I'm sorry, but when all the info you get is from people who want to make you buy the thing and lose out if you don't, making statements like that one is pretty stupid.
Obviously, I can't prove this to you, but I've got a pretty good record at sorting out winners from losers on very scant information; in fact I'm much better than "the public", which often buy crap in hordes while missing out on some very good games that fly under the radar. The patterns haven't changed much in 20 years, really, or at least very slowly.
Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are all trying to make you buy things and lose if you don't, yet my oh my are there ever differences between the presentations, or at least there will be after MS is done.
While I'm sure my list will mutate a bit between now and release, it'll actually be a miracle if these all turn out flops from my point of view.
It just made me really happy, it looks like we're finally getting the 3D mario game Nintendo's been trying to make for years but never quite pulled off.
I am hoping against hope that Sonic Team manages the same thing with Sonic on Wii. We've been waiting soooo long for a good Sonic 3D game.
(The worst part is that they haven't sucked completely. The Sonic (and Shadow in SA2) sections are actually pretty good; if they actually focused (damn it!) on speedy 3D platforming instead of weighing it down with other stupid bits it'd be awesome. We didn't see much of the Sonic game, but what we saw had nothing that looked like exploration or the silly shooting minigames... which, ironically, might be more fun on the Wii...)
I'm thinking the Wii is going to be the best console launch ever. I'm counting at least six "must own" games for me: Mario Galaxies, Twilight Princess, Red Steel, Metroid Prime 3, FF: Crystal Chronicles (assuming SquareEnix puts some decent effort into it, which I expect they will), and Dragon Quest. Plus I'm interested in some of the other things they didn't talk about during the conference, like Sadness. (Don't know if I'll buy it, but I'm interested.)
Conducting the orchestra in real time as the opening was sheer brilliance.
Definitely more compelling to me than the Dreamcast, which in my (highly-debatable, of course) opinion held the previous best launch lineup, at least in the US.
Personally, I agree with you. But it seems to be a big deal to a lot of people. I don't get why, but people are allowed to have different opinions than me.
So, they're cutting a long-standing feature to trade in for a novel feature that (after reading more about it) shows every sign of being half-assed that I'd expect to see. This has the stench of a management decision made against the recommendation of the engineers, and I bet the engineers about went ballistic when they were informed it had to be ready for E3.
I don't know about Japan, but I'm smelling Microsoft/Nintendo for this next generation, and I'm increasingly wondering if it might not be ~3:1 in Nintendo's favor in three years (which is about the earliest I'd say we can "call" the results of this generation). The opening lineup for the Wii may even best the Dreamcast's opening lineup, which was spectacular for the time (as long as you could get your RPG fix somewhere else...).
but in the long run it'll be nice to have all those features in the baseline system so game authors can design around them.
In the long run... that's what the PS4 is for.
Nice argument at first blush, but crumbles if you look at it, especially since the price-performance curve isn't linear at all; the last few % are also the most expensive. It's possible Nintendo went too far down the curve, but it seems certain to me Sony went too far up. By the time the PS3 comes down to a sane price, it may already be a Microsoft/Nintendo market.
Planning for the long term now is a losing proposition when you can plan for "the long term", which will then be the "short term", later, with all the Moore's law benefits you get just by sitting on your ass and twiddling your thumbs.
I suspect it was because of Nintendo because I think otherwise we would have heard something about it before, or at least hints.
My first thought.
This is a big risk for them. Regardless of how it turns out, they've legitimized Nintendo in the eyes of the Sony-Can-Do-No-Wrong hardcore crowd, which is the crowd Sony really had locked up.
However, getting something like this right takes time and a lot of play-testing. If this was a last-minute addition and it's basically a check-box feature, it is extremely like it will not work as well and may even be pratically useless.
Obviously, I can't know; this is just my engineering gut feature. I think if the currently-playable titles pretty much don't use this feature, we can assume it was a last-minute addition.
I await reviews from people who have used both capabilities. But in light of the legimization effect, it had better be a quality, useful implementation, or they're going to be throwing away one of their most useful arguments against Nintendo ("it's a gimmick", certainly a popular opinion) for little gain. Half-assed is worse than no-assed.
Standard flash media for what the PSP uses Sony Memory sticks for, user-added movies and music, not games themselves which will still come on proprietary carts. That's why in my phrase "cartrigdes and standard flash media", it says "and" and not "in the form of".
If I had to guess, they'd simply completely block execution off of the flash media, which can be done very effectively if they put their mind to it (never allowing it into memory marked as "executable").
Odds are it'll be a PSP that uses cartridges and standard flash media instead of proprietary Sony media, and has slightly better graphics, simply because it came later. Maybe Xbox-ish level graphics, if you sized proportionally to a full-screen TV, which implies something about a quarter as powerful.
It might succeed, because I think the PSP screwed up by trying to use discs and not catridges. There may yet be room on that end of the market for a higher-end game machine with better graphics, but without the disadvatages of using discs.
On the other hand, I'm inclined to bet it won't unless they can do something about the Nintendo creativity onslaught, which is already buying them dominance in the handheld market, and I'm one of the people who thinks the Wii has at least an even chance (33%+) to dominate the next TV console generation. First make your games fun, then make them good looking.
I think you're leaping to conclusions. Half the Xbox360 team has been tasked to build a "portable gaming console", not a portable XBox 360, which would just be absurd.
You won't always have a perfect balance as far as how many hours you're outside of the office, and how many hours you're inside the office...
Why not? (Assuming the guy means not like perfect to within a Planck constant, but a more normal kind of perfect.)
What's really so damned unique about the game industry that makes it need 110 hour weeks? What's really so damned unique about the game industry that it makes it immune to the productivity nose dive that occurs after just a few 60 hour weeks?
The real problem here is the fundamental assumption that there's something inevitable about this way of life. But somehow, almost nobody else needs to do this. So what's unique about the game industry?
High stakes? Competition? Tight cycles? Winner-take-all market? High quality requirement? None of these are unique to the game industry, not even in combination.
My personal opinion, informed on experience, is that the software industry in general is not unique. It is not immune to extremely-well-documented productivity declines that occur with excessive work weeks. It's just really, really hard to measure productivity, so people substitute time measurements instead as the nearest measurable quantity and never ask what it's measuring. The whole software industry has this disease; the game development community has an especially acute case, brought on by ignorance, pigheadedness, and (perhaps more important) the "need" for all these hours being determined by people who probably don't have to work them, or have no reason not to and can't imagine why anybody wouldn't.
If there is one Big Bang and infinite expansion with no Big Crunch, then we live in an Eternal Stasis universe; we're just in the infinitesimal blip before the stasis sets in.
At the risk of being a bit of a spoiler about the Heechee saga, it contains an alien race of energy beings that dominated during the beginning of the universe, before the universe became matter-dominated. They're manipulating the crunch of this universe and waiting for the crunch to create a universe on the next iteration that will be more conducive to their kind of existence.
Even a beam of light consisting of perfectly parallel rays digerges due to equal charges repelling.
That makes no sense. One of the reasons photons are so exciting for use in computing is that they don't interact with each other in any significant way. (Technically, they interact gravitationally, but that's of little consequence.)
I was listening up to this point, but I'd want to see some support of lasers diverging due to charge repulsion. I'm prepared to believe that the effect can arise in a material medium, just not on the basis of a single Slashdot post:). I did try some likely Google searches, but I kept getting stuff about ion beams, where I wouldn't believe it if there wasn't charge repulsion spreading. (Maybe you were thinking ion beams?)
What unique qualities make an RPG different from other games?
Call me an RPG fundamentalist. A Role-Playing Game is a game where the primary focus is on you playing the role of some kind of human-type thing. It is not a binary distinction, it is a continuum.
On the far non-RPG end, we have things like puzzle games. Tetris is not an RPG. Quake is not an RPG, because it's about blowing things up. Something like Half-Life gets a little RPG-ness; I've never played it so I don't know how much but I get the impression it's mostly a shooter. Old-school adventure games are not RPGs, they're about the puzzles, not the role.
On the far RPG end, we have things like Planescape: Torment where you play a very open-ended character with many distinct decisions to be made.
(The hypothetical perfect RPG would be simply an alternate world with no particular storyline, merely potential storylines. This doesn't exist right now, really, although Second Life probably comes closest.)
The reason I give a bit of an advantage to the RPGs where you can choose the roles is you get more Role per Game, but there is nothing "wrong" with something like FFX, it just has one "Role", which certainly qualifies as a Role-Playing Game.
Combat mechanics are certainly extremely common, but ultimately unnecessary; you can have RPGs that have no traditional combat, or have FPS-style combat, or other things.
I'm constantly running into segfaults in mplayer. I don't know if it's just a whacky codec or what, but no matter what the input, no player should ever segfault on any media.
While that is certainly literally true, it's worth pointing out that codecs are bits of code that are pushed hardest to extract every bit of performance out of them. Such hyper-optimization tends to result in other qualities of the code taking longer to catch up when compared to a more normal type of program, such as "stability" and "readability".
Is that bad? Yeah, sure, whynot. Is there a way around it? Probably not; because of the desire for performance the codecs are often flying without a net, including significant chunks of assembler. Changing a codec to, say, Python would cut out the segfaults, but would cost a lot of performance; I'll pull a number out of my ass and call it at least 1000x slower.
When interviewed, the majority of congressmen said point blank that person to person "dormroom" sharing of music was fair use and in no way objectionable.
Would you, in repsonse to a single argument from a stranger? Would anyone you know?
It is extremely unlikely that I would; generally I've heard all the arguments before. (People often mistake that for "arrogance" or "close-mindedness", but it is neither to hear all arguments and make a decision; after that, if you want to change someone's mind you'd better improve the arguments somehow, either by making them better or making news ones, or you're not going to get far.)
However, many people don't think issues through at all, for many reasons, some good, some bad, and for them one solid logical argument could make them change their mind. To take one common example, it is possible to hold a set of core beliefs that result in you having one opinion about abortion, and the opposite about capital punishment. It isn't automatically "hypocrisy" if you've got good reasons for both. But if you haven't thought it through and just have emotional feelings about the two topics, somebody might sway you one way or the other by pointing out that if you're against abortion you ought to be against the death penalty, because "pro-life". (Or the complementary argument.) So one little argument might make them change their mind, although in this case the direction is unpredictable and you might just make them all the more firmly disagree with you...
Another example on the flip side, albeit harmless, I have no firm opinions regarding the style and fashion problems and trends of today. I simply haven't thought about it, and it would take very little to convince me that today's trend utterly sucks, or that something considered awful is really nice looking. (Granted, this isn't as important to us, but the things I consider important I think about so I don't have a ready example. And some people do consider this important...)
Yes, I think there are many people out there who could be swayed by one logical argument. I consider it sad that it's so easy to not get even one logical argument on a topic. You have to go looking for them. Of course, it's so much easier to just yell, scream, call people names, and firmly ignore any evidence to the contrary of whatever you believe that what do you expect? Logical arguments are hard. I set out to make my arguments about free speech and copyright issues logical and rigorous, and it took me three years and turned out book length. (Totally serious.) Logic is hard.
It's also worth pointing out that humans had access to the scout craft for several decades and had evidently gotten quite far into the computer and control systems, as evidenced by their abilities to turn the shields on and off at will. Depending on the architecture of the computer system, it is not implausible to think that the info from the ship could be used as a virus; the aliens seemed to go for big and monolithic attack architecture, and it's plausible that they had no security in the computer itself, instead depending on social structures or even some degree of telepathic monitoring of the computer users.
If we could run our systems that way, we would in a heartbeat. Security is hard. It is not implausible that a virus attack on their systems completely and utterly blindsided them.
It's even faintly plausible that the system is so wide open that the virus is the rough equivalent of "Shut everything down and, if it turns on again, shut it off." If the system is open enough for that virus to work, it wouldn't take long even to write it. (We'll ignore the laughing skull as a Hollywood elaboration; NO serious programmer, given the stakes, would have added that element because it's just too dangerous.)
However, it should be pointed out that I think this is not really how the movie producers were thinking of it. It's an action flick, not a computer flick. But accidental or otherwise, it does so happen that what you can derive from the psychology of the aliens does match how their computers seem to work. It's more cohesive than you might think if you assume the alien computers just have to work in every way like human computers, which is a bad assumption.
# # And Now, The Ugly Truth Laid Bare: # # In Netscape Navigator 1.0 through 4.0, the history.db file was just a # Berkeley DBM file. You could trivially bind to it from Perl, and # pull out the URLs and last-access time. In Mozilla, this has been # replaced with a "Mork" database for which no tools exist. # # Let me make it clear that McCusker is a complete barking lunatic. # This is just about the stupidest file format I've ever seen. # # http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/arch/mork/primer. txt # http://jwz.livejournal.com/312657.html # http://www.jwz.org/doc/mailsum.html # http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24143 8 # # In brief, let's count its sins: # # - Two different numerical namespaces that overlap. # # - It can't decide what kind of character-quoting syntax to use: # Backslash? Hex encoding with dollar-sign? # # - C++ line comments are allowed sometimes, but sometimes// is just # a pair of characters in a URL. # # - It goes to all this serious compression effort (two different # string-interning hash tables) and then writes out Unicode strings # without using UTF-8: writes out the unpacked wchar_t characters! # # - Worse, it hex-encodes each wchar_t with a 3-byte encoding, # meaning the file size will be 3x or 6x (depending on whether # whchar_t is 2 bytes or 4 bytes.) # # - It masquerades as a "textual" file format when in fact it's just # another binary-blob file, except that it represents all its magic # numbers in ASCII. It's not human-readable, it's not hand-editable, # so the only benefit there is to the fact that it uses short lines # and doesn't use binary characters is that it makes the file bigger. # Oh wait, my mistake, that isn't actually a benefit at all. # # Pure comedy.
I was wondering about that claim. How much harder can "Wii" be than "kawaii", one of the more popular words in Japan? I haven't learned much about Japanese, but it seems like "Wee" would even be their native reading of "Wii", since "i" is(/is very close to) the English hard "e".
It's English where the name is odd and invites mispronunciation; the only native word in common use that has two "i"s in a row is "skiing". (I just grepped/usr/dict/words and I'd say the next most common one would be Naziism; everything else is foreign import, Latin names of things, or things I don't recognize at all ("oii"?).) Might have missed one in a quick skim, but skiing is definitely by far the most popular.)
which includes the nugget that nobody prior to the announcement had registered any tradmarks or websites with the Wii name.
I thought about that, and my conclusion is that this was most likely simply an oversight.
On first blush, it may seem like evidence that they don't intend to keep the Wii name, but in reality, even if they don't intend to keep the name, they would still trademark it, to prevent people from swooping in later and using it for the publicity, even if only a week's worth.
So it's not very compelling evidence.
My gut tells me that stupid or not, Wii it is, and hopes otherwise are wishful thinking. I hope not and will be glad to be proven wrong, but the conspiracy theories just don't make sense. What does Nintendo gain from giving their console a stupid name temporarily that they couldn't have gotten in better ways? I don't think there's a good answer for that.
(Most people reason about motivations backwards. When asking what the motivation of a given action is, you shouldn't ask "Does motivation X explain move Y?" The correct question is, "Given motivation X, does the actor consider move Y to be their best move?" The first question incorrectly comes up "yes" too often to be useful. If Nintendo wanted lots of publicity right then, I think there were better ways to do it then by deliberately sabotaging their name, even for a brief period of time; big companies have learned that names are too important.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but when all the info you get is from people who want to make you buy the thing and lose out if you don't, making statements like that one is pretty stupid.
Obviously, I can't prove this to you, but I've got a pretty good record at sorting out winners from losers on very scant information; in fact I'm much better than "the public", which often buy crap in hordes while missing out on some very good games that fly under the radar. The patterns haven't changed much in 20 years, really, or at least very slowly.
Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are all trying to make you buy things and lose if you don't, yet my oh my are there ever differences between the presentations, or at least there will be after MS is done.
While I'm sure my list will mutate a bit between now and release, it'll actually be a miracle if these all turn out flops from my point of view.
It just made me really happy, it looks like we're finally getting the 3D mario game Nintendo's been trying to make for years but never quite pulled off.
I am hoping against hope that Sonic Team manages the same thing with Sonic on Wii. We've been waiting soooo long for a good Sonic 3D game.
(The worst part is that they haven't sucked completely. The Sonic (and Shadow in SA2) sections are actually pretty good; if they actually focused (damn it!) on speedy 3D platforming instead of weighing it down with other stupid bits it'd be awesome. We didn't see much of the Sonic game, but what we saw had nothing that looked like exploration or the silly shooting minigames... which, ironically, might be more fun on the Wii...)
I'm thinking the Wii is going to be the best console launch ever. I'm counting at least six "must own" games for me: Mario Galaxies, Twilight Princess, Red Steel, Metroid Prime 3, FF: Crystal Chronicles (assuming SquareEnix puts some decent effort into it, which I expect they will), and Dragon Quest. Plus I'm interested in some of the other things they didn't talk about during the conference, like Sadness. (Don't know if I'll buy it, but I'm interested.)
Conducting the orchestra in real time as the opening was sheer brilliance.
Definitely more compelling to me than the Dreamcast, which in my (highly-debatable, of course) opinion held the previous best launch lineup, at least in the US.
Personally, I agree with you. But it seems to be a big deal to a lot of people. I don't get why, but people are allowed to have different opinions than me.
First, "engineering gut feature" -> "engineering gut feeling". Oops.
Second, it turns out they cut rumble to support the sensors, for obvious reasons.
So, they're cutting a long-standing feature to trade in for a novel feature that (after reading more about it) shows every sign of being half-assed that I'd expect to see. This has the stench of a management decision made against the recommendation of the engineers, and I bet the engineers about went ballistic when they were informed it had to be ready for E3.
I don't know about Japan, but I'm smelling Microsoft/Nintendo for this next generation, and I'm increasingly wondering if it might not be ~3:1 in Nintendo's favor in three years (which is about the earliest I'd say we can "call" the results of this generation). The opening lineup for the Wii may even best the Dreamcast's opening lineup, which was spectacular for the time (as long as you could get your RPG fix somewhere else...).
but in the long run it'll be nice to have all those features in the baseline system so game authors can design around them.
In the long run... that's what the PS4 is for.
Nice argument at first blush, but crumbles if you look at it, especially since the price-performance curve isn't linear at all; the last few % are also the most expensive. It's possible Nintendo went too far down the curve, but it seems certain to me Sony went too far up. By the time the PS3 comes down to a sane price, it may already be a Microsoft/Nintendo market.
Planning for the long term now is a losing proposition when you can plan for "the long term", which will then be the "short term", later, with all the Moore's law benefits you get just by sitting on your ass and twiddling your thumbs.
I suspect it was because of Nintendo because I think otherwise we would have heard something about it before, or at least hints.
My first thought.
This is a big risk for them. Regardless of how it turns out, they've legitimized Nintendo in the eyes of the Sony-Can-Do-No-Wrong hardcore crowd, which is the crowd Sony really had locked up.
However, getting something like this right takes time and a lot of play-testing. If this was a last-minute addition and it's basically a check-box feature, it is extremely like it will not work as well and may even be pratically useless.
Obviously, I can't know; this is just my engineering gut feature. I think if the currently-playable titles pretty much don't use this feature, we can assume it was a last-minute addition.
I await reviews from people who have used both capabilities. But in light of the legimization effect, it had better be a quality, useful implementation, or they're going to be throwing away one of their most useful arguments against Nintendo ("it's a gimmick", certainly a popular opinion) for little gain. Half-assed is worse than no-assed.
Standard flash media for what the PSP uses Sony Memory sticks for, user-added movies and music, not games themselves which will still come on proprietary carts. That's why in my phrase "cartrigdes and standard flash media", it says "and" and not "in the form of".
If I had to guess, they'd simply completely block execution off of the flash media, which can be done very effectively if they put their mind to it (never allowing it into memory marked as "executable").
Odds are it'll be a PSP that uses cartridges and standard flash media instead of proprietary Sony media, and has slightly better graphics, simply because it came later. Maybe Xbox-ish level graphics, if you sized proportionally to a full-screen TV, which implies something about a quarter as powerful.
It might succeed, because I think the PSP screwed up by trying to use discs and not catridges. There may yet be room on that end of the market for a higher-end game machine with better graphics, but without the disadvatages of using discs.
On the other hand, I'm inclined to bet it won't unless they can do something about the Nintendo creativity onslaught, which is already buying them dominance in the handheld market, and I'm one of the people who thinks the Wii has at least an even chance (33%+) to dominate the next TV console generation. First make your games fun, then make them good looking.
I think you're leaping to conclusions. Half the Xbox360 team has been tasked to build a "portable gaming console", not a portable XBox 360, which would just be absurd.
Naw, just bias. I wouldn't call what they do "reporting".
He's okay when he's not doing opinion pieces, though.
With Orlowski, every piece is an opinion piece.
The guy's shameless. For pete's sake, he links to the source of the quote he twisted, which makes it clear it has been twisted.
He's either got no concern for truth, or has no ability to discern it.
You won't always have a perfect balance as far as how many hours you're outside of the office, and how many hours you're inside the office...
Why not? (Assuming the guy means not like perfect to within a Planck constant, but a more normal kind of perfect.)
What's really so damned unique about the game industry that makes it need 110 hour weeks? What's really so damned unique about the game industry that it makes it immune to the productivity nose dive that occurs after just a few 60 hour weeks?
The real problem here is the fundamental assumption that there's something inevitable about this way of life. But somehow, almost nobody else needs to do this. So what's unique about the game industry?
High stakes? Competition? Tight cycles? Winner-take-all market? High quality requirement? None of these are unique to the game industry, not even in combination.
My personal opinion, informed on experience, is that the software industry in general is not unique. It is not immune to extremely-well-documented productivity declines that occur with excessive work weeks. It's just really, really hard to measure productivity, so people substitute time measurements instead as the nearest measurable quantity and never ask what it's measuring. The whole software industry has this disease; the game development community has an especially acute case, brought on by ignorance, pigheadedness, and (perhaps more important) the "need" for all these hours being determined by people who probably don't have to work them, or have no reason not to and can't imagine why anybody wouldn't.
If there is one Big Bang and infinite expansion with no Big Crunch, then we live in an Eternal Stasis universe; we're just in the infinitesimal blip before the stasis sets in.
At the risk of being a bit of a spoiler about the Heechee saga, it contains an alien race of energy beings that dominated during the beginning of the universe, before the universe became matter-dominated. They're manipulating the crunch of this universe and waiting for the crunch to create a universe on the next iteration that will be more conducive to their kind of existence.
Even a beam of light consisting of perfectly parallel rays digerges due to equal charges repelling.
:). I did try some likely Google searches, but I kept getting stuff about ion beams, where I wouldn't believe it if there wasn't charge repulsion spreading. (Maybe you were thinking ion beams?)
That makes no sense. One of the reasons photons are so exciting for use in computing is that they don't interact with each other in any significant way. (Technically, they interact gravitationally, but that's of little consequence.)
I was listening up to this point, but I'd want to see some support of lasers diverging due to charge repulsion. I'm prepared to believe that the effect can arise in a material medium, just not on the basis of a single Slashdot post
What unique qualities make an RPG different from other games?
Call me an RPG fundamentalist. A Role-Playing Game is a game where the primary focus is on you playing the role of some kind of human-type thing. It is not a binary distinction, it is a continuum.
On the far non-RPG end, we have things like puzzle games. Tetris is not an RPG. Quake is not an RPG, because it's about blowing things up. Something like Half-Life gets a little RPG-ness; I've never played it so I don't know how much but I get the impression it's mostly a shooter. Old-school adventure games are not RPGs, they're about the puzzles, not the role.
On the far RPG end, we have things like Planescape: Torment where you play a very open-ended character with many distinct decisions to be made.
(The hypothetical perfect RPG would be simply an alternate world with no particular storyline, merely potential storylines. This doesn't exist right now, really, although Second Life probably comes closest.)
The reason I give a bit of an advantage to the RPGs where you can choose the roles is you get more Role per Game, but there is nothing "wrong" with something like FFX, it just has one "Role", which certainly qualifies as a Role-Playing Game.
Combat mechanics are certainly extremely common, but ultimately unnecessary; you can have RPGs that have no traditional combat, or have FPS-style combat, or other things.
I'm constantly running into segfaults in mplayer. I don't know if it's just a whacky codec or what, but no matter what the input, no player should ever segfault on any media.
While that is certainly literally true, it's worth pointing out that codecs are bits of code that are pushed hardest to extract every bit of performance out of them. Such hyper-optimization tends to result in other qualities of the code taking longer to catch up when compared to a more normal type of program, such as "stability" and "readability".
Is that bad? Yeah, sure, whynot. Is there a way around it? Probably not; because of the desire for performance the codecs are often flying without a net, including significant chunks of assembler. Changing a codec to, say, Python would cut out the segfaults, but would cost a lot of performance; I'll pull a number out of my ass and call it at least 1000x slower.
You can't have it all.
When interviewed, the majority of congressmen said point blank that person to person "dormroom" sharing of music was fair use and in no way objectionable.
Sounds interesting. Link?
Would you, in repsonse to a single argument from a stranger? Would anyone you know?
It is extremely unlikely that I would; generally I've heard all the arguments before. (People often mistake that for "arrogance" or "close-mindedness", but it is neither to hear all arguments and make a decision; after that, if you want to change someone's mind you'd better improve the arguments somehow, either by making them better or making news ones, or you're not going to get far.)
However, many people don't think issues through at all, for many reasons, some good, some bad, and for them one solid logical argument could make them change their mind. To take one common example, it is possible to hold a set of core beliefs that result in you having one opinion about abortion, and the opposite about capital punishment. It isn't automatically "hypocrisy" if you've got good reasons for both. But if you haven't thought it through and just have emotional feelings about the two topics, somebody might sway you one way or the other by pointing out that if you're against abortion you ought to be against the death penalty, because "pro-life". (Or the complementary argument.) So one little argument might make them change their mind, although in this case the direction is unpredictable and you might just make them all the more firmly disagree with you...
Another example on the flip side, albeit harmless, I have no firm opinions regarding the style and fashion problems and trends of today. I simply haven't thought about it, and it would take very little to convince me that today's trend utterly sucks, or that something considered awful is really nice looking. (Granted, this isn't as important to us, but the things I consider important I think about so I don't have a ready example. And some people do consider this important...)
Yes, I think there are many people out there who could be swayed by one logical argument. I consider it sad that it's so easy to not get even one logical argument on a topic. You have to go looking for them. Of course, it's so much easier to just yell, scream, call people names, and firmly ignore any evidence to the contrary of whatever you believe that what do you expect? Logical arguments are hard. I set out to make my arguments about free speech and copyright issues logical and rigorous, and it took me three years and turned out book length. (Totally serious.) Logic is hard.
"info from the ship could be used as a virus" -> "info from the ship could be enough to know how to construct a virus"
It's also worth pointing out that humans had access to the scout craft for several decades and had evidently gotten quite far into the computer and control systems, as evidenced by their abilities to turn the shields on and off at will. Depending on the architecture of the computer system, it is not implausible to think that the info from the ship could be used as a virus; the aliens seemed to go for big and monolithic attack architecture, and it's plausible that they had no security in the computer itself, instead depending on social structures or even some degree of telepathic monitoring of the computer users.
If we could run our systems that way, we would in a heartbeat. Security is hard. It is not implausible that a virus attack on their systems completely and utterly blindsided them.
It's even faintly plausible that the system is so wide open that the virus is the rough equivalent of "Shut everything down and, if it turns on again, shut it off." If the system is open enough for that virus to work, it wouldn't take long even to write it. (We'll ignore the laughing skull as a Hollywood elaboration; NO serious programmer, given the stakes, would have added that element because it's just too dangerous.)
However, it should be pointed out that I think this is not really how the movie producers were thinking of it. It's an action flick, not a computer flick. But accidental or otherwise, it does so happen that what you can derive from the psychology of the aliens does match how their computers seem to work. It's more cohesive than you might think if you assume the alien computers just have to work in every way like human computers, which is a bad assumption.
I was wondering about that claim. How much harder can "Wii" be than "kawaii", one of the more popular words in Japan? I haven't learned much about Japanese, but it seems like "Wee" would even be their native reading of "Wii", since "i" is(/is very close to) the English hard "e".
/usr/dict/words and I'd say the next most common one would be Naziism; everything else is foreign import, Latin names of things, or things I don't recognize at all ("oii"?).) Might have missed one in a quick skim, but skiing is definitely by far the most popular.)
It's English where the name is odd and invites mispronunciation; the only native word in common use that has two "i"s in a row is "skiing". (I just grepped
which includes the nugget that nobody prior to the announcement had registered any tradmarks or websites with the Wii name.
I thought about that, and my conclusion is that this was most likely simply an oversight.
On first blush, it may seem like evidence that they don't intend to keep the Wii name, but in reality, even if they don't intend to keep the name, they would still trademark it, to prevent people from swooping in later and using it for the publicity, even if only a week's worth.
So it's not very compelling evidence.
My gut tells me that stupid or not, Wii it is, and hopes otherwise are wishful thinking. I hope not and will be glad to be proven wrong, but the conspiracy theories just don't make sense. What does Nintendo gain from giving their console a stupid name temporarily that they couldn't have gotten in better ways? I don't think there's a good answer for that.
(Most people reason about motivations backwards. When asking what the motivation of a given action is, you shouldn't ask "Does motivation X explain move Y?" The correct question is, "Given motivation X, does the actor consider move Y to be their best move?" The first question incorrectly comes up "yes" too often to be useful. If Nintendo wanted lots of publicity right then, I think there were better ways to do it then by deliberately sabotaging their name, even for a brief period of time; big companies have learned that names are too important.)