And take away love of money, fancy cars, new gadgets, and the greed that motivates traversal through the class system and you get: The Middle East. Millions of barely literate religious zealots with no objects or cash or prospects to obtain either, just some guns and a mystical book. Working well for them isn't it?
One of the strongest, most evolved characteristics of the human species is our desire to stay motivated. We must "obtain" and "control". In capitalism this usually equates to directing our primal desires towards that which helps ensure our personal security and enjoyment in life: cash. Take greed and money away, and that same uncontrollable desire gets directed towards each other, other races, and opposing religions. Now which is really better?
In America, an "evil" product of pure capitalism is a CEO of an energy company that puts the screws to an elderly lady on a fixed income making it harder to pay her bills. In Iraq, an "evil" product of religion are hooded fundamentalists that decapitate infidels and barely make the news. Give me a greedy, wealthy society anyday.
Why the fuck is not wearing your seat belt an offence at all!
A safety belt is a simple and effective piece of the auto safety puzzle. Much like a bumper, you could declare having to use one violates your freedoms (as would doors, windows, anything else), the the value has been proven so effective that the general public seems to agree its worth requiring both in terms of safety and insurance costs.
When I cause an auto accident, which, as we are all human, can happen from time to time, rather than you being somewhat injured and my insurance paying for a $2,000 Dr. visit, now you've been dismembered all over the highway and I have to pay a $2,000,000 bill. In other words, wearing your seatbelt isn't just a personal matter like how you wear your hair, or what music you listen to. Your seatbelt choices now dramatically impact other peoples lives. Now you of course will say "But it's YOUR fault.", and yes that is the case, but as previously stated, we are all humans and some accidents happen regardless. It's just a matter of not making every accident unnecessarily severe because a little piece of fabric (or a bumper) somehow stifles your "rights".
"More insightful than funny IMHO. No one is telling this fucktard to use OSS at gunpoint. He is free to drop his money on Microsoft crap, or Apple crap, or whathever the proprietary fuck other corporations have to offer."
This is precisely why corporations aren't comfortable with free open source software. Because just as soon as there's any criticism, they are told "Hey, fuck you, its free, go use something else if you don't like it.", and comments like that are modded "Insightful".
By the time we have the technology to terraform other planets and move between them, the megalomaniacs like Bush at the wheel will certainly have the destructive capacity to take them all out at once.
What do you mean by "defective"? If you mean receiving a batch of unburnable media you can very likely return it to the manufacturer for replacements, I have. If you mean we accept the fact that a product breaks down, I'm afraid that's how it is for most things.
Are you upset that your car isn't like the day you drove it off the lot a few years later? Or ask a person living by a body of water what it does to their furniture and pianos. Are those defective products? DVD-Rs are cheap but have a limited lifespan. Stone tablets, according to Wired magazine, have proven to be some of the longest lasting form of storage media, but it's going to be pretty expensive to get a terabyte of data on some stone tablets. It's just a matter of finding a comfortable middleground.
I ask for a "tissue" or a "napkin" instead of a "Kleenex."
There you go. Changing the world, one word at a time.
"A telemarketer who calls me once to sell me something gets an earful."
People who do this are jackasses. You do realize (and I have worked in telemarketing), that the people making the calls are rarely personally interested in the product or service they're selling right? They took a job telemarketing *drumroll* to get paid. They read a script and you giving them an "earfull" is either ignored or assures you go back on the frequently-called list. If you have a problem, call the headquarters, or thank them for their time and ask them nicely to take you off the list. It may be emasculating but it's more effective than raving like a lunatic to an entry level calling drone. We used to just put jackasses like you on speakerphone and laugh about it all together. lol.
Anyway, I never spend money on something everybody's getting hyped up about...
You're delusional. Unless you make your own toothpaste, wash your clothes in a stream, ride a home-made skateboard everywhere you go and eat your own food (or feces), you are buying items that have been hyped up. That is what the market IS. If a product is sitting on a store shelf available for purchase, it got there with marketing and advertising, PERIOD. There's only been one product to ever make it to the height of its success before a single dollar of intentional advertising was spent, you know what that product is? Hershey's chocolate bars. So unless you eat them for every meal, and build your abode out of them (in which case, you're gonna love global warming), you are buying products because of advertising.
That's the way it works, when, like movies, you are competing not based on the quality of the content/story/gameplay, but on the special effects and celebrities involved. The only way to top the last one is by outspending it.
Then there's the few examples like Napoleon Dynamite or Pi, that show you just how little money it takes to put an excellent story to the top of the charts and become insanely profitable. But of course the industries look at those as anomolies and go back to cranking out Batman Twelve with Tom Cruise and Lindsy Lohan.
Let's see some real innovative games, then I'll cry when only 80 a year succeed.
Very good summary
on
But Is It Art?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
For that to change, and for games to be taken more seriously by people who don't play them, games need to become cheaper to make, they need to be made by more- diverse groups of people, and they need to be more accessible to nongamers.
So true. Games have fallen victim to the "too many Crayons" problem that is now plaguing movies. Constraint forces creativity. An artist with a single sheet of paper and some charcoal can soar to new heights of creativity because the limitations of medium force the message to be spoken through the art not the tools. Movies can now just use 3D Animation and green-screening and post to create nearly any effect imaginable. Sadly, it cannibalizes the director's ability to convey artistic message. (see Star Wars: A New Hope vs Phantom Menace).
For whatever reason this seems to happen every time constraints are lifted on art. Back when it was damn difficult and the tools we're very primitave we were given radically different and ground-breaking games like Pac-Man, Dig-Dug, Toobin, Galaga, Joust. Short of the fact they all use a joystick and buttons, they're about as completely different as you can get. Now we have Quake 4, Doom 12, Unreal Tournament 60. There's about 3 types of games, and 500 knockoffs of those. The drive to create totally new paradigms in gaming is almost gone. DDR is probably the most recent thing I would classify as truly new.
Of course the second big problem is that game authors (rightly or wrongly) simply want bigger final dollars for their creations as opposed to higher profits. This is capitalism, and that's okay, is just means that a highly succesful niche game is less desired than a watered down whack-a-mole that sells to the unwashed masses. The concepts, themes and functions of a video game or movie will continue to be steered by whether or not it can make it onto Burger King cups and Dell Holiday catalogs.
So as much as the summary is very correct, we need specific, niche games. And while I do think there's some real "new money" to be generated in a lot of untapped small fields, I don't see how it can happen in the current environment. Braindead WoW makes money, and money is what everyone wants above all else.
"The ultimate goal is to lock out cheap independent software (especially, but not limited to, F/OSS)..."
I never understand comments like these. How exactly does DRM do that? How does DRM "force" a developer to charge a whole lot of money? If DRM were in place today and I was a freeware developer, what prevents me from just issuing a DRM key (or whatever the process is) and making my terms of agreement "anyone who requests one gets one and I charge nothing". Or does Microsoft beat down your door and say "NO, YOU HAVE TO CHARGE $500 PER USER!!11!!"
If you think that Microsoft is somehow going to force all software developers to pay some rediculous per application fee, thus forcing them all to charge for their app, thus whittling down the market to like 3 major apps, your tinfoil hat is on too tight.
If there's one thing Bill Gates knows its that his fortune was built on Windows having zillions of developers covering all possible realms of software from Diet Calculators to 3D Animation. Maybe the phrase "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!" rings a bell. Developers have to eat too, and once all of them can't afford to turn a profit off writing code for Windows unless they're one of the few working at Symantec or Microsoft or Adobe, they'll find a new career or OS to write for.
About the last scenario Microsoft wants is ONLY the major software developers like Adobe and Macromedia left standing, because they consistantly port their applications to OSX. If you were "forced" to quit using your $50 Paint Shop Pro, and replace it with $500 Photoshop instead, well then theres a 50/50 chance you may just become an OSX customer.
Microsoft may be corporate-evil, but they definately believe in small developer shops and know legions of developers and all their varying business models from freeware to $5,000/user licenses are the foundation of the Microsoft machine.
If He made us (which He has), then we owe Him our loyalties.
If he wants my loyalties he can appear before me and ask for them in clear concise communication not via a garbled 6,000 year game of "Telephone" that relies on inherently flawed and error prone humans to deliver it.
With over half the PC's sold being laptops and nearly all laptops' RAM and HD being just as user replace/upgradable as any desktop, reviewers should really give the laptop world some love.
I'll let you in on a secret: The idea behind excessive requirements in any job posting is to cut out those without the motivation or ability to prove why they are fit for the job irrespective of the requirements. ie. It's a way to filter out the weak.
Any "real" programmer can pick up a new dialect in a few days.
It takes 5 minutes to learn how to drive a clutch, a hell of a lot longer to learn how to drive it well.
Theories from one language indeed can apply to another, but the nuances and awareness of an entire framework and what works "well" versus what "works" are what seperates the wheat from the chaff.
Just do : ls -l | sort | head -10 | tr -s " " "\t" > dir.txt; gnumeric dir.txt & After all, if you're going to be manipulating it in a spreadsheet, you probably want to save it in a file somewhere anyway, right?
Kick in the *NIX fanboi defense reflex: Offer a half-baked parallel and insist that any deficiencies are things you didn't need or shouldn't be doing in the first place.
I don't know where you live, but where I live that is most certainly not the case. One of our clients is a recruiting firm and they have literally 50.NET/Java programming jobs they simply cannot fill. They pay $75,000 to $150,000 (in the midwest, where that is a very good salary) and are more than willing to accept applicants with "zero" college if you can prove you have actual coding skills. Still, the jobs sit desperately unfilled because of the small number of "real".NET/Java programmers out there. (As opposed to smelly hackers living in their mom's basement insisting that.NET/Java are passing fads and c0d3ring in Apple Python++ is the future.) So, a dime a dozen? I don't think so.
Slashdot Mirror
Then explain Vista's Aero Glass UI.
One of the strongest, most evolved characteristics of the human species is our desire to stay motivated. We must "obtain" and "control". In capitalism this usually equates to directing our primal desires towards that which helps ensure our personal security and enjoyment in life: cash. Take greed and money away, and that same uncontrollable desire gets directed towards each other, other races, and opposing religions. Now which is really better?
In America, an "evil" product of pure capitalism is a CEO of an energy company that puts the screws to an elderly lady on a fixed income making it harder to pay her bills. In Iraq, an "evil" product of religion are hooded fundamentalists that decapitate infidels and barely make the news. Give me a greedy, wealthy society anyday.
Well, there's someone that obviously doesn't know it's Friday afternoon.
A safety belt is a simple and effective piece of the auto safety puzzle. Much like a bumper, you could declare having to use one violates your freedoms (as would doors, windows, anything else), the the value has been proven so effective that the general public seems to agree its worth requiring both in terms of safety and insurance costs.
When I cause an auto accident, which, as we are all human, can happen from time to time, rather than you being somewhat injured and my insurance paying for a $2,000 Dr. visit, now you've been dismembered all over the highway and I have to pay a $2,000,000 bill. In other words, wearing your seatbelt isn't just a personal matter like how you wear your hair, or what music you listen to. Your seatbelt choices now dramatically impact other peoples lives. Now you of course will say "But it's YOUR fault.", and yes that is the case, but as previously stated, we are all humans and some accidents happen regardless. It's just a matter of not making every accident unnecessarily severe because a little piece of fabric (or a bumper) somehow stifles your "rights".
This is precisely why corporations aren't comfortable with free open source software. Because just as soon as there's any criticism, they are told "Hey, fuck you, its free, go use something else if you don't like it.", and comments like that are modded "Insightful".
Believe me, this site is a .com
My dong.
By the time we have the technology to terraform other planets and move between them, the megalomaniacs like Bush at the wheel will certainly have the destructive capacity to take them all out at once.
Well, there are other alternatives.
Two phrases I don't like seeing anywhere near each other.
Aim more for "redundant" and "widely tested" for starters.
I would have thought "Hustler" by Larry Flynt would have been #1.
Are you upset that your car isn't like the day you drove it off the lot a few years later? Or ask a person living by a body of water what it does to their furniture and pianos. Are those defective products? DVD-Rs are cheap but have a limited lifespan. Stone tablets, according to Wired magazine, have proven to be some of the longest lasting form of storage media, but it's going to be pretty expensive to get a terabyte of data on some stone tablets. It's just a matter of finding a comfortable middleground.
There you go. Changing the world, one word at a time.
"A telemarketer who calls me once to sell me something gets an earful."
People who do this are jackasses. You do realize (and I have worked in telemarketing), that the people making the calls are rarely personally interested in the product or service they're selling right? They took a job telemarketing *drumroll* to get paid. They read a script and you giving them an "earfull" is either ignored or assures you go back on the frequently-called list. If you have a problem, call the headquarters, or thank them for their time and ask them nicely to take you off the list. It may be emasculating but it's more effective than raving like a lunatic to an entry level calling drone. We used to just put jackasses like you on speakerphone and laugh about it all together. lol.
Anyway, I never spend money on something everybody's getting hyped up about...
You're delusional. Unless you make your own toothpaste, wash your clothes in a stream, ride a home-made skateboard everywhere you go and eat your own food (or feces), you are buying items that have been hyped up. That is what the market IS. If a product is sitting on a store shelf available for purchase, it got there with marketing and advertising, PERIOD. There's only been one product to ever make it to the height of its success before a single dollar of intentional advertising was spent, you know what that product is? Hershey's chocolate bars. So unless you eat them for every meal, and build your abode out of them (in which case, you're gonna love global warming), you are buying products because of advertising.
Then there's the few examples like Napoleon Dynamite or Pi, that show you just how little money it takes to put an excellent story to the top of the charts and become insanely profitable. But of course the industries look at those as anomolies and go back to cranking out Batman Twelve with Tom Cruise and Lindsy Lohan.
Let's see some real innovative games, then I'll cry when only 80 a year succeed.
So true. Games have fallen victim to the "too many Crayons" problem that is now plaguing movies. Constraint forces creativity. An artist with a single sheet of paper and some charcoal can soar to new heights of creativity because the limitations of medium force the message to be spoken through the art not the tools. Movies can now just use 3D Animation and green-screening and post to create nearly any effect imaginable. Sadly, it cannibalizes the director's ability to convey artistic message. (see Star Wars: A New Hope vs Phantom Menace).
For whatever reason this seems to happen every time constraints are lifted on art. Back when it was damn difficult and the tools we're very primitave we were given radically different and ground-breaking games like Pac-Man, Dig-Dug, Toobin, Galaga, Joust. Short of the fact they all use a joystick and buttons, they're about as completely different as you can get. Now we have Quake 4, Doom 12, Unreal Tournament 60. There's about 3 types of games, and 500 knockoffs of those. The drive to create totally new paradigms in gaming is almost gone. DDR is probably the most recent thing I would classify as truly new.
Of course the second big problem is that game authors (rightly or wrongly) simply want bigger final dollars for their creations as opposed to higher profits. This is capitalism, and that's okay, is just means that a highly succesful niche game is less desired than a watered down whack-a-mole that sells to the unwashed masses. The concepts, themes and functions of a video game or movie will continue to be steered by whether or not it can make it onto Burger King cups and Dell Holiday catalogs.
So as much as the summary is very correct, we need specific, niche games. And while I do think there's some real "new money" to be generated in a lot of untapped small fields, I don't see how it can happen in the current environment. Braindead WoW makes money, and money is what everyone wants above all else.
I never understand comments like these. How exactly does DRM do that? How does DRM "force" a developer to charge a whole lot of money? If DRM were in place today and I was a freeware developer, what prevents me from just issuing a DRM key (or whatever the process is) and making my terms of agreement "anyone who requests one gets one and I charge nothing". Or does Microsoft beat down your door and say "NO, YOU HAVE TO CHARGE $500 PER USER!!11!!"
If you think that Microsoft is somehow going to force all software developers to pay some rediculous per application fee, thus forcing them all to charge for their app, thus whittling down the market to like 3 major apps, your tinfoil hat is on too tight.
If there's one thing Bill Gates knows its that his fortune was built on Windows having zillions of developers covering all possible realms of software from Diet Calculators to 3D Animation. Maybe the phrase "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!" rings a bell. Developers have to eat too, and once all of them can't afford to turn a profit off writing code for Windows unless they're one of the few working at Symantec or Microsoft or Adobe, they'll find a new career or OS to write for.
About the last scenario Microsoft wants is ONLY the major software developers like Adobe and Macromedia left standing, because they consistantly port their applications to OSX. If you were "forced" to quit using your $50 Paint Shop Pro, and replace it with $500 Photoshop instead, well then theres a 50/50 chance you may just become an OSX customer.
Microsoft may be corporate-evil, but they definately believe in small developer shops and know legions of developers and all their varying business models from freeware to $5,000/user licenses are the foundation of the Microsoft machine.
If he wants my loyalties he can appear before me and ask for them in clear concise communication not via a garbled 6,000 year game of "Telephone" that relies on inherently flawed and error prone humans to deliver it.
With over half the PC's sold being laptops and nearly all laptops' RAM and HD being just as user replace/upgradable as any desktop, reviewers should really give the laptop world some love.
Unless I'm missing something I think the doctors you were talking to were idiots. 14 megapixels = about 3800 x 3800. I think it's pretty obvious the eye can resolve detail finer than that. I mean the number is rather pointless because you don't mention at what distance or how wide of a focus radius you're measuring, that kind of thing. But for a useless made up number 14 MP is low.
Sounds so familiar, where have I heard that before? Oh that's right, Jehovah's Witnesses.
Looks like it's working.
It takes 5 minutes to learn how to drive a clutch, a hell of a lot longer to learn how to drive it well.
Theories from one language indeed can apply to another, but the nuances and awareness of an entire framework and what works "well" versus what "works" are what seperates the wheat from the chaff.
Kick in the *NIX fanboi defense reflex: Offer a half-baked parallel and insist that any deficiencies are things you didn't need or shouldn't be doing in the first place.
I don't know where you live, but where I live that is most certainly not the case. One of our clients is a recruiting firm and they have literally 50 .NET/Java programming jobs they simply cannot fill. They pay $75,000 to $150,000 (in the midwest, where that is a very good salary) and are more than willing to accept applicants with "zero" college if you can prove you have actual coding skills. Still, the jobs sit desperately unfilled because of the small number of "real" .NET/Java programmers out there. (As opposed to smelly hackers living in their mom's basement insisting that .NET/Java are passing fads and c0d3ring in Apple Python++ is the future.) So, a dime a dozen? I don't think so.