Game Over was a great novel indeed, the updated version covers a bit of Nintendo's efforts after the SNES/SuperFamicom. It doesn't go into the N64's issues as much as I would have liked, but it's a nice addition.
The author managed to keep a nice balance between Nintendo bashing and Nintendo worshipping. The business practices Nintendo engaged in, such as the cartridge building process, were just absolutely insane. Scary thing is, they're still on top in many ways. International video game sales, the top hardware and software sales belong to Nintendo.. by far. Granted, it's got Zelda and Pokemon to back them up.
The book touches on the Playstation, and Nintendo's efforts to combat Sony's prodigy. It's definately worth reading the updated version of Game Over if you enjoyed the first version and read the making of PS.
The only times I've been able to meet girls in arcades are at the arcades located in pool halls or bowling alleys. It seems I'd meet girls there who didn't like pool/bowling, but were there with friends.
But yeah, your standard arcade is pretty male-dominated. I once asked an ex of mine why I didn't see more females in arcades, since I knew quite a few gaming girls. Her only answer was, "The only reason for a girl to go to arcades is to check out guys' buts." *grin*
There are a few coders I've seen who create elegant code that rivals fine art. Not quite Beethoven, but music has been around for a bit longer, and has had more time to create such fine artists. Maybe a few hundred years from now we'll see a code-god of Beethoven's level.
The M* I work on has been a great experience for me to see a wide variety of code. The game has exchanged hands many times since it started in 93/94, going through dozens of various coders. Some fix bugs through elegant user-friendly well-written code that looks gorgeous. Others toss on nasty patches that look like someone's stapled a band-aid to a leper's open sores. After dealing with spaghetti code for hours, a certain coder's works truly look like Beethoven to me.
But perhaps that can be attributed to the thirsty man in the desert thinking that the muddy water is Poland Spring. *grin*
It's also a matter of image; which is worse on the kid, the stigma of no computer or the stigma of a "worthless" (by modern standards) computer. Keep in mind, kids can be very cruel.
True, but on/. or in something like an IRC room, noone can tell when I'm on my old P100, or my PIII 650. Unless the kid is inviting friends over to play games on it or the like, there is little difference between the two as far as just getting online and the kid's image online to others.
Hell, the kid can still play his online MMORPG's on a P100, they just have to stick to text-based MUD/MUSH/MUCK/MOOs, which actually are quite a bit MORE intellectual and educational for kids. There are quite a few MOOs that have online schools, teaching the basics of object oriented code and server playing. Even the less educational MOOs still help reinforce mathematical skills, grammar, and spelling. And all of these text-based realities can be accessed through the same comptuers that were accessing them almost a decade ago.
My girlfriend works in an environment where her boss treats her and her co-workers very poorly, and the working conditions are quite poor. Yet she feels a loyalty to her position and will stay until the 'lull period' in her job's cycle. Personally, I think giving them anything more then the standard two weeks notice is doing them a favor they don't deserve.
I, on the other hand, have a great boss who treats me and my co-workers quite well in just about every way imaginable. Even though I could make more money elsewhere, and am struggling to make ends meet at times, it's hard for me to consider abandoning him... though I regret I may have to. Working for a good company that treats you right makes all the difference in the world, and can be a rare thing it seems.
My roommate my sophomore year at college had a full ride to our school. Every semester he ended up being withdrawn because one of his scholarships always sent the check too late for the university's books. Every semester he had to walk down to the Business Office, get cleared, re-register, and explain that it happened every semester. He just graduated last year, and sure enough, the same thing happened all eight semesters.
You're required to sign up for classes two thirds into the semester before at our school, which is well before loans or such are taken care of. My sophomore year, I attempted to get a promisary note for the loan I was getting in order to get cleared before classes started. Financial Aid couldn't do that until I was re-registered. Couldn't register until the Business Office cleared me. Couldn't get cleared at the Business Office until... sure enough... I had to get the promisary note. After explaining this neverending circle of miscommunication and red tape to the director of the Business Office, she merely said, "I don't care." Luckily the Financial Aid office broke the rules and got me taken care of, a week after classes began.
I don't think this situation was created by technology or computers, forming some sort of 'Tightening Net' as Katz speaks of. These were three different backwards departments, in the same building, on two floors of said building. These people saw each other every day, and shared the same vending machines and bathroom. When the circle formed, they had each other on the phone instantly. This is a human thing - human blunders, human red tape, human stupidity. While I can see how technology would make it that much harder to get taken care of, a good dose of human misunderstanding can go just as far if not further.
Actually, it was that reason that kept me on M*'s instead of giving them up. My excuse was: I was going to waste my time playing games instead of studying. Whether it be Dungeon Keeper, Total A., Starcraft, etc. If I'm wasting my time on a M*, at least the effort isn't gone. When I beat the level on Dungeon Keeper, the cool nifty dungeon I dug is gone. When I vanquish my foes on the RTS game, the army is gone. With a M*, my creation stays.
Yeah, I know I could have played a MMORPG like UO, but that wouldn't have let me create things and code like the MOO I got involved with did. That way I could keep on telling myself that I was keeping my coding skills fresh by wasting my time on a MOO instead of playing another game.
Ultimately, it was the fact that others could enjoy my creative efforts on CyberSphere, while the dungeon in Dungeon Keeper was only seen by me and an opponent or two. I've built many things, and coded many cool objects, which hundreds of people have enjoyed playing with. That wouldn't have been possible with any other homework avoider that I know of.
Some of the popular MOOs are still around. But one sub-segment of MOOs (a sub-segment of a sub-segment, I know), the RPG MOOs, is still very much active.
GhostWheel and CyberSphere are both around and expanding. The former is a pseudo-fantasy post-apocalyptic game, with many MUDesque themes of hunting and rising in power. The latter is a cyberpunk post-apocalyptic game, which focuses pretty strongly on role-playing, while still leaving room for gritty futuristic urban violence. Both incredible games.
Major price advantage? You're talking about the difference between a $300 product and a $150 product in the same line of conversation as someone talking about multiple TiVOs. Not to mention broadband rates.... I don't think the extra hundred and a half is going to break the bank for the type of person that this article's aimed at.
One thing that hasn't been addressed in some time, that I'd like to know about, what happened to the Dreamcast hard drive? The Dreamcast memory card, even the 4x released by Sega, can't adequately hold enough to make broadband a worthwhile endeavor in my mind. Any progress being made in getting a nice large hard drive option for the Dreamcast?
EB's actual return policy is to give a full refund for the software if all of the original packaging and materials are present. You have ten days with a receipt.
And, back when I worked at EB on the weekends, I saw a few people return games based on the EULA. Including most copies of Microsoft's MMORPG, Asheron's Call. From what I understand, it has a very restrictive EULA regarding ownership of characters and such.
Worldgroup Manager was an interesting step indeed, but annoying to code for.
I started BBS'ing around 1990 or 1991 in the central Jersey area (201/908 - now 732 area code). Ran a BBS off my 8088, 2400 baud modem, 20 meg hard drive. The small hard drive space kept my BBS from turning into a warez BBS, but I still tried to do as much as possible with what I had. Joined FIDOnet, DementedNet, and was co-founder of an ANSI art group, SNaP! The people I BBS'd with were local people, and I often met them in real life.
By the mid 90's, most of my friends were switching over to the commercial multi-line chat MBBS's. Cheers, The Imperial Fortress, Excalibur, etc. While I waxed nostalgic about the old one-line BBS's sitting in a chat room with thirty people on TIF, I didn't know how short that form of community's lifespan would be. After 96, I worked for Cheersoft, a company that wrote utilities and doors for MBBS/Worldgroup. At that point the internet was taking over most of the local BBS scene. The one-liners were dying, and the 50-100 liners were becoming mom and pop ISP's. It was sad, in a way, working in part of a scene that was dying. But the BBS scene was one of the greatest things I was involved with, and I had tons of fun. One of my best friends from high school married a girl that we met on a BBS years ago. Some of my good friends to this day are people I met back in the mid 90's on BBSes.
The thing I miss the most about it all is the geographical closeness, as another poster mentioned. One night sitting in the Worldgroup teleconference, some girl expressed interest in pizza. Within an hour, a dozen of us had driven all over Jersey to make it to a pizza place. I can't do that with people as easily over the internet. Local BBS's would do photoshoots with the sysop's girlfriend or other random female users, then post up the bikini pix on other sites to advertise their BBS. You would call these BBS's, knowing you could score with them.:-) Can't even fool yourself into believing that over the internet.
A group of former BBS'ers in central jersey have formed a very Linux-friendly telnetable BBS at darkplanet.org. If you were part of the community back in the day in that area, you might just run into a few dozen old faces.
JonKatz actually followed up on one of his "first in a series" articles! The world as we know it is over!
Actually, Jon follows up on a good deal of his 'series' articles, just they don't always make it to the front page. If you check the side sections on the left, you'll see a story or two of his that wasn't big enough.
Now, that isn't to say that there's no legitimate concern over things like desensitization to violence, couch potatoism, and other alleged societal ills that people associate with games. But a society that questions itself is the only healthy kind of society.
I know this example is used any time 'video game/television/movie violence' but look at Japan. The most violent anime, twisted porn, and violent video games. Yet a low crime rate. Similar comparisons made with gun ownership, citing England as an anti-gun nation with low crime, and other European countries as pro-gun nations with low crime on the flip side of the argument. Given all of these comparisons, I think it's unfair to say that gaming itself is the cause for a high crime rate, violence in schools, etc. The sum of society, including gaming, must be looked at here.
I agree with you totally, games are just games for all but those who have no hold on reality. Another point is, those people will find their escape anyway. The kid who plays Doom for a week then kills his classmates would probably have killed them even if he couldn't download Doom. In fact, he might just have killed them a week earlier without that outlet for his rage.
As Dave Mustaine (lead singer for Megadeth) once said in an interview for MTV hack in 1988 - "They scream and piss and moan about the kid who kills with a metal tape in his back pocket, but what about the kid who offs with a Barry Manilow tape in his back pocket? No press there!" I wonder how many kids have killed classmates after playing freecell or minesweeper religiously.
From reading the article, the bacteria just extract the substances, absorbing them into 'balls'. Having the bacteria actually transform the zinc and sulfur atoms into something else is a bit less feasible. Who knows, bacteria that form vodka from tap water...
I wonder what sort of extraction methods they're planning on using to remove the 'balls' of toxin from the water after the bacteria is added.
Unfortunately, this isn't the Jetsons. We can't press a button to have fake perfect clothing and hair drop down in front of us so that our boss doesn't see how dishelved we look in real life.
Personally, I don't think this will catch on for a while. Similar innovations have been available throughout corporate America for years now, yet have failed to become the standard. Like webcams, I suspect this will be a device best marketted to the sex industry at first.
Actually, didn't all non-Japanese versions of the PS2 have their DVD decoding moved from firmware to hardware 'cuz of that "Oops, we forgot the Macrovision!" debacle?
Actually, they forgot the Macrovision on the American version. The day of the US launch, I tried taping a clip or two off a few DVDs that couldn't be taped off my normal DVD player. Sure enough, no Macrovision this time around either. Wonder if this is going to merit a recall. If it wasn't for the overwhelming lack of supply, they might have been able to make one quickly and quietly.
Good point. Ultimately, it's going to be economic pressures that drive how these genetic tools are going to be used. We're probably going to see things that make nice profit margins instead of being made for the good of mankind.
But if a corporation could use a gene to cure cancer, or a gene for acne medicine, which do you think will make them more money? If you could make a cancer cure, and patent it, how much money do you think you could milk from the millions suffering through it out there?
It's a sad state of affairs, but with the patent office and our society in general set up the way it is, I don't see it changing any time soon.
I agree with you entirely. Most of my MP3 junkie friends point out the cost of media, the time it takes to switch discs, and the problem of skipping. With the media at an all time low in price, multi-disc trunk or backseat changers being so cheap even with anti-skipping mechanisms, I don't see the advantage.
Personally, I feel that quality is the one difference, and an MP3 usually doesn't sound as clean and robust as a (legally purchased) CD. So, like you, I'll be sticking with the 'old media'.
Heh. I wonder what they'll be able to do with the GameBoy Advance that's due out soon. Already, just with the basic GameBoy and GameBoy Color, they've released a camera, a printer, etc.
Interact, the company that makes the ever-popular Gameshark cheating system created a device that lets you send and receive email through your GameBoy much like a Pocketmail device. Looks like all of those jokes about PalmOS devices looking like GameBoys can be applied the other way around as well.
I am the original poster. The machine in question was locked inside a cabinet so that customers could sample this great new system before buying it. There was a power button, but it was inside the case. If the Dreamcast didn't have this handy ctrl-alt-delesque reset function, we'd have to open up the cabinet regularly.
And as the other reply to my post mentioned, the Windows CE logo was not just on the system and web disk, it was used in development of the games. When the X Box was just a rumor, many people theorized that Microsoft would be making the X Box in partnership with Sega Dreamcast, and Next Gen magazine made some negative comments about Microsoft stabbing Sega 'in the back' after the deals made during the initial design of the Dreamcast.
In short, everything will be far more simply/uniformly designed and will be as likely to crash as any other console, ie, just about never.
Question: have you ever used the Sega Dreamcast extensively? That system is prone to crashing on a regular basis.
Before my current job, I worked at a video game store for a few months before committing to a 'real' job. One of the first things I was taught was the Dreamcast equivalent to control-alt-delete. Push down every button at once and hit start, and you'll reboot the system. We'd need to do that at least once a day with most games. Every few days, it would crash so hard we'd need to pull the plug. And that's a console system through and through.
Well, except for one thing. I really don't like to jump on the Windows-bashing bandwagon (I'm a gamer, so I use Windows), but it is interesting to note that Dreamcast games are written using WindowsCE. If you look at any Dreamcast box or game, you'll see a little Windows logo on the back. And the Dreamcast, software written with Windows, is the one console that crashes often under heavy usage. Now that Microsoft is making their own console, using Windows, that trend might just follow. Which would be a shame for them.
They as the company probably cannot. But they as the founders could just get bought out by another company, or IPO and cash out. Many companies aren't making any money, but as long as someone's willing to throw money at them, it doesn't matter. As Barnum once said, "There's a sucker born every minute."
As a coder on a very old text-based role playing game, I've seen this happen firsthand. There is no way that we can compete with the blood splatter of Unreal Tournament, or the graphical experience of Everquest. So instead we've tried to focus on the strengths of our dying genre.
People cannot play Everquest from work, while sitting in a programming lab, or other such locations where they find themselves with free time and a firewall that lets them telnet out. Most of our players are people who play these newer games like UT or Icewind Dale, but they don't always have access to that computer. Or people who don't have the computing power and budget to support buying the latest big name game. These people are our target audience at this point, but it is an audience that is slowly shrinking. When we used to use mobs of people in our game's various hangouts and bars, we now consider it great to see a mere dozen.
Many of us are oldschool pencil and paper role players, and chose to play on the text based online game because it allows for a greater level of role playing then EverQuest or Ultima Online. I've tried most of the MMRPG's, and found them to be either giant deathmatches or painful affairs of watching a blue bar grow while staring at a spellbook. I can stare at a spellbook screenshot if I want to get the EverQuest experience. I, for one, would rather spend my time role playing where imagination and text are your only tools.
As much as the genre is dying, there is one benefit from the other games seducing the players away. The only people left on the text based role playing games are those that really want to role play. Otherwise, they'd be booting up Quake 3.
Shameless plug: If you are looking for a great text based online role playing game, check out CyberSphere.
Not just bought, but owned outright from day one. Many of the Universities founded in the mid to late 19th century were founded by capitalists, or taken over my capitalists and given their current name.
For example, consider Drew University. The college was created by Daniel Drew, a back-stabbing cold-hearted money-grubbing capitalist robber baron. Nowadays, he'd been funding the University for a tax break. Back then, it was just to get into heaven. Many private institutions have a long history of being owned, either overtly or covertly, by various corporate influences.
The university where I work at, many of the computer science professors have worked at Lucent Technologies (or the same company under its earlier names). Some of my coworkers graduated from here, and where do you think they got jobs before returning? Who do you think provides 'grants' to various computer projects, in return for us pushing our best and brightest at them as cheap interns? Damn right, Lucent. I don't think of this as some evil 'selling out'. It is not like we're forcing these students into something or pimping them out. We are providing them with a tight relationship with one of the more innovative companies in the area. We get more grant money, they become rich, and leave us money in their will. Everyone benefits, the students, the university, and the 'giant evil faceless corporations'.
Though I do find it amusing that the brightest programmer we've got as a student right now has been turning down various corporate offers and GPL'ing his work. *grin*
Or even do what the megacorporations do nowadays to get around political contribution caps: have each employee 'act independently'. So Bob from accounting registers domainnameone.com, Joe from HR registers domainnametwo.com, and so on. That way, they don't even need puppet companies.
He's not that much of a villan, he just has a different perspective on things.
I think that they did an excellent job at portraying his personality. For while he was one of the X-Men's greatest enemies, he also LED the X-Men during one of Professor X's 'trips'. And they wouldn't just hand the X-Men over to a clear-cut simple villan, like Apocalypse or such. *grin* Magneto is a well-rounded deep character, with his demons that he ends up overcoming down the line.
Slashdot Mirror
Game Over was a great novel indeed, the updated version covers a bit of Nintendo's efforts after the SNES/SuperFamicom. It doesn't go into the N64's issues as much as I would have liked, but it's a nice addition.
The author managed to keep a nice balance between Nintendo bashing and Nintendo worshipping. The business practices Nintendo engaged in, such as the cartridge building process, were just absolutely insane. Scary thing is, they're still on top in many ways. International video game sales, the top hardware and software sales belong to Nintendo.. by far. Granted, it's got Zelda and Pokemon to back them up.
The book touches on the Playstation, and Nintendo's efforts to combat Sony's prodigy. It's definately worth reading the updated version of Game Over if you enjoyed the first version and read the making of PS.
The only times I've been able to meet girls in arcades are at the arcades located in pool halls or bowling alleys. It seems I'd meet girls there who didn't like pool/bowling, but were there with friends.
But yeah, your standard arcade is pretty male-dominated. I once asked an ex of mine why I didn't see more females in arcades, since I knew quite a few gaming girls. Her only answer was, "The only reason for a girl to go to arcades is to check out guys' buts." *grin*
There are a few coders I've seen who create elegant code that rivals fine art. Not quite Beethoven, but music has been around for a bit longer, and has had more time to create such fine artists. Maybe a few hundred years from now we'll see a code-god of Beethoven's level.
The M* I work on has been a great experience for me to see a wide variety of code. The game has exchanged hands many times since it started in 93/94, going through dozens of various coders. Some fix bugs through elegant user-friendly well-written code that looks gorgeous. Others toss on nasty patches that look like someone's stapled a band-aid to a leper's open sores. After dealing with spaghetti code for hours, a certain coder's works truly look like Beethoven to me.
But perhaps that can be attributed to the thirsty man in the desert thinking that the muddy water is Poland Spring. *grin*
It's also a matter of image; which is worse on the kid, the stigma of no computer or the stigma of a "worthless" (by modern standards) computer. Keep in mind, kids can be very cruel.
/. or in something like an IRC room, noone can tell when I'm on my old P100, or my PIII 650. Unless the kid is inviting friends over to play games on it or the like, there is little difference between the two as far as just getting online and the kid's image online to others.
True, but on
Hell, the kid can still play his online MMORPG's on a P100, they just have to stick to text-based MUD/MUSH/MUCK/MOOs, which actually are quite a bit MORE intellectual and educational for kids. There are quite a few MOOs that have online schools, teaching the basics of object oriented code and server playing. Even the less educational MOOs still help reinforce mathematical skills, grammar, and spelling. And all of these text-based realities can be accessed through the same comptuers that were accessing them almost a decade ago.
Exactly the way I feel about this as well.
My girlfriend works in an environment where her boss treats her and her co-workers very poorly, and the working conditions are quite poor. Yet she feels a loyalty to her position and will stay until the 'lull period' in her job's cycle. Personally, I think giving them anything more then the standard two weeks notice is doing them a favor they don't deserve.
I, on the other hand, have a great boss who treats me and my co-workers quite well in just about every way imaginable. Even though I could make more money elsewhere, and am struggling to make ends meet at times, it's hard for me to consider abandoning him... though I regret I may have to. Working for a good company that treats you right makes all the difference in the world, and can be a rare thing it seems.
My roommate my sophomore year at college had a full ride to our school. Every semester he ended up being withdrawn because one of his scholarships always sent the check too late for the university's books. Every semester he had to walk down to the Business Office, get cleared, re-register, and explain that it happened every semester. He just graduated last year, and sure enough, the same thing happened all eight semesters.
You're required to sign up for classes two thirds into the semester before at our school, which is well before loans or such are taken care of. My sophomore year, I attempted to get a promisary note for the loan I was getting in order to get cleared before classes started. Financial Aid couldn't do that until I was re-registered. Couldn't register until the Business Office cleared me. Couldn't get cleared at the Business Office until... sure enough... I had to get the promisary note. After explaining this neverending circle of miscommunication and red tape to the director of the Business Office, she merely said, "I don't care." Luckily the Financial Aid office broke the rules and got me taken care of, a week after classes began.
I don't think this situation was created by technology or computers, forming some sort of 'Tightening Net' as Katz speaks of. These were three different backwards departments, in the same building, on two floors of said building. These people saw each other every day, and shared the same vending machines and bathroom. When the circle formed, they had each other on the phone instantly. This is a human thing - human blunders, human red tape, human stupidity. While I can see how technology would make it that much harder to get taken care of, a good dose of human misunderstanding can go just as far if not further.
Actually, it was that reason that kept me on M*'s instead of giving them up. My excuse was: I was going to waste my time playing games instead of studying. Whether it be Dungeon Keeper, Total A., Starcraft, etc. If I'm wasting my time on a M*, at least the effort isn't gone. When I beat the level on Dungeon Keeper, the cool nifty dungeon I dug is gone. When I vanquish my foes on the RTS game, the army is gone. With a M*, my creation stays.
Yeah, I know I could have played a MMORPG like UO, but that wouldn't have let me create things and code like the MOO I got involved with did. That way I could keep on telling myself that I was keeping my coding skills fresh by wasting my time on a MOO instead of playing another game.
Ultimately, it was the fact that others could enjoy my creative efforts on CyberSphere, while the dungeon in Dungeon Keeper was only seen by me and an opponent or two. I've built many things, and coded many cool objects, which hundreds of people have enjoyed playing with. That wouldn't have been possible with any other homework avoider that I know of.
Some of the popular MOOs are still around. But one sub-segment of MOOs (a sub-segment of a sub-segment, I know), the RPG MOOs, is still very much active.
GhostWheel and CyberSphere are both around and expanding. The former is a pseudo-fantasy post-apocalyptic game, with many MUDesque themes of hunting and rising in power. The latter is a cyberpunk post-apocalyptic game, which focuses pretty strongly on role-playing, while still leaving room for gritty futuristic urban violence. Both incredible games.
Major price advantage? You're talking about the difference between a $300 product and a $150 product in the same line of conversation as someone talking about multiple TiVOs. Not to mention broadband rates.... I don't think the extra hundred and a half is going to break the bank for the type of person that this article's aimed at.
One thing that hasn't been addressed in some time, that I'd like to know about, what happened to the Dreamcast hard drive? The Dreamcast memory card, even the 4x released by Sega, can't adequately hold enough to make broadband a worthwhile endeavor in my mind. Any progress being made in getting a nice large hard drive option for the Dreamcast?
EB's actual return policy is to give a full refund for the software if all of the original packaging and materials are present. You have ten days with a receipt.
And, back when I worked at EB on the weekends, I saw a few people return games based on the EULA. Including most copies of Microsoft's MMORPG, Asheron's Call. From what I understand, it has a very restrictive EULA regarding ownership of characters and such.
Worldgroup Manager was an interesting step indeed, but annoying to code for.
:-) Can't even fool yourself into believing that over the internet.
I started BBS'ing around 1990 or 1991 in the central Jersey area (201/908 - now 732 area code). Ran a BBS off my 8088, 2400 baud modem, 20 meg hard drive. The small hard drive space kept my BBS from turning into a warez BBS, but I still tried to do as much as possible with what I had. Joined FIDOnet, DementedNet, and was co-founder of an ANSI art group, SNaP! The people I BBS'd with were local people, and I often met them in real life.
By the mid 90's, most of my friends were switching over to the commercial multi-line chat MBBS's. Cheers, The Imperial Fortress, Excalibur, etc. While I waxed nostalgic about the old one-line BBS's sitting in a chat room with thirty people on TIF, I didn't know how short that form of community's lifespan would be. After 96, I worked for Cheersoft, a company that wrote utilities and doors for MBBS/Worldgroup. At that point the internet was taking over most of the local BBS scene. The one-liners were dying, and the 50-100 liners were becoming mom and pop ISP's. It was sad, in a way, working in part of a scene that was dying. But the BBS scene was one of the greatest things I was involved with, and I had tons of fun. One of my best friends from high school married a girl that we met on a BBS years ago. Some of my good friends to this day are people I met back in the mid 90's on BBSes.
The thing I miss the most about it all is the geographical closeness, as another poster mentioned. One night sitting in the Worldgroup teleconference, some girl expressed interest in pizza. Within an hour, a dozen of us had driven all over Jersey to make it to a pizza place. I can't do that with people as easily over the internet. Local BBS's would do photoshoots with the sysop's girlfriend or other random female users, then post up the bikini pix on other sites to advertise their BBS. You would call these BBS's, knowing you could score with them.
A group of former BBS'ers in central jersey have formed a very Linux-friendly telnetable BBS at darkplanet.org. If you were part of the community back in the day in that area, you might just run into a few dozen old faces.
JonKatz actually followed up on one of his "first in a series" articles! The world as we know it is over!
Actually, Jon follows up on a good deal of his 'series' articles, just they don't always make it to the front page. If you check the side sections on the left, you'll see a story or two of his that wasn't big enough.
Now, that isn't to say that there's no legitimate concern over things like desensitization to violence, couch potatoism, and other alleged societal ills that people associate with games. But a society that questions itself is the only healthy kind of society.
I know this example is used any time 'video game/television/movie violence' but look at Japan. The most violent anime, twisted porn, and violent video games. Yet a low crime rate. Similar comparisons made with gun ownership, citing England as an anti-gun nation with low crime, and other European countries as pro-gun nations with low crime on the flip side of the argument. Given all of these comparisons, I think it's unfair to say that gaming itself is the cause for a high crime rate, violence in schools, etc. The sum of society, including gaming, must be looked at here.
I agree with you totally, games are just games for all but those who have no hold on reality. Another point is, those people will find their escape anyway. The kid who plays Doom for a week then kills his classmates would probably have killed them even if he couldn't download Doom. In fact, he might just have killed them a week earlier without that outlet for his rage.
As Dave Mustaine (lead singer for Megadeth) once said in an interview for MTV hack in 1988 - "They scream and piss and moan about the kid who kills with a metal tape in his back pocket, but what about the kid who offs with a Barry Manilow tape in his back pocket? No press there!" I wonder how many kids have killed classmates after playing freecell or minesweeper religiously.
From reading the article, the bacteria just extract the substances, absorbing them into 'balls'. Having the bacteria actually transform the zinc and sulfur atoms into something else is a bit less feasible. Who knows, bacteria that form vodka from tap water...
I wonder what sort of extraction methods they're planning on using to remove the 'balls' of toxin from the water after the bacteria is added.
Unfortunately, this isn't the Jetsons. We can't press a button to have fake perfect clothing and hair drop down in front of us so that our boss doesn't see how dishelved we look in real life.
Personally, I don't think this will catch on for a while. Similar innovations have been available throughout corporate America for years now, yet have failed to become the standard. Like webcams, I suspect this will be a device best marketted to the sex industry at first.
Actually, didn't all non-Japanese versions of the PS2 have their DVD decoding moved from firmware to hardware 'cuz of that "Oops, we forgot the Macrovision!" debacle?
Actually, they forgot the Macrovision on the American version. The day of the US launch, I tried taping a clip or two off a few DVDs that couldn't be taped off my normal DVD player. Sure enough, no Macrovision this time around either. Wonder if this is going to merit a recall. If it wasn't for the overwhelming lack of supply, they might have been able to make one quickly and quietly.
Good point. Ultimately, it's going to be economic pressures that drive how these genetic tools are going to be used. We're probably going to see things that make nice profit margins instead of being made for the good of mankind.
But if a corporation could use a gene to cure cancer, or a gene for acne medicine, which do you think will make them more money? If you could make a cancer cure, and patent it, how much money do you think you could milk from the millions suffering through it out there?
It's a sad state of affairs, but with the patent office and our society in general set up the way it is, I don't see it changing any time soon.
I agree with you entirely. Most of my MP3 junkie friends point out the cost of media, the time it takes to switch discs, and the problem of skipping. With the media at an all time low in price, multi-disc trunk or backseat changers being so cheap even with anti-skipping mechanisms, I don't see the advantage.
Personally, I feel that quality is the one difference, and an MP3 usually doesn't sound as clean and robust as a (legally purchased) CD. So, like you, I'll be sticking with the 'old media'.
Heh. I wonder what they'll be able to do with the GameBoy Advance that's due out soon. Already, just with the basic GameBoy and GameBoy Color, they've released a camera, a printer, etc.
Interact, the company that makes the ever-popular Gameshark cheating system created a device that lets you send and receive email through your GameBoy much like a Pocketmail device. Looks like all of those jokes about PalmOS devices looking like GameBoys can be applied the other way around as well.
I am the original poster. The machine in question was locked inside a cabinet so that customers could sample this great new system before buying it. There was a power button, but it was inside the case. If the Dreamcast didn't have this handy ctrl-alt-delesque reset function, we'd have to open up the cabinet regularly.
And as the other reply to my post mentioned, the Windows CE logo was not just on the system and web disk, it was used in development of the games. When the X Box was just a rumor, many people theorized that Microsoft would be making the X Box in partnership with Sega Dreamcast, and Next Gen magazine made some negative comments about Microsoft stabbing Sega 'in the back' after the deals made during the initial design of the Dreamcast.
In short, everything will be far more simply/uniformly designed and will be as likely to crash as any other console, ie, just about never.
Question: have you ever used the Sega Dreamcast extensively? That system is prone to crashing on a regular basis.
Before my current job, I worked at a video game store for a few months before committing to a 'real' job. One of the first things I was taught was the Dreamcast equivalent to control-alt-delete. Push down every button at once and hit start, and you'll reboot the system. We'd need to do that at least once a day with most games. Every few days, it would crash so hard we'd need to pull the plug. And that's a console system through and through.
Well, except for one thing. I really don't like to jump on the Windows-bashing bandwagon (I'm a gamer, so I use Windows), but it is interesting to note that Dreamcast games are written using WindowsCE. If you look at any Dreamcast box or game, you'll see a little Windows logo on the back. And the Dreamcast, software written with Windows, is the one console that crashes often under heavy usage. Now that Microsoft is making their own console, using Windows, that trend might just follow. Which would be a shame for them.
They as the company probably cannot. But they as the founders could just get bought out by another company, or IPO and cash out. Many companies aren't making any money, but as long as someone's willing to throw money at them, it doesn't matter. As Barnum once said, "There's a sucker born every minute."
As a coder on a very old text-based role playing game, I've seen this happen firsthand. There is no way that we can compete with the blood splatter of Unreal Tournament, or the graphical experience of Everquest. So instead we've tried to focus on the strengths of our dying genre.
People cannot play Everquest from work, while sitting in a programming lab, or other such locations where they find themselves with free time and a firewall that lets them telnet out. Most of our players are people who play these newer games like UT or Icewind Dale, but they don't always have access to that computer. Or people who don't have the computing power and budget to support buying the latest big name game. These people are our target audience at this point, but it is an audience that is slowly shrinking. When we used to use mobs of people in our game's various hangouts and bars, we now consider it great to see a mere dozen.
Many of us are oldschool pencil and paper role players, and chose to play on the text based online game because it allows for a greater level of role playing then EverQuest or Ultima Online. I've tried most of the MMRPG's, and found them to be either giant deathmatches or painful affairs of watching a blue bar grow while staring at a spellbook. I can stare at a spellbook screenshot if I want to get the EverQuest experience. I, for one, would rather spend my time role playing where imagination and text are your only tools.
As much as the genre is dying, there is one benefit from the other games seducing the players away. The only people left on the text based role playing games are those that really want to role play. Otherwise, they'd be booting up Quake 3.
Shameless plug: If you are looking for a great text based online role playing game, check out CyberSphere.
Not just bought, but owned outright from day one. Many of the Universities founded in the mid to late 19th century were founded by capitalists, or taken over my capitalists and given their current name.
For example, consider Drew University. The college was created by Daniel Drew, a back-stabbing cold-hearted money-grubbing capitalist robber baron. Nowadays, he'd been funding the University for a tax break. Back then, it was just to get into heaven. Many private institutions have a long history of being owned, either overtly or covertly, by various corporate influences.
The university where I work at, many of the computer science professors have worked at Lucent Technologies (or the same company under its earlier names). Some of my coworkers graduated from here, and where do you think they got jobs before returning? Who do you think provides 'grants' to various computer projects, in return for us pushing our best and brightest at them as cheap interns? Damn right, Lucent. I don't think of this as some evil 'selling out'. It is not like we're forcing these students into something or pimping them out. We are providing them with a tight relationship with one of the more innovative companies in the area. We get more grant money, they become rich, and leave us money in their will. Everyone benefits, the students, the university, and the 'giant evil faceless corporations'.
Though I do find it amusing that the brightest programmer we've got as a student right now has been turning down various corporate offers and GPL'ing his work. *grin*
Or even do what the megacorporations do nowadays to get around political contribution caps: have each employee 'act independently'. So Bob from accounting registers domainnameone.com, Joe from HR registers domainnametwo.com, and so on. That way, they don't even need puppet companies.
He's not that much of a villan, he just has a different perspective on things.
I think that they did an excellent job at portraying his personality. For while he was one of the X-Men's greatest enemies, he also LED the X-Men during one of Professor X's 'trips'. And they wouldn't just hand the X-Men over to a clear-cut simple villan, like Apocalypse or such. *grin* Magneto is a well-rounded deep character, with his demons that he ends up overcoming down the line.