Re:Who could have predicted this nightmare
on
Electronic Abacus
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· Score: 2, Insightful
People were also doing business for thousands of years before the slide-rule and the abacus. Or the internal-reservoir ink pen. Heck, the pencil, for that matter. People in the fertile crescent back in the days of Sumeria and Akkadia did business without the use of paper, and before that there were people doing business without even a form of written language. Does the fact that it was possible make it better? Do you want to physically perform search queries on the reams and reams of paper that would encompass Wal-Mart's database were it in physical format? Or perhaps you'd like to handle all the people who want instantaneous order-tracking? Oh, I know, you want to sit down in the basement and operate the switchboard for the company's 1200 internal telephones, right?
People also sucked the marrow from bones and ate raw meat for thousands and thousands of years before fire was put to use in food preperation. There're still places where people do it. Does that mean we should all rush out and chase a buffalo off a cliff?
And how long ago would someone have said "I don't know about variable fonts and font sizes for all human readable text. And what good is a GUI?"
There are, of course, a fair number of people who *still* feel that any GUI is a bad GUI, but even the most hardened CLI zealot has to admit that the GUI revolutionized the computer industry. If it were all CLI, computers would be nowhere near as widely used as they are now.
Not to say that Cesium's 3d gui is going to do what those first gui's did (epsecially since I've not even seen so much as a screenshot), but maybe a 3d gui is what we need. Traditional point-and-click has reached something of a standstill. Whether it's KDE, Gnome, Windows, BeOS, or Aqua, it's all still the same basic principles. I've yet to see a really useful 3d gui, but from the (admittedly very sketchy details) it looks like a lot of thought went into Cesium. Maybe someone's finally come up with something that actually adds value.
Why should America start caring? When terrorists bombed the WTC way back when, or after the Oklahoma City bombings, or any other American-aimed terrorist acitivities, did troops from Britain, Canada, or Australia come rushing in to help out? Did we get aid packages from those nations? Does the UN hand out food to homeless, hungry children whose parents died trying to end ethnic cleansing? Hell no. We're America, we're expected to deal with things like that ourselves. To the Middle-east we're the Great Satan. To Europe we're those pigheaded fools who think they're better than anyone else. And yet, when the shit hits the fan, it's "Why doesn't America do something?" Maybe because nobody's done anything for America. You want us to rush out and kill all the terrorists? Then when we finally say, "Alright, that's just about enough of that, every terrorist we see and every country aiding them is on the shitlist" stop crying "Oh, oh, they had a reason! They did it because you Americans suck so horribly! Stop being so self-centered and they'll stop!"
America is evil for the same reason Microsoft is evil: We do all the things everybody does, but we're so freaking huge that it's bloody obvious when we do it. We try to play Big Brother and go beat up the little guys when our little bro's in the UN ask, and we get pissed on. We say, "No, we're not doing it" *because* we get so thoroughy trounced when we *do* intervene and it's "Oh, Americans are so disgusting. They don't help anyone but themselves!" Make up your freaking minds. Do you want us to nuke everyone 'till they glow, or do you want us to sit on our laurels? We can't do both, and if we go for the middle ground then there will ALWAYS be someone whining that America helps too little or too much.
now why would they go and model, and places hairs for her pubic area if it was never going to be seen in the movie?
Simple enough.. animators are people too, and CG artists tend to have at least a little geek in their blood. They get bored sometime around the last week of the render, when everything's in the hands of the renderfarm and some post guys doing touchups in photoshop (or whatever proprietary program they used), so a couple of the character design guys get together and do an anatomically correct body texture, slap it on the aki model, and the next day the office gets a few laughs out of some fake pr0n printouts floating around. If it happens to look like a shot done for Maxim, it's probably because it was the same file (or a backup version someone had sitting on their HD). And random little nitpicks like incorrect lighting or bad skin tone can be chalked up to the fact that they weren't pushing the whole power of the renderfarm toward this shot and it was probably a couple hours work by one or three guys.. not the whole dev team.
I was watching a thing on TechTV the other day about the making of Shrek.. some neophyte animator tweaked the donkey's hair wrong and made him look like a big chia pet.. they rendered a whole scene with it just because they thought it looked funny as hell. Yes, animated movies are big budget, but people still screw around on the set.
Bio-mechanical more likely, but it seemed fairly obvious they were created by humans. Why else would they look to humanity for the reason driving their existence? Though you're likely right in that a human hand never touched one of them (until they started bringing us back to life anyway). More likely organic humans eventually were phased out and replaced by more advanced artificial ones, probably constructed with living parts rather than just 'a thousand miles of fiber,' and the 'aliens' are the end product of 2000 years of oragnic/mechanical human self-driven evolution.
Yes, it would be.. but you can't write one without some very special hardware. It's impossible to create unpredictable behavior on demand in a normal computer. There are, of course, little things in the environment of the computer which could lead to non-deterministic behavior (stray magnetic fields, cosmic rays, dust..) but none of them are a part of your system. It may be difficult to predict the outcome of the program, but it Is possible.. unless you've come up with a way to generate real random numbers.
Whether they happen in the next fifty years is debatable, though I have no particular doubts, but there are two things that will make the world of the 'future' so absolutely and totally different from ours that a man of 2000 will be as lost in 3000 as a man of 1000 would be lost today.
1) The nano-assembler
A device capable of reproducing itself and manipulating matter at the atomic or even sub-atomic level. Manufacture of goods will dissappear, the construction of buildings will be done in CAD programs, not with steel girders.
2) Machines capable of mimicking our brain
I don't mean true AI, having intelligent computers would be weird, but not really anything fundamentally world-rocking. I mean a method for re-producing our own brains with an artificial device. We have, or nearly have, the technology to replace or rebuild every part of our bodies except our brain. When we are capable of rebuilding or replacing the brain, we will be immortal. And if immortality isn't the big 'holy crap, what happened to the world' changer of society, I don't know what is.
Space elevators, world peace, cheap/efficient power... They'd be nice and they'll come eventually, but they won't change the world. Stopping war forever only effects the people who were fighting. Obviously there are always counter-effects and side-effects when you change something, and world peace would change a lot of things, but it wouldn't rebuild civilzation overnight. Humans would still be humans.
But to be able to construct anything, from a perfect diamond the size of your car to a cheese danish using no more than a single device so tiny you can't see it without a fairly large microscope, that would change the world. I can't imagine what will happen when it's possible, nobody can because nothing like it has ever happened. Nobody could have predicted the changes that computers brought us, or the changes brought on by the industrial revolution, or by fire... Nano-assembly is as big as any of them. And as for the ability to transfer your consciousness from the rotting medium of meat and blood that's floating in your skull to something more efficient and more permanent... The ability to exist for as long as there is energy enough to power your mind, that would change more than society. That would change humanity at its most fundamental levels. No more fear of death, no more disease (why cure it when you can just make a copy of your body with an assembler?), no hunger (replace your gastro-intenstinal system with a fuel cell), no pain (shut down the nerves and replace the lost parts). All the things that drive man to war and religion, the two most long-lasting parts of our society, would be gone. When those things come, the world will change, and neither you nor I nor any magazine article will predict how.
<old man voice>
So ya see young'in, that thar used to be called 'the moon' and it'd come up at night so's we'd have light ta see by. This was before the Nocturnal Advertising Wars, ya see, so ya couldn't walk by tha light of tha MS Blimp yet. Well, somewhar 'round-a-bout 2004 they had ta convert the whole blamed thing to tape storage racks so's we had somewhar to backup all our data... 'Cause ya know them thar data cubes ain't got no shelf-life fer crap, not like good 'ol magnetic tape. Nup nup nup.
</old man voice>
I agree that Williams tends to write much more likable characters than Jordan, but !Xabbu annoys the hell out of me. Dread is sufficiently sadistic and twisted to make a great villain, Sellars is the perfect mysterious old man, and Orlando is probably the single most unique character i've ever read about.. but i just can't Stand !Xabbu. (note that all my references here are coming fron Otherland.. i've read MST and tailchaser, but it's been a few years).
It's just something about the little nut's mystical jibber jabber that sets me off. And it wouldn't be so bad if people didn't take it so damn seriously. I mean, come on.. you're trapped in the most advanced computer system the world has ever seen, and you're basing your decisions off african tribal mythology? Renie's started annoying me toward the end of book 3 as well, she's getting a bit pushy and domineering. I'd almost be tempted not to even read book 4, but i just have to find out what happened to Orlando, and what happens with him and Fredericks. *sigh* Addiction is a harsh mistress.
I almost started up a website to do this once just because I couldn't find it anywhere.. but I'm bigger on ideas than funds or time (like most of us geeks) so it died on the drawing board.
Anyway, I've long thought a site dedicated to gamers looking for other gamers that could be searched by geographic location would be great. Finding fellow gamers is Always a bitch. You can't just go up and ask people, "hey, do you play -game-?" Since pen-and-paper RPGers are still more than a little looked down on. So essentially you have to hunt for them within your circle of friends and for us geeks who aren't socialites this circle tends not to be very big. Once upon a time almost all my friends were gamers and I had enough to get a game going. Now it's the same ratio of gamers:non-gamers, but the actual numbers aren't big enough for any good sessions and our attempts at posting at local shops haven't worked out well.
So does anybody know of a site where you can hunt for other gamers? Or, to go the direct route, anybody looking for a couple more members in their DnD, whitewolf, or pretty much anything else party in the Columbia, SC area? Drop me an email if so (krin@no.spam.for.me.hotmail.com).
When exactly does one stop being just 'multiplayer' and start being 'massively multiplayer'? I mean, the game its self can't inherently Be 'massively multiplayer' because before release it's probably got about 30 players from within the company.
So when does it Become 'massively multiplayer'? 100 people? 200? 1000? There're muds out there with 500 people on at a time, but they don't call themselves MMUDs.. (or MMURPDs for that matter). I think it's just a marketing gimmick to let EQ and UO call themselves something other than graphical muds.. and calling tradewars a 'MMORPG RTS' is a bit nuts. Have people just totally forgotten what role-playing games Used to be?
Of course you've heard of far worse. We've all heard of far worse. We've also all heard that everyone in russia is evil (or germany or china or whichever country) and that going faster than 50mph will kill you etc.
I'm not saying that conditions in sweatshops are good everywhere or even in most places.. but does anyone actually have any hard data on how often these places are as awful as we always hear about? I don't think i've ever seen a broad study of sweatshops worldwide.. just tightly focused documentaries that generally focus more on the poverty that already existed long before foreign factories arrived.
Americans buy their shoes, so why dont they use american workers to make the shoes? Because they know unions would not let them EXPLOIT the workers.
In a word, wrong. Nike runs sweatshops because it's cheap. It's cheaper because the federal government mandates a minimum wage and requires safety regulations to be followed. If you're a corporation who's single purpose for existing is to make money (which is the only reason corporations exist) you will obviously take the cheapest course to make the most profit.
Make Nike and other corporations pay 1/3rd what t hey make to their employees in 3rd world countries and you'll find they no longer Have employees in 3rd world countries. If you pay cheap labor high wages along with high shipping costs it becomes much more cost effective to pay local labor the same wage.
Nike are able to pay for what is basically slave labor
It's not slave labor. Tell any actual slave in a 3rd world country that they can either remain a slave or go back to their home shanty town and have the Option of working in a sweatshop and being Paid and being able to quit if they want to quit and they'll not hesitate a second.
have listened to an executive at Nike say if the wages go up, they move out of that country
Of course they will. The wages go up, their profits go down. They find a new 3rd world country where wages are lower to open up a new factory. As I already said, corporations exist solely to make money by whatever means they can get away with. When they stop making money one way they'll find a new way.. that's how it works.
Grand idea.. let's start a petition for Nike to quadruple the wages they pay in 3rd world countries.
Oh, wait.. that means that in order to maintain their profits they'll need to lay off 3/4ths of the workers. But that's okay because the workers they have will be better fed and better able to work. Ah, but wait, they work too many hours. Better drop that by, oh, 1/3rd average. Which means Nike is now getting 2/12ths of the product they were getting from that sweatshop. Which of course means that their profits drop and they realize that for the balance of what they pay out in terms of upkeep and wages for that sweatshop they could put together a shoe-making-machine that does the same work as those 3rd worlders 24 hours a day, requires no wages, never gets sick, and needs one high-school dropout to make sure the laces don't get caught who'll work for minimum wage.
No, it's not right that people should have to live in the conditions that they do in 3rd world countries. Yes, anything that anyone from a 1st or even 2nd world country says about them can be easily dismissed as insensitive crap from the fat, lazy rich. However, this is the world we live in. In order to make 3rd world counties capable of competing for the same sorts of jobs and wages that people get in a 2nd world country you would have to revolutionize the entire country.. from the government to the industry to the educational system to the philosophies of individual citizens. And unfortunitally it doesn't work. It didn't work in various south american countries, it didn't work in china.
Countries can grapple their way into the global economy as something other than slave labor, but when your government takes the money from bigger nations to essentially make their very, very few rich richer in trade for allowing those nations to plunder their resources, it's not easy.
Sweatshops are bad. They always have been bad and will continue to be bad. However in terms of how well off the people working in them are, it's true that they Do have a better chance than with no job at all. When your options are take any job you can get or die you do what you can and all the 1st world activists shouting that you're mistreated doesn't get you a single grain more rice.
So if everyone is unimportant (and i wholly agree here.. the future of any one person, group of persons, or our entire species matters not a whit in the eyes of the universe), what makes these needy children so deserving of adpotion? Their lives are just as unimportant as the bloodlines of the people whom you seem to disdain so heartily.
I don't intend to have children or to adopt children and neither does my girlfriend. We agree we'd not make good parents and realize there are enough people out there churning out babies by the dozen that our contribution is not necessary to perpetuate the species.. but if that's what you want to do, do it.
Adoption carries all sorts of issues with it. If the child is young enough not to know what's going on, he'll find out eventually, and how difficult a situation is That to deal with? Or if the kid is old enough to know he's being adopted you have to deal with him knowing that no matter how many bycicles you buy him, you're Not his birth parents.. and while that may not technically make a difference it can emotionally in a familial situation. Meeting a kid at an aoption agency and seeing how he behaves when he's doing his damndest to get himself a family is one thing, but what happens if you wind up with a kid you really just don't like? By the time you get them it's too late to forcibly imprint a warped version of your own personality on them..
Now there are drawbacks to live birth too.. the pain etc. for the woman being the primary one, not to mention the possibility of birth defects, and you can still end up having a kid that just refuses to take that personality imprinting and insists on having a mind of their own..
But really, what difference does it make? You said yourself that we're all really very unimportant. If I wanted to get myself cloned instead of adopting, so what? You can say the kid i didn't adopt might've grown up to be a great person, an inventor or an artist or a world leader or whatever, but the same can be said about the kid i didn't have the other way. In the end it's all just a matter of choice, and whether you adopt or clone or have fertility treatments won't make proxima centauri burn out one century sooner (well, okay.. there are certain very remote chances it Could.. but it's really unlikely).
Assuming you didn't totally miss the point and are, thereby, not referring to the books.. the animated version of the series Was fairly unpopular.. and as for the new live-action one, it's not even out, so you can't really say how well it will do. Yes, the anticipation buzz is huge, but hype does not a good movie make. And for this we have the huge, blazing, cg-animated-alien-filled example of episode 1.
I agree with your hatred of NDA's and EULA's, but i don't see how wanting to know how things work equates to installing linux on the thing.
It'd be like taking a car and, rather than learning how the car works, ripping pieces out of it until you can attach the axels to a pair of bicycle pedals. You can now modify your bicycle powered car all day, but it's not a car anymore. By inserting a system you already understand in place of an unknown system, you've destroyed the efficiency and elegence of the old system.
Why not learn how the xbox or the ps2 or whichever's built-in OS works and Use it instead of replacing it? Yes, it would probably be easier to write support for all the special hardware into linux and then just write your games in C++ with X extensions or whatever, but you'll be writing linux games on a computer.. not writing xbox games for an xbox.
That was exactly my point. I didn't say anything was meaningful or meaningless. We all decide for ourselves what is meaningful in our lives and trying to tell another person that their chosen method of self-fulfillment is pointless is stupid because from an distant perspective, they're All pointless. If it makes You happy, it's your thing. If it makes me happy and not you, then go do what makes you happy and leave me alone:)
Ah, so the goal here would be to take a machine tuned to play games and install an operating system that is well known for its glaring lack of games?
Besides the obvious "Hey, it's there, it's a computer, linux doesn't run on it yet" challenge, what Possible purpose would there be to making linux run on an xbox? Or a dreamcast? Or any console system? Yeah, they're cheaper than an equivalent computer system, but they're not upgradable and certainly aren't designed with any of the traditional linux tasks in mind.
The X-Box has the best potential, since its most like a computer.
So why not just use a computer?
Online gaming can be great fun when you can get into the community and make friends well enough to trust them not to use every dirty trick in the _insert game here_ arsenal. But that, like most good things in life, takes time.. and while i do enjoy gaming, i don't have that kind of time available for it.
I haven't factored online gaming into my game purchases since starcraft, and probably won't unless i win the lotto and have 5 hours a day to play them.
Yeah, It's so stupid to spend all your time on something you enjoy and then get pissed off when it gets messed up. Especially when it's just a game.
Not like that classic car you spent years and thousands of dollars restoring. That could Never get totalled in an accident afterall.
Or that house that you planned for half your life and had to have wood shipped halfway across the country from the mission church it used to be in. That could Never burn down.
Or that friend of yours you've known for a decade. He could never be in an accident or get a disease or be mugged or fall off a building or have a piano dropped on him..
Get a clue, everything in life is transient. How you choose to spend your time is Your choice. If you have more fun with games than with any of the other hobbies humans find to fill our meaningless little lives, then play on. If you don't, then go out and get wasted at a club or go to church or whatever other pointless activity you feel gives your existence a purpose. But if all that makes you feel worthy of living is telling people how pitiful they are for getting upset at having something they labored to create destroyed, go do it elsewhere.
Yeah, i mean, Everyone knows that real geeks only run around the same virtual environement for hours at a time simulating the mass slaughter of friends, relatives, and total strangers in First person, not third person!
Slashdot Mirror
People were also doing business for thousands of years before the slide-rule and the abacus. Or the internal-reservoir ink pen. Heck, the pencil, for that matter. People in the fertile crescent back in the days of Sumeria and Akkadia did business without the use of paper, and before that there were people doing business without even a form of written language. Does the fact that it was possible make it better? Do you want to physically perform search queries on the reams and reams of paper that would encompass Wal-Mart's database were it in physical format? Or perhaps you'd like to handle all the people who want instantaneous order-tracking? Oh, I know, you want to sit down in the basement and operate the switchboard for the company's 1200 internal telephones, right?
People also sucked the marrow from bones and ate raw meat for thousands and thousands of years before fire was put to use in food preperation. There're still places where people do it. Does that mean we should all rush out and chase a buffalo off a cliff?
And how long ago would someone have said "I don't know about variable fonts and font sizes for all human readable text. And what good is a GUI?"
There are, of course, a fair number of people who *still* feel that any GUI is a bad GUI, but even the most hardened CLI zealot has to admit that the GUI revolutionized the computer industry. If it were all CLI, computers would be nowhere near as widely used as they are now.
Not to say that Cesium's 3d gui is going to do what those first gui's did (epsecially since I've not even seen so much as a screenshot), but maybe a 3d gui is what we need. Traditional point-and-click has reached something of a standstill. Whether it's KDE, Gnome, Windows, BeOS, or Aqua, it's all still the same basic principles. I've yet to see a really useful 3d gui, but from the (admittedly very sketchy details) it looks like a lot of thought went into Cesium. Maybe someone's finally come up with something that actually adds value.
Why should America start caring? When terrorists bombed the WTC way back when, or after the Oklahoma City bombings, or any other American-aimed terrorist acitivities, did troops from Britain, Canada, or Australia come rushing in to help out? Did we get aid packages from those nations? Does the UN hand out food to homeless, hungry children whose parents died trying to end ethnic cleansing? Hell no. We're America, we're expected to deal with things like that ourselves. To the Middle-east we're the Great Satan. To Europe we're those pigheaded fools who think they're better than anyone else. And yet, when the shit hits the fan, it's "Why doesn't America do something?" Maybe because nobody's done anything for America. You want us to rush out and kill all the terrorists? Then when we finally say, "Alright, that's just about enough of that, every terrorist we see and every country aiding them is on the shitlist" stop crying "Oh, oh, they had a reason! They did it because you Americans suck so horribly! Stop being so self-centered and they'll stop!"
America is evil for the same reason Microsoft is evil: We do all the things everybody does, but we're so freaking huge that it's bloody obvious when we do it. We try to play Big Brother and go beat up the little guys when our little bro's in the UN ask, and we get pissed on. We say, "No, we're not doing it" *because* we get so thoroughy trounced when we *do* intervene and it's "Oh, Americans are so disgusting. They don't help anyone but themselves!" Make up your freaking minds. Do you want us to nuke everyone 'till they glow, or do you want us to sit on our laurels? We can't do both, and if we go for the middle ground then there will ALWAYS be someone whining that America helps too little or too much.
now why would they go and model, and places hairs for her pubic area if it was never going to be seen in the movie?
Simple enough.. animators are people too, and CG artists tend to have at least a little geek in their blood. They get bored sometime around the last week of the render, when everything's in the hands of the renderfarm and some post guys doing touchups in photoshop (or whatever proprietary program they used), so a couple of the character design guys get together and do an anatomically correct body texture, slap it on the aki model, and the next day the office gets a few laughs out of some fake pr0n printouts floating around. If it happens to look like a shot done for Maxim, it's probably because it was the same file (or a backup version someone had sitting on their HD). And random little nitpicks like incorrect lighting or bad skin tone can be chalked up to the fact that they weren't pushing the whole power of the renderfarm toward this shot and it was probably a couple hours work by one or three guys.. not the whole dev team.
I was watching a thing on TechTV the other day about the making of Shrek.. some neophyte animator tweaked the donkey's hair wrong and made him look like a big chia pet.. they rendered a whole scene with it just because they thought it looked funny as hell. Yes, animated movies are big budget, but people still screw around on the set.
Bio-mechanical more likely, but it seemed fairly obvious they were created by humans. Why else would they look to humanity for the reason driving their existence? Though you're likely right in that a human hand never touched one of them (until they started bringing us back to life anyway). More likely organic humans eventually were phased out and replaced by more advanced artificial ones, probably constructed with living parts rather than just 'a thousand miles of fiber,' and the 'aliens' are the end product of 2000 years of oragnic/mechanical human self-driven evolution.
Yes, it would be.. but you can't write one without some very special hardware. It's impossible to create unpredictable behavior on demand in a normal computer. There are, of course, little things in the environment of the computer which could lead to non-deterministic behavior (stray magnetic fields, cosmic rays, dust..) but none of them are a part of your system. It may be difficult to predict the outcome of the program, but it Is possible.. unless you've come up with a way to generate real random numbers.
Whether they happen in the next fifty years is debatable, though I have no particular doubts, but there are two things that will make the world of the 'future' so absolutely and totally different from ours that a man of 2000 will be as lost in 3000 as a man of 1000 would be lost today.
1) The nano-assembler
A device capable of reproducing itself and manipulating matter at the atomic or even sub-atomic level. Manufacture of goods will dissappear, the construction of buildings will be done in CAD programs, not with steel girders.
2) Machines capable of mimicking our brain
I don't mean true AI, having intelligent computers would be weird, but not really anything fundamentally world-rocking. I mean a method for re-producing our own brains with an artificial device. We have, or nearly have, the technology to replace or rebuild every part of our bodies except our brain. When we are capable of rebuilding or replacing the brain, we will be immortal. And if immortality isn't the big 'holy crap, what happened to the world' changer of society, I don't know what is.
Space elevators, world peace, cheap/efficient power... They'd be nice and they'll come eventually, but they won't change the world. Stopping war forever only effects the people who were fighting. Obviously there are always counter-effects and side-effects when you change something, and world peace would change a lot of things, but it wouldn't rebuild civilzation overnight. Humans would still be humans.
But to be able to construct anything, from a perfect diamond the size of your car to a cheese danish using no more than a single device so tiny you can't see it without a fairly large microscope, that would change the world. I can't imagine what will happen when it's possible, nobody can because nothing like it has ever happened. Nobody could have predicted the changes that computers brought us, or the changes brought on by the industrial revolution, or by fire... Nano-assembly is as big as any of them. And as for the ability to transfer your consciousness from the rotting medium of meat and blood that's floating in your skull to something more efficient and more permanent... The ability to exist for as long as there is energy enough to power your mind, that would change more than society. That would change humanity at its most fundamental levels. No more fear of death, no more disease (why cure it when you can just make a copy of your body with an assembler?), no hunger (replace your gastro-intenstinal system with a fuel cell), no pain (shut down the nerves and replace the lost parts). All the things that drive man to war and religion, the two most long-lasting parts of our society, would be gone. When those things come, the world will change, and neither you nor I nor any magazine article will predict how.
<old man voice>
So ya see young'in, that thar used to be called 'the moon' and it'd come up at night so's we'd have light ta see by. This was before the Nocturnal Advertising Wars, ya see, so ya couldn't walk by tha light of tha MS Blimp yet. Well, somewhar 'round-a-bout 2004 they had ta convert the whole blamed thing to tape storage racks so's we had somewhar to backup all our data... 'Cause ya know them thar data cubes ain't got no shelf-life fer crap, not like good 'ol magnetic tape. Nup nup nup.
</old man voice>
I agree that Williams tends to write much more likable characters than Jordan, but !Xabbu annoys the hell out of me. Dread is sufficiently sadistic and twisted to make a great villain, Sellars is the perfect mysterious old man, and Orlando is probably the single most unique character i've ever read about.. but i just can't Stand !Xabbu. (note that all my references here are coming fron Otherland.. i've read MST and tailchaser, but it's been a few years).
It's just something about the little nut's mystical jibber jabber that sets me off. And it wouldn't be so bad if people didn't take it so damn seriously. I mean, come on.. you're trapped in the most advanced computer system the world has ever seen, and you're basing your decisions off african tribal mythology? Renie's started annoying me toward the end of book 3 as well, she's getting a bit pushy and domineering. I'd almost be tempted not to even read book 4, but i just have to find out what happened to Orlando, and what happens with him and Fredericks. *sigh* Addiction is a harsh mistress.
Well, i'd certainly watch a lot of SlashTV.. but realistically i think it'd probably be at least 50% anime.
I almost started up a website to do this once just because I couldn't find it anywhere.. but I'm bigger on ideas than funds or time (like most of us geeks) so it died on the drawing board.
Anyway, I've long thought a site dedicated to gamers looking for other gamers that could be searched by geographic location would be great. Finding fellow gamers is Always a bitch. You can't just go up and ask people, "hey, do you play -game-?" Since pen-and-paper RPGers are still more than a little looked down on. So essentially you have to hunt for them within your circle of friends and for us geeks who aren't socialites this circle tends not to be very big. Once upon a time almost all my friends were gamers and I had enough to get a game going. Now it's the same ratio of gamers:non-gamers, but the actual numbers aren't big enough for any good sessions and our attempts at posting at local shops haven't worked out well.
So does anybody know of a site where you can hunt for other gamers? Or, to go the direct route, anybody looking for a couple more members in their DnD, whitewolf, or pretty much anything else party in the Columbia, SC area? Drop me an email if so (krin@no.spam.for.me.hotmail.com).
When exactly does one stop being just 'multiplayer' and start being 'massively multiplayer'? I mean, the game its self can't inherently Be 'massively multiplayer' because before release it's probably got about 30 players from within the company.
So when does it Become 'massively multiplayer'? 100 people? 200? 1000? There're muds out there with 500 people on at a time, but they don't call themselves MMUDs.. (or MMURPDs for that matter). I think it's just a marketing gimmick to let EQ and UO call themselves something other than graphical muds.. and calling tradewars a 'MMORPG RTS' is a bit nuts. Have people just totally forgotten what role-playing games Used to be?
Of course you've heard of far worse. We've all heard of far worse. We've also all heard that everyone in russia is evil (or germany or china or whichever country) and that going faster than 50mph will kill you etc.
I'm not saying that conditions in sweatshops are good everywhere or even in most places.. but does anyone actually have any hard data on how often these places are as awful as we always hear about? I don't think i've ever seen a broad study of sweatshops worldwide.. just tightly focused documentaries that generally focus more on the poverty that already existed long before foreign factories arrived.
Americans buy their shoes, so why dont they use american workers to make the shoes? Because they know unions would not let them EXPLOIT the workers.
In a word, wrong. Nike runs sweatshops because it's cheap. It's cheaper because the federal government mandates a minimum wage and requires safety regulations to be followed. If you're a corporation who's single purpose for existing is to make money (which is the only reason corporations exist) you will obviously take the cheapest course to make the most profit.
Make Nike and other corporations pay 1/3rd what t hey make to their employees in 3rd world countries and you'll find they no longer Have employees in 3rd world countries. If you pay cheap labor high wages along with high shipping costs it becomes much more cost effective to pay local labor the same wage.
Nike are able to pay for what is basically slave labor
It's not slave labor. Tell any actual slave in a 3rd world country that they can either remain a slave or go back to their home shanty town and have the Option of working in a sweatshop and being Paid and being able to quit if they want to quit and they'll not hesitate a second.
have listened to an executive at Nike say if the wages go up, they move out of that country
Of course they will. The wages go up, their profits go down. They find a new 3rd world country where wages are lower to open up a new factory. As I already said, corporations exist solely to make money by whatever means they can get away with. When they stop making money one way they'll find a new way.. that's how it works.
Pull your head out of the emotion bag and think.
Grand idea.. let's start a petition for Nike to quadruple the wages they pay in 3rd world countries.
Oh, wait.. that means that in order to maintain their profits they'll need to lay off 3/4ths of the workers. But that's okay because the workers they have will be better fed and better able to work. Ah, but wait, they work too many hours. Better drop that by, oh, 1/3rd average. Which means Nike is now getting 2/12ths of the product they were getting from that sweatshop. Which of course means that their profits drop and they realize that for the balance of what they pay out in terms of upkeep and wages for that sweatshop they could put together a shoe-making-machine that does the same work as those 3rd worlders 24 hours a day, requires no wages, never gets sick, and needs one high-school dropout to make sure the laces don't get caught who'll work for minimum wage.
No, it's not right that people should have to live in the conditions that they do in 3rd world countries. Yes, anything that anyone from a 1st or even 2nd world country says about them can be easily dismissed as insensitive crap from the fat, lazy rich. However, this is the world we live in. In order to make 3rd world counties capable of competing for the same sorts of jobs and wages that people get in a 2nd world country you would have to revolutionize the entire country.. from the government to the industry to the educational system to the philosophies of individual citizens. And unfortunitally it doesn't work. It didn't work in various south american countries, it didn't work in china.
Countries can grapple their way into the global economy as something other than slave labor, but when your government takes the money from bigger nations to essentially make their very, very few rich richer in trade for allowing those nations to plunder their resources, it's not easy.
Sweatshops are bad. They always have been bad and will continue to be bad. However in terms of how well off the people working in them are, it's true that they Do have a better chance than with no job at all. When your options are take any job you can get or die you do what you can and all the 1st world activists shouting that you're mistreated doesn't get you a single grain more rice.
...overall belt tightening throughout the business that will enable us to prioritize the allocation of our resources.
Wow.. i don't think i've ever seen a sentence that said so little in so many words. I mean, what the hell does that mean?
Why's that? They simply had the temerity to strongly disagreee with a particular idea or point of view. In this case, yours :)
So if everyone is unimportant (and i wholly agree here.. the future of any one person, group of persons, or our entire species matters not a whit in the eyes of the universe), what makes these needy children so deserving of adpotion? Their lives are just as unimportant as the bloodlines of the people whom you seem to disdain so heartily.
I don't intend to have children or to adopt children and neither does my girlfriend. We agree we'd not make good parents and realize there are enough people out there churning out babies by the dozen that our contribution is not necessary to perpetuate the species.. but if that's what you want to do, do it.
Adoption carries all sorts of issues with it. If the child is young enough not to know what's going on, he'll find out eventually, and how difficult a situation is That to deal with? Or if the kid is old enough to know he's being adopted you have to deal with him knowing that no matter how many bycicles you buy him, you're Not his birth parents.. and while that may not technically make a difference it can emotionally in a familial situation. Meeting a kid at an aoption agency and seeing how he behaves when he's doing his damndest to get himself a family is one thing, but what happens if you wind up with a kid you really just don't like? By the time you get them it's too late to forcibly imprint a warped version of your own personality on them..
Now there are drawbacks to live birth too.. the pain etc. for the woman being the primary one, not to mention the possibility of birth defects, and you can still end up having a kid that just refuses to take that personality imprinting and insists on having a mind of their own..
But really, what difference does it make? You said yourself that we're all really very unimportant. If I wanted to get myself cloned instead of adopting, so what? You can say the kid i didn't adopt might've grown up to be a great person, an inventor or an artist or a world leader or whatever, but the same can be said about the kid i didn't have the other way. In the end it's all just a matter of choice, and whether you adopt or clone or have fertility treatments won't make proxima centauri burn out one century sooner (well, okay.. there are certain very remote chances it Could.. but it's really unlikely).
Assuming you didn't totally miss the point and are, thereby, not referring to the books.. the animated version of the series Was fairly unpopular.. and as for the new live-action one, it's not even out, so you can't really say how well it will do. Yes, the anticipation buzz is huge, but hype does not a good movie make. And for this we have the huge, blazing, cg-animated-alien-filled example of episode 1.
I agree with your hatred of NDA's and EULA's, but i don't see how wanting to know how things work equates to installing linux on the thing.
It'd be like taking a car and, rather than learning how the car works, ripping pieces out of it until you can attach the axels to a pair of bicycle pedals. You can now modify your bicycle powered car all day, but it's not a car anymore. By inserting a system you already understand in place of an unknown system, you've destroyed the efficiency and elegence of the old system.
Why not learn how the xbox or the ps2 or whichever's built-in OS works and Use it instead of replacing it? Yes, it would probably be easier to write support for all the special hardware into linux and then just write your games in C++ with X extensions or whatever, but you'll be writing linux games on a computer.. not writing xbox games for an xbox.
That was exactly my point. I didn't say anything was meaningful or meaningless. We all decide for ourselves what is meaningful in our lives and trying to tell another person that their chosen method of self-fulfillment is pointless is stupid because from an distant perspective, they're All pointless. If it makes You happy, it's your thing. If it makes me happy and not you, then go do what makes you happy and leave me alone :)
Ah, so the goal here would be to take a machine tuned to play games and install an operating system that is well known for its glaring lack of games?
Besides the obvious "Hey, it's there, it's a computer, linux doesn't run on it yet" challenge, what Possible purpose would there be to making linux run on an xbox? Or a dreamcast? Or any console system? Yeah, they're cheaper than an equivalent computer system, but they're not upgradable and certainly aren't designed with any of the traditional linux tasks in mind.
The X-Box has the best potential, since its most like a computer.
So why not just use a computer?
Online gaming can be great fun when you can get into the community and make friends well enough to trust them not to use every dirty trick in the _insert game here_ arsenal. But that, like most good things in life, takes time.. and while i do enjoy gaming, i don't have that kind of time available for it.
I haven't factored online gaming into my game purchases since starcraft, and probably won't unless i win the lotto and have 5 hours a day to play them.
Yeah, It's so stupid to spend all your time on something you enjoy and then get pissed off when it gets messed up. Especially when it's just a game.
Not like that classic car you spent years and thousands of dollars restoring. That could Never get totalled in an accident afterall.
Or that house that you planned for half your life and had to have wood shipped halfway across the country from the mission church it used to be in. That could Never burn down.
Or that friend of yours you've known for a decade. He could never be in an accident or get a disease or be mugged or fall off a building or have a piano dropped on him..
Get a clue, everything in life is transient. How you choose to spend your time is Your choice. If you have more fun with games than with any of the other hobbies humans find to fill our meaningless little lives, then play on. If you don't, then go out and get wasted at a club or go to church or whatever other pointless activity you feel gives your existence a purpose. But if all that makes you feel worthy of living is telling people how pitiful they are for getting upset at having something they labored to create destroyed, go do it elsewhere.
Yeah, i mean, Everyone knows that real geeks only run around the same virtual environement for hours at a time simulating the mass slaughter of friends, relatives, and total strangers in First person, not third person!