Perhaps, however it depends on the cross-section you look at.
For one, there was no such game at E3--which was the basis of the article. Two, there has been no such thing in the console market for a great many years due to regulatory influence. (Basically, yes, you will find sexually explicit games in the PC sector, but that's not what the article was talking about either.) Three, yes you will find such games in Japan even on console, but that's apples to oranges--the amount of sexually explicit acts in media is much higher there in both movies and general media. Also, the amount in games even in that situation is far less than that portrayed in movies, anime, and manga (the latter being the foremost offender.)
Any way you look at it, though, comparing mainstream games to mainstream movies will end up with the result I mentioned in my firest post. Comparing it to any of the games that you refer to would require me to start including the porn industry as "movies". As far as casual sex acts, the general Hollywood industry is *far* more likely to ever exploit them than video games.
You can compare mainstream to mainstream, porn to porn, but not mainstream to porn.
I mean, really. A guy going on and on about the "ghetto" nature of a few floozies stading at the booths is supposedly outweighing the over-sexxed nature of Hollywood? I think now.
If there's any industry that follows the "Sex Sells" motto, it would be that of the film industry. Sure, it's nice and all to idealistically blame videogames for the proliferation of viloence and sex in today's society, but it does little to explain the existance of the *realistic* violence and sex-laden nature of the movie and TV industry.
I suppose that using Brittney Spears and her hips to sell Pepsi is somehow more justified than having a "Booth Babes." I'm not saying the latter is better than the former, but it is definitly comparable. When following that line, the movie industry definitly carries protrayals of sex to a far more extreme nature than videogames ever could get away with. How many movies released last year had graphic sex scenes? How many videogames? Whatever high number you come up with for movies, you're still comparing it to a big *zero* in the gaming industry.
But, of course... With Hollywood, I guess it's considered "mature" and "artistic"--with games it's "Ghetto" and the "downfall of women."
That most people *like* GUI's for when they're using a program. While I probably would have little problem going to a text-based interface (I grew up with DOS, after all), but I'd imagine most people who would be using a POS system wouldn't find it as natural.
I guess it's rooted in one of the rules I've learned since becoming a web developer... People Like Widgets, Buttons, and Pop-Up Windows all in Pretty Colors Complimented by Ugly Animated Graphics.
Sad but true.:-)
Re:People only use Mozilla to spite MS...
on
Mozilla 0.9 Out
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· Score: 1
Thank you for understanding my point...
I will readily admit that NS6/Mozilla are pretty good renderers. The problem with that being most Netscape users do not use them. (As mentioned, NS6 has less that 1% of the browser market share, Mozilla is slightly higher. Still it only equals about 3%.) Trying to make pages work in Netscape 4.x is a chore, and really does require overspecification of just plain *bad* code.
Also as I mentioned before, I hand-write all my code. I'm also a programmer. So, basically, all my code is XHTML-ready. It is clean, concise, and compliant to all standards. Netscape 4.x (and Netscape 6/Mozilla at times) simply ignores my intentions and does wacky things to the page. I use no IE-specific tags, always nest my code properly, and follow all the rules when I build the site--then I have to go back and shuffle things around, throw in oddball tags here and there, and heavily overuse the <img src='blankpixel.gif' width='1' height='1'> technique just to get the page to look like something other than a big blob on Netscape 4.x
Personally, I *hope* Mozilla gets good and replaces all the stubborn Netscape 4.x people so that I don't have to spend hours "fixing" my HTML.:-)
Re:People only use Mozilla to spite MS...
on
Mozilla 0.9 Out
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· Score: 1
Well, I work for a web development firm. We don't "webmaster" pages, we develop, design, etc. The term "Webmaster" usually refers to someone who knows a smidgen of HTML paid to keep the site updated. (Which is moot in our case since we design database-driven websites with user backends.)
Anyway, while Netscape is "standards complient" that doesn't make it better. The problem with it is that it displays everything it supports *exactly* to standards, then fails to support the *other half* of the standards that can make the page look decent. IE support *almost all* the standards *nearly* perfectly.
One of the main differences that Netscape uses don't realize (and you really can't notice unless you side-by-side) is that Netscape is terribly impractical about standards while the IE programmers seem like they perhaps thought a bit about the W3C "recommendations" (and note, they *are* recommendations) when they implemented them.
Case in point. Generic style of TD { line-height: 18px; } You would have to do this to get your text to display with that line-height in all cases (just choosing "body" won't work. You need body, table, and td). This will work just dandy in IE, however Netscape went a bit too far.
Netscape applies the line-height to ALL TD's, epmty or not, which IE only applies them to TD's with text in them. Since line-height is a text attribute, this makes perfect sense. But it self-destructs in Netscape and makes it impossible to create smaller (notably single-tall spacers or lines) TD's. The only way would be to manually apply *another* style to every TD you didn't want that way, or use inline styles (did I mention Netscape chokes on inline styles?) which you shouldn't have to do.
Unfortunatly, we *do* have to spend hours Netscpae-proofing every page. Usually a page is ready to go and look perfect in IE in about 1/4 of the time it takes to make sure Netscape doesn't break--and we all hand-code (with Homesite), no WYSIWYG to mess things up. Besides style based things, there are just simple cases where Netscape will die just because it doens't like the combination of widths you put in a table (I.E. a row of 20,1,100%,1,20 in order to make sure it scales for different resolutions will cause, for no explicible reason, will cause the TD's with widths of 1 to display as widths of 5.)
There are plenty of reasons *why* a designer would forgo developing a Netscape version of the site--as it would cut a large amount of time and effort off the project. It also doesn't hurt the logic that IE has over an 80% market share--even a higher percentage in the business sector--and Netscape 6/Mozilla is only at about 2%-5% (The rest being Netscape 4.x. And don't even *try* to tell me that Netscape 4.x support standards. It doesn't. Not even close.)
There is something to say about a browser that displays pages how they were meant to appear then to one that blindly follows logic-void implementation of standards-recommendations.
Re:People only use Mozilla to spite MS...
on
Mozilla 0.9 Out
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· Score: 1
Some of us can't run IE. And WTF does Outlook have to do with your point?
Well... Because there's quite a bit of commenting about speed improvments to the Messanger engine as well as the browser? Perhaps that's why? I'm just talking about what I see, not pushing an agenda.
People only use Mozilla to spite MS...
on
Mozilla 0.9 Out
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· Score: 1
...not for performance. I'm sorry if anyone thinks this is a troll, but really.
I'm a web developer and use all the browsers to test sites daily. I can most assuradly say that IE is worlds faster than any version of Netscape--and probably around 5 times as fast as Netscape 4.x *at least*. (I sit there and just *wait* for pages to load instead of having them load on the spot.)
Netscape 6 and Mozilla are better, but there no where *near* as fast as IE 5.5 or IE 6b. This is not MS bias, this is just the truth.
I'm all for people using whatever version of Netscape for anti-MS reasons, but making an issue about performace shouldn't be in the picture. If you really care about rendering speed and usage, you'd use IE 5.5/6b and Outlook Express 5/6.
...is that there really isn't much left. I know, I know. People have always said this, and it's always proven wrong. The problem lately, though, is that the real proformace drive has not been aps, per se, but games. Really, there isn't jack that pushes a home computer to its limit besides 3d game.
Now, though... Most of the 3d stuff is being offloaded to super-powerful GPU's instead of the CPU. I'm currently running a P3 733, with 384 megs of RAM and a 32 meg DDR GeForce 2 GTS. I have tested many of the killer games, and have found that my system *easily* handles them. I get around 82 FPS on Quake III Arena, and I'm running Win2K on top of it! (Not known for it's amazing game performace as it's a business OS.)
I've found that if I have a problem with my performance, I'm much better suited getting more/better ram, a more powerful graphics card, and a faster hard drive than upgrading my processor.
-Jayde
I think this just shows a lack of understanding
on
No X Box for Xmas?
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· Score: 1
Knowing MS, it seems unlikely, especially since an unstable console isn't nearly as useful as an unstable office PC (with an army of IT heads running around to support it).
Okay. Whatever. I guess Hemos doesn't realize that the Xbox is not a Windows box. The OS is not Windows 9x. It is not a PC. This is a console. If there is any microsoft OS, it's a stripped down to the base bones and totally customized for the hardware it's running on.
Also, I would wager that the Windows-based OS is only one potential operating enviroment--just like the Windows CE OS in the Dreamcast was optional as well.
I think Slashdot has a long way to go to understanding the wayconsoles are set up, and what Microsoft is *actually* doing with the Xbox.
I don't know what the deal is with a huge rush of videogame-related posts on a chiefly tech site... But Taco's experitise, as well as that of many eager posters, has really shown its limits as of late.
First off, for those who post about the DC's failure due to WinCE, please get a clue. For starters, the DC was not a windows box. It was a custom Motorola processor (like every other Sega system) with its graphics subsystem being the NEC Power-VR chipset--neither of which have much relation to PC hardware whatsoever. It is true that the DC *ran* WinCE, however it was only a secondary operating system *available*. It only ran when the game was designed to use it--which many did not. Moreover, there was also a standard Sega programming enviroment available for development (C++-based) as well as the DC version of machine code. By no means was the DC a Windows-based machine. The functionality was only there to offer developers a more familar way to create games.
On top of all this anti-MS fever creating misrepresentation, it seems odd that so many people, including Taco himself are calling the Xbox vapor-ware. Perhaps this was the care 2 months ago, but the Xbox has officially come out of the woodwork as a real offering by this year. The official press releases have been made, the final box (basically) and controller(s) were shown at the CES show a few weeks ago, and all real gaming mags/sites have started true coverage. There is a current listing of over 20 big-name release games--two of which were on display at the CES--as well as a list of almost every name publisher signed up to develop for the Xbox. At any rate, it is hardly vaperous--in fact, it's probably less so that the pathetic showing of the PS2 on the market right now
If Slashdot is gonna go hog-wild on video game stories, they should at least try to read a gaming site (videogames.com or dailyradar.com are good ones) or pick up a copy of EGM every once and a while.
For the sake of accuracy, this set-top box is, and never was a successor to the Dreamcast. It is stupid to assume that it is.
Sega made a statement last week that they would be packaging DC technology and licencing it to third-parties. This is not a replacement, nor a replacement to the DC. In fact Sega also stated that they were looking into making a DC PCI-card for PC's... May as well say that Taco's PC is the DC successor as well.
A 5? No way. Anyway, Intel and AMD have nothing to do with this directly. AMD locks thier chips as well--any company does. You should know that with pricing ladders, overclockinghurts business. Since processors go up in price almost exponetially as they climb the clock-ladder, overclocking removes tons of potential income. AMD is a business just like Intel, not a charity--if you think AMD is some gift from God to help consumers out, you're wrong. They're out to make money--just like any other company in the world.
It seems to me that I remember that Tom's article stating that the *method* the AMD uses is overclocking friendly, not meant to be overclocking friendly. Since certain settings in the CPU are controlled by a responce from the MB, it allows VIA to add in features taking advantage of that. This hardly has to do with AMD itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps, however it depends on the cross-section you look at.
For one, there was no such game at E3--which was the basis of the article. Two, there has been no such thing in the console market for a great many years due to regulatory influence. (Basically, yes, you will find sexually explicit games in the PC sector, but that's not what the article was talking about either.) Three, yes you will find such games in Japan even on console, but that's apples to oranges--the amount of sexually explicit acts in media is much higher there in both movies and general media. Also, the amount in games even in that situation is far less than that portrayed in movies, anime, and manga (the latter being the foremost offender.)
Any way you look at it, though, comparing mainstream games to mainstream movies will end up with the result I mentioned in my firest post. Comparing it to any of the games that you refer to would require me to start including the porn industry as "movies". As far as casual sex acts, the general Hollywood industry is *far* more likely to ever exploit them than video games.
You can compare mainstream to mainstream, porn to porn, but not mainstream to porn.
I mean, really. A guy going on and on about the "ghetto" nature of a few floozies stading at the booths is supposedly outweighing the over-sexxed nature of Hollywood? I think now.
If there's any industry that follows the "Sex Sells" motto, it would be that of the film industry. Sure, it's nice and all to idealistically blame videogames for the proliferation of viloence and sex in today's society, but it does little to explain the existance of the *realistic* violence and sex-laden nature of the movie and TV industry.
I suppose that using Brittney Spears and her hips to sell Pepsi is somehow more justified than having a "Booth Babes." I'm not saying the latter is better than the former, but it is definitly comparable. When following that line, the movie industry definitly carries protrayals of sex to a far more extreme nature than videogames ever could get away with. How many movies released last year had graphic sex scenes? How many videogames? Whatever high number you come up with for movies, you're still comparing it to a big *zero* in the gaming industry.
But, of course... With Hollywood, I guess it's considered "mature" and "artistic"--with games it's "Ghetto" and the "downfall of women."
...demoing Soul Reaver 2 frozen showing the text "Memory allocation error 20030561. Memory could not be allocated." at the top of the screen?
That most people *like* GUI's for when they're using a program. While I probably would have little problem going to a text-based interface (I grew up with DOS, after all), but I'd imagine most people who would be using a POS system wouldn't find it as natural.
I guess it's rooted in one of the rules I've learned since becoming a web developer... People Like Widgets, Buttons, and Pop-Up Windows all in Pretty Colors Complimented by Ugly Animated Graphics .
Sad but true. :-)
Thank you for understanding my point...
I will readily admit that NS6/Mozilla are pretty good renderers. The problem with that being most Netscape users do not use them. (As mentioned, NS6 has less that 1% of the browser market share, Mozilla is slightly higher. Still it only equals about 3%.) Trying to make pages work in Netscape 4.x is a chore, and really does require overspecification of just plain *bad* code.
Also as I mentioned before, I hand-write all my code. I'm also a programmer. So, basically, all my code is XHTML-ready. It is clean, concise, and compliant to all standards. Netscape 4.x (and Netscape 6/Mozilla at times) simply ignores my intentions and does wacky things to the page. I use no IE-specific tags, always nest my code properly, and follow all the rules when I build the site--then I have to go back and shuffle things around, throw in oddball tags here and there, and heavily overuse the <img src='blankpixel.gif' width='1' height='1'> technique just to get the page to look like something other than a big blob on Netscape 4.x
Personally, I *hope* Mozilla gets good and replaces all the stubborn Netscape 4.x people so that I don't have to spend hours "fixing" my HTML. :-)
Well, I work for a web development firm. We don't "webmaster" pages, we develop, design, etc. The term "Webmaster" usually refers to someone who knows a smidgen of HTML paid to keep the site updated. (Which is moot in our case since we design database-driven websites with user backends.)
Anyway, while Netscape is "standards complient" that doesn't make it better. The problem with it is that it displays everything it supports *exactly* to standards, then fails to support the *other half* of the standards that can make the page look decent. IE support *almost all* the standards *nearly* perfectly.
One of the main differences that Netscape uses don't realize (and you really can't notice unless you side-by-side) is that Netscape is terribly impractical about standards while the IE programmers seem like they perhaps thought a bit about the W3C "recommendations" (and note, they *are* recommendations) when they implemented them.
Case in point. Generic style of TD { line-height: 18px; } You would have to do this to get your text to display with that line-height in all cases (just choosing "body" won't work. You need body, table, and td). This will work just dandy in IE, however Netscape went a bit too far.
Netscape applies the line-height to ALL TD's, epmty or not, which IE only applies them to TD's with text in them. Since line-height is a text attribute, this makes perfect sense. But it self-destructs in Netscape and makes it impossible to create smaller (notably single-tall spacers or lines) TD's. The only way would be to manually apply *another* style to every TD you didn't want that way, or use inline styles (did I mention Netscape chokes on inline styles?) which you shouldn't have to do.
Unfortunatly, we *do* have to spend hours Netscpae-proofing every page. Usually a page is ready to go and look perfect in IE in about 1/4 of the time it takes to make sure Netscape doesn't break--and we all hand-code (with Homesite), no WYSIWYG to mess things up. Besides style based things, there are just simple cases where Netscape will die just because it doens't like the combination of widths you put in a table (I.E. a row of 20,1,100%,1,20 in order to make sure it scales for different resolutions will cause, for no explicible reason, will cause the TD's with widths of 1 to display as widths of 5.)
There are plenty of reasons *why* a designer would forgo developing a Netscape version of the site--as it would cut a large amount of time and effort off the project. It also doesn't hurt the logic that IE has over an 80% market share--even a higher percentage in the business sector--and Netscape 6/Mozilla is only at about 2%-5% (The rest being Netscape 4.x. And don't even *try* to tell me that Netscape 4.x support standards. It doesn't. Not even close.)
There is something to say about a browser that displays pages how they were meant to appear then to one that blindly follows logic-void implementation of standards-recommendations.
Some of us can't run IE. And WTF does Outlook have to do with your point?
Well... Because there's quite a bit of commenting about speed improvments to the Messanger engine as well as the browser? Perhaps that's why? I'm just talking about what I see, not pushing an agenda.
...not for performance. I'm sorry if anyone thinks this is a troll, but really.
I'm a web developer and use all the browsers to test sites daily. I can most assuradly say that IE is worlds faster than any version of Netscape--and probably around 5 times as fast as Netscape 4.x *at least*. (I sit there and just *wait* for pages to load instead of having them load on the spot.)
Netscape 6 and Mozilla are better, but there no where *near* as fast as IE 5.5 or IE 6b. This is not MS bias, this is just the truth.
I'm all for people using whatever version of Netscape for anti-MS reasons, but making an issue about performace shouldn't be in the picture. If you really care about rendering speed and usage, you'd use IE 5.5/6b and Outlook Express 5/6.
It's more important to the /. community to be informed of MS bugs than *nix ones? I think not.
...is that there really isn't much left. I know, I know. People have always said this, and it's always proven wrong. The problem lately, though, is that the real proformace drive has not been aps, per se, but games. Really, there isn't jack that pushes a home computer to its limit besides 3d game.
Now, though... Most of the 3d stuff is being offloaded to super-powerful GPU's instead of the CPU. I'm currently running a P3 733, with 384 megs of RAM and a 32 meg DDR GeForce 2 GTS. I have tested many of the killer games, and have found that my system *easily* handles them. I get around 82 FPS on Quake III Arena, and I'm running Win2K on top of it! (Not known for it's amazing game performace as it's a business OS.)
I've found that if I have a problem with my performance, I'm much better suited getting more/better ram, a more powerful graphics card, and a faster hard drive than upgrading my processor.
-JaydeKnowing MS, it seems unlikely, especially since an unstable console isn't nearly as useful as an unstable office PC (with an army of IT heads running around to support it).
Okay. Whatever. I guess Hemos doesn't realize that the Xbox is not a Windows box. The OS is not Windows 9x. It is not a PC. This is a console. If there is any microsoft OS, it's a stripped down to the base bones and totally customized for the hardware it's running on.
Also, I would wager that the Windows-based OS is only one potential operating enviroment--just like the Windows CE OS in the Dreamcast was optional as well.
I think Slashdot has a long way to go to understanding the wayconsoles are set up, and what Microsoft is *actually* doing with the Xbox.
A site with the name "AMDZone" doesn't sound biased toward AMD at all. Nope.
-Jayde
Yeah, you're right. I was thinking Genesis for a moment there. Hitachi is what I meant--and the spirit is the same after all. Not PC-based stuff. :-)
I don't know what the deal is with a huge rush of videogame-related posts on a chiefly tech site... But Taco's experitise, as well as that of many eager posters, has really shown its limits as of late.
First off, for those who post about the DC's failure due to WinCE, please get a clue. For starters, the DC was not a windows box. It was a custom Motorola processor (like every other Sega system) with its graphics subsystem being the NEC Power-VR chipset--neither of which have much relation to PC hardware whatsoever. It is true that the DC *ran* WinCE, however it was only a secondary operating system *available*. It only ran when the game was designed to use it--which many did not. Moreover, there was also a standard Sega programming enviroment available for development (C++-based) as well as the DC version of machine code. By no means was the DC a Windows-based machine. The functionality was only there to offer developers a more familar way to create games.
On top of all this anti-MS fever creating misrepresentation, it seems odd that so many people, including Taco himself are calling the Xbox vapor-ware. Perhaps this was the care 2 months ago, but the Xbox has officially come out of the woodwork as a real offering by this year. The official press releases have been made, the final box (basically) and controller(s) were shown at the CES show a few weeks ago, and all real gaming mags/sites have started true coverage. There is a current listing of over 20 big-name release games--two of which were on display at the CES--as well as a list of almost every name publisher signed up to develop for the Xbox. At any rate, it is hardly vaperous--in fact, it's probably less so that the pathetic showing of the PS2 on the market right now
If Slashdot is gonna go hog-wild on video game stories, they should at least try to read a gaming site (videogames.com or dailyradar.com are good ones) or pick up a copy of EGM every once and a while.
-Jayde
For the sake of accuracy, this set-top box is, and never was a successor to the Dreamcast. It is stupid to assume that it is.
Sega made a statement last week that they would be packaging DC technology and licencing it to third-parties. This is not a replacement, nor a replacement to the DC. In fact Sega also stated that they were looking into making a DC PCI-card for PC's... May as well say that Taco's PC is the DC successor as well.
-Jayde
A 5? No way. Anyway, Intel and AMD have nothing to do with this directly. AMD locks thier chips as well--any company does. You should know that with pricing ladders, overclockinghurts business. Since processors go up in price almost exponetially as they climb the clock-ladder, overclocking removes tons of potential income. AMD is a business just like Intel, not a charity--if you think AMD is some gift from God to help consumers out, you're wrong. They're out to make money--just like any other company in the world.
It seems to me that I remember that Tom's article stating that the *method* the AMD uses is overclocking friendly, not meant to be overclocking friendly. Since certain settings in the CPU are controlled by a responce from the MB, it allows VIA to add in features taking advantage of that. This hardly has to do with AMD itself.