May I ask why you think that? That's a serious question: I'm not trying to call you out or anything. It's just that, from the writeups and descriptions of the new machine, I'm not sure what it does fundamentally differently from the old eMac. It's more powerful, to be sure, but that seems to be more the function of the overall march of computer tech in the years since the eMac's initial release. Comparatively, it does the same things as the eMac in pretty much the same way.
Is it just the new screen/design that you're referring to? That definitely does seem to be the biggest (and best) addition to this over the eMac. I'm just not sure that it's enough of a change that it's going to do more than provide a slight bump to the numbers. Ultimately, it strikes me that the niche is going to be what it always was. Which, again, isn't really a problem. The original eMac was an excellent machine for its audience, and that it didn't set the computing world on fire, per se, was perfectly acceptable because that wasn't the point. I'm thrilled that Apple is updating the machine to keep up with the times, and I certainly don't think that it's going to do any worse than the old eMac. I just don't see it doing much better, either. But, of course, that's just my opinion on the matter.
Maybe, but I'm not sure what this machine offers that wasn't previously offered by the eMac. That's certainly not to say that it's a bad machine, but it's not much more than an incremental upgrade with a nicer monitor. It's a perfectly solid and respectable computer, but anyone who wasn't previously sold on the concept of the eMac isn't going to be bowled over by this one either, I'd suspect. It's just not that different, when you get right down to it.
It might get a slight boost from the Windows/BootCamp crowd, but I have my doubts: for the average computer user, the OS they use is the one that comes installed with the box when they unpack it. Dual booting is a nice addition for the tech savvy, and it's made me seriously consider getting a Mac when I eventually need to replace my current machine, but I don't think it's going to have a major long-term impact on Apple's marketshare.
College students want a cheap but stylish machine, yet they don't want to lose their "gaming" functionality. It could be a perfect marriage.
Except that, as even a modest gaming rig, it's entirely uninspiring, largely thanks to the graphics chip. As the GMA 950 lacks support for things like T&L and vertex shaders, it's not going to cut it for most modern games. And since it draws from main system memory, the fact that the system is shipping with only 512MB (even granted the fact that it's expanadable to 2GB) is going to be a problem, as well. It seems extremely unlikely to me that this is going to set anyone's world on fire. It certainly won't bomb, but I don't really think it's going to expand much beyond the original eMac niche.
The problem, though, as others have pointed out, is less with Microsoft than with third-party programmers. It's actually trivial to set up a limited user account in Windows 2000 and XP. The problem is that there are a truly staggering number of programs out there that save their settings to the install directory or, worse, the Windows directory itself, which requires modify privileges to those locations. For the computer saavy, it's easy enough to edit file and directory permissions selectively without sacrificing too much security (say, giving write/edit access to \Program Files\Poorly Designed App without needing full access to the entire \Program Files hierarchy), but these sort of steps are neither trivial nor obvious to the uninitiated.
Microsoft's problem is defaulting to a basically insecure (everyone-as-administrator) setup. But it's easy to see why, since so much of Windows's reputation is placed on its backwards compatibility. Look at the trashing XP SP2 took for breaking compatibility with a very few applications in order to increase system security. And those incompatibilities are nothing like the problems most users would face if forced into a non-administrative paradigm.
Which doesn't totally excuse Microsoft of responsibility, of course: if earlier versions of Windows weren't such security nightmares, they wouldn't be in the situation they're in today. And they ultimately can decide to change Windows's default behavior, even if it would upset thousands of users. But, to be fair, they are essentially caught between a rock and hard place when it comes to this.
Seriously? They've built up a fair degree of buzz surrounding their new system, to be sure, but that system isn't, technically speaking, out yet. I'd say that, at this point, Nintendo resembles Apple a lot more than either Sony or Microsoft: they've got dominance over the handheld gadget market (GBA/DS vs. iPod), they seldom lead (in sales, at least) in the console/desktop arena, but have managed to carve out a modest but sustainable niche in that arena nonetheless. Quite honestly, I'm not convinced that this is going to change considerably with the advent of the Wii. That's not to say that it couldn't, of course, but declaring a victor in the next gen console wars before two-thirds of the party is even at the table strikes me as a bit premature, really.
The government doesn't save everything forever. All records created by the federal government have their own retention schedules, which can range from a few weeks to forever. There are dozens of potential reasons for needing to access any given record, though, and they aren't all as obvious as one would think. An e-mail from the president asking for a cup of coffee might well have some value to a historian or biographer. Personal communications might have potential legal repurcussions down the line, for whatever reason. Given the importance of the president, presidential communication gets treated even more gingerly than everything else (a lot of this probably will be maintained in the long-term for historical value, if nothing else). But NARA absolutely does not "store everything."
What's to keep NARA from converting most electronic record to plain text?
Potentially Armstrong v. Executive Office of the President. Format shifting is a fantastically tricky minefield to navigate. The aforementioned court case dealt specifically with the practice of printing e-mail communication and storing it as a paper record, but it speaks to the standard problems of conversion: you need to be entirely certain that you're not losing any information in the conversion process. This includes transmission information, metadata, and so on. Which isn't to say that plain text conversion can't be done in a lot of cases, but rather that it's something that needs to be undertaken very carefully.
And while NARA has been embarking on some wonderful digitization projects, no paper-born records have been replaced by electronic conversions as of yet, for precisely the same reason. The electronic conversion augments the original paper record, but NARA still needs to maintain and preserve the paper record for as long as they have always been legally required to do so.
Speaking as a trained archivist, I can say that the problem isn't finding storage space for the e-mails, per se. It's the duty and responsibility of the National Archives to preserve both content and context, and to ensure that these e-mails remain accessible for however long the retention schedules call for (which, in the case of executive communication, is not an insignificant length of time). Which means that the problem cannot be satisfactorily solved by dumping every e-mail onto a hard drive somewhere and forgetting about them. They all need to be indexed and cataloged, and provisions need to be made to ensure that the data can be migrated onto newer technology when it becomes necessary to do so without losing any of the information (or metadata) associated with it.
The volume of material is staggering, and goes beyond what NARA (or almost anyone else, for that matter) has traditionally dealt with. While storage space itself is a concern, to some degree, given that this material will continue to accumulate, the larger problem is how to manage this material. Having 800GB of e-mail is pointless if you don't provide a means to get in and retrieve specific messages, and provide the appropriate context for that e-mail.
The states are bound to obey the U.S. Constitution. Michigan, for instance, could not issue a law prohibiting free exercise of religion, nor could Hawaii pass a law denying its citizens free association. The states are no more capable of prohibiting their citizens from joining a political party than the Federal government is, under the Constitution, and they never have been. As has been pointed out elsewhere, it's a moot point, as governments at both the state and Federal level found other ways to strongly discourage participation in the CPUSA without actually declaring the party illegal.
I can only speak to the Washington Post, but the way the Sunday edition is handled there is that sections that are unlikely to be seriously impacted by up-to-the-minute news are published several days in advance. Things like the arts and comics sections, and the advertising supplements have to be ready to go well in advance of publication. Major local, national, and international news, the sports pages, and other things that can't be done up in advance are still printed the same morning they are distributed, and the two are combined for delivery.
Erm... no. The grandparent post was, I would imagine, referring to the article summary, which states plainly "Google's engineers... [are] arrogantly denying users any choice." The point being, why is it arrogance when Google fails to emulate Yahoo!'s UI, but not arrogance when Yahoo! fails to emulate Google's UI? This isn't Google fanboyism, it's a reasonable critique of an obviously biased article.
For the record, I've not used Yahoo!'s mail service, and it may well be better than Gmail. But the reasoning presented by the article is less than convincing to me, and it seems like the author is bearing something of a grudge. IMO. YMMV.
On a sort of off-topic note, I have to ask: how does one become a "former founder" of something? He founded Gentoo, then he retroactively didn't? Who's the current founder, then?
Close. More precisely, Windows will not move a file to another drive unless explicitly told to do so. So, dragging a file around the directory structure of your C: drive will move it around, while dragging it to any other drive (not just a CD/DVD drive or networked machine) will just copy it.
Which, honestly, makes a fair bit of sense, as an idiot-protection measure. Although I personally prefer KDE's system (makes no assumptions, and just gives you a menu asking whether you want to copy, move, or link the file).
Dawn of Souls did more than just the optional gameplay changes. In FF2, I'd say the changes are mostly positive in that it makes the god-awful leveling system faster, so you can play the game for the story. (Seriously, FF2 is really terrible. We've never seen the FF2 style of gameplay ever again, and for good reason.)
Ah, but we have seen it again. Although the Final Fantasy series returned to the experience level system with the next installment, Square's own SaGa series (Final Fantasy Legend in the US) owed a lot to the system first introduced in Final Fantasy II.
True, but this is rather less impressive than most case mods, as far as it goes. At least trying to stuff the innards of a x86 PC into a Mac mini, or an old iMac, or whatever has the benefit of the different form factor. The G3 Mac chassis is pretty much just another a case: it's styled a bit differently, but there's not really much of a "wow!" factor to it.::shrugs::
Everything I read from the KHTML team whined about how Apple (in their opinion) wasn't doing as much as they should have.
Where, precisely? The complaint voiced by the KHTML devs was against the "fanboys," not Apple. While they regretted that there wasn't more cooperation between the KHTML and Webcore teams, they were quick to point out that Apple was within their rights. To quote Zack Rusin, "all I'm asking for is that all the clueless people stop talking about the cooperation between Safari/Konqueror developers and how great it is. There's absolutely nothing great about it. In fact 'it' doesn't exist." Yes, this wasn't "giving Apple credit for what they HAD done," but what, precisely, were they going to give credit for? What Apple was providing had traditionally been useless to them. Both sides were willing to go on as they were despite this: it was the reaction of the "fanboys" that was problem. This isn't about Apple. It was never about Apple. Apple's behavior is a complete straw man.
Final Fantasy IX wasn't a step in the right direction for anything. It was a pointless nostalgia fest: most of the characters were ill-defined ciphers (Amarant, Eiko, Quina), and those that weren't were basically archetypes with nothing unique to distinguish them (Freya, Steiner). The villain, too, never seemed to have any real motivation for anything. Even the "remote places" you mention were quite often little more than nostalgic rehashes of former locations in the series (Gulug Volcano, for instance). And I really don't understand how the characters were any less "rediculous looking" than in Final Fantasy VIII.
All Final Fantasy IX did was to hit the right buttons to make nostalgic fans feel all warm and fuzzy inside. It was not a particularly strong game on its merits, and, arguably even worse, it was a deliberately derivative one. As a one-off it was bad enough: to purposely lead the series down that line would kill it. Unless you have a deep emotional attachment to the 16-bit days, there's very little there for anyone, and, although I am admittedly one of those 16-bit fans, there's simply not enough of us to support the series without the interest of newcomers.
Alternatively, there's Final Fantasy Origins, which is actually prettier (the PlayStation having a higher resolution than the GBA). Plus, most of the obnoxious gameplay changes are optional. None of the bonus dungeons, though....
Erm... the series hasn't been helmed by a single director since Final Fantasy VI (the first game not directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi). Even the names most commonly associated with the franchise (Yoshitaka Amano, Nobuo Uematsu, Sakaguchi himself) haven't worked on all the games (and all three are no longer working for Square Enix).
As someone else said, the Final Fantasy "series" isn't a series in the sense you take it to mean. It's a franchise, or a brand. More specifically, it's a showcase flagship for Square Enix (and Square before them) to present try out new ideas and concepts and pretty much guarantee an audience.
Let's kill the blatent FF7/Clud fanboyism. If you want real, macho heroes, look no further than Locke and Edgar. Cloud just doesn't cut it. Even his name is sissy.
Y'mean Locke, the guy who spends the majority of the game sulking over his comatose girlfriend? Edgar gets some nice moments, but even he whines and sulks regarding Sabin at times. Honestly, the only "real, macho heroes" in that game are Mog and Umaro, and the latter doesn't talk.
The only people I find that dispute the SNES generation as being the best, are those that picked up the series at 7. They may rank 7 highly, they may enjoy the entire series, but 6 always comes out on top.
Err... sorry to burst your bubble. I've been playing the game since the first one, way back when (and, just to be clear, it was much inferior to, say Dragon Warrior III as far as NES RPGs go...). I played, and enjoyed, Final Fantasy VI, but it has easily been surpassed by several subsequent installments.
Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and X all had much better developed and paced plots, and none suffered from the total destruction of the game's narrative that FFVI did approximately halfway through. The gameplay in both FFVIII and FFX was substantially more interesting and entertaining than the gameplay in FFVI, as well. While this is my opinion, and I don't claim that it represents any sort of universal truth, the point is that it is all subjective, and there are plenty of us old-timers who don't view FFVI as the be-all and end-all.
That said, I do tend to agree with you regarding the graphics: the early 3D installments, particularly, have aged poorly. Although several of the SNES games also have their moments, thanks in large part to an overreliance on the terminally hideous Mode 7 effects of the SNES (FFVI's mine cart sequence, anyone?)
I'm not really sure U.S. history is "a lot less bloody," looking at it in realistic terms. American history doesn't go back nearly as far as European history, and while Europe had two nasty wars in the 20th century, it had a comparatively peaceful 19th century. Indeed, the American Civil War was one of the bloodiest conflicts in the history of the world, and the rationale for that came exactly out of the sort of "deterrence in regards to their own governments" you suggest would have prevented bloodshed (and was every bit as ineffective, in the end, as this sort deterrence usually is, I would add).
I'm honestly fairly indifferent to the gun control debate: I don't think it's much more than a sideshow, really. But the anti-gun control rhetoric is similarly misguided, IMO, and its invocation generally glosses over the true complexity and controversy of the Second Amendment, which goes back to its inception, and is by no means a recent development.
That's a bit of a straw man, though. No one ever suggested that "everybody that uses the software should become a programmer." I'm a long-time, happy user of various flavors of Linux (mostly Gentoo and Debian), but I'm certainly no programmer.
Similarly, if I owned a car, while I might not be able to realign the tires (or whatever), I would at least take the time to know how to throw on a spare, should the need arise, or to know to take the thing in to have the oil changed regularly.
It's the same thing with computers, no matter what operating system: you don't need to be a specialist to be a responsible user, and no one seriously suggests otherwise.
Umm... Firefly episodes were aired on Friday nights. No NFL football on Fridays. Fox didn't schedule any sports during that day.
Yes, they did. Baseball, to be precise. And during the playoffs. Firefly got preempted quite a bit as a result. To be sure, things had cleared up by the middle of October, but we were already several episodes in by that stage.
Erm, no. Chris Columbus directed the first two films, and is still on board as executive producer. Alfonso Cuaron (who directed the third) was never intended to direct the fourth, although he has stated he'd like to come back later and do at least one more. Neither Columbus, Cuaron, or Newell have ever hinted at being displeased with Rowling's involvement.
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May I ask why you think that? That's a serious question: I'm not trying to call you out or anything. It's just that, from the writeups and descriptions of the new machine, I'm not sure what it does fundamentally differently from the old eMac. It's more powerful, to be sure, but that seems to be more the function of the overall march of computer tech in the years since the eMac's initial release. Comparatively, it does the same things as the eMac in pretty much the same way.
Is it just the new screen/design that you're referring to? That definitely does seem to be the biggest (and best) addition to this over the eMac. I'm just not sure that it's enough of a change that it's going to do more than provide a slight bump to the numbers. Ultimately, it strikes me that the niche is going to be what it always was. Which, again, isn't really a problem. The original eMac was an excellent machine for its audience, and that it didn't set the computing world on fire, per se, was perfectly acceptable because that wasn't the point. I'm thrilled that Apple is updating the machine to keep up with the times, and I certainly don't think that it's going to do any worse than the old eMac. I just don't see it doing much better, either. But, of course, that's just my opinion on the matter.
Maybe, but I'm not sure what this machine offers that wasn't previously offered by the eMac. That's certainly not to say that it's a bad machine, but it's not much more than an incremental upgrade with a nicer monitor. It's a perfectly solid and respectable computer, but anyone who wasn't previously sold on the concept of the eMac isn't going to be bowled over by this one either, I'd suspect. It's just not that different, when you get right down to it.
It might get a slight boost from the Windows/BootCamp crowd, but I have my doubts: for the average computer user, the OS they use is the one that comes installed with the box when they unpack it. Dual booting is a nice addition for the tech savvy, and it's made me seriously consider getting a Mac when I eventually need to replace my current machine, but I don't think it's going to have a major long-term impact on Apple's marketshare.
Except that, as even a modest gaming rig, it's entirely uninspiring, largely thanks to the graphics chip. As the GMA 950 lacks support for things like T&L and vertex shaders, it's not going to cut it for most modern games. And since it draws from main system memory, the fact that the system is shipping with only 512MB (even granted the fact that it's expanadable to 2GB) is going to be a problem, as well. It seems extremely unlikely to me that this is going to set anyone's world on fire. It certainly won't bomb, but I don't really think it's going to expand much beyond the original eMac niche.
The problem, though, as others have pointed out, is less with Microsoft than with third-party programmers. It's actually trivial to set up a limited user account in Windows 2000 and XP. The problem is that there are a truly staggering number of programs out there that save their settings to the install directory or, worse, the Windows directory itself, which requires modify privileges to those locations. For the computer saavy, it's easy enough to edit file and directory permissions selectively without sacrificing too much security (say, giving write/edit access to \Program Files\Poorly Designed App without needing full access to the entire \Program Files hierarchy), but these sort of steps are neither trivial nor obvious to the uninitiated.
Microsoft's problem is defaulting to a basically insecure (everyone-as-administrator) setup. But it's easy to see why, since so much of Windows's reputation is placed on its backwards compatibility. Look at the trashing XP SP2 took for breaking compatibility with a very few applications in order to increase system security. And those incompatibilities are nothing like the problems most users would face if forced into a non-administrative paradigm.
Which doesn't totally excuse Microsoft of responsibility, of course: if earlier versions of Windows weren't such security nightmares, they wouldn't be in the situation they're in today. And they ultimately can decide to change Windows's default behavior, even if it would upset thousands of users. But, to be fair, they are essentially caught between a rock and hard place when it comes to this.
Seriously? They've built up a fair degree of buzz surrounding their new system, to be sure, but that system isn't, technically speaking, out yet. I'd say that, at this point, Nintendo resembles Apple a lot more than either Sony or Microsoft: they've got dominance over the handheld gadget market (GBA/DS vs. iPod), they seldom lead (in sales, at least) in the console/desktop arena, but have managed to carve out a modest but sustainable niche in that arena nonetheless. Quite honestly, I'm not convinced that this is going to change considerably with the advent of the Wii. That's not to say that it couldn't, of course, but declaring a victor in the next gen console wars before two-thirds of the party is even at the table strikes me as a bit premature, really.
The government doesn't save everything forever. All records created by the federal government have their own retention schedules, which can range from a few weeks to forever. There are dozens of potential reasons for needing to access any given record, though, and they aren't all as obvious as one would think. An e-mail from the president asking for a cup of coffee might well have some value to a historian or biographer. Personal communications might have potential legal repurcussions down the line, for whatever reason. Given the importance of the president, presidential communication gets treated even more gingerly than everything else (a lot of this probably will be maintained in the long-term for historical value, if nothing else). But NARA absolutely does not "store everything."
Potentially Armstrong v. Executive Office of the President. Format shifting is a fantastically tricky minefield to navigate. The aforementioned court case dealt specifically with the practice of printing e-mail communication and storing it as a paper record, but it speaks to the standard problems of conversion: you need to be entirely certain that you're not losing any information in the conversion process. This includes transmission information, metadata, and so on. Which isn't to say that plain text conversion can't be done in a lot of cases, but rather that it's something that needs to be undertaken very carefully.
And while NARA has been embarking on some wonderful digitization projects, no paper-born records have been replaced by electronic conversions as of yet, for precisely the same reason. The electronic conversion augments the original paper record, but NARA still needs to maintain and preserve the paper record for as long as they have always been legally required to do so.
Speaking as a trained archivist, I can say that the problem isn't finding storage space for the e-mails, per se. It's the duty and responsibility of the National Archives to preserve both content and context, and to ensure that these e-mails remain accessible for however long the retention schedules call for (which, in the case of executive communication, is not an insignificant length of time). Which means that the problem cannot be satisfactorily solved by dumping every e-mail onto a hard drive somewhere and forgetting about them. They all need to be indexed and cataloged, and provisions need to be made to ensure that the data can be migrated onto newer technology when it becomes necessary to do so without losing any of the information (or metadata) associated with it.
The volume of material is staggering, and goes beyond what NARA (or almost anyone else, for that matter) has traditionally dealt with. While storage space itself is a concern, to some degree, given that this material will continue to accumulate, the larger problem is how to manage this material. Having 800GB of e-mail is pointless if you don't provide a means to get in and retrieve specific messages, and provide the appropriate context for that e-mail.
The states are bound to obey the U.S. Constitution. Michigan, for instance, could not issue a law prohibiting free exercise of religion, nor could Hawaii pass a law denying its citizens free association. The states are no more capable of prohibiting their citizens from joining a political party than the Federal government is, under the Constitution, and they never have been. As has been pointed out elsewhere, it's a moot point, as governments at both the state and Federal level found other ways to strongly discourage participation in the CPUSA without actually declaring the party illegal.
I can only speak to the Washington Post, but the way the Sunday edition is handled there is that sections that are unlikely to be seriously impacted by up-to-the-minute news are published several days in advance. Things like the arts and comics sections, and the advertising supplements have to be ready to go well in advance of publication. Major local, national, and international news, the sports pages, and other things that can't be done up in advance are still printed the same morning they are distributed, and the two are combined for delivery.
Erm... no. The grandparent post was, I would imagine, referring to the article summary, which states plainly "Google's engineers... [are] arrogantly denying users any choice." The point being, why is it arrogance when Google fails to emulate Yahoo!'s UI, but not arrogance when Yahoo! fails to emulate Google's UI? This isn't Google fanboyism, it's a reasonable critique of an obviously biased article.
For the record, I've not used Yahoo!'s mail service, and it may well be better than Gmail. But the reasoning presented by the article is less than convincing to me, and it seems like the author is bearing something of a grudge. IMO. YMMV.
On a sort of off-topic note, I have to ask: how does one become a "former founder" of something? He founded Gentoo, then he retroactively didn't? Who's the current founder, then?
Close. More precisely, Windows will not move a file to another drive unless explicitly told to do so. So, dragging a file around the directory structure of your C: drive will move it around, while dragging it to any other drive (not just a CD/DVD drive or networked machine) will just copy it.
Which, honestly, makes a fair bit of sense, as an idiot-protection measure. Although I personally prefer KDE's system (makes no assumptions, and just gives you a menu asking whether you want to copy, move, or link the file).
Ah, but we have seen it again. Although the Final Fantasy series returned to the experience level system with the next installment, Square's own SaGa series (Final Fantasy Legend in the US) owed a lot to the system first introduced in Final Fantasy II.
True, but this is rather less impressive than most case mods, as far as it goes. At least trying to stuff the innards of a x86 PC into a Mac mini, or an old iMac, or whatever has the benefit of the different form factor. The G3 Mac chassis is pretty much just another a case: it's styled a bit differently, but there's not really much of a "wow!" factor to it. ::shrugs::
Where, precisely? The complaint voiced by the KHTML devs was against the "fanboys," not Apple. While they regretted that there wasn't more cooperation between the KHTML and Webcore teams, they were quick to point out that Apple was within their rights. To quote Zack Rusin, "all I'm asking for is that all the clueless people stop talking about the cooperation between Safari/Konqueror developers and how great it is. There's absolutely nothing great about it. In fact 'it' doesn't exist." Yes, this wasn't "giving Apple credit for what they HAD done," but what, precisely, were they going to give credit for? What Apple was providing had traditionally been useless to them. Both sides were willing to go on as they were despite this: it was the reaction of the "fanboys" that was problem. This isn't about Apple. It was never about Apple. Apple's behavior is a complete straw man.
Final Fantasy IX wasn't a step in the right direction for anything. It was a pointless nostalgia fest: most of the characters were ill-defined ciphers (Amarant, Eiko, Quina), and those that weren't were basically archetypes with nothing unique to distinguish them (Freya, Steiner). The villain, too, never seemed to have any real motivation for anything. Even the "remote places" you mention were quite often little more than nostalgic rehashes of former locations in the series (Gulug Volcano, for instance). And I really don't understand how the characters were any less "rediculous looking" than in Final Fantasy VIII.
All Final Fantasy IX did was to hit the right buttons to make nostalgic fans feel all warm and fuzzy inside. It was not a particularly strong game on its merits, and, arguably even worse, it was a deliberately derivative one. As a one-off it was bad enough: to purposely lead the series down that line would kill it. Unless you have a deep emotional attachment to the 16-bit days, there's very little there for anyone, and, although I am admittedly one of those 16-bit fans, there's simply not enough of us to support the series without the interest of newcomers.
Alternatively, there's Final Fantasy Origins, which is actually prettier (the PlayStation having a higher resolution than the GBA). Plus, most of the obnoxious gameplay changes are optional. None of the bonus dungeons, though....
Erm... the series hasn't been helmed by a single director since Final Fantasy VI (the first game not directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi). Even the names most commonly associated with the franchise (Yoshitaka Amano, Nobuo Uematsu, Sakaguchi himself) haven't worked on all the games (and all three are no longer working for Square Enix).
As someone else said, the Final Fantasy "series" isn't a series in the sense you take it to mean. It's a franchise, or a brand. More specifically, it's a showcase flagship for Square Enix (and Square before them) to present try out new ideas and concepts and pretty much guarantee an audience.
Y'mean Locke, the guy who spends the majority of the game sulking over his comatose girlfriend? Edgar gets some nice moments, but even he whines and sulks regarding Sabin at times. Honestly, the only "real, macho heroes" in that game are Mog and Umaro, and the latter doesn't talk.
Err... sorry to burst your bubble. I've been playing the game since the first one, way back when (and, just to be clear, it was much inferior to, say Dragon Warrior III as far as NES RPGs go...). I played, and enjoyed, Final Fantasy VI, but it has easily been surpassed by several subsequent installments.
Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and X all had much better developed and paced plots, and none suffered from the total destruction of the game's narrative that FFVI did approximately halfway through. The gameplay in both FFVIII and FFX was substantially more interesting and entertaining than the gameplay in FFVI, as well. While this is my opinion, and I don't claim that it represents any sort of universal truth, the point is that it is all subjective, and there are plenty of us old-timers who don't view FFVI as the be-all and end-all.
That said, I do tend to agree with you regarding the graphics: the early 3D installments, particularly, have aged poorly. Although several of the SNES games also have their moments, thanks in large part to an overreliance on the terminally hideous Mode 7 effects of the SNES (FFVI's mine cart sequence, anyone?)
I'm not really sure U.S. history is "a lot less bloody," looking at it in realistic terms. American history doesn't go back nearly as far as European history, and while Europe had two nasty wars in the 20th century, it had a comparatively peaceful 19th century. Indeed, the American Civil War was one of the bloodiest conflicts in the history of the world, and the rationale for that came exactly out of the sort of "deterrence in regards to their own governments" you suggest would have prevented bloodshed (and was every bit as ineffective, in the end, as this sort deterrence usually is, I would add).
I'm honestly fairly indifferent to the gun control debate: I don't think it's much more than a sideshow, really. But the anti-gun control rhetoric is similarly misguided, IMO, and its invocation generally glosses over the true complexity and controversy of the Second Amendment, which goes back to its inception, and is by no means a recent development.
That's a bit of a straw man, though. No one ever suggested that "everybody that uses the software should become a programmer." I'm a long-time, happy user of various flavors of Linux (mostly Gentoo and Debian), but I'm certainly no programmer.
Similarly, if I owned a car, while I might not be able to realign the tires (or whatever), I would at least take the time to know how to throw on a spare, should the need arise, or to know to take the thing in to have the oil changed regularly.
It's the same thing with computers, no matter what operating system: you don't need to be a specialist to be a responsible user, and no one seriously suggests otherwise.
Yes, they did. Baseball, to be precise. And during the playoffs. Firefly got preempted quite a bit as a result. To be sure, things had cleared up by the middle of October, but we were already several episodes in by that stage.
Erm, no. Chris Columbus directed the first two films, and is still on board as executive producer. Alfonso Cuaron (who directed the third) was never intended to direct the fourth, although he has stated he'd like to come back later and do at least one more. Neither Columbus, Cuaron, or Newell have ever hinted at being displeased with Rowling's involvement.