I think this time around, it was just obvious... mostly in part due to the "something in the air" banners. Aside from that, it was pretty much common knowledge that Apple would produce some sort of improved portability laptop design, either as a thin machine, or something in the vein of the Asus eeePC. It just wasn't known which way they'd go.
Same with iTMS rentals/Apple TV.
No one picked up on Time Capsule or new iPhone/iPod touch apps.
Barack Obama could use this material to finally put an end to the criticism that he isn't "black enough". With this stuff, he could probably put even Shaft to shame.
The simple act of cloning an animal doesn't suddenly make the meat from it toxic or cancerous to the consumer. (We can thank the sci-fi community for those fears, more than anything...)
The problem with cloning is what happens to the cloned animals after the fact. Without genetic diversity, they become more likely to contract diseaases that could wipe out an entire herd of clones. Not that any animal is somehow safer from contracting disease in general, but keeping a wide gene-pool in play means you have far better odds of containing such diseases before it devistates the entire industry.
Overall, cloning our food resources is probably a bad idea in the long run, but that said, it's got relatively little to do with its effect on humans themselves.
If you were going to go this far for manual labor, why not take it a step further and motion capture it for use with an AI driven control system later on. As long as the system knows the proper motions and when/where to apply them, the exoskeleton should be able to do the work itself as a playable macro.
If so, anyone with a fancy Ford vehicle all prettied up in games like Forza Motorsport 2 won't ever get a chance to show off their work to others without running afoul of Ford's copyrights.
As long as you own the code for your product, I don't see why you couldn't simply try selling it as shareware until you're finished supported it, then simply release it later on as an open source project when you're ready to retire it. If you come up with any useful tricks for it in your closed-source development cycle, others could take advantage of it later on when you finally release it into the wild.
Consider just how dated IR remote control technology is, combined with the repeated need for line-of-sight with you devices, why do we still bother? Have you ever paged through a universal remote manual? There's thousands of configuration codes involved with trying to set one up... and it's all a method of trial and error just to get your devices configured just right.
I think the more obvious issue here is why we haven't made a push for Bluetooth-based controllers for our fancy new digital, high-definition devices... especially at a show that's supposed to demonstrate what our future holds.
While this guy from Gizmodo is an asshat for screwing up an event like this for a cheap laugh, the companies involved should be embarassed for leaving their cutting edge technology so unprotected that anyone off the street could mess up their multi-million dollar presentations.
What the Gizmodo guy demonstrated was the future of technology failing catastrophically right at the very point it was most needed.
This whole thing could have been avoided by either a bluetooth-like remote system, where only a single controller can be paired to a particular system... or even having the foresight to obscure or disable the IR ports on these devices prior to the show.
Well, after picking up the Nintendo DS SimCity title (which plays a lot like SC2K, only less impressively so), I've come to the conclusion that they really should have just ported the classic game to the system instead. The DS hardware seems like the perfect platform to breath new life into SimCity classic, and could certainly use the second screen to demonstrate just how well the game was developed in it's original form.
For example, the touch screen could handle the traditional city building gameplay elements, while the top screen could display all of the statistical changes to your game in real-time without requiring the user to interrupt the simulation to view their progress.
Navigation of the charts, graphs and maps could be rotated though by the L and R buttons, and value changes could be entered using the D-pad, leaving the touch screen open for further, independent interaction.
A good programmer doesn't write 20 line ambiguous intelligent scripts that do the job. A good programmer plans for his demise/departure by following the standards in the industry. I would rather a project take 30% more time but be supportable by more than the creator. This comes from experience, I work on multiple networks and have been through more than one web migration. I tell ya, the one thing that bugs me most is short sidedness, these programmers who are very intelligent and write scripts to prove to the world that they are smart. However they forget to document because why should you document something that works? You take those 20 line snippits and after 3 years or so you have about 100 of them in your environment, something breaks and all hell breaks loose for days because your replacement has to grep through all your code while you are unavailable.
While that works in a utopian environment where you are respected and seen as an equal among your co-workers, it doesn't quite help much in situatuations where you're considered "expendable" and in constant competition for your job against some new foreigner upstart who'd be more than willing to do the same work at half the cost.
Sure, it may not be entirely ethical to obfuscate the code you generate when it's technically the property of the company you work for, but when the only one who's watching your back is you, ethics can take a back seat to ensuring your own long-term survival.
If you really want to know what makes a good programmer, it's the guy who keeps the easy to read code for himself while leaving the stuff that read likes vomit but somehow miraculously works as needed. Also when things go wrong, it's much easier for everyone to just let you be the hero at the last minute, instead of letting a bunch of experts try to reverse engineer with too little progress too late.
If it's good enough for Scotty, it's good enough for anyone.
The upcoming game "Spore" is supposed to have some fairly impressive organic modeling tools that are extremely simple to use. Some of the early demo videos of the modeler in action certainly suggest the learning curve involved will be fairly small versus the type of content one could generate with it.
... they did exactly what they were designed to do. They paved the way for the iPhone by acting as the product Apple intended for consumers to want, only designed with specifications far lower than most other stand alone MP3 players on the market. This ensured the phones would not harm the iPod market or endure long enough to interfere with the iPhone once it was introduced.
Yeah, had the MC-10 myself as a kid. Was probably the very first computer I learned to program. Also had the cassette tape deal, the printer and the 16K expansion module, bringing the total RAM to a whopping 20KB of space. (Assuming it didn't crash the system if a light breeze entered the room.)
Sure, the system wasn't as nice as the Apple II's, but it could easily be mistaken for the lower half of a sub-notebook (like the Asus eeePC) even today. Considering that the system came out in the 80's and managed to do everything it did at it's physical size, it's perhaps more relavent now than it was back then.
"Most of the microstock companies that sell Royalty-free images already do that, in the form of tagging and descriptions provided by the photographer.
For example, my picture of a burning tire has a bunch of tags and a full description so that anyone searching for tires, fire, burning, smoke, etc. can find that picture.
Now, when the media people buy the images, they just need to keep track of those descriptions and tags, but that is a much smaller problem."
The problem with that, is that it's only taking descriptions from a single user or a key few, rather than a broad base. Unfortunately, people often see only that which interests them personally in any given image, rather than viewing all of the items in the image as having equal significance to relative to each other. This tunnel vision effect gets even worse when someone has a direct, personal stake in how someone else might interpret their content.
However, this is easily corrected by simply taking a random sampling of a very large number of users and filtering out the garbage results (basically any description that isn't found in a dictionary.) Then just expand on it using a context-sensitive thesaurus relative to the submitted descriptions.
... is that there are massive collections of high-quality royalty free images like these that most of these companies probably already own for their own media productions. Apparently what it's come down to is that it's now far easier to find an image based on any random keyword using google images than it is for these companies to search their own content on their own servers.
So, how do we fix this without requiring several thousands of man-hours to assign dozens or even hundreds of single word descriptions to each and every image?
Perhaps one way to go is to create a wikipedia-type system entirely for image collections, then have the content owners submit their content to the system for review by thosands of users at random, each assigning a unique description to each image they encounter. Once a collection has been completely reviewed, the system would then generate a searchable RSS feed specific to that collection that the collection owner could use to let users seach their content locally.
The actual task of handling the workload wouldn't even have to be considered "work" if you presented it right to the end user. For example, you could set up a multi-player "game" where dozens of people compete within a set time limit to come up with the most unique descriptions, (relative to a dictionary of allowed terms) and then penalize them for repeated descriptions by more than one user. You could even give out weekly prizes to the top players.
Sure, telling someone to use BASIC in this day and age may seem childish and stupid to some, but there is a lot to be said for being able to write useful programs under limited resources. For example, picking up an old Apple II and learning how to recreate functions modern programming languages handle automatically can really make you appreciate how far along programming languages have come, as well as make you treat your own code with far more respect than you might do now. Also, it removes the overhead of the graphical user interface by simply not offering one.
If you can't figure that much out without the benefit of a pretty GUI, you probably shouldn't be programming anyway... as you probably don't have any real clue what is going on underneath the hood of your system.
The "virtual" in virtual worlds means it isn't real. Once you leave the bounds of the physical world here on earth, you're in uncharted waters. After that, you might as well be living in the old west where the only justice you get is the justice you take.
The crooks may still wear black, but they pack all new weapons now.
"While not making it illegal per say many ISPs reduce the bandwidth for encrypted traffic for just this reason. Torrents announce themselves as such as part of the protocol, they were getting throttled, so they got smart and started encrypting their traffic. Guess what? My ISP started throttling all encrypted traffic, alright for say doing banking, but when I'm using VPN to get into my work and do remote desktop, db access etc, it really sucks."
Maybe it's time we start considering a new form of encryption that somehow obfuscates it's packets to look like normal, everyday unencrypted data. It might not be entirely efficient, but depending on how bad the throttling is between each system, it might be worth the extra processing to make the data look a lot less "interesting" to the network servers.
God, this crap is irritating to read about... especially when half your body doesn't work because of problems like this. Here I am watching the last of my youth drain away with ideas I'll never see come to fruition, while they frustratingly dangle this damned carrot in my face.
Sure, I know there's risks involved in rushing into human testing in medicine, before a complete study on other animals has been completed. But, you know... some things are worth taking the extra risk for!
So how about offering up guinea pig slots for those of us with not much else left to lose?
What they really mean, is that there's no way it can be done without pissing off enough customers for a class-action lawsuit against them.
Who gets to identify "copyright" and how do those with permission to use said materials bypass the system for legitimate reasons? Who is going to pay for the resources needed to store signature files for each copyrighted work on earth and the hardware needed to perform comparisons of any download with the signature database in realtime in such a manner that it doesn't adversely affect network performance?
Finally, wouldn't all these techniques be rendered useless by encrypted tunneling software short of making encryption over the internet illegal in itself? And who gets to enforce that?
Considering this generation is supposed to be the one that renders further graphical improvements irrelevent, we should be seeing more attention paid toward improving core gaming elements, such as better NPC AIs. Even if you have to sacrifice some visual quality to do it, making a fun game should outweigh making a pretty game.
- Locked, On-Disc Game Content -
The whole idea of calling content that's been on the game disc since day one "downloadable" is extremely underhanded and motivated entirely by greed alone. I agreed to pay the additional $10 per game for the next gen experience you promised me. Don't turn around and ask me for more money to access the content I already own.
- Proprietary Game Development -
We're now in an age where many gamers are just as competent about the mechanics of a game as the game designers themselves. Instead of locking us out, let us in to create and distribute our own custom content to other users. The end user could well become the best source of innovation in an industry notorious for becoming too complacent with formulas that work, rather than experimenting with untested concepts.
- Games Based On Past Wars -
While we've seen some gems such as the Call of Duty series, the games themselves are becoming a blur with one another simply because the protagonist and antagonists are always the same, just with slightly different controls. Instead, why not create ficticious battles or introduce antichronistic advantages/disadvantages to each side. (For example, a small WWII axis forces army with late 20th/early 21st century weaponry vs the allied forces armed only with time correct weaponry and shear numbers.)
- Tedious Game Clichés -
Perhaps it's time we consider putting some game play styles to rest, such as party-themed mini-games (especially on the Wii) and the ever dreaded escort mission. Why should the user have to pay for lazy game development by enduring crap that only serves fill in the total game play hour odometer.
- Franchise sharing -
Ok, the whole Mario vs Sonic argument died the day Sega killed off the Dreamcast. After we get our fill of Super Smash Brothers Brawl, I do not want to hear any more on the subject... period.
- Console Exclusivity -
Mostly referring to 3rd party titles favoring one console over the others. Instead, stop asking us to choose and just make the game for the system I do own. The PS3 owners aren't going to rush out and buy a 360 over one game, and 360 owners aren't about to do the same for the PS3. If they don't already own one, they probably never will.
- HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray -
Given that the loss of Blu-Ray in the format wars would crush Sony under the PS3's weight, this battle is unlikely to die anytime soon. One side eventually needs to conceed or else both will lose out to a 3rd choice that is more easily adopted by the traditional DVD users out there. At the moment, HD-DVD edges out Blu-Ray in this respect due to the ease of creating hybrid DVD/HD-DVD discs for distribution in one box.
Sure, it may not mesh well with the current "throw your shit anywhere" philosophy of interface design, but I guarantee you any interface you design from using the original human interface guidelines will be easily navigated and highly usable.
Just out of curiousity, what happens to all that music these companies "own" if they all go down in flames? Does it all get buried under litigation for potentially decades until our legal system can define who owns what? If so, we might well be headed back to the age of "talkies", where the only music that accompanies anything is created in the present along side the content itself.
This kind of ties into the earlier thread on mind doping using various prescription drugs to enhance thinking and reasoning. In particular, I've found beta-blockers, like Atenolol, tend to directly affect the brain even when asleep to some pretty useful levels. My own experiences were able to unlock certain aspects, such as lucid dreaming as well as controlled simulation of real-world problems with fairly usable results.
Unlike the type of thinking we typically do when awake, this actually allows you to take some more abstract and unconventional liberties you wouldn't ordinarily think of under normal circumstances. It's surprisingly useful for evaluating and countering logical uncertainties in things like computer programming. Of course, the medication did occasionally cause some extremely vivid dreams that would have given Salvador Dali a run for his money, but it was pretty rare after a while.
As for regular dreaming as threat simulation, it could be suggested that such medications directly alter how your mind prioritizes information, causing benign situations to be treated as traumatic, thus committed to memory more clearly, rather than being compressed and archived randomly. However, it's hard to say at this point if there is a net negative effect related to repeated exposure of such scenarios. For example, is it possible to take on so much "relevent" data, that it starts to hinder or even prevent any further "relevent" data from being stored for future use? (Sort of like how some vietnam vets suffer from "shell shock", and eventually become overly paranoid of their home surroundings.)
Slashdot Mirror
I think this time around, it was just obvious... mostly in part due to the "something in the air" banners. Aside from that, it was pretty much common knowledge that Apple would produce some sort of improved portability laptop design, either as a thin machine, or something in the vein of the Asus eeePC. It just wasn't known which way they'd go.
Same with iTMS rentals/Apple TV.
No one picked up on Time Capsule or new iPhone/iPod touch apps.
Is this anything like the "gay agenda"? Because I've yet to receive a pamphlet on it...
Barack Obama could use this material to finally put an end to the criticism that he isn't "black enough". With this stuff, he could probably put even Shaft to shame.
*shuts his mouth*
The simple act of cloning an animal doesn't suddenly make the meat from it toxic or cancerous to the consumer. (We can thank the sci-fi community for those fears, more than anything...)
The problem with cloning is what happens to the cloned animals after the fact. Without genetic diversity, they become more likely to contract diseaases that could wipe out an entire herd of clones. Not that any animal is somehow safer from contracting disease in general, but keeping a wide gene-pool in play means you have far better odds of containing such diseases before it devistates the entire industry.
Overall, cloning our food resources is probably a bad idea in the long run, but that said, it's got relatively little to do with its effect on humans themselves.
If you were going to go this far for manual labor, why not take it a step further and motion capture it for use with an AI driven control system later on. As long as the system knows the proper motions and when/where to apply them, the exoskeleton should be able to do the work itself as a playable macro.
If so, anyone with a fancy Ford vehicle all prettied up in games like Forza Motorsport 2 won't ever get a chance to show off their work to others without running afoul of Ford's copyrights.
As long as you own the code for your product, I don't see why you couldn't simply try selling it as shareware until you're finished supported it, then simply release it later on as an open source project when you're ready to retire it. If you come up with any useful tricks for it in your closed-source development cycle, others could take advantage of it later on when you finally release it into the wild.
Consider just how dated IR remote control technology is, combined with the repeated need for line-of-sight with you devices, why do we still bother? Have you ever paged through a universal remote manual? There's thousands of configuration codes involved with trying to set one up... and it's all a method of trial and error just to get your devices configured just right.
I think the more obvious issue here is why we haven't made a push for Bluetooth-based controllers for our fancy new digital, high-definition devices... especially at a show that's supposed to demonstrate what our future holds.
While this guy from Gizmodo is an asshat for screwing up an event like this for a cheap laugh, the companies involved should be embarassed for leaving their cutting edge technology so unprotected that anyone off the street could mess up their multi-million dollar presentations.
What the Gizmodo guy demonstrated was the future of technology failing catastrophically right at the very point it was most needed.
This whole thing could have been avoided by either a bluetooth-like remote system, where only a single controller can be paired to a particular system... or even having the foresight to obscure or disable the IR ports on these devices prior to the show.
Well, after picking up the Nintendo DS SimCity title (which plays a lot like SC2K, only less impressively so), I've come to the conclusion that they really should have just ported the classic game to the system instead. The DS hardware seems like the perfect platform to breath new life into SimCity classic, and could certainly use the second screen to demonstrate just how well the game was developed in it's original form.
For example, the touch screen could handle the traditional city building gameplay elements, while the top screen could display all of the statistical changes to your game in real-time without requiring the user to interrupt the simulation to view their progress.
Navigation of the charts, graphs and maps could be rotated though by the L and R buttons, and value changes could be entered using the D-pad, leaving the touch screen open for further, independent interaction.
A good programmer doesn't write 20 line ambiguous intelligent scripts that do the job. A good programmer plans for his demise/departure by following the standards in the industry. I would rather a project take 30% more time but be supportable by more than the creator.
This comes from experience, I work on multiple networks and have been through more than one web migration. I tell ya, the one thing that bugs me most is short sidedness, these programmers who are very intelligent and write scripts to prove to the world that they are smart. However they forget to document because why should you document something that works? You take those 20 line snippits and after 3 years or so you have about 100 of them in your environment, something breaks and all hell breaks loose for days because your replacement has to grep through all your code while you are unavailable.
While that works in a utopian environment where you are respected and seen as an equal among your co-workers, it doesn't quite help much in situatuations where you're considered "expendable" and in constant competition for your job against some new foreigner upstart who'd be more than willing to do the same work at half the cost.
Sure, it may not be entirely ethical to obfuscate the code you generate when it's technically the property of the company you work for, but when the only one who's watching your back is you, ethics can take a back seat to ensuring your own long-term survival.
If you really want to know what makes a good programmer, it's the guy who keeps the easy to read code for himself while leaving the stuff that read likes vomit but somehow miraculously works as needed. Also when things go wrong, it's much easier for everyone to just let you be the hero at the last minute, instead of letting a bunch of experts try to reverse engineer with too little progress too late.
If it's good enough for Scotty, it's good enough for anyone.
The upcoming game "Spore" is supposed to have some fairly impressive organic modeling tools that are extremely simple to use. Some of the early demo videos of the modeler in action certainly suggest the learning curve involved will be fairly small versus the type of content one could generate with it.
... they did exactly what they were designed to do. They paved the way for the iPhone by acting as the product Apple intended for consumers to want, only designed with specifications far lower than most other stand alone MP3 players on the market. This ensured the phones would not harm the iPod market or endure long enough to interfere with the iPhone once it was introduced.
Yeah, had the MC-10 myself as a kid. Was probably the very first computer I learned to program. Also had the cassette tape deal, the printer and the 16K expansion module, bringing the total RAM to a whopping 20KB of space. (Assuming it didn't crash the system if a light breeze entered the room.)
Sure, the system wasn't as nice as the Apple II's, but it could easily be mistaken for the lower half of a sub-notebook (like the Asus eeePC) even today. Considering that the system came out in the 80's and managed to do everything it did at it's physical size, it's perhaps more relavent now than it was back then.
"Most of the microstock companies that sell Royalty-free images already do that, in the form of tagging and descriptions provided by the photographer.
For example, my picture of a burning tire has a bunch of tags and a full description so that anyone searching for tires, fire, burning, smoke, etc. can find that picture.
Now, when the media people buy the images, they just need to keep track of those descriptions and tags, but that is a much smaller problem."
The problem with that, is that it's only taking descriptions from a single user or a key few, rather than a broad base. Unfortunately, people often see only that which interests them personally in any given image, rather than viewing all of the items in the image as having equal significance to relative to each other. This tunnel vision effect gets even worse when someone has a direct, personal stake in how someone else might interpret their content.
However, this is easily corrected by simply taking a random sampling of a very large number of users and filtering out the garbage results (basically any description that isn't found in a dictionary.) Then just expand on it using a context-sensitive thesaurus relative to the submitted descriptions.
... is that there are massive collections of high-quality royalty free images like these that most of these companies probably already own for their own media productions. Apparently what it's come down to is that it's now far easier to find an image based on any random keyword using google images than it is for these companies to search their own content on their own servers.
So, how do we fix this without requiring several thousands of man-hours to assign dozens or even hundreds of single word descriptions to each and every image?
Perhaps one way to go is to create a wikipedia-type system entirely for image collections, then have the content owners submit their content to the system for review by thosands of users at random, each assigning a unique description to each image they encounter. Once a collection has been completely reviewed, the system would then generate a searchable RSS feed specific to that collection that the collection owner could use to let users seach their content locally.
The actual task of handling the workload wouldn't even have to be considered "work" if you presented it right to the end user. For example, you could set up a multi-player "game" where dozens of people compete within a set time limit to come up with the most unique descriptions, (relative to a dictionary of allowed terms) and then penalize them for repeated descriptions by more than one user. You could even give out weekly prizes to the top players.
Sure, telling someone to use BASIC in this day and age may seem childish and stupid to some, but there is a lot to be said for being able to write useful programs under limited resources. For example, picking up an old Apple II and learning how to recreate functions modern programming languages handle automatically can really make you appreciate how far along programming languages have come, as well as make you treat your own code with far more respect than you might do now. Also, it removes the overhead of the graphical user interface by simply not offering one.
If you can't figure that much out without the benefit of a pretty GUI, you probably shouldn't be programming anyway... as you probably don't have any real clue what is going on underneath the hood of your system.
The "virtual" in virtual worlds means it isn't real. Once you leave the bounds of the physical world here on earth, you're in uncharted waters. After that, you might as well be living in the old west where the only justice you get is the justice you take.
The crooks may still wear black, but they pack all new weapons now.
"While not making it illegal per say many ISPs reduce the bandwidth for encrypted traffic for just this reason. Torrents announce themselves as such as part of the protocol, they were getting throttled, so they got smart and started encrypting their traffic. Guess what? My ISP started throttling all encrypted traffic, alright for say doing banking, but when I'm using VPN to get into my work and do remote desktop, db access etc, it really sucks."
Maybe it's time we start considering a new form of encryption that somehow obfuscates it's packets to look like normal, everyday unencrypted data. It might not be entirely efficient, but depending on how bad the throttling is between each system, it might be worth the extra processing to make the data look a lot less "interesting" to the network servers.
God, this crap is irritating to read about... especially when half your body doesn't work because of problems like this. Here I am watching the last of my youth drain away with ideas I'll never see come to fruition, while they frustratingly dangle this damned carrot in my face.
Sure, I know there's risks involved in rushing into human testing in medicine, before a complete study on other animals has been completed. But, you know... some things are worth taking the extra risk for!
So how about offering up guinea pig slots for those of us with not much else left to lose?
What they really mean, is that there's no way it can be done without pissing off enough customers for a class-action lawsuit against them.
Who gets to identify "copyright" and how do those with permission to use said materials bypass the system for legitimate reasons? Who is going to pay for the resources needed to store signature files for each copyrighted work on earth and the hardware needed to perform comparisons of any download with the signature database in realtime in such a manner that it doesn't adversely affect network performance?
Finally, wouldn't all these techniques be rendered useless by encrypted tunneling software short of making encryption over the internet illegal in itself? And who gets to enforce that?
Hmm...
- Poor AI Coding -
Considering this generation is supposed to be the one that renders further graphical improvements irrelevent, we should be seeing more attention paid toward improving core gaming elements, such as better NPC AIs. Even if you have to sacrifice some visual quality to do it, making a fun game should outweigh making a pretty game.
- Locked, On-Disc Game Content -
The whole idea of calling content that's been on the game disc since day one "downloadable" is extremely underhanded and motivated entirely by greed alone. I agreed to pay the additional $10 per game for the next gen experience you promised me. Don't turn around and ask me for more money to access the content I already own.
- Proprietary Game Development -
We're now in an age where many gamers are just as competent about the mechanics of a game as the game designers themselves. Instead of locking us out, let us in to create and distribute our own custom content to other users. The end user could well become the best source of innovation in an industry notorious for becoming too complacent with formulas that work, rather than experimenting with untested concepts.
- Games Based On Past Wars -
While we've seen some gems such as the Call of Duty series, the games themselves are becoming a blur with one another simply because the protagonist and antagonists are always the same, just with slightly different controls. Instead, why not create ficticious battles or introduce antichronistic advantages/disadvantages to each side. (For example, a small WWII axis forces army with late 20th/early 21st century weaponry vs the allied forces armed only with time correct weaponry and shear numbers.)
- Tedious Game Clichés -
Perhaps it's time we consider putting some game play styles to rest, such as party-themed mini-games (especially on the Wii) and the ever dreaded escort mission. Why should the user have to pay for lazy game development by enduring crap that only serves fill in the total game play hour odometer.
- Franchise sharing -
Ok, the whole Mario vs Sonic argument died the day Sega killed off the Dreamcast. After we get our fill of Super Smash Brothers Brawl, I do not want to hear any more on the subject... period.
- Console Exclusivity -
Mostly referring to 3rd party titles favoring one console over the others. Instead, stop asking us to choose and just make the game for the system I do own. The PS3 owners aren't going to rush out and buy a 360 over one game, and 360 owners aren't about to do the same for the PS3. If they don't already own one, they probably never will.
- HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray -
Given that the loss of Blu-Ray in the format wars would crush Sony under the PS3's weight, this battle is unlikely to die anytime soon. One side eventually needs to conceed or else both will lose out to a 3rd choice that is more easily adopted by the traditional DVD users out there. At the moment, HD-DVD edges out Blu-Ray in this respect due to the ease of creating hybrid DVD/HD-DVD discs for distribution in one box.
... does a beard and dark skin count as a "facial expression" now?
Sure, it may not mesh well with the current "throw your shit anywhere" philosophy of interface design, but I guarantee you any interface you design from using the original human interface guidelines will be easily navigated and highly usable.
Just out of curiousity, what happens to all that music these companies "own" if they all go down in flames? Does it all get buried under litigation for potentially decades until our legal system can define who owns what? If so, we might well be headed back to the age of "talkies", where the only music that accompanies anything is created in the present along side the content itself.
This kind of ties into the earlier thread on mind doping using various prescription drugs to enhance thinking and reasoning. In particular, I've found beta-blockers, like Atenolol, tend to directly affect the brain even when asleep to some pretty useful levels. My own experiences were able to unlock certain aspects, such as lucid dreaming as well as controlled simulation of real-world problems with fairly usable results.
Unlike the type of thinking we typically do when awake, this actually allows you to take some more abstract and unconventional liberties you wouldn't ordinarily think of under normal circumstances. It's surprisingly useful for evaluating and countering logical uncertainties in things like computer programming. Of course, the medication did occasionally cause some extremely vivid dreams that would have given Salvador Dali a run for his money, but it was pretty rare after a while.
As for regular dreaming as threat simulation, it could be suggested that such medications directly alter how your mind prioritizes information, causing benign situations to be treated as traumatic, thus committed to memory more clearly, rather than being compressed and archived randomly. However, it's hard to say at this point if there is a net negative effect related to repeated exposure of such scenarios. For example, is it possible to take on so much "relevent" data, that it starts to hinder or even prevent any further "relevent" data from being stored for future use? (Sort of like how some vietnam vets suffer from "shell shock", and eventually become overly paranoid of their home surroundings.)