This actually makes sense. This brings PC gaming inline with the Xbox, which is something that Microsoft wants to do. It simplifies the interface from "Put in in, select your install folder, install the application, find the installed shortcut, Run the game" to "put it in." You can't argue with the elegance of that interface.
And yes, the first thing I'll do is create a library of virtual DVD's so that I don't have to keep looking for wherever it is that I'm keeping my games these days. But for those people who don't find physical media to be a pain (considering I'm swimming in a pile of physical media right now), this could be really good. Drop it in, and it works.
Of course, his brushing over issues of patching doesn't instill much confidence, but... eh. Too bad they don't include a re-writable section of the disk that the patch can, well, patch.
YOGURT Which means, if you hurry, there could be a princess in your future. Now, if you want to get back there before she marries Sleeping Beauty, there's and special can of fuel in your glove compartment. Good luck, boys.
BARF Bye, Yogurt.
LONE STARR And, Yogurt, thanks.
YOGURT You're welcome. And my the Schwartz be with you..... (starts to fade away).....oh...oh....what a world, what a world. (completely fades out)"
This movie will be better than the first two. Why? Because it will end. And with it the bastardization of my childish notions of purity and good will finally cease.
At least until the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie comes out. Or the next US Doctor Who. Superman. Jurassic Park IV. The Transformers live-action movie. Narnia. Did I mention Keanu as Sinbad?
Their vegetable and Sesame Top Ramen were excellent, far exceeding other dehydrated prepackaged square noodles. Too bad they stopped making either of them.
Anyway, my point was, who is going to rate all of these things? Epinions is great and all, but how much do you have to love your iPod or hate your Microsoft Turbo Mouse before you're going to go online and rate it? Do you think Shaws brand canned meatballs are going to garner any more reviews?
What keeps the other person involved in the register fraud from just blowing by the security guy too?
I can't tell you the number of times I've walked by the door man at Frys, or just flashed my recipt as I walked by, usually through impatience while they're with someone else. But if they're alone, hey, why hassle some guy with a lousy job?
But the people most likely to know that you can do that are the employees. What keeps them from telling their "man on the outside" to just keep walking?
A lot of it has to do with tone. If you take a somewhat original but firm stance which sounds intelligent enough to get somebody agreeing with you, you will be modded up. Look at the page a few days ago on the Harvard acceptance letter scandal. Lots of people took the very un-Slashdot opinion that the students who followed an unpublished URL deserved to get canned. They were modded up, because they spoke calmly and sounded intelligent.
They also masked a moral argument as an intellectual one, which seems to help these days.
Also, respond to the first thread. If you're not near the top of the page you're less likely to be read by a moderator who shares your opinion. Don't respond to the middle of a thread... only to the first or last comment in a string. People don't read the alternate middle comments.
And I may get modded down for saying this, but saying you may get modded down for saying something just doesn't draw the mod points like it used to.
Your post won't be moderated as "Offtopic" if you add "-OT" to your subject line. Feel free to try this with "Flamebait."
These days, Simpsons quotes need to be longer than 6 lines to really draw the freebies.
CmdrTaco and friends are a lot less likely to use the beatdown stick for talking about Slashdot. For some reason, talking about Slashdot draws mod points too. But don't draw too many, or you'll be Offtopic.
The first rule of Slashdot is that you don't quote Fight Club. The second rule of Slashdot is that you don't quote Fight Club.
Goatse and In Soviet Russia are so old that some people haven't even heard of them. Take advantage of this fact.
Recycle previous posts that have been moderated up.
Make humorous light of other poster's spellings, or use witty misspellings in your posts. I don't know why, but for the past few months the moderators seem to have B.S.'s in English.
Punctuate your remark with one unashamedly unmasked swearword. But use only one, otherwise it's just too much of this shit.
And, of course, if you can say something because you have actual information or insight to share, that's good too. But let's be real, this is Slashdot.
A certain moral fiber? This required a username and password. To access your personal information. Information they were going to send you in a few days anyway. This would be like finding out the ATM at the corner where the bank was moving into was already working, and going and making a withdrawl from your account.
Harvard got caught with a truly poorly secured computing environment, and is taking it out on their applicants. F*&k Harvard. Go with a vendor who knows that a "go live date" doesn't mean you post your site a month in advance and hope nobody finds it.
The longer I live here, the more I respect MIT and the less I respect Harvard.
I know we're all trying to forget the pain, but Windows ME was 5 years ago.
XP is far more stable than Win98. But it still crashes too frequently for my tastes. Generally speaking WinME was crashing on me about once a day, and XP crashes on me about once every two weeks, frequently related to something that was done or installed rather than general operating procedures.
There are also the times when I come back to the machine which I swear had been running something, but now is happily sitting with no running applications except for those in my startup items folder... very suspicious...
Either way it still dies, and still does so at the most inappropriate times. It also automatically reboots, as another poster pointed out, making it particularly difficult to figure out what just went wrong.
It's far more stable than 95, but that's not saying mutch. Demand better.
Just so that people know, the bear idea is many years old, and was from Japan
here is a practical application of it, note the date on the article. Here is another take. Note this was out in the field in 2000.
There was also a great telepresence robot bear pair, whereby moving one robot bear would move the resultant other robot bear at the other end of the phone line, but I can't seem to find a link to it.
Because online can eat up to 1/3rd of a development budget? And if a gamer isn't going to go online with a game, why would they get 2/3rds of a game?
Development resources are allocated on a zero-sum basis. For one feature to make it in, another has to be cut.
It really can be that big of a burden on developers, depending on the engine and required additional art and programming resources, not to mention the endless bug fixes and additional resources reqired for the servers and maintenence, bandwidth, server programming, etc, etc, etc.
The point was that while online can be a great feature for a small subset of players, the lack of online capability is not something that is going to stop developers from supporting a system.
I'm not convinced online capabilities crippled the GameCube. For one, the PS2 didn't have online capabilities when it shipped, and it had tons of dev support.
As a developer, online is a huge cost and a huge potential liability. It requires basically an entire engine re-write, and an additional month of debugging. It really is a pain. Plus so few people actually go online with their games that it hardly seems worth it for all but big-budget titles.
If anything, the PS2 got dev support because it was the obvious platform most likely to get the highest installed userbase, and with Microsoft's backing and a known development environment the Xbox became a very strong potential second. They also bought some great exclusives. Nintendo, on the other hand, didn't bring anything new to the table. Sure, it's Nintendo, but there was no real reason to think they had a shot at #1 this time.
Not that I'm not happy with my GameCube, mind you. Metroid Prime was brilliant, and that alone was worth every penny.
Very true. From the perspective of someone very close to what is going on, all of these games look different and have as different overtones as Final Fantasy 3 did from Mystic Quest. But to someone on the outside, you have an endless stream of Final Fantasy games. And the ones that aren't officially Final Fantasy titled are as close as one could possibly be in artistic style and gameplay. To someone on the outside, they're indiscernable.
Kingdom Hearts was a great game, and I give Square total credit for making that. But again, it was a tremendously low-risk game in a genre that Square is known for. How could you go wrong with full rein over the Magic Kingdom?
I don't think Square is getting a backlash because they're too successful. I think Square is disappointing people because what they were was revolutionary, something people got behind, and what they have become is a factory. Square used to be in the position that Blizzard is in today: they released games "when they were done," every release was a huge event that sold ridiculously well, every one was a gem. They tried new things and they did them amazingly well. Now imagine Blizzard starts selling Warcraft 4,5, and 6 in the span of 4 years. Heck, they release a Warcraft 4 2. They do a Warcraft 3 2 movie. Some of these are good, but none achieve the brilliance that Blizzard is known for. Of course there will be "backlash," because we know they are better than that. We know they still have creative people at their company that can create amazing original experiences, and we're trying to encourage them to branch out and do exactly that.
Let Final Fantasy Die. You can summon Phoenix on it in 5 years.
The Windows-based infrastructure is designed to allow Wells Fargo to update and add services such as new languages and envelope-free deposits to its entire network remotely.
Umm... Wouldn't envelope-free deposits require an on-site hardware shift anyway? That is, unless Windows Embedded now runs rapid prototype machinery.
It sounds like you have a pseudo permacrunch schedule. I'd look into the things that people do to deal with harsh crunch times. Such as...
Use any excuse to get up and walk around. Walk around the office to talk to people F2F instead of IMing them. Walk to the bathroom. Walk up any stairs that may be around. Any excuse to move is a good one. Offer to help new people move their desks, etc.
If practical, bike to work. If necessary, park a few blocks away and bike in. I can't emphasize physical activity enough.
Assume that during those 4 days, you do nothing but work. Get enough sleep, take the time to cook all of your meals, and work. That's all you have time to do, really, before you have to start eating fast food and being sleep deprived. Any movies will have to wait for the weekend.
On your days off, exercise a lot. Devote one of your days to Dance Dance Revolution, Rock Climbing, Frisbee golf, swimming with your kids, or whatever, but you have to require yourself to spend the day being active, preferably outside, preferably with the people you care about.
Get sunlight. This can be the hardest thing if you work in the middle of an office building, come in before the sun comes up and leave after it goes down, but adequate lighting has a tremendous influence over mood. Add more lights to your desk and work area, and take your lunches outside under the sun. Open all of your curtains at work and at home.
Take up different projects or responsibilities at work. If you work on the install routine for banking software, help the office setup an intramural softball league. If you are engineering a new print head for a new type of hybrid lazer / inkjet printer, help the marketing people write promo material. This will help stave off burnout, and let you go through the necessary periods of dicking off without guilt. Studies have shown that a workforce produces the most in total if it is offtask "wasting time" for roughly 10% of their worktime. If you're working 12 hours a day, that's about an hour and fifteen minutes. And because you're working extra long, you will need extra time off of your primary task.
Move closer to work. If you can't do that, talk to your boss about telecommuting 2 days of the week. Invest some time getting to know the roadways between your home and work really well, and risk a few speeding tickets. I managed to shave 2-hours off of a 4-hour commute just by learning which highways and roadways were abandoned when, and which stretches the cops wouldn't bat an eye about speeding until you were over 150. I also avoided 6 dollars in tolls.
Find things to do in the car. Create a life diary on tape for future generations. Get lots of audio books from your local library. Carpool with interesting people. Learn to speak a foriegn language. The more intellectually engaged you can be in the car, the less the footprint of such a long commute will be.
In defense of AOL-Time Warner, If I were a traditional media bigwig and I had heard about upstart technology companies making billions (in investor dollars), an industry that was going to take over and destroy the traditional media, and I had no experience or knowledge of what they were talking about, I'd get a little scared and do something stupid too. AOL, on the other hand, probably knew they were lucking out and cashed the heck in.
Now, it can certainly be argued that if someone is on the board of directors of a company that is about to approve such a foolish thing they're getting paid well to know about the technology etc. But few executives actually go down to the floor of their companies anymore, and more and more are losing the pulse of what is going on. They just "don't have time" to get a clue.
CEO payoffs are rediculous. Carly was got roughly 3 million in salary last year. While in my mind a reasonable company would put this closer to 400k or less, 3 million is too high but not insane. But a 20 million payoff plus 20 million in additional benefits for running a company into the ground? That's 8 million dollars per year she was there. Giving a year's salary to help someone have time to find another job seems reasonable and just, but giving them 10 years of an already far-too-high salary for getting fired?
All of this stands in stark contrast to what they're telling the people on the front lines. Carly's 3 million dollar salary would pay for 30 great engineers. Her giant golden parachute stands in direct contrast to the treatment of the workers HP laid off. How many of them got 10 years worth of salary? Or legal, financial, career counseling, a secratary, health insurance, a 200,000k dollar per year pension (after 5 years of service)? Or even got to keep their computer?
Of course, if it was an HP computer it might not be worth keeping. But the point is that many CEO's have lost the ability to think about troop morale in any context, and certainly in the context of getting laid off. It's hard for people to hear that we need to cut corners from a person whose income is 95% disposable.
It might be worth it for a big company to put out giant per year salaries to lure great CEO's to the top slot. But so far that strategy seems to have failed miserably.
It's funny, but having grown up in the 80's and having matured into computing in the 90's, by then HP had already started to fade. Their computers were notoriously crash-prone, their inkjet printers were slow, and their calculators seemed badly out of date compared to the very user-friendly TI stuff (I know about the power of the HP, no need for a flame war). And since then they've only gotten worse. My entire impression of HP, for my entire life, has been negative.
It's really kind of heartening to think back to what HP had done, and why so many companies and people still foolishly hold it in high regard. They really were a tech powerhouse in the 70's and early 80's, before they started rebranding iPods with the slogan "Invent." People gave HP a break for a very long time because they had built up a degree of cred, cred which they have been shamelessly squandering for many years.
But people still care about them. It's kind of heartening that way. Like thinking about your Grandfather when he was young, energetic, and happy, rather than the grumpy, senile jerk he has become.
You can repeat formulas. Just look at "The Hero with a Thousand Faces." It's an excellent book on the underlying structure of basically every hero-driven book ever made.
The problem is not that they're making sequals. Final Fantasy III was pretty close overall in spirit, plot, and characters to Final Fantasy II (US naming conventions). But what it had was years of time inbetween for people to get excited. They're making nothing but sequals now, and they're making them far too frequently. Every few years I can take a week to beat a Final Fantasy game, but if one comes out every month... what's the point? What's the "event?" On the one hand, like how Disney moved from a 3-year development cycle to a 2-year one, your quality will suffer because you're not taking enough time to do things right. On the other hand, your audience hasn't had enough time to really get worked into a frenzy about another one.
Every game developer has a profit-driven business model in a creative enterprise involving risk. The problem with Square as I see it is that after The Spirits Within, they became cripplingly risk-averse. Before that they did Einhander, Brave Fencer Musashi, Bushido Blade, Ehrgeiz, Parasite Eve, Racing Lagoon, Tobal, and Xenogears. It made Action games, Racing games, Fighting games, Survival Horror... And every time they branched out into a new area they made a great game which helped redefine that genre. Since FFTSW, they've made nothing but RPG's, Sequals, and sequals to RPG's. The culture of creativity has really suffered from those golden days. They weren't releasing a Final Fantasy X2.5 every few weeks because they were busy making other types of games. Now they're so afraid of straying from known resources that they dillute their one property. Final Fantasy This - Final Fantasy That. It's sad to see, coming from the group that gave us some of the best moments and games on the Playstation, and whom some of us still remember fondly for Rad Racer and Thexder.
BTW, it looks like Square is publishing Everquest II in Japan. Somehow that sounds fitting.
Slashdot Mirror
This actually makes sense. This brings PC gaming inline with the Xbox, which is something that Microsoft wants to do. It simplifies the interface from "Put in in, select your install folder, install the application, find the installed shortcut, Run the game" to "put it in." You can't argue with the elegance of that interface.
And yes, the first thing I'll do is create a library of virtual DVD's so that I don't have to keep looking for wherever it is that I'm keeping my games these days. But for those people who don't find physical media to be a pain (considering I'm swimming in a pile of physical media right now), this could be really good. Drop it in, and it works.
Of course, his brushing over issues of patching doesn't instill much confidence, but... eh. Too bad they don't include a re-writable section of the disk that the patch can, well, patch.
Is that some form of crappy encryption for images?
"Which means....
.....oh...oh....what a world, what a world. (completely fades out)"
YOGURT Which means, if you hurry, there could be a princess in your future. Now, if you want to get back there before she marries Sleeping Beauty, there's and special can of fuel in your glove compartment. Good luck, boys.
BARF Bye, Yogurt.
LONE STARR And, Yogurt, thanks.
YOGURT You're welcome. And my the Schwartz be with you..... (starts to fade away)
This movie will be better than the first two. Why? Because it will end. And with it the bastardization of my childish notions of purity and good will finally cease.
At least until the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie comes out. Or the next US Doctor Who. Superman. Jurassic Park IV. The Transformers live-action movie. Narnia. Did I mention Keanu as Sinbad?
My poor, poor notions of purity and good...
I'm personally amazed that you can film a child watching his father be beheaded, walk over, pick it up, and still get a G rating.
Bambi was bad an all, but at least she didn't crawl inside of her mother for warmpth.
Their vegetable and Sesame Top Ramen were excellent, far exceeding other dehydrated prepackaged square noodles. Too bad they stopped making either of them.
Anyway, my point was, who is going to rate all of these things? Epinions is great and all, but how much do you have to love your iPod or hate your Microsoft Turbo Mouse before you're going to go online and rate it? Do you think Shaws brand canned meatballs are going to garner any more reviews?
What keeps the other person involved in the register fraud from just blowing by the security guy too?
I can't tell you the number of times I've walked by the door man at Frys, or just flashed my recipt as I walked by, usually through impatience while they're with someone else. But if they're alone, hey, why hassle some guy with a lousy job?
But the people most likely to know that you can do that are the employees. What keeps them from telling their "man on the outside" to just keep walking?
A lot of it has to do with tone. If you take a somewhat original but firm stance which sounds intelligent enough to get somebody agreeing with you, you will be modded up. Look at the page a few days ago on the Harvard acceptance letter scandal. Lots of people took the very un-Slashdot opinion that the students who followed an unpublished URL deserved to get canned. They were modded up, because they spoke calmly and sounded intelligent.
They also masked a moral argument as an intellectual one, which seems to help these days.
Also, respond to the first thread. If you're not near the top of the page you're less likely to be read by a moderator who shares your opinion. Don't respond to the middle of a thread... only to the first or last comment in a string. People don't read the alternate middle comments.
And I may get modded down for saying this, but saying you may get modded down for saying something just doesn't draw the mod points like it used to.
Your post won't be moderated as "Offtopic" if you add "-OT" to your subject line. Feel free to try this with "Flamebait."
These days, Simpsons quotes need to be longer than 6 lines to really draw the freebies.
CmdrTaco and friends are a lot less likely to use the beatdown stick for talking about Slashdot. For some reason, talking about Slashdot draws mod points too. But don't draw too many, or you'll be Offtopic.
The first rule of Slashdot is that you don't quote Fight Club.
The second rule of Slashdot is that you don't quote Fight Club.
Goatse and In Soviet Russia are so old that some people haven't even heard of them. Take advantage of this fact.
Recycle previous posts that have been moderated up.
Make humorous light of other poster's spellings, or use witty misspellings in your posts. I don't know why, but for the past few months the moderators seem to have B.S.'s in English.
Punctuate your remark with one unashamedly unmasked swearword. But use only one, otherwise it's just too much of this shit.
And, of course, if you can say something because you have actual information or insight to share, that's good too. But let's be real, this is Slashdot.
Did I mention that Slashdot bashing works too?
damn.
I guess I've got to go root for Yale.
A certain moral fiber? This required a username and password. To access your personal information. Information they were going to send you in a few days anyway. This would be like finding out the ATM at the corner where the bank was moving into was already working, and going and making a withdrawl from your account.
Harvard got caught with a truly poorly secured computing environment, and is taking it out on their applicants. F*&k Harvard. Go with a vendor who knows that a "go live date" doesn't mean you post your site a month in advance and hope nobody finds it.
The longer I live here, the more I respect MIT and the less I respect Harvard.
"'I guess they just don't have productive tools like we have,' he went on to suggest."
That's not a nice way to refer to your employees.
Exactly. And how else would you find choke points in your house when you get swarmed by the undead?
I like to keep my respawn in the bathroom. That way I have an excuse to spawn camp.
I know we're all trying to forget the pain, but Windows ME was 5 years ago.
XP is far more stable than Win98. But it still crashes too frequently for my tastes. Generally speaking WinME was crashing on me about once a day, and XP crashes on me about once every two weeks, frequently related to something that was done or installed rather than general operating procedures.
There are also the times when I come back to the machine which I swear had been running something, but now is happily sitting with no running applications except for those in my startup items folder... very suspicious...
Either way it still dies, and still does so at the most inappropriate times. It also automatically reboots, as another poster pointed out, making it particularly difficult to figure out what just went wrong.
It's far more stable than 95, but that's not saying mutch. Demand better.
Just so that people know, the bear idea is many years old, and was from Japan
here is a practical application of it, note the date on the article. Here is another take. Note this was out in the field in 2000.
There was also a great telepresence robot bear pair, whereby moving one robot bear would move the resultant other robot bear at the other end of the phone line, but I can't seem to find a link to it.
Because online can eat up to 1/3rd of a development budget? And if a gamer isn't going to go online with a game, why would they get 2/3rds of a game?
Development resources are allocated on a zero-sum basis. For one feature to make it in, another has to be cut.
It really can be that big of a burden on developers, depending on the engine and required additional art and programming resources, not to mention the endless bug fixes and additional resources reqired for the servers and maintenence, bandwidth, server programming, etc, etc, etc.
The point was that while online can be a great feature for a small subset of players, the lack of online capability is not something that is going to stop developers from supporting a system.
I'm not convinced online capabilities crippled the GameCube. For one, the PS2 didn't have online capabilities when it shipped, and it had tons of dev support.
As a developer, online is a huge cost and a huge potential liability. It requires basically an entire engine re-write, and an additional month of debugging. It really is a pain. Plus so few people actually go online with their games that it hardly seems worth it for all but big-budget titles.
If anything, the PS2 got dev support because it was the obvious platform most likely to get the highest installed userbase, and with Microsoft's backing and a known development environment the Xbox became a very strong potential second. They also bought some great exclusives. Nintendo, on the other hand, didn't bring anything new to the table. Sure, it's Nintendo, but there was no real reason to think they had a shot at #1 this time.
Not that I'm not happy with my GameCube, mind you. Metroid Prime was brilliant, and that alone was worth every penny.
Very true. From the perspective of someone very close to what is going on, all of these games look different and have as different overtones as Final Fantasy 3 did from Mystic Quest. But to someone on the outside, you have an endless stream of Final Fantasy games. And the ones that aren't officially Final Fantasy titled are as close as one could possibly be in artistic style and gameplay. To someone on the outside, they're indiscernable.
Kingdom Hearts was a great game, and I give Square total credit for making that. But again, it was a tremendously low-risk game in a genre that Square is known for. How could you go wrong with full rein over the Magic Kingdom?
I don't think Square is getting a backlash because they're too successful. I think Square is disappointing people because what they were was revolutionary, something people got behind, and what they have become is a factory. Square used to be in the position that Blizzard is in today: they released games "when they were done," every release was a huge event that sold ridiculously well, every one was a gem. They tried new things and they did them amazingly well. Now imagine Blizzard starts selling Warcraft 4,5, and 6 in the span of 4 years. Heck, they release a Warcraft 4 2. They do a Warcraft 3 2 movie. Some of these are good, but none achieve the brilliance that Blizzard is known for. Of course there will be "backlash," because we know they are better than that. We know they still have creative people at their company that can create amazing original experiences, and we're trying to encourage them to branch out and do exactly that.
Let Final Fantasy Die. You can summon Phoenix on it in 5 years.
The Windows-based infrastructure is designed to allow Wells Fargo to update and add services such as new languages and envelope-free deposits to its entire network remotely.
Umm... Wouldn't envelope-free deposits require an on-site hardware shift anyway? That is, unless Windows Embedded now runs rapid prototype machinery.
Sounds like they're running WtFXML.
It sounds like you have a pseudo permacrunch schedule. I'd look into the things that people do to deal with harsh crunch times. Such as...
Use any excuse to get up and walk around. Walk around the office to talk to people F2F instead of IMing them. Walk to the bathroom. Walk up any stairs that may be around. Any excuse to move is a good one. Offer to help new people move their desks, etc.
If practical, bike to work. If necessary, park a few blocks away and bike in. I can't emphasize physical activity enough.
Assume that during those 4 days, you do nothing but work. Get enough sleep, take the time to cook all of your meals, and work. That's all you have time to do, really, before you have to start eating fast food and being sleep deprived. Any movies will have to wait for the weekend.
On your days off, exercise a lot. Devote one of your days to Dance Dance Revolution, Rock Climbing, Frisbee golf, swimming with your kids, or whatever, but you have to require yourself to spend the day being active, preferably outside, preferably with the people you care about.
Get sunlight. This can be the hardest thing if you work in the middle of an office building, come in before the sun comes up and leave after it goes down, but adequate lighting has a tremendous influence over mood. Add more lights to your desk and work area, and take your lunches outside under the sun. Open all of your curtains at work and at home.
Take up different projects or responsibilities at work. If you work on the install routine for banking software, help the office setup an intramural softball league. If you are engineering a new print head for a new type of hybrid lazer / inkjet printer, help the marketing people write promo material. This will help stave off burnout, and let you go through the necessary periods of dicking off without guilt. Studies have shown that a workforce produces the most in total if it is offtask "wasting time" for roughly 10% of their worktime. If you're working 12 hours a day, that's about an hour and fifteen minutes. And because you're working extra long, you will need extra time off of your primary task.
Move closer to work. If you can't do that, talk to your boss about telecommuting 2 days of the week. Invest some time getting to know the roadways between your home and work really well, and risk a few speeding tickets. I managed to shave 2-hours off of a 4-hour commute just by learning which highways and roadways were abandoned when, and which stretches the cops wouldn't bat an eye about speeding until you were over 150. I also avoided 6 dollars in tolls.
Find things to do in the car. Create a life diary on tape for future generations. Get lots of audio books from your local library. Carpool with interesting people. Learn to speak a foriegn language. The more intellectually engaged you can be in the car, the less the footprint of such a long commute will be.
Good luck!
In defense of AOL-Time Warner, If I were a traditional media bigwig and I had heard about upstart technology companies making billions (in investor dollars), an industry that was going to take over and destroy the traditional media, and I had no experience or knowledge of what they were talking about, I'd get a little scared and do something stupid too. AOL, on the other hand, probably knew they were lucking out and cashed the heck in.
Now, it can certainly be argued that if someone is on the board of directors of a company that is about to approve such a foolish thing they're getting paid well to know about the technology etc. But few executives actually go down to the floor of their companies anymore, and more and more are losing the pulse of what is going on. They just "don't have time" to get a clue.
CEO payoffs are rediculous. Carly was got roughly 3 million in salary last year. While in my mind a reasonable company would put this closer to 400k or less, 3 million is too high but not insane. But a 20 million payoff plus 20 million in additional benefits for running a company into the ground? That's 8 million dollars per year she was there. Giving a year's salary to help someone have time to find another job seems reasonable and just, but giving them 10 years of an already far-too-high salary for getting fired?
All of this stands in stark contrast to what they're telling the people on the front lines. Carly's 3 million dollar salary would pay for 30 great engineers. Her giant golden parachute stands in direct contrast to the treatment of the workers HP laid off. How many of them got 10 years worth of salary? Or legal, financial, career counseling, a secratary, health insurance, a 200,000k dollar per year pension (after 5 years of service)? Or even got to keep their computer?
Of course, if it was an HP computer it might not be worth keeping. But the point is that many CEO's have lost the ability to think about troop morale in any context, and certainly in the context of getting laid off. It's hard for people to hear that we need to cut corners from a person whose income is 95% disposable.
It might be worth it for a big company to put out giant per year salaries to lure great CEO's to the top slot. But so far that strategy seems to have failed miserably.
It's funny, but having grown up in the 80's and having matured into computing in the 90's, by then HP had already started to fade. Their computers were notoriously crash-prone, their inkjet printers were slow, and their calculators seemed badly out of date compared to the very user-friendly TI stuff (I know about the power of the HP, no need for a flame war). And since then they've only gotten worse. My entire impression of HP, for my entire life, has been negative.
It's really kind of heartening to think back to what HP had done, and why so many companies and people still foolishly hold it in high regard. They really were a tech powerhouse in the 70's and early 80's, before they started rebranding iPods with the slogan "Invent." People gave HP a break for a very long time because they had built up a degree of cred, cred which they have been shamelessly squandering for many years.
But people still care about them. It's kind of heartening that way. Like thinking about your Grandfather when he was young, energetic, and happy, rather than the grumpy, senile jerk he has become.
You can repeat formulas. Just look at "The Hero with a Thousand Faces." It's an excellent book on the underlying structure of basically every hero-driven book ever made.
The problem is not that they're making sequals. Final Fantasy III was pretty close overall in spirit, plot, and characters to Final Fantasy II (US naming conventions). But what it had was years of time inbetween for people to get excited. They're making nothing but sequals now, and they're making them far too frequently. Every few years I can take a week to beat a Final Fantasy game, but if one comes out every month... what's the point? What's the "event?" On the one hand, like how Disney moved from a 3-year development cycle to a 2-year one, your quality will suffer because you're not taking enough time to do things right. On the other hand, your audience hasn't had enough time to really get worked into a frenzy about another one.
Every game developer has a profit-driven business model in a creative enterprise involving risk. The problem with Square as I see it is that after The Spirits Within, they became cripplingly risk-averse. Before that they did Einhander, Brave Fencer Musashi, Bushido Blade, Ehrgeiz, Parasite Eve, Racing Lagoon, Tobal, and Xenogears. It made Action games, Racing games, Fighting games, Survival Horror... And every time they branched out into a new area they made a great game which helped redefine that genre. Since FFTSW, they've made nothing but RPG's, Sequals, and sequals to RPG's. The culture of creativity has really suffered from those golden days. They weren't releasing a Final Fantasy X2.5 every few weeks because they were busy making other types of games. Now they're so afraid of straying from known resources that they dillute their one property. Final Fantasy This - Final Fantasy That. It's sad to see, coming from the group that gave us some of the best moments and games on the Playstation, and whom some of us still remember fondly for Rad Racer and Thexder.
BTW, it looks like Square is publishing Everquest II in Japan. Somehow that sounds fitting.
From the article:
McBride says that while his staff is small in numbers, it's high on engineering expertise.
Apparently his staff is high on something.
http://www.ccs.lanl.gov/ccs5/apps/epid.shtmlp ://episims.lanl.gov/
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FCC Member Copps In Favor of Municipal WiFi
"So he cops in?"
"No Copps is out."
"He cops out of what?"
"Wi"
"Because I'm asking you."
"Wi"
"Because I want to know!"
"WI!"