It's a lot better analogy than I realized at the time. The road network is packetized, routed, and with redundant links. Every connection is point-to-point except for neighborhood streets which are like lans.
With this in mind you can start to understand why Robert Moses ("The Power Broker", 1974) was obsessed with road-building. There was legal power and money (he actually wrote his own state laws) but he was hooked on an engineering level too.
That's true, but Cablevision doesn't have any business-class service. Their upstream cap is just an uncomfortable part of their contract, and one that is getting more and more uncomfortable as everybody hops on bittorrent.
Verizon is finally offering 5M upstream for $179, but you can bet most moms & dads will cough up blood at that price.
Actually Cablevision's (Optimum Online) response time seems to be about one day. The reason to get a T1 is because you can only use about 10% upstream on a cable connection before they get pissed. So in terms of pricing, a T1 is actually worth the price/bandwidth for sustained use.
>I'm not convinced the article provides a solid basis for blaming choice as a problem.
It's not "choice," it's lack of integration and/or standardization. Right now on Windows I have browser choice - 3 of them. That's because all 3 of them are buggy. If one browser worked the way I wanted, all the time, then the other two would get deleted.
We used to have other choices on Windows, such as word processors and spreadsheets. They got standardized.
>Ofcourse Torment was released 7 years ago already
Well if it's 7 years old, that might be the the perfect time for me to try it out. I'm a scabby-edge sorta guy with games nowadays.
>Wat Ultima VI massive multiplayer? See, that's something new.
It is something new. There's a lot of 19-20 year old kids on WOW obsessed with leveling up, and I was probably the same age when I attacked FF7 the same way, and for the same reasons (big game, nice graphics).
But you know, FF7 ruined the RPG (would that be "hack and slash"?) concept for me, and a lot of kids quit WOW too, cuz its a chore. I played Dragon Warrior II and Phantasy Star III in my mid-twenties and had a lot more fun.
Thanks. And it's suspicious. With regards to the prostitution incident, the article freely admits that they didn't even try to reproduce it. And their excuse was, "it wouldn't reflect well on anyone involved if the money turned the lab into a brothel."
Oh really, reproducible claims wouldn't reflect well on anyone. I'll keep that in mind.
Sure, line breaks are the most important thing. When writing HTML, you have to start with the assumption that it's an ASCII document where the only formatting options you have are tabs and line breaks. If I were to teach someone HTML today, I'd start by grilling them on the use of 1, 2, and 3 BR's at a time.
Irnoically enough, their website's font size and screen width assumes the desktop is set to exactly 1024, which are two things HTML was never intended to force on its users.
>Those things are not here, I guess we can service service? Seems strange to me.
Agreed. The response is, we can offer services, but we need fewer people to do it. I would love to do management consulting at a factory in China. The problem is, a Chinese factory only needs 1 of me. In that scenario, everyone else is out of a job.
Not surprisingly, people in Europe are having fewer kids. The economists are screaming bloody hell, but I think it's going to work out for them.
I'm not surprised that HP is beating Dell in PC sales. From what I've seen over the years, HP PC's are exceedingly popular. Apparently most residential and small business customers, when they need a computer, they go to CompUSA or BestBuy. And invariably, they come home with an HP.
To step up to a Dell, you need a tech friend to say, "Just buy a Dell." Believe it or not, it's a conversation many people don't have. And once you get online to Dell, it's a slippery slope to realizing that even Dell is overpriced, and you could end up going to another online store.
HP was smart, they went after the retail channel. They never had any illusions about being the fastest PC's for the best price. Instead of building their image, like Dell, they built their brand.
There's another force at work, which is the loss of creative innocence. A lot of anime used to be screened for theaters. You had 2 hour epics that were well-written and cinematic.
Then when anime started catching on in America, a lot of anime switched to a straight-to-VHS format. Suddenly the artwork dropped (in a lot of cases) to that of a Saturday morning cartoon, flat, no shadows. You had a lot more campy anime effects, like people falling over when they get insulted or teardrops down the back of the head (in comedy) and in action, cardboard characters and ridiculous drama.
A good example is Evangelion, which I thought was derivative at the time. I knew from the first couple episodes that I was watching something that was made to fit the *mold* of what people *thought* anime was supposed to be. Looking back, Evangelion is a classic, I guess because anime has gotten worse. The lead character smokes a lot and has a messy apartment. It's funny now, but back then, the joke was *already* old and done many times in other shows. The stressed-out child tank pilot, again, it's an old concept.
Most anime comes from Japanese TV, so I'm sure there's good stuff I haven't seen. The biggest American source, Adult Swim, doesn't even scratch the surface in the comedy department. But cinematic anime is gone. Likewise, in the gaming industry, RTS is gone. Space shooters are gone. And you'd have to be crazy to play FPS, RPG, or turn-based games because they haven't changed.
Expectations have gone up, that much I'll agree with. But in games and anime, the industry got too big.
What's worse, FPS was a programming hack to get 3D working before the invention of 3D cards. Even 1980's games like Bard's Tale and Eye of the Beholder had a 3D-ish first person perspective. Likewise, early FPS games like Doom and Duke weren't 3D either. The first fully 3D FPS, as far as I know, was Quake.
I think you could make the case that 3D was the death knell for gaming. Remember Playstation games like FF7 where the backdrops were all pre-rendered two-dimensional artwork? Or truly 3D games, like Mario64, that were never sequeled? 3D Zeldas that just sucked and were boring?
I like 3D, but I don't think the game industry likes dealing with it at all.
I agree with you that realism is killing games, but there's a difference between graphical realism and simulation. Simulation is moving parts, interacting with each other. In principle, it's not a bad thing. Gran Turismo, a driving simulator, was one of the most interesting games of all.
Micromanagement is a bad thing. You don't need to micromanage a simulator, that's just how it works out for a game like Sim City. The game knows where it needs police stations, it just refuses to build them.
Actually I think Civ 4 is a chore once you get 10 or so cities. All the 4X (i.e. management) games have this same problem. The bigger your empire gets, the time it takes to complete a turn goes up to like an hour. I tend to restart 4X games rather than complete them.
From what I've seen watching people play WOW, most of the game is running forward, attacking, and running backwards. Pretty simplistic. I'm sure the 40-player clan battles are more interesting, but I really don't care.
I'm old enough to have grown up with DOS and 8-bit Nintendo, but the reason I stopped playing a lot of games has as much to do with them getting less interesting as it does with me getting older.
On the FPS front, I played Doom, Wolfenstein, Heretic, and Duke. By the time I got to Doom II, I was getting bored. Run around, shoot stuff, get blown up in a frenzy and come back to life. When Quake came out I was horrified, I thought "the only color this game has is brown." Team Fortress and shopping mall mods kept me going for a while, but ultimately a homemade shopping mall couldn't replace the settings of Duke.
On the RPG front, the last game I played was FF7. That game was so popular, we talked about it in bars. But after 40-60 hours of collecting orbs and attaching them to weapons, I realized Yuffie was stronger than everyone, and the orbs didn't do jack.
WOW is nothing more than Ultima VI - that was 15 years ago. People who play WOW are fascinated by the idea that they can level up, grow their stats, carry weapons and armor. No kidding! WOW proves that Ultima in 1992 had the right idea.
Zelda I, II, and SNES were hardcore action games. You got into fights, and you died. Look how that turned out. In Zelda 64, you wandered around an empty plain and rode a horse.
The Gamecube doesn't even have a Mario game. It has Super Smash Bros. The best game of all time, Mario 64, never had a sequel. Not even bonus levels. Mario 64 just got dropped, like it never happened.
The best Castlevania game of all time, SOTN, is still 2-D. A decent 3D Castlevania game never happened. You could see that in the 3D era, the programming was getting much, much harder.
This sounds familiar, but it sounds like the case of a scientist raising a feral child, and giving up when he realized the feral child would never become "human".
I seriously doubt that a normal human child would defer to an ape in a social environment.
>How will this affect Wikipedia's already shaky reputation with the academic world?
It doesn't. The New York Times has a journalist that pushed for war with Iraq against all available evidence. She goes to the office. She's on payroll. She prints whatever she wants under the banner of the Times.
Wikipedia is no worse than the NYT, and probably better than most.
Slashdot Mirror
>It's not perfect, but it works.
It's a lot better analogy than I realized at the time. The road network is packetized, routed, and with redundant links. Every connection is point-to-point except for neighborhood streets which are like lans.
With this in mind you can start to understand why Robert Moses ("The Power Broker", 1974) was obsessed with road-building. There was legal power and money (he actually wrote his own state laws) but he was hooked on an engineering level too.
>(usenet still tops out at 1MB/sec)
That's because usenet servers are capped. If you want unlimited usenet, get a private news account.
Is it sustainable? Can you run at 200kBps for weeks on end without pissing them off? Cuz I can get that speed too, for a few days at a time.
That's true, but Cablevision doesn't have any business-class service. Their upstream cap is just an uncomfortable part of their contract, and one that is getting more and more uncomfortable as everybody hops on bittorrent.
Verizon is finally offering 5M upstream for $179, but you can bet most moms & dads will cough up blood at that price.
Actually Cablevision's (Optimum Online) response time seems to be about one day. The reason to get a T1 is because you can only use about 10% upstream on a cable connection before they get pissed. So in terms of pricing, a T1 is actually worth the price/bandwidth for sustained use.
I admire the skepticism, but here it is:
http://obswww.unige.ch/~udry/udry_preprint.pdf
Dated April 25 so I guess it's not published yet.
>This process of atmosphere glows is responsible for the massive bloom of life in the arctic regions of the earth.
Lol?
>The Temperate Latitudes....grows the most plant life.
Lol! Ever heard of Brazil?
I *pray* you're a troll, but somehow, I think you're a space scientist.
>I'm not convinced the article provides a solid basis for blaming choice as a problem.
It's not "choice," it's lack of integration and/or standardization. Right now on Windows I have browser choice - 3 of them. That's because all 3 of them are buggy. If one browser worked the way I wanted, all the time, then the other two would get deleted.
We used to have other choices on Windows, such as word processors and spreadsheets. They got standardized.
>Ofcourse Torment was released 7 years ago already
Well if it's 7 years old, that might be the the perfect time for me to try it out. I'm a scabby-edge sorta guy with games nowadays.
>Wat Ultima VI massive multiplayer? See, that's something new.
It is something new. There's a lot of 19-20 year old kids on WOW obsessed with leveling up, and I was probably the same age when I attacked FF7 the same way, and for the same reasons (big game, nice graphics).
But you know, FF7 ruined the RPG (would that be "hack and slash"?) concept for me, and a lot of kids quit WOW too, cuz its a chore. I played Dragon Warrior II and Phantasy Star III in my mid-twenties and had a lot more fun.
Thanks. And it's suspicious. With regards to the prostitution incident, the article freely admits that they didn't even try to reproduce it. And their excuse was, "it wouldn't reflect well on anyone involved if the money turned the lab into a brothel."
Oh really, reproducible claims wouldn't reflect well on anyone. I'll keep that in mind.
Sure, line breaks are the most important thing. When writing HTML, you have to start with the assumption that it's an ASCII document where the only formatting options you have are tabs and line breaks. If I were to teach someone HTML today, I'd start by grilling them on the use of 1, 2, and 3 BR's at a time.
Irnoically enough, their website's font size and screen width assumes the desktop is set to exactly 1024, which are two things HTML was never intended to force on its users.
>Those things are not here, I guess we can service service? Seems strange to me.
Agreed. The response is, we can offer services, but we need fewer people to do it. I would love to do management consulting at a factory in China. The problem is, a Chinese factory only needs 1 of me. In that scenario, everyone else is out of a job.
Not surprisingly, people in Europe are having fewer kids. The economists are screaming bloody hell, but I think it's going to work out for them.
I'm not surprised that HP is beating Dell in PC sales. From what I've seen over the years, HP PC's are exceedingly popular. Apparently most residential and small business customers, when they need a computer, they go to CompUSA or BestBuy. And invariably, they come home with an HP.
To step up to a Dell, you need a tech friend to say, "Just buy a Dell." Believe it or not, it's a conversation many people don't have. And once you get online to Dell, it's a slippery slope to realizing that even Dell is overpriced, and you could end up going to another online store.
HP was smart, they went after the retail channel. They never had any illusions about being the fastest PC's for the best price. Instead of building their image, like Dell, they built their brand.
Anyone find it ironic that Microsoft's legal costs have reached the size of a long int?
There's another force at work, which is the loss of creative innocence. A lot of anime used to be screened for theaters. You had 2 hour epics that were well-written and cinematic.
Then when anime started catching on in America, a lot of anime switched to a straight-to-VHS format. Suddenly the artwork dropped (in a lot of cases) to that of a Saturday morning cartoon, flat, no shadows. You had a lot more campy anime effects, like people falling over when they get insulted or teardrops down the back of the head (in comedy) and in action, cardboard characters and ridiculous drama.
A good example is Evangelion, which I thought was derivative at the time. I knew from the first couple episodes that I was watching something that was made to fit the *mold* of what people *thought* anime was supposed to be. Looking back, Evangelion is a classic, I guess because anime has gotten worse. The lead character smokes a lot and has a messy apartment. It's funny now, but back then, the joke was *already* old and done many times in other shows. The stressed-out child tank pilot, again, it's an old concept.
Most anime comes from Japanese TV, so I'm sure there's good stuff I haven't seen. The biggest American source, Adult Swim, doesn't even scratch the surface in the comedy department. But cinematic anime is gone. Likewise, in the gaming industry, RTS is gone. Space shooters are gone. And you'd have to be crazy to play FPS, RPG, or turn-based games because they haven't changed.
Expectations have gone up, that much I'll agree with. But in games and anime, the industry got too big.
What's worse, FPS was a programming hack to get 3D working before the invention of 3D cards. Even 1980's games like Bard's Tale and Eye of the Beholder had a 3D-ish first person perspective. Likewise, early FPS games like Doom and Duke weren't 3D either. The first fully 3D FPS, as far as I know, was Quake.
I think you could make the case that 3D was the death knell for gaming. Remember Playstation games like FF7 where the backdrops were all pre-rendered two-dimensional artwork? Or truly 3D games, like Mario64, that were never sequeled? 3D Zeldas that just sucked and were boring?
I like 3D, but I don't think the game industry likes dealing with it at all.
I agree with you that realism is killing games, but there's a difference between graphical realism and simulation. Simulation is moving parts, interacting with each other. In principle, it's not a bad thing. Gran Turismo, a driving simulator, was one of the most interesting games of all.
Micromanagement is a bad thing. You don't need to micromanage a simulator, that's just how it works out for a game like Sim City. The game knows where it needs police stations, it just refuses to build them.
Actually I think Civ 4 is a chore once you get 10 or so cities. All the 4X (i.e. management) games have this same problem. The bigger your empire gets, the time it takes to complete a turn goes up to like an hour. I tend to restart 4X games rather than complete them.
From what I've seen watching people play WOW, most of the game is running forward, attacking, and running backwards. Pretty simplistic. I'm sure the 40-player clan battles are more interesting, but I really don't care.
I'm old enough to have grown up with DOS and 8-bit Nintendo, but the reason I stopped playing a lot of games has as much to do with them getting less interesting as it does with me getting older.
On the FPS front, I played Doom, Wolfenstein, Heretic, and Duke. By the time I got to Doom II, I was getting bored. Run around, shoot stuff, get blown up in a frenzy and come back to life. When Quake came out I was horrified, I thought "the only color this game has is brown." Team Fortress and shopping mall mods kept me going for a while, but ultimately a homemade shopping mall couldn't replace the settings of Duke.
On the RPG front, the last game I played was FF7. That game was so popular, we talked about it in bars. But after 40-60 hours of collecting orbs and attaching them to weapons, I realized Yuffie was stronger than everyone, and the orbs didn't do jack.
WOW is nothing more than Ultima VI - that was 15 years ago. People who play WOW are fascinated by the idea that they can level up, grow their stats, carry weapons and armor. No kidding! WOW proves that Ultima in 1992 had the right idea.
Zelda I, II, and SNES were hardcore action games. You got into fights, and you died. Look how that turned out. In Zelda 64, you wandered around an empty plain and rode a horse.
The Gamecube doesn't even have a Mario game. It has Super Smash Bros. The best game of all time, Mario 64, never had a sequel. Not even bonus levels. Mario 64 just got dropped, like it never happened.
The best Castlevania game of all time, SOTN, is still 2-D. A decent 3D Castlevania game never happened. You could see that in the 3D era, the programming was getting much, much harder.
Here's a question: ATAGGGCCTGATTACGT. Answer?
DNA scientists are struggling to find the answer. CS'ers know they need a decoder ring. That decoder is the organism itself.
If the organism works, not much reason to change the code.
I look forward to posting this exact same comment 40 years from now...
This sounds familiar, but it sounds like the case of a scientist raising a feral child, and giving up when he realized the feral child would never become "human".
I seriously doubt that a normal human child would defer to an ape in a social environment.
The photo is 163x110 pixels. Is this supposed to be a photo of outer space or what?
>You do realize that if AOL goes of and dies then AIM will stop working, right?
Um, who cares? You mean you can't write an IM client yourself?
IM existed before AOL. AOL was responsible for putting line breaks between everyone's thoughts.
>How will this affect Wikipedia's already shaky reputation with the academic world?
It doesn't. The New York Times has a journalist that pushed for war with Iraq against all available evidence. She goes to the office. She's on payroll. She prints whatever she wants under the banner of the Times.
Wikipedia is no worse than the NYT, and probably better than most.