If people aren't very excited by this tournament, it's largely because Quake 3's day is done.
Online its popularity is dwarfed by Counter Strike, which, for better or worse, has replaced Quake as the game of choice of the vast majority of online players. (A fact not lost on developers, who are falling over themselves to bring out CS-like games.)
Of course, no one knows how many people are even playing Q3, thanks to the servers failing to distinguish between bots and humans. In fact, looking at the numbers, it's entirely possible that there are more humans playing Quake 2. Q3 tournaments are in sharp decline, too; Quakecon was an exception, with Q3 even having been dropped (in lieu of CS) in the most widely followed "pro gaming" tourneys.
Q3 never really managed to make the impact that its predecessors did. The leading theory, which you can find on almost any gaming message board: id makes good engines, but has become progressively worse at making a fun game. There's something to that, but there's also Q3 itself to blame -- an arcade-y version of deathmatch without the depth of the original.
In the party of Joe Lieberman, this type of social control is becoming increasingly popular. Liberman wants to clean up Hollywood and video games; now Torricelli wants to police students.
Many would find this unsurprising had it come from the GOP. But it's time to understand that neither party is very enthusiastic about liberty.
For an illuminating look at this matter, see filmmaker Tim Robbins' current Nation essay:
Try forcing your way into someone's home claiming that your stolen [whatever] in in there. You bet you can be legally shot by the landowner. Deal with it. This isn't a socialist owned state.
Er, that would seem to be the problem, yes?
It's not socialism that is to blame for the BSA's excesses. It's another ideology, starting with 'C'.
In any society, the police answer to the interests of the elite, but the DMCA brings their servility to a new low.
In practice, the DMCA has stood for the proposition that federal resources are to be used to stamp out the tradition of fair use, lock up academic inquiry, and handcuff society to the fictions of corporations.
Warms the heart to think of the feds running errands for the criminal monopolist Microsoft, doesn't it?
This is what it comes down to: the desire to send their packets ahead of, and even to the exclusion of, yours.
That allows all sorts of social control to be exercised in the name of an icy cold "efficiency," as defined by executives and politicians. The democratic experiment of the Net will quickly be brought to heel in that scenario, and taught to surrender to the thirst for profits.
No thanks! Big business has already polluted our politics, our environment, and our media. It must not be allowed to subsume the Net in its perverse corporate culture, too.
In this case, Slashdot had a perfect opportunity to promote activism in behalf of a cause it holds dear -- and it dropped the ball.
The question, of course, is: are Slashdot stories merely intended to generate lots and lots of posts, or are they intended to help generate the world we want to see?
"With the arrest of Dmitry Sklyarov, it has become apparent that it is not safe for non-US software engineers to visit the United States," says Alan Cox, a leading UK-based programmer of the Linux operating system.
Excellent. Maybe Europe can teach sleepwalking Americans to be more mindful of their vanishing liberties.
The.us giveaway belongs to the same pillaging outlook that characterizes this administration's view of its duty to the public trust.
Is there money in the.us domain? Give it to business.
Are the public airwaves ripe for commercialization? Give licenses away for a pittance (while thwarting the licensing of small bandwidth community stations that would compete with corporate behemoths).
Is there oil in the Alaskan wilderness? Allow business to pump it, though the quantity is slight and the environmental damage great.
Is the health of school students compromised by the unsafe standards of the US beef industry? Sure, but relax regulations, anyway.
This isn't government of, by, or for the people, but a plain old fashioned free-for-all by the base and greedy, conducted under the nose of a public too bored and uninformed to care.
It comes down to the extent that your chosen medium "does it for you." Whether it's with numbers telling you what colors to choose or pull-down menus selecting a filter to provide a technique you couldn't achieve on your own, you're simply riding bitch to someone else's creativity.
Nice computer-assisted graphic design there. But sorry, not fine art.
Knock Napster all you want, but at a certain point it achieved a critical mass that allowed you to find virtually anything. I wonder if I'd ever have seen my taste in music expand so much without being able to rove through its huge listings of foreign, experimental, and long-forgotten recordings. Musically, it became, briefly, for me, anyway, the digital equivalent of the Great Library at Alexandria....
For that, I'm thankful to Napster -- a bunch of venture capitalists the world round saw fit to introduce me to tons and tons of unusual music. For free! So, actually, it's the venture capitalists to whom I owe thanks: your misspent millions really were enjoyed over here, guys.
Of course, that could only have happened as long as it was all free, encouraging everyone and his Swahili uncle to jump in. Sure, the idea wasn't altruistic; the good Napster funders always planned to extract gold from the service once they'd found a means to do so.
Now that (ostensibly) they finally have, most people have departed for greener pastures. Greener pastures, mind, that they showed how to plant. Hoping to get richer, they merely succeeded in creating the paradigm for sharing music on a vast public scale -- without making anyone richer. Brilliant move, that one. And now with their newly signed contracts for Tom Jones recordings they want to be paid. Hee hee! What's new, Pussycat?:)
Good lord, this sounds exactly like American capitalism!
Over the past twenty-five years we've seen a broad decline in real earnings and spending power. Meanwhile, true growth has only affected the ruling class...
Katz's larger point is superb, so why does he bury the stuff about mega-media's control in a misguided eulogy for the sucky Suck?
Suck going down the tubes doesn't mean that "individual voices" are lost. Or that anyone is being marginalized. No, it means simply that you can't make money writing snarky prolix diatribes (or, actually, that you can, sort of, as long as a Wall Street-driven ad bubble hasn't burst). Every wiseacre knows this.
Yes, Big Media is gonna getcher momma. Yes, this is reason for fear. I would point to Slate, for example.
Katz has underestimated Slate's role and importance. It's easy to dismiss the rag as "a massively-subsidized bulletin board for narcissistic Washington and New York publishing and media people," and it's certainly a tasty line to read. The real importance of Slate, however, is Microsoft's gaining a foothold upon elite opinion; not only does Big Redmond get intellectual cachet in the long musty tradition of patronage, but more vitally, it corrals a number of biggies in the op-ed mob under its protective (read: paychecked) roof. The biggest snare of all is Kinsley, who, despite his tiresome editor's column witticisms about biting the hand that feeds him, is made docile by his embarrassing employment -- and the top banana makes his staff and freelancers docile, too. When is the last time you read anything in the least threatening to power on Slate? You never will. Lesson of Slate: if you ever get to be the biggest monopoly on the planet, hire the best-known Ivy League scribblers to be on your "team," too. Then sit back and watch the worker ants work. Notice their individual voices. Notice they're too busy cashing their checks to complain much about you or your friends.
I agree wholeheartedly with Katz on Salon, which, thanks to Jake Tapper, ran some of the best campaign coverage anywhere. Does Salon's imminent demise mean that Big Media is to blame? Think outside of the ad-impoverished Net context for a moment. Where is the analog of Salon in print? One is tempted to say, maybe, Harper's Magazine, although that's still a mismatch. Harper's is a much older, venerable publication, and yet even it only survived death at the hands of Cowles Media in the 80s through last-minute philanthropic intervention. As it is, it barely makes it. And yet it is one of, and perhaps the, most indispensible reads in America.
If in the print world it's hard to sell intellectual, left-of-center writing, why should it be any easier on the Net? The problem isn't Big Media. The problem is the American mind. You can't get many Americans to read such stuff; they don't like, want, respect, or see any need for it. You will have noticed which TV shows top the Nielsens, and which national newspaper is available on every corner.... This cuts to the issue of "marginalization" that upsets Katz. Please; unorthodox work is always going to be marginalized by virtue of its difficulty, its demands. The really interesting stuff is often on the margins.
Whatever happens to Small Media, I fervently hope the Net is never so thoroughly colonized as to lose boards such as Slashdot. Decades after their invention, boards represent the true revolution in digital media, and as long as they exist, we're not going to be silenced. That is enough, really. To be able to speak freely is really enough. I hope Salon pulls off a miracle, too; or maybe not such a miracle, since, although Katz fails to mention it, the site is now in the porn biz. Damn smart move, that.
It's interesting to compare this turgid model law with the proactive consumer legislation of more than three decades ago. Then, in the wake of groundbreaking work such as Nader's, we agreed as a society that the consumer must be served, protected, and ultimately given the power of redress when bilked, injured, or otherwise harmed by business. We seemed to understand the premise of the old warning, caveat emptor.
Today, we are inclined otherwise: UCITA, along with movements to limit tort liability, is a philosophical realignment so profound it makes one tremulous about the eagerness to forfeit personal dignity for the benefit of mega-wealthy companies. Its adoption is another step toward reversing the earlier equation: now, consumers shall exist to serve business, which shall answer to them only when and as it suits its own interests. Our new motto, venditor emptor, says that the proper order of things is Microsoft first, you second. Sign here, suckers.
We need to ask ourselves how we've lost something essential, which, for want of a better word, let's call spine. And let us see whether, if we still have what it takes as a free people, we can get it back.
Who needs your "decent CGI and action sequences"?
on
Review: Evolution
·
· Score: 1
Not to be rude, but the Taco ended my interest in both this movie and his review with this early sentence:
"Decent CGI and action sequences are available too. Nothing that will warrant awards in this day and age, but it might entertain you for a few minutes."
Sorry, life's too short for crap that "might" entertain me for a few minutes. There is so much good stuff and even great stuff out there, who has time for a half-baked Duchovny CGI vehicle?
As others have explained to you in this thread, the use of a server in China implies nothing about the Chinese government. If a Chinese hooker gives you the clap, do you blame Beijing?
But what does deserve scrutiny is why we've even been told that a Chinese server was used. Given the recent contretemps over US spying, you might use a bit of imagination and ask why your own government might like you to reach the kneejerk conclusion that you so ploddingly have.
It's hardly original or daring (as the Voice piece and even the recent NY Times sneer somewhat begrudgingly acknowledge) to note that LOTR lacks a certain pyschological depth. So what? We've been hearing that for nearly half a century. The trilogy's perfectly fine, in fact, without it. What Tolkien created in his Middle Earth's lands and peoples, and what he manages to do with language, exposition and plot, are quite enough, thanks.
Almost more than any complaint against Tolkien himself, the Voice's Julian Dibbell finds it hard to tolerate the thought that geeks -- geeks! -- might have a profound influence upon the culture. Yes, it's probably true, as he suggests, that just about everything from your PC to your evening's "time suck" on Everquest bears some Tolkienesque homage, influence, relationship, or even blatant rip-off. So? Why all the sneering at geeks, then? Isn't this a proof of cultural validity, instead? The piece never bothers to explain why the author is fretting so much (but one guesses: the need to appear clever before the non-geek Voice crowd, and even perhaps a tinge of jealousy that Hobbits are more viable today than left wing lit crit).
With the exception of the odd atom-splitting discovery or acceptance of a job at Microsoft, geeks hardly ever hurt anyone. Let us have our beloved author and our much-obsessed-over film adaption, and don't let it worry you too much, Mr. Dibbell.
That a remote in your pocket, or you just glad...
on
You Are What You Click
·
· Score: 1
"You leave a little bit of your personal signature on your remote," says Predictive's chief executive, Devin Hosea.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.gamespy.com/stats/
If people aren't very excited by this tournament, it's largely because Quake 3's day is done.
Online its popularity is dwarfed by Counter Strike, which, for better or worse, has replaced Quake as the game of choice of the vast majority of online players. (A fact not lost on developers, who are falling over themselves to bring out CS-like games.)
Of course, no one knows how many people are even playing Q3, thanks to the servers failing to distinguish between bots and humans. In fact, looking at the numbers, it's entirely possible that there are more humans playing Quake 2. Q3 tournaments are in sharp decline, too; Quakecon was an exception, with Q3 even having been dropped (in lieu of CS) in the most widely followed "pro gaming" tourneys.
Q3 never really managed to make the impact that its predecessors did. The leading theory, which you can find on almost any gaming message board: id makes good engines, but has become progressively worse at making a fun game. There's something to that, but there's also Q3 itself to blame -- an arcade-y version of deathmatch without the depth of the original.
I know you hate this idea, but I think the Internet needs a fingerprint.
Please notify me the moment this genius has his next idea.
In the party of Joe Lieberman, this type of social control is becoming increasingly popular. Liberman wants to clean up Hollywood and video games; now Torricelli wants to police students.
Many would find this unsurprising had it come from the GOP. But it's time to understand that neither party is very enthusiastic about liberty.
For an illuminating look at this matter, see filmmaker Tim Robbins' current Nation essay:
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0727-01.htm
...the vibrating hotel bed industry.
Er, that would seem to be the problem, yes?
It's not socialism that is to blame for the BSA's excesses. It's another ideology, starting with 'C'.
In any society, the police answer to the interests of the elite, but the DMCA brings their servility to a new low.
In practice, the DMCA has stood for the proposition that federal resources are to be used to stamp out the tradition of fair use, lock up academic inquiry, and handcuff society to the fictions of corporations.
Warms the heart to think of the feds running errands for the criminal monopolist Microsoft, doesn't it?
Boring story, lifeless characters, terrible dialogue. Oh yes, and big brash sfx.
It was ahead of its time! And looking around at Hollywood product today, you could say Tron's time has finally come.
...to the extent that porn does?
This is what it comes down to: the desire to send their packets ahead of, and even to the exclusion of, yours.
That allows all sorts of social control to be exercised in the name of an icy cold "efficiency," as defined by executives and politicians. The democratic experiment of the Net will quickly be brought to heel in that scenario, and taught to surrender to the thirst for profits.
No thanks! Big business has already polluted our politics, our environment, and our media. It must not be allowed to subsume the Net in its perverse corporate culture, too.
You are exactly right.
In this case, Slashdot had a perfect opportunity to promote activism in behalf of a cause it holds dear -- and it dropped the ball.
The question, of course, is: are Slashdot stories merely intended to generate lots and lots of posts, or are they intended to help generate the world we want to see?
Excellent. Maybe Europe can teach sleepwalking Americans to be more mindful of their vanishing liberties.
The .us giveaway belongs to the same pillaging outlook that characterizes this administration's view of its duty to the public trust.
.us domain? Give it to business.
Is there money in the
Are the public airwaves ripe for commercialization? Give licenses away for a pittance (while thwarting the licensing of small bandwidth community stations that would compete with corporate behemoths).
Is there oil in the Alaskan wilderness? Allow business to pump it, though the quantity is slight and the environmental damage great.
Is the health of school students compromised by the unsafe standards of the US beef industry? Sure, but relax regulations, anyway.
This isn't government of, by, or for the people, but a plain old fashioned free-for-all by the base and greedy, conducted under the nose of a public too bored and uninformed to care.
Well, see, the thing is, the people of Chernobyl can't get the stupid stuff out of their bodies. Funny that, eh brainiac?
Well, yes.
:^)?
Ever heard of their bloody fundraisers
It comes down to the extent that your chosen medium "does it for you." Whether it's with numbers telling you what colors to choose or pull-down menus selecting a filter to provide a technique you couldn't achieve on your own, you're simply riding bitch to someone else's creativity.
Nice computer-assisted graphic design there. But sorry, not fine art.
Knock Napster all you want, but at a certain point it achieved a critical mass that allowed you to find virtually anything. I wonder if I'd ever have seen my taste in music expand so much without being able to rove through its huge listings of foreign, experimental, and long-forgotten recordings. Musically, it became, briefly, for me, anyway, the digital equivalent of the Great Library at Alexandria....
:)
For that, I'm thankful to Napster -- a bunch of venture capitalists the world round saw fit to introduce me to tons and tons of unusual music. For free! So, actually, it's the venture capitalists to whom I owe thanks: your misspent millions really were enjoyed over here, guys.
Of course, that could only have happened as long as it was all free, encouraging everyone and his Swahili uncle to jump in. Sure, the idea wasn't altruistic; the good Napster funders always planned to extract gold from the service once they'd found a means to do so.
Now that (ostensibly) they finally have, most people have departed for greener pastures. Greener pastures, mind, that they showed how to plant. Hoping to get richer, they merely succeeded in creating the paradigm for sharing music on a vast public scale -- without making anyone richer. Brilliant move, that one. And now with their newly signed contracts for Tom Jones recordings they want to be paid. Hee hee! What's new, Pussycat?
Good lord, this sounds exactly like American capitalism!
Over the past twenty-five years we've seen a broad decline in real earnings and spending power. Meanwhile, true growth has only affected the ruling class...
Pretty good for a convicted monopolist!
Do other felons manage to perpetuate their crimes quite as efficiently as Microsoft's executives?
Katz's larger point is superb, so why does he bury the stuff about mega-media's control in a misguided eulogy for the sucky Suck?
Suck going down the tubes doesn't mean that "individual voices" are lost. Or that anyone is being marginalized. No, it means simply that you can't make money writing snarky prolix diatribes (or, actually, that you can, sort of, as long as a Wall Street-driven ad bubble hasn't burst). Every wiseacre knows this.
Yes, Big Media is gonna getcher momma. Yes, this is reason for fear. I would point to Slate, for example.
Katz has underestimated Slate's role and importance. It's easy to dismiss the rag as "a massively-subsidized bulletin board for narcissistic Washington and New York publishing and media people," and it's certainly a tasty line to read. The real importance of Slate, however, is Microsoft's gaining a foothold upon elite opinion; not only does Big Redmond get intellectual cachet in the long musty tradition of patronage, but more vitally, it corrals a number of biggies in the op-ed mob under its protective (read: paychecked) roof. The biggest snare of all is Kinsley, who, despite his tiresome editor's column witticisms about biting the hand that feeds him, is made docile by his embarrassing employment -- and the top banana makes his staff and freelancers docile, too. When is the last time you read anything in the least threatening to power on Slate? You never will. Lesson of Slate: if you ever get to be the biggest monopoly on the planet, hire the best-known Ivy League scribblers to be on your "team," too. Then sit back and watch the worker ants work. Notice their individual voices. Notice they're too busy cashing their checks to complain much about you or your friends.
I agree wholeheartedly with Katz on Salon, which, thanks to Jake Tapper, ran some of the best campaign coverage anywhere. Does Salon's imminent demise mean that Big Media is to blame? Think outside of the ad-impoverished Net context for a moment. Where is the analog of Salon in print? One is tempted to say, maybe, Harper's Magazine, although that's still a mismatch. Harper's is a much older, venerable publication, and yet even it only survived death at the hands of Cowles Media in the 80s through last-minute philanthropic intervention. As it is, it barely makes it. And yet it is one of, and perhaps the, most indispensible reads in America.
If in the print world it's hard to sell intellectual, left-of-center writing, why should it be any easier on the Net? The problem isn't Big Media. The problem is the American mind. You can't get many Americans to read such stuff; they don't like, want, respect, or see any need for it. You will have noticed which TV shows top the Nielsens, and which national newspaper is available on every corner.... This cuts to the issue of "marginalization" that upsets Katz. Please; unorthodox work is always going to be marginalized by virtue of its difficulty, its demands. The really interesting stuff is often on the margins.
Whatever happens to Small Media, I fervently hope the Net is never so thoroughly colonized as to lose boards such as Slashdot. Decades after their invention, boards represent the true revolution in digital media, and as long as they exist, we're not going to be silenced. That is enough, really. To be able to speak freely is really enough. I hope Salon pulls off a miracle, too; or maybe not such a miracle, since, although Katz fails to mention it, the site is now in the porn biz. Damn smart move, that.
It's interesting to compare this turgid model law with the proactive consumer legislation of more than three decades ago. Then, in the wake of groundbreaking work such as Nader's, we agreed as a society that the consumer must be served, protected, and ultimately given the power of redress when bilked, injured, or otherwise harmed by business. We seemed to understand the premise of the old warning, caveat emptor.
Today, we are inclined otherwise: UCITA, along with movements to limit tort liability, is a philosophical realignment so profound it makes one tremulous about the eagerness to forfeit personal dignity for the benefit of mega-wealthy companies. Its adoption is another step toward reversing the earlier equation: now, consumers shall exist to serve business, which shall answer to them only when and as it suits its own interests. Our new motto, venditor emptor, says that the proper order of things is Microsoft first, you second. Sign here, suckers.
We need to ask ourselves how we've lost something essential, which, for want of a better word, let's call spine. And let us see whether, if we still have what it takes as a free people, we can get it back.
Not to be rude, but the Taco ended my interest in both this movie and his review with this early sentence:
"Decent CGI and action sequences are available too. Nothing that will warrant awards in this day and age, but it might entertain you for a few minutes."
Sorry, life's too short for crap that "might" entertain me for a few minutes. There is so much good stuff and even great stuff out there, who has time for a half-baked Duchovny CGI vehicle?
As others have explained to you in this thread, the use of a server in China implies nothing about the Chinese government. If a Chinese hooker gives you the clap, do you blame Beijing?
But what does deserve scrutiny is why we've even been told that a Chinese server was used. Given the recent contretemps over US spying, you might use a bit of imagination and ask why your own government might like you to reach the kneejerk conclusion that you so ploddingly have.
It's hardly original or daring (as the Voice piece and even the recent NY Times sneer somewhat begrudgingly acknowledge) to note that LOTR lacks a certain pyschological depth. So what? We've been hearing that for nearly half a century. The trilogy's perfectly fine, in fact, without it. What Tolkien created in his Middle Earth's lands and peoples, and what he manages to do with language, exposition and plot, are quite enough, thanks.
Almost more than any complaint against Tolkien himself, the Voice's Julian Dibbell finds it hard to tolerate the thought that geeks -- geeks! -- might have a profound influence upon the culture. Yes, it's probably true, as he suggests, that just about everything from your PC to your evening's "time suck" on Everquest bears some Tolkienesque homage, influence, relationship, or even blatant rip-off. So? Why all the sneering at geeks, then? Isn't this a proof of cultural validity, instead? The piece never bothers to explain why the author is fretting so much (but one guesses: the need to appear clever before the non-geek Voice crowd, and even perhaps a tinge of jealousy that Hobbits are more viable today than left wing lit crit).
With the exception of the odd atom-splitting discovery or acceptance of a job at Microsoft, geeks hardly ever hurt anyone. Let us have our beloved author and our much-obsessed-over film adaption, and don't let it worry you too much, Mr. Dibbell.
Depends on your aim, doesn't it?
The black and white Quake 3 stuff looks better than that oversaturated, over-produced game does out of the box.
:)
Get Alex to release this, and I'll reinstall Q3.