It's not like you're going for a liberal arts degree there - grades and standardized testing scores are what matter at MIT. What you wrote in an essay's hardly going to influence what you do in a technical environment like that.
Which is incredibly short-sighted. The world needs more diverse, creative types who can communicate with everyone else - people who can write. They serve as a bridge between the fierce logicians of the world to whom everything is a computation.
I work in software, I am a tech writer. I find myself working with incredibly smart, talented people who often work next to each other and yet never talk to each other. So I end up acting as the catalyst in order to get anything accomplished. But it works.
I like to think good writers work as a creative lubricant between the anti-social and brilliant. Maybe MIT could use a few more of those types. Of course since I applied to MIT years back and wasn't accepted, maybe this is just the rejected ego talking.
Also, considering that more than 60% of the population are probably foreign, it might help to have a couple native English speakers there. Just my jingoistic opinion.
Also, 500 words is not a long essay. And standardized tests and grades are a poor judge of talent.
For everyone who argues that WoW, or any other MMORPG, is a game only for hardcore gamers, and that they alienate the casual fanbase, which has been argued over and over, I can only say that while I feel their pain, the people at Blizzard are not stupid. This is just standard marketing strategy.
I can tell you that the core base of WoW, from a marketing perspective, will always be for the hardcore segment of the population. This is because they are the ones who will always pay, month after month, for the service, and who will continue to remain loyal to the game for years. This is their core profit center, like it or not. If you look at customers of any industry there are four types of customers:
1. short term, high paying customers - These are casual gamers. They play maybe several months but don't stay on. They lose interest or are alienated by the hardcore players. This is me, btw.
2. short term, low paying customers (they try the trials but never pay for the service)
3. long term, low paying customers Also casual gamers who might start and stop, or decide to play some time later when a trial comes along.
4. long term, high paying customers (hardcore gamers). These guys generate the most profit for the company. They will be around for years after the casual players have decided they don't want to play.
Marketing strategy dictates you make the game most enjoyable for the hardcore gamers, because they will stay on long after the casual gamers have left, and they pay the most. They make the most money for the company, so they will be the ones that are cared for the most. Once the hardcore segment has left, you might as well put a dagger in the project. This is one of the reasons MMORPGs, which unlike most games, require a monthly subscription, will remain the boring levelling treadmill many people detest. Subscription models state that hardcore clients are the best center of profit. Hence the continuance of levelling treadmills. End of story.
Well no offense to Thoreau but he wasn't exactly poor, even when he was in Walden Pond people would stop by and bring him pies and stuff. But I agree with your overall point.
I would argue that there really is no such thing as independant music being played on most stations. 'Indie promotion' is just another buzzword that makes it sound like it's creative and underground, which is far from the truth. Indie promotion is another word for payola. That's all it is. If there are a few indie promoters that can get some unknown band on the radio, they are very few and far between.
And as far as station programmers choosing playlists, well I don't know enough about it to make a conclusion, but given the fact that where I live Clear channel owns both 'classic rock' stations and they both play pretty much the same playlist, I doubt the station managers have any control on what Clear Channel wants played. At any specific time I can turn on a Clear Channel station and be guaranteed to hear one of 3 AC/DC songs (who knew they only put out three songs?) or some old Aerosmith song.
The music industry is stagnating right now. MTV has been useless for several years now, choosing to focus on reality television rather than music videos or innovative sound. Mom and pop radio stations have been bought out by the one or two monopolies left in broadcasting.
And anyone that can tell me Lil' Jon is a musician with a straight face deserves a frickin Oscar. It's almost as if two music executives sat in a room together and made a bet that they could make millions off of a bum with no talent just from pure marketing hype alone.
I think if there's anything that can make a big difference, it's a media-centered site like Apple's iTunes that has things like music videos, sampling, playlists, online radio stations. I can listen to more new bands in a week through iTunes than I ever heard introduced as a new band on a radio, in all the years I've been alive.
Despite your valid arguments that there MAY be a few peoples that still exist in their native habitats, at least over the past few thousands of years, most of these are few and far between. The history of man is one of conquer. From the early Dynasties in China to Europe to India to the Middle East to the Americas, most of the now 'native' people have long been killed off and replaced by bands of other tribes. The goths in Europe, the germanic peoples, the Roman Empire, the Mayans, the lists go on and on.
"You're one to talk" is a valid argument in the case of the grandparent, though perhaps a bit too generalized. He's making a good point, so it pisses me off that this forum has become so fucking crass as to have to argue every point back and forth like bickering kids. Yes, ok there are Basques and Hawaiians. You think they just spontaneously originated 2 million years ago? Don't be so shortsighted.
The U.S. "stolen land" critique is not valid in application of the argument and is at best off-topic, because none of the current people in the U.S. were responsible for the destruction of the Indians' homeland. Their ancestors, sure, but that's how it goes. That's the same as blaming my ancestors for slavery, even though they didn't move to this country until after slavery was made illegal.
To the point of fair assembly and congregation, I think these types of devices are horrible for many other reasons. The U.S. aside, these devices will eventually be sent to countries with less freedoms like China or Africa and used to lethal force.
Frankly I hope the two parties tear each other to pieces. Maybe then some third party could finally get in edgewise and actually get rid of this horribly corrupt administration and Congress, Dems and Repubs alike. And no, I don't necessarily mean Libertarian. Something that fits with my socially liberal, fiscally conservative agenda. Let's face it, neither party is anywhere close to that right now.
Personally I'm a moderate, and I agreed with a lot of O'Connor's decisions, particularly recent were her decisions on eminent domain (although I agree with her Pro-Choice stance too). I can't help but feel all of America is about to get the hard end of the stick with Bush's next appointee. And if he decides to be the angry child he normally is, I have no doubts the government will cease to function in Washington over this next nomination.
From the geek perspective, there is technology that is 10 times better than the stuff MS puts out.
You're wrong about this, but only to a certain degree. I think there is technology from a software standpoint that might be 2 or 4 times better than MS, but software just hasn't improved that much on an overall OS level.
However look at Firefox. Firefox is a perfect example of a grassroots technology taking market share from Microsoft. IE was horrible, and Firefox offered many things that were a major improvement over IE. I realized just seconds after using it how great it was, and was so happy with it I convinced family members to use it because it would import less spyware through ActiveX, would allow them tabbed browsing and pop up blocking, and had ad blocking technology too.
Now, I'm sorry, but Linux is not the killer app Firefox is, from a desktop user standpoint. I've setup Linux before, and frankly in my opinion from base enduser standpoint, Windows is more intuitive. From a server standpoint, Linux has really hit MS hard because it is much better in this department, but that's another story.
MS is worried because Linux could be, eventually, the type of killer app Firefox is, and could begin to eat into their desktop share (although Apple now seems intent on doing this by adopting x86 - you can bet that scares the folks in Redmond a little). I think they're also worried because the big selling points of Windows revolved around two things; MS Office and gaming. Well, now there's OpenOffice if you need Office. And for gaming, well 95% of all games are now played on consoles, not WindowsPC. Hence the Xbox.
MS being a huge government lobbyist is hardly news to me; in fact if you look at those numbers, it's pretty obvious that Patrick Leahy is pretty firmly under the control of media conglomerates like Time Warner, Sony, and Viacom; and that scares me more than anything else, because he's certainly not the only one, and because the media are responsible for bringing news to the general public. In fact, the mere fact that this is being brought up on someone's unknown blog points to the fact that the media is not doing their job with regards to informing the public and being a true source of objective journalism. That scares me a lot more than MS trying to buy off politicians, because it's already pretty obvious that our federal government has been bought out by corporate conglomerates in general. The media, our so-called fourth check on power, spends more time talking about Tom Cruise's infatuation with making an ass out of himself than it does reporting the little things that would actually matter to many of us non-sheeple. The dumbing down of our news by corporations annoys me more than hearing that MS uses lobbyists. I'm happy there are those out there reporting on this, but I'm equally not surprised.
This game is getting released in 2008. That means, wow, the Xbox360 will have an MMORPG in _3_ years.
This is the kind of crappy hype I hate, where they announce how awesome their console is because it'll have some game no one has reviewed or tested yet, oh and which won't be released even on PC for the next two years.
A method and system for getting a patent approved by which a patent submitter (client) spends millions of dollars paying off a company (lobbying firm) to present evidence, some in the form of a sardonic comic and/or controversial newspaper articles, in order to make a case for its highly regarded (retarded) patent. The client selects an appropriately vague paragraph to describe said patent, whereupon the patent office (monkeys flinging poo) receives the request and examines (flings poo at) biased information provided by the lobbying firm. The patent office generates a patent number and provides it to the client whereby some form of payment (bananas) are then provided by client to the patent office and/or politicians (con artists).
Last I heard he was revamping the script on Duke Nukem Forever: The Movie, slated for release this summer. Unfortunately it's only being released in certain select theatres, such as those residing in the Negaverse.
"The unions just don't have the leverage against the videogame industry that they do against the movie industry since a good game with bad voice acting is still going to sell."
Sorry, your argument is severely flawed.
Unionized voice actors can do a lot to help or hinder a game. If you take into account the games that are big-budget, many of them are based on Hollywood movies that are released around the same time, ie Spiderman, the Matrix, Harry Potter, X-Men, Star Wars, etc. If they can't hire the original voice actors to fill some of these roles, the game just doesn't sound right. Not to mention voice actors from popular series' like Snake would just sound different. Sound is definitely an underrated component of games.
Personally I'm less intrigued about voice actor unions, and more intrigued about what affect this might have on software unions, and if this game union could lead to a larger standardized union for software makers in general, even expanding to outside the gaming industry to all tech workers.
Perhaps this could be the beginning of a final push to give software developers a true trade union?
While I'm not an FPS fan (gives me headaches), the fact you can do anything to the external environment is extremely exciting for really just about every game, not just an FPS. Outside the scope of the game, I imagine this will be awesome for every other genre. RPGs, adventure games...
I had the same doubts about WindWaker being cartoony and childish, but after playing it I was satisfied that it belongs in the general pantheon of Zelda games. It clearly grows darker as you progress, and is very hard to put down.
Viewing the 'screenshots' caused my BS detector to go off, of course, because these are very obviously prerendered elements. They shouldn't be allowed to call them screenshots. But those things aside, it'll be nice to see a more adult Zelda, and hopefully a much darker one.
I would disagree, and say that the series sucked ever since VII. I do remember all the playability of VII, how confused I was at first, then how interesting the system really was, the different choices you had, where they led, and the minigames involved. You didn't have to spend most of your time fighting one thing, you were free to run around and develop your skills, or run races, or experiment with chocobos, or a number of other things.
That said, VII in many ways nailed the coffin shut. First off, it was so popular that Square followed a formula and all the rest have been pretty much the same. Am I the only person annoyed by the general hero, now little more than a thin, androgenous anime figure?
FFX did it for me; I couldn't play the same hero character. I probably won't return to a FF title, if for no other reason than animation alone; I'm tired of playing anime games. But that's my own personal opinion and a large majority of gamers don't seem to mind this. So I'll stick to whatever else comes along.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not like you're going for a liberal arts degree there - grades and standardized testing scores are what matter at MIT. What you wrote in an essay's hardly going to influence what you do in a technical environment like that.
Which is incredibly short-sighted. The world needs more diverse, creative types who can communicate with everyone else - people who can write. They serve as a bridge between the fierce logicians of the world to whom everything is a computation.
I work in software, I am a tech writer. I find myself working with incredibly smart, talented people who often work next to each other and yet never talk to each other. So I end up acting as the catalyst in order to get anything accomplished. But it works.
I like to think good writers work as a creative lubricant between the anti-social and brilliant. Maybe MIT could use a few more of those types. Of course since I applied to MIT years back and wasn't accepted, maybe this is just the rejected ego talking.
Also, considering that more than 60% of the population are probably foreign, it might help to have a couple native English speakers there. Just my jingoistic opinion.
Also, 500 words is not a long essay. And standardized tests and grades are a poor judge of talent.
Yeah I think 100K is a pretty weak figure. I think 640K should be enough for anyone.
I think certain pandimensional beings would disagree with your assertion that they aren't already uber-smart.
And here I thought the Trinity was drinking, drugs, and premarital sex.
For everyone who argues that WoW, or any other MMORPG, is a game only for hardcore gamers, and that they alienate the casual fanbase, which has been argued over and over, I can only say that while I feel their pain, the people at Blizzard are not stupid. This is just standard marketing strategy.
I can tell you that the core base of WoW, from a marketing perspective, will always be for the hardcore segment of the population. This is because they are the ones who will always pay, month after month, for the service, and who will continue to remain loyal to the game for years. This is their core profit center, like it or not. If you look at customers of any industry there are four types of customers:
1. short term, high paying customers - These are casual gamers. They play maybe several months but don't stay on. They lose interest or are alienated by the hardcore players. This is me, btw.
2. short term, low paying customers (they try the trials but never pay for the service)
3. long term, low paying customers Also casual gamers who might start and stop, or decide to play some time later when a trial comes along.
4. long term, high paying customers (hardcore gamers). These guys generate the most profit for the company. They will be around for years after the casual players have decided they don't want to play.
Marketing strategy dictates you make the game most enjoyable for the hardcore gamers, because they will stay on long after the casual gamers have left, and they pay the most. They make the most money for the company, so they will be the ones that are cared for the most. Once the hardcore segment has left, you might as well put a dagger in the project. This is one of the reasons MMORPGs, which unlike most games, require a monthly subscription, will remain the boring levelling treadmill many people detest. Subscription models state that hardcore clients are the best center of profit. Hence the continuance of levelling treadmills. End of story.
Well no offense to Thoreau but he wasn't exactly poor, even when he was in Walden Pond people would stop by and bring him pies and stuff. But I agree with your overall point.
Let's not also forget that Fry was, after all, his own grandfather.
I would argue that there really is no such thing as independant music being played on most stations. 'Indie promotion' is just another buzzword that makes it sound like it's creative and underground, which is far from the truth. Indie promotion is another word for payola. That's all it is. If there are a few indie promoters that can get some unknown band on the radio, they are very few and far between.
And as far as station programmers choosing playlists, well I don't know enough about it to make a conclusion, but given the fact that where I live Clear channel owns both 'classic rock' stations and they both play pretty much the same playlist, I doubt the station managers have any control on what Clear Channel wants played. At any specific time I can turn on a Clear Channel station and be guaranteed to hear one of 3 AC/DC songs (who knew they only put out three songs?) or some old Aerosmith song.
The music industry is stagnating right now. MTV has been useless for several years now, choosing to focus on reality television rather than music videos or innovative sound. Mom and pop radio stations have been bought out by the one or two monopolies left in broadcasting.
And anyone that can tell me Lil' Jon is a musician with a straight face deserves a frickin Oscar. It's almost as if two music executives sat in a room together and made a bet that they could make millions off of a bum with no talent just from pure marketing hype alone.
I think if there's anything that can make a big difference, it's a media-centered site like Apple's iTunes that has things like music videos, sampling, playlists, online radio stations. I can listen to more new bands in a week through iTunes than I ever heard introduced as a new band on a radio, in all the years I've been alive.
Maybe because they're busy surfing the web and answering online surveys about workplace productivity?
Despite your valid arguments that there MAY be a few peoples that still exist in their native habitats, at least over the past few thousands of years, most of these are few and far between. The history of man is one of conquer. From the early Dynasties in China to Europe to India to the Middle East to the Americas, most of the now 'native' people have long been killed off and replaced by bands of other tribes. The goths in Europe, the germanic peoples, the Roman Empire, the Mayans, the lists go on and on.
"You're one to talk" is a valid argument in the case of the grandparent, though perhaps a bit too generalized. He's making a good point, so it pisses me off that this forum has become so fucking crass as to have to argue every point back and forth like bickering kids. Yes, ok there are Basques and Hawaiians. You think they just spontaneously originated 2 million years ago? Don't be so shortsighted.
The U.S. "stolen land" critique is not valid in application of the argument and is at best off-topic, because none of the current people in the U.S. were responsible for the destruction of the Indians' homeland. Their ancestors, sure, but that's how it goes. That's the same as blaming my ancestors for slavery, even though they didn't move to this country until after slavery was made illegal.
To the point of fair assembly and congregation, I think these types of devices are horrible for many other reasons. The U.S. aside, these devices will eventually be sent to countries with less freedoms like China or Africa and used to lethal force.
Congratulations for not RTFA. I belive I stated I liked HER ruling on it - she was part of the dissent.
Frankly I hope the two parties tear each other to pieces. Maybe then some third party could finally get in edgewise and actually get rid of this horribly corrupt administration and Congress, Dems and Repubs alike. And no, I don't necessarily mean Libertarian. Something that fits with my socially liberal, fiscally conservative agenda. Let's face it, neither party is anywhere close to that right now.
Personally I'm a moderate, and I agreed with a lot of O'Connor's decisions, particularly recent were her decisions on eminent domain (although I agree with her Pro-Choice stance too). I can't help but feel all of America is about to get the hard end of the stick with Bush's next appointee. And if he decides to be the angry child he normally is, I have no doubts the government will cease to function in Washington over this next nomination.
Let the war begin!
From the geek perspective, there is technology that is 10 times better than the stuff MS puts out.
You're wrong about this, but only to a certain degree. I think there is technology from a software standpoint that might be 2 or 4 times better than MS, but software just hasn't improved that much on an overall OS level.
However look at Firefox. Firefox is a perfect example of a grassroots technology taking market share from Microsoft. IE was horrible, and Firefox offered many things that were a major improvement over IE. I realized just seconds after using it how great it was, and was so happy with it I convinced family members to use it because it would import less spyware through ActiveX, would allow them tabbed browsing and pop up blocking, and had ad blocking technology too.
Now, I'm sorry, but Linux is not the killer app Firefox is, from a desktop user standpoint. I've setup Linux before, and frankly in my opinion from base enduser standpoint, Windows is more intuitive. From a server standpoint, Linux has really hit MS hard because it is much better in this department, but that's another story.
MS is worried because Linux could be, eventually, the type of killer app Firefox is, and could begin to eat into their desktop share (although Apple now seems intent on doing this by adopting x86 - you can bet that scares the folks in Redmond a little). I think they're also worried because the big selling points of Windows revolved around two things; MS Office and gaming. Well, now there's OpenOffice if you need Office. And for gaming, well 95% of all games are now played on consoles, not WindowsPC. Hence the Xbox.
MS being a huge government lobbyist is hardly news to me; in fact if you look at those numbers, it's pretty obvious that Patrick Leahy is pretty firmly under the control of media conglomerates like Time Warner, Sony, and Viacom; and that scares me more than anything else, because he's certainly not the only one, and because the media are responsible for bringing news to the general public. In fact, the mere fact that this is being brought up on someone's unknown blog points to the fact that the media is not doing their job with regards to informing the public and being a true source of objective journalism. That scares me a lot more than MS trying to buy off politicians, because it's already pretty obvious that our federal government has been bought out by corporate conglomerates in general. The media, our so-called fourth check on power, spends more time talking about Tom Cruise's infatuation with making an ass out of himself than it does reporting the little things that would actually matter to many of us non-sheeple. The dumbing down of our news by corporations annoys me more than hearing that MS uses lobbyists. I'm happy there are those out there reporting on this, but I'm equally not surprised.
This game is getting released in 2008. That means, wow, the Xbox360 will have an MMORPG in _3_ years.
This is the kind of crappy hype I hate, where they announce how awesome their console is because it'll have some game no one has reviewed or tested yet, oh and which won't be released even on PC for the next two years.
Hasbro goes from clean cut toy company and becomes a modern day Mafia. Leading the way to high tech illegal gambling and racketeering.
And this is different from a modern corporation in what way?
Umm, you spelled 'genius' wrong, genius.
A method and system for getting a patent approved by which a patent submitter (client) spends millions of dollars paying off a company (lobbying firm) to present evidence, some in the form of a sardonic comic and/or controversial newspaper articles, in order to make a case for its highly regarded (retarded) patent. The client selects an appropriately vague paragraph to describe said patent, whereupon the patent office (monkeys flinging poo) receives the request and examines (flings poo at) biased information provided by the lobbying firm. The patent office generates a patent number and provides it to the client whereby some form of payment (bananas) are then provided by client to the patent office and/or politicians (con artists).
We have sacked those who renamed the planet Eurectum to prevent further jokes from occurring. Its new name is Yorassol.
1. Wait 2 years.
2. Buy new Apple.
Last I heard he was revamping the script on Duke Nukem Forever: The Movie, slated for release this summer. Unfortunately it's only being released in certain select theatres, such as those residing in the Negaverse.
"The unions just don't have the leverage against the videogame industry that they do against the movie industry since a good game with bad voice acting is still going to sell."
Sorry, your argument is severely flawed.
Unionized voice actors can do a lot to help or hinder a game. If you take into account the games that are big-budget, many of them are based on Hollywood movies that are released around the same time, ie Spiderman, the Matrix, Harry Potter, X-Men, Star Wars, etc. If they can't hire the original voice actors to fill some of these roles, the game just doesn't sound right. Not to mention voice actors from popular series' like Snake would just sound different. Sound is definitely an underrated component of games.
Personally I'm less intrigued about voice actor unions, and more intrigued about what affect this might have on software unions, and if this game union could lead to a larger standardized union for software makers in general, even expanding to outside the gaming industry to all tech workers.
Perhaps this could be the beginning of a final push to give software developers a true trade union?
While I'm not an FPS fan (gives me headaches), the fact you can do anything to the external environment is extremely exciting for really just about every game, not just an FPS. Outside the scope of the game, I imagine this will be awesome for every other genre. RPGs, adventure games...
Well, all hype aside, it's sounding pretty cool.
I had the same doubts about WindWaker being cartoony and childish, but after playing it I was satisfied that it belongs in the general pantheon of Zelda games. It clearly grows darker as you progress, and is very hard to put down.
Viewing the 'screenshots' caused my BS detector to go off, of course, because these are very obviously prerendered elements. They shouldn't be allowed to call them screenshots. But those things aside, it'll be nice to see a more adult Zelda, and hopefully a much darker one.
I would disagree, and say that the series sucked ever since VII. I do remember all the playability of VII, how confused I was at first, then how interesting the system really was, the different choices you had, where they led, and the minigames involved. You didn't have to spend most of your time fighting one thing, you were free to run around and develop your skills, or run races, or experiment with chocobos, or a number of other things.
That said, VII in many ways nailed the coffin shut. First off, it was so popular that Square followed a formula and all the rest have been pretty much the same. Am I the only person annoyed by the general hero, now little more than a thin, androgenous anime figure?
FFX did it for me; I couldn't play the same hero character. I probably won't return to a FF title, if for no other reason than animation alone; I'm tired of playing anime games. But that's my own personal opinion and a large majority of gamers don't seem to mind this. So I'll stick to whatever else comes along.
Would be a much radder headline.
I thought the word "radder" was also extinct, having also been last heard in California. Two big discoveries!