is that with strict hardware limitations, games could be designed entirely by one person -- or a small group of people -- so a more coherent artistic vision was possible.
These days, with games being created by tens or hundreds of people, what you get is the median quality of everyone's artistry, and it's a lot harder to produce a unique or artful product.
How beautiful to go back and play Crystal Castles coin-op, or Adventure on the Atari 2600, and really hear one person's unique voice.
and told me that Microsoft plans to FUD other VMware businesses into an early grave, so that five/ten years from now they can monopolize the emulation industry and make it unfeasible as a alternative to other, more bloated operating systems.
Nice to see Microsoft taking reponsibility for their mistakes, but they really should have done so when they designed Windows.
Next you'll be criticizing the quality of the beef at McDonald's.
Most Americans want to surf the web, download MP3s, and spend $2500 to watch the Matrix DVD on a two hour flight, and they'll pay the same amount for Windows whether Microsoft makes it secure, or not.
Bill Gates is a smart business man. Microsoft is a successful business. As such, the $ is the bottom line. Analzying their products from any other perspective is a waste of time.
I know you're Kevin H. Spencer. I went to your blog, then searched for your book, and found it listed for sale on the same page as the book you were reviewing.
It's in no way unreasonable for me to suggest this glowing review, which leads directly into a link for me to click on to purchase the book, should have included the sentence: "Kevin Spencer is a technical writer, and has written books on programming for OSX." That would have allowed me to make a fully informed reading of your review.
Now, everyone take a deep breath, and count to ten.
What is Intel's larger strategy? Why does it want to kill firewire? Because it legitimizes Apple's technology choices? Because it reveals how limited USB is? Enquiring minds want to know.
This wasn't a troll in the slightest, especially considering the legal battles between Apple and Sorenson about who owns the codec. I mean, if you can recompile mplayer to use the Sorenson codec for free under Darwin...
if I were a lawyer for Sorenson, this would be a nontrivial development, that's all.
But then again, I'm NAL, so maybe I should just sit in the corner with my/. dunce cap.
Now, as for the sweeping statement that Slashdot readers are intelligent people, you may be straining your credibility...
It's true, I spoke with terms that were way, way too broad on that one...
I guess what I meant is that I enjoy slashdot being all things to all people. There's a healthy mix of enthusiasts and professionals, casual and diehard alike. But when things like book reviews are posted so casually, they ring hollow. I'm not a syadmin and I found it hard to take the review seriously, and it disappoints me to think that any of the actual admins reading it might feel the same way.
No. But, for all I knew before I googled him, Kevin Spencer WAS a pastry chef.
If you're going to review a book, tell us who you are. An average Joe? The author's peer? Did you share a room with him at a UNIX conference in Toledo? Do your daughters play soccer together?
Slashdot readers are intelligent people who don't like to waste their time or be told half-truths. Any information about the identity of the reviewer that might allow us to form a more informed opinion of the book should be divulged. This isn't amateur hour. Lots of professionls use this site and as such upholding some basic journalistic tenets is a sound idea.
The question is, at what point does slashdot have to start adhering to standard ethics of journalism? Which is to say: the person who wrote the glowing review -- located conveniently over a link to purchase the book at bn.com -- should at least tell us he's an author of published works on the same subject... whose books are listed alongside those of the author he's lauding.
Notice, though, that the screen shot from Metal slug looks pretty dope.
Pac-Man was designed to look exactly as you see it on the screen, pixel for pixel -- so I'm sure the interpolation looks (or, perhaps more accurately, feels) like it's drifted a bit from what the artist(s) intended.
The graphics of Metal Slug and just about every other modern game, on the other hand, are downsampled to a given screen resolution. In those situations, the algorithm would offset the downsampling and possibly render an image that's closer, not further, from what the artists intended.
I still find myself doing web searches for pkz204g.exe all the time. Let's not beat around the bush: the Windows mainstay in the world of zip, Winzip, is awful, awful, awful. There are other decent zip guis and zip-compatible win32 archivers out there, but none of them seem quite right. PKzip should have a better win32 offering, and maybe now we'll get to see it.
Archival software should be a central component of any modern operating system. On Windows, it's an afterthought -- and not even a particularly good afterthought.
will they manufacture a wireless modem that is "always on" in 160 countries, but bumps it up to high speeds when I stroll through a Ricochet zone or a community 802.11b hot spot? Never? The Jetsons promised me way much more than this. Come on -- chop, chop -- make it happen.
We Americans (when exactly did the residents of Canada, Central America, and South America yield that moniker to the residents of the United States? I must have missed it) consume so much of the world's resources and gleefully create such a disproportionate amount of waste that the people whose nations are now our toilets are more than willing to fly airplanes into us.
SUVs exist solely to circumvent fuel emissions legislation. The original Nintendo Entertainment System was a fraction of the size everywhere else in the world as it was in the U.S. -- United States consumers didn't like the small one, so Nintendo threw it into a big gray box, and it sold like gangbusters. And, while we're talking about silicon(e), How many tit jobs do you see while walking the streets of Paris? Milan? Tokyo? Lisbon?
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah -- Transmeta. I have no clue why Transmeta's stuff didn't really fly in the states. Someone should do an expensive study.
Sorry -- I am a total idiot!! Yeah, that's really ironic, actually. Think about it for a second.
1. Linus spearheads the creation of a free operating system (linux). 2. This action, which was originally just a nerdy "can I do it???" kind of a thing, turns out to be a massive political coup, undermining the monopoly of a company (Microsoft) which represents for millions of geeks and intelligent human beings alike the dominance of greed and business over science, art, and intellectual freedom. 3. Linus' company (he works for transmeta) then needs Microsoft to survive.
When you think about it, it's really kind of a head-scratcher. I mean, of all the cruel ironies!!
The winning tickets featured "singles," or races with only one horse selected, in the first four legs of the ticket, and then every horse in the final two races. On a $2 ticket, those combinations and strategy cost $192.
Mr. Davis bet a $12 pick-six ticket, or played that exact combination six separate times, costing him $1,152. It was a highly unusual strategy for betting the pick six -- horseplayers like to cover as many combinations as possible -- and the configuration raised suspicions of New York Racing Association officials, who alerted Breeders' Cup Ltd. and the state wagering board.
Mr. Davis had opened the Catskill OTB account within two weeks of the Breeders' Cup, had deposited money on five occasions -- four increments of $500 and one of $250 -- but had not made a bet until that pick six, according to investigative sources.
The six winning tickets were each worth $428,392. In addition, by including every horse in the last two races, the bettor collected 108 of the 186 consolation payoffs for hitting five of six winners; each consolation ticket was worth $4,606.20.
snip.
It's still confusing no matter how many times I read it, but it sounds like he made six identical bets, when the point of the pick-six ticket is to place several different bets on one ticket. Anyone who can clarify this a bit more, please do.
It was a relatively expensive and complicated bet based on the cumulative outcome of six separate races... and he placed the exact same bet six times.
Once you've done that, putting a flashing marquee on your front lawn that reads "cheating the OTB out of millions of dollars is my very smart, infallible plan" is officially redundant.
The game had a style that screenshots just can't reproduce fully... the characters were 2D polygonal models, not sprites, and the animation was superb. Cinematic cut scenes were a novelty in 1991, and the cut scenes in OOTW were fantastic.
The game looked like nothing else ever seen in video game world, broke all sorts of storytelling boudaries for video games (remember how it left it to the user to figure out where the cinematics ended and the game began? Totally immersive) and was a blast to play for hours on end. It had action elements, strategy elements, puzzle-solving... and a compelling, minimal storyline.
Are the most immersive. Think Zelda 64. Think GTA3. These are games with a lot of action and a lot of attention to detail. The designers made it entirely entertaining to do nothing more than explore the landscape all day long. The attention to every detail is there in some of our other favorites, too... Space Quest I-III spring to mind, not to mention the Z-word, Zork. Even the abstract, near-wordless Out of This World -- a game I'd happily spend hours arguing is the most entertaining game of the last twenty years -- had this quality, full of the little details in the periphery that made playing the game such a successful escapist fantasy.
If my iPaq can't run a quake server on emulated PalmOS while converting my mp3s to ogg while I watch a 160x120 AVI of the matrix on my 20-minute commuter rail trip, then the terrorists have already won.
Slashdot Mirror
is that with strict hardware limitations, games could be designed entirely by one person -- or a small group of people -- so a more coherent artistic vision was possible.
These days, with games being created by tens or hundreds of people, what you get is the median quality of everyone's artistry, and it's a lot harder to produce a unique or artful product.
How beautiful to go back and play Crystal Castles coin-op, or Adventure on the Atari 2600, and really hear one person's unique voice.
and told me that Microsoft plans to FUD other VMware businesses into an early grave, so that five/ten years from now they can monopolize the emulation industry and make it unfeasible as a alternative to other, more bloated operating systems.
Boy, is he crraaaazy!!
is that you can take them off real easy, but if you don't pay for the candy bar first, the store manager gets extraordinarily argumentative.
Nice to see Microsoft taking reponsibility for their mistakes, but they really should have done so when they designed Windows.
Next you'll be criticizing the quality of the beef at McDonald's.
Most Americans want to surf the web, download MP3s, and spend $2500 to watch the Matrix DVD on a two hour flight, and they'll pay the same amount for Windows whether Microsoft makes it secure, or not.
Bill Gates is a smart business man. Microsoft is a successful business. As such, the $ is the bottom line. Analzying their products from any other perspective is a waste of time.
Community forums rule.
I know you're Kevin H. Spencer. I went to your blog, then searched for your book, and found it listed for sale on the same page as the book you were reviewing.
It's in no way unreasonable for me to suggest this glowing review, which leads directly into a link for me to click on to purchase the book, should have included the sentence: "Kevin Spencer is a technical writer, and has written books on programming for OSX." That would have allowed me to make a fully informed reading of your review.
Now, everyone take a deep breath, and count to ten.
What is Intel's larger strategy? Why does it want to kill firewire? Because it legitimizes Apple's technology choices? Because it reveals how limited USB is? Enquiring minds want to know.
This wasn't a troll in the slightest, especially considering the legal battles between Apple and Sorenson about who owns the codec. I mean, if you can recompile mplayer to use the Sorenson codec for free under Darwin...
/. dunce cap.
if I were a lawyer for Sorenson, this would be a nontrivial development, that's all.
But then again, I'm NAL, so maybe I should just sit in the corner with my
Now, as for the sweeping statement that Slashdot readers are intelligent people, you may be straining your credibility...
It's true, I spoke with terms that were way, way too broad on that one...
I guess what I meant is that I enjoy slashdot being all things to all people. There's a healthy mix of enthusiasts and professionals, casual and diehard alike. But when things like book reviews are posted so casually, they ring hollow. I'm not a syadmin and I found it hard to take the review seriously, and it disappoints me to think that any of the actual admins reading it might feel the same way.
No. But, for all I knew before I googled him, Kevin Spencer WAS a pastry chef.
If you're going to review a book, tell us who you are. An average Joe? The author's peer? Did you share a room with him at a UNIX conference in Toledo? Do your daughters play soccer together?
Slashdot readers are intelligent people who don't like to waste their time or be told half-truths. Any information about the identity of the reviewer that might allow us to form a more informed opinion of the book should be divulged. This isn't amateur hour. Lots of professionls use this site and as such upholding some basic journalistic tenets is a sound idea.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe =UTF-8&safe=off&q=%22Dave+Taylor%22+%22Kevin+Spenc er%22
The question is, at what point does slashdot have to start adhering to standard ethics of journalism? Which is to say: the person who wrote the glowing review -- located conveniently over a link to purchase the book at bn.com -- should at least tell us he's an author of published works on the same subject... whose books are listed alongside those of the author he's lauding.
Notice, though, that the screen shot from Metal slug looks pretty dope.
Pac-Man was designed to look exactly as you see it on the screen, pixel for pixel -- so I'm sure the interpolation looks (or, perhaps more accurately, feels) like it's drifted a bit from what the artist(s) intended.
The graphics of Metal Slug and just about every other modern game, on the other hand, are downsampled to a given screen resolution. In those situations, the algorithm would offset the downsampling and possibly render an image that's closer, not further, from what the artists intended.
is Sorenson's lawyers cracking their knuckles.
I still find myself doing web searches for pkz204g.exe all the time. Let's not beat around the bush: the Windows mainstay in the world of zip, Winzip, is awful, awful, awful. There are other decent zip guis and zip-compatible win32 archivers out there, but none of them seem quite right. PKzip should have a better win32 offering, and maybe now we'll get to see it.
Archival software should be a central component of any modern operating system. On Windows, it's an afterthought -- and not even a particularly good afterthought.
will they manufacture a wireless modem that is "always on" in 160 countries, but bumps it up to high speeds when I stroll through a Ricochet zone or a community 802.11b hot spot? Never? The Jetsons promised me way much more than this. Come on -- chop, chop -- make it happen.
Does the article say "Linus needs Transmeta?"
He could easily find a job with [insert favorite linux corporation].
I wouldn't be so sure about that if I were you. By which I mean: I don't have a favorite linux corporation.
We Americans (when exactly did the residents of Canada, Central America, and South America yield that moniker to the residents of the United States? I must have missed it) consume so much of the world's resources and gleefully create such a disproportionate amount of waste that the people whose nations are now our toilets are more than willing to fly airplanes into us.
SUVs exist solely to circumvent fuel emissions legislation. The original Nintendo Entertainment System was a fraction of the size everywhere else in the world as it was in the U.S. -- United States consumers didn't like the small one, so Nintendo threw it into a big gray box, and it sold like gangbusters. And, while we're talking about silicon(e), How many tit jobs do you see while walking the streets of Paris? Milan? Tokyo? Lisbon?
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah -- Transmeta. I have no clue why Transmeta's stuff didn't really fly in the states. Someone should do an expensive study.
Sorry -- I am a total idiot!! Yeah, that's really ironic, actually. Think about it for a second.
1. Linus spearheads the creation of a free operating system (linux).
2. This action, which was originally just a nerdy "can I do it???" kind of a thing, turns out to be a massive political coup, undermining the monopoly of a company (Microsoft) which represents for millions of geeks and intelligent human beings alike the dominance of greed and business over science, art, and intellectual freedom.
3. Linus' company (he works for transmeta) then needs Microsoft to survive.
When you think about it, it's really kind of a head-scratcher. I mean, of all the cruel ironies!!
Nope.
It's still confusing no matter how many times I read it, but it sounds like he made six identical bets, when the point of the pick-six ticket is to place several different bets on one ticket. Anyone who can clarify this a bit more, please do.
It was a relatively expensive and complicated bet based on the cumulative outcome of six separate races... and he placed the exact same bet six times.
Once you've done that, putting a flashing marquee on your front lawn that reads "cheating the OTB out of millions of dollars is my very smart, infallible plan" is officially redundant.
The game had a style that screenshots just can't reproduce fully... the characters were 2D polygonal models, not sprites, and the animation was superb. Cinematic cut scenes were a novelty in 1991, and the cut scenes in OOTW were fantastic.
The game looked like nothing else ever seen in video game world, broke all sorts of storytelling boudaries for video games (remember how it left it to the user to figure out where the cinematics ended and the game began? Totally immersive) and was a blast to play for hours on end. It had action elements, strategy elements, puzzle-solving... and a compelling, minimal storyline.
good game.
Are the most immersive. Think Zelda 64. Think GTA3. These are games with a lot of action and a lot of attention to detail. The designers made it entirely entertaining to do nothing more than explore the landscape all day long. The attention to every detail is there in some of our other favorites, too... Space Quest I-III spring to mind, not to mention the Z-word, Zork. Even the abstract, near-wordless Out of This World -- a game I'd happily spend hours arguing is the most entertaining game of the last twenty years -- had this quality, full of the little details in the periphery that made playing the game such a successful escapist fantasy.
If my iPaq can't run a quake server on emulated PalmOS while converting my mp3s to ogg while I watch a 160x120 AVI of the matrix on my 20-minute commuter rail trip, then the terrorists have already won.