"And just because these junk bonds are junk bonds doesn't mean they're worthless.... oh wait, yes it does."
Junk bonds are not in fact junk, if by that you are using the everday American interpretation of that word. It makes one think twice about the meme theory to realize that for 50 years or so financial professionals refused to deal with lower-grade bonds simply because they had been labelled with that term.
It was the realization that "junk" bonds were really quite valuable once the correct math for valuation of risk were applied that unlocked the financial restructuring of the US in the 1980s (and incidently made a few people disgustingly wealthy). We in the US have been reaping the beneifts of that restructuring ever since, although we may be running out of gas here finally (2001).
"When you're renting, you have the right to use something for a specific period of time. That's all. If Hertz went out of business while I'm on my next trip, do you think they'd let me keep the rental car? Hell, no!"
The difference being, when a car rental company goes out of business, they don't come by and rip out of your brain all the memories of any place you travelled to using one of their cars (ala "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale"). When business-critical software disappears, the virtual knowledge developed though the use of that software can disappear also, destroying your business process. That's a bit of a bummer.
Actually, "source code escrow" agreements used to be quite common, and are still to be found in contracts for business-critical applications such as EPR systems. The vendor agrees to put a copy of the source code in escrow with a law firm or CPA firm that handles such situations, to be release to the customer if the vendor ceases to be a going concern (or in some cases if they terminate the product line), at which point the terms automatically change from license to ownership. I imagine most of the really big guys will put similar protection in the contracts with M$.
Now, has anyone ever made actual USE of such an agreement? That I can't tell you.
UIUC, like many other large universities, recently signed a "pouring rights" contract with a major soft drink vendor that essentially makes it illegal to sell any drink on campus unless it is a product of that vendor. In exchange for a cut of the loot, of course.
Now, when universities start selling "installing rights" contracts to software vendors, will your little group be outlawed?
"Finally, I think that equating simplified with dumbed-down is absolutely backwards. Yes, younger children can play the new D but it's also a cleaner, better game (I'd still rather play messy shadowrun, but nonetheless.)"
This is a matter of opinion, so there is no absolute answer. I would just like to note that in making my original original post, I did take into account the difference between simplified and dumbed down. Chess and checkers are two of the "simplest" games ever devised, yet also two of the most challenging and long-lasting.
When I said dumbed down, I did actually mean dumbed down. Sorry if you disagree.
As far as I can tell, Hasbro's business model is as follows:
* Identify reasonably profitable gaming company
* Purchase said company
* Identify 20/80 products - that is, the 20% of that company's products that are the most profitable.
* Terminate all products not in the top 20%
* Kill original version of the 20% products, then release a dumbed down version with (a) any complex rule removed (b) simplified, glaring graphics that appeal to (unsophisticated) 2 year olds. In other words, fast-food-ize the games.
* Sit back and rake in the bucks.
"I consider a financial "loss" to be anything which I can claim on my taxes at the end of the year. Nothing else constitutes real loss.
Therefore things like software piracy, virus attacks, are not losses."
That's funny. My coworker and I, who are 100% scheduled from now through April 30th on an ERP implementation for a small manufacturing company, have spent the last three hours (and appear to have about 3 more to go, or a total of 12 manhours) working on the e-mail server because some idiot decided sending out Kourinokava.vbs files was funny (and yes, I know the users shouldn't have clicked on that). Now, that's 12 manhours down the drain. Plus, when I arrive at the manufacturing site tomorrow, I won't be prepared for the work I was going to do, and another 8 hours or so of everyone's time will be wasted as we try to work through that unprepardness.
"He then manually landed the craft, with only 4 seconds of fuel remaining on touchdown"
I believe that was 64 seconds of fuel, with 60 seconds being needed to orient the descent module and fire the ascent module engine for a successful abort. The real question is whether Armstrong would have eaten into that 60 seconds to land. On the records he has always said no...
Sorry, I couldn't resist. Although I always expected AD to be late and have problems when new (as with any heavy-duty directory system including NDS), I assumed that when AD did arrive it would at least match the available features of NDS (as well as Vines and others). Nope - it only seems to cover about 60% of NDS' functionality from what I can see. Too bad it seems destined to win anyway.:-(
Anyway, to get just a bit on-topic I would start by laying out what you hope to achieve by migrating to AD and calculating expected cost/benefit. Don't forget to consider the option of delaying for 12 months until others have finished doing the research and writing the books.
I do have to access Microsoft's web site as part of my work responsibilities. Although I don't personally like many things M$ does, I can put up with them as with any other vendor. The thing that really annoys me, though, is that searching M$'s tech support sites will produce different results when using IE than when using Netscape Navigator (IE results being more complete, natch).
That doesn't surprise me, and I guess it isn't really worse than any trick organizations play to gain competitive advantage, but it does irritate me a lot for some reason.
Looks somewhat similar to the Cross Crosspad, with the laptop/pad interface integrated into one unit. As a person who can't have a 30 second conversation without drawing a sketch, I thought the Crosspad was pretty neat, but it died in the market. Wonder if IBM can do better? I believe they did some of the Crosspad's software to begin with.
_Network Computing_ is one of the good guys out there. Since Novell lost its dominance in corporate networking, _NC_ hasn't had a majority of its ad pages from any one vendor (that may or may not correlate to ad revenue). They seem to be pretty vendor neutral and willing to call shots as they see 'em. They have certainly p**sed off Cisco several times in the last year, which takes some courage. This is one of the few trade rags I trust.
"Trains are among the most inexpensive, most environmentally friendly, and most efficient ways to transport large amounts of anything (people, goods, etc)"
True in many circumstances when compared to road transport (automobiles, trucks), but not compared to ships. Ships are many times more efficient than trains. Think about the Norfolk Southern shipping coal overseas from the Virginia ports - it takes dozens of unit trains to fill one cargo ship. And the per BTU efficiency of movement is much higher for a ship.
The Burlington Northern RaiLink, where goods moving from EU to Asia are dropped off at a North American east coast port, shipped by train to Seattle or LA, then put back on a ship for the rest of the journey, is used to save time, not money. The rail part cuts 2-3 weeks off the total transit time.
"Telecom cables are flexible, trains dont usually like it when their tracks start to change shape."
Within a reasonable limit (say a couple of meters per kilometer), railroads are actually quite flexible. Think about the differential expansion on the rails in a mountain railroad when the temperature goes from -15 deg.C to 10 deg.C between dawn and noon, for example.
If your goal is to get some experience in the US, and if you have some money to travel and live on your own for a few months, it is actually easiest to get an internship and/or temporary work when you are a student. Check to see if your university has a partnership with a US college/university - you might already be considered an honorary student at Nowhereville State University. Or you may be able to register for classes at a US college without too much difficulty. In this situation, it is fairly easy to get a work permit for an internship or a 1-year position at a job related to your field of study. Check with an immigration lawyer for details.
As far as the choice of working or going directly into reseach, IMHO you should work outside of the university in a non-research position for at least two years before making that decision. You can always return to the university from the real world and get back on the PhD track, but it can be very difficult to leave the academic world and go back to industry. Not as true as it once was, and not as true for the EE/CS area, but still a concern.
"Most senior management will buy the story if you explain it to them in these terms, otherwise it may appear that you are simply a hidden slacker unable to take responsibility for the "natural development" of your career and hence must be "irresponsible by nature" and therefore (by extension) unable to do any job responsibly by default (refer to the second most difficult thing above)."
While I personally do agree with most of your points, I would like to offer a possibility for another perspective.
I would suggest that the next time you are in a good video store you rent "The Dawn Patrol". [Warning - plot spoiler]. I don't remember the characters offhand, but there was a captain who was responsible for "managing" a wing of WWI flyers. "Managing" in this context basically meant deciding who would be sent out to their deaths, particularly the newbies. There was also a lieutenant who was the best flyer in the wing, but who was constantly giving his commander enormous amounts of Dilbert-style grief about what an incompetent idiot he was, how his flying skills had deterioriated, how he didn't have the courage to stand up to the higher-ups and make the tough decisions, etc. etc.
There are two keys points in the movie: the paired looks of glee on the face of the captain and shock on the face of the lieutenant as the captain gives the lieutenant his captain's bars and turns over command of the wing; and the look of horror on the (new) commander's face when he realizes he is going to have to assign his brother (a newbie) to a mission that will mean certain death.
I guess the point here is, if you are truly content to just be a technical contributor, then that's fine. But if you are sitting on the management sidelines, quoting Dilbert at every staff meeting, perhaps there is a reason why upper management is insisting on an "up or out" policy.
"It's hard to tell your manager, that 'there no fix for the problem yet, but it's expected in the next pre-patch release.' Big businesses like accountability, someone they can point a finger at and say 'Make it work'."
Has anyone ever managed to hold a major software house accountable for _anything_? Microsoft, IBM, any of the big (or small) ERP vendors? I haven't seen it happen in 15 years of software support. My former employer had a super-double platinum support contract, and about 25 million USD a year in business, with a software vendor you know very well, and we NEVER managed to pin them down and force them to fix ANY of the bugs we found - some of them quite serious.
[Having previewed this, I will make one exception: Novell tends to stand behind its products more than other vendors]
As to whether you can support Linux et al, that's another question, but I hope no one is thinking they can force a commercial software house to stand behind anything. Not to even mention UMCITA.
"Is it just me, or does Iridium have more lives than a cat? I mean, hey, being slated for destruction two, or even three, times is one thing, but when even the US DoD steps in to take up the slack, you've got to wonder if those satellites are ever coming down."
I tracked a lot of the Iridium financial and PR stuff in the early days (several evil MBA projects ). Buried pretty deep in this info was the fact that the US Department of Defense was either a large potential customer, or a large actual customer but the details were secret. I have been wondering for a while if we would see something like this - it seems pretty clear now that DoD is making use of this system and doesn't want to give it up. Interesting.
Back in the early '80's the Washington University (wustl) Computer Science Department used a neat Turing Machine emulator in its introductory CS classes. One of those things that makes absolutely no sense when you are doing it, but three years later you wake up and say "_that's_ what that was for!!!".
Does anyone know if this emulator still exists? If so, has it been ported to Windows or Linux (or MS-DOS for that matter - it originally ran under the UCSD p-System!)?
"With so many people clamoring for this type of thing in the IT field, why isn't someone doing this? Wait a minute, why aren't I doing this?"
IMHO the key issue here is "won't roll over at the first subpoena". Should you choose to supply this service, and should a federal law enforcement agency decide to pursue one of your clients, you will need hundreds of thousands of USD to begin mounting a defense. Assuming you can find lawyers willing to take on said agency. Note that my intention isn't to start an "X-Files" type conspiracy discussion but just to point out that there is a _lot_ of leverage that a government can bring to bear when it wants something.
"You are playing the "best of". That 10% of games that are remembered. They're good because they were good game designs."
This is a valid point, but there is a counterpoint as well: constraints often force the creation of elegent design. When the constraints are removed, bigger things are accomplished but elegence is often lost in the process. This applies to most engineering fields that I know of; look at the design of an electropneumatic control system from the 1920's vs. a digital control system today. No doubt you can accomplish many more things with DCS', but the designs from the 1920's were often far "better" (whatever that means). The constraints of available technology forced the engineers of the day to be good.
The same may be true for games. The old Tank was (IMHO) much more fun to play than most of the current crop of 3D shooter tank sims (if you deliver one of each to my house I will be happy to verify that thought!). The designers of the early 1980's didn't have as much to work with as today's game designers - were their works better? Or just simpler?
"In reality you have to realize that most games really would benefit from realism at least in interaction with the game itself."
Keeping in mind that these sort of questions are purely subjective, I must respectfully disagree. Consider SimCity (now called SimCity Classic) vs. SimCity 2000. SimCity is by far the better game: easier to understand, easier to play, and the player develops a better understanding of the underlying system dynamics model (usually unawares). SimCity 2000 took this clean, enjoyable game and gunked it up with useless pseudo-3D graphics and meaningless options. Even SimCity 3000, which got the 3D graphics right, is in many ways (MHO) inferior to the original.
Personally I think this applies to many of the current generation of games. Panzer General II vs. Panzer General 3D is another one that comes to mind.
"Thinka about it... all the characters in the first three movies speak English (either Gods English, or American")"
Well, I would say that this one was pretty well answered by J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien, who knew a few things about language, and did in fact develop unique languages for each distinct race/culture in his stories, nonetheless stated these stories were written in Westron ("Common Speech") and translated into English (real or British English if you are being really picky). Why? Because otherwise no one could understand them. That seems pretty reasonable to me.
Slashdot Mirror
"And just because these junk bonds are junk bonds doesn't mean they're worthless.... oh wait, yes it does."
Junk bonds are not in fact junk, if by that you are using the everday American interpretation of that word. It makes one think twice about the meme theory to realize that for 50 years or so financial professionals refused to deal with lower-grade bonds simply because they had been labelled with that term.
It was the realization that "junk" bonds were really quite valuable once the correct math for valuation of risk were applied that unlocked the financial restructuring of the US in the 1980s (and incidently made a few people disgustingly wealthy). We in the US have been reaping the beneifts of that restructuring ever since, although we may be running out of gas here finally (2001).
sPh
"When you're renting, you have the right to use something for a specific period of time. That's all. If Hertz went out of business while I'm on my next trip, do you think they'd let me keep the rental car? Hell, no!"
The difference being, when a car rental company goes out of business, they don't come by and rip out of your brain all the memories of any place you travelled to using one of their cars (ala "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale"). When business-critical software disappears, the virtual knowledge developed though the use of that software can disappear also, destroying your business process. That's a bit of a bummer.
sPh
Actually, "source code escrow" agreements used to be quite common, and are still to be found in contracts for business-critical applications such as EPR systems. The vendor agrees to put a copy of the source code in escrow with a law firm or CPA firm that handles such situations, to be release to the customer if the vendor ceases to be a going concern (or in some cases if they terminate the product line), at which point the terms automatically change from license to ownership. I imagine most of the really big guys will put similar protection in the contracts with M$.
Now, has anyone ever made actual USE of such an agreement? That I can't tell you.
sPh
UIUC, like many other large universities, recently signed a "pouring rights" contract with a major soft drink vendor that essentially makes it illegal to sell any drink on campus unless it is a product of that vendor. In exchange for a cut of the loot, of course.
Now, when universities start selling "installing rights" contracts to software vendors, will your little group be outlawed?
sPh
"Finally, I think that equating simplified with dumbed-down is absolutely backwards. Yes, younger children can play the new D but it's also a cleaner, better game (I'd still rather play messy shadowrun, but nonetheless.)"
This is a matter of opinion, so there is no absolute answer. I would just like to note that in making my original original post, I did take into account the difference between simplified and dumbed down. Chess and checkers are two of the "simplest" games ever devised, yet also two of the most challenging and long-lasting.
When I said dumbed down, I did actually mean dumbed down. Sorry if you disagree.
sPh
Except for that little bit at the end there ;-)
sPh
As far as I can tell, Hasbro's business model is as follows:
* Identify reasonably profitable gaming company
* Purchase said company
* Identify 20/80 products - that is, the 20% of that company's products that are the most profitable.
* Terminate all products not in the top 20%
* Kill original version of the 20% products, then release a dumbed down version with (a) any complex rule removed (b) simplified, glaring graphics that appeal to (unsophisticated) 2 year olds. In other words, fast-food-ize the games.
* Sit back and rake in the bucks.
When they acquired Avalon Hill it was a sad day.
sPh
"When you get right down to it, it's really Intel's fault. Their CPUs will run any code, without giving any thought to security... "
Sorry, x86's since the 80286 have included multi-ring security. Too bad no one ever implemented anything with it...
sPh
"I consider a financial "loss" to be anything which I can claim on my taxes at the end of the year. Nothing else constitutes real loss.
Therefore things like software piracy, virus attacks, are not losses."
That's funny. My coworker and I, who are 100% scheduled from now through April 30th on an ERP implementation for a small manufacturing company, have spent the last three hours (and appear to have about 3 more to go, or a total of 12 manhours) working on the e-mail server because some idiot decided sending out Kourinokava.vbs files was funny (and yes, I know the users shouldn't have clicked on that). Now, that's 12 manhours down the drain. Plus, when I arrive at the manufacturing site tomorrow, I won't be prepared for the work I was going to do, and another 8 hours or so of everyone's time will be wasted as we try to work through that unprepardness.
Now, exactly how is that NOT a cost?
sPh
"He then manually landed the craft, with only 4 seconds of fuel remaining on touchdown"
I believe that was 64 seconds of fuel, with 60 seconds being needed to orient the descent module and fire the ascent module engine for a successful abort. The real question is whether Armstrong would have eaten into that 60 seconds to land. On the records he has always said no...
sPh
Sorry, I couldn't resist. Although I always expected AD to be late and have problems when new (as with any heavy-duty directory system including NDS), I assumed that when AD did arrive it would at least match the available features of NDS (as well as Vines and others). Nope - it only seems to cover about 60% of NDS' functionality from what I can see. Too bad it seems destined to win anyway. :-(
Anyway, to get just a bit on-topic I would start by laying out what you hope to achieve by migrating to AD and calculating expected cost/benefit. Don't forget to consider the option of delaying for 12 months until others have finished doing the research and writing the books.
sPh
I do have to access Microsoft's web site as part of my work responsibilities. Although I don't personally like many things M$ does, I can put up with them as with any other vendor. The thing that really annoys me, though, is that searching M$'s tech support sites will produce different results when using IE than when using Netscape Navigator (IE results being more complete, natch).
That doesn't surprise me, and I guess it isn't really worse than any trick organizations play to gain competitive advantage, but it does irritate me a lot for some reason.
sPh
Looks somewhat similar to the Cross Crosspad, with the laptop/pad interface integrated into one unit. As a person who can't have a 30 second conversation without drawing a sketch, I thought the Crosspad was pretty neat, but it died in the market. Wonder if IBM can do better? I believe they did some of the Crosspad's software to begin with.
sPh
_Network Computing_ is one of the good guys out there. Since Novell lost its dominance in corporate networking, _NC_ hasn't had a majority of its ad pages from any one vendor (that may or may not correlate to ad revenue). They seem to be pretty vendor neutral and willing to call shots as they see 'em. They have certainly p**sed off Cisco several times in the last year, which takes some courage. This is one of the few trade rags I trust.
sPh
"Trains are among the most inexpensive, most environmentally friendly, and most efficient ways to transport large amounts of anything (people, goods, etc)"
True in many circumstances when compared to road transport (automobiles, trucks), but not compared to ships. Ships are many times more efficient than trains. Think about the Norfolk Southern shipping coal overseas from the Virginia ports - it takes dozens of unit trains to fill one cargo ship. And the per BTU efficiency of movement is much higher for a ship.
The Burlington Northern RaiLink, where goods moving from EU to Asia are dropped off at a North American east coast port, shipped by train to Seattle or LA, then put back on a ship for the rest of the journey, is used to save time, not money. The rail part cuts 2-3 weeks off the total transit time.
sPh
"Telecom cables are flexible, trains dont usually like it when their tracks start to change shape."
Within a reasonable limit (say a couple of meters per kilometer), railroads are actually quite flexible. Think about the differential expansion on the rails in a mountain railroad when the temperature goes from -15 deg.C to 10 deg.C between dawn and noon, for example.
Earthquakes are another matter...
sPh
If your goal is to get some experience in the US, and if you have some money to travel and live on your own for a few months, it is actually easiest to get an internship and/or temporary work when you are a student. Check to see if your university has a partnership with a US college/university - you might already be considered an honorary student at Nowhereville State University. Or you may be able to register for classes at a US college without too much difficulty. In this situation, it is fairly easy to get a work permit for an internship or a 1-year position at a job related to your field of study. Check with an immigration lawyer for details.
As far as the choice of working or going directly into reseach, IMHO you should work outside of the university in a non-research position for at least two years before making that decision. You can always return to the university from the real world and get back on the PhD track, but it can be very difficult to leave the academic world and go back to industry. Not as true as it once was, and not as true for the EE/CS area, but still a concern.
That's my 2 units of minimal monetary value.
sPh
"Most senior management will buy the story if you explain it to them in these terms, otherwise it may appear that you are simply a hidden slacker unable to take responsibility for the "natural development" of your career and hence must be "irresponsible by nature" and therefore (by extension) unable to do any job responsibly by default (refer to the second most difficult thing above)."
While I personally do agree with most of your points, I would like to offer a possibility for another perspective.
I would suggest that the next time you are in a good video store you rent "The Dawn Patrol". [Warning - plot spoiler]. I don't remember the characters offhand, but there was a captain who was responsible for "managing" a wing of WWI flyers. "Managing" in this context basically meant deciding who would be sent out to their deaths, particularly the newbies. There was also a lieutenant who was the best flyer in the wing, but who was constantly giving his commander enormous amounts of Dilbert-style grief about what an incompetent idiot he was, how his flying skills had deterioriated, how he didn't have the courage to stand up to the higher-ups and make the tough decisions, etc. etc.
There are two keys points in the movie: the paired looks of glee on the face of the captain and shock on the face of the lieutenant as the captain gives the lieutenant his captain's bars and turns over command of the wing; and the look of horror on the (new) commander's face when he realizes he is going to have to assign his brother (a newbie) to a mission that will mean certain death.
I guess the point here is, if you are truly content to just be a technical contributor, then that's fine. But if you are sitting on the management sidelines, quoting Dilbert at every staff meeting, perhaps there is a reason why upper management is insisting on an "up or out" policy.
sPh
"It's hard to tell your manager, that 'there no fix for the problem yet, but it's expected in the next pre-patch release.' Big businesses like accountability, someone they can point a finger at and say 'Make it work'."
Has anyone ever managed to hold a major software house accountable for _anything_? Microsoft, IBM, any of the big (or small) ERP vendors? I haven't seen it happen in 15 years of software support. My former employer had a super-double platinum support contract, and about 25 million USD a year in business, with a software vendor you know very well, and we NEVER managed to pin them down and force them to fix ANY of the bugs we found - some of them quite serious.
[Having previewed this, I will make one exception: Novell tends to stand behind its products more than other vendors]
As to whether you can support Linux et al, that's another question, but I hope no one is thinking they can force a commercial software house to stand behind anything. Not to even mention UMCITA.
sPh
"Is it just me, or does Iridium have more lives than a cat? I mean, hey, being slated for destruction two, or even three, times is one thing, but when even the US DoD steps in to take up the slack, you've got to wonder if those satellites are ever coming down."
I tracked a lot of the Iridium financial and PR stuff in the early days (several evil MBA projects ). Buried pretty deep in this info was the fact that the US Department of Defense was either a large potential customer, or a large actual customer but the details were secret. I have been wondering for a while if we would see something like this - it seems pretty clear now that DoD is making use of this system and doesn't want to give it up. Interesting.
sPh
Back in the early '80's the Washington University (wustl) Computer Science Department used a neat Turing Machine emulator in its introductory CS classes. One of those things that makes absolutely no sense when you are doing it, but three years later you wake up and say "_that's_ what that was for!!!".
Does anyone know if this emulator still exists? If so, has it been ported to Windows or Linux (or MS-DOS for that matter - it originally ran under the UCSD p-System!)?
Just a bit of off-topic curosity.
sPh
"With so many people clamoring for this type of thing in the IT field, why isn't someone doing this? Wait a minute, why aren't I doing this?"
IMHO the key issue here is "won't roll over at the first subpoena". Should you choose to supply this service, and should a federal law enforcement agency decide to pursue one of your clients, you will need hundreds of thousands of USD to begin mounting a defense. Assuming you can find lawyers willing to take on said agency. Note that my intention isn't to start an "X-Files" type conspiracy discussion but just to point out that there is a _lot_ of leverage that a government can bring to bear when it wants something.
sPh
"You are playing the "best of". That 10% of games that are remembered. They're good because they were good game designs."
This is a valid point, but there is a counterpoint as well: constraints often force the creation of elegent design. When the constraints are removed, bigger things are accomplished but elegence is often lost in the process. This applies to most engineering fields that I know of; look at the design of an electropneumatic control system from the 1920's vs. a digital control system today. No doubt you can accomplish many more things with DCS', but the designs from the 1920's were often far "better" (whatever that means). The constraints of available technology forced the engineers of the day to be good.
The same may be true for games. The old Tank was (IMHO) much more fun to play than most of the current crop of 3D shooter tank sims (if you deliver one of each to my house I will be happy to verify that thought!). The designers of the early 1980's didn't have as much to work with as today's game designers - were their works better? Or just simpler?
sPh
"In reality you have to realize that most games really would benefit from realism at least in interaction with the game itself."
Keeping in mind that these sort of questions are purely subjective, I must respectfully disagree. Consider SimCity (now called SimCity Classic) vs. SimCity 2000. SimCity is by far the better game: easier to understand, easier to play, and the player develops a better understanding of the underlying system dynamics model (usually unawares). SimCity 2000 took this clean, enjoyable game and gunked it up with useless pseudo-3D graphics and meaningless options. Even SimCity 3000, which got the 3D graphics right, is in many ways (MHO) inferior to the original.
Personally I think this applies to many of the current generation of games. Panzer General II vs. Panzer General 3D is another one that comes to mind.
sPh
"Thinka about it... all the characters in the first three movies speak English (either Gods English, or American")"
Well, I would say that this one was pretty well answered by J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien, who knew a few things about language, and did in fact develop unique languages for each distinct race/culture in his stories, nonetheless stated these stories were written in Westron ("Common Speech") and translated into English (real or British English if you are being really picky). Why? Because otherwise no one could understand them. That seems pretty reasonable to me.
sPh