But they're not doing it the way we did. You're missing a fundamental difference. Our society, our expectations, our laws had time to change as technology evolved. They're going through 150 years of technological advance in a few decades. Their big problem is not what is happening to the people today. To put it in savage terms, they have enough people that they can economically afford to treat them terribly.
The problem is that they are mortgaging the future by doing horrible, horrible things to their environment. Eventually, they'll have to fix them in order to become a 1st world nation. Take a look at Los Angeles, and what the California Air Resources Board has done to try and improve the air. Then take a look at photos of Wuhan or any of dozens of other industrial centers. You can't build a stable long term economy in a place where the air itself is debilitating. Same goes for water and soil pollution.
Take a look at Times Beach Missouri ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach,_Missouri ) to get an idea of what they'll be up against in the future. I'm guessing that at its worst, Times Beach was less dangerous than residential areas in China today.
I enjoy happy endings wtih problems solved. But one where there's some reason the problem got solved. In most of his books, the major problem gets solved independent of the actions of the main characters. I do agree, though, that he does a good job presenting new things to the public. As I say, he writes a great 67% of a book.
Agreed. Read the original. More generally, read the edited verison of any of his books, not the unedited. The unedited sometimes have other interesting side characters, but he also tends to go all George Lucas where he needs someone else to tell him when Enough is Enough.
I'd say take a risk on the first two. The first one is a quick read, but is very much his early writing style where the characters are kind of stark, black and white with detail purposefully omitted in the shadows. The second is more representive of the tone the rest of the books take, with a more indepth, colorful character development.
My new rule is that good writers are separated from the bad (aka hacks) by their ability to devise a good ending to the story they started.
Michael Criton is king of the hacks this way. He comes up with interesting starts and middles, then the end is always that the problem gets solved by some dues ex machina. It's like he read War of the Worlds, and based an entire career on that ending type.
I'll buy gear from any company that finds religion, and starts adhering to standards. Sony is now using SD cards in their video cameras, (and also memoryStick) using the MP4 format (better than.mov, at least I feel), is doing much better about using standard connectors for things, and is offers eBook readers with no wireless component, so you'll always be able to load them with eBooks without worring about big brother.
Yeah, they did the XCP thing. And ripped Linux off of the PS3. But if you want to send a message, you buy the products they make that conform to standards (assuming they're worth buying), and don't buy the ones that don't. That's the stuff that influences what they make. Just crossing a company off the list for something they did years ago isn't a way to affect change.
We were watching the Super Bowl with our kids. And out popped Janet's nipple. Live, and unexpected. Parents who wanted to be "responsible" in preventing their children from seeing such things were caught totally by surprise. I think my kids will be OK, but it kinda puts a dent in that argument. On the other hand, it's perfectly possible to keep kids from watching certain channels, or all channels at certain times. Put whatever you want on then...
Really? Microchip comes out with dozens of new variations of cheap 8-bitters every year. Somebody must be writing for them...Like me! So there's at least one such job... In reality, those programming jobs are going more and more to people who integrate systems at the PCB board level. The tiny, tiny micros are now often seen more as configurable logic as much as time-based computers.
There's a bit of truth to that Model T stuff. Everybody thinks they know how to drive a standard transmission until you throw 'em in an antique without synchros... I woudl guess you could say the same about automatic spark advance, but I've never personally experienced that...
If you want to get an intimate feel for writing programs without being able to waste resources, try embedded systems programming. The microchip 10F series has only a few dozen bytes of ram, and a couple hundred words of flash. And no hardware multiply. Making it do useful things is an art. Oh, and unlike some relic from the 70's, you can actually get a job programming for tiny microcontrollers.
That said, it does seem like a cool class. One I'd like to take, but for personal interest, not professional development.
Plus, sooner or later the general public is going to realize that megapixels aren't everything. A the output of a 6 megapixel Nikon D40 will amaze your non-photographer friends, while the 14Megapixel Samsung compact you just bought at walmart will most definately not.
Or at least your parents are. One of the best sum-ups of the 2008 presidential election I heard was "Dad takes money out of his bank account and sends it to McCain. The kids ask him for money, then send it to Obama..."
If corporations are "conservative" how come almost all their TV Media outlets (ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN) are pro-big-government and anti-individual liberty? It appears the corporations are actually the opposite of conservative: Progressive (aka liberal).
Because Media Outlets are staffed by people with Journalism and Media majors, not by the actual members of the board of directors. Now let me think...What school in most colleges typically offer those degrees...Hmmm... Oh yeah! LIBERAL arts!. Presto. All media outlets, by default, will tend to be to the left of center. That said, there are conservatives with these degrees, so it's perfectly possible to create a right-leaning media organization if you cherry-pick your people (or make the lefties afraid for their jobs...).
To say "they" should be inflating the price is to say they shouldn't be selling it at all. While the US has extracted the lion's share of it, there's lots of helium other places, lots of which is just allowed to escape while capturing natural gas. We could stop selling it, and other countries would simply produce more, keeping the price relatively stable. Although, if this production was partially due to the capture of previously released sources, you might say that you achieved your goal.
You can say the same thing about water. There's lots of it on earth, but getting it to all the right places in a sufficiently pure state is a bit of a challenge.
Explain to me how this is gonna make my Vi editor sessions more productive, and I'll be ready to listen. It seems to me that an adaptive keyboard is a crutch for people who don't want to learn a product well enough to be good at it. I fail to see how having buttons that change with context is really much better than being able to chose the same context with a mouse. Unless you reach that zen level where you stop thinking "Copy the line...press YY..." to just doing it without thinking, then there's not much to be gained.
I remember in the early 90's, the SysOpp of our local BBS had a variety of level-limited varieties of what today is called a MMO (although it was only as massive as a typical football team, and only one or two of us could be online at a time). They were ASCII/ANSI based dungeons where you fought monsters and got stuff. Only 15 minutes of play per day per person please! Other people want to dial in!
Eventually we all chipped in a few bucks (Convincing my mom to write a check to a stranger I met on the computer ("how is he on our computer?") was a challenge). But eventually we got enough dough together to buy a license so we could all level up, and go attack the much more powerful monsters represented by such fear-invoking characters as '#', '%', '&'. Oh yeah, I remember old '&'. He'll never cross us again. I'll tell you that much.
The days of people making games as a labour of love are almost gone.
Another way of saying this is:
The days of people wanting to play games made as a labour of love are almost gone
The general public likes games with high production value, and is willing to pay for them. That's the way it goes. However, I think your statement is also false. I would say:
The environment where people make games as a labour of love is becoming highly fragmented
It was easy when everybody you knew had a Commodore 64 or Apple II. You wrote a game, put it on a disk, and showed it to your friend. Now, the market for homebrew is very, very fragmented. There's homebrew for every console imaginable out there. There's homebrew for Flash games, homebrew for iPhone, homebrew for Android. And there's still homebrew for all the legacy platforms (something that didn't exist during your "golden days" because there were no legacy platforms!). In terms of shear numbers, I'd guess that the number of homebrew games is far greater now than at any time in the past, due to the ability of like-minded people to meet over the internet across long distances.
Slashdot Mirror
But they're not doing it the way we did. You're missing a fundamental difference. Our society, our expectations, our laws had time to change as technology evolved. They're going through 150 years of technological advance in a few decades. Their big problem is not what is happening to the people today. To put it in savage terms, they have enough people that they can economically afford to treat them terribly.
The problem is that they are mortgaging the future by doing horrible, horrible things to their environment. Eventually, they'll have to fix them in order to become a 1st world nation. Take a look at Los Angeles, and what the California Air Resources Board has done to try and improve the air. Then take a look at photos of Wuhan or any of dozens of other industrial centers. You can't build a stable long term economy in a place where the air itself is debilitating. Same goes for water and soil pollution.
Take a look at Times Beach Missouri ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach,_Missouri ) to get an idea of what they'll be up against in the future. I'm guessing that at its worst, Times Beach was less dangerous than residential areas in China today.
I enjoy happy endings wtih problems solved. But one where there's some reason the problem got solved. In most of his books, the major problem gets solved independent of the actions of the main characters. I do agree, though, that he does a good job presenting new things to the public. As I say, he writes a great 67% of a book.
Agreed. Read the original. More generally, read the edited verison of any of his books, not the unedited. The unedited sometimes have other interesting side characters, but he also tends to go all George Lucas where he needs someone else to tell him when Enough is Enough.
I'd say take a risk on the first two. The first one is a quick read, but is very much his early writing style where the characters are kind of stark, black and white with detail purposefully omitted in the shadows. The second is more representive of the tone the rest of the books take, with a more indepth, colorful character development.
My new rule is that good writers are separated from the bad (aka hacks) by their ability to devise a good ending to the story they started.
Michael Criton is king of the hacks this way. He comes up with interesting starts and middles, then the end is always that the problem gets solved by some dues ex machina. It's like he read War of the Worlds, and based an entire career on that ending type.
If you like that, you should read the stuff that follows. It's nearly as good.
I'll buy gear from any company that finds religion, and starts adhering to standards. Sony is now using SD cards in their video cameras, (and also memoryStick) using the MP4 format (better than .mov, at least I feel), is doing much better about using standard connectors for things, and is offers eBook readers with no wireless component, so you'll always be able to load them with eBooks without worring about big brother.
Yeah, they did the XCP thing. And ripped Linux off of the PS3. But if you want to send a message, you buy the products they make that conform to standards (assuming they're worth buying), and don't buy the ones that don't. That's the stuff that influences what they make. Just crossing a company off the list for something they did years ago isn't a way to affect change.
No, AM radio works fine without a ferrite bar antenna. If it doesn't it's because you're holding...
Ah, fuck it. Too obvious.
grand purge of stupid off of the internet.
Again? It's not gonna require a merger with Time Warner this time, is it?
We were watching the Super Bowl with our kids. And out popped Janet's nipple. Live, and unexpected. Parents who wanted to be "responsible" in preventing their children from seeing such things were caught totally by surprise. I think my kids will be OK, but it kinda puts a dent in that argument. On the other hand, it's perfectly possible to keep kids from watching certain channels, or all channels at certain times. Put whatever you want on then...
I am almost absolutely positive ... I could be wrong though.
Hey! Stop plagarizing my project status reports!
Really? Microchip comes out with dozens of new variations of cheap 8-bitters every year. Somebody must be writing for them...Like me! So there's at least one such job... In reality, those programming jobs are going more and more to people who integrate systems at the PCB board level. The tiny, tiny micros are now often seen more as configurable logic as much as time-based computers.
There's a bit of truth to that Model T stuff. Everybody thinks they know how to drive a standard transmission until you throw 'em in an antique without synchros... I woudl guess you could say the same about automatic spark advance, but I've never personally experienced that...
If you want to get an intimate feel for writing programs without being able to waste resources, try embedded systems programming. The microchip 10F series has only a few dozen bytes of ram, and a couple hundred words of flash. And no hardware multiply. Making it do useful things is an art. Oh, and unlike some relic from the 70's, you can actually get a job programming for tiny microcontrollers.
That said, it does seem like a cool class. One I'd like to take, but for personal interest, not professional development.
Plus, sooner or later the general public is going to realize that megapixels aren't everything. A the output of a 6 megapixel Nikon D40 will amaze your non-photographer friends, while the 14Megapixel Samsung compact you just bought at walmart will most definately not.
Or at least your parents are. One of the best sum-ups of the 2008 presidential election I heard was "Dad takes money out of his bank account and sends it to McCain. The kids ask him for money, then send it to Obama..."
If corporations are "conservative" how come almost all their TV Media outlets (ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN) are pro-big-government and anti-individual liberty? It appears the corporations are actually the opposite of conservative: Progressive (aka liberal).
Because Media Outlets are staffed by people with Journalism and Media majors, not by the actual members of the board of directors. Now let me think...What school in most colleges typically offer those degrees...Hmmm... Oh yeah! LIBERAL arts!. Presto. All media outlets, by default, will tend to be to the left of center. That said, there are conservatives with these degrees, so it's perfectly possible to create a right-leaning media organization if you cherry-pick your people (or make the lefties afraid for their jobs...).
Really? I can see it now... Commercials selling gold replaced by Commercials selling tanks of helium... Look for them now during Sean Hannity...
To say "they" should be inflating the price is to say they shouldn't be selling it at all. While the US has extracted the lion's share of it, there's lots of helium other places, lots of which is just allowed to escape while capturing natural gas. We could stop selling it, and other countries would simply produce more, keeping the price relatively stable. Although, if this production was partially due to the capture of previously released sources, you might say that you achieved your goal.
No problem. I've got one. It's right up there...
You can say the same thing about water. There's lots of it on earth, but getting it to all the right places in a sufficiently pure state is a bit of a challenge.
Explain to me how this is gonna make my Vi editor sessions more productive, and I'll be ready to listen. It seems to me that an adaptive keyboard is a crutch for people who don't want to learn a product well enough to be good at it. I fail to see how having buttons that change with context is really much better than being able to chose the same context with a mouse. Unless you reach that zen level where you stop thinking "Copy the line...press YY..." to just doing it without thinking, then there's not much to be gained.
Um, no. No we don't.
I remember in the early 90's, the SysOpp of our local BBS had a variety of level-limited varieties of what today is called a MMO (although it was only as massive as a typical football team, and only one or two of us could be online at a time). They were ASCII/ANSI based dungeons where you fought monsters and got stuff. Only 15 minutes of play per day per person please! Other people want to dial in!
Eventually we all chipped in a few bucks (Convincing my mom to write a check to a stranger I met on the computer ("how is he on our computer?") was a challenge). But eventually we got enough dough together to buy a license so we could all level up, and go attack the much more powerful monsters represented by such fear-invoking characters as '#', '%', '&'. Oh yeah, I remember old '&'. He'll never cross us again. I'll tell you that much.
The days of people making games as a labour of love are almost gone.
Another way of saying this is:
The days of people wanting to play games made as a labour of love are almost gone
The general public likes games with high production value, and is willing to pay for them. That's the way it goes. However, I think your statement is also false. I would say:
The environment where people make games as a labour of love is becoming highly fragmented
It was easy when everybody you knew had a Commodore 64 or Apple II. You wrote a game, put it on a disk, and showed it to your friend. Now, the market for homebrew is very, very fragmented. There's homebrew for every console imaginable out there. There's homebrew for Flash games, homebrew for iPhone, homebrew for Android. And there's still homebrew for all the legacy platforms (something that didn't exist during your "golden days" because there were no legacy platforms!). In terms of shear numbers, I'd guess that the number of homebrew games is far greater now than at any time in the past, due to the ability of like-minded people to meet over the internet across long distances.