Education is always offensive. It always on some fundamental level upsets the balance in people's minds. It always replaces wrong ideas with more accurate ideas, or at least augments preconcieved notions with dissenting notions. Education is inherently dissonant.
Offending should be the primary role of a curator.
It's a good thing too. Whenever science conflicts with preconcieved notions, the only polite thing to do is hide the science. After all, offending or presenting notions contrary to popular belief is not the role of the museum curator.
Of course, these museums should be patted on the back for doing the right thing despite the obvious monetary benefits to the contrary. They bit the bullet and avoided the temptation to draw controversy, protesters, and the rise in ticket sales that such media attention brings. Then there are the side issues of overcrowding, parking, and a loss of focus on their scientific and educational mission that such things would bring.
Now we can all safely go back to teaching our children that the creatures at the sulfurous vents at the bottom of the ocean are really demons escaping from hell, souls so small that they slipped through Satan's ever present but large and chubby fingers.
Boston too. Quite frankly, these days I hardly ever see earbuds on people that aren't the distinctive Apple white. I'd estimate I see at least two pairs of white earbuds on my 15 minute morning commute.
Which leads me to my next point: Please, for the love of god, educate these people on the benefit of better headsets. Tell them that an amazing set of Sennheiser's can be had for as low as 80 bucks, and show them how much better the sound quality is. Heck, show them how much better the sound quality is from a 40 dollar pair of Sony cups at Target. But show them! These people don't realize how much better their music can sound for just a few dollars more. Those white earbuds, while better than some, are still terrible. Get them on real headsets!
That the iPod is so popular isn't bad at all. But that we see so many white iPod earbuds despite the fact that sound quality can be worlds better for 10% more is a downright shame.
I should point out that all consoles after the 16 bit era, except for the Saturn, were inherently Polygon-based. Even 2D masterpieces like Symphony of the Night are a bunch of 2D textures mapped to very rigid polygons. Handhelds up until this point have been the exception, as the polygon pushing power of the GBA is not exactly legendary, but I wouldn't be surprised if the DS was 100% textured.
Don't get me wrong, this is great in a lot of ways. Just imagining the optimizations that must have gone into, say, needing to reduce your art assets memory footprint by 20% without decreasing their size on the SNES must have been incredibly painful. Now it will take a coder an hour to write and debug a script that takes all of your art assets, reduces their physical size, then rescales them back to the size the game needs. Or maybe your game needs larger sprites / etc. While there are still quality / etc effects from manipulations, such things are much easier when all sprites are polygons.
But make no mistake, pretty much all sprites these days are polygon textures.
Does anyone know what format they are using? There was a Slashdot article a few months back about Microsoft's push for WMV as the default projection standard for theaters. Is this the beginning of that standard? If anyone has the funding and long-term self interest to give away 500 ludicrously expensive cameras to jump-start an endeavor, it's Microsoft.
Katamari Damacy didn't exactly make the PS2 cry and beg for mercy. You're talking about a field of objects and vision that while it could be cluttered it didn't exceed the amount of pushable polys by a long shot. Certainly it didn't have anywhere near as many polys on screen as, say, Madden 2004, and those were textured / lit / etc.
Plus, Katamari is a prime example of a game that could be optimized. All of the "regular" edges were rounded, almost unnecessarily so. Removing or reducing the rounded edges could reduce polycount by 50 - 90%. Likewise, with the reduced size / resolution of the DS screen it would be much easier to "drop out" things from the world sooner, from ants that stick around long after they're black dots on the regular screen to cars that you can barely see when you're giant. Katamari is optimized for such transitions, and to do so would be relatively easy. You could probably get another 50% poly savings there too. Plus the DS is running at about 40% length and 40% height resolution on each of it's screens, saving between 50% - 80% on poly rendering, depending on how they decide to use the second screen.
You can also drop the "special effect" in katamari. You know, that distance blur thing, which so many people find so annoying. On a TFT screen, it will probably be impossible to see anyway.
And if you did have to remove objects from the world, it would be relatively easy to do, and just boost the size multiplier of the remaining objects.
There are a ton of ways that you can optimise the design of Katamari Damacy down to a smaller system. This shouldn't be a problem at all.
In most tests the outcome is largely believed beforehand. Most tests are to confirm or rule out theories. Very few tests are truly exploratory in nature, as the exploratory nature of such tests rules out a lot of controls that one should put on such things.
For individual things that need to be accessed frequently or given to people, use those really thin plastic sleeves. They're about 1000 for 10 dollars, and they don't take up much more room than the CD themselves. Whenever I have CD's to deal with, they wind up in a little pile of sleeves somewhere.
For things that can be logically grouped together, use binders. I've come across some crappy binders like yours which have broken near maximum capacity, but I've also got several that have lasted for years and years. The key is that the main company who sells binders, and who has somehow gotten a stranglehold on most of the retail market (you know who I'm talking about) makes crap. The offbrands in this case seem to perform significantly better. I've got about as many computer CD's in my three binders as my roommate has music CD's in her 4' by 6' shelf.
And for a lot of things, throw them out. As other people have pointed out, you don't need the drivers that came with all of the little pieces of hardware you own. You are most likely to need to reinstall drivers when you're updating OS's, and at that point the drivers will be inherently out of date anyway. Anything you personally have burned to CD is suspect, as either A: you didn't want it enough to keep it on your main PC and B: chances are you downloaded it anyway.
For any games you haven't played in a year, write down your serial number and throw out the CD. If you ever want to play them again, download the game.
As for DVD movies... stop buying so many movies! Movie purchases serve two functions. 1. If a movie is really, really good you can watch it every day. This happens to most people a few times in their lives, but ultimately most movies aren't so much better than other movies that they're worth seeing more than once or twice. You've seen these movies at least 5 times, and are likely to again. 2. It's iconic. It allows you to associate yourself with that movie and vice-versa, supporting them at the same time as showing other people your tastes. Ultimately, though, the prospect of spending 20 dollars for a movie that you could rent for 3 is a losing prospect most of the time, especially as a lot of purchased DVD's don't get watched more than once or twice. Divide your collection into things that fit into the first category, things that fit into the second category, and things that don't fit into either category. Category 1 should be kept in a handy binder, near your DVD playback device. Category 2 "might" go back on your shelf in the original container, but only if you don't already have symbols of that movie up and around. Otherwise if it is a sharable movie put it in the binder, or just get rid of it. Having the alien trilogy around gets you no more subculture cred than having candles: They're great but everyone has them anyway. Movies that don't fit into either of these categories should be roundly dumped.
You can't keep everything. Liner notes go. Boxes go. The experience is what it is all about, but experiences are transient. Let the disks die.
I wonder if the point was to get a list of IP's to deny access to.
However, it looks like the weakest link wasn't exploited. There were no regular clueless users onboard to steal passwords from. There were no janitors to impersonate or locks to pick. There were no unannounced maintenence men from DELL to swap in a new redundant RAID disk. It was all too clean.
If you have anything not published or not known outside of yourself, that is now codename: project X. Write "Project X" down on your list of previous projects. Also write down "Project Y" "Project Z" and "Project AA-AZ." The company may rightfully complain that those are stupid project names but hey, they're not your company's to name.
Re:One born every minute.
on
Halo 2 Expansion?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Plese tell me you're joking.
Many games have been pushed out the door unfinished. The Legacy of Kain is a famous example, as somewhere in the middle of development they realized they weren't going to make it and cut out huge chunks of game, including the ending, several levels, powerups, etc. In that case it was painfully obvious that they didn't finish in time, as their game constantly referred to a different number of things to do than you actually had, there were quite a few bugs, empty areas, etc. This was made all the worse by the fact that the game was really really good, and if they had convinced their publisher to give them 6 more months for content generation they could have had a staggeringly, legendarily good game.
Xenogears suffered a similar fate. At the time I was playing it, I felt that it was the best RPG ever made. I still feel that way, almost. It's half of the best RPG ever made. They go into excrutiating detail early on, creating a vast and rich world to really lose yourself in. The gameplay is great, they address all of the issues people talk about hating in standard RPG's... It's truly great. Then, about 50 hours in, they switch to "diarama - o - vision." A static picture appears on the screen, and text scrolls by. For about 10 hours. Occasionally this is broken up by largely unfinished gameplay sequences. I swear, this is the only game I've played on a console that had multiple save points within a single flow of text. It went from the greatest RPG ever made to the worst in the span of one cinematic. Eventually it regains its footing and actually finishes like it started, and the ending is great and satisfying despite some laughably bad voice acting. But by that point the experience is totally ruined.
As a less extreme example, the new KOTOR had an ending that just fell completely flat. It wasn't a content pull like in Legacy of Kane, it wasn't a stick-to-the-eye like Xenogears. It was just a rush job, with a much better and more satisfying ending being yanked for time, replaced by something half-arsed and roundly disappointing.
Unfinished games suck. They suck the enjoyment out of a title and they suck out the potential. In the example of Xenogears, it was pretty clear they just had bitten off something that was far, far too big for any reasonable budget of the time. Any publisher would have done the same, though any publisher should have pushed them to work on the important points of the plot first and shaped the degree of detail in the world that could be achieved realistically.
But Halo 2? We're talking about a guarenteed million seller here. Any publisher would have ponied up the extra 6 months for that, as a good reception for Halo 2 would guarentee another insane sales bonanza for Halo 3. The bloody thing made 200 million in presales. But Microsoft isn't any publisher: Microsoft is a publisher with a system to sell. If Microsoft is really dumping the Xbox for the Ybox this upcoming Christmas, they have a major problem on their hands if their in-house publisher releases a system-selling game for the wrong system. Hence, buggy, unbalanced, or even unfinished, they had to get it out the door. Which is a crying shame really, and will really hurt their Halo 3 sales. The moment they realized that Halo 2 was going to ship either late or unfinished, they should have switched the bungee people over to XBox 2 development right away, and had them work on porting what they had done and finishing what they hadn't done. It would have sold a lot more systems than Halo 3 is now capable of.
Don't be so impatient. No publisher or game development company wants to wait until absolutely every little detail is perfect before putting something in a box, but it should least bloody well be finished. Given the choice between a bad experience now and a perfect experience in 6 months, go with the perfect experience. With so many great games out anything less isn't worth your time.
5% of the computers may be Apples, but that doesn't mean 5% of a website's hits are going to come from Apple machines. For one, people with broadband surf more, so that skews results. For another, many apple surfers go to apple related sites, while many of these types of surveys use PCWorld.com and other available PC specific sites.
OS marketshare does not equal browser market share.
Opera masquerades it's User Agent as I.E. by default. It's actually a bit controversial in the Opera community, as while it reduces their numbers for a long time it increased the number of sites that didn't crap out.
It's also pretty easy to filter for if you realize that a Mozilla compatible I.E. with the word Opera attached to the end is not likely to have come from Redmond. But the numbers that these companies are throwing around sound about right for Opera's marketshare, so they're probably doing such filtering already.
Sorry for the formatting of the following paragraph, but it is to prove a point.
Slashcode has been behaving interestingly for a few years now. Using only Plain Old Text you can insert
any of the allowed
HTML tags.
Allow
me
to show
you. If you will.
Note
how
these last two spaces happened without any formatting tags.
Showing that this is, indeed, Plain Old Text mode.
Sorry for the formatting of the following paragraph, but it is to prove a point.
Slashcode has been behaving <i>interestingly</i> for a few years now. <br>Using only <b>Plain Old Text</b> you can <strong>insert</strong> <div>any of the</div> allowed <p>HTML tags. <UL>Allow</UL> <li>me</li> <ol>to show</ol> <em>you.</em> <BR>If</br> <tt>you</tt> will.
<dl>Note</dl> <dt>how</dt> <dd>these</dd> <cite>last two spaces happened without any formatting tags.</cite>
Showing that this is, indeed, Plain Old Text mode.
This kind of renders HTML format obsolete, code format redundant, and extrans just a variant of code. And all of those options are functionally available under the increasingly misnamed "Plain Old Text." Of course this was a big improvement over the old method, and is an improvement that should stay. But the option menu should go, as many people get stuck in HTML mode and don't know how to get out, and other don't realize that you can use the allowed HTML tags in plain old text mode.
How much energy does it take nature to grow a potato using only sunlight and the available nutrients in soil and air?
An equally good question is how long does it take? If we were willing for a super efficient replicator to replicate itself over the course of a 9 month pregnancy and a 13 year gestation period, it might not take that much energy at a given time. But we're even more special-purposed than these machines would be, and we take a bloody long time and a lot of energy to self-replicate. If you wanted it faster than that, your energy requirements would go proportionally, multiplied by some scalar representing lost efficiencies.
In other words, you can have it now, you can have it right, you can have it cheaply. But you have to pick two.
You can get japanese H games in the US legally, though not at any retailers that I know of. There are cute little animal games where your cute little animal takes cute little turds, but not on anybody. There is a webgame version of Puyo Puyo where your special attack is throwing up on your opponent. There were a few games in the 80's where birds would poo on you, though those weren't very good games. There's the 7 sins, where the point is to try to have sex with as many people as possible. There is, of course a PS2 version.
There are a lot of bad games out there. But then, there are millions of games out there. By the same token, I don't have anything morally against making parents come in and buy games for their kids if they want them to have them. I've known far too many people in the retail sector who have told kids no, and been yelled at by the parent for stopping their kid from buying, say, Manslaughter. Inevitably, the parent then comes back the following day and freaks out on the poor underpaid associate for selling such filth to their kid.
I think the generation which preceeded ours has certain expectations about cartoons and videogames which ours does not. To them, more mature cartoons or videogames is like Jack Daniels flavored breastmilk. Or black leather studded diapers. In exactly the same way that movies were seen as kid's stuff at the turn of the century, so too is videogames the realm of kids. And therefore anything that gets released in a videogame is marketed at kids, and all of that stuff that you see in videogames is people trying to mess up your children.
It's a different perspective. While I don't disagree with the idea of restricting the sale of certain videogames to minors, I do disagree with the perspective.
Oh no, no patent. Amazon has enough bunk patents for now. I was just decrying the state of people shouting "privacy" at the top of their lungs. If amazon was reading my e-mails, that would be a privacy violation. If they're monitoring what pages I linger on... so what?
Yes, getting a patent on this is bogus. But these days the phrase "bogus patent" is redundant.
It's a lot larger than medical conferences. Have you walked up a busy street in New York? Did you see that hip looking guy talking into his cellphone about the album he happens to be holding up in his cellphone hand? Dimes to dollars there is nobody on the other end of the line. See those two people standing out front of that otherwise deserted italian resturant on a busy corner, eating and talking about how good the food is? Come back in 30 minutes, they'll probably still be there. Ever had a really cute, friendly girl walk up to you in a club and ask you to buy her a Michelob?
Live people placements are getting quite common. When I was between jobs during the bust I did a little work with one. I wasn't involved in the live placement part: I was explicitly corporate whoring. But they did have lots of jobs if you wanted to be hip and approachably pretty and get people to buy you a specific drink, or to shout into your phone on a busy street about how good such and such is, or to be huddled around some store and generate buzz.
Of course, in LA you have professional "friends"... People you hire to come to parties and pretend they know you, to seed the mood and really get everyone dancing. We don't have that much here. We do have paid people to mingle and dance in the clubs, though that's been going on for years.
There is actually one thing we do better than any animal. We throw. No other animal is capable of throwing anything as far or as accurately as we are, and that's not just from a big-brained standpoint.
It's almost like we're spear and rock-chucking machines.
There are other benefits to being bipedal. With two legs we can squeeze through smaller spaces than we could if we had four or eight. We're one of the only mammals that is exclusively bipedal. Even gorillas walk with their arms. We'd probably have the highest typing rate of all of the animals (if stupid PETA would allow me to continue my research). The physical feats that skateboarders do in half-pipes are comparable to the impressive physical feats other animals are capable of. Or, say, the russian balancing acts at Cirque de Solei.
Compared to other animals, the human physical form is incredibly flexible. Don't knock it just because the grass looks greener.
I hate to say it like this, but so? Amazon could have most of this information if they wanted by just running a credit report. Of course they don't want to pay for that, but it isn't exactly difficult to get one's information these days.
Listen, if having my age, sex, birthdate, anniversary, purchasing history, and websites I A9'd for on file allows them to push the crap down and let float to the top only those things that I want, more power to them. If they could have known for example last week exactly what I happened to be looking for, and popped it up on their home page when I visited, I'm sure I would have bought my castanetes from them. Their price is only 2 dollars more than the place I bought them from, and that was after hours of searching. If they're willing to remind me that my friend's birthday is coming up, I could probably use the reminder anyway.
A problem could arise if, say, there were something in there that were both incriminating and about to be used incorrectly in a court of law. But at some point we have to accept that this is not a public body and if it were that the courts wouldn't use circumstancial evidence lightly. But the risk of the government seraching my amazon records and deciding that I'm a criminal who is friends with other criminals is very low. I see a lot less risk there than, say, what they're trying to pull with the TSA.
If amazon can put something in front of me that I have to have every time I go to their site, more power to them. I want things that I want, and I'm kind of tired of having to wade through the junk to find it.
Slashdot Mirror
Education is always offensive. It always on some fundamental level upsets the balance in people's minds. It always replaces wrong ideas with more accurate ideas, or at least augments preconcieved notions with dissenting notions. Education is inherently dissonant.
Offending should be the primary role of a curator.
It's a good thing too. Whenever science conflicts with preconcieved notions, the only polite thing to do is hide the science. After all, offending or presenting notions contrary to popular belief is not the role of the museum curator.
Of course, these museums should be patted on the back for doing the right thing despite the obvious monetary benefits to the contrary. They bit the bullet and avoided the temptation to draw controversy, protesters, and the rise in ticket sales that such media attention brings. Then there are the side issues of overcrowding, parking, and a loss of focus on their scientific and educational mission that such things would bring.
Now we can all safely go back to teaching our children that the creatures at the sulfurous vents at the bottom of the ocean are really demons escaping from hell, souls so small that they slipped through Satan's ever present but large and chubby fingers.
And on a side note, we're all doomed.
Boston too. Quite frankly, these days I hardly ever see earbuds on people that aren't the distinctive Apple white. I'd estimate I see at least two pairs of white earbuds on my 15 minute morning commute.
Which leads me to my next point: Please, for the love of god, educate these people on the benefit of better headsets. Tell them that an amazing set of Sennheiser's can be had for as low as 80 bucks, and show them how much better the sound quality is. Heck, show them how much better the sound quality is from a 40 dollar pair of Sony cups at Target. But show them! These people don't realize how much better their music can sound for just a few dollars more. Those white earbuds, while better than some, are still terrible. Get them on real headsets!
That the iPod is so popular isn't bad at all. But that we see so many white iPod earbuds despite the fact that sound quality can be worlds better for 10% more is a downright shame.
I should point out that all consoles after the 16 bit era, except for the Saturn, were inherently Polygon-based. Even 2D masterpieces like Symphony of the Night are a bunch of 2D textures mapped to very rigid polygons. Handhelds up until this point have been the exception, as the polygon pushing power of the GBA is not exactly legendary, but I wouldn't be surprised if the DS was 100% textured.
Don't get me wrong, this is great in a lot of ways. Just imagining the optimizations that must have gone into, say, needing to reduce your art assets memory footprint by 20% without decreasing their size on the SNES must have been incredibly painful. Now it will take a coder an hour to write and debug a script that takes all of your art assets, reduces their physical size, then rescales them back to the size the game needs. Or maybe your game needs larger sprites / etc. While there are still quality / etc effects from manipulations, such things are much easier when all sprites are polygons.
But make no mistake, pretty much all sprites these days are polygon textures.
Does anyone know what format they are using? There was a Slashdot article a few months back about Microsoft's push for WMV as the default projection standard for theaters. Is this the beginning of that standard? If anyone has the funding and long-term self interest to give away 500 ludicrously expensive cameras to jump-start an endeavor, it's Microsoft.
Well, I have seen one digitally projected "film" (can we even call them that anymore?) and I will never see one again. It was HORRIBLE.
Yeah, and I hear Episode 3 isn't much better.
You are kidding, right?
Katamari Damacy didn't exactly make the PS2 cry and beg for mercy. You're talking about a field of objects and vision that while it could be cluttered it didn't exceed the amount of pushable polys by a long shot. Certainly it didn't have anywhere near as many polys on screen as, say, Madden 2004, and those were textured / lit / etc.
Plus, Katamari is a prime example of a game that could be optimized. All of the "regular" edges were rounded, almost unnecessarily so. Removing or reducing the rounded edges could reduce polycount by 50 - 90%. Likewise, with the reduced size / resolution of the DS screen it would be much easier to "drop out" things from the world sooner, from ants that stick around long after they're black dots on the regular screen to cars that you can barely see when you're giant. Katamari is optimized for such transitions, and to do so would be relatively easy. You could probably get another 50% poly savings there too. Plus the DS is running at about 40% length and 40% height resolution on each of it's screens, saving between 50% - 80% on poly rendering, depending on how they decide to use the second screen.
You can also drop the "special effect" in katamari. You know, that distance blur thing, which so many people find so annoying. On a TFT screen, it will probably be impossible to see anyway.
And if you did have to remove objects from the world, it would be relatively easy to do, and just boost the size multiplier of the remaining objects.
There are a ton of ways that you can optimise the design of Katamari Damacy down to a smaller system. This shouldn't be a problem at all.
Well, you see, they had been trying to switch over to BSD, they they had this driver problem...
In most tests the outcome is largely believed beforehand. Most tests are to confirm or rule out theories. Very few tests are truly exploratory in nature, as the exploratory nature of such tests rules out a lot of controls that one should put on such things.
Next time warn people if you're going to link to an article with an image like this. Or this. Sweet mother of Jesus some of these are wrong.
For individual things that need to be accessed frequently or given to people, use those really thin plastic sleeves. They're about 1000 for 10 dollars, and they don't take up much more room than the CD themselves. Whenever I have CD's to deal with, they wind up in a little pile of sleeves somewhere.
For things that can be logically grouped together, use binders. I've come across some crappy binders like yours which have broken near maximum capacity, but I've also got several that have lasted for years and years. The key is that the main company who sells binders, and who has somehow gotten a stranglehold on most of the retail market (you know who I'm talking about) makes crap. The offbrands in this case seem to perform significantly better. I've got about as many computer CD's in my three binders as my roommate has music CD's in her 4' by 6' shelf.
And for a lot of things, throw them out. As other people have pointed out, you don't need the drivers that came with all of the little pieces of hardware you own. You are most likely to need to reinstall drivers when you're updating OS's, and at that point the drivers will be inherently out of date anyway. Anything you personally have burned to CD is suspect, as either A: you didn't want it enough to keep it on your main PC and B: chances are you downloaded it anyway.
For any games you haven't played in a year, write down your serial number and throw out the CD. If you ever want to play them again, download the game.
As for DVD movies... stop buying so many movies! Movie purchases serve two functions. 1. If a movie is really, really good you can watch it every day. This happens to most people a few times in their lives, but ultimately most movies aren't so much better than other movies that they're worth seeing more than once or twice. You've seen these movies at least 5 times, and are likely to again. 2. It's iconic. It allows you to associate yourself with that movie and vice-versa, supporting them at the same time as showing other people your tastes. Ultimately, though, the prospect of spending 20 dollars for a movie that you could rent for 3 is a losing prospect most of the time, especially as a lot of purchased DVD's don't get watched more than once or twice. Divide your collection into things that fit into the first category, things that fit into the second category, and things that don't fit into either category. Category 1 should be kept in a handy binder, near your DVD playback device. Category 2 "might" go back on your shelf in the original container, but only if you don't already have symbols of that movie up and around. Otherwise if it is a sharable movie put it in the binder, or just get rid of it. Having the alien trilogy around gets you no more subculture cred than having candles: They're great but everyone has them anyway. Movies that don't fit into either of these categories should be roundly dumped.
You can't keep everything. Liner notes go. Boxes go. The experience is what it is all about, but experiences are transient. Let the disks die.
I wonder if the point was to get a list of IP's to deny access to.
However, it looks like the weakest link wasn't exploited. There were no regular clueless users onboard to steal passwords from. There were no janitors to impersonate or locks to pick. There were no unannounced maintenence men from DELL to swap in a new redundant RAID disk. It was all too clean.
Done
If you have anything not published or not known outside of yourself, that is now codename: project X. Write "Project X" down on your list of previous projects. Also write down "Project Y" "Project Z" and "Project AA-AZ." The company may rightfully complain that those are stupid project names but hey, they're not your company's to name.
Plese tell me you're joking.
Many games have been pushed out the door unfinished. The Legacy of Kain is a famous example, as somewhere in the middle of development they realized they weren't going to make it and cut out huge chunks of game, including the ending, several levels, powerups, etc. In that case it was painfully obvious that they didn't finish in time, as their game constantly referred to a different number of things to do than you actually had, there were quite a few bugs, empty areas, etc. This was made all the worse by the fact that the game was really really good, and if they had convinced their publisher to give them 6 more months for content generation they could have had a staggeringly, legendarily good game.
Xenogears suffered a similar fate. At the time I was playing it, I felt that it was the best RPG ever made. I still feel that way, almost. It's half of the best RPG ever made. They go into excrutiating detail early on, creating a vast and rich world to really lose yourself in. The gameplay is great, they address all of the issues people talk about hating in standard RPG's... It's truly great. Then, about 50 hours in, they switch to "diarama - o - vision." A static picture appears on the screen, and text scrolls by. For about 10 hours. Occasionally this is broken up by largely unfinished gameplay sequences. I swear, this is the only game I've played on a console that had multiple save points within a single flow of text. It went from the greatest RPG ever made to the worst in the span of one cinematic. Eventually it regains its footing and actually finishes like it started, and the ending is great and satisfying despite some laughably bad voice acting. But by that point the experience is totally ruined.
As a less extreme example, the new KOTOR had an ending that just fell completely flat. It wasn't a content pull like in Legacy of Kane, it wasn't a stick-to-the-eye like Xenogears. It was just a rush job, with a much better and more satisfying ending being yanked for time, replaced by something half-arsed and roundly disappointing.
Unfinished games suck. They suck the enjoyment out of a title and they suck out the potential. In the example of Xenogears, it was pretty clear they just had bitten off something that was far, far too big for any reasonable budget of the time. Any publisher would have done the same, though any publisher should have pushed them to work on the important points of the plot first and shaped the degree of detail in the world that could be achieved realistically.
But Halo 2? We're talking about a guarenteed million seller here. Any publisher would have ponied up the extra 6 months for that, as a good reception for Halo 2 would guarentee another insane sales bonanza for Halo 3. The bloody thing made 200 million in presales. But Microsoft isn't any publisher: Microsoft is a publisher with a system to sell. If Microsoft is really dumping the Xbox for the Ybox this upcoming Christmas, they have a major problem on their hands if their in-house publisher releases a system-selling game for the wrong system. Hence, buggy, unbalanced, or even unfinished, they had to get it out the door. Which is a crying shame really, and will really hurt their Halo 3 sales. The moment they realized that Halo 2 was going to ship either late or unfinished, they should have switched the bungee people over to XBox 2 development right away, and had them work on porting what they had done and finishing what they hadn't done. It would have sold a lot more systems than Halo 3 is now capable of.
Don't be so impatient. No publisher or game development company wants to wait until absolutely every little detail is perfect before putting something in a box, but it should least bloody well be finished. Given the choice between a bad experience now and a perfect experience in 6 months, go with the perfect experience. With so many great games out anything less isn't worth your time.
5% of the computers may be Apples, but that doesn't mean 5% of a website's hits are going to come from Apple machines. For one, people with broadband surf more, so that skews results. For another, many apple surfers go to apple related sites, while many of these types of surveys use PCWorld.com and other available PC specific sites.
OS marketshare does not equal browser market share.
Opera masquerades it's User Agent as I.E. by default. It's actually a bit controversial in the Opera community, as while it reduces their numbers for a long time it increased the number of sites that didn't crap out.
It's also pretty easy to filter for if you realize that a Mozilla compatible I.E. with the word Opera attached to the end is not likely to have come from Redmond. But the numbers that these companies are throwing around sound about right for Opera's marketshare, so they're probably doing such filtering already.
I think he's suggesting that, as a people, they're just pretty Bulgar.
Slashcode has been behaving interestingly for a few years now.
Using only Plain Old Text you can insert any of the allowed
HTML tags.
me
- to show
you.If you will.
Note
how
these last two spaces happened without any formatting tags.
This kind of renders HTML format obsolete, code format redundant, and extrans just a variant of code. And all of those options are functionally available under the increasingly misnamed "Plain Old Text." Of course this was a big improvement over the old method, and is an improvement that should stay. But the option menu should go, as many people get stuck in HTML mode and don't know how to get out, and other don't realize that you can use the allowed HTML tags in plain old text mode.Showing that this is, indeed, Plain Old Text mode.
How much energy does it take nature to grow a potato using only sunlight and the available nutrients in soil and air?
An equally good question is how long does it take? If we were willing for a super efficient replicator to replicate itself over the course of a 9 month pregnancy and a 13 year gestation period, it might not take that much energy at a given time. But we're even more special-purposed than these machines would be, and we take a bloody long time and a lot of energy to self-replicate. If you wanted it faster than that, your energy requirements would go proportionally, multiplied by some scalar representing lost efficiencies.
In other words, you can have it now, you can have it right, you can have it cheaply. But you have to pick two.
You can get japanese H games in the US legally, though not at any retailers that I know of. There are cute little animal games where your cute little animal takes cute little turds, but not on anybody. There is a webgame version of Puyo Puyo where your special attack is throwing up on your opponent. There were a few games in the 80's where birds would poo on you, though those weren't very good games. There's the 7 sins, where the point is to try to have sex with as many people as possible. There is, of course a PS2 version.
There are a lot of bad games out there. But then, there are millions of games out there. By the same token, I don't have anything morally against making parents come in and buy games for their kids if they want them to have them. I've known far too many people in the retail sector who have told kids no, and been yelled at by the parent for stopping their kid from buying, say, Manslaughter. Inevitably, the parent then comes back the following day and freaks out on the poor underpaid associate for selling such filth to their kid.
I think the generation which preceeded ours has certain expectations about cartoons and videogames which ours does not. To them, more mature cartoons or videogames is like Jack Daniels flavored breastmilk. Or black leather studded diapers. In exactly the same way that movies were seen as kid's stuff at the turn of the century, so too is videogames the realm of kids. And therefore anything that gets released in a videogame is marketed at kids, and all of that stuff that you see in videogames is people trying to mess up your children.
It's a different perspective. While I don't disagree with the idea of restricting the sale of certain videogames to minors, I do disagree with the perspective.
Oh no, no patent. Amazon has enough bunk patents for now. I was just decrying the state of people shouting "privacy" at the top of their lungs. If amazon was reading my e-mails, that would be a privacy violation. If they're monitoring what pages I linger on... so what?
Yes, getting a patent on this is bogus. But these days the phrase "bogus patent" is redundant.
It's a lot larger than medical conferences. Have you walked up a busy street in New York? Did you see that hip looking guy talking into his cellphone about the album he happens to be holding up in his cellphone hand? Dimes to dollars there is nobody on the other end of the line. See those two people standing out front of that otherwise deserted italian resturant on a busy corner, eating and talking about how good the food is? Come back in 30 minutes, they'll probably still be there. Ever had a really cute, friendly girl walk up to you in a club and ask you to buy her a Michelob?
Live people placements are getting quite common. When I was between jobs during the bust I did a little work with one. I wasn't involved in the live placement part: I was explicitly corporate whoring. But they did have lots of jobs if you wanted to be hip and approachably pretty and get people to buy you a specific drink, or to shout into your phone on a busy street about how good such and such is, or to be huddled around some store and generate buzz.
Of course, in LA you have professional "friends"... People you hire to come to parties and pretend they know you, to seed the mood and really get everyone dancing. We don't have that much here. We do have paid people to mingle and dance in the clubs, though that's been going on for years.
There is actually one thing we do better than any animal. We throw. No other animal is capable of throwing anything as far or as accurately as we are, and that's not just from a big-brained standpoint.
It's almost like we're spear and rock-chucking machines.
There are other benefits to being bipedal. With two legs we can squeeze through smaller spaces than we could if we had four or eight. We're one of the only mammals that is exclusively bipedal. Even gorillas walk with their arms. We'd probably have the highest typing rate of all of the animals (if stupid PETA would allow me to continue my research). The physical feats that skateboarders do in half-pipes are comparable to the impressive physical feats other animals are capable of. Or, say, the russian balancing acts at Cirque de Solei.
Compared to other animals, the human physical form is incredibly flexible. Don't knock it just because the grass looks greener.
I hate to say it like this, but so? Amazon could have most of this information if they wanted by just running a credit report. Of course they don't want to pay for that, but it isn't exactly difficult to get one's information these days.
Listen, if having my age, sex, birthdate, anniversary, purchasing history, and websites I A9'd for on file allows them to push the crap down and let float to the top only those things that I want, more power to them. If they could have known for example last week exactly what I happened to be looking for, and popped it up on their home page when I visited, I'm sure I would have bought my castanetes from them. Their price is only 2 dollars more than the place I bought them from, and that was after hours of searching. If they're willing to remind me that my friend's birthday is coming up, I could probably use the reminder anyway.
A problem could arise if, say, there were something in there that were both incriminating and about to be used incorrectly in a court of law. But at some point we have to accept that this is not a public body and if it were that the courts wouldn't use circumstancial evidence lightly. But the risk of the government seraching my amazon records and deciding that I'm a criminal who is friends with other criminals is very low. I see a lot less risk there than, say, what they're trying to pull with the TSA.
If amazon can put something in front of me that I have to have every time I go to their site, more power to them. I want things that I want, and I'm kind of tired of having to wade through the junk to find it.