Yer a troll. A troll with a bad accent. Chinese has equivalents to R and L sounds in English. It is Japanese that you are mocking so poorly - to make the sound represented by the letter R in Japanese, you have to put the tongue right in the middle of where you put the tongue to make R or L sounds in English, so it is quite difficult for native Japanese speakers to get them differentiated.
I used to subscribe to Official Playstation Magazine for exactly that reason. It was worth the US$40/year for me to get the demo disks, sort of as an inoculation against all the crappy games that come out.
But think of that from the game publisher's point of view. Every time someone plays Spyro: Some Crazy Dwagon on the demo disk, learns that the game is crap, and gives it a miss in the store, that's a fail.
I dunno. I haven't read the article or even just looked at the pictures. But I'm thinking that the answer to your question is "Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black."
Count me in on the legion (for certain values of legion) of PSP owners who thought UMD movies were a pretty good idea, but not for $20. They should have been giving the damn things away like candy. I've been flying a lot for work, lately, and the PSP is a nice thing to have on a plane. I've only bought one disk that wasn't a game, and that was Green Day's concert album. Everything else, I thought to myself "nice, but why don't I just buy the DVD and convert it myself." That's because of the price. If they made the UMD movies in the $5-10 range, that would be below my hassle threshold, and I'd pick them up that way instead.
But once we get to photorealism, what is going to sustain growth?
Nudity. Nudity and sex. (Our two chief weapons...) Nudity and sex and development kits that make it easy for any small shop to put their game out there. After the blockbuster, the next phase is ubiquity, where anyone with the right hardware and a dream can come up with the next big thing.
In film, you get a lot of crappy art-house flicks because of that, and a whole lot of cheap, derivative porn, but you also get some good movies. Same thing will happen with video games, it just won't take as long as it did with movies.
As you say, any one of us could simulate it. That means the part of the problem where simulation is useful has probably been solved. This team is to the point where to learn more, they need to actually make some stuff.
I'm sure you're familiar enough with the engineering-to-manufacturing process to know that things don't always work out in the real world the way they do in the simulation. It is an old cliche, but it has some truth - at some point in any project you have to shoot the engineers and just build the damn thing.
That's what they use between units in a row of condos or townhomes. Instead of running the insulation up and down between the studs, you weave it in and out along the wall. Keeps the noise down. So, yeah, your larger builders would have experience with it.
I had a bunch of trouble recently getting my PS2 to read the old games, when it had worked fine before. I dug around until I found a site that told me what my problem was (which I cannot find right now, so there goes the informative mod): the laser needed cleaning. It played PS2 games fine, but not the PS1. After (voiding the warranty), opening it up, and very carefully cleaning the lens, it played them all just fine.
Is your place kind of dusty? Maybe you just need to clean the laser up.
All the gamers that are looking for the next best way to kill aliens in them shooter games, they're always looking for the next big thing, and the game industry caters to them pretty constantly. They probably don't want the old console.
Crash and Spyro still rock out, though. My wife will occasionally kill off a weekend afternoon and just walk the pattern in the first Spyro. But then you've also got your cutting edge stuff like Prince of Persia.
All it takes is one quick Terms of Service update and a DSL price hike, and all economic incentive drains out of this idea.
His entire thesis seems to be that, a bunch of people could make a little bit of money each month on the margin between what the DSL providers charge and what their neighbors would be willing to pay for access. If the DSL provider eats that up with a rate hike, then the money is gone.
Narita doesn't need more English. Anyone at a sales counter or behind a airline desk already speaks English, Japanese, and who knows how many other languages. They've got that covered. There are three things that Narita needs to be a perfect airport:
1. Free wireless networking. They have wireless already, but it wants a credit card.
2. More than one shop that sells Meiji Black dark chocolate. I generally buy all they have when I travel through there, but it is not enough to keep me going until next time. In fact, they should be giving that stuff away for free, too.
3. Also, they need to keep the kids out of the Playstation play area so that us weary adult travelers can get some quality time with Jak and Daxter.
I'm not saying these are reasonable, I'm just saying that's what it would take for Narita to be perfect.
Yeah, sure it isn't a grand gesture and it isn't infrastructure you can put your hands on. On the other hand, look how much bang they're getting for their buck: The press release above says they spent $18,000 from a grant and they've got monthlies of a few hundred bucks a site? So call it $30,000, even $40,000 a year. You're not going to get much road for that, and only the village that gets the road is going to benefit. You might be able to fund one visiting team of clinicians for $40K, but again, that only helps the people who can get to the clinic. Sometimes it is okay to improve things incrementally.
That'd be cool. My Grandad and my uncle are both hams, but it never appealed to me. Grandpa is the reason I want a motorhome anyway, because I cherish the memories of camping with them when I was growing up. He always used to bring his portable radio unit along when he came to visit. He ran some wire across the peak of our roof for his antenna.
But if I could push data through the night sky instead of garbled, squawking chit-chat with my uncle, I'd be into it. Thanks for the link!
Someday, I want a motorhome, so that I can tool around to National Parks in the US and still be able to have refrigerated salsa and my Playstation 2. And in this dream, I also have wireless networking between my motorhome and other motorhomes in the campground, and there are hotspots at the dumping station and at ranger stations and at nearby truckstops, so that as I'm cruising around the country, I can keep getting email, do a little surfing, and for the webcam mounted on the dash to send updates out to the blog. And if the folks in the next campsite have the same system in their motorhome, then we can have a lan party, until it is time for the Park Ranger to talk about wolf ecology over at the campfire.
That's the way it should be. In all the arts, but music particularly. Music used to be very much a part of the lives of everyday people, not just listening to it but making it. I mean, the music industry used to be all about publishing sheet music so that people could play popular songs, not just listen to them. So if it rolls back around to where people are making music on their own again, and sharing it among their friends, then that's great. It was good enough for most of the people in history, it will work out okay for us.
It might hurt your ears for a couple of years, but just wait until the technology has soaked in a little. In a few years, first graders will be learning how to loop tracks, and when those kids hit high school, then you'll hear some good stuff.
Yeah, actually that's because since the dot-crash, computer books just aren't selling as well. You've gotta keep your sales per square foot pretty high to support a big store like that, so the computer books will get trimmed back a little to make room for something that will sell a little better.
New version of [Software] has [feature1..featureN] that will make it incompatible with previous versions. Observers say that [Company] hopes this will drive sales of [Software].
That kind of thing is cool to talk about, but it is like starting a union. If someone in the department doesn't walk out, then you're out of work and you've handed them a promotion. So stick together. Everyone should hand in their resignation at the same time. Better impact that way, anyhow.
Slashdot Mirror
For the visual learners, here is your argument in pictoral format.
http://xkcd.com/538/
That was my very first thought on reading the article summary. Well played, sir.
Yer a troll. A troll with a bad accent. Chinese has equivalents to R and L sounds in English. It is Japanese that you are mocking so poorly - to make the sound represented by the letter R in Japanese, you have to put the tongue right in the middle of where you put the tongue to make R or L sounds in English, so it is quite difficult for native Japanese speakers to get them differentiated.
I used to subscribe to Official Playstation Magazine for exactly that reason. It was worth the US$40/year for me to get the demo disks, sort of as an inoculation against all the crappy games that come out.
But think of that from the game publisher's point of view. Every time someone plays Spyro: Some Crazy Dwagon on the demo disk, learns that the game is crap, and gives it a miss in the store, that's a fail.
I dunno. I haven't read the article or even just looked at the pictures. But I'm thinking that the answer to your question is "Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black."
Count me in on the legion (for certain values of legion) of PSP owners who thought UMD movies were a pretty good idea, but not for $20. They should have been giving the damn things away like candy. I've been flying a lot for work, lately, and the PSP is a nice thing to have on a plane. I've only bought one disk that wasn't a game, and that was Green Day's concert album. Everything else, I thought to myself "nice, but why don't I just buy the DVD and convert it myself." That's because of the price. If they made the UMD movies in the $5-10 range, that would be below my hassle threshold, and I'd pick them up that way instead.
Nudity. Nudity and sex. (Our two chief weapons...) Nudity and sex and development kits that make it easy for any small shop to put their game out there. After the blockbuster, the next phase is ubiquity, where anyone with the right hardware and a dream can come up with the next big thing.
In film, you get a lot of crappy art-house flicks because of that, and a whole lot of cheap, derivative porn, but you also get some good movies. Same thing will happen with video games, it just won't take as long as it did with movies.
As you say, any one of us could simulate it. That means the part of the problem where simulation is useful has probably been solved. This team is to the point where to learn more, they need to actually make some stuff.
I'm sure you're familiar enough with the engineering-to-manufacturing process to know that things don't always work out in the real world the way they do in the simulation. It is an old cliche, but it has some truth - at some point in any project you have to shoot the engineers and just build the damn thing.
That's okay for small stuff, but for something big, like Slashdot, you need a whole lot of cranks.
That's what they use between units in a row of condos or townhomes. Instead of running the insulation up and down between the studs, you weave it in and out along the wall. Keeps the noise down. So, yeah, your larger builders would have experience with it.
I had a bunch of trouble recently getting my PS2 to read the old games, when it had worked fine before. I dug around until I found a site that told me what my problem was (which I cannot find right now, so there goes the informative mod): the laser needed cleaning. It played PS2 games fine, but not the PS1. After (voiding the warranty), opening it up, and very carefully cleaning the lens, it played them all just fine.
Is your place kind of dusty? Maybe you just need to clean the laser up.
All the gamers that are looking for the next best way to kill aliens in them shooter games, they're always looking for the next big thing, and the game industry caters to them pretty constantly. They probably don't want the old console.
Crash and Spyro still rock out, though. My wife will occasionally kill off a weekend afternoon and just walk the pattern in the first Spyro. But then you've also got your cutting edge stuff like Prince of Persia.
Backwards compatibility rules!
All it takes is one quick Terms of Service update and a DSL price hike, and all economic incentive drains out of this idea.
His entire thesis seems to be that, a bunch of people could make a little bit of money each month on the margin between what the DSL providers charge and what their neighbors would be willing to pay for access. If the DSL provider eats that up with a rate hike, then the money is gone.
I enjoyed reading that quite a bit.
Likewise. Great Grandpa was TJ Jonesmith. His dad was Thomas Jefferson Jonesmith, but he was just TJ.
Narita doesn't need more English. Anyone at a sales counter or behind a airline desk already speaks English, Japanese, and who knows how many other languages. They've got that covered. There are three things that Narita needs to be a perfect airport:
1. Free wireless networking. They have wireless already, but it wants a credit card.
2. More than one shop that sells Meiji Black dark chocolate. I generally buy all they have when I travel through there, but it is not enough to keep me going until next time. In fact, they should be giving that stuff away for free, too.
3. Also, they need to keep the kids out of the Playstation play area so that us weary adult travelers can get some quality time with Jak and Daxter.
I'm not saying these are reasonable, I'm just saying that's what it would take for Narita to be perfect.
Thanks, man. That's the most concise and useful how-to I've ever seen on the internet.
Yeah, sure it isn't a grand gesture and it isn't infrastructure you can put your hands on. On the other hand, look how much bang they're getting for their buck: The press release above says they spent $18,000 from a grant and they've got monthlies of a few hundred bucks a site? So call it $30,000, even $40,000 a year. You're not going to get much road for that, and only the village that gets the road is going to benefit. You might be able to fund one visiting team of clinicians for $40K, but again, that only helps the people who can get to the clinic. Sometimes it is okay to improve things incrementally.
That'd be cool. My Grandad and my uncle are both hams, but it never appealed to me. Grandpa is the reason I want a motorhome anyway, because I cherish the memories of camping with them when I was growing up. He always used to bring his portable radio unit along when he came to visit. He ran some wire across the peak of our roof for his antenna.
But if I could push data through the night sky instead of garbled, squawking chit-chat with my uncle, I'd be into it. Thanks for the link!
Someday, I want a motorhome, so that I can tool around to National Parks in the US and still be able to have refrigerated salsa and my Playstation 2. And in this dream, I also have wireless networking between my motorhome and other motorhomes in the campground, and there are hotspots at the dumping station and at ranger stations and at nearby truckstops, so that as I'm cruising around the country, I can keep getting email, do a little surfing, and for the webcam mounted on the dash to send updates out to the blog. And if the folks in the next campsite have the same system in their motorhome, then we can have a lan party, until it is time for the Park Ranger to talk about wolf ecology over at the campfire.
It is a pretty bleak view of the future, but one that I could see happening. This should be insightful, not flamebait.
It might hurt your ears for a couple of years, but just wait until the technology has soaked in a little. In a few years, first graders will be learning how to loop tracks, and when those kids hit high school, then you'll hear some good stuff.
Yeah, actually that's because since the dot-crash, computer books just aren't selling as well. You've gotta keep your sales per square foot pretty high to support a big store like that, so the computer books will get trimmed back a little to make room for something that will sell a little better.
New version of [Software] has [feature1..featureN] that will make it incompatible with previous versions. Observers say that [Company] hopes this will drive sales of [Software].
Whatever.
That kind of thing is cool to talk about, but it is like starting a union. If someone in the department doesn't walk out, then you're out of work and you've handed them a promotion. So stick together. Everyone should hand in their resignation at the same time. Better impact that way, anyhow.