But we're the 'type' of people who would get excited over this. To someone who isn't technical in any way whatsoever, all this seems like is "well, they put another 6-wheeler on mars... How many times am I supposed to get excited about that?". There are a lot of people who think that any space research is a waste, and this time you can't even show them a human doing the exploring, just "those RC cars".
I really wish it weren't the case. The first time I saw the scale of the Curiosity rover my jaw dropped, and we're just ~1 year away from it landing. But many people only see the billions spent into this, and can't make any connection between that and anything useful "back on earth".
Not to mention, this is relatively easy to publicize, because "it sends back pictures". How do you explain to people what the hell the LHC is for? This kind of struggle won't go away. Science keeps having to fight for a budget.
I'm gonna be overly literal and note that "no sound in space" is exactly the statement you can make. What you're describing is monitoring the vibrations going through solid objects, and/or placing a microphone in the path of the expanding gas exiting the thrusters. If you placed a microphone literally "in space" a few feet away from the vehicle, you'd hear nothing.
We're used to listening to sound moving through air. If you placed a microphone on the body of the vehicle, you'd get vibration readings, but they wouldn't "sound" like that, you'd hear a lot of spikes and creaking. But we're kind of nit-picking -- they wanted the video to be interesting, and adding sound to what we'd expect to *produce* sound makes it seem more natural.
...There's not enough atmosphere for a soft parachute landing.
The lunar landings were easier because there was no atmosphere. The problem here is that there *is* an atmosphere, but, as you mention, it's too thin for just parachutes. So you have to deal with re-entry heat, wind, particles flying around (all the "bad" stuff that comes with landing on a planet with an atmosphere), but you don't get to just pop a triple-parachute the way they return objects for a soft landing on earth.
I'm sure they know what they're doing, they've had some experience at this after all. But just as a superficial observation, I have to agree with the previous comment -- it *seems* overly complicated.
Currently the score is:
50% Funny
30% Insightful
20% Troll
Troll? Really? That doesn't make sense in any context. If you think this was meant to get a rise out of people, maybe "flamebait". Whoever modded that "troll" is both lacking in a sense of humor, and ignorant of what "trolling" is.
The parent post is currently modded "funny", and while the post should definitely be modded up, "funny" is not what I'd associate with that video. It's sad, especially because it's so recent. And these vacant mannequins are held up as "role models"? This isn't just sad, it's genuinely harmful.
There was also a DS9 ep where Quark tried to scan Kira's face so that a client could "do her" in the holodeck.
So the future is clear: every time somebody posts an "I'd do her" comment (one of the most common comment types on youtube), an ad would pop up asking "if you were serious about that comment, we can make it happen!".
Well, a wormhole assumes that there's a black hole, and I can still sit here and type. Of course, it could be that it *did* open a wormhole to another dimension, and we (the entire planet) were sucked into it. It just happens that this other dimension is exactly like ours, except the moon is made out of cheese. I guess we won't know until someone brings back a new moon rock for a taste-test.
Most likely because they tend to be low cost, meaning that they can be impulse buys, and thus generate more revenue than $50 non-AAA games.
The impulse buy is certainly a big part of it. I'm not going to lose any sleep on a $5 mistake, but if I by a $50 game that I get tired of after a couple of hours, it'll really bug me. Because of this, I won't wait for there to be 15 reviews on metacritic for a $5 game -- if I see just a couple of recommendations, and I know it's the type of game I'll probably like, then I'll just take the chance. Sure, I've been burnt a couple of times, but there were far more cases where I found I really fun time-sink for spare change.
...For the steam release, I saw people blogging about it
It makes more sense when you consider that it's all on the same platform. If you see a good deal on Steam, and you're on Twitter/Facebook, you're just an Alt+TAB away from recommending it to whomever is following you. This is especially true for short-span offers. It's common to see a tweet like "game X is awesome and it's on Steam for half price right now!". A couple of times I saw a tweet like that while I was working, for a game that I wanted to try out. I just launched the Steam client, made the purchase, and got back to work. This is a scenario that can't happen on a console.
It also doesn't have the super-fast life cycle that you'd see on other systems, in terms of exposure. You'll keep getting offered 3 and 4 year-old games, that are excellent, and cost a third of their launch price. Not to mention that special offers (the ones that last a couple of days) can slash the price of a relatively recent game (~2 years old) to $15 and lower, for a games that launched at $55.
There are also constantly offers of bundles of game "series" and games+DLC, as well as the "Valve Pack" and "Id Pack" -type deals. Most of the games I buy these days aren't full-price, in fact they're usually less than half-price. This wasn't the case 5 years ago.
Many of them only require minimal specs. I have Steam installed on a netbook, and while it's sluggish inside the Steam interface, the games themselves (the ones intended for low-spec machines) run just fine. This flexibility is a huge advantage.
...At least beyond "you can sell absolutely anything if you put it on the front page of steam for $5".
I take this fact alone to be a good thing. This will attract more developers to either port current games to Steam, or develop them simultaneously for multiple platforms *including* Steam. If this happens, then it's just a matter of time before consumers will start being more picky about their choices, and eventually you'll get $5 games that are more than worth the price (of which there already are many).
I can't afford to spend money on dedicated game machines, because of the limitation to play them only at one location. On the other hand, I have PCs almost anywhere I spend time (home, work, travel). I love Steam for many reasons, and one of them is the fact that you can buy anything from a tiny, casual $5 game up to a 40-hour, triple-A RPG, all on the same platform. The addition of more small indie games is always welcome.
I don't have first-hand information about this, but I know a guy who's job it is to help companies setup redundant backup systems. He keeps saying that there are so many formats, so much hardware nuance, and so many proprietary methods of getting data on and off the tapes, that he only goes for them in the most extreme cases. Many times he's called in to retrieve data that was backed up 5 years ago, and already it's a challenge to find the right hardware/software combination to do so.
But, like I said, this is second-hand information.
It's not 2 years. It's 5, at least. I remember the numerous promises of 45Gb discs and 70Gb discs using blu-ray technology. The bottleneck is usually the burn-time per-disc (about 20 hours). By the time this is market-ready, HDDs will be 50-terabytes large, and this will be too small to be practical.
Many people use the same reasoning, and for many cases, it's true. But what if you *just* need to backup? HD video comes to mind. How much storage space do you have (I mean physical storage)? how much more vulnerable is a complete hard drive than a CD? What's more practical for off-site backup of large amounts of data (many terabytes)? I much prefer discs to tapes, which are the only option unless you have an ungodly internet connection and can get online storage *really* cheap.
That's what I meant about people voting with their wallets in the case of pay-to-play -- I hope they won't stand for it. But in this case they're not (yet) talking about a continuous stream of cash from the player, just a Steam-like system where you buy the "option" to play the game on multiple platforms, using the same license.
Unfortunately, play-to-use seems inevitable in the entire software market. Right now the in-between cases are called "services" (online backup, for example). OnLive markets its business model as a "service". How long before the OS becomes a "service"?
At least in the gaming market you've got a strong indie sector which doesn't *solely* look at its revenue stream. Also, a one-off game will always be easier to release than maintaining an entire service (in the near-future, anyway). But I never underestimate the greed of corporations. Pay-to-play, IMO, is unavoidable.
Isn't that effectively the way it is anyway with the Madden and FIFA series? If you want to play the latest "content" (I refuse to call every iteration a different "game"), then you have to pay for it at almost constant intervals. All this will do is increase the "resolution" of the payments. The question to ask is: over a period of (for example) 3 years, how much would playing the latest version cost?
And yeah, they're probably going to push for pay-to-play, and they're not the only ones. Evey company would like a WoW on their hands so they can have a constant stream of revenue rather than "pulses" of cash every time they release a title (accompanied with very expensive advertisement and PR for each one). When that eventually (almost inevitably) happens, then I hope people will vote with their wallets.
Well, we're assuming that the length of a game means that if you play "diligently" from the beginning it'll take you a certain amount of time to finish the game. Here are a few issues that come to mind:
1) Game environment -- e.g Portal 2. Many people treated the game as a race, or a kind of test. It took me about 12 hours to finish it. When I tell people that, those who treated the game like a test almost laugh (some say they finished in 5 hours, which I'm not even sure is technically possible), while others say they explored every nook and cranny and it took them 15 hours or more. I actually did take my time to explore, but I didn't find at least two or three very interesting hidden clues which, I learned later, I just walked by.
2) Non-linear content -- e.g The Witcher 2 (and other RPGs, but especially the Witcher 2). If you only complete the game once, then no matter what choices you took, you don't have the whole picture. Never mind that you could have taken different paths, and in doing so changed how the game progresses and ends. If you only played once then you don't know all that there is to know, and you've only "consumed" about 60% of the game. Having said that, if, once you finish the game for the first time, you don't get the itch to play it (*at least*) one more time in order to explore the "what ifs", then the game simply wasn't for you. Which if fine, but you probably should have known that about yourself when you picked a "hardcore" RPG.
3) Gaming style -- Crysis 2. I actually didn't play the game, since FPSs aren't by cup of tea, but I heard the following many times: "I used stealth a lot, and felt like by doing so I missed out on much of the gameplay". This isn't quite the same as the previous example, since in this case you *did* go through the entire rail, but you used a particular gaming style -- stealth. This time the replay value depends on whether you enjoyed the game enough to do it over and play differently, even if the game has already shown you everything it had to show you. There isn't an easy answer for this one, IMO, since if you bought the game then you *are* an FPS fan, so it really becomes a question of personal taste.
In the above 3 examples the game "contains" the production value that warrants a $50-60 price tag, but it's up to you if you actually see/consume it all, regardless of whether you've completed the game.
Finally, here's my point (well, part of my point...): What if you *could* finish the game in 2 hours, even on your first playthrough, and the rest of the game's content could only be encountered in replays? I'm not talking about Civilization or Sim games, I mean a game where you make decisions to guide a narrative. I suppose one answer would be "it depends on how good the game is", but then that's *always* the way you gauge if a game was worth the money, and you can only do so after you've finished it.
Slashdot Mirror
But we're the 'type' of people who would get excited over this. To someone who isn't technical in any way whatsoever, all this seems like is "well, they put another 6-wheeler on mars... How many times am I supposed to get excited about that?". There are a lot of people who think that any space research is a waste, and this time you can't even show them a human doing the exploring, just "those RC cars".
I really wish it weren't the case. The first time I saw the scale of the Curiosity rover my jaw dropped, and we're just ~1 year away from it landing. But many people only see the billions spent into this, and can't make any connection between that and anything useful "back on earth".
Not to mention, this is relatively easy to publicize, because "it sends back pictures". How do you explain to people what the hell the LHC is for? This kind of struggle won't go away. Science keeps having to fight for a budget.
And then compare it to the previous rovers: here and here.
The Curiosity Rover weighs almost a ton(!). Not that the Phoenix is any lightweight.
...and maybe while you're at it, put some people in that Humvee?
(yeah yeah, I know, different debate entirely)
I'm gonna be overly literal and note that "no sound in space" is exactly the statement you can make. What you're describing is monitoring the vibrations going through solid objects, and/or placing a microphone in the path of the expanding gas exiting the thrusters. If you placed a microphone literally "in space" a few feet away from the vehicle, you'd hear nothing.
We're used to listening to sound moving through air. If you placed a microphone on the body of the vehicle, you'd get vibration readings, but they wouldn't "sound" like that, you'd hear a lot of spikes and creaking. But we're kind of nit-picking -- they wanted the video to be interesting, and adding sound to what we'd expect to *produce* sound makes it seem more natural.
It's no worse than the various lunar landers.
The lunar landings were easier because there was no atmosphere. The problem here is that there *is* an atmosphere, but, as you mention, it's too thin for just parachutes. So you have to deal with re-entry heat, wind, particles flying around (all the "bad" stuff that comes with landing on a planet with an atmosphere), but you don't get to just pop a triple-parachute the way they return objects for a soft landing on earth.
I'm sure they know what they're doing, they've had some experience at this after all. But just as a superficial observation, I have to agree with the previous comment -- it *seems* overly complicated.
Currently the score is:
50% Funny
30% Insightful
20% Troll
Troll? Really? That doesn't make sense in any context. If you think this was meant to get a rise out of people, maybe "flamebait". Whoever modded that "troll" is both lacking in a sense of humor, and ignorant of what "trolling" is.
The parent post is currently modded "funny", and while the post should definitely be modded up, "funny" is not what I'd associate with that video. It's sad, especially because it's so recent. And these vacant mannequins are held up as "role models"? This isn't just sad, it's genuinely harmful.
There was also a DS9 ep where Quark tried to scan Kira's face so that a client could "do her" in the holodeck.
So the future is clear: every time somebody posts an "I'd do her" comment (one of the most common comment types on youtube), an ad would pop up asking "if you were serious about that comment, we can make it happen!".
"surrounds a huge, feeding black hole"
In this particular case, I think it's a drinking black hole.
PA-DUM-PUM!
Theoretically, everything with mass contains the particle. So yeah, just buy something that has mass.
Well, a wormhole assumes that there's a black hole, and I can still sit here and type. Of course, it could be that it *did* open a wormhole to another dimension, and we (the entire planet) were sucked into it. It just happens that this other dimension is exactly like ours, except the moon is made out of cheese. I guess we won't know until someone brings back a new moon rock for a taste-test.
Most likely because they tend to be low cost, meaning that they can be impulse buys, and thus generate more revenue than $50 non-AAA games.
The impulse buy is certainly a big part of it. I'm not going to lose any sleep on a $5 mistake, but if I by a $50 game that I get tired of after a couple of hours, it'll really bug me. Because of this, I won't wait for there to be 15 reviews on metacritic for a $5 game -- if I see just a couple of recommendations, and I know it's the type of game I'll probably like, then I'll just take the chance. Sure, I've been burnt a couple of times, but there were far more cases where I found I really fun time-sink for spare change.
...For the steam release, I saw people blogging about it
It makes more sense when you consider that it's all on the same platform. If you see a good deal on Steam, and you're on Twitter/Facebook, you're just an Alt+TAB away from recommending it to whomever is following you. This is especially true for short-span offers. It's common to see a tweet like "game X is awesome and it's on Steam for half price right now!". A couple of times I saw a tweet like that while I was working, for a game that I wanted to try out. I just launched the Steam client, made the purchase, and got back to work. This is a scenario that can't happen on a console.
It also doesn't have the super-fast life cycle that you'd see on other systems, in terms of exposure. You'll keep getting offered 3 and 4 year-old games, that are excellent, and cost a third of their launch price. Not to mention that special offers (the ones that last a couple of days) can slash the price of a relatively recent game (~2 years old) to $15 and lower, for a games that launched at $55.
There are also constantly offers of bundles of game "series" and games+DLC, as well as the "Valve Pack" and "Id Pack" -type deals. Most of the games I buy these days aren't full-price, in fact they're usually less than half-price. This wasn't the case 5 years ago.
Many of them only require minimal specs. I have Steam installed on a netbook, and while it's sluggish inside the Steam interface, the games themselves (the ones intended for low-spec machines) run just fine. This flexibility is a huge advantage.
...At least beyond "you can sell absolutely anything if you put it on the front page of steam for $5".
I take this fact alone to be a good thing. This will attract more developers to either port current games to Steam, or develop them simultaneously for multiple platforms *including* Steam. If this happens, then it's just a matter of time before consumers will start being more picky about their choices, and eventually you'll get $5 games that are more than worth the price (of which there already are many).
I can't afford to spend money on dedicated game machines, because of the limitation to play them only at one location. On the other hand, I have PCs almost anywhere I spend time (home, work, travel). I love Steam for many reasons, and one of them is the fact that you can buy anything from a tiny, casual $5 game up to a 40-hour, triple-A RPG, all on the same platform. The addition of more small indie games is always welcome.
I don't have first-hand information about this, but I know a guy who's job it is to help companies setup redundant backup systems. He keeps saying that there are so many formats, so much hardware nuance, and so many proprietary methods of getting data on and off the tapes, that he only goes for them in the most extreme cases. Many times he's called in to retrieve data that was backed up 5 years ago, and already it's a challenge to find the right hardware/software combination to do so.
But, like I said, this is second-hand information.
It's not 2 years. It's 5, at least. I remember the numerous promises of 45Gb discs and 70Gb discs using blu-ray technology. The bottleneck is usually the burn-time per-disc (about 20 hours). By the time this is market-ready, HDDs will be 50-terabytes large, and this will be too small to be practical.
Many people use the same reasoning, and for many cases, it's true. But what if you *just* need to backup? HD video comes to mind. How much storage space do you have (I mean physical storage)? how much more vulnerable is a complete hard drive than a CD? What's more practical for off-site backup of large amounts of data (many terabytes)? I much prefer discs to tapes, which are the only option unless you have an ungodly internet connection and can get online storage *really* cheap.
Whenever I see a storage-related story, my mind always appends "FOR PORN!"
Looking over the first few comments to this story, I'm hardly the only one.
That's what I meant about people voting with their wallets in the case of pay-to-play -- I hope they won't stand for it. But in this case they're not (yet) talking about a continuous stream of cash from the player, just a Steam-like system where you buy the "option" to play the game on multiple platforms, using the same license.
Unfortunately, play-to-use seems inevitable in the entire software market. Right now the in-between cases are called "services" (online backup, for example). OnLive markets its business model as a "service". How long before the OS becomes a "service"?
At least in the gaming market you've got a strong indie sector which doesn't *solely* look at its revenue stream. Also, a one-off game will always be easier to release than maintaining an entire service (in the near-future, anyway). But I never underestimate the greed of corporations. Pay-to-play, IMO, is unavoidable.
Isn't that effectively the way it is anyway with the Madden and FIFA series? If you want to play the latest "content" (I refuse to call every iteration a different "game"), then you have to pay for it at almost constant intervals. All this will do is increase the "resolution" of the payments. The question to ask is: over a period of (for example) 3 years, how much would playing the latest version cost?
And yeah, they're probably going to push for pay-to-play, and they're not the only ones. Evey company would like a WoW on their hands so they can have a constant stream of revenue rather than "pulses" of cash every time they release a title (accompanied with very expensive advertisement and PR for each one). When that eventually (almost inevitably) happens, then I hope people will vote with their wallets.
Well, we're assuming that the length of a game means that if you play "diligently" from the beginning it'll take you a certain amount of time to finish the game. Here are a few issues that come to mind:
1) Game environment -- e.g Portal 2. Many people treated the game as a race, or a kind of test. It took me about 12 hours to finish it. When I tell people that, those who treated the game like a test almost laugh (some say they finished in 5 hours, which I'm not even sure is technically possible), while others say they explored every nook and cranny and it took them 15 hours or more. I actually did take my time to explore, but I didn't find at least two or three very interesting hidden clues which, I learned later, I just walked by.
2) Non-linear content -- e.g The Witcher 2 (and other RPGs, but especially the Witcher 2). If you only complete the game once, then no matter what choices you took, you don't have the whole picture. Never mind that you could have taken different paths, and in doing so changed how the game progresses and ends. If you only played once then you don't know all that there is to know, and you've only "consumed" about 60% of the game. Having said that, if, once you finish the game for the first time, you don't get the itch to play it (*at least*) one more time in order to explore the "what ifs", then the game simply wasn't for you. Which if fine, but you probably should have known that about yourself when you picked a "hardcore" RPG.
3) Gaming style -- Crysis 2. I actually didn't play the game, since FPSs aren't by cup of tea, but I heard the following many times: "I used stealth a lot, and felt like by doing so I missed out on much of the gameplay". This isn't quite the same as the previous example, since in this case you *did* go through the entire rail, but you used a particular gaming style -- stealth. This time the replay value depends on whether you enjoyed the game enough to do it over and play differently, even if the game has already shown you everything it had to show you. There isn't an easy answer for this one, IMO, since if you bought the game then you *are* an FPS fan, so it really becomes a question of personal taste.
In the above 3 examples the game "contains" the production value that warrants a $50-60 price tag, but it's up to you if you actually see/consume it all, regardless of whether you've completed the game.
Finally, here's my point (well, part of my point...): What if you *could* finish the game in 2 hours, even on your first playthrough, and the rest of the game's content could only be encountered in replays? I'm not talking about Civilization or Sim games, I mean a game where you make decisions to guide a narrative. I suppose one answer would be "it depends on how good the game is", but then that's *always* the way you gauge if a game was worth the money, and you can only do so after you've finished it.
They're for weak people who need others in order to validate their existence.
Now MOD ME UP DAMN YOU!!!! I NEED YOUR VALIDATION!!!