The median high-definition monitor, despite a larger pixel count, is still smaller than living-room SDTVs.
You mean in terms of total surface area? That's understandable. Typical use of a desktop monitor is from around two feet away; the television is anywhere from 5 to 20 feet away from the couch.
I'm still waiting for the game about Vietnam where the Vietcong are portrayed as covert freedom fighters, and the Americans are the evil imperialists who napalm villages and destroy your countryside with Agent Orange. That's a game I've wanted to play for years, but I'm sure that even after decades, America wouldn't have the stomach for it. I wonder if the same people who want this game to be published would also advocate a Vietnam game like this?
Vietcong did a pretty good job of showing the ambiguity. It wasn't from Charlie's perspective but an American squad. Beautiful jungle scenery, terrifying action, a true sensory immersion. Your character starts out all gung-ho but ends up fairly jaded by the end of the game, feeling all the blood and sacrifice has been for naught.
The fact that you can't see how a game could be a serious depiction of war only says something about your imagination.
It's sort of like saying "How can an action movie be a real-life depiction of violent encounters?" Action movies are unrealistic by nature because they are fantasy. First-person shooters employ the loose rules of reality as action movies with one-man armies, numerous violent encounters emerged from without a scratch or severe injuries that are impossibly shrugged off. Games add to that unreality with health packs, save points, etc.
Movies can try depicting violence realistically but those that do stray from the action genre. Furthermore, there's always a bit of artificiality with script immunity. You know the main character isn't going to die or if he does it's going to be in a dramatically meaningful way towards the end of the film. Imagine how Private Ryan would have felt if big name Tom Hanks got killed on the landing craft the moment the ramp dropped and the story focused on a series of unnamed actors after that, moving from character to character as they were killed and the story took up with the next one. How do you portray that in a game?
I won't say it's impossible to do a serious and realistic war game but it certainly wouldn't resemble any shooter we've ever seen.
It really preserves the assonitic complexity and quality of the packets when they move from your wall to your router. Cheaper cables let noisy bits through that go all wobbly and clog your connection. I hear their new wifi cables are hella expensive but totally worth it.
I dont know why we keep trying to stream stuff to game consoles. I'm guilty of it as well, but why turn a console into a PC when we already have PCs capable of far more, with more freedom and less headaches?
Why pay for enough horsepower to rival a small PC and then pay for another small PC to do what the first chunk of hardware could do itself if only the console manufacturers didn't build walled gardens?
I think the console makers aren't just shooting themselves in the foot but fucking themselves up their own asses. They could make a killing by creating a new model for people to get used to, console as not only game machine but general PC. I suppose that Microsoft's biggest fear is that people will run miro or bittorrent to pull down content instead of paying a bajillionty bucks buying through their console store. And God forbid if they go to Youtube or Hulu to watch.
1) Tap into old school hacker community mentality. 2) Rely on good people to do your large organizations work for free. 3) Degrade your own service. 4) Profit!
Of course peolpe helping each other and a solid community are great, but in the context of this happening in lieu of large for-profit organizations providing quality service? I think not.
Yeah, that pisses me off. I think it's great when a company creates a good enough product that a hacker fanbase can grow up around it but when it's obvious that they're underfunding support just to make a buck, it makes me see red.
I think it's far more reasonable if a for-profit sets up the community tools and does things to compensate the volunteers for their time. Let them get in on early betas, let them talk to the developers, get the warm fuzzies going on. But most corporate types don't think this way. Enthusiastic users are like gold but they usually get shat on. Back when Watchmen was released, the company that did the intro titles released the sequence online. It generated a tremendous volume of popular buzz, goodwill, and word of mouth. You'd think the studios would be happy? No, cease and desist threats went flying.
Personal case in point, picked up a Sansa Fuze player last December. It's billed as mp3 and video with 8gb of storage. Hardware-wise, this thing is brilliant. $99, how could you possibly go wrong? The media converter software. The fucker crashes if you look at it sideways. Conversion takes far too long and there's pages and pages of bug complaints on the user forum, some people advocating the use of third party tools to do a pre-conversion on the vids. Don't even get me started on the codecs. Long story short, I could recommend this product to someone looking for an mp3 player because that's just click and drag but I'd only recommend the video side of it to a techie who enjoys futzing with gadgets. You know Sansa sent that media coder over to some job shop in India and never bothered to fix what they got back.
I've never read the Tower series though I am familiar with it. I'd planned on holding off until he finished the damn thing and then I heard it was a disappointment. I know King likes to write without an outline and this can be both exhilarating and frustrating. The Stand was an amazing book but the ending was a total deus ex cloaca.
I've found that pattern in his books over the years, they're fun journeys but disappointing endings.
The fan reaction to Galactica seems to be very similar to the fan reaction to the Dark Tower -- some people think the ending was perfect but many more are screaming about how it made no sense and didn't hold up. I think this is understandable because King and the BSG writers worked the same way; no outlines, just going where the muse took 'em on a given day. I know there were retcons in both the Tower and BSG that had people wanting to throw things against the wall.
We've also all seen the classical antidepressant commercial. Some guy "hurts everywhere" and "everyone". Then he pops a couple cute little pills and "everywhere" and "everyone" magically stops hurting - whatever problems he may have had with his health or his career or his relationships or his dog are magically cured by those cute little pills.
Never felt more betrayed than by the cold and flu ads. They show someone miserable at night but he pops the meds and the next morning he doesn't even look like he's been sick! I know damn well the super model beer commercial fantasy is more likely to happen than that!
I remember puking my guts out in the early morning and feeling shocked that the pharmaceutical companies would lie to us so brazenly in the commercials. Then I realized just how sick I must be to find this surprising.
It's an interesting decision. By implementing an easy-to-use VM for legacy software they're able to stick to their policies (maintain support for all legacy Win32 software) and on the other hand restructure their operating system with new knowledge. Each time I see news on Windows 7 I can't help but wondering if Microsoft has finally seen the light. There might be hope still!
I'm sick of what seems to be the sudden belief that, unless a game has the most up-to-date graphics and is filled with so-called 'mature' content (which seems to be a euphemism for gallons of blood and swearwords), it's not 'hardcore', and anyone who doesn't play it is a casual gamer by default. Gaming is my main hobby, and I spent the majority of my free time and money on either playing games or other related activities; and yet apparently because I don't own an Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, or a gaming-calibre PC, I'm not one of this self-professed hardcore.
Naw, I think it's more like the difference between a car owner and a gearhead. To my mind, a casual gamer is someone who may own a major system but only plays it a few hours a week or who prefers games that are low commitment. Lots of people play the equivalent of 80's arcade games on their phones. An 80's arcade game could be played for 30 seconds or 30 minutes depending on how good you were but you can walk away at any time. Contrast this with a CRPG from Japan you put 80 hours into.
The other matter is how obsessive people get over a show. I know I always geek out over something I like, getting into the writing, thinking about how it will twist and turn. Other people may approach the same show and say they like it but just sit and passively let the thing go by. They'll keep watching, they may buy the DVD's but you can't really have a conversation about it with them. Casual viewer, in other words.
Casual games can tend to overlap with another category I call party games. You can have several people over and play the game and have fun. You wouldn't do this with a Final Fantasy but even a fighting game is great when you're swapping the controller around with a few friends. These are inclusive games.
The real definition of a hardcore gamer, at least to me, is someone who blows a lot of time and money on gaming and tend to be the most vocal segment of the audience which is why they tend to be catered to by developers. These hardcore types can geek out over cartoony CRPG's just as easily as they can over MURDER GOREFEST APOCALYPSE.
The market these days is bigger than ever. Casual games are expanding the market into new areas, not just cannibalizing existing sales. Look at the car market. There will always be a demand for tiny, minimum cost vehicles. There will be a demand for kid wagons, be it the station wagon, the minivan that replaced it, or the giant dickwad SUV's that came after that. Traditionally sports cars were the dickwad vehicle of choice. People who had the need for a kid wagon but wanted to assert their dickwaddishness got an SUV and satisfied both needs. The station wagon had a bit of a die-off but that was only one way of satisfying the need for a family vehicle. Now that SUV's are on the decline, the latest fad term is crossover vehicle. Sorry, when I hear crossover I think of interstate accidents, "crossed the median and had a head-on collision, killing a family of four."
In today's games market, we are seeing many competing trends. Years back we heard that the shooter was killing the adventure game. Haven't seen too many of them out there recently. But this just means the market is open for the next great adventure game. Someone comes out with that and will make a hit and you'll see a dozen clones the following year. We heard that the consoles were killing computer gaming but not quite. Big budget computer gaming has taken a hit but there's still a market for people who drop $5000 on their electronic penises. But there's still money to be made in computer gaming, just look at how well Steam is doing. What's more accurate to say is that it's the death of the computer game store -- you hardly see any PC games in EB these days, it's all about the consoles.
The other thing everyone was pissing and moaning about is that AAA titles would cost $20 mil and up and everyone would go bankrupt. However, we're seeing low-budget games selling well on the consoles. This can be analogized to movies. We'll watch quirky indie comedies made for $20k and we'll watch the next big action flick made for $200 mil. The existence of one doesn't push out the other.
If anything, I would say that the expanding market will provide more niche opportunities. Back in the 50's, I Love Lucy was watched by what, half the nation? Today's top shows don't have anywhere near those kinds of numbers but the networks are doing just fine. I don't think any future game series will have the same hold on the market like Mario on the NES but I don't think anybody is crying over how GTAIV did.
I'm just hoping something like this will happen in the future.
Biden returning from trip, eases himself down into a chair in the Oval Office.
Obama: Long trip there, Joe? *hands him drink*
Biden: Long trip, long visit, good to be back. Thanks. So, how are things back at the ranch?
Obama: Fine, fine. The girls showed me something fairly remarkable on the internet.
Biden: Kids today, whippersnappers et cetera. What was it, youbook or facespace?
Obama: No, no. Something called bittorrent. Did you know there's all sorts of music online? And you can just download it!
Biden: *looks wary* That's none of that file-sharing, is it?
Obama: No, it's called bittorrent. All the kids are doing it.
Biden: Sure it's not piracy?
Obama: I just ordered our boys to blow the heads off of three pirates off of Somalia. I think I know piracy when I see it.
Biden: Sure it's none of that p2b-er b2a um a2m or whatever it is?
Obama: Nope. Bittorrent.
Biden: Hmph. *takes a closer look* Hey, this is neat. Wonder why the Hollywood guys haven't built something like this.
Meanwhile, in the White House IT office
Tech 1: Hey, looks like someone's using bittorrent.
Tech 2: Damn, I thought we blocked the port. Better fix it now before anyone notices.
Tech 1: Better not. Did you see the IP on that one?
Tech 2: Shit, you're right. I'm not going to be the one to tell the POTUS he can't play. Remember how pissed Cheney got after he spent all that time assuring everyone those emails were safely lost and whoops, we found the backups?
Tech 1: *shudders* Tell me about it. I haven't seen anyone that mad since I "accidentally" deleted Rove's furry scat collection.
This kinda of reminds of the '640KB should be enough for everyone' theory. If everyone is just content surfing the web and writing e-mails, then sure the 'good enough' solution sounds fair, but if 'good enough' also means dealing with a Windows ME experience then no thanks. At the same time what is considered 'good enough' will evolve over time and new solutions are created and user expectations evolve.
That last sentence is the key to the whole debate. There's been wicked kewl shite just over the horizon ever since I've been in computers and for quite a few years beforehand. But we've reached a point where the innovations in software don't really require more horsepower on the user's machine.
If we strictly consider the office work environment, we pretty much had everything we needed with win2k and office2k. There's been no new killer app introduced since then. Probably the only argument to be made is that there's more in excel 2007 than in 2k but those extra goodies came at the price of a lot of crap.
Also bear in mind that the customer base has fragmented tremendously. Computer users used to be a unified market of geeks and business types but now it's as fragmented as the user base for home entertainment. Some people are happy with a small broadcast TV, some people need a thousand cable channels and a 72" screen with all the doodads. Both people are in the same general market but their segments are widely divergent.
Will my 'good enough' computer handle my photo library, my 32MP entry level camera, recognise the faces in my photo collection. This sound like far fetched stuff today, but as these technologies peculate down from high end systems and people get used to the computer doing more of their mind-numbing repetitive tasks, user expectation will adapt and want them in their 'good enough' computers.
Call that ten years from now. I don't have an interest in photography now, probably won't by then, but since you do you'll be happy to upgrade for those features. I know I'll have a different machine by then and will be doing different things. Your mother might still be happy running on your trade-down, it does everything she needs.
In many ways plenty of people are already using 'good enough' computers. Whether they are satisfied with them is a whole other question.
Fifteen years ago most people didn't have a need for web and email so developing that need was pretty big in the first place. Some may never progress beyond that point.
This is usually the way of things. Wanna hazard a guess as to how much food costs at your favorite restaurant? I can guarantee your $12 entree didn't cost even half that much for them at the wholesaler. But the gross on that ain't anywhere near the net. If you want to talk about a contemptible outrage, you're talking about BS like components getting marked up 4x at the big box retailers. Yeah, you get the printer for cost and the $2 data cable for $20.
MOD PARENT UP!!! I'm sick of conservatives rewriting history. The Soviet Union fell on Reagan's watch, therefore he's responsible! And you know what else? MTV came out in the 80's. Thank Reagan for that. When did MTV start sucking and stop playing music? Under Clinton. Fucking liberal, just proves it. And have you noticed how few 9-11's happened under Reagan, never had an asteroid impact or alien invasion. That's because we bankrupted the aliens first!
(I just hope the spies didn't discover the fighter's only weakness, a small thermal exhaust port...)
You mean the tailpipe? The flaw with the plane isn't a matter of engineering, it's that the damn things will be too expensive to risk in combat! Something might break.
I hope this game isn't brought down by bullshit polarized moral choices too. Kill woman in house, don't lose karma. Steal her toaster though, lose karma. Post about it on slashdot, regain karma.
This is after the apocalypse. Nobody's making toasters anymore. Human life is cheap but toasters are priceless.
I'm intrigued by the premise of Fallout but I've heard bad things about broken elements in the game, bugged quests, stuff where you're left trying to read walkthroughs online to figure out how to fix what went wrong. Any patches for this stuff yet?
I am sorry, but I really take offense to this comment. I am a conservative and all of my family and friends are conservative, and none of us are against welfare. We all believe that safety nets are needed because sometimes bad things do happen to people. If I had to guess, you are taking a few quotes from some fringe conservatives and sweeping the rest under the same brush.
What we don't like is the current welfare system that does not encourage people to get off the welfare system. The current system is broken and broken badly.
Thank you, you are different from the conservatives I usually talk to. I'm of the opinion that welfare is necessary but our current implementation is flawed. Usually a conservative criticizing welfare will claim he wants to make it work better but actually wants to simply get rid of it because the very concept infuriates his ideology. My dad is representative of the usual conservative I talk to -- complains bitterly about the spics and niggers on welfare who don't want to do a lick of goddamn work but does not see the irony when he's on social security with military retirement, some scraps of a phone company pension, using the VA and collecting that government check. Somehow the safety net that's keeping him off the streets is bad when it involves other people.
I agree with the poster below me who says the definition of conservative has been twisted beyond recognition, the same way that corrupt Dems in DC have mucked up liberalism, not that the right wing noise machine hasn't helped do violence to the word, using it with the same tone of disgust usually reserved for pedophiles and furries.
Slashdot Mirror
The median high-definition monitor, despite a larger pixel count, is still smaller than living-room SDTVs.
You mean in terms of total surface area? That's understandable. Typical use of a desktop monitor is from around two feet away; the television is anywhere from 5 to 20 feet away from the couch.
I'm still waiting for the game about Vietnam where the Vietcong are portrayed as covert freedom fighters, and the Americans are the evil imperialists who napalm villages and destroy your countryside with Agent Orange. That's a game I've wanted to play for years, but I'm sure that even after decades, America wouldn't have the stomach for it. I wonder if the same people who want this game to be published would also advocate a Vietnam game like this?
Vietcong did a pretty good job of showing the ambiguity. It wasn't from Charlie's perspective but an American squad. Beautiful jungle scenery, terrifying action, a true sensory immersion. Your character starts out all gung-ho but ends up fairly jaded by the end of the game, feeling all the blood and sacrifice has been for naught.
The fact that you can't see how a game could be a serious depiction of war only says something about your imagination.
It's sort of like saying "How can an action movie be a real-life depiction of violent encounters?" Action movies are unrealistic by nature because they are fantasy. First-person shooters employ the loose rules of reality as action movies with one-man armies, numerous violent encounters emerged from without a scratch or severe injuries that are impossibly shrugged off. Games add to that unreality with health packs, save points, etc.
Movies can try depicting violence realistically but those that do stray from the action genre. Furthermore, there's always a bit of artificiality with script immunity. You know the main character isn't going to die or if he does it's going to be in a dramatically meaningful way towards the end of the film. Imagine how Private Ryan would have felt if big name Tom Hanks got killed on the landing craft the moment the ramp dropped and the story focused on a series of unnamed actors after that, moving from character to character as they were killed and the story took up with the next one. How do you portray that in a game?
I won't say it's impossible to do a serious and realistic war game but it certainly wouldn't resemble any shooter we've ever seen.
It really preserves the assonitic complexity and quality of the packets when they move from your wall to your router. Cheaper cables let noisy bits through that go all wobbly and clog your connection. I hear their new wifi cables are hella expensive but totally worth it.
I dont know why we keep trying to stream stuff to game consoles. I'm guilty of it as well, but why turn a console into a PC when we already have PCs capable of far more, with more freedom and less headaches?
Why pay for enough horsepower to rival a small PC and then pay for another small PC to do what the first chunk of hardware could do itself if only the console manufacturers didn't build walled gardens?
I think the console makers aren't just shooting themselves in the foot but fucking themselves up their own asses. They could make a killing by creating a new model for people to get used to, console as not only game machine but general PC. I suppose that Microsoft's biggest fear is that people will run miro or bittorrent to pull down content instead of paying a bajillionty bucks buying through their console store. And God forbid if they go to Youtube or Hulu to watch.
Sheesh... I can't imagine people's behavior online seriously being influenced by some silly "rating" system.
Oh, and by the way... copyright is evil, I support socialism, Microsoft sucks, just kidding I support libertarianism, and OMG ponies!
Don't worry, I downmodded you to prove this doesn't work. *pauses for a moment* Oh, bugger.
1) Tap into old school hacker community mentality.
2) Rely on good people to do your large organizations work for free.
3) Degrade your own service.
4) Profit!
Of course peolpe helping each other and a solid community are great, but in the context of this happening in lieu of large for-profit organizations providing quality service? I think not.
Yeah, that pisses me off. I think it's great when a company creates a good enough product that a hacker fanbase can grow up around it but when it's obvious that they're underfunding support just to make a buck, it makes me see red.
I think it's far more reasonable if a for-profit sets up the community tools and does things to compensate the volunteers for their time. Let them get in on early betas, let them talk to the developers, get the warm fuzzies going on. But most corporate types don't think this way. Enthusiastic users are like gold but they usually get shat on. Back when Watchmen was released, the company that did the intro titles released the sequence online. It generated a tremendous volume of popular buzz, goodwill, and word of mouth. You'd think the studios would be happy? No, cease and desist threats went flying.
Personal case in point, picked up a Sansa Fuze player last December. It's billed as mp3 and video with 8gb of storage. Hardware-wise, this thing is brilliant. $99, how could you possibly go wrong? The media converter software. The fucker crashes if you look at it sideways. Conversion takes far too long and there's pages and pages of bug complaints on the user forum, some people advocating the use of third party tools to do a pre-conversion on the vids. Don't even get me started on the codecs. Long story short, I could recommend this product to someone looking for an mp3 player because that's just click and drag but I'd only recommend the video side of it to a techie who enjoys futzing with gadgets. You know Sansa sent that media coder over to some job shop in India and never bothered to fix what they got back.
I've never read the Tower series though I am familiar with it. I'd planned on holding off until he finished the damn thing and then I heard it was a disappointment. I know King likes to write without an outline and this can be both exhilarating and frustrating. The Stand was an amazing book but the ending was a total deus ex cloaca.
I've found that pattern in his books over the years, they're fun journeys but disappointing endings.
The fan reaction to Galactica seems to be very similar to the fan reaction to the Dark Tower -- some people think the ending was perfect but many more are screaming about how it made no sense and didn't hold up. I think this is understandable because King and the BSG writers worked the same way; no outlines, just going where the muse took 'em on a given day. I know there were retcons in both the Tower and BSG that had people wanting to throw things against the wall.
So, what' your take?
We've also all seen the classical antidepressant commercial. Some guy "hurts everywhere" and "everyone". Then he pops a couple cute little pills and "everywhere" and "everyone" magically stops hurting - whatever problems he may have had with his health or his career or his relationships or his dog are magically cured by those cute little pills.
Never felt more betrayed than by the cold and flu ads. They show someone miserable at night but he pops the meds and the next morning he doesn't even look like he's been sick! I know damn well the super model beer commercial fantasy is more likely to happen than that!
I remember puking my guts out in the early morning and feeling shocked that the pharmaceutical companies would lie to us so brazenly in the commercials. Then I realized just how sick I must be to find this surprising.
It's an interesting decision. By implementing an easy-to-use VM for legacy software they're able to stick to their policies (maintain support for all legacy Win32 software) and on the other hand restructure their operating system with new knowledge. Each time I see news on Windows 7 I can't help but wondering if Microsoft has finally seen the light. There might be hope still!
Rest assured, they will find a way to fuck it up.
I'm sick of what seems to be the sudden belief that, unless a game has the most up-to-date graphics and is filled with so-called 'mature' content (which seems to be a euphemism for gallons of blood and swearwords), it's not 'hardcore', and anyone who doesn't play it is a casual gamer by default. Gaming is my main hobby, and I spent the majority of my free time and money on either playing games or other related activities; and yet apparently because I don't own an Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, or a gaming-calibre PC, I'm not one of this self-professed hardcore.
Naw, I think it's more like the difference between a car owner and a gearhead. To my mind, a casual gamer is someone who may own a major system but only plays it a few hours a week or who prefers games that are low commitment. Lots of people play the equivalent of 80's arcade games on their phones. An 80's arcade game could be played for 30 seconds or 30 minutes depending on how good you were but you can walk away at any time. Contrast this with a CRPG from Japan you put 80 hours into.
The other matter is how obsessive people get over a show. I know I always geek out over something I like, getting into the writing, thinking about how it will twist and turn. Other people may approach the same show and say they like it but just sit and passively let the thing go by. They'll keep watching, they may buy the DVD's but you can't really have a conversation about it with them. Casual viewer, in other words.
Casual games can tend to overlap with another category I call party games. You can have several people over and play the game and have fun. You wouldn't do this with a Final Fantasy but even a fighting game is great when you're swapping the controller around with a few friends. These are inclusive games.
The real definition of a hardcore gamer, at least to me, is someone who blows a lot of time and money on gaming and tend to be the most vocal segment of the audience which is why they tend to be catered to by developers. These hardcore types can geek out over cartoony CRPG's just as easily as they can over MURDER GOREFEST APOCALYPSE.
The market these days is bigger than ever. Casual games are expanding the market into new areas, not just cannibalizing existing sales. Look at the car market. There will always be a demand for tiny, minimum cost vehicles. There will be a demand for kid wagons, be it the station wagon, the minivan that replaced it, or the giant dickwad SUV's that came after that. Traditionally sports cars were the dickwad vehicle of choice. People who had the need for a kid wagon but wanted to assert their dickwaddishness got an SUV and satisfied both needs. The station wagon had a bit of a die-off but that was only one way of satisfying the need for a family vehicle. Now that SUV's are on the decline, the latest fad term is crossover vehicle. Sorry, when I hear crossover I think of interstate accidents, "crossed the median and had a head-on collision, killing a family of four."
In today's games market, we are seeing many competing trends. Years back we heard that the shooter was killing the adventure game. Haven't seen too many of them out there recently. But this just means the market is open for the next great adventure game. Someone comes out with that and will make a hit and you'll see a dozen clones the following year. We heard that the consoles were killing computer gaming but not quite. Big budget computer gaming has taken a hit but there's still a market for people who drop $5000 on their electronic penises. But there's still money to be made in computer gaming, just look at how well Steam is doing. What's more accurate to say is that it's the death of the computer game store -- you hardly see any PC games in EB these days, it's all about the consoles.
The other thing everyone was pissing and moaning about is that AAA titles would cost $20 mil and up and everyone would go bankrupt. However, we're seeing low-budget games selling well on the consoles. This can be analogized to movies. We'll watch quirky indie comedies made for $20k and we'll watch the next big action flick made for $200 mil. The existence of one doesn't push out the other.
If anything, I would say that the expanding market will provide more niche opportunities. Back in the 50's, I Love Lucy was watched by what, half the nation? Today's top shows don't have anywhere near those kinds of numbers but the networks are doing just fine. I don't think any future game series will have the same hold on the market like Mario on the NES but I don't think anybody is crying over how GTAIV did.
To recap, we will have a CGI farm pretending to be an actor pretending to be a robot pretending to be a man.
Imagine if we could get a Beowulf cluster of these things.
It would strip naked, scream "Beowulf!" and rip the arm off of something?
...the Ninja!!! True ultimate power and all that jazz.
Bubububbut I thought the market decided these things! I guess I didn't realize that the legislature was on the market as well.
I'm just hoping something like this will happen in the future.
Biden returning from trip, eases himself down into a chair in the Oval Office.
Obama: Long trip there, Joe? *hands him drink*
Biden: Long trip, long visit, good to be back. Thanks. So, how are things back at the ranch?
Obama: Fine, fine. The girls showed me something fairly remarkable on the internet.
Biden: Kids today, whippersnappers et cetera. What was it, youbook or facespace?
Obama: No, no. Something called bittorrent. Did you know there's all sorts of music online? And you can just download it!
Biden: *looks wary* That's none of that file-sharing, is it?
Obama: No, it's called bittorrent. All the kids are doing it.
Biden: Sure it's not piracy?
Obama: I just ordered our boys to blow the heads off of three pirates off of Somalia. I think I know piracy when I see it.
Biden: Sure it's none of that p2b-er b2a um a2m or whatever it is?
Obama: Nope. Bittorrent.
Biden: Hmph. *takes a closer look* Hey, this is neat. Wonder why the Hollywood guys haven't built something like this.
Meanwhile, in the White House IT office
Tech 1: Hey, looks like someone's using bittorrent.
Tech 2: Damn, I thought we blocked the port. Better fix it now before anyone notices.
Tech 1: Better not. Did you see the IP on that one?
Tech 2: Shit, you're right. I'm not going to be the one to tell the POTUS he can't play. Remember how pissed Cheney got after he spent all that time assuring everyone those emails were safely lost and whoops, we found the backups?
Tech 1: *shudders* Tell me about it. I haven't seen anyone that mad since I "accidentally" deleted Rove's furry scat collection.
This kinda of reminds of the '640KB should be enough for everyone' theory. If everyone is just content surfing the web and writing e-mails, then sure the 'good enough' solution sounds fair, but if 'good enough' also means dealing with a Windows ME experience then no thanks. At the same time what is considered 'good enough' will evolve over time and new solutions are created and user expectations evolve.
That last sentence is the key to the whole debate. There's been wicked kewl shite just over the horizon ever since I've been in computers and for quite a few years beforehand. But we've reached a point where the innovations in software don't really require more horsepower on the user's machine.
If we strictly consider the office work environment, we pretty much had everything we needed with win2k and office2k. There's been no new killer app introduced since then. Probably the only argument to be made is that there's more in excel 2007 than in 2k but those extra goodies came at the price of a lot of crap.
Also bear in mind that the customer base has fragmented tremendously. Computer users used to be a unified market of geeks and business types but now it's as fragmented as the user base for home entertainment. Some people are happy with a small broadcast TV, some people need a thousand cable channels and a 72" screen with all the doodads. Both people are in the same general market but their segments are widely divergent.
Will my 'good enough' computer handle my photo library, my 32MP entry level camera, recognise the faces in my photo collection. This sound like far fetched stuff today, but as these technologies peculate down from high end systems and people get used to the computer doing more of their mind-numbing repetitive tasks, user expectation will adapt and want them in their 'good enough' computers.
Call that ten years from now. I don't have an interest in photography now, probably won't by then, but since you do you'll be happy to upgrade for those features. I know I'll have a different machine by then and will be doing different things. Your mother might still be happy running on your trade-down, it does everything she needs.
In many ways plenty of people are already using 'good enough' computers. Whether they are satisfied with them is a whole other question.
Fifteen years ago most people didn't have a need for web and email so developing that need was pretty big in the first place. Some may never progress beyond that point.
This is usually the way of things. Wanna hazard a guess as to how much food costs at your favorite restaurant? I can guarantee your $12 entree didn't cost even half that much for them at the wholesaler. But the gross on that ain't anywhere near the net. If you want to talk about a contemptible outrage, you're talking about BS like components getting marked up 4x at the big box retailers. Yeah, you get the printer for cost and the $2 data cable for $20.
It's 20 (or so) light years from Earth. According to this [theregister.co.uk] article, we've probably already pissed off any inhabitants...
We still have what, ten years left to invent an FTL drive and get there to preemptively apologize for reality television, right?
MOD PARENT UP!!! I'm sick of conservatives rewriting history. The Soviet Union fell on Reagan's watch, therefore he's responsible! And you know what else? MTV came out in the 80's. Thank Reagan for that. When did MTV start sucking and stop playing music? Under Clinton. Fucking liberal, just proves it. And have you noticed how few 9-11's happened under Reagan, never had an asteroid impact or alien invasion. That's because we bankrupted the aliens first!
I've been playing for years and I ain't hooked yet!
(I just hope the spies didn't discover the fighter's only weakness, a small thermal exhaust port...)
You mean the tailpipe? The flaw with the plane isn't a matter of engineering, it's that the damn things will be too expensive to risk in combat! Something might break.
I hope this game isn't brought down by bullshit polarized moral choices too. Kill woman in house, don't lose karma. Steal her toaster though, lose karma. Post about it on slashdot, regain karma.
This is after the apocalypse. Nobody's making toasters anymore. Human life is cheap but toasters are priceless.
I'm intrigued by the premise of Fallout but I've heard bad things about broken elements in the game, bugged quests, stuff where you're left trying to read walkthroughs online to figure out how to fix what went wrong. Any patches for this stuff yet?
I am sorry, but I really take offense to this comment. I am a conservative and all of my family and friends are conservative, and none of us are against welfare. We all believe that safety nets are needed because sometimes bad things do happen to people. If I had to guess, you are taking a few quotes from some fringe conservatives and sweeping the rest under the same brush.
What we don't like is the current welfare system that does not encourage people to get off the welfare system. The current system is broken and broken badly.
Thank you, you are different from the conservatives I usually talk to. I'm of the opinion that welfare is necessary but our current implementation is flawed. Usually a conservative criticizing welfare will claim he wants to make it work better but actually wants to simply get rid of it because the very concept infuriates his ideology. My dad is representative of the usual conservative I talk to -- complains bitterly about the spics and niggers on welfare who don't want to do a lick of goddamn work but does not see the irony when he's on social security with military retirement, some scraps of a phone company pension, using the VA and collecting that government check. Somehow the safety net that's keeping him off the streets is bad when it involves other people.
I agree with the poster below me who says the definition of conservative has been twisted beyond recognition, the same way that corrupt Dems in DC have mucked up liberalism, not that the right wing noise machine hasn't helped do violence to the word, using it with the same tone of disgust usually reserved for pedophiles and furries.