There's certainly layers of nuance and meaning that can get heaped onto human communication. As an aspie geek, it's very easy for me to get what was literally said and completely blow past the subtext. "What's wrong?" "Nothing." "Ok! I'll be on my way." Nooo, that's the nothing that means there's something and I'm supposed to fish.
However, the author really starts heaping on the layers of meaning in his examples. It reminds me of the conference scenes from Dune where whole conversations are intuited from the lifting of an eyebrow. "I knew it, he knew it, he knew I knew he knew it, but he didn't realize I knew he knew I knew he knew it. The twitching of my pinkie finger drew his attention away from my own eyebrow thus concealing my knowledge." Puts me in mind of great bits of comedy where sophisticated and devious characters are speaking obliquely around a topic of great significance, doing so in such a way that they soon realize they're not entirely sure if they're both having the same conversation.
A player could feel more satisfied if it plays against a computer with the same knowledge and resources as a human player, because then it would have to play more like a human. With such cheats, the player will feel annoyed that the computer always attack when he is the weakest, without real knowledge, or can attack with twise the units he know is the maximum at a given time.
What always bothered me in 4x games is that I'd do my initial planet/city grab, then sit tight building defenses while shuddering at the big enemy force groups moving by. (Master of Orion, 32k ship stacks anyone?) Then I'd finally be able to put a death fleet together and relish some big clashes. Guess what? The enemy megafleets go away. Argh! Sometimes I just want to smash metal on metal and watch the sparks fly. It's no fun when the enemy doesn't come out to play. Ultimately the human wants to win but it's not any fun if there's no fight.
The cheapest way for the computer to beat the human is to simply open up multiple fronts that cannot be simultaneously micro-managed. Even maintaining one significant skirmish at the front will prevent the human from micromanaging the base back home.
I've been a fan of RTS from the beginning but haven't seen anything really exciting since Total Anihillation. Maybe I've missed some great ideas but pretty much every one I've tried since has been met with the initial glee of pretty graphics and then the crushing disappointment of seeing AI mistakes that were getting old when Command and Conquer first came out.
Honestly, I found Starcraft 1 to be more compelling for the storyline than the gameplay. SCII seems to be the exact same game with prettier graphics.
I think you will see more of this, the console makers want to extend this "generation" out longer than previous ones. Instead of creating next gen consoles Sony and MS seem to be working on enhancing the current crop with things like this. I just hope that when the next generation does come around that they will be backwards compatible with all the games and addon hardware.
Sounds good to me. The jump from cart-based consoles to the Playstation was completely astounding. Playstation to Playstation 2, also astounding. I haven't seen the PS3 up close but the jump between Xbox and 360 didn't feel as huge. I think they really should have held off another year or two so that the difference would be more astounding. The difference between generations shouldn't feel gradual, it should feel like night and day.
The article doesn't say what level of damage would have resulted from an impact. Anybody want to weigh in?
I remember my old science book said that the one responsible for Meteor Crater was the size of a box car but that's kind of imprecise. It's a question of mass and velocity. The looser, rock-ice bodies tend to explode in the air. We've had a couple historically that were big enough to be mistaken for nuclear tests but they exploded high in the air over remote stretches of ocean.
There were shitty overhead transparency packs from textbook publishers long before Powerpoint. And the worst professor I ever encountered was a Trig guy from Jamaica whose accent was so thick and handwriting so bad he invented a dozen new letters for the Greek alphabet. No, this is like blaming shitty writing on the computer, acting as if shitty writers never worked on typewriters. And before that I'm sure longhand enthusiasts were cursing the scourge of the typewriter for promoting lazy thinking and balderdash. Al Gore's movie was the most impressive powerpoint presentation I've ever seen. (probably helped that it was not on powerpoint but you get the idea.) There are many fascinating presentations on the TED Talks, all using multimedia displays.
Tools can be used and they can be abused. Blame the person using them, not the tool itself. Unless it's Twitter. That's fucking worthless.
Fantasy RPGs are so boring. I can't handle the whole elves and goblins and swinging swords thing. I'm not saying other settings are automatically more interesting but fantasy just seems to tired, kind of like WW2 FPS games. Futuristic settings at least seem to offer more possibilities (even if they're not always used) and what about a modern day RPG? Persona did it with a J-RPG series.
Swinging a sword with a leather clad character versus some dumb goblin makes me want to retch.
Blame that on a lack of imagination on the part of fantasy writers. Tolkien started the trope with "fantasy = medieval Europe with hints of a grander older age that's like Rome -- only there's magic and dragons and shit." While other authors have tried breaking the trope, Europe with dragons and castles remains dominant. Some have tried doing stories like "Ancient Greece as seen in the myths." Some have had success, some not. But it's hard to find fantasy that tries moving the history forward. How about seeing the Renaissance in that Europe analog? How about the introduction of firearms? How about sword and sorcery in the age of piracy? You sort of kind of had a sense of that in the Pirates of the Caribbean movie with magic being real but why not go nuts with it? You've got your civilized races from across the sea trying to conquer a new continent. The native empires have strong warriors but are turned against each other allowing for a divide and conquer approach. So you have the fall of great magic-using civilizations, rouges and scoundrels and adventurers scrambling for treasure. You've got gunpowder, you've got swords, you've got magic and humanoid beasties and possibly flying feathered serpents to go along with the dragons.
Of course, there are the more notable scifi efforts like Shadowrun, directly transplating a D&D sensibility into a cyberpunk setting. You also have Warhammer 40k which takes the Tolkien by way of D&D world of Warhammer and puts it into space.
They really have no idea what you're talking about
on
Reporting To Executives
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I don't mean to sound flippant or like a cocky IT jerk but they really have no idea what you're talking about. You'll have to translate it into terms they can understand.
In my company, the issue we're looking at is trying to quantify the value of IT. What management does not understand it devalues. So there's a bunch of geeks in a room doing shit. But what does it mean for the bottom line? Just filing reports on trouble tickets doesn't do the job. One ticket could be for showing a person where their start menu disappeared to and another could represent an continuing problem that took a hundred hours of work to resolve.
Staying until 2am to fix a problem in the server room doesn't count for diddly if all anyone sees of you in public is you being rude to a secretary for losing her word icon. That's all that will be remembered.
"An entire generation is growing up, if we don't figure out how to change that behavior so it respects copyright and subscription revenue on the part of distributors, we're going to wake up and see cord cutting."
I read that as: "Bitch! They's people walkin' round out there with mah money in they's pocket! Get out there and sell mo' pussy!"
I have a 17-yr old cousin and it's interesting to see what's on her playlist. It ranges from Black-Eyed Peas to Sinatra. The Red Hot Chili Peppers are her favorite band. Her 11-yr old sister is a giant Beatles fan. They get their music via itunes and a few CD rips and their range is incredibly eclectic.
When I was between those ages my selection was a lot more limited due to finances and exposure to music. I didn't have the money to buy stuff I wasn't absolutely sure I was going to like and so my horizons never really got opened until the net and napster. I was able to find out about bands to look for with the net and then napster allowed me to sample new genres without ever leaving home.
Our central IT dept gives us something like 100MB of quota on the Exchange server. Running out of quota? The official advice is 'save your stuff in a PST file'.
Of course you can't save your PST on the IT dept-supplied backed-up network drive because MS say "don't do that". So people end up with PST files on unbacked-up local storage on a particular machine...
I feel your pain.
I'm completely sold on the utility of a product like Exchange/Outlook but Microsoft's implementation is sorely lacking. IT complains about people wanting to use their email like a file folder but hell, why not? Disk space is disk space. And offloading old mail into PST's just means you're more likely to lose things. And Microsoft's built-in search has been problematic at best. And we're not even yet talking about the backend difficulties of archiving to satisfy data retention policies.
There is massive room for improvement in the world of Exchange. The interface for end-users is clunky and many things are counter-intuitive. Google is making severe inroads into this very kind of collaborative environment, better than Exchange, better than Sharepoint. The competition should be a good thing.
The Mayans actually had dates carved into stylae which took place long, long after 2012. For example: For example, on the west panel at the Temple of Inscriptions in Palenque, a section of the text projects into the future to the 80th Calendar Round (CR) 'anniversary' of the famous Palenque ruler K'inich Janaab' Pakal's accession to the throne (Pakal's accession occurred on a Calendar Round date 5 Lamat 1 Mol, at Long Count 9.9.2.4.8 equivalent to 27 July 615 CE).[12] It does this by commencing with Pakal's birthdate 9.8.9.13.0 8 Ajaw 13 Pop (24 March 603 CE) and adding to it the Distance Number 10.11.10.5.8.[13] This calculation arrives at the 80th Calendar Round since his accession, a day that also has a CR date of 5 Lamat 1 Mol, but which lies over 4,000 years in the future from Pakal's time--the day 21 October in the year 4772. The inscription notes that this day would fall eight days after the completion of the 1st piktun [since the creation or zero date of the Long Count system], where the piktun is the next-highest order above the b'ak'tun in the Long Count. If the completion date of that piktun--13 October 4772--were to be written out in Long Count notation, it could be represented as 1.0.0.0.0.0. The 80th CR anniversary date, eight days later, would be 1.0.0.0.0.8 5 Lamat 1 Mol.
Word of mouth amongst friends. Local game/comicbook shop poster boards.
But do you remember how inaccurate that sort of thing was? And depending upon how gullible you were when you heard the story... This is how urban legends spread. Remember how Rod Stewart had to be taken to the hospital and had his stomach pumped because it was full of like three gallons of human semen? It's so true! There's no such thing as Snopes so you have to believe me on this one. My cousin was an orderly at the hospital where it happened.
I'm always struck by my pre-Internet memories, because I have no recollection of how I learned timely, geek-related facts. I was a huge Trek fan in high school, and I knew all about conventions and movie plans and whatnot. I'm sure I got some of it from BBS's, and I must have subscribed to some 'zines, but how did I ever find those without - not just without the Internet, but without ubiquitous search?
The search thing really is amazing. The first band I really got into was Rush. I'd read the liner notes and see the names but most of the inside stuff was completely unknown. I probably would have found it in rock zines if I'd only known where to find them. Who was the Ayn Rand referenced in 2112? No idea. Hit the wiki page for Rush and suddenly I've got all the info hyperlinked. Rand is an objectivist blowhard, Red Barchetta was based on a scifi novel, Neal Peart took a road trip with the original author years after the song was written, did you know that a barchetta is a type of Italian sports auto? And when you go searching for Rush online you'll discover some band doing a cover of one of their songs. Wow, who knew? And suddenly that's the entry point for discovering more music to enjoy. Doing a web search on the Cthulhu Mythos led me to both Therion and the Darkest of the Hillside Thickets. And here I thought the only Lovecraftian music out there was either atonal flutes piping away or Erich Zahn.
I love how it becomes easy to find how things are so interconnected. World history always did us a disservice because each region of the world was discussed as if it were kept in complete isolation from all the rest. This is the Middle East. This is Europe. Here's Africa. Here's the story of this culture. But while you're tackling each separately, you never have any appreciation for how everything is running concurrently, the flow of culture and ideas.
Part of it may just be that the tech world as a whole has transformed from what it was in the mid-nineties. Back then, everything was awe-inspiring and amazing in the tech world, and now it's all pretty pedestrian, we've become quite jaded.
It still is. Age and experience has shown you how to find where faults and flaws are. Childlike awe is easy to come by as a child. As an adult, you have to work at it, knowing the bullshit for what it is but not letting it ruin your appreciation for everything else.
I find Microsoft's willingness to squeeze for storage interesting in two respects: One, it suggests a very high level of optimism about their position in the market. Two, it suggests that they don't much care about, or aren't making much money from, downloadable offerings for the Xbox(or that they view those offerings as being extremely compelling and likely to drive consumer behavior).
Agreed. I find their position pretty much inexplicable. Purchased games can eat up a gig or two easily. Install a DVD-based game on the HDD for faster access? Gigs and gigs are lost. My version has the 20gb drive. How exactly do they expect me to download HD movies, even if they're self-deleting rentals? There's just no space left. And I can't save games onto non-registered memory, nonono. The only thing my USB stick is good for is throwing on content I want to view, but only if it's encoded in a format Xbox will accept.
The whole understanding of Microsoft's strategy back in the days of the first Xbox is that video games were the entry point for becoming the media portal in the living room. You start with games, then include the player for physical media (DVD replacements being on the horizon at the time), then eventually get the streaming media and it's Xbox for everything connected to the TV a decade down the line. Games, movies, TV shows, music, digital distribution of all of it, plus it's your living room internet portal, they were going to have it sewn up. Well, if that's the idea, why the hell weren't they giving away gigantic drives with the 360? Subsidize the shit out of it, you want people downloading stuff! But that didn't happen. They've got a nice albeit overpriced storefront chock full of things to download and there's just not enough room to do much with it. Fail? I think so.
Back when Tomb Raider 1 came out people were saying "Wow, for the price of just the graphics card to play this on my PC I could get a Playstation. No-brainer, man." And for quite some time this really was the truth of it. Well, for the price of what it takes to have a tricked out 360, you could get a gaming machine! Sure, not something completely insane and overpriced like Alienware but certainly something that's open-architecture with less bullshit. I picked up a 360 with the intention of just playing games on it, not looking to do anything more but I've actually gotten annoyed seeing all the things they could be doing with it but have failed at. None of that stuff fit their business model it seems.
*Movie X* was such an influential part of my childhood. You can't just take *X* hours of a series and cram it into a movie without losing everything magical about it. There's just too much compromise moving from *medium X* to the movies. And changing *minor element X* to *minor element Y* just proves that point. This is one movie I will definitely claim not to see. The graphics look pretty good though.
Fuck *X*. I can't believe you like that shit. Epic n00bage.
It was the "citizenry incapable of evaluating arguments and ignorant of history" aka "the average person" who kept *them* in check - the "useful idiots" as Lennon so lovingly referred to them were born out of western higher education.
No, I'm pretty sure he called them fans. But Ringo was always a bit of a dick.
Slashdot Mirror
There's certainly layers of nuance and meaning that can get heaped onto human communication. As an aspie geek, it's very easy for me to get what was literally said and completely blow past the subtext. "What's wrong?" "Nothing." "Ok! I'll be on my way." Nooo, that's the nothing that means there's something and I'm supposed to fish.
However, the author really starts heaping on the layers of meaning in his examples. It reminds me of the conference scenes from Dune where whole conversations are intuited from the lifting of an eyebrow. "I knew it, he knew it, he knew I knew he knew it, but he didn't realize I knew he knew I knew he knew it. The twitching of my pinkie finger drew his attention away from my own eyebrow thus concealing my knowledge." Puts me in mind of great bits of comedy where sophisticated and devious characters are speaking obliquely around a topic of great significance, doing so in such a way that they soon realize they're not entirely sure if they're both having the same conversation.
A player could feel more satisfied if it plays against a computer with the same knowledge and resources as a human player, because then it would have to play more like a human. With such cheats, the player will feel annoyed that the computer always attack when he is the weakest, without real knowledge, or can attack with twise the units he know is the maximum at a given time.
What always bothered me in 4x games is that I'd do my initial planet/city grab, then sit tight building defenses while shuddering at the big enemy force groups moving by. (Master of Orion, 32k ship stacks anyone?) Then I'd finally be able to put a death fleet together and relish some big clashes. Guess what? The enemy megafleets go away. Argh! Sometimes I just want to smash metal on metal and watch the sparks fly. It's no fun when the enemy doesn't come out to play. Ultimately the human wants to win but it's not any fun if there's no fight.
Let's get some of them illegal pr0n bots and install them on MPAA computers, see how they like dealing with the shit end of the stick.
The cheapest way for the computer to beat the human is to simply open up multiple fronts that cannot be simultaneously micro-managed. Even maintaining one significant skirmish at the front will prevent the human from micromanaging the base back home.
I've been a fan of RTS from the beginning but haven't seen anything really exciting since Total Anihillation. Maybe I've missed some great ideas but pretty much every one I've tried since has been met with the initial glee of pretty graphics and then the crushing disappointment of seeing AI mistakes that were getting old when Command and Conquer first came out.
Honestly, I found Starcraft 1 to be more compelling for the storyline than the gameplay. SCII seems to be the exact same game with prettier graphics.
One begins with F and the other with O
Felch Orangutans? Outre and offensive. I like it.
I think you will see more of this, the console makers want to extend this "generation" out longer than previous ones. Instead of creating next gen consoles Sony and MS seem to be working on enhancing the current crop with things like this. I just hope that when the next generation does come around that they will be backwards compatible with all the games and addon hardware.
Sounds good to me. The jump from cart-based consoles to the Playstation was completely astounding. Playstation to Playstation 2, also astounding. I haven't seen the PS3 up close but the jump between Xbox and 360 didn't feel as huge. I think they really should have held off another year or two so that the difference would be more astounding. The difference between generations shouldn't feel gradual, it should feel like night and day.
The article doesn't say what level of damage would have resulted from an impact. Anybody want to weigh in?
I remember my old science book said that the one responsible for Meteor Crater was the size of a box car but that's kind of imprecise. It's a question of mass and velocity. The looser, rock-ice bodies tend to explode in the air. We've had a couple historically that were big enough to be mistaken for nuclear tests but they exploded high in the air over remote stretches of ocean.
... and why does the first link in the summary go to very very NSFW porn?
Explain what SFW porn is, please.
There were shitty overhead transparency packs from textbook publishers long before Powerpoint. And the worst professor I ever encountered was a Trig guy from Jamaica whose accent was so thick and handwriting so bad he invented a dozen new letters for the Greek alphabet. No, this is like blaming shitty writing on the computer, acting as if shitty writers never worked on typewriters. And before that I'm sure longhand enthusiasts were cursing the scourge of the typewriter for promoting lazy thinking and balderdash. Al Gore's movie was the most impressive powerpoint presentation I've ever seen. (probably helped that it was not on powerpoint but you get the idea.) There are many fascinating presentations on the TED Talks, all using multimedia displays.
Tools can be used and they can be abused. Blame the person using them, not the tool itself. Unless it's Twitter. That's fucking worthless.
Fantasy RPGs are so boring. I can't handle the whole elves and goblins and swinging swords thing. I'm not saying other settings are automatically more interesting but fantasy just seems to tired, kind of like WW2 FPS games. Futuristic settings at least seem to offer more possibilities (even if they're not always used) and what about a modern day RPG? Persona did it with a J-RPG series.
Swinging a sword with a leather clad character versus some dumb goblin makes me want to retch.
Blame that on a lack of imagination on the part of fantasy writers. Tolkien started the trope with "fantasy = medieval Europe with hints of a grander older age that's like Rome -- only there's magic and dragons and shit." While other authors have tried breaking the trope, Europe with dragons and castles remains dominant. Some have tried doing stories like "Ancient Greece as seen in the myths." Some have had success, some not. But it's hard to find fantasy that tries moving the history forward. How about seeing the Renaissance in that Europe analog? How about the introduction of firearms? How about sword and sorcery in the age of piracy? You sort of kind of had a sense of that in the Pirates of the Caribbean movie with magic being real but why not go nuts with it? You've got your civilized races from across the sea trying to conquer a new continent. The native empires have strong warriors but are turned against each other allowing for a divide and conquer approach. So you have the fall of great magic-using civilizations, rouges and scoundrels and adventurers scrambling for treasure. You've got gunpowder, you've got swords, you've got magic and humanoid beasties and possibly flying feathered serpents to go along with the dragons.
Of course, there are the more notable scifi efforts like Shadowrun, directly transplating a D&D sensibility into a cyberpunk setting. You also have Warhammer 40k which takes the Tolkien by way of D&D world of Warhammer and puts it into space.
I don't mean to sound flippant or like a cocky IT jerk but they really have no idea what you're talking about. You'll have to translate it into terms they can understand.
In my company, the issue we're looking at is trying to quantify the value of IT. What management does not understand it devalues. So there's a bunch of geeks in a room doing shit. But what does it mean for the bottom line? Just filing reports on trouble tickets doesn't do the job. One ticket could be for showing a person where their start menu disappeared to and another could represent an continuing problem that took a hundred hours of work to resolve.
Staying until 2am to fix a problem in the server room doesn't count for diddly if all anyone sees of you in public is you being rude to a secretary for losing her word icon. That's all that will be remembered.
So are deaf people going to sue Sony for not signing bands that cater to the hearing impaired?
I'm all for promoting access for the disabled but there's just some things that can't be done no matter how many lawsuits you file.
"An entire generation is growing up, if we don't figure out how to change that behavior so it respects copyright and subscription revenue on the part of distributors, we're going to wake up and see cord cutting."
I read that as: "Bitch! They's people walkin' round out there with mah money in they's pocket! Get out there and sell mo' pussy!"
I have a 17-yr old cousin and it's interesting to see what's on her playlist. It ranges from Black-Eyed Peas to Sinatra. The Red Hot Chili Peppers are her favorite band. Her 11-yr old sister is a giant Beatles fan. They get their music via itunes and a few CD rips and their range is incredibly eclectic.
When I was between those ages my selection was a lot more limited due to finances and exposure to music. I didn't have the money to buy stuff I wasn't absolutely sure I was going to like and so my horizons never really got opened until the net and napster. I was able to find out about bands to look for with the net and then napster allowed me to sample new genres without ever leaving home.
Sorry, but your "lolz" make you unqualified to comment on any serious matter and be taken seriously.
And the stick up your ass prevents you from appreciating the "lolz." My condolences.
Our central IT dept gives us something like 100MB of quota on the Exchange server. Running out of quota? The official advice is 'save your stuff in a PST file'.
Of course you can't save your PST on the IT dept-supplied backed-up network drive because MS say "don't do that". So people end up with PST files on unbacked-up local storage on a particular machine...
I feel your pain.
I'm completely sold on the utility of a product like Exchange/Outlook but Microsoft's implementation is sorely lacking. IT complains about people wanting to use their email like a file folder but hell, why not? Disk space is disk space. And offloading old mail into PST's just means you're more likely to lose things. And Microsoft's built-in search has been problematic at best. And we're not even yet talking about the backend difficulties of archiving to satisfy data retention policies.
There is massive room for improvement in the world of Exchange. The interface for end-users is clunky and many things are counter-intuitive. Google is making severe inroads into this very kind of collaborative environment, better than Exchange, better than Sharepoint. The competition should be a good thing.
I call bs...whenever an attractive woman walks by smelling like she just stepped out of the shower I have only immoral thoughts.
The summary is talking about ethics. They said nothing about moral relativity. :)
The Mayans actually had dates carved into stylae which took place long, long after 2012. For example:
For example, on the west panel at the Temple of Inscriptions in Palenque, a section of the text projects into the future to the 80th Calendar Round (CR) 'anniversary' of the famous Palenque ruler K'inich Janaab' Pakal's accession to the throne (Pakal's accession occurred on a Calendar Round date 5 Lamat 1 Mol, at Long Count 9.9.2.4.8 equivalent to 27 July 615 CE).[12] It does this by commencing with Pakal's birthdate 9.8.9.13.0 8 Ajaw 13 Pop (24 March 603 CE) and adding to it the Distance Number 10.11.10.5.8.[13] This calculation arrives at the 80th Calendar Round since his accession, a day that also has a CR date of 5 Lamat 1 Mol, but which lies over 4,000 years in the future from Pakal's time--the day 21 October in the year 4772. The inscription notes that this day would fall eight days after the completion of the 1st piktun [since the creation or zero date of the Long Count system], where the piktun is the next-highest order above the b'ak'tun in the Long Count. If the completion date of that piktun--13 October 4772--were to be written out in Long Count notation, it could be represented as 1.0.0.0.0.0. The 80th CR anniversary date, eight days later, would be 1.0.0.0.0.8 5 Lamat 1 Mol.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_Long_Count_calendar#2012_and_the_Long_Count [wikipedia.org]
I read all that hearing Sheldon's voice in my head.
Based on the design, it looks like slashdot is marking the occasion too....what....it always looks like this?
I don't even want to know what Idle is commemorating.
Word of mouth amongst friends. Local game/comicbook shop poster boards.
But do you remember how inaccurate that sort of thing was? And depending upon how gullible you were when you heard the story... This is how urban legends spread. Remember how Rod Stewart had to be taken to the hospital and had his stomach pumped because it was full of like three gallons of human semen? It's so true! There's no such thing as Snopes so you have to believe me on this one. My cousin was an orderly at the hospital where it happened.
I'm always struck by my pre-Internet memories, because I have no recollection of how I learned timely, geek-related facts. I was a huge Trek fan in high school, and I knew all about conventions and movie plans and whatnot. I'm sure I got some of it from BBS's, and I must have subscribed to some 'zines, but how did I ever find those without - not just without the Internet, but without ubiquitous search?
The search thing really is amazing. The first band I really got into was Rush. I'd read the liner notes and see the names but most of the inside stuff was completely unknown. I probably would have found it in rock zines if I'd only known where to find them. Who was the Ayn Rand referenced in 2112? No idea. Hit the wiki page for Rush and suddenly I've got all the info hyperlinked. Rand is an objectivist blowhard, Red Barchetta was based on a scifi novel, Neal Peart took a road trip with the original author years after the song was written, did you know that a barchetta is a type of Italian sports auto? And when you go searching for Rush online you'll discover some band doing a cover of one of their songs. Wow, who knew? And suddenly that's the entry point for discovering more music to enjoy. Doing a web search on the Cthulhu Mythos led me to both Therion and the Darkest of the Hillside Thickets. And here I thought the only Lovecraftian music out there was either atonal flutes piping away or Erich Zahn.
I love how it becomes easy to find how things are so interconnected. World history always did us a disservice because each region of the world was discussed as if it were kept in complete isolation from all the rest. This is the Middle East. This is Europe. Here's Africa. Here's the story of this culture. But while you're tackling each separately, you never have any appreciation for how everything is running concurrently, the flow of culture and ideas.
Part of it may just be that the tech world as a whole has transformed from what it was in the mid-nineties. Back then, everything was awe-inspiring and amazing in the tech world, and now it's all pretty pedestrian, we've become quite jaded.
It still is. Age and experience has shown you how to find where faults and flaws are. Childlike awe is easy to come by as a child. As an adult, you have to work at it, knowing the bullshit for what it is but not letting it ruin your appreciation for everything else.
I find Microsoft's willingness to squeeze for storage interesting in two respects: One, it suggests a very high level of optimism about their position in the market. Two, it suggests that they don't much care about, or aren't making much money from, downloadable offerings for the Xbox(or that they view those offerings as being extremely compelling and likely to drive consumer behavior).
Agreed. I find their position pretty much inexplicable. Purchased games can eat up a gig or two easily. Install a DVD-based game on the HDD for faster access? Gigs and gigs are lost. My version has the 20gb drive. How exactly do they expect me to download HD movies, even if they're self-deleting rentals? There's just no space left. And I can't save games onto non-registered memory, nonono. The only thing my USB stick is good for is throwing on content I want to view, but only if it's encoded in a format Xbox will accept.
The whole understanding of Microsoft's strategy back in the days of the first Xbox is that video games were the entry point for becoming the media portal in the living room. You start with games, then include the player for physical media (DVD replacements being on the horizon at the time), then eventually get the streaming media and it's Xbox for everything connected to the TV a decade down the line. Games, movies, TV shows, music, digital distribution of all of it, plus it's your living room internet portal, they were going to have it sewn up. Well, if that's the idea, why the hell weren't they giving away gigantic drives with the 360? Subsidize the shit out of it, you want people downloading stuff! But that didn't happen. They've got a nice albeit overpriced storefront chock full of things to download and there's just not enough room to do much with it. Fail? I think so.
Back when Tomb Raider 1 came out people were saying "Wow, for the price of just the graphics card to play this on my PC I could get a Playstation. No-brainer, man." And for quite some time this really was the truth of it. Well, for the price of what it takes to have a tricked out 360, you could get a gaming machine! Sure, not something completely insane and overpriced like Alienware but certainly something that's open-architecture with less bullshit. I picked up a 360 with the intention of just playing games on it, not looking to do anything more but I've actually gotten annoyed seeing all the things they could be doing with it but have failed at. None of that stuff fit their business model it seems.
*Movie X* was such an influential part of my childhood. You can't just take *X* hours of a series and cram it into a movie without losing everything magical about it. There's just too much compromise moving from *medium X* to the movies. And changing *minor element X* to *minor element Y* just proves that point. This is one movie I will definitely claim not to see. The graphics look pretty good though.
Fuck *X*. I can't believe you like that shit. Epic n00bage.
It was the "citizenry incapable of evaluating arguments and ignorant of history" aka "the average person" who kept *them* in check - the "useful idiots" as Lennon so lovingly referred to them were born out of western higher education.
No, I'm pretty sure he called them fans. But Ringo was always a bit of a dick.