Yes you are quite correct. Second life's land system is indeed pretty BS. The price SL charges for land has absolutely no relation to the costs involved in running the server that handles that land. It's purely a monopoly situation where they've been pulling in money for doing just about nothing. To be frank I was stupified when I heard they open sourced the client but it seems libsecondlife was forcing them to do that anyways.
The question at this point is whether Linden Labs will adapt to a market where they will lose their monopoly or if they will just keep clinging till it all falls apart.
OpenSim is based off libsecondlife which is not an FOSS project. In fact libsecondlife has many dev's who seem to be very big MS.net fans who seem to have mindsets about as far as you can get from FOSS.
libsecondlife is coded in c# and nobody worries about whether it'll work with mono.
It's just like the difference between VGA and DVI. It's a nice little bonus feature at best.
standard high capacity optical drive
This is the one I understand the least. Was there something wrong with a DVD drive? Developers are often struggling already to find a use for a single DVD disc. Is something horrible going to happen to you if you have to switch to disc 2 after playing final fantasy 13 for 60 hours?
3) Extremists that seam to believe that all games must be art.
Yes from the various things I've read it's been implied that he is indeed an extremist who thinks the game industry is screwing up all over the place by not making everything about "art".
Also your stipulation that art and fun are not mutually exclusive is somewhat questionable. From an idealists point of view it's true that they are not exclusive but the people who pay for and critique art are very unlikely to attribute the title "art" to anything popular among the masses. The elitists can't be elite about their "refined taste" if everyone has the same tastes after all.
Plus for a lot of us art and fun ARE mutually exclusive. I don't need some dumbass artiste who can't even balance his check book impressing his "inspirational" views on whatever he wishes to pontificate on into my entertainment.
I believe there is some confusion over the term developer here. A lot of people use it to mean a company that creates games. In this context Hecker is working for the developer of Spore.
I don't think Hecker is even a Jr. Developer or anything of the sort of the actual game though. He's just another indie hack who wants to think games are some art form (as if we need that particular elitist disease in video gaming).
He's got a bit of a reputation as a ranter about this sort of thing. It's no surprise he'd take this sort of position because Nintendo's mantra of "just make it fun!" is pretty much directly opposed to the idea of games as an art. It's kind of amusing he works for Will Wright though considering Will is probably the most likely dev in the industry to throw art out the window and worry about fun factor first.
I'd have no problem paying for Live if it actually did something. Paying 7 bucks a month for a chat server though? Yea right. That'll fly on consoles where theres no multitasking environment to handle stuff like buddy lists properly but not on a PC.
Anyone who's claiming Live will solve any multiplayer problems they've had in the last 5 years is having wistful thinking. It's a matchmaking service! Most games don't even need such a thing. You can't use that for a real FPS for instance. Nobody wants to play a crappy 4 player match hosted off your PC. Games like diablo can no longer really use matchmaking either because after d2 people expect dedicated secure servers.
That means that the only big genre that needs what Live offers is RTS's. I don't think Blizzard is going to be chomping at the bit to switch over to Live either when battle.net actually makes money off advertising.
"Teachers don't freaking teach anything in class anymore." Really? I work in the public school system. I'm in schools every day. Are you? No? Then shut the f*ck up. Generalizations like "Teachers don't" label you an idiot anyway.
You didn't even read the post did you? I elaborated much further to point out that some teachers are just lazy and others are restricted to teaching only as fast as the slowest person can understand.
At no point did I imply that even a majority of teachers are somehow failing to do the very best they can. Generalizing the fact that our method of instructing students is poor though hardly labels me an "idiot".
I was about to say this is a good thing because frankly the problem is that teachers don't freaking teach anything in class anymore. Some of you who are older might not realize how bad it is but classrooms have been dumbed down horribly by the lowest common denominator problem. Basically the instructor is lazy or has to explain things really slowly such that any halfway smart kid will just go to sleep. They then make up for it with stupid amounts of homework.
So reducing homework and maybe making teachers actually teach sounds good at first though but then I remembered all the busy work. So how about instead of making our kids waste a full 40 hours a week sitting in class snoozing we give them less school and actually make sure they do their learning at home at their own pace.
I hate to say it, but I have to side with Sony on this one. They had an agreement and it was broken. It sounds like Kotaku perhaps had some privaleged information and took advantage of it. I know Sony has been digging its own grave lately, but it seems like everyone jumps on any chance to report anything negative about them. And there's a lot of it out there. -justin
As usual RTFA. This isn't like some people are trying to spin it. Kotaku had a normal press relationship with Sony. They had a test unit (kotaku is big enough that you can't act like this is some sort of bribe) and some invitations to press events. They contacted Sony to try and confirm the rumor and got shot down.
This is just what it appears to be. Typical corporation trying to cover up stories by threatening to withdraw future release of info. Kotaku just happens to be big enough to laugh at Sony for even trying. This is actually quite a snafu on Sony's part. They probably think they just dusted off some small blog but here they are sitting on slashdot.
The problem is they are correct that this IS illegal. The DMCA is a law and it prohibits this activity. Now of course the DMCA itself is illegal as well which means they'll just use it as a club against someone but drop the case before it can be proved unconstitutional.
What pray tell are they measuring this "unexpected warming" against? Considering this is a new sub diving to new depths never reached before I'd love to know how they know the water down there is warming. They shouldn't HAVE any data for temperatures down that far.
You have to read between the lines because of the military secrecy but it sounds like they just made some improvements on ion drives. While using ion drives in space is common sense it doesn't really do anything to help the real problem of it still taking stupid amounts of reaction mass to get into space in the first place.
Even if he is Lucifer himself, that doesn't make his arguments any less or more valid.
Umm... I think by definition that actually would make his arguments less valid.
I don't think Satan is defined as being an "invalid" person. He's more of a "if you listen to me you'll end up burning in a pool of magma for all eternity" kind of guy. The arguments which lead you to that pool could be perfectly valid though!
The article is a total crock of @#$#. Just looking at the charts shows you that the audio "difference" is so incredibly tiny that the actual players probably have far more to do with it than the format.
1) Wind does not create enough potential kinetic energy to serve as a useful coal/petrol replacement. 2) Current solar conversion systems do not have anywhere near the efficiency to serve as a useful coal/petrol replacement. 3) Even if we get "green" on energy usage the requirements of running civilization will continue to escalate rapidly.
We need to concentrate on reality here! Yes we need to cut down pollution to stop greenhouse warming but pretending warm fuzzy solutions will work is just a waste of time. The environmentalists need to just suck up their guts and admit it's time for nuclear as we don't have any other working solutions on the drawing board.
That list can only be a US only list. Considering that video games are one of the few industries where the US are not the majority market such a list is actually quite useless.
I would be willing to bet some good money that Madden has never been the top selling game in any year ever.
I was under the impression neurons used neurotransmitters to communicate info between two cells but this article implies electrical signals do that. It would be nice to read some text on this subject that tried to explain the abstract difference between what transmits what information.
It's obvious they will never give "permission" to do this. Their whole business model is based on using OS X as a driving force to sell their hardware with high profit margins. Some people might agree that they could survive going the other way but Apple doesn't seem convinced.
That being said I doubt they can do much to stop it. It'll be interesting to see what kind of court cases get brought up over virtualization though. Perhaps they could finally bring the whole EULA nonsense to an end.
If it's really going to require DX10 then it's not going to be due out for a long long time. ATI just very recently released DX10 cards and Nvidia hasn't had them out very long either. All of them are extremely expensive and it'll take a great deal of time for DX10 to build the market mass to support any kind of reasonably succesful game limited to DX10 only.
Ok so basically nobody is going to be able to make horrendously ugly "realistic" graphics that end up looking like a 12 year old made them in bryce and poser right?
I love the privacy and security features in FF 1.5, where you can easily disable images or cookies from external servers, without having to manually edit the config file. Those options are missing in FF 2.0.
While I admit I skipped 1.5 I'm not quite sure what you mean. There are typical options for cookies under the privacy tab. You can disallow them entirely and whitelist or you can allow them or blacklist sites. You can look at all the cookies and delete whichever ones you want. Was there some sort of option to disable them temporarily?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes you are quite correct. Second life's land system is indeed pretty BS. The price SL charges for land has absolutely no relation to the costs involved in running the server that handles that land. It's purely a monopoly situation where they've been pulling in money for doing just about nothing. To be frank I was stupified when I heard they open sourced the client but it seems libsecondlife was forcing them to do that anyways.
The question at this point is whether Linden Labs will adapt to a market where they will lose their monopoly or if they will just keep clinging till it all falls apart.
OpenSim is based off libsecondlife which is not an FOSS project. In fact libsecondlife has many dev's who seem to be very big MS .net fans who seem to have mindsets about as far as you can get from FOSS.
libsecondlife is coded in c# and nobody worries about whether it'll work with mono.
Doesn't making laws which define what a word means violate the first amendment or something?
TV is not 24 fps. It's 60 fps interlaced. Slashdot needs a -1 "my eyeballs/ears are amazing" tag I think.
It's just like the difference between VGA and DVI. It's a nice little bonus feature at best.
This is the one I understand the least. Was there something wrong with a DVD drive? Developers are often struggling already to find a use for a single DVD disc. Is something horrible going to happen to you if you have to switch to disc 2 after playing final fantasy 13 for 60 hours?
Yes from the various things I've read it's been implied that he is indeed an extremist who thinks the game industry is screwing up all over the place by not making everything about "art".
Also your stipulation that art and fun are not mutually exclusive is somewhat questionable. From an idealists point of view it's true that they are not exclusive but the people who pay for and critique art are very unlikely to attribute the title "art" to anything popular among the masses. The elitists can't be elite about their "refined taste" if everyone has the same tastes after all.
Plus for a lot of us art and fun ARE mutually exclusive. I don't need some dumbass artiste who can't even balance his check book impressing his "inspirational" views on whatever he wishes to pontificate on into my entertainment.
I believe there is some confusion over the term developer here. A lot of people use it to mean a company that creates games. In this context Hecker is working for the developer of Spore.
I don't think Hecker is even a Jr. Developer or anything of the sort of the actual game though. He's just another indie hack who wants to think games are some art form (as if we need that particular elitist disease in video gaming).
He's got a bit of a reputation as a ranter about this sort of thing. It's no surprise he'd take this sort of position because Nintendo's mantra of "just make it fun!" is pretty much directly opposed to the idea of games as an art. It's kind of amusing he works for Will Wright though considering Will is probably the most likely dev in the industry to throw art out the window and worry about fun factor first.
I'd have no problem paying for Live if it actually did something. Paying 7 bucks a month for a chat server though? Yea right. That'll fly on consoles where theres no multitasking environment to handle stuff like buddy lists properly but not on a PC.
Anyone who's claiming Live will solve any multiplayer problems they've had in the last 5 years is having wistful thinking. It's a matchmaking service! Most games don't even need such a thing. You can't use that for a real FPS for instance. Nobody wants to play a crappy 4 player match hosted off your PC. Games like diablo can no longer really use matchmaking either because after d2 people expect dedicated secure servers.
That means that the only big genre that needs what Live offers is RTS's. I don't think Blizzard is going to be chomping at the bit to switch over to Live either when battle.net actually makes money off advertising.
You didn't even read the post did you? I elaborated much further to point out that some teachers are just lazy and others are restricted to teaching only as fast as the slowest person can understand.
At no point did I imply that even a majority of teachers are somehow failing to do the very best they can. Generalizing the fact that our method of instructing students is poor though hardly labels me an "idiot".
I was about to say this is a good thing because frankly the problem is that teachers don't freaking teach anything in class anymore. Some of you who are older might not realize how bad it is but classrooms have been dumbed down horribly by the lowest common denominator problem. Basically the instructor is lazy or has to explain things really slowly such that any halfway smart kid will just go to sleep. They then make up for it with stupid amounts of homework.
So reducing homework and maybe making teachers actually teach sounds good at first though but then I remembered all the busy work. So how about instead of making our kids waste a full 40 hours a week sitting in class snoozing we give them less school and actually make sure they do their learning at home at their own pace.
As usual RTFA. This isn't like some people are trying to spin it. Kotaku had a normal press relationship with Sony. They had a test unit (kotaku is big enough that you can't act like this is some sort of bribe) and some invitations to press events. They contacted Sony to try and confirm the rumor and got shot down.
This is just what it appears to be. Typical corporation trying to cover up stories by threatening to withdraw future release of info. Kotaku just happens to be big enough to laugh at Sony for even trying. This is actually quite a snafu on Sony's part. They probably think they just dusted off some small blog but here they are sitting on slashdot.
The problem is they are correct that this IS illegal. The DMCA is a law and it prohibits this activity. Now of course the DMCA itself is illegal as well which means they'll just use it as a club against someone but drop the case before it can be proved unconstitutional.
What pray tell are they measuring this "unexpected warming" against? Considering this is a new sub diving to new depths never reached before I'd love to know how they know the water down there is warming. They shouldn't HAVE any data for temperatures down that far.
You have to read between the lines because of the military secrecy but it sounds like they just made some improvements on ion drives. While using ion drives in space is common sense it doesn't really do anything to help the real problem of it still taking stupid amounts of reaction mass to get into space in the first place.
Umm... I think by definition that actually would make his arguments less valid.
I don't think Satan is defined as being an "invalid" person. He's more of a "if you listen to me you'll end up burning in a pool of magma for all eternity" kind of guy. The arguments which lead you to that pool could be perfectly valid though!
The article is a total crock of @#$#. Just looking at the charts shows you that the audio "difference" is so incredibly tiny that the actual players probably have far more to do with it than the format.
Why ruin Alaska for natural gas?
They're trying to remove the snow. I know you've been in an igloo all your life and this probably seems frightening but trust us, it's going to be OK.
This is simple physics!
1) Wind does not create enough potential kinetic energy to serve as a useful coal/petrol replacement.
2) Current solar conversion systems do not have anywhere near the efficiency to serve as a useful coal/petrol replacement.
3) Even if we get "green" on energy usage the requirements of running civilization will continue to escalate rapidly.
We need to concentrate on reality here! Yes we need to cut down pollution to stop greenhouse warming but pretending warm fuzzy solutions will work is just a waste of time. The environmentalists need to just suck up their guts and admit it's time for nuclear as we don't have any other working solutions on the drawing board.
That list can only be a US only list. Considering that video games are one of the few industries where the US are not the majority market such a list is actually quite useless.
I would be willing to bet some good money that Madden has never been the top selling game in any year ever.
I was under the impression neurons used neurotransmitters to communicate info between two cells but this article implies electrical signals do that. It would be nice to read some text on this subject that tried to explain the abstract difference between what transmits what information.
It's obvious they will never give "permission" to do this. Their whole business model is based on using OS X as a driving force to sell their hardware with high profit margins. Some people might agree that they could survive going the other way but Apple doesn't seem convinced.
That being said I doubt they can do much to stop it. It'll be interesting to see what kind of court cases get brought up over virtualization though. Perhaps they could finally bring the whole EULA nonsense to an end.
If it's really going to require DX10 then it's not going to be due out for a long long time. ATI just very recently released DX10 cards and Nvidia hasn't had them out very long either. All of them are extremely expensive and it'll take a great deal of time for DX10 to build the market mass to support any kind of reasonably succesful game limited to DX10 only.
The scary part about DRM is that if companies start designing computers in a certain way it could become a DMCA violation to install Linux.
In all reality the scary part about Vista is what the hardware vendors are doing with trusted computing without even being prompted by Microsoft.
Ok so basically nobody is going to be able to make horrendously ugly "realistic" graphics that end up looking like a 12 year old made them in bryce and poser right?
Nintendo must be sweating bullets.