Long ago, the Coca-Cola management decided that their main competitor wasn't Pepsi or RC or even lemonade. They realized their main competitor was water! So they set out to market the product as a substitute for water. And it's worked very well.
Of course, these days both Coke and Pepsi own bottled water operations - which are much more profitable on a per unit basis than the soda pop they also sell.
Still, it's interesting how a huge company can change a society when it sets its collective, corporate mind to the task.
One of the best multiplayer games ever was M.U.L.E., one of the many innovative games produced by the old Electronic Arts (back when they promoted programmers and game designers like rock stars).
Another good one, as many have mentioned, was the original Gauntlet. Along the same lines, the Baldur's Gate games for the PS2 were pretty good.
I left Windows because I was tired of always having to fix something or other every other weekend. Either my girlfriend's computer would have a problem or mine would. I didn't want to fix computers all weekend - I wanted to have a life! So I ditched Windows and tried out this new thing called Linux that was supposed to be super-stable, no crashes, etc.
That worked OK, but all of a sudden buying new hardware became a monumental task. Will it work with Linux, or is it Windows-only? What hoops do I have to jump through? And when something *did* occasionally go wrong, it didn't usually mean spending a weekend fixing it. Usually, it meant spending a week fixing it.
That's why, when Mac OS X became stable (version 10.1), I took the plunge and bought a Mac. I haven't spent time worrying about or tinkering with my computer or my wife's computer since. Everything just works. I have my life back.
It's always startling when I see the supposedly huge numbers trotted out by industry, then I think about the size of the total population, and I think...pfui! Like platinum records in the US represent sales of 1 million albums. Big deal - 1/300th of the U.S. population bought your album! Whoopee! *Everyone* loves you, don't they?
Or these numbers for Microsoft. So the worldwide operating system market is 300 million copies? Holy crap! Given work computers and all, we're talking about only 200 million people who use computers in the whole world!
Besides, the planet does have 6 billion people, so again, we have a small, niche market. And all the noise that's made over it!
It just always amazes me when I see these numbers and realize what a tiny proportion of the population is buying a given shiny-object-of-the-month, yet it's all over the news as if every person everywhere on the earth were buying it.
Letting your kid outside to play with his friends is un-workable in dangerous, urban environments. I'd much rather my kid get the same kind of exploratory feelings I got from playing in the woods from playing Zelda, versus having him venture, unsupervised, into the dirty, polluted, woody ravines by our home in east Oakland, which are overrun with crack users, and prostitutes.
I mean no criticism of you and yours with the following; it's just something I thought should be said:
In a rational society, either the people's law enforcement system would take care of the problem of crack users, prostitutes, and polluteres ruining woody ravines near their homes, or the people would be empowered to take care of the problem themselves using whatever force is necessary.
It's irrational to create a society wherein good people hide behind walls while the criminals roam free.
Please, folks, wherever you live, work toward getting people who understand this into positions of power.
It's as if we're in 1986 again and everybody's still saying the NES is a fad and the big new game machine is going to be the Atari XEGS.
I'm sorry to be a pedant, but . . .
When Nintendo was introducing the NES to the North American market, everyone in the media was saying that *videogames* were a fad that had already run its course (as evidenced by the video game market crash of 1983). No one thought the Atari XEGS (or the 7800 for that matter) would be "the big new game machine." They thought there would never *be* another big game machine from *any* manufacturer. (Which just makes Nintendo's triumph all the more impressive.)
A better analogy might be drawn by going forward a few years to the North American introduction of the NEC Turbografx-16, the Nintendo Super NES, and the Sega Genesis. Mainstream gamers and the press thought the SNES would maintain Nintendo's dominance of the industry. The "knowledgeable" commentators were sure the Turbografx would win out, given the huge and excellent software library for the system in Japan. No one thought crappy little Sega, fresh from the beating their 'losers-only' Master System had taken in the market-place, would have the huge impact they did.
See, all you skeptics! It's 2006 and we *are* living in the future!
Who cares if we aren't flying to work in our personal hover cars/jet packs, haven't cured the common cold, haven't eradicated hunger, or, heck, solved any of life's huge questions, when we have all the advertising promised us in films such as Blade Runner and Minority Report?
Seriously, though, I'm so fscking sick of seeing all those video screens running ads in the grocery store every week. Food Network at the checkout counter, adapalooza back by the dairy products, and now CBS in the deli/produce section. I spend about $120/week at that store, and their only thought is how they can make my time in their store even more unpleasant. Thanks a lot, guys.
I wish we still had independent grocery stores where I live...
You're right, Sturegeon's law holds true for video games. But I've been discovering that there's more to it than that.
Over the winter, I went back through all my collected console games (Atari 2600/5200/7800, ColecoVision, Intellivision, NES, TG-16, SNES, Genesis, Jaguar, N64, Atari 800, Apple ][, Amiga) plus a lot of arcade games. And, unlike some, I've also kept up with modern stuff through the Playstation 2.
What I've found is that, for me, the games that hold up the best are the ones that are simple to use but complex behind the scenes. That is, games like the Atari 2600 Adventure cartridge, where you simply move around a multi-screen world, avoid being eaten by the three dragons, and move various game pieces into the correct locations in order to win. That game would be pretty boring, except that there are many different game pieces (each with a different use in the game world), and the number of ways they can be laid out around the game world is pretty huge. That keeps the game fresh, while the simple rules and game controls keeps it from becoming a job to learn to use it each time I come back to it.
I find that so many games are either too complex for non-obessive play, or are of the "play it through once and toss it" variety, or both. And that's just the *good* games. There are of course the other 80% of games that are absolute crap and not worth even a minute of my time, or that are simply an inferior implementation of a good idea some other game designer had.
So, I find myself playing the classic, relatively simple games like Pac-Man, Galaga, Star Raiders, and King of Fighters routinely, because I can have a quick bit of fun with them and then go on with my life, while I play the more in-depth games like Adventure, Military Madness (oh, for a randomized version of that!), and Wizard's Crown less frequently but for sustained periods each time, when I really want to get into a game and have the time to do so.
But there's still one huge problem with *all* games - they're horribly repetitive. That's what killed my interest in The Sims, as well as all the online games. But it's also what keeps me from playing everything from Pac-Man to Civilization more than once in a while. After a while, all games start to feel like work. You take the same actions over and over and over and over. In some games, you get power ups of one sort or another, but they're always rendered useless because your opponents get equally more powerful, leaving you effectively running to remain in place. Doesn't that sound more like work than fun?
Even so, I'd settle for another game as non-static as Adventure if I could find it. So if anyone can point out large-world, randomized games that have come out in the last five years, I'd appreciate it. I simply haven't found a single one, but it'd be nice to have one with modern graphics and game play.
In a stunning show of shamelessness in the face of a total lack of innovation, Intel today unveiled to a gaggle of gullible corporate lackeys and ass-kissing note-takers their newest product: an empty plastic box. An Intel spokesperson said they hope that some day, someone will build a computer to put in the box. At that point, they hope to load it down with the deeply flawed and customer-hostile Microsoft Windows operating system, thereby releasing misery from the confines of dens and offices and into family rooms worldwide.
Governments do not lower taxes once they have established them.
You've got to be kidding. The U.S. federal government lowered personal and/or corporate taxes several times over the last four years, congress is always lowering taxes for one industry or another (they're known as "loopholes"), and Reagan lowered taxes considerably in his first term. And that's just off the top of my head.
I was a conservative Republican in the 80s. Now I don't recognize the Republican party at all. The Democrats are actually more conservative than the Republicans!
I don't understand how so many of the people lined up behind the GWB administration can call themselves conservatives and get away with it.
Come to think of it, it's probably the same way that Bill Clinton, the New York Times, or CBS could be called liberal . ..
I just don't understand those political labels any more. Or maybe they've just lost all meaning. Perhaps like Humpty Dumpty, our 'leaders' give words whatever meaning they want them to have and it's up to us to figure it all out.
After reading this i thought the author is very spoiled. Sorry to say. Many countries (including mine) suffer from high unemployment rates.
If this company hired the staff they obviously need to get the job done right and on time, then there would be less unemployed people AND those who are working would have better lives. Everyone wins.
Besides which, if you follow your logic, eventually we'll all be working for just barely enough money to feed ourselves enough food to get the energy to go to work each day. Sure, we'll be living under bridges and running around in rags, but hey, it's better than starving!
Get some pride, man. Each human being is worthy of a better life than that, but no one is going to give it to us. We have to insist on it. That's the way it's always been, and that's the way it will always be.
Voter registration rolls are handled by the local precinct officials.
Yes, but local precinct officials are subordinate to the state election officials, though, as pointed out in this article, for example: 'In the months leading up to the November 2000 presidential election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, in coordination with Governor Jeb Bush, ordered local election supervisors to purge 57,700 voters from the registries, supposedly ex-cons not allowed to vote in Florida. At least 90.2 percent of those on this "scrub" list, targeted to lose their civil rights, are innocent.'
It wasn't the local officials who decided to make the purge; it was Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush, both Republicans and both working for the G.W. Bush campaign.
2x2 matrices are sometimes useful, but more often they just encourage us to limit the number of possibilities we consider. We're so prone to thinking in terms of binary choices anyway that what we need is something to help us see the multitude of possibilities rather than something that narrows the scope.
Slashdot Mirror
Long ago, the Coca-Cola management decided that their main competitor wasn't Pepsi or RC or even lemonade. They realized their main competitor was water! So they set out to market the product as a substitute for water. And it's worked very well.
Of course, these days both Coke and Pepsi own bottled water operations - which are much more profitable on a per unit basis than the soda pop they also sell.
Still, it's interesting how a huge company can change a society when it sets its collective, corporate mind to the task.
Okay, maybe it was a weak joke, but "Troll"?!? Didn't anyone read the next story down on the front page? "Republican Aide Attempts to Hire Hackers"??
and you'll solve the problem.
I'm still waiting for the computer with one button: "Do What I Mean"
Everything else is an abject design failure.
One of the best multiplayer games ever was M.U.L.E., one of the many innovative games produced by the old Electronic Arts (back when they promoted programmers and game designers like rock stars).
Another good one, as many have mentioned, was the original Gauntlet. Along the same lines, the Baldur's Gate games for the PS2 were pretty good.
Sounds like somebody's trying to set his previous employer up the bomb.
What makes you think I only have *a* wife and *a* girlfriend?
No, I was describing a progression that took place over many years. I ran Linux and/or *BSD from approximately 1997 to 2002.
The girlfriend is now my wife.
I left Windows because I was tired of always having to fix something or other every other weekend. Either my girlfriend's computer would have a problem or mine would. I didn't want to fix computers all weekend - I wanted to have a life! So I ditched Windows and tried out this new thing called Linux that was supposed to be super-stable, no crashes, etc.
That worked OK, but all of a sudden buying new hardware became a monumental task. Will it work with Linux, or is it Windows-only? What hoops do I have to jump through? And when something *did* occasionally go wrong, it didn't usually mean spending a weekend fixing it. Usually, it meant spending a week fixing it.
That's why, when Mac OS X became stable (version 10.1), I took the plunge and bought a Mac. I haven't spent time worrying about or tinkering with my computer or my wife's computer since. Everything just works. I have my life back.
And I much prefer it this way.
Now if they could just make the software secure, they might have something worth buying.
It's always startling when I see the supposedly huge numbers trotted out by industry, then I think about the size of the total population, and I think...pfui! Like platinum records in the US represent sales of 1 million albums. Big deal - 1/300th of the U.S. population bought your album! Whoopee! *Everyone* loves you, don't they?
Or these numbers for Microsoft. So the worldwide operating system market is 300 million copies? Holy crap! Given work computers and all, we're talking about only 200 million people who use computers in the whole world!
Besides, the planet does have 6 billion people, so again, we have a small, niche market. And all the noise that's made over it!
It just always amazes me when I see these numbers and realize what a tiny proportion of the population is buying a given shiny-object-of-the-month, yet it's all over the news as if every person everywhere on the earth were buying it.
Letting your kid outside to play with his friends is un-workable in dangerous, urban environments. I'd much rather my kid get the same kind of exploratory feelings I got from playing in the woods from playing Zelda, versus having him venture, unsupervised, into the dirty, polluted, woody ravines by our home in east Oakland, which are overrun with crack users, and prostitutes.
I mean no criticism of you and yours with the following; it's just something I thought should be said:
In a rational society, either the people's law enforcement system would take care of the problem of crack users, prostitutes, and polluteres ruining woody ravines near their homes, or the people would be empowered to take care of the problem themselves using whatever force is necessary.
It's irrational to create a society wherein good people hide behind walls while the criminals roam free.
Please, folks, wherever you live, work toward getting people who understand this into positions of power.
It's as if we're in 1986 again and everybody's still saying the NES is a fad and the big new game machine is going to be the Atari XEGS.
I'm sorry to be a pedant, but . . .
When Nintendo was introducing the NES to the North American market, everyone in the media was saying that *videogames* were a fad that had already run its course (as evidenced by the video game market crash of 1983). No one thought the Atari XEGS (or the 7800 for that matter) would be "the big new game machine." They thought there would never *be* another big game machine from *any* manufacturer. (Which just makes Nintendo's triumph all the more impressive.)
A better analogy might be drawn by going forward a few years to the North American introduction of the NEC Turbografx-16, the Nintendo Super NES, and the Sega Genesis. Mainstream gamers and the press thought the SNES would maintain Nintendo's dominance of the industry. The "knowledgeable" commentators were sure the Turbografx would win out, given the huge and excellent software library for the system in Japan. No one thought crappy little Sega, fresh from the beating their 'losers-only' Master System had taken in the market-place, would have the huge impact they did.
It would be nice to right click and "open in new tab" now and then, a feature that is glaringly absent.
Really? Safari on the Mac has that feature.
Oh, that's right. Windows only uses one mouse button, unlike Macs. Silly me!
AT&T's method is faster to deploy?
I live in a development constructed in 1999.
When I moved in, there was no consumer-level high-speed Internet access offered in the neighborhood.
Now, in 2006, Comcast has fiber to each and every home.
AT&T? "Sorry, DSL isn't offered in your area."
Faster to deploy? Right.
See, all you skeptics! It's 2006 and we *are* living in the future!
Who cares if we aren't flying to work in our personal hover cars/jet packs, haven't cured the common cold, haven't eradicated hunger, or, heck, solved any of life's huge questions, when we have all the advertising promised us in films such as Blade Runner and Minority Report?
Seriously, though, I'm so fscking sick of seeing all those video screens running ads in the grocery store every week. Food Network at the checkout counter, adapalooza back by the dairy products, and now CBS in the deli/produce section. I spend about $120/week at that store, and their only thought is how they can make my time in their store even more unpleasant. Thanks a lot, guys.
I wish we still had independent grocery stores where I live...
You're right, Sturegeon's law holds true for video games. But I've been discovering that there's more to it than that.
Over the winter, I went back through all my collected console games (Atari 2600/5200/7800, ColecoVision, Intellivision, NES, TG-16, SNES, Genesis, Jaguar, N64, Atari 800, Apple ][, Amiga) plus a lot of arcade games. And, unlike some, I've also kept up with modern stuff through the Playstation 2.
What I've found is that, for me, the games that hold up the best are the ones that are simple to use but complex behind the scenes. That is, games like the Atari 2600 Adventure cartridge, where you simply move around a multi-screen world, avoid being eaten by the three dragons, and move various game pieces into the correct locations in order to win. That game would be pretty boring, except that there are many different game pieces (each with a different use in the game world), and the number of ways they can be laid out around the game world is pretty huge. That keeps the game fresh, while the simple rules and game controls keeps it from becoming a job to learn to use it each time I come back to it.
I find that so many games are either too complex for non-obessive play, or are of the "play it through once and toss it" variety, or both. And that's just the *good* games. There are of course the other 80% of games that are absolute crap and not worth even a minute of my time, or that are simply an inferior implementation of a good idea some other game designer had.
So, I find myself playing the classic, relatively simple games like Pac-Man, Galaga, Star Raiders, and King of Fighters routinely, because I can have a quick bit of fun with them and then go on with my life, while I play the more in-depth games like Adventure, Military Madness (oh, for a randomized version of that!), and Wizard's Crown less frequently but for sustained periods each time, when I really want to get into a game and have the time to do so.
But there's still one huge problem with *all* games - they're horribly repetitive. That's what killed my interest in The Sims, as well as all the online games. But it's also what keeps me from playing everything from Pac-Man to Civilization more than once in a while. After a while, all games start to feel like work. You take the same actions over and over and over and over. In some games, you get power ups of one sort or another, but they're always rendered useless because your opponents get equally more powerful, leaving you effectively running to remain in place. Doesn't that sound more like work than fun?
Even so, I'd settle for another game as non-static as Adventure if I could find it. So if anyone can point out large-world, randomized games that have come out in the last five years, I'd appreciate it. I simply haven't found a single one, but it'd be nice to have one with modern graphics and game play.
-Joe
I'd rather they go with non-Microsoft products so they don't become hosts to spammers and malware. Those things affect my computing experience.
Whether they go 100% open source or not doesn't really matter to me.
Corrected article follows:
Intel Flaunts Empty Plastic Case
In a stunning show of shamelessness in the face of a total lack of innovation, Intel today unveiled to a gaggle of gullible corporate lackeys and ass-kissing note-takers their newest product: an empty plastic box. An Intel spokesperson said they hope that some day, someone will build a computer to put in the box. At that point, they hope to load it down with the deeply flawed and customer-hostile Microsoft Windows operating system, thereby releasing misery from the confines of dens and offices and into family rooms worldwide.
Governments do not lower taxes once they have established them.
You've got to be kidding. The U.S. federal government lowered personal and/or corporate taxes several times over the last four years, congress is always lowering taxes for one industry or another (they're known as "loopholes"), and Reagan lowered taxes considerably in his first term. And that's just off the top of my head.
Oh, how I wish I had mod points. You're so right.
.
I was a conservative Republican in the 80s. Now I don't recognize the Republican party at all. The Democrats are actually more conservative than the Republicans!
I don't understand how so many of the people lined up behind the GWB administration can call themselves conservatives and get away with it.
Come to think of it, it's probably the same way that Bill Clinton, the New York Times, or CBS could be called liberal . .
I just don't understand those political labels any more. Or maybe they've just lost all meaning. Perhaps like Humpty Dumpty, our 'leaders' give words whatever meaning they want them to have and it's up to us to figure it all out.
-Joe
After reading this i thought the author is very spoiled. Sorry to say. Many countries (including mine) suffer from high unemployment rates.
If this company hired the staff they obviously need to get the job done right and on time, then there would be less unemployed people AND those who are working would have better lives. Everyone wins.
Besides which, if you follow your logic, eventually we'll all be working for just barely enough money to feed ourselves enough food to get the energy to go to work each day. Sure, we'll be living under bridges and running around in rags, but hey, it's better than starving!
Get some pride, man. Each human being is worthy of a better life than that, but no one is going to give it to us. We have to insist on it. That's the way it's always been, and that's the way it will always be.
I've heard of that. Isn't it called War Operating Planned Response, or WOPR for short?
I think there was a movie about it a while back.
Voter registration rolls are handled by the local precinct officials.
Yes, but local precinct officials are subordinate to the state election officials, though, as pointed out in this article, for example: 'In the months leading up to the November 2000 presidential election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, in coordination with Governor Jeb Bush, ordered local election supervisors to purge 57,700 voters from the registries, supposedly ex-cons not allowed to vote in Florida. At least 90.2 percent of those on this "scrub" list, targeted to lose their civil rights, are innocent.'
It wasn't the local officials who decided to make the purge; it was Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush, both Republicans and both working for the G.W. Bush campaign.
And "unfriendly countries" would never be able to get one of their agents hired at a commercial company?
If they did, how would we (the buyers) know whether our closed source software was trojaned?
There are risks either way. At least with open source there's a much greater chance that such shenanigans will be caught.
2x2 matrices are sometimes useful, but more often they just encourage us to limit the number of possibilities we consider. We're so prone to thinking in terms of binary choices anyway that what we need is something to help us see the multitude of possibilities rather than something that narrows the scope.