I'm glad you're able to justify it to yourself, I really am. Actually, I'm not glad that someone who is obviously smart enough to code well doesn't have the moral fibre to know when what they are doing is NOT a benefit to the world.
Justifying that the mines you work on are the 'nicer' mines still doesn't change the fact that you're building mines. Things that blow up, thing designed to kill and mame and destroy.
But hey, if you're happy with that, go right on working for the military because you get to shoot stuff... never mind that those things that you're shooting end up killing a whole lot of innocents, you get to to shoot stuff.
Until, as another poster pointed out, they decide to use this technology on personnel mines too. Hell, that's probably been the plan all along, they just told them the other story so they could get people who might otherwise not work on the project to do so.
It's still making mines. Mines have one purpose, and that is to blow stuff up. Be it people or vehicles, it's all destruction and killing and just plain bad.
I don't know how people live with themselves building weapons like these, I just don't.
(Note: I worked for a little while as a student engineer on the ANZAC frigates here in Australia. I was ok with that as they are basically just big boats, and by and large all they are ever used for is patrolling our coastlines for illegal fishermen etc... but it's a fine line in some regards I suppose.
But building MINES? I don't get where you can justify that to yourself)
Huh, I knew number 2 had voice, but I never knew (or remembered) that number 1 did... way, way before their mentioned game indeed.
Also, you'd think it'd be easier to find out what game really was the first via this wonderful interweb... but nope, can't find it anywhere!
So what does this mean right now?
on
Freedb.org Ending
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
I have no CDs on hand here at work to see what happens when I try a db lookup, but does it mean that there is no info anymore on freedb on the lookup? Or is it just that any new entries have no-where to go?
The quality of submissions were total, utter shit. You'd be better off typing in the info yourself.
Not so, well, not really. If you used it as a starting point, and checked the entries against the CD you were ripping then by and large the entries were really good. (Some freaky choices in categories sometimes)
Where there were issues, it was far easier to quickly edit one or two entries or the artist name etc. rather than type the whole thing in.
Look, they're funny, they're well done and all, but the thing that truly SHITS me up the wall about those ads (do note that we don't have them in Australia, I've only seen them on the Mac site), is that they try to imply that:
* Macs never crash, windows does: Erm... ok, here in the office we have a mac and the rest are PCs... the mac is running OSX and has crashed a couple of times and is hardly ever used (It's a demo machine for our product... it's looks purty)... so it's couple of crashes are a pretty high percentage. The XP laptop I'm using right now... I cannot for the life of me remember when it crashed last. I can't. I don't think I've EVER seen a blue screen on this machine, not once... and I develop code on it, running a java app server, a web server and a db server along with an IDE, while reading email and surfing the web and listening to email... IT DOESN'T CRASH. I HATE that they are trying to continue the myth that Mac don't crash and PCs do... it's shit. ALL personal computers crash or foul up at one stage or another and since XP, Windows hasn't been any worse than OSX.
* That iTunes is the bloody be all and end all of music management software. Well... I tried to like it, everyone else seemed to, but I can't. It's interface is horrible and cluttered and lifeless and, well, just not how I like my music library to be displayed. Up until really recently I was using Winamp with it's great little media library. That was until Media Player 11 came along... man, I love this thing, really nice interface, great way to view my library (many different options)... it's really nice, and it synchs up nicely with my MP3 player too. (although to tell you the truth, I've always prefered to just drag and drop... that seems simplest to me.
Ergh... I can't be bothered doing there other ones... but you get my drift. They really prey on the bullshit impressions people may still have about pcs, but they almost flat out lie about how the mac works in some situations.
they've been so legacy happy in the past! Why not now?
Erm.... you've completely got it wrong there... Microsoft has always been about the NEW operating system supporting things that ran on the OLD operating system... not the other way around.
I mean really? What obligation are they under? You have a copy of an operating system that runs everything it's supposed to now and in the immediate future. There was nothing in the deal that said "Your copy of Windows XP will continue to support the bleeding edge games for 10 years after we release it".
Come on.
How many programs only run on Mac OSX and don't run on OS9?
I hardly see how a finger is being given at all here... and it's not like you haven't had fair warning that Vista is coming out.. hell it's late, late, late... so there's no big 'whoops I bought XP because I didn't know Vista was coming out'.
The main deal is that Vista will still run all the XP stuff, so you haven't had the 'finger' given to you for buying XP, because when you do upgrade to Vista down the track you won't have to upgrade all your software as well if you don't want to... that would be giving the finger... kinda like how Apple did with OSX not really supporting old OS9 programs.
Man, Microsoft can do no right by some people, no matter how hard they actually do try.
This is the machine that I grew up with, a 48K monster of raw power! Rubber keys, tape drive, colours only able to be applied in blocks (of, like, 8 pixels or so).
What a machine.
I still have 2 of them, and the tapes, although I doubt they work now. (the tapes, not the machines, they'll still run, I guarantee)
Absolutely agree on all your points. Too often open software proponents are all about the 'ideological stance' that the software is taking, and how it's better for bunnies or something.
People DON'T CARE! They really couldn't give a flying hoohah about how wonderful Open Source software is, and how it'll save the world. They just want to know that hey! Look, I don't have to pay top dollar just to write a letter or do a spreadsheet... hey, look, it's FREE! Wow, I'd better check this out.
But, put together a TERRIBLE looking ad with ideological crap that says nothing about the product... you've got a whole lotta waste of money.
I'm sorry, but I read the linked article, and really don't find anything that implies that MS put back anything a decade. Just because Microsoft offered MSDOS as a solution doesn't mean that it's all their fault that it became so popular. Other systems that you mention, like OS-9 run on Motorolla chipsets, and so weren't suitable for the 8080 architechture that they were aiming for.
Look, MSDOS wasn't great, but it did the job it was asked to do. It became popular due to factors not just in Microsoft's control. And what about OS/2? Microsoft and IBM created that, and there are many who thought it was a great operating system... it had all the things you think an operating system should have (multi-threading etc), and Microsoft pushed it as the operating system to have... but Windows became hugely popular in the marketplace.
You put all this blame on Microsoft as if it existed in a vacuum and sales, market pressures, other companies etc. had nothing to do with it. If another company created another product that was better that PEOPLE WANTED and bought more than Microsoft's ones, then it would have been more popular.
Comparing what actually happened in history to what could have happened in a perfect world, where all advances happened as soon as they possibly could is just nonsense. We'd all be driving electric cars and have all our electricity provided by renewable resources while having computers embedded in our brains or something. I use Windows every day and enjoy it, I enjoy the programs I use on it, I enjoy the way that I pretty much forget about the operating system these days... it just works and I'm happy with it.
It's quite ridiculous to paint MS as 'EVIL' and blame them for the state of all computing today... really it is.
We had people go ape about how terrible Dell is over those two photos of ONE incident with NO futher information as to how it occured, NO information as to whether the user had done anything stupid to their machine.
And yet here we have Apple having yet more issues with their machines, on a wide scale, and doing nothing about it, and people say... "yeah... well... others have problems too".
Face it, Apples are nice machines, but they are in NO WAY perfect or the holy grail of computing that so many of you seem to think they are.
Except, if you'd read the article, his last album costs $11.88 on iTunes, and $14.98 as a CD on Amazon. That's only $3.10 difference... with physical media, liner notes and cover. (I still far prefer CDs to downloads).
After looking around on your site I found nothing that would be worth paying for, it just seems like a blog. Can you point me to some of your efforts that would usually be the sort that would need protecting such as the music/books etc. that you speak? I just can't find them to see whether the content that you've produced is the sort that people would generally want to copy. (if you get my meaning?)
So why don't they work elsewhere? My god that is a stupid comment.
Because there is no work elsewhere. Because they don't have the skills required at place X or Y. Because they need the money to eat.
God, any number of reasons. People need to work, in overpopulated contries such as there, people will do almost any work in order to get food and shelter.
> Halo 3 production these days doesn't seem any different from a big budget Hollywood production.
I agree, and that's exactly what's wrong with today's games...
Oh what a ridiculous thing to say. Just because a game has fantastic production values, does not make it terrible... in fact it can help a great deal. I was just playing Hitman - Blood Money the other day and it's music, environments, voice acting etc. are all supurb and only enhance the feel and realism of the game.
Half Life 2... another example (I've been using these games a bit lately in examples!).
There are still small games with limited graphic and sound flair that are fun, but 'Great looking, great sounding' does not equal 'crap game'. Bringing in a bit of Hollywood can help games, sure it can hinder if looks and mainstream appeal is all that's included, but lush scores, good acting and well directed scenes are all plusses in my book.
Give me a good epic journey with lots of variety in landscape and area design, and give me some brain twisters along the way so I feel a sense of accomplishment in my gameplay.
Some of the best FPSs are like that, HL2 to me is a great story being told as you partake in it, there's shooting, there's problems, there's physics to play with, it's all a great journey. The Blood Money series too is not just a run and kill, in fact to do your job the best you should be killing only the one person per mission.
On the other hand I enjoy a game of Painkiller from time to time as just mindless shoot-shoot-shoot.
My main point that games like the civilisation series and the like are things which really take a large investment of time, and preferably in long sittings... I just don't have that time anymore, so I like the quick pick up and play type games more now.
I'm not sure that a sample of one really constitutes any kind of evidence that such is the state of play for the majority of gamers these days. You're falling into the 'in my day' syndrome, which is always dangerous, and a supurb way to be considered a grumpy old man.
We had it easy when we were kids with running water and heated homes etc... I mean come on, each generation has things when they grow up that are different to those before it.
The fact that your nephew is a prick is due to bad parenting, plain and damn simple. We're already seeing it with our kids vs. others their age (they're almost 3 and almost 2, so early, early days yet). We enforce dicipline, praise when they do the right thing, spend lots of time with them, limit their tv usage etc. and so far (rose tinted glasses notwithstanding), they are really, really good kids. They test limits, I would be worried if they didn't, but they have respect for themselves and others and are showing a lot of intelligence and humour. Other friends who are brought up in a similar way are also wonderful kids.
However others, who are given everything and aren't diciplined are little brutes and seem to lack imagination too.
Kids/adults/whoever shouldn't have to battle Interupts, Extended memory configurations, VESA drivers etc. (or, getting old school, having to battle a dying tape drive to get it to load your game after waiting a couple of minutes only to find it didn't work) just to play games. Games should be an escape, a challenge, a joy, and in a number of ways a learning experience.
Also, don't start thinking that because kids today don't need to tinker as much they end up not understanding as much about the computers... each generation tends to build on the previous, and the lower level stuff gets simpler (I'll be buggered if I could work an old valve computer or punchcards). The lack of needing to worry about the low level should mean you can extend further into more complex territories if you so wish.
Who actually thinks the 'security level' isn't anything more than the Bush government trying to ensure the populous is kept nice and concerned enough to believe that only a Republican government can keep them safe from those pesky 'outsiders'.
Why ANYONE would want this brought into their homes is beyond me...
They mention the hardware survey, and they say that it was very successful, which is why they've started this play monitoring as well. Therefore they are two different things.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad you're able to justify it to yourself, I really am. Actually, I'm not glad that someone who is obviously smart enough to code well doesn't have the moral fibre to know when what they are doing is NOT a benefit to the world.
Justifying that the mines you work on are the 'nicer' mines still doesn't change the fact that you're building mines. Things that blow up, thing designed to kill and mame and destroy.
But hey, if you're happy with that, go right on working for the military because you get to shoot stuff... never mind that those things that you're shooting end up killing a whole lot of innocents, you get to to shoot stuff.
Until, as another poster pointed out, they decide to use this technology on personnel mines too. Hell, that's probably been the plan all along, they just told them the other story so they could get people who might otherwise not work on the project to do so.
It's still making mines. Mines have one purpose, and that is to blow stuff up. Be it people or vehicles, it's all destruction and killing and just plain bad.
I don't know how people live with themselves building weapons like these, I just don't.
(Note: I worked for a little while as a student engineer on the ANZAC frigates here in Australia. I was ok with that as they are basically just big boats, and by and large all they are ever used for is patrolling our coastlines for illegal fishermen etc... but it's a fine line in some regards I suppose.
But building MINES? I don't get where you can justify that to yourself)
Huh, I knew number 2 had voice, but I never knew (or remembered) that number 1 did... way, way before their mentioned game indeed.
Also, you'd think it'd be easier to find out what game really was the first via this wonderful interweb... but nope, can't find it anywhere!
I have no CDs on hand here at work to see what happens when I try a db lookup, but does it mean that there is no info anymore on freedb on the lookup? Or is it just that any new entries have no-where to go?
What about the mirrors?
The quality of submissions were total, utter shit. You'd be better off typing in the info yourself.
Not so, well, not really. If you used it as a starting point, and checked the entries against the CD you were ripping then by and large the entries were really good. (Some freaky choices in categories sometimes)
Where there were issues, it was far easier to quickly edit one or two entries or the artist name etc. rather than type the whole thing in.
It is/was a great service.
"People remember the crashes in the pre-XP SP2 days. I do. Referring to them in a light-hearted ad doesn't count as flat-out lying."
It does if you're pretending to compare the current state of two operating systems, saying that one crashes while the other does not.
They both crash, very rarely. End of story. The ad's trying to resurrect the 'Windows always crash' mantra when it doesn't apply anymore.
Look, they're funny, they're well done and all, but the thing that truly SHITS me up the wall about those ads (do note that we don't have them in Australia, I've only seen them on the Mac site), is that they try to imply that:
* Macs never crash, windows does: Erm... ok, here in the office we have a mac and the rest are PCs... the mac is running OSX and has crashed a couple of times and is hardly ever used (It's a demo machine for our product... it's looks purty)... so it's couple of crashes are a pretty high percentage. The XP laptop I'm using right now... I cannot for the life of me remember when it crashed last. I can't. I don't think I've EVER seen a blue screen on this machine, not once... and I develop code on it, running a java app server, a web server and a db server along with an IDE, while reading email and surfing the web and listening to email... IT DOESN'T CRASH. I HATE that they are trying to continue the myth that Mac don't crash and PCs do... it's shit. ALL personal computers crash or foul up at one stage or another and since XP, Windows hasn't been any worse than OSX.
* That iTunes is the bloody be all and end all of music management software. Well... I tried to like it, everyone else seemed to, but I can't. It's interface is horrible and cluttered and lifeless and, well, just not how I like my music library to be displayed. Up until really recently I was using Winamp with it's great little media library. That was until Media Player 11 came along... man, I love this thing, really nice interface, great way to view my library (many different options)... it's really nice, and it synchs up nicely with my MP3 player too. (although to tell you the truth, I've always prefered to just drag and drop... that seems simplest to me.
Ergh... I can't be bothered doing there other ones... but you get my drift. They really prey on the bullshit impressions people may still have about pcs, but they almost flat out lie about how the mac works in some situations.
they've been so legacy happy in the past! Why not now?
Erm.... you've completely got it wrong there... Microsoft has always been about the NEW operating system supporting things that ran on the OLD operating system... not the other way around.
How many games that you play on XP now run on 98?
Any?
Any?
NO...
Dear god, give them a break.
How many games support OpenGL these days? DirectX runs on Windows and also both XBoxes, so why the hell would they do anything in OpenGL?
While they're at it, why don't they convert everything over to OpenOffice and hey, just give up on Windows and switch to Linux?
I mean really? What obligation are they under? You have a copy of an operating system that runs everything it's supposed to now and in the immediate future. There was nothing in the deal that said "Your copy of Windows XP will continue to support the bleeding edge games for 10 years after we release it".
Come on.
How many programs only run on Mac OSX and don't run on OS9?
I hardly see how a finger is being given at all here... and it's not like you haven't had fair warning that Vista is coming out.. hell it's late, late, late... so there's no big 'whoops I bought XP because I didn't know Vista was coming out'.
The main deal is that Vista will still run all the XP stuff, so you haven't had the 'finger' given to you for buying XP, because when you do upgrade to Vista down the track you won't have to upgrade all your software as well if you don't want to... that would be giving the finger... kinda like how Apple did with OSX not really supporting old OS9 programs.
Man, Microsoft can do no right by some people, no matter how hard they actually do try.
This is the machine that I grew up with, a 48K monster of raw power! Rubber keys, tape drive, colours only able to be applied in blocks (of, like, 8 pixels or so).
What a machine.
I still have 2 of them, and the tapes, although I doubt they work now. (the tapes, not the machines, they'll still run, I guarantee)
Wikipedia has nice info
Absolutely agree on all your points. Too often open software proponents are all about the 'ideological stance' that the software is taking, and how it's better for bunnies or something.
People DON'T CARE! They really couldn't give a flying hoohah about how wonderful Open Source software is, and how it'll save the world. They just want to know that hey! Look, I don't have to pay top dollar just to write a letter or do a spreadsheet... hey, look, it's FREE! Wow, I'd better check this out.
But, put together a TERRIBLE looking ad with ideological crap that says nothing about the product... you've got a whole lotta waste of money.
*hisssss* *pop* *hisssss* *crackle* *pop* *hisss*
Reduced dynamic range
Wears out
Huge
Sounds terrible.
Yeah, I can see how you like vinyl better.
I'm sorry, but I read the linked article, and really don't find anything that implies that MS put back anything a decade. Just because Microsoft offered MSDOS as a solution doesn't mean that it's all their fault that it became so popular. Other systems that you mention, like OS-9 run on Motorolla chipsets, and so weren't suitable for the 8080 architechture that they were aiming for.
Look, MSDOS wasn't great, but it did the job it was asked to do. It became popular due to factors not just in Microsoft's control. And what about OS/2? Microsoft and IBM created that, and there are many who thought it was a great operating system... it had all the things you think an operating system should have (multi-threading etc), and Microsoft pushed it as the operating system to have... but Windows became hugely popular in the marketplace.
You put all this blame on Microsoft as if it existed in a vacuum and sales, market pressures, other companies etc. had nothing to do with it. If another company created another product that was better that PEOPLE WANTED and bought more than Microsoft's ones, then it would have been more popular.
Comparing what actually happened in history to what could have happened in a perfect world, where all advances happened as soon as they possibly could is just nonsense. We'd all be driving electric cars and have all our electricity provided by renewable resources while having computers embedded in our brains or something. I use Windows every day and enjoy it, I enjoy the programs I use on it, I enjoy the way that I pretty much forget about the operating system these days... it just works and I'm happy with it.
It's quite ridiculous to paint MS as 'EVIL' and blame them for the state of all computing today... really it is.
What evidence do you have to actually make the blanket statement that he's set the industry back a decade?
Links?
Books?
Anything other than opinion pieces?
We had people go ape about how terrible Dell is over those two photos of ONE incident with NO futher information as to how it occured, NO information as to whether the user had done anything stupid to their machine.
And yet here we have Apple having yet more issues with their machines, on a wide scale, and doing nothing about it, and people say... "yeah... well... others have problems too".
Face it, Apples are nice machines, but they are in NO WAY perfect or the holy grail of computing that so many of you seem to think they are.
Except, if you'd read the article, his last album costs $11.88 on iTunes, and $14.98 as a CD on Amazon. That's only $3.10 difference... with physical media, liner notes and cover. (I still far prefer CDs to downloads).
That's in NO way VASTLY overpriced.
After looking around on your site I found nothing that would be worth paying for, it just seems like a blog. Can you point me to some of your efforts that would usually be the sort that would need protecting such as the music/books etc. that you speak? I just can't find them to see whether the content that you've produced is the sort that people would generally want to copy. (if you get my meaning?)
So why don't they work elsewhere?
My god that is a stupid comment.
Because there is no work elsewhere. Because they don't have the skills required at place X or Y. Because they need the money to eat.
God, any number of reasons. People need to work, in overpopulated contries such as there, people will do almost any work in order to get food and shelter.
> Halo 3 production these days doesn't seem any different from a big budget Hollywood production.
I agree, and that's exactly what's wrong with today's games...
Oh what a ridiculous thing to say. Just because a game has fantastic production values, does not make it terrible... in fact it can help a great deal. I was just playing Hitman - Blood Money the other day and it's music, environments, voice acting etc. are all supurb and only enhance the feel and realism of the game.
Half Life 2... another example (I've been using these games a bit lately in examples!).
There are still small games with limited graphic and sound flair that are fun, but 'Great looking, great sounding' does not equal 'crap game'. Bringing in a bit of Hollywood can help games, sure it can hinder if looks and mainstream appeal is all that's included, but lush scores, good acting and well directed scenes are all plusses in my book.
Give me a good epic journey with lots of variety in landscape and area design, and give me some brain twisters along the way so I feel a sense of accomplishment in my gameplay.
Some of the best FPSs are like that, HL2 to me is a great story being told as you partake in it, there's shooting, there's problems, there's physics to play with, it's all a great journey. The Blood Money series too is not just a run and kill, in fact to do your job the best you should be killing only the one person per mission.
On the other hand I enjoy a game of Painkiller from time to time as just mindless shoot-shoot-shoot.
My main point that games like the civilisation series and the like are things which really take a large investment of time, and preferably in long sittings... I just don't have that time anymore, so I like the quick pick up and play type games more now.
I'm not sure that a sample of one really constitutes any kind of evidence that such is the state of play for the majority of gamers these days. You're falling into the 'in my day' syndrome, which is always dangerous, and a supurb way to be considered a grumpy old man.
We had it easy when we were kids with running water and heated homes etc... I mean come on, each generation has things when they grow up that are different to those before it.
The fact that your nephew is a prick is due to bad parenting, plain and damn simple. We're already seeing it with our kids vs. others their age (they're almost 3 and almost 2, so early, early days yet). We enforce dicipline, praise when they do the right thing, spend lots of time with them, limit their tv usage etc. and so far (rose tinted glasses notwithstanding), they are really, really good kids. They test limits, I would be worried if they didn't, but they have respect for themselves and others and are showing a lot of intelligence and humour. Other friends who are brought up in a similar way are also wonderful kids.
However others, who are given everything and aren't diciplined are little brutes and seem to lack imagination too.
Kids/adults/whoever shouldn't have to battle Interupts, Extended memory configurations, VESA drivers etc. (or, getting old school, having to battle a dying tape drive to get it to load your game after waiting a couple of minutes only to find it didn't work) just to play games. Games should be an escape, a challenge, a joy, and in a number of ways a learning experience.
Also, don't start thinking that because kids today don't need to tinker as much they end up not understanding as much about the computers... each generation tends to build on the previous, and the lower level stuff gets simpler (I'll be buggered if I could work an old valve computer or punchcards). The lack of needing to worry about the low level should mean you can extend further into more complex territories if you so wish.
Who actually thinks the 'security level' isn't anything more than the Bush government trying to ensure the populous is kept nice and concerned enough to believe that only a Republican government can keep them safe from those pesky 'outsiders'.
Why ANYONE would want this brought into their homes is beyond me...
Another good game if you like interactive fiction is Phototopia.
:)
Man, a text adventure! I haven't played on of them since Zork! I might give it a go some time..
Ahh, Grim Fandango, great game, from a great pedigree... ahhh.
They mention the hardware survey, and they say that it was very successful, which is why they've started this play monitoring as well. Therefore they are two different things.