"We certainly have the needed computer power in small packages now,"
How small is it once its been hardened to withstand the radiation? And once hardened, what's its heat dissipation look like, especially in the absence of convection cooling?
"and the datalinks available (especially in LEO!"
How well will those datalinks work in orbit? Would the sun effectively jam them? And if they are able to talk to each other, would their tranceivers be good enough to hear and talk to the ground if/when needed?
"Should concentrate on smaller devices. I can imagine a robot same size as a Radio Shaft "Zip Sap" moving quickly to space"
Space is still way the heck up there, and you still need lots and lots of fuel and oxydizer to get up to LEO. You don't see stuff the size of sounding rockets getting up there.
Besides, the bigger the pieces we can send up there, the less on-site (i. e. on-orbit) assembly is needed when it gets there. Even for us on the ground there is a lot to be said about pre-fabrication.
"but it is time that NASA got serious about X-project and spaceshipone type design. "
Because they got nowhere near orbit.
"A re-usable vehicle that could take off from space, go into orbit, dock w/ space stations, etc., and then land back on earth is well within our reach technologically."
Within our technological abilities? Perhaps. Within our budget? Heck no. And then there are other options that could help that trigger the NIMBY crowd, like nuclear propulsion.
"So if I'm somewhere else, say orbiting in the space station, do I have to now lookup every country, every state and province, to see whom I can email or not?"
Or you can just... you know... not email people you don't now.
Lack of faith in my government is exactly why I think we need one. Right now we seem to be stuck in a cycle of electing people we really don't really like. The federal government seems either unable or unwilling to fix itself, and the only proposals for constitutional change froming from the federal government involve banning gay marriage and flag burning (more to do with individual rights than the functions of government). The only avenue left to the people (other than armed revolution) is application to the state legislatures to puruse constitutional change without involving Washington.
Rather than candidates telling people what they want, it's time for some sort of process that actually listens to popular desires with respect to our national government. If it turns out that the people really want what we see happening in Washington today, then at the very least our constitution should be altered to make the whole thing a little more honest (even if we don't really like the taste of the truth in this case). For example, if the people really want the White House to have all but complete war-making powers, then it's time to get rid of the silliness about Congressional war declarations if we're not going to use it.
If, after the dust settles, the people decide that they prefer the constitution as written (or something close to it) over the nature of the government today, then at the very least the process will inpsire the national government to fix itself (lest the people go over their heads). The Twentieth Amendment, fixing the problems of a lame duck period in the term of House members, didn't get through the House (go figure) until several states passed resolutions calling for a convention. Even if the folks in the US government are still reluctant to police themselves, then the people need to pursue constitutional methods to fix these problems themselves.
It's not that I trust whoever might be sent to the convention, it's that I don't see how thing can get that much worse. The status quo of the constitution and the government at odds with each other cannot (be allowed to) stand. If the people opt to ditch our current method of government and hold on to the current republican constitution, at the very least the process could fix some easily-abused loopholes caused by vague language. Otherwise, if we're going to be an empire, it's time to stop pretending that we're not.
"Now we probably need to talk about a new Amendment to the Constitution to protect property rights the way the 5th Amendment was supposed to,"
Screw that, we need a whole new Constitutional Convention. Our constitution and our government bear little resemblance to each other, and it's time for us to explicitly decide which one we truly want.
"This is exactly like the music/movie industry's stance on electronic distribution."
What? They keep on trying to get you to do something that you don't want to do, never taking "no" for an answer, until you finally relent, go along with them to their little party and get DRMed out the wazoo, because it's "not so bad after all?"
Seriously, if you find it OK to browbeat your wife like that, you're in for a fun marraige. Try not to be too surprised when her lawyer contacts you.
"For example, we are changing the command line environment in Windows using a new object-oriented command line technology, code-named "Monad," that will exceed what has been delivered in Linux and Unix for many years. It will take three to five years to fully develop and deliver."
If everybody wants games on DTV, then Nintendo's component video cables, needed to play GCN games in 480p, would have sold a lot better than they have. They've even removed the digital video out from GCNs with little negative response from consumers.
If DTV were that important, the GCN, with its support for progressive scan, would be seriously trouncing the PS2. The only progressive support you see on the PS2 is on DVD playback, and that's only on the newer units. And yet the market seems content in paying (more money!) for the inferior 480i.
It's a revolution. It's supposed to reach to the common man. The common man doesn't have the latest and greatest in their a/v setup, so there's no reason for the Revolution to cater to the elite(ist). If anything, the people who insist on HDTV and such are the people who Nintendo are actually trying to distance themselves from in an effort to reach a broader audience, the very people some of us feel are causing the games industry to stagnate the way it is.
Only the bourgeois elite care about real-time rendered forearm hair and the picture resolution to see it, and the hidebound electronics industry aristocracy are doing nothing for the gaming proletariat by offering it. The masses need better games! It is time for the people to rise up and demand a gaming industry again, television and set-top box manufacturers be damned!
Video games got started not in living rooms with big-screen TVs, stereo systems, comfortable sofas and easy access to the kitchen, but in cold, unfinished basements with hand-me-down televisions that required "warming up," maybe a boom-box to route sound out of for stereo, and no furniture save for a washer and dryer. If the Revolution is to have any shot at reinventing gaming, it will have to be able to return to gaming's roots to start. There is no HDTV down there.
(On a slightly more serious note, what the heck is HDTV supposed to do for gaming?)
What good is innovation if Intel strog-arms OEMs to keep it from getting to market?
AMD has done all the innovation they should need for a while (at least until P4s catch up, if they ever do). The problem is that it's not getting to the consumers. And what's the point of having all this innovation if nobody gets to use it?
Well... Toy Story wasn't rendered real-time, after all. Perhaps they were sayin that given enough time it could deliver Toy Story.:)
"Same thing with the infamous "Mode 7" in the Super NES system."
Huh? Nintendo Power said the SNES would deliver scaling and rotation. When the SNES came out, we got... scaling and rotation. The only thing that wasn't delivered were game companies that had figured out what to do with it beyond the a/v shows that all launch titles end up being. That took time.
But even then , F-Zero was a launch title, as was PilotWings. That's a heck of a lot more Mode 7 than the ActRaiser cut-scenes that Nintendo Power focused on at the time.
"With the next generation of consoles becoming nothing more than computers, what becomes the purpose of having two separate machines?"
Like the old Mac ads: It Just Works. Drop in the disk, plug the box into the TV and you're good to go. No having to fish around in the OS to adjust display settings because you're opting to use TV output, for example.
They also tend not to have bug-ridden web browsers "intergrated" into them.
"Or perhaps the real point is, why use your computer for gaming?"
For that set of people who buy the bleeding edge hardware. I could go on, but this'd turn into flamebait.
"How many times can you run around shooting the same bad guys with the same tired weapons?"
How many times can you run around a maze eating dots? The 1980's game crash happened for a reason, and there are those that believe, as gaming and, more specifically, game content have gone mainstream, we may be staring down another one on the horizon, possibly with this upcoming generation of hardware.
At this point, I'd say that, if not this upcoming generation, then the generation after that will rely on whatever Nintendo still has up their sleeves for the Revolution. They claim that they'll be targeting non-gamers like nobody else (while Microsoft and Sony both seem to still be aiming at the "appliance" angle), but whether or not they can actually deliver remains to be seen.
"While I realize that the gaming industry thinks that games are Hollywood productions, "
I'd say more that Hollywood believes that games are Hollywood productions. Look at who owns what game companies nowadays. They're applying Hollywood thinking to game publishing, and that's even failing them in the movie-making business nowadays.
"Keep riding the bleeding edge of gaming."
Bleeding edge isn't as safely profitable as rehashing out old games.
"Why do games today *have* to be something I can't let my 5 year old son play?"
So long as 18-24 year-old guys keep on spending lots of money on little more than tits and blood, then that's what they're going to keep publishing. It's going to continue to be this way until that demographic decides to move on to something else (which I don't think has ever happened in the history of humanity), or some other demographic rises up and throws around equally large sums of money on something else. This goes back to the Hollywood factor.
Again, things will depend on the Revolution's ability to reach its stated goal of attracting large numbers of non-gamers.
Microsoft, Sony Promise Sun, Moon, Failt to Deliver! Film at 11!
We saw this with the Xbox and the PS2, we saw it to an extent with the PSX. This shouldn't surprise anybody at this point.
Really, I've gotten over looking at tech specs and I'm simply waiting to hear about the titles each will have. So far, FFXI for Xbox 360 is vaguely interesting, but I already have the PS2 version (and could probably install it on the PS3 if I really, really wanted to). Beyond that, I'm not sure S-E is even going to be playing the "exclusive title" game any more (after all, XI is canon Final Fantasy and will be appearing on two different consoles now. XII seems locked in for PS2, but beyond that... and let alone any future DQ games...)
PS3 might get my interest if they up-scan the resolution on PSX polygons (like Bleem!), but I doubt they will and I already have hardware to play PSX games at their original resolution.
So far, the only system that has games for it I know I will like is the Revolution, if only for the "download old ROMs" aspect. Especially if Sega gets in on the act as they've been hinting.
"Seriously, they think making a law that makes child porn illegal PROTECTS children.. From what? the naked body god gave them when they were born?"
No, more like protecting them from the naked body God gave the freaky old man that's offering to buy them toys if they go through with it.
" from the person who BROKE THE LAW the idiots put in place to protect the children when they decided to take/look at child porn?"
From the person who paid money to the photographer, to the person who exploited children who either weren't able to say "no" or had no idea what they were saying "yes" to until it was well beyond too late.
"if you want to look at a system that works, consider countries where child porn isn't 'illegal' like japan, for instance."
Huh? You're pointing to a country where it is illegal to show genetalia (or even drawings of it) and you're saying that they have a more "liberal" attitude towards pornography?
All the hentai manga and anime you downloaded off the internet isn't legal for distribution in Japan as-is. What you see is what the artists drew before they had to obfuscate naughty bits to comply with Japanese law. And all the fictional depictions of teenagers having sex is legal because they are still depicted as being over the age of consent for Japan, whereas in the US the Supreme Court recently overturned a law against "simulated child pornography," meaning that it's legal here for fictional portrayals of sex even if the fictional characters aren't above the age of consent (however, in both countries, actors and actresses in live-action scenese must still be at least 18 years of age).
Japan may be more liberal in where you're allowed to sell/purchase pornography (depending on what state you look at), but pointing to a country where their porn looks like it came out of the Witness Protection Program and saying they're more liberal in content than the US is outright absurd.
"It doesn't make would be child rapists less likely to comit acts,"
The sale and purchase of child pornography funds these rapists, giving them the ability to continue to do it.
"depictions of naked kids aren't."
Depictions of naked adults are illegal in Japan! On the other hand, depictions of naked kids are legal in the US so long as it's not pornographic in nature.
" I did actually think that people saying it was so easy to acquire child porn were hyping it up until I installed it myself and seen dozens of links to what I assume are extremely disgusting freenet sites..."
So... why exactly were you looking for such sites?
Slashdot Mirror
But how many Libraries of Congress is that?
Is it because he doesn't want computers in his head, or that he doesn't want Microsoft products in his head?
"We certainly have the needed computer power in small packages now,"
How small is it once its been hardened to withstand the radiation? And once hardened, what's its heat dissipation look like, especially in the absence of convection cooling?
"and the datalinks available (especially in LEO!"
How well will those datalinks work in orbit? Would the sun effectively jam them? And if they are able to talk to each other, would their tranceivers be good enough to hear and talk to the ground if/when needed?
We'll see if you keep saying that once they learn how to make their own nuclear bombs!
"Should concentrate on smaller devices. I can imagine a robot same size as a Radio Shaft "Zip Sap" moving quickly to space"
Space is still way the heck up there, and you still need lots and lots of fuel and oxydizer to get up to LEO. You don't see stuff the size of sounding rockets getting up there.
Besides, the bigger the pieces we can send up there, the less on-site (i. e. on-orbit) assembly is needed when it gets there. Even for us on the ground there is a lot to be said about pre-fabrication.
"but it is time that NASA got serious about X-project and spaceshipone type design. "
Because they got nowhere near orbit.
"A re-usable vehicle that could take off from space, go into orbit, dock w/ space stations, etc., and then land back on earth is well within our reach technologically."
Within our technological abilities? Perhaps. Within our budget? Heck no. And then there are other options that could help that trigger the NIMBY crowd, like nuclear propulsion.
"Of course, they plan to leave the exploding parts out of their next versions."
We're talking about rockets. They rely on exploding parts, otherwise they tend not to go anywhere.
Unless NASA will be opting for nuclear power on these things (HA!), rest assured that the launch area will be heavily laden with "NO SMOKING!" signs.
"So if I'm somewhere else, say orbiting in the space station, do I have to now lookup every country, every state and province, to see whom I can email or not?"
Or you can just... you know... not email people you don't now.
The "wild west" had a US Marshalls and a US Army presence.
Lack of faith in my government is exactly why I think we need one. Right now we seem to be stuck in a cycle of electing people we really don't really like. The federal government seems either unable or unwilling to fix itself, and the only proposals for constitutional change froming from the federal government involve banning gay marriage and flag burning (more to do with individual rights than the functions of government). The only avenue left to the people (other than armed revolution) is application to the state legislatures to puruse constitutional change without involving Washington.
Rather than candidates telling people what they want, it's time for some sort of process that actually listens to popular desires with respect to our national government. If it turns out that the people really want what we see happening in Washington today, then at the very least our constitution should be altered to make the whole thing a little more honest (even if we don't really like the taste of the truth in this case). For example, if the people really want the White House to have all but complete war-making powers, then it's time to get rid of the silliness about Congressional war declarations if we're not going to use it.
If, after the dust settles, the people decide that they prefer the constitution as written (or something close to it) over the nature of the government today, then at the very least the process will inpsire the national government to fix itself (lest the people go over their heads). The Twentieth Amendment, fixing the problems of a lame duck period in the term of House members, didn't get through the House (go figure) until several states passed resolutions calling for a convention. Even if the folks in the US government are still reluctant to police themselves, then the people need to pursue constitutional methods to fix these problems themselves.
It's not that I trust whoever might be sent to the convention, it's that I don't see how thing can get that much worse. The status quo of the constitution and the government at odds with each other cannot (be allowed to) stand. If the people opt to ditch our current method of government and hold on to the current republican constitution, at the very least the process could fix some easily-abused loopholes caused by vague language. Otherwise, if we're going to be an empire, it's time to stop pretending that we're not.
"Now we probably need to talk about a new Amendment to the Constitution to protect property rights the way the 5th Amendment was supposed to,"
Screw that, we need a whole new Constitutional Convention. Our constitution and our government bear little resemblance to each other, and it's time for us to explicitly decide which one we truly want.
Yes, it won't be "well distributed" until there are 2 more in Maryland to give it parity with Virginia. :)
"This is exactly like the music/movie industry's stance on electronic distribution."
What? They keep on trying to get you to do something that you don't want to do, never taking "no" for an answer, until you finally relent, go along with them to their little party and get DRMed out the wazoo, because it's "not so bad after all?"
Seriously, if you find it OK to browbeat your wife like that, you're in for a fun marraige. Try not to be too surprised when her lawyer contacts you.
Unless Longhorn is also on that 3-5 year timetable, it's heavily implied that the new CLI has officially been axed from Longhorn.
If everybody wants games on DTV, then Nintendo's component video cables, needed to play GCN games in 480p, would have sold a lot better than they have. They've even removed the digital video out from GCNs with little negative response from consumers.
If DTV were that important, the GCN, with its support for progressive scan, would be seriously trouncing the PS2. The only progressive support you see on the PS2 is on DVD playback, and that's only on the newer units. And yet the market seems content in paying (more money!) for the inferior 480i.
It's a revolution. It's supposed to reach to the common man. The common man doesn't have the latest and greatest in their a/v setup, so there's no reason for the Revolution to cater to the elite(ist). If anything, the people who insist on HDTV and such are the people who Nintendo are actually trying to distance themselves from in an effort to reach a broader audience, the very people some of us feel are causing the games industry to stagnate the way it is.
Only the bourgeois elite care about real-time rendered forearm hair and the picture resolution to see it, and the hidebound electronics industry aristocracy are doing nothing for the gaming proletariat by offering it. The masses need better games! It is time for the people to rise up and demand a gaming industry again, television and set-top box manufacturers be damned!
Video games got started not in living rooms with big-screen TVs, stereo systems, comfortable sofas and easy access to the kitchen, but in cold, unfinished basements with hand-me-down televisions that required "warming up," maybe a boom-box to route sound out of for stereo, and no furniture save for a washer and dryer. If the Revolution is to have any shot at reinventing gaming, it will have to be able to return to gaming's roots to start. There is no HDTV down there.
(On a slightly more serious note, what the heck is HDTV supposed to do for gaming?)
It's more like "short bus special."
What good is innovation if Intel strog-arms OEMs to keep it from getting to market?
AMD has done all the innovation they should need for a while (at least until P4s catch up, if they ever do). The problem is that it's not getting to the consumers. And what's the point of having all this innovation if nobody gets to use it?
Will it come with a new filesystem? No.
Will it come with a new command line interface? No.
Will it come with risk-laden RSS support "integrated" into the OS so that it can't be uninstalled? Yes.
Nice set of priorities there, Microsoft. I hope you aren't too surprised when I prioritize my cash in such a way that I stick with NT 5.x.
" You people do realize that the current PS3 and 360 dev kits are not the finished version of the hardware right?"
You do realize that launch titles will be made with these current devkits?
Games made with devkits for the completed systems won't come out until the first console price drop or so.
""Toy Story Quality Graphics Rendering"?"
:)
Well... Toy Story wasn't rendered real-time, after all. Perhaps they were sayin that given enough time it could deliver Toy Story.
"Same thing with the infamous "Mode 7" in the Super NES system."
Huh? Nintendo Power said the SNES would deliver scaling and rotation. When the SNES came out, we got... scaling and rotation. The only thing that wasn't delivered were game companies that had figured out what to do with it beyond the a/v shows that all launch titles end up being. That took time.
But even then , F-Zero was a launch title, as was PilotWings. That's a heck of a lot more Mode 7 than the ActRaiser cut-scenes that Nintendo Power focused on at the time.
"With the next generation of consoles becoming nothing more than computers, what becomes the purpose of having two separate machines?"
Like the old Mac ads: It Just Works. Drop in the disk, plug the box into the TV and you're good to go. No having to fish around in the OS to adjust display settings because you're opting to use TV output, for example.
They also tend not to have bug-ridden web browsers "intergrated" into them.
"Or perhaps the real point is, why use your computer for gaming?"
For that set of people who buy the bleeding edge hardware. I could go on, but this'd turn into flamebait.
"How many times can you run around shooting the same bad guys with the same tired weapons?"
How many times can you run around a maze eating dots? The 1980's game crash happened for a reason, and there are those that believe, as gaming and, more specifically, game content have gone mainstream, we may be staring down another one on the horizon, possibly with this upcoming generation of hardware.
At this point, I'd say that, if not this upcoming generation, then the generation after that will rely on whatever Nintendo still has up their sleeves for the Revolution. They claim that they'll be targeting non-gamers like nobody else (while Microsoft and Sony both seem to still be aiming at the "appliance" angle), but whether or not they can actually deliver remains to be seen.
"While I realize that the gaming industry thinks that games are Hollywood productions, "
I'd say more that Hollywood believes that games are Hollywood productions. Look at who owns what game companies nowadays. They're applying Hollywood thinking to game publishing, and that's even failing them in the movie-making business nowadays.
"Keep riding the bleeding edge of gaming."
Bleeding edge isn't as safely profitable as rehashing out old games.
"Why do games today *have* to be something I can't let my 5 year old son play?"
So long as 18-24 year-old guys keep on spending lots of money on little more than tits and blood, then that's what they're going to keep publishing. It's going to continue to be this way until that demographic decides to move on to something else (which I don't think has ever happened in the history of humanity), or some other demographic rises up and throws around equally large sums of money on something else. This goes back to the Hollywood factor.
Again, things will depend on the Revolution's ability to reach its stated goal of attracting large numbers of non-gamers.
Microsoft, Sony Promise Sun, Moon, Failt to Deliver! Film at 11!
We saw this with the Xbox and the PS2, we saw it to an extent with the PSX. This shouldn't surprise anybody at this point.
Really, I've gotten over looking at tech specs and I'm simply waiting to hear about the titles each will have. So far, FFXI for Xbox 360 is vaguely interesting, but I already have the PS2 version (and could probably install it on the PS3 if I really, really wanted to). Beyond that, I'm not sure S-E is even going to be playing the "exclusive title" game any more (after all, XI is canon Final Fantasy and will be appearing on two different consoles now. XII seems locked in for PS2, but beyond that... and let alone any future DQ games...)
PS3 might get my interest if they up-scan the resolution on PSX polygons (like Bleem!), but I doubt they will and I already have hardware to play PSX games at their original resolution.
So far, the only system that has games for it I know I will like is the Revolution, if only for the "download old ROMs" aspect. Especially if Sega gets in on the act as they've been hinting.
I wouldn't call "lead role in the latest Spielburg film" being all that difficult.
At any rate, though, it's really hard for me to look at either him or Travolta andnot see "vapid brainwashee." Even their smiles frighten me.
Ooh, a NAMBLA member!
"Seriously, they think making a law that makes child porn illegal PROTECTS children.. From what? the naked body god gave them when they were born?"
No, more like protecting them from the naked body God gave the freaky old man that's offering to buy them toys if they go through with it.
" from the person who BROKE THE LAW the idiots put in place to protect the children when they decided to take/look at child porn?"
From the person who paid money to the photographer, to the person who exploited children who either weren't able to say "no" or had no idea what they were saying "yes" to until it was well beyond too late.
"if you want to look at a system that works, consider countries where child porn isn't 'illegal' like japan, for instance."
Huh? You're pointing to a country where it is illegal to show genetalia (or even drawings of it) and you're saying that they have a more "liberal" attitude towards pornography?
All the hentai manga and anime you downloaded off the internet isn't legal for distribution in Japan as-is. What you see is what the artists drew before they had to obfuscate naughty bits to comply with Japanese law. And all the fictional depictions of teenagers having sex is legal because they are still depicted as being over the age of consent for Japan, whereas in the US the Supreme Court recently overturned a law against "simulated child pornography," meaning that it's legal here for fictional portrayals of sex even if the fictional characters aren't above the age of consent (however, in both countries, actors and actresses in live-action scenese must still be at least 18 years of age).
Japan may be more liberal in where you're allowed to sell/purchase pornography (depending on what state you look at), but pointing to a country where their porn looks like it came out of the Witness Protection Program and saying they're more liberal in content than the US is outright absurd.
"It doesn't make would be child rapists less likely to comit acts,"
The sale and purchase of child pornography funds these rapists, giving them the ability to continue to do it.
"depictions of naked kids aren't."
Depictions of naked adults are illegal in Japan! On the other hand, depictions of naked kids are legal in the US so long as it's not pornographic in nature.
" I did actually think that people saying it was so easy to acquire child porn were hyping it up until I installed it myself and seen dozens of links to what I assume are extremely disgusting freenet sites..."
So... why exactly were you looking for such sites?