Congressional hearings as merely a club to attack the other party with when they are truly essential to a well running government. A lot of our problems would have been avoided if they had kept fulfilling that role, but they are phobic about saying anything bad about other Republicans. Let's just hope that there are enough old hands in Congress that can remember how this is supposed to work!
That's a strawman; a PS3 is more than a graphics card.
I would have been more inclined to agree with you when they were still overestimating the capabilities of the Cell processor and planning to do the graphics with that alone. When they fell back to an Nvidia solution their graphical architecture became much more mundane while the total system architecture got more complex.
I'm not saying that the PS3 isn't still a worthwhile purchase for whatever reasons, but that this is a concrete example of how Sony has fallen behind the technology curve this generation because of their extended delays in launching the system.
I know it's unfashionable to pile on Sony anymore, but for the PS2 and XBox there was a 3-6 month window before PC graphics caught up. I do believe that is what drove some of the early adapters, that something so powerful wasn't available in any other form.
The Nvidia card that is said to be equivalent to the one in the PS3 is the 7900, which was launched in March.
The PS3 has been delayed so much that they are now launching AFTER the graphics card that they are equivalent to has been superseded. That's not a good thing when you're selling your console at a premium.
You just bought a lower-quality version of the audio tracks compared to what you would have had with a used CD. That is the great iTunes ruse.
Albums off of iTunes are cheaper than most physical CD purchases and they're always more convenient. It's called a trade-off, not a ruse. You might not want to make that trade-off, but a lot of other people do.
They based Google Video on a plug-in version of VLC until around sometime in Septmber of 2005.
Is it because Google fumbled around trying to implement some sort of open-standards solution while YouTube built up a userbase with the corporate controlled but much more user friendly Flash format? (Egad, it even uses patented video codecs that Macromedia licensed!)
That's at least part of the answer.
Ouch Slashdot. $1.65 Billion. Ouch.
Didn't Venus try this?
it is not meant ... to create buzz
You just made the toolchain and middleware vendors cry. WTG.
We didn't even steal the concept of rounders and turn it into baseball. Baseball really is a British invention. The idea that it is American (and "America's past-time") was just a marketing ploy by Spalding to sell althletic equipment.
Wikipedia has a nice article on The Origin of Baseball.
BTW, My city was used as the control for the origional flouride treatments in the early 1900's Only retarted morons are afraid of the Flouride in water.
I've always thought a resistance to floridation was unfounded, but my two brothers and I grew up in a town without it and none of us has ever had a single cavity. A few of my friends I grew up with also didn't have any. Certainly we weren't a cavity free town, but how does this compare to places with Floridation? Do no kids there get cavities?
Our hometown actually tried to floridate the water again in the late 1990's and they rejected it again. I didn't follow the debate then as I no longer lived there, so I don't know if conspiracy theories played a role in their decision to reject it.
The growing ubiquity of Flash for video shows one of the strengths of closed-source software, namely that they can license patented technology and deploy it widely.
If an open source project tried to license the same video compression algorithms how much would it cost? (It'd basically be the last software license the patent holder would ever sell.) Who would pay? (If your response is "death to software patents" you're missing the point.)
My memory on this is a little fuzzy on this and I can't find the old web pages, but before the original Matrix came out I seem to remember the Corona Coming Attractions website lising it as being based on a Shadowrun novel. Anyone else remember this or am I just delusional?
You are dead on. Thievery illicitly drains supply, Piracy illicitly drains demand.
Though different, they are of a kind in the damage they do.
This is why the typical model in Asia is to give away the client software and charge for subscriptions. Piracy destroys the economic foundation of our high-production stand-alone mass media.
It's hitting PC games first because PC gamers are by definition going to have better access to pirated software.
DRM is actually the best hope if we want to keep having the same sort of entertainment that we can get now, unless the culture changes to shun pirates and piracy. I'd bet DRM is the reason that Square/Enix is looking into creating their own hardware.
I don't like DRM or subscription services, but when the government can't/won't enforce the laws and the people don't respect them it's inevitable.
At least in an expo setting, you had to walk by the small guys to get to the big guys.
Not really. The big publishers were all in the main hall which you could get to from the parking garage without getting anywhere near the smaller halls. The small guys were off to the side and somewhat hidden.
Indeed, I would think this would be awesome for this small publishers. In some ways it levels the playing field. The question is how much will it cost small publishers to take part in the new E3? Word has it that some old E3 budgets were in the area of $75 million. I'd guess that it's going to be much more affordable.
Silpheed was a few simple polygon spaceships in front of a pre-rendered movie background, does it count?
I limited my list to games that included the action/reaction gameplay that defined the FMV genre. However, if I had to include Silpheed I'd modify the list thusly:
1) TimeGal - The death animations were so cute!
2) Road Avenger - It almost feels like you're really driving!
3) Dragon's Lair - Retro gaming on the Sega CD!
3.5) Silpheed - Bitchin' Spaceships!
4) Night Trap - Dana Plato FTW (RIP)
5) Sewer Shark - It's very very bad
Sorry Dana!
1) TimeGal - The death animations were so cute!
2) Road Avenger - It almost feels like you're really driving!
3) Dragon's Lair - Retro gaming on the Sega CD!
4) Night Trap - Dana Plato FTW (RIP)
5) Sewer Shark - It's very very bad
Game diversity tends to be a side effect of a large install base rather than the cause of it.
The Dreamcast had a good set of quality games in a large number of genres, including games that were experimental at the time like Seaman and Samba De Amigo. (Presaging games like Nintendogs and Guitar Hero.) We all remember how the Dreamcast died, in a cloud of PS2 hype.
The PS2 now has the largest diversity of games for the simple reason that there is a large market for them. Of the last gen it's supposed to be the most difficult to program for and it's the least powerful, but those considerations are minor when you have such a huge install base.
I think the game industry is tripping over itself trying to understand casual games. The state of the industry has been relativly stagnant for so long that we struggle to put names to games that don't fit within our genre headings. Because they don't appeal to a self described "Hardcore" audience we've reflexivly named them "Casual".
It's similar to the rise of Alternative music in the 90's. It didn't sound like 80's rock or metal so we had to come up with a new name for it. Then we slowly realized that musical culture was changing and this wasn't just a new genre - the publics notion of the sound of rock was changing. The idea of Alternative became less and less useful as everything was given that label. I think the same thing is happening in games, and the implications make me optimistic about the future.
Exactly. The people who are upset that E3 is being changed are the people who made it untenable in the first place. E3 was intended to be an important business event, not the GenCon for video games that it has become.
The necessity of being a media circus has thrown the cost-benefit equation of E3 way off track. As a business event it was becoming less and less valuable because of the increasingly non-industry attendance, as a media event it was becoming less and less valuable because of the proliferation of other media channels (thanks Internet!), and it was continually getting more expensive. This change is good.
You want to make money? Find an acceptable product or well known name and shove it down America's throat
Worked great for Starbucks with
Akeelah and the Bee didn't it?
It's much easier to make something good and desired in the first place, unfortunatly doing that is very hard.
I have no idea why Amazon thinks they're uniquely positioned to do this, it sounds like panic and confusion to me. If it works and they make buckets of cash and/or beautiful art then they're geniuses and all is forgiven, but it right now it just looks like they've lost focus.
they don't play every game they rate? !??
My understanding is that they don't play any game they rate.
Have things changed? Their description seems a little off. I'll highlight what they seem to get wrong in the quote from the article below.
Instead of having members of the ESRB sit down and play the games in order to decide a rating, developers must submit a written report of everything the game includes. They must also compile a video that is representative of the content a gamer will find in the game when they purchase it at the store. Additionally, the game is played by a number of people who are unaffiliated to the game industry, and who then recommend the game's rating. All three elements, as well as others, are taken into consideration when the rating is assigned.
For the first highlight, it's a little misleading, "representative of the content a gamer will find" makes it sound like a representitive cross-section of the content. So, for a game like Animal Crossing you would expect hours of gathering fruit and catching fish. But actually the footage is of selected acts and elements (there is a list) and of those acts or elements carried out the the greatest degree present anywhere in the game. So, for Animal Crossing you would have footage of the character getting bitten by Tarantulas and Scorpions, showing the greatest degree of violence in the game.
They make a point of saying that they don't care about the context of the event, because a parent glancing over at the screen won't care either.
This system is why Rockstar is liable in the eyes of the ESRB for not disclosing the content on the disc - they shipped those animation paths, models,et al. They provided footage that was supposed to show the greatest degree of sexuality on the disc and it was probably just kissing and a bouncing car. It doesn't matter that it required a hack to access because the ESRB doesn't care how the shipped content is played, they just care about the content.
For the second point, "the game is played by a number of people who are unaffiliated to the game industry" -- maybe I just don't remember the process correctly and maybe it's changed, but I don't think that you ever send the ESRB actual code. After all, a lot of games recieve their ratings before they're complete.
Please replace "Dragon Slayer" with "Dragon's Lair", and 1984 with 1983.
Also, consider this an official request for a way to edit posts in the first minute after they're posted.