Yes, Lotus Notes had it. Lotus notes also had a lot of things. Like syphillis. It's a good feature - the fact that it was pioneered on a stupid, stupid program is beside the point.
I'm just wondering when better newsgroup browsing is coming. Last time I used T-bird for newsgroups I found it just as cumbersome as OE.
I agree, basically he's making the same point about Ajax that he made quite well abou frames - they break the web. The web has never been good at being anything but pages - possibly submitted forms, possibly just pages of info, but always pages. Imho, the only thing that web pages needed beyond basic javascript was server-side updating (forced, server-event-driven "refresh", preferably sending only a diff for efficiency's sake). All this "web app" stuff should've just been an embedded object of a different platform like Java or TCL or something.
The problem is that said platform never standardised - never ended up the same platform on every windows/mac/linux/sun box in the country the way browsers (roughly) do. Well, partially the same - I guess that's the other problem - a website deformed by incompatibilities is just ugly, while a similarly deformed client program is non-functional. Either way, Java was too ambitious and proprietary. Java was too heavy and too Sun. Plus, any such platform must communicate entirely through http or fear the wrath of the firewall gods.
But we needed something there - some standardised VM that could be embedded into a browser for web-apps. It's just that Java wasn't it - something smaller and nicer like Tcl/Tk would've been much better.
Fine. Four character minimum. Problem solved. Only real problem is masking local intranet domain names.
Re:AO and M should be combined.
on
ESRB Retorts to NIMF
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The difference, though, is what the poster noticed - you can have a movie with tons and tons of sex, nudity, etc. and get an "R" rating. Eg. "Eyes Wide Shut" - a similar game wouldn't stand a chance of dodging the Ao bullet.
The fact is that by the MPAA's standards, GTA would still be an "R" rated project instead of higher "adult" ratings.
Nonsense. The D20 system survives because of it's association with the Dungeons and Dragons brand. World of Darkness's system is perfectly simple, requiring no use of levels. In many "level" based RPG's like Diablo, the levels are meaningless - they simply represent a number of stat-building points that are made available to the player once they achieve the level. The concept of the level could be eliminated trivially by just giving the player the stat-building points and not mentioning the level, as is done in many non-D&D RPGs.
Character classes are a similar anachronism. Other RPGs do just fine without them - D20 maintains theirs simply because D&D has always been class-based. With a single balanced player-creation system there's no need to pigeonhole characters into classes.
I mean hell, D20 still has rules to let players roll their stats randomly. That's the ultimate anachronism.
Think bigger. VR Glasses? Plug 'em into the controller, give them the same position tracking as the controller has. Instant Augmented Reality gaming. Of course, you'd still have to be in front (or near) to the TV (or wherever you've got the pad locators) and it depends on having the locators be micro-acurate.
I'm betting the more likely case is the aforementioned storage. Considering that you could easily store NES games on a memory card, imagine holding a library of NES games in the Rev pad - the "turn sideways" functionality and the small size of NES games comes together really, really well there.
Perhaps even a "NES box" accessory that is a substitute for the Rev? Just a receiver for the gamepad and a NES emulator chip, plugged into the TV?
And what happens to the many news + porno sites that nerds like to visit? Where do you draw the line? Fark has boobies links for example - but only a prude would call it a porn site. But there are numerous sites that slide down the line between Fark and straight out porn sites.
The big problem would be that only an idiot would put their porn site on.XXX - because with that level of labelling, you'd risk more than just client side filtering (which only a foolish porno webmaster would complain about) but full-fledged back-end censorship - any one of the middling systems between your users and your site could be owned by "family oriented" bodies who might just drop all.XXX packets.
Risk does not rule. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that all of the classic MB and Hasbro games suck. They're all poorly balanced, sluggish, and take days to complete. Did anyone ever finish a game of Monopoly? Hell, did anybody ever get much further than the "buy up all the empty properties" phase? Especially since many of these games were elimination games - the winners are decided in the first hour or two of play, and the remaining players get to sit and watch.
Risk is pretty much just all about getting the cards, and then a tedious grind of actually ploughing troops into the other players. Tons of slow administration, and really not too much fun.
Still, some new popular games are equally tedious (Twilight Imperium comes to mind - Master of Orion without a computer to handle all the calculations for you) but there are so many new modern games that (a) don't take days to complete (b) are fun, and (c) don't base victory on elimination. Risk 2150, for example, makes Risk a little more tedious with extra rules, but also makes victory achievable - the game is much shorter, and doesn't base it on the lottery of the cards. Then there's all the laundry-list of "odd, historical non-violent European boardgames named after some odd little place" like Settlers of Catan, Carcasonne, and Tikal - they're all much more fun than the "classics".
Yep. Really, the only risk is that a future version of the GPL could be BSD-style. After all, a more-restrictive GPL license or a license with absurd clauses would simply not be used. The worst that can happen is that someone can re-close their derivation of your code if RMS ever loses his mind.
I wouldn't even expect that. I'd be thinking to make a glorified Zaurus. If you've got a firewire port or a USB port, you don't need a drive - they can share one. If you've got handwriting recognition (which they're talking about) - even something as simple as Grafitti (gesture-to-letter mapping) you don't need a keyboard - just the shift/alt/otherbucky keys next to the drawing pad. That way multilingual support becomes entirely a software issue. Personally, I prefer a keyboard - but I wouldn't be surprised if they go the handwriting-only way.
Wifi would be the priority to me - cables don't do so well in the 3rd world.
I'm surprised - I've heard Flux isn't quite as user-friendly as other lightweights - IceWM seems to garner the most support for that (but that may be just because it looks the most like Win9x).
Simple idea for "art" game. Sim Auschwitz. Run a factory/camp in Nazi Germany, with no scripted encounters, following a Peter Molyneux style of gameplay. Considerations include funding, productivity, and the risk of being labeled treasonous if he's too nice to your prisoners. The game would have a clear effect on the player (as the player gets to experience the decisions that lead him to kill the annoying or sick workers, let Mengele perform experiments there, and ultimately stuff his workers into the furnaces).
There, the meaning of the game would come from the gameplay and the setting. From the design itself. Not from the script.
If Architecture, Directing, and similar high-abstractions are art forms, then so is game design.
And in a game where the designer is also an artist, then the designer can use art to further his vision. Even otherwise, a director leads his actors and effects people to bend their art to his vision - so does a game designer.
(I was going to use Sim Earth as a concrete existing example of a game that has designer-oriented messages without relying on script/movies/etc. but I figured the hypothetical case was better)
Fine then. Settlers of Catan - yes, it's a boardgame - but in any PC game case you could describe the programming, the simulation, etc. as the "art" rather than the gameplay itself.
And by breaking an artform into it's component media to discard "art" you open the possibility of denying that any number of things are "art" - for example, take a Pixar film - the animation is art, the script is art, the modelling is art... but is it an art to put it all together? If so, then I don't see how a game is exempt from that.
Remember that the mainstream view of the Games industry is the MTV Video Game Awards and the XBox commercials. Nobody ever gave Ebert a copy of Myst, Monkey Island, Ico, or any of the other classics of the art.
I think this is a very good point - the instances are there because they're needed. Imho, the problem is that the "real world" + RPG as an MMO model is fundamentally flawed.
The designer wants everybody to be able to play through all the same quests, but at the same time wants there to be only one existing version of each quest in the game world. Those are mutually exclusive goals.
At some point you have to admit that MMOs aren't really the "single massive world" they admit to be - they're a group of small single-player, co-op, and deathmatch games that happen to use the world map as a game browser. The fact is that real life has a lot of gameplay flaws, and the interest of real-life primarily comes from the obscene amount of content.
Unless the designers of an MMO want to make hundreds of in-world quests in a giant overlapping mess of the game world individually for each player, the "real world as MMO" mentality is fruitless.
No, game publishers do it - but they sell them direct through internet. The latest Leisure Suit Larry did this for example. They just don't sell them in stores.
Hot Coffee didn't deserve an AO rating anyways. Yes, it was explicit sex. Guess what, tons of movies have explicit sex, and they get rated R, not NC17. Until either (a) the whole point of the movie is explicit sex, and (b) they show genitalia, it's still rated R.
Consider that Eyes Wide Shut got rated R for sex. Meanwhile, GTA:SA, with one little sex scene, got effectively rated NC-17 (and thus unviable in stores) for sex.
The game industry could loosen their standards and still be further than the movie industry. It's just that grumpy old people like movies better than games.
If any government-driven media rating should go on, it would have to be across-the-board to be fair. Everything from comics to TV shows. Otherwise, it gives competing businesses an advantage. You think that comics and games and movies don't all compete with each other for kids' eyeballs?
Yes, but a game with sex and tits in it that is _not_ porno should be considered on the same metrics as a film with those features. Since there are R rated movies with lots of sex in them (i.e. Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut") then a game should be held to the same standards before being discarded as pr0n.
What do you want to bet that such a game would be AO?
Oh, and as an aside: the NIMF does not publicize who funds them. For all anyone knows, they're funded by the DVD industry who wants to main the game industry so that people will rent more movies. That should set off alarm bells to everyone - even the "they have a point" folks. At least we know who pays the ESRB.
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I find it rather odd that the machine they play on probably cost more than a year's rent for them.
Comments do, headlines don't. THat's why he's submitting articles - it gets his followable linked name into the headlines.
Yes, Lotus Notes had it. Lotus notes also had a lot of things. Like syphillis. It's a good feature - the fact that it was pioneered on a stupid, stupid program is beside the point.
I'm just wondering when better newsgroup browsing is coming. Last time I used T-bird for newsgroups I found it just as cumbersome as OE.
I know that's what sold me on the DS. One play of the Prime demo at an EB store and I wanted one.
Personally, I think the suck of 1984 is horribly overrated. 1984 only sucked if you had an atari. For us C64 owners, it was a very good year.
He's remarkably direct. Doesn't beat around the bush much does he?
They might not let you do that (unless you live in the town of Fucking). Drew should get off his duff and get Fark.eu - that would work well.
I agree, basically he's making the same point about Ajax that he made quite well abou frames - they break the web. The web has never been good at being anything but pages - possibly submitted forms, possibly just pages of info, but always pages. Imho, the only thing that web pages needed beyond basic javascript was server-side updating (forced, server-event-driven "refresh", preferably sending only a diff for efficiency's sake). All this "web app" stuff should've just been an embedded object of a different platform like Java or TCL or something.
The problem is that said platform never standardised - never ended up the same platform on every windows/mac/linux/sun box in the country the way browsers (roughly) do. Well, partially the same - I guess that's the other problem - a website deformed by incompatibilities is just ugly, while a similarly deformed client program is non-functional. Either way, Java was too ambitious and proprietary. Java was too heavy and too Sun. Plus, any such platform must communicate entirely through http or fear the wrath of the firewall gods.
But we needed something there - some standardised VM that could be embedded into a browser for web-apps. It's just that Java wasn't it - something smaller and nicer like Tcl/Tk would've been much better.
Fine. Four character minimum. Problem solved. Only real problem is masking local intranet domain names.
The difference, though, is what the poster noticed - you can have a movie with tons and tons of sex, nudity, etc. and get an "R" rating. Eg. "Eyes Wide Shut" - a similar game wouldn't stand a chance of dodging the Ao bullet.
The fact is that by the MPAA's standards, GTA would still be an "R" rated project instead of higher "adult" ratings.
Nonsense. The D20 system survives because of it's association with the Dungeons and Dragons brand. World of Darkness's system is perfectly simple, requiring no use of levels. In many "level" based RPG's like Diablo, the levels are meaningless - they simply represent a number of stat-building points that are made available to the player once they achieve the level. The concept of the level could be eliminated trivially by just giving the player the stat-building points and not mentioning the level, as is done in many non-D&D RPGs.
Character classes are a similar anachronism. Other RPGs do just fine without them - D20 maintains theirs simply because D&D has always been class-based. With a single balanced player-creation system there's no need to pigeonhole characters into classes.
I mean hell, D20 still has rules to let players roll their stats randomly. That's the ultimate anachronism.
Think bigger. VR Glasses? Plug 'em into the controller, give them the same position tracking as the controller has. Instant Augmented Reality gaming. Of course, you'd still have to be in front (or near) to the TV (or wherever you've got the pad locators) and it depends on having the locators be micro-acurate.
I'm betting the more likely case is the aforementioned storage. Considering that you could easily store NES games on a memory card, imagine holding a library of NES games in the Rev pad - the "turn sideways" functionality and the small size of NES games comes together really, really well there.
Perhaps even a "NES box" accessory that is a substitute for the Rev? Just a receiver for the gamepad and a NES emulator chip, plugged into the TV?
Or the damn thing vibrates. Yay.
And what happens to the many news + porno sites that nerds like to visit? Where do you draw the line? Fark has boobies links for example - but only a prude would call it a porn site. But there are numerous sites that slide down the line between Fark and straight out porn sites.
.XXX - because with that level of labelling, you'd risk more than just client side filtering (which only a foolish porno webmaster would complain about) but full-fledged back-end censorship - any one of the middling systems between your users and your site could be owned by "family oriented" bodies who might just drop all .XXX packets.
The big problem would be that only an idiot would put their porn site on
Risk does not rule. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that all of the classic MB and Hasbro games suck. They're all poorly balanced, sluggish, and take days to complete. Did anyone ever finish a game of Monopoly? Hell, did anybody ever get much further than the "buy up all the empty properties" phase? Especially since many of these games were elimination games - the winners are decided in the first hour or two of play, and the remaining players get to sit and watch.
Risk is pretty much just all about getting the cards, and then a tedious grind of actually ploughing troops into the other players. Tons of slow administration, and really not too much fun.
Still, some new popular games are equally tedious (Twilight Imperium comes to mind - Master of Orion without a computer to handle all the calculations for you) but there are so many new modern games that (a) don't take days to complete (b) are fun, and (c) don't base victory on elimination. Risk 2150, for example, makes Risk a little more tedious with extra rules, but also makes victory achievable - the game is much shorter, and doesn't base it on the lottery of the cards. Then there's all the laundry-list of "odd, historical non-violent European boardgames named after some odd little place" like Settlers of Catan, Carcasonne, and Tikal - they're all much more fun than the "classics".
Yep. Really, the only risk is that a future version of the GPL could be BSD-style. After all, a more-restrictive GPL license or a license with absurd clauses would simply not be used. The worst that can happen is that someone can re-close their derivation of your code if RMS ever loses his mind.
Not nice, but hardly catastrophic.
I wouldn't even expect that. I'd be thinking to make a glorified Zaurus. If you've got a firewire port or a USB port, you don't need a drive - they can share one. If you've got handwriting recognition (which they're talking about) - even something as simple as Grafitti (gesture-to-letter mapping) you don't need a keyboard - just the shift/alt/otherbucky keys next to the drawing pad. That way multilingual support becomes entirely a software issue. Personally, I prefer a keyboard - but I wouldn't be surprised if they go the handwriting-only way.
Wifi would be the priority to me - cables don't do so well in the 3rd world.
I'm surprised - I've heard Flux isn't quite as user-friendly as other lightweights - IceWM seems to garner the most support for that (but that may be just because it looks the most like Win9x).
Simple idea for "art" game. Sim Auschwitz. Run a factory/camp in Nazi Germany, with no scripted encounters, following a Peter Molyneux style of gameplay. Considerations include funding, productivity, and the risk of being labeled treasonous if he's too nice to your prisoners. The game would have a clear effect on the player (as the player gets to experience the decisions that lead him to kill the annoying or sick workers, let Mengele perform experiments there, and ultimately stuff his workers into the furnaces).
There, the meaning of the game would come from the gameplay and the setting. From the design itself. Not from the script.
If Architecture, Directing, and similar high-abstractions are art forms, then so is game design.
And in a game where the designer is also an artist, then the designer can use art to further his vision. Even otherwise, a director leads his actors and effects people to bend their art to his vision - so does a game designer.
(I was going to use Sim Earth as a concrete existing example of a game that has designer-oriented messages without relying on script/movies/etc. but I figured the hypothetical case was better)
Fine then. Settlers of Catan - yes, it's a boardgame - but in any PC game case you could describe the programming, the simulation, etc. as the "art" rather than the gameplay itself.
And by breaking an artform into it's component media to discard "art" you open the possibility of denying that any number of things are "art" - for example, take a Pixar film - the animation is art, the script is art, the modelling is art... but is it an art to put it all together? If so, then I don't see how a game is exempt from that.
Remember that the mainstream view of the Games industry is the MTV Video Game Awards and the XBox commercials. Nobody ever gave Ebert a copy of Myst, Monkey Island, Ico, or any of the other classics of the art.
I think this is a very good point - the instances are there because they're needed. Imho, the problem is that the "real world" + RPG as an MMO model is fundamentally flawed.
The designer wants everybody to be able to play through all the same quests, but at the same time wants there to be only one existing version of each quest in the game world. Those are mutually exclusive goals.
At some point you have to admit that MMOs aren't really the "single massive world" they admit to be - they're a group of small single-player, co-op, and deathmatch games that happen to use the world map as a game browser. The fact is that real life has a lot of gameplay flaws, and the interest of real-life primarily comes from the obscene amount of content.
Unless the designers of an MMO want to make hundreds of in-world quests in a giant overlapping mess of the game world individually for each player, the "real world as MMO" mentality is fruitless.
No, game publishers do it - but they sell them direct through internet. The latest Leisure Suit Larry did this for example. They just don't sell them in stores.
Hot Coffee didn't deserve an AO rating anyways. Yes, it was explicit sex. Guess what, tons of movies have explicit sex, and they get rated R, not NC17. Until either (a) the whole point of the movie is explicit sex, and (b) they show genitalia, it's still rated R.
Consider that Eyes Wide Shut got rated R for sex. Meanwhile, GTA:SA, with one little sex scene, got effectively rated NC-17 (and thus unviable in stores) for sex.
The game industry could loosen their standards and still be further than the movie industry. It's just that grumpy old people like movies better than games.
If any government-driven media rating should go on, it would have to be across-the-board to be fair. Everything from comics to TV shows. Otherwise, it gives competing businesses an advantage. You think that comics and games and movies don't all compete with each other for kids' eyeballs?
Yes, but a game with sex and tits in it that is _not_ porno should be considered on the same metrics as a film with those features. Since there are R rated movies with lots of sex in them (i.e. Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut") then a game should be held to the same standards before being discarded as pr0n.
What do you want to bet that such a game would be AO?
Oh, and as an aside: the NIMF does not publicize who funds them. For all anyone knows, they're funded by the DVD industry who wants to main the game industry so that people will rent more movies. That should set off alarm bells to everyone - even the "they have a point" folks. At least we know who pays the ESRB.
One of them is pestering the government to make it their legal prerogative. That's the difference.