People who optimize for lines faster than 56K are just plain lazy. Do you think people would have bothered creating heavier and heavier forms of compression for media if it weren't for the slowness of our connections? As the speed bar gets raised, people lose sight of the challenge of packing a crapload of content into a quickly downloaded page.
This happens in everything. Look at computer game designers who fancy up essentially 2-D games with resource hogging 3-D graphics. Look at the apathy with which consumers approach fuel economy of vehicles in the US because gas is so abundant and cheap.
The goal must be to think big in a small box if we are going to challenge ourselves.
See, what you're missing is that New York really needs brick walkways to raise the morale of the citizens. With better walkways, there won't be as much of a problem with people leaving them in order to jaywalk (apparently a huge problem in the city). In addition, there aren't enough things in the Big Apple named Bloomberg and that must be corrected.
This, combined with Intel's next generation of processor serial numbers and Microsoft's online product activation essentially guarantees that someone at tech support can laugh as your computer secretly downloads updates that don't work to the exact person who registered the product.
The future of corporate disaster has arrived at last.
I'm still waiting for it to work the other way around.
Being able to see what's on my computer through a device strapped to my head has limited application in my world. What I'm looking for is the computer to see what I see through a device strapped to my head.
The smartasses among us will be quick to point out that this technology exists and that it's called a camera but I need something smaller than that.
Photography has always suffered from the need to tote around equipment and, while that equipment has become smaller and smaller, there is always the need to remove it, ready it, and take the shot. I believe that once a camera is developed that is small enough to fit comfortably over the eye, that doesn't impair the users vision, and that can be activated with a minimal amount of effort, we will see a greater number of pictures which right now are just missed opportunities in viewers minds. Art, science, news; everything will benefit from the ability to instantly shutter away a picture for later use. We shouldn't be projecting in, we should be looking out.
Cheating in single player games isn't the threat here. With the possible exception of developing an addiction to workarounds and codes that could carry into online play, cheating by yourself is no threat to anyone but yourself.
I've heard a number of game designers whine about people using codes to diminish the challenge and subsequently the reward of games they put together. It seems silly. Take Time Splitters for the PS2. Free Radical didn't see fit to put any codes into the game in order to skip through the built in reward system. Players must beat sections of the game to reveal hidden characters, levels, and play modes. While I don't mind playing through the game for these extras, I've had a number of friends grow tired of the game--mostly thanks to the limited number of playable multiplayer maps at the outset--because they didn't have the patience. Free Radical shot themselves in the foot in my eyes because the lazy people in the market passed on the game after renting it or playing it at a friend's house and seeing how much work they would have to do to get anything cool.
What game designers have to realize is that there exist two crowds: those who are happy to have a reward for all their hard work and those who want all the fun stuff now. Both of them spend money on games and both crowds must be appeased. And please spare me the argument that the presence of codes encourages everyone to cheat and cheapens the morals of good players. My friend Eric and I are both from the former crowd of gameplayers and we often have two saved games on our memory cards: one with our hard-won games and one with all the cheats enabled that we whip out for the party.
My concern is how the 2M (or MMOG) FPS games will be. At E3, I was witness to around half a dozen with varying levels of coolness. The best (in this reviewers humble opinion) was Planetside from Sony Online. I'm still wiping away the tears of joy after playing a little deathmatch with the other goers and piloting a buggy with a copilot manning the guns. Still, will even the best 2M FPS keep my attention?
I keep asking myself, "Will I want to frag 500 pigs an hour if the scenario never ends?" Think about it. There are suddenly no rounds or matches, just an ongoing war that, in most of the games I saw, never ends. You die, then you just warp back into base and charge for the frontline again.
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So let's paint a spaceship with it, have a very loud rock concert, and crash the ship into the sun.
Maybe we could make a LEGO toy that taught people not to say "DAT tape" (when DAT already stands for "Digital Audio Tape").
People who optimize for lines faster than 56K are just plain lazy. Do you think people would have bothered creating heavier and heavier forms of compression for media if it weren't for the slowness of our connections? As the speed bar gets raised, people lose sight of the challenge of packing a crapload of content into a quickly downloaded page.
This happens in everything. Look at computer game designers who fancy up essentially 2-D games with resource hogging 3-D graphics. Look at the apathy with which consumers approach fuel economy of vehicles in the US because gas is so abundant and cheap.
The goal must be to think big in a small box if we are going to challenge ourselves.
Has anyone programmed a hidden bomb that must be disabled every couple times you boot up?
Yeah, it's called Windows.
See, what you're missing is that New York really needs brick walkways to raise the morale of the citizens. With better walkways, there won't be as much of a problem with people leaving them in order to jaywalk (apparently a huge problem in the city). In addition, there aren't enough things in the Big Apple named Bloomberg and that must be corrected.
This, combined with Intel's next generation of processor serial numbers and Microsoft's online product activation essentially guarantees that someone at tech support can laugh as your computer secretly downloads updates that don't work to the exact person who registered the product.
The future of corporate disaster has arrived at last.
I'm still waiting for it to work the other way around.
Being able to see what's on my computer through a device strapped to my head has limited application in my world. What I'm looking for is the computer to see what I see through a device strapped to my head.
The smartasses among us will be quick to point out that this technology exists and that it's called a camera but I need something smaller than that.
Photography has always suffered from the need to tote around equipment and, while that equipment has become smaller and smaller, there is always the need to remove it, ready it, and take the shot. I believe that once a camera is developed that is small enough to fit comfortably over the eye, that doesn't impair the users vision, and that can be activated with a minimal amount of effort, we will see a greater number of pictures which right now are just missed opportunities in viewers minds. Art, science, news; everything will benefit from the ability to instantly shutter away a picture for later use. We shouldn't be projecting in, we should be looking out.
Cheating in single player games isn't the threat here. With the possible exception of developing an addiction to workarounds and codes that could carry into online play, cheating by yourself is no threat to anyone but yourself.
I've heard a number of game designers whine about people using codes to diminish the challenge and subsequently the reward of games they put together. It seems silly. Take Time Splitters for the PS2. Free Radical didn't see fit to put any codes into the game in order to skip through the built in reward system. Players must beat sections of the game to reveal hidden characters, levels, and play modes. While I don't mind playing through the game for these extras, I've had a number of friends grow tired of the game--mostly thanks to the limited number of playable multiplayer maps at the outset--because they didn't have the patience. Free Radical shot themselves in the foot in my eyes because the lazy people in the market passed on the game after renting it or playing it at a friend's house and seeing how much work they would have to do to get anything cool.
What game designers have to realize is that there exist two crowds: those who are happy to have a reward for all their hard work and those who want all the fun stuff now. Both of them spend money on games and both crowds must be appeased. And please spare me the argument that the presence of codes encourages everyone to cheat and cheapens the morals of good players. My friend Eric and I are both from the former crowd of gameplayers and we often have two saved games on our memory cards: one with our hard-won games and one with all the cheats enabled that we whip out for the party.
My concern is how the 2M (or MMOG) FPS games will be. At E3, I was witness to around half a dozen with varying levels of coolness. The best (in this reviewers humble opinion) was Planetside from Sony Online. I'm still wiping away the tears of joy after playing a little deathmatch with the other goers and piloting a buggy with a copilot manning the guns. Still, will even the best 2M FPS keep my attention? I keep asking myself, "Will I want to frag 500 pigs an hour if the scenario never ends?" Think about it. There are suddenly no rounds or matches, just an ongoing war that, in most of the games I saw, never ends. You die, then you just warp back into base and charge for the frontline again.