Re:CYAN DIDN'T DEVELOP THIS GAME - AMEND/DELETE TH
on
Myst III: Exile Review
·
· Score: 1
Don't take me for dumber than I look. I'm well
aware the Miller brothers didn't develop
Myst III. My point is, they shouldn't have sold
the rights to someone who would release a shoddy
product, if they had any respect for their fans.
(Of course, there was probably no way for them to
know ahead of time that UbiSoft was going to
release a shoddy product. But maybe they ought to
do something to pressure UbiSoft to correct the
situation. And if you don't think there's any
way for them to apply pressure, imagine the effect
"Creators of Original Myst Say Myst III Sucks"
would have on sales.)
Don't bother sending email to Cyan, they don't take
tech support calls for Myst or Riven. But a
thoughtful, well-written paper letter to
Robyn and Rand Miller expressing disappointment at
the way they've handed off their world (and their
loyal players) to such incompetent, player-hostile
commercial hacks would certainly be in order. (Not that I blame the game designers or programmers at UbiSoft -- I'm sure it's not their fault they weren't given time for proper QA and that the distribution medium is so screwed up. UbiSoft's management on the other hand....) I
don't know where to write them, but I bet a letter
c/o Cyan at
Cyan Worlds, Inc.
14617 N. Newport Hwy.
Mead, WA 99021-9378
would eventually get there. A letter c/o Warner
Books (publisher of the Myst novels) would most
likely work, too:
c/o Author Mail
Warner Books
1271 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Who knows, the Millers seem like pretty nice guys
-- maybe they'd even put some pressure on UbiSoft
to fix things.
What's this DVB business? Reading the tech specs it keeps referring to the "DVB subsystem" and saying things like "Software:...DVB System running on separate RTOS". There's also some stuff about content protection: "Secure mechanism, using triple DES". And, oh boy, "Macrovision 7 compliant"! Sounds to me like they're going to some trouble to keep the Linux hackers away from the fun parts.
My problem isn't so much that they can't consider
things from another's perspective, it's that they
don't even seem to consider things from their own perspectives.:)
Dying Earth is one of those books you just ought to read -- Vance's language is unsurpassed,
his wry sense of humor is often delightful, and his
talent for invention makes most fantasy written in
the last hundred years look depressingly
unimaginative.
That said, there's a certain thin quality
to the stories in Dying Earth that's kept
me from wanting to read them again, even though
the book has a permanent place on my shelf. Vance's characters are original and individual,
but still strangely flat. They seem to lack not
just emotional depth, but self-awareness, so that
they wander through life uncaringly, completely
unaffected by their adventures; with the result
that in the end the reader, too, finds it hard to
care what happens to them, and walks away equally
unaffected.
So after you've read Dying Earth, do
yourself a favor and pick up something like Gene
Wolfe's Book of the New Sun or Fritz
Lieber's Fafhrd & Grey Mouser stories -- very
different works, but each in their own way showing
how the same material could have been more
rewarding in the hands of a writer less afraid to
get his hands dirty.
Because entanglement degrades over time, it's necessary for long-distance communication that a pair be as perfectly entangled as possible to begin with.
Can someone point me to a reasonably nontechnical explanation of this? (E.g., one that doesn't require the reader to be able to roll his/her own Hamiltonians.) What does "degrades over time" mean? Is this an intrinsic property of the entanglement (which I thought I was just beginning to understand before reading this, but apparently not), or do they just mean that the chance of something perturbing the system (and making the entangled pair useless -- in the same way as an eavesdropper would) increases over time? Or do they mean something else altogether?
It's no surprise, of course. Even the name "StarWars" itself conveys a message of conflict and carnage. A New Hope is, at bottom, a story about armed rebellion by rabble against a benevolent legal order, precisely the sort of communistic message we had come so close to defeating in Vietnam.
*LOL*
Good one. And The Phantom Menace is, of course, a story about a heroic
rebellion by desperate patriots against a decadent oligarchic regime, precisely the sort of fascistic message we came so close to
achieving at Munich, right?
I've always been annoyed by this expression [...]
A more apropoe expression would be -- First remove the tree from your own eye, before helping someone remove the splinter from theirs.
Hey, just because I've got this beam stuck in my eye doesn't mean I can't help you fish out that mote.
I don't see what difference it makes, frankly.
But just to avoid difficulty with the Baseless
Metaphors Department, I'll rephrase my statement
as follows:
"And if it isn't [the case that Mr. Holtzman is
innocent of / and/or opposed to NSI's previous
bad behavior], it's a questionable accusation of
wrongdoing coming from someone whose ability
to assert moral superiority is significantly
compromised by his own prior and apparently
unrepentant involvement in activities similar to
and perhaps more reprehensible than those he is
engaged in criticizing."
...just to name a few. Now, maybe Mr. Holtzman had nothing to do
with all that -- heck, maybe he left out of principle when NSI
stopped acting like a government contractor and started acting
like a would-be monopolist. But if that is the case, there ought
to have been a disclaimer somewhere in his comments. And if it
isn't, it's the pot calling the kettle black.
What you describe sounds very much like "flood science", a very entertaining field to study. Is "scientific creationism" just another name for "flood science".
Perhaps they're different subfields of the same discipline. There's a lot of interaction between them, and they're heavily co-dependent.
There's a very good article available via CataLaw on the 'science' in 'scientific creationism' -- specifically with reference to the legal history of debates over whether teaching it in schools is teaching science or teaching religion.
Scientific Creationism is a peculiarly American delusion that for the same evidence that has led most educated people to believe that the universe is many billions of years old, that the Earth is several billion years old, and that humans evolved from African plains apes, and so on and so forth, one can construct an equally plausible or even more plausible explanation putting the age of the Earth and the universe at a few thousand years, with all life created roughly simultaneously and at its current level of complexity shortly thereafter.
Symptoms include: The acceptance of the Bible as validated experimental evidence; the invocation of a great flood in order to explain away geological evidence; and various contorted attempts to do away with general relativity, some of which sound plausible if you don't look at the math too closely.
Sure you can watch a TV image on a monitor. I like to watch a TV in a small window while doing other work on the PC. Check out
this site for some pretty cheap PCI and USB TV tuners with A/V and coax inputs.
Perhaps I should have specified "without using
a PC". My thinking is more "hey, I've got this
pretty good 19" CRT that's not hooked up to
anything right now, why go to the trouble of
getting another CRT just to watch television,
which I don't do a whole lot of anyway?"
I don't think that you want to do this. AFAIK, the TV is 480x320 or 512x384 or something, and the resoution is going to be absolute
crap if you do it. Anyway, why do you want to use a monitor as a tiny TV screen? I don't think you'd like the size very much. Better to
sell the monitor and use the $20 to buy a small TV set instead.
Basically, I've got a pretty good 19" monitor
that I almost never use (because the machine
it's hooked up to is a server and I use my
laptop most of the time). I don't want to get
rid of it because, hey, it's a pretty good
monitor and you never know when you might need
one.:) But I've got a small apartment
and it does take up several cubic feet of
space; I'd rather not have to take several
*more* cubic feet of space up with a TV. (At
the moment I've got a tiny dorm-style 12" TV
that a friend didn't need any more.) For a
TV 19" is a little small these days, but I
don't have room for something larger than
about 24" anyway. As for
the resolution, hey, it's not going to be any
worse than an actual TV, right?
For less than $100, you can buy a little box that converts VGA output to something your TV understands. They are usually used for
presentations (PowerPoint), but work fine for general usage, games, etc. as well.
Does anyone know where I can get the reverse --
something that will convert NTSC (preferably
S-Video, but something with an ordinary RCA
composite jack would do) to VGA, allowing a
VGA/SVGA monitor to be used as a TV? There are
all kinds of boxes out there to hook PCs up to
TVs, but I haven't been able to find anything
going the other way.
I think the question was "can I find a job",
rather than "will I like living overseas."
Most countries have strict rules about employing
foreigners who don't have work visas, e.g.
American students. But most medium-to-large
companies will be willing to deal with the
paperwork necessary to get you a work visa, if
they really want to hire you.
As to all the little difficulties like phone
service, medical care, and talking to strangers,
yes, you can take those as a given, but tens of
thousands of expatriate Americans manage to
have a great time even so, even in places where
the level of public services is a lot lower than
in France, Italy, or Germany, and the languages
are a lot harder to learn.
(I'm curious: if your German is almost fluent,
why'd you have so much trouble having meaningful
conversations? My German is lousy, but while I
was living in Spain I met lots of Germans with
decent English and most of 'em were willing to
talk. Some of them were even worth talking to.)
My guess is it's nothing so ideological as
"blocking access to information" -- what they're
blocking is sites that redirect content.
The
filtering software isn't smart enough to detect
whether a particular Babelfish translation is
of www.acceptiblesite.com
or www.sitetheywanttoblock.com, so
it's simpler to just block all access to
Babelfish.
Likewise for all the anonymizing
sites and whatnot -- if a site makes it impossible
to tell whether what you're looking at is
something they want to block, they block that
site.
...eliminating inheritance tax... will in
fact bring about a stronger economy due to the
fact that rather than having money tied up in
charitable foundations, it will be in more
liquid forms, mainly equity.
What the hell does that mean? Listen, I don't
normally rant and rave, but seeing something
this clueless moderated up this high makes gives
me the screaming heebie-jeebies.
How does having money "tied up" in equity
bring about a stronger economy? Sure, it helps
keep the NASDAQ up, but that's hardly the same
thing. A liquid asset doesn't do jack for the
economy until somebody liquidates it.
And what gives you the idea that giving more
money to the rich will mean more money in
liquid assets? Last I heard, statistically,
the rich were much more likely to spend money
on illiquid assets like country estates, luxury motor yachts, and numbered Swiss accounts than any
charitable foundation is.
(You want more money in liquid assets? Fine:
abolish the inheritance tax on stocks, and
double the inheritance tax on property. I
won't stop you.)
What do you think charitable foundations do
with their money, put it in a sock under the
bed? They spend it. In fact they spend
it a lot faster than the rich do. On rent,
salaries, goods and services... all those
goodies that keep the economy moving. Money
given to a charitable foundation is hardly
"tied up".
And all that aside, you've totally missed the
point of the article.
People having money is
not a problem. People having lots of
money is not a problem.
People having money at the expense of
everyone else is a problem.
Every example you give is GOVERNMENT imposing too much power, not corporations.
Perhaps I'm missing something. The only 'government' examples I can see in the
article are the court cases (and related
lawyerly hassles):
DeCSS linking
Mormon linking
Cyberpatrol hack
Amazon patents
MS Kerberos code
Which of those involves a federal power not enumerated in the US Constitution? Last I heard, the Constitution gave Congress explicit power to create laws governing copyrights and patents. (There's no way on Earth to write a law that ensures they'll only use that power wisely.)
(Those of you in this thread that are using this as an argument for libertarianism or anarcho-capitalism, maybe you can answer a question for me: What is it that under such a system provides a check on the power of wealthy individuals and corporations? I'm genuinely curious -- this is the one thing that bugs me about it and I can't find a good answer in the standard literature.:))
Slashdot Mirror
(Of course, there was probably no way for them to know ahead of time that UbiSoft was going to release a shoddy product. But maybe they ought to do something to pressure UbiSoft to correct the situation. And if you don't think there's any way for them to apply pressure, imagine the effect "Creators of Original Myst Say Myst III Sucks" would have on sales.)
Cyan Worlds, Inc.
14617 N. Newport Hwy.
Mead, WA 99021-9378
would eventually get there. A letter c/o Warner Books (publisher of the Myst novels) would most likely work, too:
c/o Author Mail
Warner Books
1271 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Who knows, the Millers seem like pretty nice guys -- maybe they'd even put some pressure on UbiSoft to fix things.
What's this DVB business? Reading the tech specs it keeps referring to the "DVB subsystem" and saying things like "Software: ...DVB System running on separate RTOS". There's also some stuff about content protection: "Secure mechanism, using triple DES". And, oh boy, "Macrovision 7 compliant"! Sounds to me like they're going to some trouble to keep the Linux hackers away from the fun parts.
My problem isn't so much that they can't consider things from another's perspective, it's that they don't even seem to consider things from their own perspectives. :)
That said, there's a certain thin quality to the stories in Dying Earth that's kept me from wanting to read them again, even though the book has a permanent place on my shelf. Vance's characters are original and individual, but still strangely flat. They seem to lack not just emotional depth, but self-awareness, so that they wander through life uncaringly, completely unaffected by their adventures; with the result that in the end the reader, too, finds it hard to care what happens to them, and walks away equally unaffected.
So after you've read Dying Earth, do yourself a favor and pick up something like Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun or Fritz Lieber's Fafhrd & Grey Mouser stories -- very different works, but each in their own way showing how the same material could have been more rewarding in the hands of a writer less afraid to get his hands dirty.
http://www.siliconalleydaily.com/issues/sar0418200 1.html#Headline8299
Maybe this is a good time to bring up David Brin's Star Wars despots vs. Star Trek populists again.
I don't see what difference it makes, frankly. But just to avoid difficulty with the Baseless Metaphors Department, I'll rephrase my statement as follows:
Better?There's a big gap between celebrity fantasies and real women -- if you can't see it maybe you need some psychiatric help.
Now, why the Commander feels the need to share his fantasy with us, that's an open question...
(P.S. The phrase you were looking for is "one too many". "One-to-many" means something else.)
Perhaps they're different subfields of the same discipline. There's a lot of interaction between them, and they're heavily co-dependent.
There's a very good article available via CataLaw on the 'science' in 'scientific creationism' -- specifically with reference to the legal history of debates over whether teaching it in schools is teaching science or teaching religion.
Symptoms include: The acceptance of the Bible as validated experimental evidence; the invocation of a great flood in order to explain away geological evidence; and various contorted attempts to do away with general relativity, some of which sound plausible if you don't look at the math too closely.
Have you got a URL for that? I can't seem to find it on the web.
Cool! Thanks!
As for integrating with society, hell, even in the States it takes two or three generations. :)
Most countries have strict rules about employing foreigners who don't have work visas, e.g. American students. But most medium-to-large companies will be willing to deal with the paperwork necessary to get you a work visa, if they really want to hire you.
As to all the little difficulties like phone service, medical care, and talking to strangers, yes, you can take those as a given, but tens of thousands of expatriate Americans manage to have a great time even so, even in places where the level of public services is a lot lower than in France, Italy, or Germany, and the languages are a lot harder to learn.
(I'm curious: if your German is almost fluent, why'd you have so much trouble having meaningful conversations? My German is lousy, but while I was living in Spain I met lots of Germans with decent English and most of 'em were willing to talk. Some of them were even worth talking to.)
The filtering software isn't smart enough to detect whether a particular Babelfish translation is of www.acceptiblesite.com or www.sitetheywanttoblock.com, so it's simpler to just block all access to Babelfish.
Likewise for all the anonymizing sites and whatnot -- if a site makes it impossible to tell whether what you're looking at is something they want to block, they block that site.
Lame, yes, but so's the whole idea of censorware.
What the hell does that mean? Listen, I don't normally rant and rave, but seeing something this clueless moderated up this high makes gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies.
How does having money "tied up" in equity bring about a stronger economy? Sure, it helps keep the NASDAQ up, but that's hardly the same thing. A liquid asset doesn't do jack for the economy until somebody liquidates it.
And what gives you the idea that giving more money to the rich will mean more money in liquid assets? Last I heard, statistically, the rich were much more likely to spend money on illiquid assets like country estates, luxury motor yachts, and numbered Swiss accounts than any charitable foundation is.
(You want more money in liquid assets? Fine: abolish the inheritance tax on stocks, and double the inheritance tax on property. I won't stop you.)
What do you think charitable foundations do with their money, put it in a sock under the bed? They spend it. In fact they spend it a lot faster than the rich do. On rent, salaries, goods and services... all those goodies that keep the economy moving. Money given to a charitable foundation is hardly "tied up".
And all that aside, you've totally missed the point of the article.
People having money is not a problem.
People having lots of money is not a problem.
People having money at the expense of everyone else is a problem.
Perhaps I'm missing something. The only 'government' examples I can see in the article are the court cases (and related lawyerly hassles):
- DeCSS linking
- Mormon linking
- Cyberpatrol hack
- Amazon patents
- MS Kerberos code
Which of those involves a federal power not enumerated in the US Constitution? Last I heard, the Constitution gave Congress explicit power to create laws governing copyrights and patents. (There's no way on Earth to write a law that ensures they'll only use that power wisely.)(Those of you in this thread that are using this as an argument for libertarianism or anarcho-capitalism, maybe you can answer a question for me: What is it that under such a system provides a check on the power of wealthy individuals and corporations? I'm genuinely curious -- this is the one thing that bugs me about it and I can't find a good answer in the standard literature. :))