First FFX-2, now this.. are they running of ideas? Or are they just more adversive to taking risks?
I personally think it's a bit of corporate schizophrenia after the failure of Square Pictures and the merger with Enix. XI was released as a MMORPG, so that introduces a natural "gap" in the game style of the series. (XII is rumored to combine elements of Vagrant Story with FF Tatics, further divorcing the series from its heritage.)
I think Square might be doing the revisits with VII and X to provide both a venue to continue with classic turn-based RPGS, as well as using pre-built scenarios to experiement with unusual game designs. Parasite Eve, The Bouncer, Vagrant Story... they were all experiments that had limited market success. Future experiements will likely hitchup to the FF star to keep Squinix solvent. (This is a little similar to what Blizzard was trying to do with Starcraft: Ghost, IMHO.)
It seems common in the west for people to not "know" that they are "eating dead animals" when they eat meat.
Even if you did media studies at one of the ex-polytechnics, I still think most of your classmates would know what pork is.
I think you missed the point of the "know" comment. To many meat eaters in the West, they are no longer truely aware of what's involved in the killing and butchering of animals for foodstuffs. We no longer hunt or farm cows, pigs, and chickens, and have come to rely on factory farms and third parties for our animal flesh needs.
There was a recent controvery regarding one of KFC's suppliers of chicken meat, which videos made of factory workers "abusing" the chickens in order to kill them. The minor scandal forced KFC to stop using that supplier, even though such "abuse" is common in the factory farming industry. "Out of sight, out of mind."
Even the historical influences on American English helps to create the disconnect. We don't say that we eat "pig" or "cow." We eat "pork" and "beef." If you are at the dinner table and say "That's good pig!" you'd be though of as vulgar.
It really should be something closer to "mean time between failures" or something. Since many reboots could occur after a very lengthy session, or as the requirement for a update or install, these numbers are going to be inflated for more sophisticated OS's like XP.
For raw reboots, the worst would technically be Mac OS 8, since its memory model caused a single crashing app to take down the whole system. Despite this, many users were still productive with it, since you could go for long stretches between app crashes. And even under OS X and any Windows, the most frequent situation I've encountered (outside of updates) that required a restart was a broken shut down sequence. (Really! I've had many occurances where to shut down a computer, I have had to restart it first.)
Having a Firewire option is great for people who don't have alot of USB2 connectors but have Firewire. Doesn't seem like a huge market though.
I'd have to agree here. I'm a big Mac user, but FireWire's design is biased towards continuous data streaming (for like audio and video), while USB 2.0 (or even 1.1) is good enough for random access flash media. Since a big use for the keychains is to help move files between machines (even between PCs and Macs, if you're careful), the poor deployment for IEEE 1394 in the Wintel sphere is going to limit the utility of this.
It's a shame though, my Mac at home has three FireWire ports completely unused, while I needed to get a hub to handle all my USB devices.
I always thought Crimson Skies was a ripoff (at least in theme) of that old Disney Cartoon "Tail Spin." It also had groovy prop planes, huge dirigibles, film-noir leanings and an Art Deco style.
Retrotech or "steampunk" seems to always be bubbling under mainstream consciousness. Tim Burton's take on Batman, the Steampunk comic books, TailSpin and Treasure Planet, the old Space: 1899 RPG, etc...
I personally love this genre, but everytime it makes a stab at becoming mainstream, it usually fades quickly. (Even the recent Batman movies got morphed into camp, leaving the "Noir Deco" esthetic to the first season of the Animated Series.) You would think with the Sci-Fi concept being pioneered by Jules Verne and others that this kind of retrotech fiction would be evergreen in our popular culture, but it just doesn't appeal to the masses (or even most geeks!) like medieval fantasy or futuristic conjecture...
It is amazing that you write a rant about how people don't understand numbers and then your sig is 2 + 2 = 5 (For extremely large values of 2)
In defense of this typical.sig, it's partly a reference to 1984 and partly a reference to rounding error due to real numbers.
In 1984, the protagonist was held captive by The Party, and was being brainwashed into beliving "doublethink" with the interogator using "2+2=5" as the example. It's been years since I read the novel, but he evenually breaks down when he starts to doubt that 2 and 2 make 4. (It involved a face-mounted rat cage, and betraying a love interest.)
As for round-off error, serious mathheads will argue that the written representation of "2" can only exactly refer to an integer, not a real number. The argument usually covers things like repeating decimals and irrational numbers. (At least imaginary numbers have nothing to do with this.) Even in the more concrete computer sciences which I have more experience with, computers do a very bad job with comparisions and value preservation for floating point numbers, since the finite bit storage for most float types can only store so many "digits" of a number before having to round off the last one.
Still, your assertion about humans having difficulty conceptualizing large numbers is valid: I personally think of it as a "Carl Sagan" type problem.
BTW, I got 25% on the quiz, which disappointed me, until I read the analysis and discovered that I was near the 50% percentile populationwise. This surprised me since I'm from the US, and the quiz is UK-biased. Still disappoint though, I'm used to getting 90% percentile on standardized tests.
While I have little doubt that the numbers you cited are true, without citations and context, you are only going to be dismissed by most on the right due to the Mark Twain equivalence. (That is, statistics are in the same category as lies.)
Besides, you're just preaching to the choir here./. is already mostly leftist.
When the Zip drive came out, the price/megabyte of Zip disk was less than the equivalent for hard disks.
Non sequitur. Zips were meant to replace floppys, not hard drives. Or were you mislead by the "hard drive-like" speed claims Iomega originally had? (Which was true at the time.)
A $10 disk is too expensive for disposable media.
Ugh, expensive? A Zip disk is more "disposable" than the more costly flash media that's now in vogue. I used the same 100 MB disk for about two years back in the day, but my first SanDisk USB drive lasted me only three months.
Yes, having the "drive" and "media" be in one self-contained unit USB dongle may be a boon, but there is something to be said for keeping them separate, reliability-wise. And for those who use the "adaptor" style drives that have removable flash memory, you start to outspend the cost of Zip and SuperDisk media once you get to your third unit.
Cheap USB flash drives are the true successors to floppies. Before their emergence, the only options people had were CD-R and CD-RWs. But the technology still wasn't yet as cheap as floppies, but they could hold vastly more and not everyone had the hardware. By the time they became somewhat cheap enough and plentiful enough, USB drives started appearing.
Actually, people have tried on many occasions to update the floppy drive for larger capacities. But Iomega Zip disks, Imation SuperDisks, and the various magneto-optical medias of past years never could get market momentum, despite being more economical in some ways than the HD floppy.
I personally think that if the Mac didn't get marginalized as a platform, it would have lifted the Zip media format as the new portable standard. Despite the infamous "Click Of Death," just about every public Mac I saw during my college days had a Zip drive in it. Apple (and the various clone makers) had them available as factory options. It's a shame that Iomega couldn't make the same inroads with the various PC manufacturers; it was like as though they didn't want to be associated with a company so Mac-friendly.
It probably didn't help that SCSI Zip drives consistently outperformed parallel drives. This performance issue wouldn't have mattered if more PC makers included the drives as an internal option, since internal drives had full performance. It wasn't until Intel's USB (which Apple was the early adopter of!) that PC manufacturers were able to get full performance out of external Zip drives. By then, it was too late for Iomega...
And I would agree with you... I personally hate the genre for that very reason. (I prefer turn-based games.)
But I'm not the one who uses the terminology in magazine articles, game reviews, and press releases. "RTS" has a whole connotation now that makes it a mild misnomer compared with the denotative meaning of the individual words.
It's like calling George W. Bush a liberal. Even though it's literally true (for sufficiently economic definitions of "liberal"), it would only mislead people into thinking you are a liar or a fool.
Utopia was the first one. Boo-hoo you can't rush. What a bummer...game has to actually be decided by strategy! The game can't be won militarily?
/me rolls eyes
Of course the game can be won with non-miliatry means, that was the point of my issue with calling Utopia a "Real Time Stategy" game. The RTS genre's defined by heavy unit manipulation in real time; Utopia's semi-turn based. You could only control one unit at a time, which had to be a naval unit. Land units were "terrain," not units. Buildings had limited resource requirements and were built instantly, yadda yadda yadda.
Look, Don himself considers Utopia to be a "sim" not an "RTS", more like Civilization than Starcraft. The Intellvision WAS supposed to have a tactical strategy game, but it didn't make it to market due to management shortsightedness.
I have both an Intellevision, as well as the offical INTV emulation package. Utopia's more closely related to political theory, since the goal was to maintain a statistical population. It was NOT intended to be a military game, but included military content as part of a larger whole.
I just don't think he invented the RTS genre. Some unknown dude at Mattel did.
That would be Don Daglow, who at last reckoning would be at Stormfront Studios. He was the primary programmer of the Utopia game.
Calling it an RTS would be kind of stretch, though. While it had the same diversity of resources/buildings that games like Warcraft and so on have, there were no real military units beyond a couple of boats and terrain tiles representing rebels. There was little opportunity for tactical play, or even basic "rushing."
Oh, and one thing I forgot, some apps store special files in your personal Library folder. These files are usually in ~/Library/Application Support/, but some apps place files in a folder with same name as the app itself. (Like iTunes and iMovie, which have plug-ins folders here.)
Out of curiosity, what if one does want to access or manipulate a particular file associated with an application? I'd rather have optionally hidden than always hidden...
Control-Click (or right-click with a 3rd party mouse) on the application you want to tinker with. A contextual menu with "Show Package Contents" should appear for most OS X applications. This opens a Finder window that allows to examine the app's internal support files that are contained in the app's "bundle."
For certain OS X apps (usually ports from the OS 9 era) that don't show this menu, you will need to use a "resource editor" like ResEdit or Resourcer. The former only runs in Classic, while the latter is kind of expensive. (But worth the money if you do some kinds of development work.)
Finally, for invisible files, you can use some freeware apps, like TinkerTool, to change a hidden system preference to show invisibles in the Finder. Or you can just use the Terminal to examine such files use standard Unix commands.
Interesting to have a language where imported words are so sharply defined. Xenophobia, anyone?
I'm not fluent in Japanese, but my understanding was that this was a recent invention. Prior to the Meiji Reformation, I think, Hira* was traditionally used for feminine speech and words, while Kata* was used for masculine, like the "gender" concept used by many European languages (but not quite). The xenophobia I think came about during Japan's flurtation with nationalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Any Japanese/.'ers willing to clarify or correct this? I don't have links handy to where I first read about this, so I may be spouting urban legend as far as I know... My Japan knowledge was mostly acquired through osmosis via J-Pop culture.
Why was the parent article smacked down? I was sincere with my question, since some the the "fake motion" effect looked like side effects of light radiation instead of reflection. (I didn't know about the English page that explained the biology of perception.)
Most of the images were in color, so I couldn't test them by printing them out myself... (No color printer right now...)
The parent poster's image came from this web page...
They have got to be the best optical illusions I've ever seen! I wonder if they would still work as well when printed instead of a computer screen, though...
And the lateness continues... (-;
Classic doesn't seem to have changed much in years, so I'm not sure if much effort will be put into it in the future. Apple certainly seems to be more forward-looking than backwards-looking in this respect, to the detriment of compatibility.
My expectation of Classic being changed is simply because the current implentation seems to be "hooked" deeply in the OS proper. For example, Classic has access to the montior screen (like the menu bar) that most Carbon and Cocoa apps can't easily replicate. (As a similar example, the Dock also access system hooks that aren't publically documented for handling window zooming and Expose.) I wouldn't be surprised if Apple has to re-write or outright remove Classic if they make revisions to the rest of the OS. (Classic, due to it's single-user bias, has security implications for OS X, and may have to adjusted to compensate, for example.)
For the person who wrote the headline, and obviously is clueless...
For the record, I didn't write the headline, it originally was...
Economist Takes Old TV Show Way Too Seriously
But I think Michael thought it was a little too snarky...
The article does make valid economic points (especially if you are Libertarian), but the notion of using money on the island was probably an afterthought by the show's writers. (As the essayist admits himself.)
Slashdot Mirror
I personally think it's a bit of corporate schizophrenia after the failure of Square Pictures and the merger with Enix. XI was released as a MMORPG, so that introduces a natural "gap" in the game style of the series. (XII is rumored to combine elements of Vagrant Story with FF Tatics, further divorcing the series from its heritage.)
I think Square might be doing the revisits with VII and X to provide both a venue to continue with classic turn-based RPGS, as well as using pre-built scenarios to experiement with unusual game designs. Parasite Eve, The Bouncer, Vagrant Story... they were all experiments that had limited market success. Future experiements will likely hitchup to the FF star to keep Squinix solvent. (This is a little similar to what Blizzard was trying to do with Starcraft: Ghost, IMHO.)
There was a recent controvery regarding one of KFC's suppliers of chicken meat, which videos made of factory workers "abusing" the chickens in order to kill them. The minor scandal forced KFC to stop using that supplier, even though such "abuse" is common in the factory farming industry. "Out of sight, out of mind."
Even the historical influences on American English helps to create the disconnect. We don't say that we eat "pig" or "cow." We eat "pork" and "beef." If you are at the dinner table and say "That's good pig!" you'd be though of as vulgar.
For raw reboots, the worst would technically be Mac OS 8, since its memory model caused a single crashing app to take down the whole system. Despite this, many users were still productive with it, since you could go for long stretches between app crashes. And even under OS X and any Windows, the most frequent situation I've encountered (outside of updates) that required a restart was a broken shut down sequence. (Really! I've had many occurances where to shut down a computer, I have had to restart it first.)
No kidding, poster like the Grammar Godwins are why I recently changed my .sig.
No, no, no. You haven't been paying attention lately, have you? It should be...
Imaging a beowulf cluster of these... in Japan!
...it's amazing you missed such low hanging fruit.
I'd have to agree here. I'm a big Mac user, but FireWire's design is biased towards continuous data streaming (for like audio and video), while USB 2.0 (or even 1.1) is good enough for random access flash media. Since a big use for the keychains is to help move files between machines (even between PCs and Macs, if you're careful), the poor deployment for IEEE 1394 in the Wintel sphere is going to limit the utility of this.
It's a shame though, my Mac at home has three FireWire ports completely unused, while I needed to get a hub to handle all my USB devices.
Retrotech or "steampunk" seems to always be bubbling under mainstream consciousness. Tim Burton's take on Batman, the Steampunk comic books, TailSpin and Treasure Planet, the old Space: 1899 RPG, etc...
I personally love this genre, but everytime it makes a stab at becoming mainstream, it usually fades quickly. (Even the recent Batman movies got morphed into camp, leaving the "Noir Deco" esthetic to the first season of the Animated Series.) You would think with the Sci-Fi concept being pioneered by Jules Verne and others that this kind of retrotech fiction would be evergreen in our popular culture, but it just doesn't appeal to the masses (or even most geeks!) like medieval fantasy or futuristic conjecture...
In defense of this typical .sig, it's partly a reference to 1984 and partly a reference to rounding error due to real numbers.
In 1984, the protagonist was held captive by The Party, and was being brainwashed into beliving "doublethink" with the interogator using "2+2=5" as the example. It's been years since I read the novel, but he evenually breaks down when he starts to doubt that 2 and 2 make 4. (It involved a face-mounted rat cage, and betraying a love interest.)
As for round-off error, serious mathheads will argue that the written representation of "2" can only exactly refer to an integer, not a real number. The argument usually covers things like repeating decimals and irrational numbers. (At least imaginary numbers have nothing to do with this.) Even in the more concrete computer sciences which I have more experience with, computers do a very bad job with comparisions and value preservation for floating point numbers, since the finite bit storage for most float types can only store so many "digits" of a number before having to round off the last one.
Still, your assertion about humans having difficulty conceptualizing large numbers is valid: I personally think of it as a "Carl Sagan" type problem.
BTW, I got 25% on the quiz, which disappointed me, until I read the analysis and discovered that I was near the 50% percentile populationwise. This surprised me since I'm from the US, and the quiz is UK-biased. Still disappoint though, I'm used to getting 90% percentile on standardized tests.
While I have little doubt that the numbers you cited are true, without citations and context, you are only going to be dismissed by most on the right due to the Mark Twain equivalence. (That is, statistics are in the same category as lies.)
Besides, you're just preaching to the choir here. /. is already mostly leftist.
Non sequitur. Zips were meant to replace floppys, not hard drives. Or were you mislead by the "hard drive-like" speed claims Iomega originally had? (Which was true at the time.)
A $10 disk is too expensive for disposable media.
Ugh, expensive? A Zip disk is more "disposable" than the more costly flash media that's now in vogue. I used the same 100 MB disk for about two years back in the day, but my first SanDisk USB drive lasted me only three months.
Yes, having the "drive" and "media" be in one self-contained unit USB dongle may be a boon, but there is something to be said for keeping them separate, reliability-wise. And for those who use the "adaptor" style drives that have removable flash memory, you start to outspend the cost of Zip and SuperDisk media once you get to your third unit.
1. blow in the cartridge
2. click it up and down.
...
6. Give up, and buy a top-loader
My uncle bought one of the these back in the day. Said it was the best $50 he ever spent.
Actually, people have tried on many occasions to update the floppy drive for larger capacities. But Iomega Zip disks, Imation SuperDisks, and the various magneto-optical medias of past years never could get market momentum, despite being more economical in some ways than the HD floppy.
I personally think that if the Mac didn't get marginalized as a platform, it would have lifted the Zip media format as the new portable standard. Despite the infamous "Click Of Death," just about every public Mac I saw during my college days had a Zip drive in it. Apple (and the various clone makers) had them available as factory options. It's a shame that Iomega couldn't make the same inroads with the various PC manufacturers; it was like as though they didn't want to be associated with a company so Mac-friendly.
It probably didn't help that SCSI Zip drives consistently outperformed parallel drives. This performance issue wouldn't have mattered if more PC makers included the drives as an internal option, since internal drives had full performance. It wasn't until Intel's USB (which Apple was the early adopter of!) that PC manufacturers were able to get full performance out of external Zip drives. By then, it was too late for Iomega...
And I would agree with you... I personally hate the genre for that very reason. (I prefer turn-based games.)
But I'm not the one who uses the terminology in magazine articles, game reviews, and press releases. "RTS" has a whole connotation now that makes it a mild misnomer compared with the denotative meaning of the individual words.
It's like calling George W. Bush a liberal. Even though it's literally true (for sufficiently economic definitions of "liberal"), it would only mislead people into thinking you are a liar or a fool.
Of course the game can be won with non-miliatry means, that was the point of my issue with calling Utopia a "Real Time Stategy" game. The RTS genre's defined by heavy unit manipulation in real time; Utopia's semi-turn based. You could only control one unit at a time, which had to be a naval unit. Land units were "terrain," not units. Buildings had limited resource requirements and were built instantly, yadda yadda yadda.
Look, Don himself considers Utopia to be a "sim" not an "RTS", more like Civilization than Starcraft. The Intellvision WAS supposed to have a tactical strategy game, but it didn't make it to market due to management shortsightedness.
I have both an Intellevision, as well as the offical INTV emulation package. Utopia's more closely related to political theory, since the goal was to maintain a statistical population. It was NOT intended to be a military game, but included military content as part of a larger whole.
That would be Don Daglow, who at last reckoning would be at Stormfront Studios. He was the primary programmer of the Utopia game.
Calling it an RTS would be kind of stretch, though. While it had the same diversity of resources/buildings that games like Warcraft and so on have, there were no real military units beyond a couple of boats and terrain tiles representing rebels. There was little opportunity for tactical play, or even basic "rushing."
Oh, and one thing I forgot, some apps store special files in your personal Library folder. These files are usually in ~/Library/Application Support/, but some apps place files in a folder with same name as the app itself. (Like iTunes and iMovie, which have plug-ins folders here.)
Control-Click (or right-click with a 3rd party mouse) on the application you want to tinker with. A contextual menu with "Show Package Contents" should appear for most OS X applications. This opens a Finder window that allows to examine the app's internal support files that are contained in the app's "bundle."
For certain OS X apps (usually ports from the OS 9 era) that don't show this menu, you will need to use a "resource editor" like ResEdit or Resourcer. The former only runs in Classic, while the latter is kind of expensive. (But worth the money if you do some kinds of development work.)
Finally, for invisible files, you can use some freeware apps, like TinkerTool, to change a hidden system preference to show invisibles in the Finder. Or you can just use the Terminal to examine such files use standard Unix commands.
I'm not fluent in Japanese, but my understanding was that this was a recent invention. Prior to the Meiji Reformation, I think, Hira* was traditionally used for feminine speech and words, while Kata* was used for masculine, like the "gender" concept used by many European languages (but not quite). The xenophobia I think came about during Japan's flurtation with nationalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Any Japanese /.'ers willing to clarify or correct this? I don't have links handy to where I first read about this, so I may be spouting urban legend as far as I know... My Japan knowledge was mostly acquired through osmosis via J-Pop culture.
Most of the images were in color, so I couldn't test them by printing them out myself... (No color printer right now...)
o_O Egad! That's not even an animated GIF!
The parent poster's image came from this web page...
They have got to be the best optical illusions I've ever seen! I wonder if they would still work as well when printed instead of a computer screen, though...
You should be HELD BACK for writing such stuff!
Seriously, did DNA every discuss spam as a cultural menace before he died? It would be precisely the sort of thing Vogons would be in to, wouldn't it?
Thanks to a "problem of scale" I could never find out if the copy my library had really had the fleet or not...
Then again, I aways thought that the genuine fluff was much more interesting...
My expectation of Classic being changed is simply because the current implentation seems to be "hooked" deeply in the OS proper. For example, Classic has access to the montior screen (like the menu bar) that most Carbon and Cocoa apps can't easily replicate. (As a similar example, the Dock also access system hooks that aren't publically documented for handling window zooming and Expose.) I wouldn't be surprised if Apple has to re-write or outright remove Classic if they make revisions to the rest of the OS. (Classic, due to it's single-user bias, has security implications for OS X, and may have to adjusted to compensate, for example.)
*sigh* I didn't write it... I thought /.'ers knew that story submissions could be edited?
For the record, I didn't write the headline, it originally was...
Economist Takes Old TV Show Way Too Seriously
But I think Michael thought it was a little too snarky...
The article does make valid economic points (especially if you are Libertarian), but the notion of using money on the island was probably an afterthought by the show's writers. (As the essayist admits himself.)