Why would we content with helium as output? Ok, as a first step, lets get there first, but would it be relatively easy to produce heavier elements than helium? Elements which are rare and expensive to mine?
It's not as simple as that. The temperatures and pressures needed to fuse helium into heavier elements is several magnitudes above what is needed to fuse hydrogen into helium. The energy expenditures needed would far outweigh the current cost of obtaining these elements.
A good way to research the topic of fusion is to look up information on the formation and life cycle of stars, nature's fusion reactors. You'll find that as very massive stars age, they burn through their hydrogen fuel quickly. Once that's all used up, gravity threatens to collapse them, until temperature and pressure in the core raises to the point that fusion into heavier elements can happen.
But then you'll see that the first steps of the heavier fusion processes create very common elements: carbon, oxygen, nitrogen. That's precisely why these elements are so abundant. By the time you get to elements even remotely rare, you're talking pressure and temps on astronomical scales. Finally, in the very massive stars, fusion can't go any further than iron, because after iron, fusion reactions no longer yield energy, but absorb energy. So after iron, it becomes an even more uphill battle.
Most likely if we do ever manage to harness fusion, it will stop at helium, as that will serve our needs well.
Is this moral? It is illegal, but the class wasn't about legalities, it was about morality. This is akin to the steal a loaf of bread to feed a starving family question.
Actually, the original article is talking about ethics, not morality. There IS a difference, though very subtle, and I'd be hard-pressed to explain it in words.
I can give an example though: You mention about the "steal a loaf of bread to feed your starving family" and ask if this is moral. Well, that really depends on your religion. Morality is often dictated and defined by religious principles. Many Christian faiths, for example, would say that it is still morally wrong to steal, even if you're serving a greater good (that of feeding your starving family), claiming that two wrongs don't make a right. Other faiths may believe that you're morally justified in stealing because you're balancing the moral wrong of a society that does not provide enough food to eat for all its citizens.
Now, is it ethical to steal in this case? That's a tougher one to answer. When I think of ethics, I don't think of the same things that I do when I think of morality. When I think of an ethical question, I tend to think of it in terms of the whole rather than the parts. For example, it might be ethical for the man to steal food if that same man later pays for what he stole when he and his family are back on their feet again, or if a third party takes pity on him and pays for the stolen food himself.
Linux for the masses means the same thing Windows for the maasses means: preinstalled OS. An equivalant review would be someone taking an old Linux PC and trying to put windows on it only to find that she's missing the proper drivers. Now add the industy's lack of Linux support and she has no one to hand her drivers.
I'm glad someone finally made this point, because it's a good one.
One of the reasons you don't see a lot of similar problems with Windows is because 99 times out of 100 you get a new machine with the OS preinstalled and don't have to go through the grief of getting everything to work. Someone else has done the dirty work for you.
I despise software installation. My current two PCs came with Linux preinstalled specifically because I didn't want to deal with the problems. My desktop is a Dell which I got when Dell was briefly offering workstations with RH 6.2 (I since upgraded it to RH 7.1 and the upgrade was a freaking nightmare. I spent two days manually editing config files the upgrader trashed). My wife's laptop is from QliLinux with RH 8.0 preinstalled. On that machine, everything just WORKS. I got my wife an Archos Jukebox MP3 player for Christmas, which has a 20 gig USB drive. Plugged it in to the USB port, and boom, there it was. All I had to do was install some MP3 encoding software since RH stupidly ripped all of theirs out of the distibution. Once I had that in place, my wife brought up grip and, again, it just WORKED. Same for the network stuff. Plug it in to the D-link router and, boom, she's connected to the cable modem. Browse the web? Click on the "browse the web" button and, boom, Mozilla comes up. No fuss, no muss.
I'm going to be in the market this year to replace my aging desktop. I sure as hell am not going to spend hours collecting lists of Linux-supported hardware from HOWTOs, building my own system, and then ordering and installing CDs myself. I'm going to buy mine the same way a Windows user buys his/her machine: go to someplace like penguincomputing.com, select all the specs I want from pulldown menus, add to cart, checkout, pay, deliver, remove from box, plug it in, turn it on.
When the 60's doc get on line, that's when the revolution is going to happen!
Either that, or people will start smoking more pot.
Re:How about the proper weblink?!
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NARA Goes Online
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· Score: 1
I don't get 404'd....i get a stinkin' MS website asking if I'd like to search for something else and that they can't find what I'm looking for!
In other news, citing the rising tide of civil unrest among programmers and the radical open source movement, George W. Bush appointed Bill Gates of Microsoft Chancellor of the United States. The Chancellor promptly issued emergency powers for himself to better disseminate MS products throughout the US in an attempt to stablize the country.
powers not enumerated in constitution reserved for states, people
To be a proper/. poll, this should read:
powers not enumerated in constitution reserved for states, you insensitive clod.
right of cowboy neal to bare ???
I dearly hope this right has been infringed on.
Re:What's the point of sending these documents?
on
NARA Goes Online
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· Score: 1
Seeing as how our government does not honor a lot of the rights we have on a day to day basis. For example, if I protest the war in this post, some blind moderator will mark it as a troll. In essence, I am being punished for my right to free speech without being penalized for it.
Trying to draw an analogy between the/. moderation system and the US Constitution is like trying to compare apples and car engines.
The moderation system is nothing at all like the rights listed in the Bill of Rights. The moderation system, in essence, is a glorified popularity system. I try to do my part (see link in my sig if you're interested), but unfortunately that's what it turns into.
Being moderated down is not "punishment", unless/. karma is your be-all and end-all (and if it is, get a life). The correct analogy is comparing your ability to post a dissenting opinion AT ALL and not have the/. maintainers take it down is a better comparison to the rights indicated in the Consitution.
Maybe NARA should include pictures of dead Veitnamese, South Americans, Africans, Phillipinos, Afghani, Iraqis, Iranians, Syrians, Palestinians, etc. That is the legacy of the documents listed in the article above. I am afraid to think what the forefathers would be saying if they were alive today.
You mean the same forefathers that, when they said "all men are created equal", defined equality to mean those that were male, white, landowners, Christian, and could pay the poll tax?
Don't get me wrong; I agree that the US has caused terrible things to happen, or allowed terrible things to happen, but I don't think you can claim to know the minds of the founding fathers of the US. Also, in many of the cases of the US instigating these terrible acts, they were not done specifically with malice towards the people involved. In many cases, there was the overall goal of trying to stare down the Soviet Union. Given the choice between a world dominated by them, and the one that we live in now, I'll take the latter, even if that means there is blood on America's hands.
Do I like the fact that these things happened in order to push back Soviet influence and power? Absolutely not. Only a complete sociopath likes the fact that such things happen, or want them to happen. But there's a larger picture to be considered here.
Go ahead and flame me for my positions. That's your right, as it is my right to state such an opinion.
It's not your machine, it is the company's. As such, those MP3s are not legal because you can't transfer the licenses to your company while still listening to them.
Not legal? Bullshit.
What the hell do licenses have to do with it? There is no license here. He made a copy of CDs he legally purchased. He uses these MP3s for his own listening enjoyment. He does not trade them, sell them, or distribute them. So where in all this do you see it is illegal?
Now if the machine did belong to the school (and if you see the followup post he made, he clearly states that it is his, but for the sake of argument, say it belongs to the school). If him having those MP3s is a violation of the terms of use of the system, then, yes, the school has every right to demand that he remove them. But this does not make them illegal. If you're basing your statement about legality purely on the ownership of the machine, then your logic is falacious.
THIS is how to handle disputes
on
Open Source DRM
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· Score: 1
That being said, I would very much appreciate it if the name of this product were changed. I'd rather avoid confusion sooner rather than later. After all, 'Ogg Vorbis' was only a project codename, and was never expected to take off.:)
People, take a look at this simple, polite exchange between two groups that have a disagreement over the equivalent of a trademark issue. THIS is how it should be done. I shudder to think of how many lawyers would be involved by this time had this been two corporations.
Thank you, both of you, for providing this excellent example.
Course, we'll never be able to play HDTV on a computer.
You realize, don't you, by actually saying that something will never happen, you have practically assured that it will happen at some point. Just like when people said man would not fly.
Of course, this still doesn't explain the lack of flying cars...
Nethack is still one of the greatest games ever. Everytime Slashdot posts an article about it (last one) [slashdot.org], there's a mass Geek orgasm of relating stories, gloating about accomplishments and a general outpouring of affection, both past and present.
Are you equating Nethack with graphic adventure? Because I don't think that quite fits.
Don't get me wrong. Nethack is a neat game that I use as a diversion on occassion, but I am not as dedicated a player to it as I might be for graphic adventures. If I were to categorize Nethack, it would be hack-n-slash, or dungeon delving, or something like that. It doesn't fit into the graphic adventure category because most graphic adventures have a plot more sophisticated than "get into dungeon, retrieve artifact, get out alive."
And before someone says "what about the quest you have to go on?", this is just a variation of the same thing: "go into quest area, beat up boss, get out alive"
I suppose I'm nitpicking here, but that's one of the things Slashdot allows people to do best:)
3. Full Motion Video
And then again... this is not a genre, it's just poor designed video games with a bad transition/gaming ratio...
I'd say this genre did not so much die out as evolve. The FMVs were around because no one could render such great scenes with just graphics, so they used lots and lots of filmed scenes. The problem with this is that this has to consistute the whole game, otherwise you'd keep switching between really cool FMVs and clunky graphics.
Today, with machines that can draw millions of polygons a second, you can just render cut scenes and plot point scenes like this and have it look like the rest of the game.
1. Graphic Adventure
They are right again. Why did Graphic adventures died? I really really enjoid Maniac MAnsion, Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island (I II & III)... why aren't new-3d-full-of-eye-candies-graphic-adventures? Perhaps there's a need for a new Roberta.
I think you're right. I mention in another post that I liked the graphic adventure games, but when they first came out, I clung ferociously to text adventures until someone introduced me to King's Quest IV. Then I got hooked on Roberta's game design style.
The really sad part of all this is that a few of the genres that are supposedly dying are the ones that were my favorites (text adventure, graphic adventure), and they were my favorites because they combined two things that I craved into one: A challenge to my intellect, and a game set in an engaging story or plot.
This is not to say I can't or won't play other games. It's simply that they do not hold my interest as much as the older genres I mentioned above. The real sad part is the fact that these genres have died or are dying because of the law of supply and demand. No one is demanding these games anymore, so no one is supplying them. That's the real sad part, IMHO.
Of course, just as I post my story submission to slashdot on this, no sooner than I reload the page after submitting it when the story appears from someone else. Doh!
Seriously, though, I think I'll repeat a comment that I made in my story submission. Does anyone else think that SCO has bitten off more than they can chew? I knew that they were going to make a move, but I thought for sure they were going to pick an "easy" target, like some small Linux distributor. About as big a company as I suspected they would hit was Red Hat.
Suing IBM was a huge mistake. Or more accurately: suing IBM first was a big mistake. They should have done what other companies have, which is take on the little fish in the pond hoping some will roll over and pony up the dough, before attempting to harpoon the whale.
Not that I'm unhappy about this turn of events, mind you. IBM, which has had more experience in dealing with IP rights and patents in the little finger of one of their lawyers than SCO has in their entire company, will pound them into the dirt. The sound you are now hearing is that of the death dirge for SCO.
Maybe some companies are different, but judging from the average quality of games (both in terms of stability and "playability"), I suspect this is the normal policy.
Some companies are indeed different, and it seems to be that the smaller the game development company, the better the product.
Case in point: My wife is nuts for Spyro the Dragon (PS) and Ratchet and Clank (PS2), both from a little company called Insomniac Games. After watching her play these games, I tried them myself and got hooked. Man, these games are solid. After mastering them, I started playing games specifically to do the weirdest shit I can possibly think of on them. I found a few bugs to be sure, but very minor ones, the kind that simply make something odd-looking happen and let the game continue without crashing or making the game unsolvable. Also, the playability of these games is great.
Now compare this to my wife's experience with Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets for the PS2 from Electronic Arts, or as I like to call it, Harry Potter and the Endless "Loading" Messages. Not only did the constant loading from disk wreck some of the continunity, it locked up several times during disk loads. Electronic Arts is a much bigger company than Insomniac Games, you would think they would have more money for QA testing, but the smaller company beats them out on that score.
This is, of course, just one example, and YMMV. I remember Electronic Arts came out with some real kickass games for the C64 years ago (but they were a smaller company back then... hmmm)
Now pardon me while I go back to Ratchet and Clank and try to do even weirder shit on it...
Hate to break this to you, dude, but not everyone in the world uses UNIX or UNIX-like systems. Try maybe 95% of the desktops out there using something other than *NIX. I mean, hell, I use exclusively RH Linux at home, but I realize that in the real world, people are using something else.
I understand you're trying to make a point, but I just get the sense that this trivializes the problem.
Or am I just taking you too seriously and this should have been rated 5 Funny?
It's like Trusted Computing and signed Xbox images - they're not trying to shut out competition, but if that incidentally happens, they're not going to cry about it.
<PETPEEVE>
Please stop using the Xbox as an example of the Great Microsoft Conspiracy. I have no love for Microsoft (all the PCs in my house are RH Linux), but even I see that using the Xbox as an example of shutting out competition is bogus. The Xbox is their hardware. They designed it. It is not the same thing as a third party creating a generic PC. It is specifically designed for one thing and one thing only. They have every damn right to restrict the hell out of it.
Especially since he already had an excellent delivery system.
Are you referring to the V2 rockets? This is NOT an excellent delivery system by any stretch of the imagination. I won't even go into how inaccurate these rockets were. The simple fact of the matter is that there is a lot more to delivering an atomic bomb to target via a missile than "mount it on the nosecone, point, and fire". The first atomic bombs were goddamn heavy. There is no way that a Nazi V2 could be fitted with one. It would flop over and crash from the added weight.
If the Nazis had developed the bomb, they would have had to deliver it the same way the US did, via bomber. And if the Luftwaffe had been in the same sad state it was by the '44 or '45, the earliest they might have ever had the bomb, not even that would work. They'd be forced to drive it on to the battlefield, or leave it behind in a city and retreat.
Even if the Nazis developed the bomb, it would have been too little too late.
But to say that a merger with Sony would be better than Apple is just plain dumb. What have the two in common? Absolutely nothing. Sony has no interest in the server market - if they had they'd be there already. Furthermore, the technology that Sun pioneers has absolutely NOTHING to do with ANY Sony market.
As a present Sun employee, I can state that I have heard nothing about any association with Sony, not an alliance and most certainly not a merger. I usually like Cringley, but he pulled this one right out of his ass. If it was his opinion that Sony and Sun should merge, he should have stated it that way, and not in the way he did, which suggested that such talks were going on now or hinted at.
File this one away with the many, many other Sun merge/acquisition rumors that have been heard over the years that, as far as I know, have had no basis in reality. Remember that Sun Microsystems is Scott's baby; at the present time he would no sooner give it up than you would give up your arm.
Re:Sounds trollish
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The Faded Sun
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· Score: 5, Informative
I know Sun is losing money, but this article sounds subjective and trollish all the same. Anyone care to confirm the facts mentioned?
As a current employee of Sun Microsystems, I can at least clear up one little factoid in the article that every Sun pundit likes to mention for dramatic impact without either understanding or wanting the reader to understand.
The so-called $ 2 billion loss was a one-time writeoff that had to do with the revaluation of various companies that Sun acquired. People who bother to research their facts rather than simply spit them back verbatim for shock value would see that this is something that many companies do, and is more a sign of the bad economy than necessarily bad management at Sun. Without that write-off, Sun would have made a small profit.
I can't really comment on the other points in the article, since a lot of it is subjective, and anything I might say on it would be inherently biased by the fact that I work for Sun.
How is this any different from other legislation against spam? It states that I can sue spammers for infringement. Big fucking deal. Give me a law where the police or other law enforcement agency will handle it for me. If someone lifts my wallet or robs my house, I don't have to prosecute the case myself. The police do it for me. All I may have to do is testify against the perp.
Give me a law that allows me to simply report the infringement and let the proper agency deal with it, and then I'll agree that we have a law "with teeth".
Oh, and while you're at it, get rid of those stipulations in other anti-spam/anti-telemarketer legislation that exempts political campaigns and charities. I will decide when I want to know more about a candidate for election or which charities I give my money to.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not as simple as that. The temperatures and pressures needed to fuse helium into heavier elements is several magnitudes above what is needed to fuse hydrogen into helium. The energy expenditures needed would far outweigh the current cost of obtaining these elements.
A good way to research the topic of fusion is to look up information on the formation and life cycle of stars, nature's fusion reactors. You'll find that as very massive stars age, they burn through their hydrogen fuel quickly. Once that's all used up, gravity threatens to collapse them, until temperature and pressure in the core raises to the point that fusion into heavier elements can happen.
But then you'll see that the first steps of the heavier fusion processes create very common elements: carbon, oxygen, nitrogen. That's precisely why these elements are so abundant. By the time you get to elements even remotely rare, you're talking pressure and temps on astronomical scales. Finally, in the very massive stars, fusion can't go any further than iron, because after iron, fusion reactions no longer yield energy, but absorb energy. So after iron, it becomes an even more uphill battle.
Most likely if we do ever manage to harness fusion, it will stop at helium, as that will serve our needs well.
Actually, the original article is talking about ethics, not morality. There IS a difference, though very subtle, and I'd be hard-pressed to explain it in words.
I can give an example though: You mention about the "steal a loaf of bread to feed your starving family" and ask if this is moral. Well, that really depends on your religion. Morality is often dictated and defined by religious principles. Many Christian faiths, for example, would say that it is still morally wrong to steal, even if you're serving a greater good (that of feeding your starving family), claiming that two wrongs don't make a right. Other faiths may believe that you're morally justified in stealing because you're balancing the moral wrong of a society that does not provide enough food to eat for all its citizens.
Now, is it ethical to steal in this case? That's a tougher one to answer. When I think of ethics, I don't think of the same things that I do when I think of morality. When I think of an ethical question, I tend to think of it in terms of the whole rather than the parts. For example, it might be ethical for the man to steal food if that same man later pays for what he stole when he and his family are back on their feet again, or if a third party takes pity on him and pays for the stolen food himself.
I'm glad someone finally made this point, because it's a good one.
One of the reasons you don't see a lot of similar problems with Windows is because 99 times out of 100 you get a new machine with the OS preinstalled and don't have to go through the grief of getting everything to work. Someone else has done the dirty work for you.
I despise software installation. My current two PCs came with Linux preinstalled specifically because I didn't want to deal with the problems. My desktop is a Dell which I got when Dell was briefly offering workstations with RH 6.2 (I since upgraded it to RH 7.1 and the upgrade was a freaking nightmare. I spent two days manually editing config files the upgrader trashed). My wife's laptop is from QliLinux with RH 8.0 preinstalled. On that machine, everything just WORKS. I got my wife an Archos Jukebox MP3 player for Christmas, which has a 20 gig USB drive. Plugged it in to the USB port, and boom, there it was. All I had to do was install some MP3 encoding software since RH stupidly ripped all of theirs out of the distibution. Once I had that in place, my wife brought up grip and, again, it just WORKED. Same for the network stuff. Plug it in to the D-link router and, boom, she's connected to the cable modem. Browse the web? Click on the "browse the web" button and, boom, Mozilla comes up. No fuss, no muss.
I'm going to be in the market this year to replace my aging desktop. I sure as hell am not going to spend hours collecting lists of Linux-supported hardware from HOWTOs, building my own system, and then ordering and installing CDs myself. I'm going to buy mine the same way a Windows user buys his/her machine: go to someplace like penguincomputing.com, select all the specs I want from pulldown menus, add to cart, checkout, pay, deliver, remove from box, plug it in, turn it on.
And I will fully expect it to just work.
Either that, or people will start smoking more pot.
In other news, citing the rising tide of civil unrest among programmers and the radical open source movement, George W. Bush appointed Bill Gates of Microsoft Chancellor of the United States. The Chancellor promptly issued emergency powers for himself to better disseminate MS products throughout the US in an attempt to stablize the country.
To be a proper /. poll, this should read:
powers not enumerated in constitution reserved for states, you insensitive clod.
right of cowboy neal to bare ???I dearly hope this right has been infringed on.
Trying to draw an analogy between the /. moderation system and the US Constitution is like trying to compare apples and car engines.
The moderation system is nothing at all like the rights listed in the Bill of Rights. The moderation system, in essence, is a glorified popularity system. I try to do my part (see link in my sig if you're interested), but unfortunately that's what it turns into.
Being moderated down is not "punishment", unless /. karma is your be-all and end-all (and if it is, get a life). The correct analogy is comparing your ability to post a dissenting opinion AT ALL and not have the /. maintainers take it down is a better comparison to the rights indicated in the Consitution.
Maybe NARA should include pictures of dead Veitnamese, South Americans, Africans, Phillipinos, Afghani, Iraqis, Iranians, Syrians, Palestinians, etc. That is the legacy of the documents listed in the article above. I am afraid to think what the forefathers would be saying if they were alive today.
You mean the same forefathers that, when they said "all men are created equal", defined equality to mean those that were male, white, landowners, Christian, and could pay the poll tax?
Don't get me wrong; I agree that the US has caused terrible things to happen, or allowed terrible things to happen, but I don't think you can claim to know the minds of the founding fathers of the US. Also, in many of the cases of the US instigating these terrible acts, they were not done specifically with malice towards the people involved. In many cases, there was the overall goal of trying to stare down the Soviet Union. Given the choice between a world dominated by them, and the one that we live in now, I'll take the latter, even if that means there is blood on America's hands.
Do I like the fact that these things happened in order to push back Soviet influence and power? Absolutely not. Only a complete sociopath likes the fact that such things happen, or want them to happen. But there's a larger picture to be considered here.
Go ahead and flame me for my positions. That's your right, as it is my right to state such an opinion.
Typical cost to consumer of your average CD: $15
Cost to the RIAA to actually manufacture the disc: $0.84
Damages sought by RIAA in suit against college student: $97.8 billion
The look of the RIAA when this blows up in their face and they are majorly embarrassed in front of the public: priceless.
(Hey, someone had to do this one ...)
Not legal? Bullshit.
What the hell do licenses have to do with it? There is no license here. He made a copy of CDs he legally purchased. He uses these MP3s for his own listening enjoyment. He does not trade them, sell them, or distribute them. So where in all this do you see it is illegal?
Now if the machine did belong to the school (and if you see the followup post he made, he clearly states that it is his, but for the sake of argument, say it belongs to the school). If him having those MP3s is a violation of the terms of use of the system, then, yes, the school has every right to demand that he remove them. But this does not make them illegal. If you're basing your statement about legality purely on the ownership of the machine, then your logic is falacious.
People, take a look at this simple, polite exchange between two groups that have a disagreement over the equivalent of a trademark issue. THIS is how it should be done. I shudder to think of how many lawyers would be involved by this time had this been two corporations.
Thank you, both of you, for providing this excellent example.
You realize, don't you, by actually saying that something will never happen, you have practically assured that it will happen at some point. Just like when people said man would not fly.
Of course, this still doesn't explain the lack of flying cars ...
Nethack is still one of the greatest games ever. Everytime Slashdot posts an article about it (last one) [slashdot.org], there's a mass Geek orgasm of relating stories, gloating about accomplishments and a general outpouring of affection, both past and present.
Are you equating Nethack with graphic adventure? Because I don't think that quite fits.
Don't get me wrong. Nethack is a neat game that I use as a diversion on occassion, but I am not as dedicated a player to it as I might be for graphic adventures. If I were to categorize Nethack, it would be hack-n-slash, or dungeon delving, or something like that. It doesn't fit into the graphic adventure category because most graphic adventures have a plot more sophisticated than "get into dungeon, retrieve artifact, get out alive."
And before someone says "what about the quest you have to go on?", this is just a variation of the same thing: "go into quest area, beat up boss, get out alive"
I suppose I'm nitpicking here, but that's one of the things Slashdot allows people to do best :)
To round out the list:
* "That's not really dying" posts.
* Nostalgia posts ("I remember those games...").
* Michael Moore's speech was great/terrible posts.
and of course
* Posts that attempt to summarise what future posts will be like.
You forgot:
3. Full Motion Video
And then again... this is not a genre, it's just poor designed video games with a bad transition/gaming ratio...
I'd say this genre did not so much die out as evolve. The FMVs were around because no one could render such great scenes with just graphics, so they used lots and lots of filmed scenes. The problem with this is that this has to consistute the whole game, otherwise you'd keep switching between really cool FMVs and clunky graphics.
Today, with machines that can draw millions of polygons a second, you can just render cut scenes and plot point scenes like this and have it look like the rest of the game.
1. Graphic Adventure
They are right again. Why did Graphic adventures died? I really really enjoid Maniac MAnsion, Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island (I II & III)... why aren't new-3d-full-of-eye-candies-graphic-adventures? Perhaps there's a need for a new Roberta.
I think you're right. I mention in another post that I liked the graphic adventure games, but when they first came out, I clung ferociously to text adventures until someone introduced me to King's Quest IV. Then I got hooked on Roberta's game design style.
I really miss games like that.
The really sad part of all this is that a few of the genres that are supposedly dying are the ones that were my favorites (text adventure, graphic adventure), and they were my favorites because they combined two things that I craved into one: A challenge to my intellect, and a game set in an engaging story or plot.
This is not to say I can't or won't play other games. It's simply that they do not hold my interest as much as the older genres I mentioned above. The real sad part is the fact that these genres have died or are dying because of the law of supply and demand. No one is demanding these games anymore, so no one is supplying them. That's the real sad part, IMHO.
I believe that was called The Mouse That Roared. Cute movie.
Should we give money to someone moronic enough to put a hot cup of coffee between her legs?
Of course, just as I post my story submission to slashdot on this, no sooner than I reload the page after submitting it when the story appears from someone else. Doh!
Seriously, though, I think I'll repeat a comment that I made in my story submission. Does anyone else think that SCO has bitten off more than they can chew? I knew that they were going to make a move, but I thought for sure they were going to pick an "easy" target, like some small Linux distributor. About as big a company as I suspected they would hit was Red Hat.
Suing IBM was a huge mistake. Or more accurately: suing IBM first was a big mistake. They should have done what other companies have, which is take on the little fish in the pond hoping some will roll over and pony up the dough, before attempting to harpoon the whale.
Not that I'm unhappy about this turn of events, mind you. IBM, which has had more experience in dealing with IP rights and patents in the little finger of one of their lawyers than SCO has in their entire company, will pound them into the dirt. The sound you are now hearing is that of the death dirge for SCO.
Some companies are indeed different, and it seems to be that the smaller the game development company, the better the product.
Case in point: My wife is nuts for Spyro the Dragon (PS) and Ratchet and Clank (PS2), both from a little company called Insomniac Games. After watching her play these games, I tried them myself and got hooked. Man, these games are solid. After mastering them, I started playing games specifically to do the weirdest shit I can possibly think of on them. I found a few bugs to be sure, but very minor ones, the kind that simply make something odd-looking happen and let the game continue without crashing or making the game unsolvable. Also, the playability of these games is great.
Now compare this to my wife's experience with Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets for the PS2 from Electronic Arts, or as I like to call it, Harry Potter and the Endless "Loading" Messages. Not only did the constant loading from disk wreck some of the continunity, it locked up several times during disk loads. Electronic Arts is a much bigger company than Insomniac Games, you would think they would have more money for QA testing, but the smaller company beats them out on that score.
This is, of course, just one example, and YMMV. I remember Electronic Arts came out with some real kickass games for the C64 years ago (but they were a smaller company back then ... hmmm)
Now pardon me while I go back to Ratchet and Clank and try to do even weirder shit on it ...
chmod 664 *
Hate to break this to you, dude, but not everyone in the world uses UNIX or UNIX-like systems. Try maybe 95% of the desktops out there using something other than *NIX. I mean, hell, I use exclusively RH Linux at home, but I realize that in the real world, people are using something else.
I understand you're trying to make a point, but I just get the sense that this trivializes the problem.
Or am I just taking you too seriously and this should have been rated 5 Funny?
<PETPEEVE>
Please stop using the Xbox as an example of the Great Microsoft Conspiracy. I have no love for Microsoft (all the PCs in my house are RH Linux), but even I see that using the Xbox as an example of shutting out competition is bogus. The Xbox is their hardware. They designed it. It is not the same thing as a third party creating a generic PC. It is specifically designed for one thing and one thing only. They have every damn right to restrict the hell out of it.
</PETPEEVE>
Are you referring to the V2 rockets? This is NOT an excellent delivery system by any stretch of the imagination. I won't even go into how inaccurate these rockets were. The simple fact of the matter is that there is a lot more to delivering an atomic bomb to target via a missile than "mount it on the nosecone, point, and fire". The first atomic bombs were goddamn heavy. There is no way that a Nazi V2 could be fitted with one. It would flop over and crash from the added weight.
If the Nazis had developed the bomb, they would have had to deliver it the same way the US did, via bomber. And if the Luftwaffe had been in the same sad state it was by the '44 or '45, the earliest they might have ever had the bomb, not even that would work. They'd be forced to drive it on to the battlefield, or leave it behind in a city and retreat.
Even if the Nazis developed the bomb, it would have been too little too late.
As a present Sun employee, I can state that I have heard nothing about any association with Sony, not an alliance and most certainly not a merger. I usually like Cringley, but he pulled this one right out of his ass. If it was his opinion that Sony and Sun should merge, he should have stated it that way, and not in the way he did, which suggested that such talks were going on now or hinted at.
File this one away with the many, many other Sun merge/acquisition rumors that have been heard over the years that, as far as I know, have had no basis in reality. Remember that Sun Microsystems is Scott's baby; at the present time he would no sooner give it up than you would give up your arm.
As a current employee of Sun Microsystems, I can at least clear up one little factoid in the article that every Sun pundit likes to mention for dramatic impact without either understanding or wanting the reader to understand.
The so-called $ 2 billion loss was a one-time writeoff that had to do with the revaluation of various companies that Sun acquired. People who bother to research their facts rather than simply spit them back verbatim for shock value would see that this is something that many companies do, and is more a sign of the bad economy than necessarily bad management at Sun. Without that write-off, Sun would have made a small profit.
I can't really comment on the other points in the article, since a lot of it is subjective, and anything I might say on it would be inherently biased by the fact that I work for Sun.
How is this any different from other legislation against spam? It states that I can sue spammers for infringement. Big fucking deal. Give me a law where the police or other law enforcement agency will handle it for me. If someone lifts my wallet or robs my house, I don't have to prosecute the case myself. The police do it for me. All I may have to do is testify against the perp.
Give me a law that allows me to simply report the infringement and let the proper agency deal with it, and then I'll agree that we have a law "with teeth".
Oh, and while you're at it, get rid of those stipulations in other anti-spam/anti-telemarketer legislation that exempts political campaigns and charities. I will decide when I want to know more about a candidate for election or which charities I give my money to.