First, let me say that this discovery adds even more examples to the fact that Antarctica is a science sweet spot. From ancient fossils to some of the lowest natural temperatures on terra firma, Antarctica is a truly awesome place. It's really one of the last frontier's on the planet, second to perhaps the deepest oceans and the interior of the Earth.
Next, I'd like to admit that I'm a huge fan of dinosaurs. Anyone else here credit an interest in dinosaurs to the original 1993 Jurassic Park movie? This was actually the first movie I ever saw in a theater, and it's hard to believe that come July that will be 11 years ago.
When I saw the movie, I became obsessed with everything dinosaur. It shaped my entire future by also sparking a greater interest in science in general. So I'm basically the man I am today thanks to Jurassic Park. Which makes a good scapegoat for when people have a problem with me.;)
And for a good laugh be sure to check out the Jurassic Park game for the SNES. When you go inside buildings it turns into a weird FPS mode that looks like absolute ass. (That'd be a perfect spot for a goatse link, damn, I should be a troll...)
In a time of global terrorism, high crime rates and world hunger, the virtual evils of a computer game are really trivial.
In the span of a few hundred million years, the Earth will become less and less habitable due to the expected changes to our giant stellar friend 1 AU away, and that's assuming an asteroid doesn't get us first. On this time scale, the evils of global terrorism, high crime rates, and world hunger are really trivial.
What good does it do if we stop terrorism, crime, and eliminate hunger, if we're still doomed to be completely annihilated in ~500 million years?
Okay, I know I'm going to take a hit on my karma for posting this, but the main reason for my post is to simply prove that it does no good to insult a pass-time that many gamers take seriously by calling aspects of its nature trivial in comparison to something else. Everything is trivial compared to the scenario I just described, just as indeed, I suppose video games are trivial compared to the concerns you described.
Now, would you go around telling people not to live their lives the way they do because we've only got ~500 million years left here on Earth? No, you wouldn't?
Then shut the hell up and let people enjoy a video game in whatever manner that wish, including taking its problems as serious as they wish to imagine them. It may not seem right, natural, or even healthy to you, but there are far worse things people can do with their time.
MMORPGs are an excellent way for the socially inept to form rather serious bonds of friendship, and end up living better lives because of it.
But I guess everyone should stop complaining about the faults of virtual worlds, or maybe stop playing in virtual worlds entirely, since it's so trivial in comparison to your examples. In fact, I think I'll turn in my Dark Age of Camelot account and join the police force right now! Thanks for your insight, buddy!
The article says it all, really, and is probably something you should show your Boss.
I think that if your boss does not already understand the ways of Linux, perhaps reading an article on a Web page won't be enough to convince him.
Get a hold of one of the new IBM ads and play it for him. Seeing a major, big name company back Linux with a TV spot would carry a lot more weight than someone's opinion on a Web page, no matter how eloquent that opinion is presented. But then, I'm not even employed right now, so I shouldn't be giving advice on what to show your boss.;)
Still, it's hard for anyone to ignore the opinion of IBM. Or rather, it's a lot easier to ignore the opinion of an author at the BBC.
But why does Feb 1st seem so familiar. Didn't something disastrous happen at this time last year?
I'll give you a hint. It starts with a "C" and ends with an "olumbia"...
Yes, it's the one year anniversary of the Columbia tragedy already. And here we are on Slashdot, talking about SCO being the "victim" of yet another DDOS, which was probably of their own making in an effort to paint the Linux community as a band of evil hackers and SCO the poor, innocent company under siege. Newsworthy indeed!
So basically, here's the year 2003 in review:
- A piece of foam impacting the RCC on the space shuttle's wing can destroy it.
- A software company can pump their stock by pretending to own Linux.
More than 25,000 searchers, who scoured a debris "footprint" that was 645 miles long, found 84,900 individual pieces, about 38 percent of the space shuttle.
Does this not make one wonder how much of the shuttle might still be "out there" waiting to be found, or perhaps sitting on display in someone's house? Granted, much of it would have been literally vaporized, however I think that would amount to far less than the remaining 62% of Columbia.
I heard on CNN that pages of Ilan Ramon's journal were found recently in Texas. A quick google news turned up this article on the Post.
It has also been stated that remains from all seven astronauts were recovered, and that some of the organisms on the shuttle actually survived.
This all points to the possibility that there is still more shuttle out there, and that perhaps we could be finding Columbia piece by precious piece for years to come...
First let me say I hope this problem is fixed. Next let me say even if it is not, Spirit has done some wonderful things already and that sure beats going boom before it ever lands like so many before it.
Now I'm going to say this: would all the people that bragged about NASA/JPL doing so much better than the Beagle team be quiet?
Guess what. Landing a complex machine on another planet is not easy. It's simply amazing humans can even do this at all. When something goes wrong, we can't exactly reach out and tap the little thing a few times to see if it fixes it.
The teams behind both Spirit and Beagle did excellent work against the insane list of Things That Can Go Wrong in getting something from here to there. Both teams did their best, and both teams make me feel very proud of the human race.
Acutally, we know that Nemesis tanked because our own WilWheaton had his scene cut.
And we all know what Enterprise really needed was an annoying genius kid that plays with nanites and goes to booty town with Ashley Judd, making the thousands of teenage geeks watching even more annoyed with him, the lucky bastard...
It started off with a huge strike against it. They refused to call it Star Trek: Enterprise. It was simply Enterprise. I guess the "Star Trek" name is too tarnished? Or is it, perhaps, that they wanted to market to a new fanbase, assuming that the die-hard trekkies will watch anyway. I think it was an attempt to distance themselves from Trek.
Well, it worked. It also helps that the show is nothing at all like Star Trek. Basic premise of every episode: Let's take a good idea from TOS or TNG, update it with a new cast and new effects, and completely ruing the meaning!
A recent episode had what seemed like interstellar terrorists on it. The theme was a sort-of "with us or against us" thing, as if the episode had come straight out of a propaganda machine. I don't need my Star Trek telling me what to think. I want my Star Trek making me think. That's what Trek was always best at: making people think about things. What if? Why? The settings was incidental. The effects were irrelevant. The story was what mattered. Enterprise ditched that and focused on everything else. The result?
Star Trek Lite: It tastes bland and isn't very filling, but people accept it anyway.
The sad thing is the cast works. I think Backula does a great job, and I loved his role in Quantum Leap. Phlox is pretty entertaining. But these few perks just can't make up for the general disarray of the series.
And don't even get me STARTED on Star Trek timeline continuity. If Trek continuity were a person, it would be time for it to seek rape consoling! The Borg episode... the Romulans? What the hell? Have the writers ever even watched any of the previous Treks?
Sorry Enterprise, but I can't say I will miss you.
Seriously. How many of you would vote with your dollars and simply not buy games that were severely crippled?
I know I wouldn't.
But yes, subscriber based content a la MMORPGs does seem to be the going trend, and I'm not too upset with that since you're usually paying for the continued development and patching of the game.
I do, however, take issue with being forced to pay $50 up-front for a game I have to purchase a subscription to even play.
I think MMORPGs should be free to download; since you can't play without paying it's not like you're going to pirate their game.
I think some of the content or areas will be locked out when it first comes out. Also didn't they say there are something like 1400 quests in the game? That ought to keep you busy for a while.
It depends on how involved these quests are. Throwing a number at me doesn't really impress me without an average time for completion of a quest. If each quest takes an hour, then yes, you have a lot of content there, but if each can be done in a few minutes... it wouldn't satisfy cross-over customers used to games like EQ, daoc, etc...
When Blizzard flat out says that the game is designed with casual gamers in mind, I really believe that seasoned MMORPG veterans are going to be a bit dissapointed. Honestly, I hope I'm wrong though. The game looks breathtaking.
I'm a die-hard Blizzard fan. I've played every Blizzard game on the PC, and most of the SNES games. Thus, I kind of know their strengths and weakness. Their biggest weakness (most evident in say, Diablo II) is completely underestimating their fanbase.
Back in the days of the Diablo II stress test, we were told it would be impossible to solo in Hell difficulty games in Act IV. Guess what? That's what everyone ended up doing. It was the standard way to level as fast as possible.
Blizzard has flat out said that WoW is going to be different than other MMORPGs in that it won't require as much of a time investment. So here's what I see happening. The gamers are going to breeze through all of WoWs content upon its release in a very short amount of time, and become bored rather quickly.
I could be totally wrong on this... it is just my prediction. At least one very good thing about MMORPGs is that they are constantly being updated, so hopefully Blizzard can patch in some new monsters/areas or whatever will be needed.
Bottom line, though, is that Blizzard has a track record of underestimating the average gamer.
The new upgraded systems/reels can support 150 minutes. I believe this change occurred about the time of the release of the second matrix movie.
But do they still clip the sides as another poster here mentioned? If that's the case, my interest in IMAX would be reduced to negative numbers. I don't care about any bells and whistles that much; I want to see the whole movie though, which means entire length and no clipping/pan-n-scan nonsense.
Is why, when we are paying a monthly fee, do we still have to go buy the damn CD for $50?
I think that new MMORPGs should either be a free download, or start at something more reasonable, like $20-$30. The price of a full game doesn't make sense, because after I buy it, I still cannot play the game until I fork over a credit card number.
Other than that, I think the monthly fees are, for the most part, understandable.
"The web site you are trying to access has exceeded its allocated data transfer."
Excuse me... did we just Slashdot a text file? I think this might be some sort of new record! Anyone out there keeping score?
Or perhaps Geocities has a very low bandwidth limit for its accounts. Actually, I'm pretty sure it does, when you figure in the amount of people that don't even try to RTFA.
Perhaps there is some evolutionary reason for hair loss... I mean, isn't hair kind of a "vestigial organ" from when humans were furry? Perhaps now that humans wear clothes, hats, and etcetera, even the remaining hair is becoming useless, outside of vanity purposes.
There's also another possibility. In nature, creatures tend to send "signals" that they've reached a certain stage of development. This is probably why humans develop pubic hair; it's the body's way of saying that it is physically ready to produce offspring.
Perhaps the process of balding is a signal of some stage of development, too. It could mean "I'm older and wizened" or "I am a little past my prime" (sorry bald guys, I'm just guessing!). I know some people start going bald in their 20s... so perhaps it isn't a totally evolutionary response... but anyway, it is food for thought... What do the rest of you think?
Any of you moderators care to explain why this is flamebait? I am sure it is much easier to mod me down into oblivion. In case you didn't notice, I had a valid point.
Anyway, please fill me in.
I think perhaps a lot of folks from Microsoft have mod points these days...
Yep, just like television. All the pundits predicted that no one would want to stare at a little box all day.
Oh, and compact discs. I mean, 650 MB of read-only data? C'mon, that's more worthless than 8-track tapes!
Or maybe it is a fad like bell-bottoms. They go out for a while, then come back in the 24th century as part of Starfleet uniforms! Quick, everyone go check the ST Encyclopedia and see if it mentions P2P!
All joking aside, to use a trite but true statement, I think the genie is out of the bottle, cat's out of the bag, etc. The only people that think P2P is a fad are probably the people that want it to be a fad.
P2P will likely usher in new business models, and new ways of getting entertainment. The RIAA/MPAA clinging to the old ways would be, as some have pointed out, not unlike the makers of horse-drawn carriages trying to stop the production of the automobile.
Change happens. People don't usually like it, but are capable of adjusting. Corporations are not people (despite what the law may say) and simply refuse to adjust to change unless they can see an obvious, and instant, financial gain.
Technology often makes current systems obsolete. For example, gunpowder pretty much made the feudal system of government obsolete. In the future, an invention like matter transporters (beam me up!) would probably make our current governments obsolete.
P2P is making the way we purchase, oh I'm sorry, "consume" entertainment obsolete. I highly doubt the RIAA/MPAA can cripple technology enough to keep us all in the old days.
Slashdot Mirror
Next, I'd like to admit that I'm a huge fan of dinosaurs. Anyone else here credit an interest in dinosaurs to the original 1993 Jurassic Park movie? This was actually the first movie I ever saw in a theater, and it's hard to believe that come July that will be 11 years ago.
When I saw the movie, I became obsessed with everything dinosaur. It shaped my entire future by also sparking a greater interest in science in general. So I'm basically the man I am today thanks to Jurassic Park. Which makes a good scapegoat for when people have a problem with me. ;)
And for a good laugh be sure to check out the Jurassic Park game for the SNES. When you go inside buildings it turns into a weird FPS mode that looks like absolute ass. (That'd be a perfect spot for a goatse link, damn, I should be a troll...)
Excuse me, GigsVT, but you owe me one keyboard. I was able to clean the soda off the monitor, though, so it could be worse. ;)
In the span of a few hundred million years, the Earth will become less and less habitable due to the expected changes to our giant stellar friend 1 AU away, and that's assuming an asteroid doesn't get us first. On this time scale, the evils of global terrorism, high crime rates, and world hunger are really trivial.
What good does it do if we stop terrorism, crime, and eliminate hunger, if we're still doomed to be completely annihilated in ~500 million years?
Okay, I know I'm going to take a hit on my karma for posting this, but the main reason for my post is to simply prove that it does no good to insult a pass-time that many gamers take seriously by calling aspects of its nature trivial in comparison to something else. Everything is trivial compared to the scenario I just described, just as indeed, I suppose video games are trivial compared to the concerns you described.
Now, would you go around telling people not to live their lives the way they do because we've only got ~500 million years left here on Earth? No, you wouldn't?
Then shut the hell up and let people enjoy a video game in whatever manner that wish, including taking its problems as serious as they wish to imagine them. It may not seem right, natural, or even healthy to you, but there are far worse things people can do with their time.
MMORPGs are an excellent way for the socially inept to form rather serious bonds of friendship, and end up living better lives because of it.
But I guess everyone should stop complaining about the faults of virtual worlds, or maybe stop playing in virtual worlds entirely, since it's so trivial in comparison to your examples. In fact, I think I'll turn in my Dark Age of Camelot account and join the police force right now! Thanks for your insight, buddy!
I asked them about it years ago, and someone from Blizzard said that there are some things they "just won't comment on."
So while they probably don't approve, they aren't all up in arms about it like Sony was over EQ.
I think that if your boss does not already understand the ways of Linux, perhaps reading an article on a Web page won't be enough to convince him.
Get a hold of one of the new IBM ads and play it for him. Seeing a major, big name company back Linux with a TV spot would carry a lot more weight than someone's opinion on a Web page, no matter how eloquent that opinion is presented. But then, I'm not even employed right now, so I shouldn't be giving advice on what to show your boss. ;)
Still, it's hard for anyone to ignore the opinion of IBM. Or rather, it's a lot easier to ignore the opinion of an author at the BBC.
But why does Feb 1st seem so familiar. Didn't something disastrous happen at this time last year?
I'll give you a hint. It starts with a "C" and ends with an "olumbia" ...
Yes, it's the one year anniversary of the Columbia tragedy already. And here we are on Slashdot, talking about SCO being the "victim" of yet another DDOS, which was probably of their own making in an effort to paint the Linux community as a band of evil hackers and SCO the poor, innocent company under siege. Newsworthy indeed!
So basically, here's the year 2003 in review:
- A piece of foam impacting the RCC on the space shuttle's wing can destroy it.
- A software company can pump their stock by pretending to own Linux.
Guess we've learned a lot!
More than 25,000 searchers, who scoured a debris "footprint" that was 645 miles long, found 84,900 individual pieces, about 38 percent of the space shuttle.
Does this not make one wonder how much of the shuttle might still be "out there" waiting to be found, or perhaps sitting on display in someone's house? Granted, much of it would have been literally vaporized, however I think that would amount to far less than the remaining 62% of Columbia.
I heard on CNN that pages of Ilan Ramon's journal were found recently in Texas. A quick google news turned up this article on the Post.
It has also been stated that remains from all seven astronauts were recovered, and that some of the organisms on the shuttle actually survived.
This all points to the possibility that there is still more shuttle out there, and that perhaps we could be finding Columbia piece by precious piece for years to come...
Ping matters not to a true master such as myself. You would just have to wait ten minutes to find out that I owned your sorry ass. ;)
He then tried to sell a reporter an R2 unit with a bad motivator, which promptly fried before the transaction was even completed.
Spirit status updates are here: http://spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/statustextonly .html
Now I'm going to say this: would all the people that bragged about NASA/JPL doing so much better than the Beagle team be quiet?
Guess what. Landing a complex machine on another planet is not easy. It's simply amazing humans can even do this at all. When something goes wrong, we can't exactly reach out and tap the little thing a few times to see if it fixes it.
The teams behind both Spirit and Beagle did excellent work against the insane list of Things That Can Go Wrong in getting something from here to there. Both teams did their best, and both teams make me feel very proud of the human race.
And we all know what Enterprise really needed was an annoying genius kid that plays with nanites and goes to booty town with Ashley Judd, making the thousands of teenage geeks watching even more annoyed with him, the lucky bastard...
Well, it worked. It also helps that the show is nothing at all like Star Trek. Basic premise of every episode: Let's take a good idea from TOS or TNG, update it with a new cast and new effects, and completely ruing the meaning!
A recent episode had what seemed like interstellar terrorists on it. The theme was a sort-of "with us or against us" thing, as if the episode had come straight out of a propaganda machine. I don't need my Star Trek telling me what to think. I want my Star Trek making me think. That's what Trek was always best at: making people think about things. What if? Why? The settings was incidental. The effects were irrelevant. The story was what mattered. Enterprise ditched that and focused on everything else. The result?
Star Trek Lite: It tastes bland and isn't very filling, but people accept it anyway.
The sad thing is the cast works. I think Backula does a great job, and I loved his role in Quantum Leap. Phlox is pretty entertaining. But these few perks just can't make up for the general disarray of the series.
And don't even get me STARTED on Star Trek timeline continuity. If Trek continuity were a person, it would be time for it to seek rape consoling! The Borg episode... the Romulans? What the hell? Have the writers ever even watched any of the previous Treks?
Sorry Enterprise, but I can't say I will miss you.
I had just mentioned this exact same thing in this post.
Seriously. How many of you would vote with your dollars and simply not buy games that were severely crippled?
I know I wouldn't.
But yes, subscriber based content a la MMORPGs does seem to be the going trend, and I'm not too upset with that since you're usually paying for the continued development and patching of the game.
I do, however, take issue with being forced to pay $50 up-front for a game I have to purchase a subscription to even play.
I think MMORPGs should be free to download; since you can't play without paying it's not like you're going to pirate their game.
Anyone know of any MMORPGs that do this?
It depends on how involved these quests are. Throwing a number at me doesn't really impress me without an average time for completion of a quest. If each quest takes an hour, then yes, you have a lot of content there, but if each can be done in a few minutes... it wouldn't satisfy cross-over customers used to games like EQ, daoc, etc...
When Blizzard flat out says that the game is designed with casual gamers in mind, I really believe that seasoned MMORPG veterans are going to be a bit dissapointed. Honestly, I hope I'm wrong though. The game looks breathtaking.
Back in the days of the Diablo II stress test, we were told it would be impossible to solo in Hell difficulty games in Act IV. Guess what? That's what everyone ended up doing. It was the standard way to level as fast as possible.
Blizzard has flat out said that WoW is going to be different than other MMORPGs in that it won't require as much of a time investment. So here's what I see happening. The gamers are going to breeze through all of WoWs content upon its release in a very short amount of time, and become bored rather quickly.
I could be totally wrong on this... it is just my prediction. At least one very good thing about MMORPGs is that they are constantly being updated, so hopefully Blizzard can patch in some new monsters/areas or whatever will be needed.
Bottom line, though, is that Blizzard has a track record of underestimating the average gamer.
But do they still clip the sides as another poster here mentioned? If that's the case, my interest in IMAX would be reduced to negative numbers. I don't care about any bells and whistles that much; I want to see the whole movie though, which means entire length and no clipping/pan-n-scan nonsense.
me foaming at the mouth and making gurgling sounds of joy. me want game now!
I think that new MMORPGs should either be a free download, or start at something more reasonable, like $20-$30. The price of a full game doesn't make sense, because after I buy it, I still cannot play the game until I fork over a credit card number.
Other than that, I think the monthly fees are, for the most part, understandable.
Nelson: Ha Ha
Excuse me... did we just Slashdot a text file? I think this might be some sort of new record! Anyone out there keeping score?
Or perhaps Geocities has a very low bandwidth limit for its accounts. Actually, I'm pretty sure it does, when you figure in the amount of people that don't even try to RTFA.
There's also another possibility. In nature, creatures tend to send "signals" that they've reached a certain stage of development. This is probably why humans develop pubic hair; it's the body's way of saying that it is physically ready to produce offspring.
Perhaps the process of balding is a signal of some stage of development, too. It could mean "I'm older and wizened" or "I am a little past my prime" (sorry bald guys, I'm just guessing!). I know some people start going bald in their 20s... so perhaps it isn't a totally evolutionary response... but anyway, it is food for thought... What do the rest of you think?
Anyway, please fill me in.
I think perhaps a lot of folks from Microsoft have mod points these days...
Oh, and compact discs. I mean, 650 MB of read-only data? C'mon, that's more worthless than 8-track tapes!
Or maybe it is a fad like bell-bottoms. They go out for a while, then come back in the 24th century as part of Starfleet uniforms! Quick, everyone go check the ST Encyclopedia and see if it mentions P2P!
All joking aside, to use a trite but true statement, I think the genie is out of the bottle, cat's out of the bag, etc. The only people that think P2P is a fad are probably the people that want it to be a fad.
P2P will likely usher in new business models, and new ways of getting entertainment. The RIAA/MPAA clinging to the old ways would be, as some have pointed out, not unlike the makers of horse-drawn carriages trying to stop the production of the automobile.
Change happens. People don't usually like it, but are capable of adjusting. Corporations are not people (despite what the law may say) and simply refuse to adjust to change unless they can see an obvious, and instant, financial gain.
Technology often makes current systems obsolete. For example, gunpowder pretty much made the feudal system of government obsolete. In the future, an invention like matter transporters (beam me up!) would probably make our current governments obsolete.
P2P is making the way we purchase, oh I'm sorry, "consume" entertainment obsolete. I highly doubt the RIAA/MPAA can cripple technology enough to keep us all in the old days.