Evolution is not compatible with any state of the world. For example, if there were only one kind of fossil for each creature and there were no creatures different than those existing today (save the ones that died off) evolution wouldn't be accepted. If Australia had the same wildlife that asia had, evolution wouldn't be accepted. If animals who had one body part in common were likely to have others in common (why shouldn't many mammals lay eggs and many reptiles have fur and give live birth?), evolution wouldn't be attractive.
Just because experiments to prove evolution would be unfeasable doesn't mean the theory is false or even unscientific.
Let's get historical again shall we? Ptolemy had a wonderful system of explaining planetary movement, even better than Galileo's. He had a complex system of equations and constants which would spit out right answers. Galileo's wasn't as good, but it was extremely simple. The biggest hole was that the last planet's orbit was irregular, as if another planet was influencing it. Using his theory, Galileo was able to predict the location of another planet which he verified existed (and was promptly imprisoned for his heretical beliefs by the catholic church).
How is this like evolution? Well, Galileo couldn't very well throw a new planet up into space to verify it would behave as he predicted. We can't wait billions of years for animals to evolve. Galileo's theory was simple, while Ptolemy's required lots of constants. Galileo predicted the existance of a planet which he later found. Evolution's predicted the existance of many fossils which have been found (and some which haven't).
(We can also simulate what people like to call microevolution in a lab. Stick a bunch of fruit flies in a jar and spray it full of DDT. Repeat for 3 generations.)
Experimentation is only one part of the scientific methodology. Perhaps you should go read some Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, or Charles Darwin. I may not be a creationist, but at least I bothered reading the Bible.
No I'm not going to flame you for being religious.
What I am going to say is that Creation Science is in no way scientific. However, creationism is a theory of how things happened, just not a scientific one. (Science has become used to describe anything these days whether or not it uses scientific methodology (e.g. Political Science)).
The reason why creation can not be science is that it cannot be proven (or disproven). The theory of evolution focuses why it's true. Creationism tries to "prove" itself by disproving evolution rather by by its own merits (and thus win by default). Creationism is also extremely broad (every logical world could have been created with creationism, so it fails to explain why the world is this way and not some other way).
Let's get historical. A lot of people bash Darwin and haven't bothered to even read his books or know his arguments, so I'll use one he used. Darwin found that throughout his travels in the world there were never amphibians on islands surrounded by saltwater, unless introduced by humans (in which case they thrived). Darwin also knew that the amphibians died when they tried to swim in salt water. The most likely explanation was that since no frogs were there when the island formed, no frogs could ever be on the island since they couldn't swim. Creationim's explanation would be that God created amphibians on large land masses but not small ones because it was part of his plan. From there, I'd like to know how or why this is part of God's plan.
I don't see a good way of explaining why God decided that amphibians shouldn't be on oceanic islands.
There's many more examples like this. Let's not forget the theory of Gravity fails on the quantum level, but no one's about to discard it. Evolution isn't perfect, but without it, biology wouldn't exist (why would we believe that experiments on other animals would be relevant to humans? God could've created all the animals completely differently...but also could not have.)
Creationism is too broad and is compatible with any state of the world. As such, there's nothing one can find in the world to disprove it. Since it cannot be disproven, it's not a scientific theory.
Cars are a luxury item and the features you describe give near-0 productivity improvements.
You equate Linux and Mac as both having to learn new systems, but fail to mention any sort of learning curve. The learning curve on Mac is much shallower than Linux or Windows (assuming they've not used it.) Computers were introduced to make people more productive. With a shallower learning curve and features that can actually make a user more productive (e.g. native office support, a good clipboard), I don't understand why anyone would have trouble spending a little extra money to make employees more productive.
That said, I'll be happy when there's a Linux GUI as good as either Windows or MacOS. I'll also be happy when MS writes a good kernel and releases it gratis/libre. Guess which one has a better chance of happening?
The author makes a good case from a security perspective for switching from Windows. He fails to point out why MacOS wouldn't be a more suitable candidate. MacOS X has an excellent security record , can run MS Office (all versions) natively, and is extremely user friendly. If your user's not exactly tech savvy, I doubt they'll be able to do crossover office. Additionally, if you run multiple OSes simultaneously, I fail to see how this solves the security problem.
The only disadvantage to MacOS is price, but for any business, this price difference is easily recouped by being completely immune to the worm du jour.
Really, it's inertia and slick marketing that keep MS in its place.
One problem was the time problem. In the time it takes to get one stealth kill, you can get many run and gun kills. The solution is a heavy penalty for dying, like not respawning.
Now the problem with the stealth paradigm is that it can be boring for those already dead: you really want to wait for a 20 minute stalk match with the last two players?
CS I think balances these two, despite being the first game in the genre to populatize the no-respawn rule. I get most of my kills not because I'm the faster shot, because I see the other player first and can line a shot up without him even noticing me (and no, I don't camp, I just go alternative routes). I can play CS like a stealth game (especially in maps like oilrig) but you don't have to, which is what's so great about it. (In America's army and RC3, it's stealth only (or sit at a choke point and fire into the smoke) which is less exciting. I want to stalk an enemy who isn't necessarily stalking me.) The max time limit of 4-5 minutes in most maps (though it can seem like forever) also helps as well as the ability to stalk a specific target (e.g. the VP or the bomb sites) on offense.
_Beneath_the_Wheel_ is important in a heavily corperate society because it talks about having gifts in areas (like technology) and that sometimes just because you can work until midnight every day on X project because your boss wants you to, doesn't mean you should and more importantly that it won't make you any happier in the long term.
While knowledge is power, power in itself is not an ends, something many forget. Hesse's novels are no less than a retelling of Socrate's "Know thyself" in parable form.
I'm surprised no one in this thread is talking about beta testing this on their network. I'm currently doing tests at my work, so that when SP2 does come out, we can do a 0-day rollout. This is a release candidate, meaning that if it's good, there won't be any changes.
For the vast majority of users, I don't think XP firewall is going to help. These are the same users how have 3000 adware/spyware items (my sister's record) on their machines. If they click yes to spyware/adware pop-ups, they'll probably just click allow on the dialogue boxes for XP firewall.
While a built-in firewall isn't a bad idea, it requires user education in order to be at all effective.
It sounds like you didn't do much testing. I write programs to do jobs at my work, and though I believe in my abilities, I also don't believe I'm God. Therefore, I test everything thoroughly before I use them in production. And I'm public sector. In the private sector, it's even more crucial as your customers can actually walk away.
You should've tested this new fax technology, in house and then by setting up a group of "special" customers (give them a small discount as incentive) to beta test it with (and since they know there could be errors and they are being compensated, they won't be pissed when there are bugs). After the new fax technology works for a month or two (depending on how much it's used), then, and only then, begin using for everyone. Repeat this procedure on a smaller scale if you are using the software in a never-before-used-way. This technique really goes for most technology.
The problem with counter-strike and many video games as a sport is that they can't really be watched. In any traditional sport, there's some obvious object on which to focus the camera (a ball or a puck in most cases). The action usually focuses around this one object. Similarly, there's also no walls obstructing views of all participants except a few. Most rounds in CS are won by eliminated each individual member of the other team, thus making there as many focal points as are players on the team.
You could handle this in one of three ways. First, don't watch it live and show "important" clips (where people are killed or die). That would allow fans to see all the important stuff, but would have the feel of a highlight reel in sports (you know somethings going to happen) and it fails to give context to the action. You could focus on one player the whole time, but then you'd miss stuff.
One of the most fun things about CS is the element of surprise (which is not possible in, say Goldeneye since the opponent can see your screen), but at the same time, this same innate inability to see what's going on is what makes it a horrible spectator sport.
Perhaps I'm just being naive, but anyone else notice a pattern here? Suse, a German OSS distro, is being considered as a candidate in Germany. Mandrakesoft, a French OSS distro, is being considered in France. The American government is using an American-based proprietary OS.
Anyone else see a pattern? Perhaps it's not open-source ideals that's driving this move, but good old-fashioned protectionism, at least in part.
Newsflash: This is an open-source advocacy site. Perhaps you don't remember years ago when Linux was considered a hackers-only OS. While it's not mainstream, the mere fact that it is seriously considered by a member of the G8 as a serious contender is news, as it shows further heading toward that direction.
Comcast has special introductory offers of $20/month to compete directly with dial-up. It wouldn't make sense for them to drop the price to $20 as it would eliminate their profit margin. They're providing about 100 times the bandwidth of dialup for only twice the price and you complain about value?
If you think broadband is expensive, look at the rest of your cable bill.
I'll agree that there is a balance between ease of use and power, but with a PC you can do what you please. But there's programs that challenge this notion. I=tunes is pretty easy to use but also very powerful.
Is that it's essentially PC hardware. Heck, it uses the DirectX API. So what's my problem? Why not port games to PC since it's almost exactly the same. Answer: MS pays developers to develop for X-Box exclusively (think Halo).
While I wouldn't mind buying a PC X-Box kit (I'm not calling it an emulator since it wouldn't be emulating anything), I feel stupid maintaining two x86 PCs just because his Billness decided that's the way it should be. (Everyone talks about the extra X-box features, but really the feature set is dumbed down PC interface).
Because you can sell a game used, it makes the game worth more. Someone had to buy the game new in order for it to be used (duh). For whoever that person is, that game becomes cheaper (net: new price - used price = net price). As any student of economics knows, the effect of decreasing price on any object is to increase units sold. Note that this decrease in price occurs without either the store or the gaming company having to make less money on the initial sale.
As for the enormous markup, that's what the free market is all about. EBGames in no way has a monopoly on selling used games. Mad about the markup? Go on EBay or a different store. As long as people buy used games at these prices, they will continue to cost as much as they do. It's EB's job to try to maximize its profits.
In conclusion, because you can resell a game, it ultimately makes the game worth more without changing the price and therefore increases sales of new games.
We recently upgraded to PS 8.8 at my work and though I don't use Linux at work, I do use FireFox/Mozilla. Both of which have rendering issues on some of our pages. Some relatively new versions of mozilla won't even respond to menu clicks. It's really not the OS you ought to be worried about with Linux IMHO, it's browser compatibility. (And about people writing applications with browsers and standards in mind).
As an alternate solution, I'd recommend Norton Ghost. Keep a backup of a "good" image for each PC model in the office. When a client fails, simply refresh the image (takes like 20 minutes). It's not especially elegant, but it gets the job done.
There's a reason we have a legal system for breach of contract. Intel breached their contract with you and ought to be held accountable. Worried about Intel's lawyers? Just call the press or threaten to. It'll cost Intel more to deal with the bad press than it will to replace your chip. As soon as they hear about a care, I guarentee they'll capitulate and just give you a replacement.
I was busy one summer, my sister would be going to college in the fall, so I decided to order her a computer. Athlon 1.2 Ghz (really fast at the time) with 512 DDR memory (or so the guy said). I also wanted to buy a good GFX card with the system and swap it with my aging Rage 128 (the salesman assured me I could).
I got the system and there was no DDR memory, which pissed me off. I took out the video card and put in my card and tried to boot the system. No go. The on-board card wasn't being overriden by the Rage 128 (couldn't even see the bios screen with the rage128 plugged in). After rumaging around the bios and finding nothing, I call tech support.
He said that I needed to reformat the hard drive since the problem was with the windows registry which, he said, was stored on the master boot record and thus could only be fixed with a reformat. I tried to tell him he was full of BS but he hung up on me.
Let's take Civ3. The AI in that game made using larger maps with slower computers pretty unplayable, but the normal sized maps were very playable. So if you bought a brand new computer today, you'd get extra playability out of this game (which, coincidently will run on a Pentium 133 on smaller maps (Min sys req P3 450)). My point is the game scales.
So what's different with FPS? Well, for starters, the genre's physics and basic premise hasn't really changed since Quake (where they added rooms on top of rooms, jumping, and free look). While graphics are nice, good graphics are certainly not required to make a great game. (Tetris anyone?)
Though not meant as a blast to FPS people, the genre doesn't require huge ammounts of processing power except for the friggin' graphics. As an analogue to the Civ scenario, people with worse GFX cards should still be able to play the game with worse graphics. Unless there's some sort of wiz-bang AI or complex physics, I'd hope processor power wouldn't matter too much either.
People played the original Half-life on P2 300s and they still play it on Athlon64's. All I can say is I hope the new Half-life will try to be as accomedating as the original and provide the same evolutionary gameplay that made it a classic.
By not allowing other people to use their OS on their own hardware, apple killed itself once. Not cooperating with "#2" and trying to be compatible is why Apple lost the #1 spot once. Glad to see they don't mind repeating mistakes.
I really wish the artistic community could invent a better name than post-modern for the current period. The real problem is the usage of the word modern to mean a period which ended more than a hundred years ago. No one else uses the word modern this way and to change it to conform with the artistic world would be more complicated than the reverse. Is Linux a powerful, modern, operating system? Oh excuse me. It's a powerful post-modern operating system. And it's not "this modern world". It'd be "This Post-Modern world". The phrase modern computer would become oxymoronic.
I suppose the people who use Gnu/Linux should start calling Linux a postmodern OS first.
Slashdot Mirror
Evolution is not compatible with any state of the world. For example, if there were only one kind of fossil for each creature and there were no creatures different than those existing today (save the ones that died off) evolution wouldn't be accepted. If Australia had the same wildlife that asia had, evolution wouldn't be accepted. If animals who had one body part in common were likely to have others in common (why shouldn't many mammals lay eggs and many reptiles have fur and give live birth?), evolution wouldn't be attractive.
Just because experiments to prove evolution would be unfeasable doesn't mean the theory is false or even unscientific.
Let's get historical again shall we? Ptolemy had a wonderful system of explaining planetary movement, even better than Galileo's. He had a complex system of equations and constants which would spit out right answers. Galileo's wasn't as good, but it was extremely simple. The biggest hole was that the last planet's orbit was irregular, as if another planet was influencing it. Using his theory, Galileo was able to predict the location of another planet which he verified existed (and was promptly imprisoned for his heretical beliefs by the catholic church).
How is this like evolution? Well, Galileo couldn't very well throw a new planet up into space to verify it would behave as he predicted. We can't wait billions of years for animals to evolve. Galileo's theory was simple, while Ptolemy's required lots of constants. Galileo predicted the existance of a planet which he later found. Evolution's predicted the existance of many fossils which have been found (and some which haven't).
(We can also simulate what people like to call microevolution in a lab. Stick a bunch of fruit flies in a jar and spray it full of DDT. Repeat for 3 generations.)
Experimentation is only one part of the scientific methodology. Perhaps you should go read some Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, or Charles Darwin. I may not be a creationist, but at least I bothered reading the Bible.
No I'm not going to flame you for being religious.
What I am going to say is that Creation Science is in no way scientific. However, creationism is a theory of how things happened, just not a scientific one. (Science has become used to describe anything these days whether or not it uses scientific methodology (e.g. Political Science)).
The reason why creation can not be science is that it cannot be proven (or disproven). The theory of evolution focuses why it's true. Creationism tries to "prove" itself by disproving evolution rather by by its own merits (and thus win by default). Creationism is also extremely broad (every logical world could have been created with creationism, so it fails to explain why the world is this way and not some other way).
Let's get historical. A lot of people bash Darwin and haven't bothered to even read his books or know his arguments, so I'll use one he used. Darwin found that throughout his travels in the world there were never amphibians on islands surrounded by saltwater, unless introduced by humans (in which case they thrived). Darwin also knew that the amphibians died when they tried to swim in salt water. The most likely explanation was that since no frogs were there when the island formed, no frogs could ever be on the island since they couldn't swim. Creationim's explanation would be that God created amphibians on large land masses but not small ones because it was part of his plan. From there, I'd like to know how or why this is part of God's plan.
I don't see a good way of explaining why God decided that amphibians shouldn't be on oceanic islands.
There's many more examples like this. Let's not forget the theory of Gravity fails on the quantum level, but no one's about to discard it. Evolution isn't perfect, but without it, biology wouldn't exist (why would we believe that experiments on other animals would be relevant to humans? God could've created all the animals completely differently...but also could not have.)
Creationism is too broad and is compatible with any state of the world. As such, there's nothing one can find in the world to disprove it. Since it cannot be disproven, it's not a scientific theory.
Cars are a luxury item and the features you describe give near-0 productivity improvements.
You equate Linux and Mac as both having to learn new systems, but fail to mention any sort of learning curve. The learning curve on Mac is much shallower than Linux or Windows (assuming they've not used it.) Computers were introduced to make people more productive. With a shallower learning curve and features that can actually make a user more productive (e.g. native office support, a good clipboard), I don't understand why anyone would have trouble spending a little extra money to make employees more productive.
That said, I'll be happy when there's a Linux GUI as good as either Windows or MacOS. I'll also be happy when MS writes a good kernel and releases it gratis/libre. Guess which one has a better chance of happening?
The author makes a good case from a security perspective for switching from Windows. He fails to point out why MacOS wouldn't be a more suitable candidate. MacOS X has an excellent security record , can run MS Office (all versions) natively, and is extremely user friendly. If your user's not exactly tech savvy, I doubt they'll be able to do crossover office. Additionally, if you run multiple OSes simultaneously, I fail to see how this solves the security problem.
The only disadvantage to MacOS is price, but for any business, this price difference is easily recouped by being completely immune to the worm du jour.
Really, it's inertia and slick marketing that keep MS in its place.
One problem was the time problem. In the time it takes to get one stealth kill, you can get many run and gun kills. The solution is a heavy penalty for dying, like not respawning.
Now the problem with the stealth paradigm is that it can be boring for those already dead: you really want to wait for a 20 minute stalk match with the last two players?
CS I think balances these two, despite being the first game in the genre to populatize the no-respawn rule. I get most of my kills not because I'm the faster shot, because I see the other player first and can line a shot up without him even noticing me (and no, I don't camp, I just go alternative routes). I can play CS like a stealth game (especially in maps like oilrig) but you don't have to, which is what's so great about it. (In America's army and RC3, it's stealth only (or sit at a choke point and fire into the smoke) which is less exciting. I want to stalk an enemy who isn't necessarily stalking me.) The max time limit of 4-5 minutes in most maps (though it can seem like forever) also helps as well as the ability to stalk a specific target (e.g. the VP or the bomb sites) on offense.
_Beneath_the_Wheel_ is important in a heavily corperate society because it talks about having gifts in areas (like technology) and that sometimes just because you can work until midnight every day on X project because your boss wants you to, doesn't mean you should and more importantly that it won't make you any happier in the long term.
While knowledge is power, power in itself is not an ends, something many forget. Hesse's novels are no less than a retelling of Socrate's "Know thyself" in parable form.
I'm surprised no one in this thread is talking about beta testing this on their network. I'm currently doing tests at my work, so that when SP2 does come out, we can do a 0-day rollout. This is a release candidate, meaning that if it's good, there won't be any changes.
For the vast majority of users, I don't think XP firewall is going to help. These are the same users how have 3000 adware/spyware items (my sister's record) on their machines. If they click yes to spyware/adware pop-ups, they'll probably just click allow on the dialogue boxes for XP firewall.
While a built-in firewall isn't a bad idea, it requires user education in order to be at all effective.
1. Play games.
2. Get Stoned.
3. Draw
4. PROFIT!
Anyone else have trouble reaching step 4?
It sounds like you didn't do much testing. I write programs to do jobs at my work, and though I believe in my abilities, I also don't believe I'm God. Therefore, I test everything thoroughly before I use them in production. And I'm public sector. In the private sector, it's even more crucial as your customers can actually walk away.
You should've tested this new fax technology, in house and then by setting up a group of "special" customers (give them a small discount as incentive) to beta test it with (and since they know there could be errors and they are being compensated, they won't be pissed when there are bugs). After the new fax technology works for a month or two (depending on how much it's used), then, and only then, begin using for everyone. Repeat this procedure on a smaller scale if you are using the software in a never-before-used-way. This technique really goes for most technology.
The problem with counter-strike and many video games as a sport is that they can't really be watched. In any traditional sport, there's some obvious object on which to focus the camera (a ball or a puck in most cases). The action usually focuses around this one object. Similarly, there's also no walls obstructing views of all participants except a few. Most rounds in CS are won by eliminated each individual member of the other team, thus making there as many focal points as are players on the team.
You could handle this in one of three ways. First, don't watch it live and show "important" clips (where people are killed or die). That would allow fans to see all the important stuff, but would have the feel of a highlight reel in sports (you know somethings going to happen) and it fails to give context to the action. You could focus on one player the whole time, but then you'd miss stuff.
One of the most fun things about CS is the element of surprise (which is not possible in, say Goldeneye since the opponent can see your screen), but at the same time, this same innate inability to see what's going on is what makes it a horrible spectator sport.
Perhaps I'm just being naive, but anyone else notice a pattern here? Suse, a German OSS distro, is being considered as a candidate in Germany. Mandrakesoft, a French OSS distro, is being considered in France. The American government is using an American-based proprietary OS.
Anyone else see a pattern? Perhaps it's not open-source ideals that's driving this move, but good old-fashioned protectionism, at least in part.
Newsflash: This is an open-source advocacy site. Perhaps you don't remember years ago when Linux was considered a hackers-only OS. While it's not mainstream, the mere fact that it is seriously considered by a member of the G8 as a serious contender is news, as it shows further heading toward that direction.
That's 99 Euros. If I could only get a euro for a dollar.
Comcast has special introductory offers of $20/month to compete directly with dial-up. It wouldn't make sense for them to drop the price to $20 as it would eliminate their profit margin. They're providing about 100 times the bandwidth of dialup for only twice the price and you complain about value?
If you think broadband is expensive, look at the rest of your cable bill.
Ninja Gaiden. Riddick.
I'll agree that there is a balance between ease of use and power, but with a PC you can do what you please. But there's programs that challenge this notion. I=tunes is pretty easy to use but also very powerful.
Is that it's essentially PC hardware. Heck, it uses the DirectX API. So what's my problem? Why not port games to PC since it's almost exactly the same. Answer: MS pays developers to develop for X-Box exclusively (think Halo).
While I wouldn't mind buying a PC X-Box kit (I'm not calling it an emulator since it wouldn't be emulating anything), I feel stupid maintaining two x86 PCs just because his Billness decided that's the way it should be. (Everyone talks about the extra X-box features, but really the feature set is dumbed down PC interface).
Because you can sell a game used, it makes the game worth more. Someone had to buy the game new in order for it to be used (duh). For whoever that person is, that game becomes cheaper (net: new price - used price = net price). As any student of economics knows, the effect of decreasing price on any object is to increase units sold. Note that this decrease in price occurs without either the store or the gaming company having to make less money on the initial sale.
As for the enormous markup, that's what the free market is all about. EBGames in no way has a monopoly on selling used games. Mad about the markup? Go on EBay or a different store. As long as people buy used games at these prices, they will continue to cost as much as they do. It's EB's job to try to maximize its profits.
In conclusion, because you can resell a game, it ultimately makes the game worth more without changing the price and therefore increases sales of new games.
We recently upgraded to PS 8.8 at my work and though I don't use Linux at work, I do use FireFox/Mozilla. Both of which have rendering issues on some of our pages. Some relatively new versions of mozilla won't even respond to menu clicks. It's really not the OS you ought to be worried about with Linux IMHO, it's browser compatibility. (And about people writing applications with browsers and standards in mind).
As an alternate solution, I'd recommend Norton Ghost. Keep a backup of a "good" image for each PC model in the office. When a client fails, simply refresh the image (takes like 20 minutes). It's not especially elegant, but it gets the job done.
There's a reason we have a legal system for breach of contract. Intel breached their contract with you and ought to be held accountable. Worried about Intel's lawyers? Just call the press or threaten to. It'll cost Intel more to deal with the bad press than it will to replace your chip. As soon as they hear about a care, I guarentee they'll capitulate and just give you a replacement.
I was busy one summer, my sister would be going to college in the fall, so I decided to order her a computer. Athlon 1.2 Ghz (really fast at the time) with 512 DDR memory (or so the guy said). I also wanted to buy a good GFX card with the system and swap it with my aging Rage 128 (the salesman assured me I could).
I got the system and there was no DDR memory, which pissed me off. I took out the video card and put in my card and tried to boot the system. No go. The on-board card wasn't being overriden by the Rage 128 (couldn't even see the bios screen with the rage128 plugged in). After rumaging around the bios and finding nothing, I call tech support.
He said that I needed to reformat the hard drive since the problem was with the windows registry which, he said, was stored on the master boot record and thus could only be fixed with a reformat. I tried to tell him he was full of BS but he hung up on me.
Talk about customer service.
You could use quicksort which has the O(n log n) benefits of Merge sort and can be done in place (like bubble sort).
You can put a shitty picture in a good frame but the picture's still shit.
You can port Postal 2 to Linux and it'll still suck.
Let's take Civ3. The AI in that game made using larger maps with slower computers pretty unplayable, but the normal sized maps were very playable. So if you bought a brand new computer today, you'd get extra playability out of this game (which, coincidently will run on a Pentium 133 on smaller maps (Min sys req P3 450)). My point is the game scales.
So what's different with FPS? Well, for starters, the genre's physics and basic premise hasn't really changed since Quake (where they added rooms on top of rooms, jumping, and free look). While graphics are nice, good graphics are certainly not required to make a great game. (Tetris anyone?)
Though not meant as a blast to FPS people, the genre doesn't require huge ammounts of processing power except for the friggin' graphics. As an analogue to the Civ scenario, people with worse GFX cards should still be able to play the game with worse graphics. Unless there's some sort of wiz-bang AI or complex physics, I'd hope processor power wouldn't matter too much either.
People played the original Half-life on P2 300s and they still play it on Athlon64's. All I can say is I hope the new Half-life will try to be as accomedating as the original and provide the same evolutionary gameplay that made it a classic.
By not allowing other people to use their OS on their own hardware, apple killed itself once. Not cooperating with "#2" and trying to be compatible is why Apple lost the #1 spot once. Glad to see they don't mind repeating mistakes.
I really wish the artistic community could invent a better name than post-modern for the current period. The real problem is the usage of the word modern to mean a period which ended more than a hundred years ago. No one else uses the word modern this way and to change it to conform with the artistic world would be more complicated than the reverse. Is Linux a powerful, modern, operating system? Oh excuse me. It's a powerful post-modern operating system. And it's not "this modern world". It'd be "This Post-Modern world". The phrase modern computer would become oxymoronic.
I suppose the people who use Gnu/Linux should start calling Linux a postmodern OS first.