The Zelda debate wasn't a Realism Vs. Style debate. Zelda came out when I was 6. Listen to the music. The dungeons were dark and harrowing. The monsters as scary as they could be. Invincible Knights, Wizrobes that popped out of thin air to hit you, the Feared shield eating Like-Like's. All the later Zelda games reinforced this concept of you were exploring into enemy teritory and were mostly on your own. Most had at least half the game in a world controlled by evil. The Cell-shading trounced the long time fans expectations of what a Zelda game was. It wasn't that it wasn't real enough it was that the FEEL of the game created by the STYLE was different from the other Zeldas. It look like and felt in certain ways what happens when certain anime get translated over and they edit out all the blood and change all the guns to cork guns. It wasn't quite that bad of a perversion but it still didn't feel right. You weren't isolated. You didn't have a feel of the entire world versus you. Those feelings defined the Zelda experience more then any graphics. Yet the graphic style didn't convey them. Basically Wind Waker was a good game, but it wasn't really a Zelda game. Calling it Zelda was a marketing ploy.
*cue sarcasm* Let's replace a quasi-governmental body have trouble reacting to the growth of the internet due to it being formed during the internet's infancy with another quasi-governmental body formed in the aftermath of WW2. YA, That'll work. *end sarcasm* Seriously, the UM works well in certain areas (specifically oversight of election and aid program), but is NOT a good foundation for any type of Hegemony. Hegemony meaning any body that makes rules for the entire planet with power to enforce them over local or national preference. Point being UN is not a good foundation as it was designed to prevent a nuclear WW3 as a treaty organization. I'm not saying it's bad but it's a very silly fit we looked at properly
Do quite the opposite of a Boycott. Right now the Chinese is caught in a catch-22. They want to maintain their totalirian control over society yet desire more then anything the Almighty Dollar. However, our economy REQUIRES financial freedom. You think those that become millionaires from paupers in China won't demand more and more control over the government? It's Happening but it's happening slowly. I'm personally cautiously optimistic about China. Yet, I woouldn't consider moving anytime soon.
You Crazy Dams are some of the greatest enviromental disasters EVER. Look what the the large Nile dam (can't remember the name) did to the fishing industry of the Nile delta. I can go on for days. Hydroelectric power is definately not GREEN an any sense of the word. Look at some of D.N.A's evnivromental books and paper for more info. Yes, the inpact can be significantly reduced, but you might as well strip mine for a similiar effect. Just because it doesn't cause "greenhouse" gases doesn't make it eviromentally safe.
I doubt this will have any real effect good or bad on our Judicial system. The jury members must be agreed upon by both the prosecutors and defendents lawyers. As a result, any person choosen as a jury member will be someone BOTH sides think can be PERSUADED with their ARGUEMENTS. Evidence has NO place in the courtroom because if a potential jurer makes a decision based ONLY on the evidence then one side would see that the evidence is against him and not allow that person on the jury. ANY jury trial is decided COMPLETELY by the skill of lawyers. This is the very fundamental flaw in our Court Systems.
On SouthPark I'll definately agree with you, but honestly the Daily Show isn't really much better then a regular news show. However, they are completely honest about their shortcomings. They don't pretend to be completely fair. They say they go after whatever they find funniest. In end the end they are only as informative as a regular news show, BUT they don't present it in a way that makes it seem like their bit is in anyway a definitive presentation of the subject. This put them miles above a regular new show.
Southpark's main target has always been hipocrisy in America. I've often thought of it as the most moral show on television. It takes some hipocrisy, blows it up to massive sizes, and shows it turning on itself.
Yes, that is a problem, but it's not a show stopper. Seriously, there were much better ways of handling it. Like mainly increase the NPC to PC ratio. What would the ratio of those with force powers to those without to make the game proper to the material? let's say 5 thousand to one. Your talking about a game that spans galaxies is a population of 5 billion really all that out of place? That's assuming that all one million players wer on the same server. Besides it be cool if it wasn't every time you threw a stick it hit a PC in a MMORPG. I'm sick of these fake playgrounds. Yes, I realize there is a lot more issues, but they can be resolved. I CALL FOR EQUAL RIGHTS FOR NPCS.
Most people aren't thieves. The merely want their content delivered the way they want it. It should be simple for a company to offer a better downloading experience then a decentralized p2p. I'd be willing to pay if the offer me more value then p2p programs. By that I mean easier searchs, high quality files, ability to find related music, and better availibility. RIAA has really been doing nothing but shooting itself it's foot and watching it bleed.
The real story is not that Anime is breaking mainstream, but 'Video On Demand' is Breaking mainstream. This channel is a V.O.D. Cable companies are sliding around the age old network/ad revenue streams and starting to except new models, at least for cliques. Unlike the RIAA and MPAA they aren't killing their businesses by refusing to provide customers with the content delivery systems they crave. Sure, It's on the edge where they're not hitting traditional streams, but then again Linux isn't competing head to head with Windows until it soften them up either. There me be hope for the world after all.
You should be looking at it taking at least a year to get rid of most of your MS software. Start with proprietary formats. Send memos against using.doc and microsoft formats. Retrain them on how to save in like PDF or something. Go then to cross platform apps. Look to Open/StarOffice. Don't forget one of the selling points of open source is the extra influence you have over the apps development. Become a laison between your end users and the developers. You will become invaluable to both. Add the software on their computers but don't delete the old. During a crisis they will feel better with the old. Slowly train them on it one-on-one. Remember you want Mozilla or Opera to replace their browser. Show them the joys of Tab Browseng and they won't go back to IE. Outlook can be a stickler if your using it for project management. Look at Evolution but I'm not sure if it's been ported to Windows yet. Have everyone make a list of every app they use down to even media players. Slowly, tick them off one by one. The OS goes last. However, any new hires should be trained on a complete system. You are already paying for their adjustment time. Lead your people slowly; don't push anything on them and the productivity drop, do to the change, will be small.
Look consider college if just for the social aspect. Let me put it this way I went straight out of High school to a low-end tech job and worked my way up. Sure, I'm farther now then if I went to college, but I'm 22 and haven't had a date in 5 years. I know no one my own age and rarely relate to those I do know. So basically I have to reinvent myself or stay alone the rest of my life. Not Fun. There are unforeseen consequences to breaking the mold.
He got $422,000. Can you even Buy SoftImage for that price? I don't have the numbers on me here but I seriously doubt it. At least not outfit an office with that much. Shoot Maya and Max can top 50 grand per workstation. They are not even near SoftImage's price range as it's directed mainly towards Hollywood.
If you have someone who is running into problems with certain sections of your license perhaps you should have them come up with a proposal for a license. After all if they want to use your code but have problems with certain sections of the code then they will know how to rewrite it so they can use it. Your probably not going to find a license that gives you everything you want(without some heavy searching) so collaborate and create your own. Maybe release it under the BSD license in the mean time. Think about what parts you want them to be able modify without sending it back and what parts you want to be feed back to you. It's tough but if you have someone already blocked by the license you can shift the work onto them.
All consoles mainly differ from the pc by their Unified Memory Architecture. This basically means that all of the hardware shares the same memory so the latency between the various parts is nearly zero. Basically your graphics card and cpu use the same memory as your sound card. Xbox just takes the top of the line graphics card and eliminates the bottle-neck of pushing numbers to it. Don't kid your selves the first genaration titles look better then PS2 and weren't designed to truly take advantage of all the xbox can do. Later games will look MUCH better. Of course, the true secret is in the sauce. If the games aren't fun what does it matter how much better they look. It's why nintendo is still alive. They make good games.
You missed my point fact of the matter when you fly your a molecule of water in droplet that falls into a bucket of water that is everyone flying. Now you can see everyone in the drop of water and your perspective is based upon that. You know that a thimble will draw out water from this bucket. Your scared because the thimble is so much greater then your drop, everyone you see and meet. However, it's extremely small compared to the whole. Your say 1 person per hour ok fine but spread that over the entire country, then spread that by the people in your airport, now take the percentage of people you see in said airport. Got it? Your really really small part of the whole you see very little of what goes on. You blow up the number but not your perspective. Perspective is everything.
Ok so it generates 9999 false alarms on ONE BILLION people. The security staff needed for that many people is already in place and these Billion people are spread out across the world I doubt you can find a billion flyers in the U.S. alone. In other words you might have 10 people false alerted a major airport. I can live with that. All they need to do is approach you and hand check your I.D. it's not like they are going to throw you in jail cause a computer picked your face out of the crowd. Matter of fact Terrorists will probably run if approached by security. Simply said as long as they use it as a tool it's fine. Flag the person for an extra long checkout I can deal with extra delays.
This is unconfirmed but the guys on the radio said that is if you can pick up the AM Radio Bagdad that they are claiming the attack is theres. Sorry if it's misinformation, but I'm not a radio geek.
Ok from the reaction to this article and how discouraged everyone is by the modern "news". We all know there is a major problem the question is how to get around it. Frankly it's not as cut and dry as we'd like to think. It takes journalists to make articles rather good or bad. Someone has to pay for them. Online mags had huge venture capitalists that expect a payoff. It's much easier to take small pay-offs and "whore-out" if you will to make a modest initial return then make a hardhitting nonbias reporting and hope your company doesn't fall through the cracks before it becomes so popular that companies will pay for any reviews not just favorable ones. In other words you have to have a firm, establish company in comand of the market in order to have ethics on what your reporting, else you don't make enough money on normal advertising and are squashed by debts. What can we do?
My solution is to have a comunity site like slashdot only based upon moderating the article as opposed to discussing it. Where we see these comments it would be more of:
Red Herring line 3 para 2 he said blah blah blah that doesn't have todo with yada yada yada.
Thus as a comunity we define the actual integrity of articles. Of course I might be dreaming but you never know.
First off cell shading is a bad idea, period. The media must fit the type of game. A 3-d game needs to have depth perception. Zelda has never been succesfully copied that I can tell. The original Zelda was probably the first game I ever played up into all hours of the night. Granted I was 6 and had to sneak away from parents to do this should tell you how much I love this game. Still the Zelda storyline has always been serious, simple yes, but serious. The only way I can compare it is with the original fairy tales, not the disney crap. No, I don't want Zelda to look photo-realistic, but the 3-d style of the N64 one was nearly perfect even if the world was to small. I feel like I've been raped. You've taken a serious part of my youth and made it look like Power Rangers. This as tantamount to me as if Carmack decided to make Doom 3 cell shading. I still play the original Zelda and the snes ones. I'm not ashamed they were serious games.
I agree with the basic premise of the article that those of us concerned with IP of the individual nature should be working toward creating structures that clearly define what's legal and what's not with the large corporations. However, We are a small minority. We are fighting corporations with BILLIONS invested in this area. Our only leverage is our rights which are defended by the Supreme Court. So yes I agree with you, but I think it's as likely to happen as stopping a war by getting everyone to hold hands and sing.
Slashdot Mirror
The Zelda debate wasn't a Realism Vs. Style debate.
Zelda came out when I was 6. Listen to the music. The dungeons were dark and harrowing. The monsters as scary as they could be. Invincible Knights, Wizrobes that popped out of thin air to hit you, the Feared shield eating Like-Like's.
All the later Zelda games reinforced this concept of you were exploring into enemy teritory and were mostly on your own. Most had at least half the game in a world controlled by evil. The Cell-shading trounced the long time fans expectations of what a Zelda game was.
It wasn't that it wasn't real enough it was that the FEEL of the game created by the STYLE was different from the other Zeldas. It look like and felt in certain ways what happens when certain anime get translated over and they edit out all the blood and change all the guns to cork guns. It wasn't quite that bad of a perversion but it still didn't feel right.
You weren't isolated. You didn't have a feel of the entire world versus you. Those feelings defined the Zelda experience more then any graphics. Yet the graphic style didn't convey them. Basically Wind Waker was a good game, but it wasn't really a Zelda game. Calling it Zelda was a marketing ploy.
*cue sarcasm*
Let's replace a quasi-governmental body have trouble reacting to the growth of the internet due to it being formed during the internet's infancy with another quasi-governmental body formed in the aftermath of WW2. YA, That'll work. *end sarcasm*
Seriously, the UM works well in certain areas (specifically oversight of election and aid program), but is NOT a good foundation for any type of Hegemony. Hegemony meaning any body that makes rules for the entire planet with power to enforce them over local or national preference.
Point being UN is not a good foundation as it was designed to prevent a nuclear WW3 as a treaty organization. I'm not saying it's bad but it's a very silly fit we looked at properly
Do quite the opposite of a Boycott. Right now the Chinese is caught in a catch-22. They want to maintain their totalirian control over society yet desire more then anything the Almighty Dollar. However, our economy REQUIRES financial freedom. You think those that become millionaires from paupers in China won't demand more and more control over the government? It's Happening but it's happening slowly. I'm personally cautiously optimistic about China. Yet, I woouldn't consider moving anytime soon.
You Crazy Dams are some of the greatest enviromental disasters EVER. Look what the the large Nile dam (can't remember the name) did to the fishing industry of the Nile delta. I can go on for days. Hydroelectric power is definately not GREEN an any sense of the word. Look at some of D.N.A's evnivromental books and paper for more info. Yes, the inpact can be significantly reduced, but you might as well strip mine for a similiar effect. Just because it doesn't cause "greenhouse" gases doesn't make it eviromentally safe.
I doubt this will have any real effect good or bad on our Judicial system. The jury members must be agreed upon by both the prosecutors and defendents lawyers. As a result, any person choosen as a jury member will be someone BOTH sides think can be PERSUADED with their ARGUEMENTS. Evidence has NO place in the courtroom because if a potential jurer makes a decision based ONLY on the evidence then one side would see that the evidence is against him and not allow that person on the jury. ANY jury trial is decided COMPLETELY by the skill of lawyers. This is the very fundamental flaw in our Court Systems.
On SouthPark I'll definately agree with you, but honestly the Daily Show isn't really much better then a regular news show. However, they are completely honest about their shortcomings. They don't pretend to be completely fair. They say they go after whatever they find funniest. In end the end they are only as informative as a regular news show, BUT they don't present it in a way that makes it seem like their bit is in anyway a definitive presentation of the subject. This put them miles above a regular new show.
Southpark's main target has always been hipocrisy in America. I've often thought of it as the most moral show on television. It takes some hipocrisy, blows it up to massive sizes, and shows it turning on itself.
Yes, that is a problem, but it's not a show stopper.
Seriously, there were much better ways of handling it. Like mainly increase the NPC to PC ratio. What would the ratio of those with force powers to those without to make the game proper to the material? let's say 5 thousand to one. Your talking about a game that spans galaxies is a population of 5 billion really all that out of place? That's assuming that all one million players wer on the same server. Besides it be cool if it wasn't every time you threw a stick it hit a PC in a MMORPG. I'm sick of these fake playgrounds. Yes, I realize there is a lot more issues, but they can be resolved.
I CALL FOR EQUAL RIGHTS FOR NPCS.
Most people aren't thieves. The merely want their content delivered the way they want it. It should be simple for a company to offer a better downloading experience then a decentralized p2p. I'd be willing to pay if the offer me more value then p2p programs. By that I mean easier searchs, high quality files, ability to find related music, and better availibility. RIAA has really been doing nothing but shooting itself it's foot and watching it bleed.
The real story is not that Anime is breaking mainstream, but 'Video On Demand' is Breaking mainstream. This channel is a V.O.D. Cable companies are sliding around the age old network/ad revenue streams and starting to except new models, at least for cliques. Unlike the RIAA and MPAA they aren't killing their businesses by refusing to provide customers with the content delivery systems they crave. Sure, It's on the edge where they're not hitting traditional streams, but then again Linux isn't competing head to head with Windows until it soften them up either. There me be hope for the world after all.
You should be looking at it taking at least a year to get rid of most of your MS software. Start with proprietary formats. Send memos against using .doc and microsoft formats. Retrain them on how to save in like PDF or something. Go then to cross platform apps. Look to Open/StarOffice. Don't forget one of the selling points of open source is the extra influence you have over the apps development. Become a laison between your end users and the developers. You will become invaluable to both. Add the software on their computers but don't delete the old. During a crisis they will feel better with the old. Slowly train them on it one-on-one. Remember you want Mozilla or Opera to replace their browser. Show them the joys of Tab Browseng and they won't go back to IE. Outlook can be a stickler if your using it for project management. Look at Evolution but I'm not sure if it's been ported to Windows yet. Have everyone make a list of every app they use down to even media players. Slowly, tick them off one by one. The OS goes last. However, any new hires should be trained on a complete system. You are already paying for their adjustment time. Lead your people slowly; don't push anything on them and the productivity drop, do to the change, will be small.
Look consider college if just for the social aspect. Let me put it this way I went straight out of High school to a low-end tech job and worked my way up. Sure, I'm farther now then if I went to college, but I'm 22 and haven't had a date in 5 years. I know no one my own age and rarely relate to those I do know. So basically I have to reinvent myself or stay alone the rest of my life. Not Fun. There are unforeseen consequences to breaking the mold.
He got $422,000.
Can you even Buy SoftImage for that price?
I don't have the numbers on me here but I seriously doubt it. At least not outfit an office with that much. Shoot Maya and Max can top 50 grand per workstation. They are not even near SoftImage's price range as it's directed mainly towards Hollywood.
If you have someone who is running into problems with certain sections of your license perhaps you should have them come up with a proposal for a license. After all if they want to use your code but have problems with certain sections of the code then they will know how to rewrite it so they can use it. Your probably not going to find a license that gives you everything you want(without some heavy searching) so collaborate and create your own. Maybe release it under the BSD license in the mean time. Think about what parts you want them to be able modify without sending it back and what parts you want to be feed back to you. It's tough but if you have someone already blocked by the license you can shift the work onto them.
All consoles mainly differ from the pc by their Unified Memory Architecture. This basically means that all of the hardware shares the same memory so the latency between the various parts is nearly zero. Basically your graphics card and cpu use the same memory as your sound card. Xbox just takes the top of the line graphics card and eliminates the bottle-neck of pushing numbers to it. Don't kid your selves the first genaration titles look better then PS2 and weren't designed to truly take advantage of all the xbox can do. Later games will look MUCH better. Of course, the true secret is in the sauce. If the games aren't fun what does it matter how much better they look. It's why nintendo is still alive. They make good games.
You missed my point fact of the matter when you fly your a molecule of water in droplet that falls into a bucket of water that is everyone flying. Now you can see everyone in the drop of water and your perspective is based upon that. You know that a thimble will draw out water from this bucket. Your scared because the thimble is so much greater then your drop, everyone you see and meet. However, it's extremely small compared to the whole. Your say 1 person per hour ok fine but spread that over the entire country, then spread that by the people in your airport, now take the percentage of people you see in said airport. Got it? Your really really small part of the whole you see very little of what goes on. You blow up the number but not your perspective. Perspective is everything.
Ok so it generates 9999 false alarms on ONE BILLION people. The security staff needed for that many people is already in place and these Billion people are spread out across the world I doubt you can find a billion flyers in the U.S. alone. In other words you might have 10 people false alerted a major airport. I can live with that. All they need to do is approach you and hand check your I.D. it's not like they are going to throw you in jail cause a computer picked your face out of the crowd. Matter of fact Terrorists will probably run if approached by security. Simply said as long as they use it as a tool it's fine. Flag the person for an extra long checkout I can deal with extra delays.
This is unconfirmed but the guys on the radio said that is if you can pick up the AM Radio Bagdad that they are claiming the attack is theres. Sorry if it's misinformation, but I'm not a radio geek.
Ok from the reaction to this article and how discouraged everyone is by the modern "news". We all know there is a major problem the question is how to get around it. Frankly it's not as cut and dry as we'd like to think. It takes journalists to make articles rather good or bad. Someone has to pay for them. Online mags had huge venture capitalists that expect a payoff. It's much easier to take small pay-offs and "whore-out" if you will to make a modest initial return then make a hardhitting nonbias reporting and hope your company doesn't fall through the cracks before it becomes so popular that companies will pay for any reviews not just favorable ones. In other words you have to have a firm, establish company in comand of the market in order to have ethics on what your reporting, else you don't make enough money on normal advertising and are squashed by debts. What can we do?
My solution is to have a comunity site like slashdot only based upon moderating the article as opposed to discussing it. Where we see these comments it would be more of:
Red Herring line 3 para 2
he said blah blah blah that doesn't have todo with yada yada yada.
Thus as a comunity we define the actual integrity of articles. Of course I might be dreaming but you never know.
First off cell shading is a bad idea, period. The media must fit the type of game. A 3-d game needs to have depth perception. Zelda has never been succesfully copied that I can tell. The original Zelda was probably the first game I ever played up into all hours of the night. Granted I was 6 and had to sneak away from parents to do this should tell you how much I love this game. Still the Zelda storyline has always been serious, simple yes, but serious. The only way I can compare it is with the original fairy tales, not the disney crap. No, I don't want Zelda to look photo-realistic, but the 3-d style of the N64 one was nearly perfect even if the world was to small. I feel like I've been raped. You've taken a serious part of my youth and made it look like Power Rangers. This as tantamount to me as if Carmack decided to make Doom 3 cell shading. I still play the original Zelda and the snes ones. I'm not ashamed they were serious games.
I agree with the basic premise of the article that those of us concerned with IP of the individual nature should be working toward creating structures that clearly define what's legal and what's not with the large corporations. However, We are a small minority. We are fighting corporations with BILLIONS invested in this area. Our only leverage is our rights which are defended by the Supreme Court. So yes I agree with you, but I think it's as likely to happen as stopping a war by getting everyone to hold hands and sing.