Nintendo is doing more innovation with its system than either X-Box or Sony.
First, look at the controller. Sony decided to copy its last system almost whole-sale. X-Box is absolutely abysmal.
Round two. Software. I don't know who's been saying Nintendo hasn't been making innovative games. Two words: Metroid Prime. It's won game of the year practically every major gaming site and is the only game to really combine the FPS and an adventure game in such a tight package. The newest Zelda game has some of the most revolutionary graphics I've seen in a while. Lastly, is there any multiplayer game more fun and unique than Smash Brothers (or the sequel)? If anyone can find what game they've decided to copy with that, I'd be really curious.
On the flipside, the X-Box's main draw is yet-another-first-person-shooter. Sony's best are available for other consoles (Madden on everything, GTA on PC).
While Nintendo's games tend to star familiar characters, that doesn't mean the gameplay involved cannot be truly innovative, which is really the same its always been.
This's the first I'd heard of Plan 9. I went to the website and though the intro was legnthy, it's designed to be a GUI-based OS that implements many of the things Bell sees wrong with Unix. Anyone using out there care to add something?
I love first person shooters as much as the next guy, but the genre is inherently simplistic on some levels. Hand-eye coordination is the deciding factor in most FPS (and other action games) and in any other genre it's hard to make intelligence the determining factor without creating complexity (exception: Tetris).
But why do I think FPS are complex? Our generation has grown up on them. My girlfriend can't play Quake to save her life (looking with a mouse is really hard to get used to for some people), but she'll come to LAN parties to play Warcraft (which, is a relatively simple RTS compared to Rise of Nations).
I challenge anyone to create a simple game that doesn't require coordination to win (checkers is about the only one I can think of).
Red alert 2's acting was so bad, I almost stopped playing the game. Tanya was the most memorable character. There seemed to be an endless number of tanktops she would wear while leaning over a table. The camera knew where to point;) I thought it was pretty sad.
I don't care if you're running MS, Linux, or FreeBSD. That damn port should've been firewalled and the software should've been patched. What's scary is imagining what could've happened if someone intentionally tried to hack the power plant. Some terrorist cell could cause a nuclear meltdown without ever setting foot in the US.
Interesting discussion, however, nothing mentioned in the article is actually unique to Buddhism. The idea of dying, coming back, and trying to escape this cycle through learning is common to Hinduism, Jainism, and even Pythagorean religion.
The article misses a major part of video card market. Most people don't buy video cards soley based on what games they can play. Otherwise, everyone's card would be out of date in less than a year. People buy video cards and other computer hardware based on not only what it can do in the present, but what it will be able to do in the future. Most people can't afford to buy a new video card every month. And for those people, looking at a benchmark will give them some idea of the advantages of different pieces of hardware in conjunction with software that hasn't been developed yet.
I know I'm sacrificing karma on this but I'll ask the question anyway...why? Though I love linux as much as the next guy, OSX is probably the best GUI around. Why not concentrate efforts on making KDE the best GUI possible...better than OSX...before trying to port it? It'd be like Microsoft porting IIs to Linux. Who'd honestly use it?
Quoth the author:
nuke-alwin writes "eWeek is reporting that Los Alamos National Laboratory announced it will use more than 3,300 Opteron chips in two of its Linux clusters...." (emphasis mine)
From lanl.gov: Lightning includes 2,816 Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), making it the largest Opteron system delivered in 2003 and the first 64-bit Linux supercomputer in the ASCI program.
Last I checked, 2816 is less than 3,300, though I can't get to the e-week article. Are the extra 500 chips in case of failure? But an 18% failure rate seems rather high....
Having played most of the games by black isle (Fallout series, Balder's Gate series, Neverwinter nights) and I seriously think they've lost something. Fallout and its sequel were terrific for their stress of doing things outside combat to earn experience, and only about half the game was even combat related. Steadily, they've lost this. Neverwinter nights, although terrific graphically, was little more than a diablo sequel using the D&D engine. Sure, there's a couple scattered characters that you can persuade and a couple locks to pick, but it's no longer possible to go through the game as a character not specializing in combat (try playing through as a bard=)) nor are there really multiple ways to complete most quests. To make it even more blatant, they tweaked the D&D experience system to allow more combat with less experience (you only get 14% of what you noramlly would). In contrast, in Fallout 2, you could beat both the first and the last bosses in fallout 2 without taking part in fighting if your intelligence and speech were good enough. It wouldn't suprise me if the next game skipped the ability to choose dialogue options (which were largely pointless in neverwinter nights anyway), and marketed it as a good looking 3D hack'n'slash.
I definitely agree. Even Blizzard (through Warcraft 3) has done this to some extent and I think it's necessary. If there's one all-purpose unit, people will simply crank that unit out exclusively.
However, battle micro in starcraft I felt was under-stressed. Having watched my brother and other high ranked people play SC, I quickly noticed no one payed any attention to combat whatsoever, making caster type units (templars, ghosts, queens) pretty ineffective.
I like warcraft 3's balance. Many units have auto-cast, so you don't have to micro casters and battle has been considerably slowed compared to production rate, so it's now possible to be somewhat skillful in battle without knowing all the hotkeys. The unit cap makes it so there are seldom any battles on the scaled of starcraft, which many people have canned, but I honestly think that this's the best feature as it allows you room to control things.
Back in the day, my girlfriend at the time wanted to try Linux. Installig a second hard drive her laptop wasn't an option. Rather than repartioning the entire hard drive, I simply burned the "system restore partition" on to a CD, deleted it, and installed Linux there.
The entire process took about 2 hours and didn't require us to purchase software (important for college kids).
I've found all of his books quite good, especially for beginners in the field. His newest, The Universe in a Nutshell, is especially good.
(Unfortunately, it wasn't released by the O'Reilly books. See, I wanted the Linux Kernel in a Nutshell, MacOS in a Nutshell, and the Universe in a Nutshell next to each other, but that's just me).
I know not everyone has time to read all the comments so I'll summarize the comments:
* Microsoft sux0rz. They're software has lots of bugs 'cause they're not 1337. * My system has been up for the last century running FreeBSD. * M$ Sucks. * All Software has bugs. * Open source software has less bugs. * First post!
It seems absurd to create a universe in which the players have absolutely no control about the future of it. There's no heroism when something just "has" to happen. For example, if no one joins the rebel alliance, the rebels will still win. If no one joins the imperial army, the rebels will still have a tough fight. Why not just say, this is the star wars universe but things could happen differently than in the movies? Wouldn't it be more fun if you could try to kill Darth Vader even if you had only a small chance of succeeding?
I don't understand the adventure gaming is dead claim.
Zelda -- Wind waker came out recently. Absolutely spectacular game, great reviews, good sales. Have you been living under a rock?
Grand Theft Auto -- Brings the adventure genre to the urban environment. You complete quests in return from items and to unlock new areas. I suppose it could be classified as a driving game, but if you're playing GTA cause you like racing, you've got problems.
Adventure gaming isn't dead, it's just changed forms. The only kind of adventure game that I can think of that's dead is the kind with no action element. And I can deal with that.
The comment about innovation is both accurate and innacurate. Linux, not being primarily a desktop OS, has done little to revolutionize the desktop. Even Taco said at one point said about a new MS product "Now we know the interface we need to clone." OSS software has done wonders for the internet though and we've seen innovation there. Apache anyone? (However, if you want real innovation on the desktop, check out OSX.)
Actually you could. On a single system (RAID level 1 or higher) ensures that if any one hard drive goes bad, no data is lost. In raid 1, a second drive simply mirrors the first for example (it gets more efficient and more complicated as one goes up levels but you get the idea.)
No hardware is totally reliable. According to the article, in an early mainframe, there was a 2nd CPU to check the operations of the first.
In the bank example, the cheap and brute force way would be to simply have two systems keep track of any one account. If either system goes down, nothing bad happens. Just put up a new system and have it mirror the data of the one working system.
Redundency is the key to reliability. It doesn't matter if it's implimented on a beowulf cluster or a mainframe.
Yay for college comp sci majors. Anyway, I started using Linux my freshman year. The sound card, nor the video card, nor the modem worked on install. Eventually, the community solved the problem by releasing new drivers. I then began poking around and reading stuff casually. I now know my way around a Linux system pretty well, but this stuff takes time. What new Linux users need to realize is two things. First, you've probably been using windows for years. Just cause you can stick a Redhat CD in your drive, doesn't make you a Linux pro, it takes years of use. Secondly, Linux and Windows are both good at different things. Linux is a better programming environment than windows while gaming and office stuff are much easier in windows (especially for the novice). That said, being more experienced, I now use the same products on both platforms (Mozilla/OpenOffice/AIM/XEmacs) and have even achieved uptimes of over 2 weeks in Windows 98SE (which I find amazing=)). However, until my addiction to Warcraft 3 ends (or wine gets faster), I'm afraid I'm stuck in Windows at least part of the time.
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Nintendo is doing more innovation with its system than either X-Box or Sony.
First, look at the controller. Sony decided to copy its last system almost whole-sale. X-Box is absolutely abysmal.
Round two. Software. I don't know who's been saying Nintendo hasn't been making innovative games. Two words: Metroid Prime. It's won game of the year practically every major gaming site and is the only game to really combine the FPS and an adventure game in such a tight package. The newest Zelda game has some of the most revolutionary graphics I've seen in a while. Lastly, is there any multiplayer game more fun and unique than Smash Brothers (or the sequel)? If anyone can find what game they've decided to copy with that, I'd be really curious.
On the flipside, the X-Box's main draw is yet-another-first-person-shooter. Sony's best are available for other consoles (Madden on everything, GTA on PC).
While Nintendo's games tend to star familiar characters, that doesn't mean the gameplay involved cannot be truly innovative, which is really the same its always been.
This's the first I'd heard of Plan 9. I went to the website and though the intro was legnthy, it's designed to be a GUI-based OS that implements many of the things Bell sees wrong with Unix. Anyone using out there care to add something?
Ah SCO. The Microsoft of Germany. Can we get a borg-like icon for them instead of the company logo?
I love first person shooters as much as the next guy, but the genre is inherently simplistic on some levels. Hand-eye coordination is the deciding factor in most FPS (and other action games) and in any other genre it's hard to make intelligence the determining factor without creating complexity (exception: Tetris).
But why do I think FPS are complex? Our generation has grown up on them. My girlfriend can't play Quake to save her life (looking with a mouse is really hard to get used to for some people), but she'll come to LAN parties to play Warcraft (which, is a relatively simple RTS compared to Rise of Nations).
I challenge anyone to create a simple game that doesn't require coordination to win (checkers is about the only one I can think of).
Red alert 2's acting was so bad, I almost stopped playing the game. Tanya was the most memorable character. There seemed to be an endless number of tanktops she would wear while leaning over a table. The camera knew where to point;) I thought it was pretty sad.
I don't care if you're running MS, Linux, or FreeBSD. That damn port should've been firewalled and the software should've been patched. What's scary is imagining what could've happened if someone intentionally tried to hack the power plant. Some terrorist cell could cause a nuclear meltdown without ever setting foot in the US.
Interesting discussion, however, nothing mentioned in the article is actually unique to Buddhism. The idea of dying, coming back, and trying to escape this cycle through learning is common to Hinduism, Jainism, and even Pythagorean religion.
The article misses a major part of video card market. Most people don't buy video cards soley based on what games they can play. Otherwise, everyone's card would be out of date in less than a year. People buy video cards and other computer hardware based on not only what it can do in the present, but what it will be able to do in the future. Most people can't afford to buy a new video card every month. And for those people, looking at a benchmark will give them some idea of the advantages of different pieces of hardware in conjunction with software that hasn't been developed yet.
I know I'm sacrificing karma on this but I'll ask the question anyway...why? Though I love linux as much as the next guy, OSX is probably the best GUI around. Why not concentrate efforts on making KDE the best GUI possible...better than OSX...before trying to port it? It'd be like Microsoft porting IIs to Linux. Who'd honestly use it?
Quoth the author:
nuke-alwin writes "eWeek is reporting that Los Alamos National Laboratory announced it will use more than 3,300 Opteron chips in two of its Linux clusters...." (emphasis mine)
From lanl.gov:
Lightning includes 2,816 Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), making it the largest Opteron system delivered in 2003 and the first 64-bit Linux supercomputer in the ASCI program.
Last I checked, 2816 is less than 3,300, though I can't get to the e-week article. Are the extra 500 chips in case of failure? But an 18% failure rate seems rather high....
Having played most of the games by black isle (Fallout series, Balder's Gate series, Neverwinter nights) and I seriously think they've lost something. Fallout and its sequel were terrific for their stress of doing things outside combat to earn experience, and only about half the game was even combat related. Steadily, they've lost this. Neverwinter nights, although terrific graphically, was little more than a diablo sequel using the D&D engine. Sure, there's a couple scattered characters that you can persuade and a couple locks to pick, but it's no longer possible to go through the game as a character not specializing in combat (try playing through as a bard=)) nor are there really multiple ways to complete most quests. To make it even more blatant, they tweaked the D&D experience system to allow more combat with less experience (you only get 14% of what you noramlly would). In contrast, in Fallout 2, you could beat both the first and the last bosses in fallout 2 without taking part in fighting if your intelligence and speech were good enough. It wouldn't suprise me if the next game skipped the ability to choose dialogue options (which were largely pointless in neverwinter nights anyway), and marketed it as a good looking 3D hack'n'slash.
I definitely agree. Even Blizzard (through Warcraft 3) has done this to some extent and I think it's necessary. If there's one all-purpose unit, people will simply crank that unit out exclusively.
However, battle micro in starcraft I felt was under-stressed. Having watched my brother and other high ranked people play SC, I quickly noticed no one payed any attention to combat whatsoever, making caster type units (templars, ghosts, queens) pretty ineffective.
I like warcraft 3's balance. Many units have auto-cast, so you don't have to micro casters and battle has been considerably slowed compared to production rate, so it's now possible to be somewhat skillful in battle without knowing all the hotkeys. The unit cap makes it so there are seldom any battles on the scaled of starcraft, which many people have canned, but I honestly think that this's the best feature as it allows you room to control things.
My 2 cents.
Back in the day, my girlfriend at the time wanted to try Linux. Installig a second hard drive her laptop wasn't an option. Rather than repartioning the entire hard drive, I simply burned the "system restore partition" on to a CD, deleted it, and installed Linux there.
The entire process took about 2 hours and didn't require us to purchase software (important for college kids).
A little known fact is that the "Forever" in DNF stands for the legnth of the development cycle.
I don't believe this...I mean, isn't DNF the vaporware standard?
I've found all of his books quite good, especially for beginners in the field. His newest, The Universe in a Nutshell, is especially good.
(Unfortunately, it wasn't released by the O'Reilly books. See, I wanted the Linux Kernel in a Nutshell, MacOS in a Nutshell, and the Universe in a Nutshell next to each other, but that's just me).
I know not everyone has time to read all the comments so I'll summarize the comments:
* Microsoft sux0rz. They're software has lots of bugs 'cause they're not 1337.
* My system has been up for the last century running FreeBSD.
* M$ Sucks.
* All Software has bugs.
* Open source software has less bugs.
* First post!
Will it include a "Operation North Korean Freedom" mission in the game?
It seems absurd to create a universe in which the players have absolutely no control about the future of it. There's no heroism when something just "has" to happen. For example, if no one joins the rebel alliance, the rebels will still win. If no one joins the imperial army, the rebels will still have a tough fight. Why not just say, this is the star wars universe but things could happen differently than in the movies? Wouldn't it be more fun if you could try to kill Darth Vader even if you had only a small chance of succeeding?
I'm curious. It mentioned at the end how he collaberated with different developers (i.e. Kojima). Anyone happen to know which game they did together?
I don't understand the adventure gaming is dead claim.
Zelda -- Wind waker came out recently. Absolutely spectacular game, great reviews, good sales. Have you been living under a rock?
Grand Theft Auto -- Brings the adventure genre to the urban environment. You complete quests in return from items and to unlock new areas. I suppose it could be classified as a driving game, but if you're playing GTA cause you like racing, you've got problems.
Adventure gaming isn't dead, it's just changed forms. The only kind of adventure game that I can think of that's dead is the kind with no action element. And I can deal with that.
The comment about innovation is both accurate and innacurate. Linux, not being primarily a desktop OS, has done little to revolutionize the desktop. Even Taco said at one point said about a new MS product "Now we know the interface we need to clone." OSS software has done wonders for the internet though and we've seen innovation there. Apache anyone? (However, if you want real innovation on the desktop, check out OSX.)
Is there something going on I don't know about or is there a reason no one comments anymore?
Actually you could. On a single system (RAID level 1 or higher) ensures that if any one hard drive goes bad, no data is lost. In raid 1, a second drive simply mirrors the first for example (it gets more efficient and more complicated as one goes up levels but you get the idea.)
No hardware is totally reliable. According to the article, in an early mainframe, there was a 2nd CPU to check the operations of the first.
In the bank example, the cheap and brute force way would be to simply have two systems keep track of any one account. If either system goes down, nothing bad happens. Just put up a new system and have it mirror the data of the one working system.
Redundency is the key to reliability. It doesn't matter if it's implimented on a beowulf cluster or a mainframe.
Yay for college comp sci majors. Anyway, I started using Linux my freshman year. The sound card, nor the video card, nor the modem worked on install. Eventually, the community solved the problem by releasing new drivers. I then began poking around and reading stuff casually. I now know my way around a Linux system pretty well, but this stuff takes time. What new Linux users need to realize is two things. First, you've probably been using windows for years. Just cause you can stick a Redhat CD in your drive, doesn't make you a Linux pro, it takes years of use. Secondly, Linux and Windows are both good at different things. Linux is a better programming environment than windows while gaming and office stuff are much easier in windows (especially for the novice). That said, being more experienced, I now use the same products on both platforms (Mozilla/OpenOffice/AIM/XEmacs) and have even achieved uptimes of over 2 weeks in Windows 98SE (which I find amazing=)). However, until my addiction to Warcraft 3 ends (or wine gets faster), I'm afraid I'm stuck in Windows at least part of the time.