Foreigners have made considerable contributions to technology in the US. The Manhattan project team had large numbers of refugees in it. Important parts of the team that put man on the moon came from the German rocket program. Andy Grove and a number of other high tech pioneers came from outside the US. Bringing in foreigners is smart.
This is true, I'm completely in favor of allowing in new immigrants. However, H1Bs are not immigrants. H1Bs are sojourners, as you will find out when your H1B period ends.
The correct way to handle H1B visas is to make them into real greencards and eliminate them as sojourner visas. Hey, I don't want my cousin-in-law to be forced to go back to Thailand when her H1B visa ends.
Your other quote just points out another problem with the H1B process:
Finally, the US government even makes a profit on H1B processing. To get an H1B processed costs $1125. I've heard that the average processing time is in the order of fractions of an hour.
This will actually distort the process, since government officials tend not to want to eliminate revenue whatever the source. (However, I wouldn't object to it as much if H1Bs were brought in as real immigrants and not sojourners.)
One last thing, your quote:
There are, of course, abuses, as there is in any scheme, but overall the program is a good idea.
We shouldn't just accept abuses, we should take care of them however we can. One way would be to fast track H1Bs to real greencards. In this way, we would eliminate certain deficiencies in the program that allow for abuses.
First, it doesn't mention the PS2, it mentions the Playstation. It makes a big difference whether or not they are referring to Playstation 2's or Playstation 1's. Mod chipping is a venerable practice on PS1's. It's how I can play Samurai Spirits collections and Last Blade on my Playstation, while most American's are stuck with games like War Gods and other nonsense (because they are "3D").
Of course, as the ad says, mod chips also allow people to play copied games, but this is far from their only purpose. (Mods used to come out for cartridge systems by Sega and Nintendo as well, though it was often enough to just resize the cartridge slot.)
If he was convicted of mod-chipping seperately from selling pirated games, it is a big deal. Sony says the case was, "precedent setting." Therefore, I doubt the conviction was based on his selling of pirated games, which are already illegal.
Just one more reason not to do business with Sony. I'll accept anti-piracy measures. Iw ill never accept reion coding and I will not support a company that participates in it, especially with such vigor as Sony.
Here's the story of my friend and here quest for a free Web mail account. My friend had a Webmail account at Amexmail, when one day she got a message. Basically, it amounted to "if you want to continue to use your Amexmail account, you must pay a fee." Well, I decided to help my friend out, "Animenation has free Webmail, why don't I set you an account up there."
Well, predictably, Animenation sent the message "if you want to continue to use your Animenation Email account, you must pay a fee."
Here's the funny thing. I used to work at a.com that provided Web based Email, so this makes a lot of sense to me. Why give something away if it is costing you money to do so? It was one part of our business plan that never made sense to me. We didn't even have any method for people to make donations.
Part of the problem is that non-technical people don't realize that these things cost money, because they had been free up until now. It reminds me of the one character in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls who resented having to pay for air on the Moon. Outrageous that he had to pay for something that he had come to think of as free.
Now, the Apple thing is a special case for two reasons. It is expensive, $100.00 is a big jump from free, and Mac owners probably thought of it as part of the bundled software they got with their Mac. (Honestly, I never used it so I didn't care, I'm on dialup, and even post meltdown I still have lots of free accounts. I pay for Web space at Tripod even though I hardly use it. I get my real Email from AT&T and use Hotmail as my spam-trap. So, while I remember signing up for iTools I haven't looked at it since then.)
The reality is that many free Web based services that I used to use that were really cool, like zKey or Workspot have either started charging or gone to.com Heaven. (Or, sometimes, first the former and then the latter.) It is irritating when you suddenly find you can't get to your Email or to files you stored on a remote drive. However, that's the price you pay when stuff is free. (Bad customer relations is what companies like Apple pay when they don't have a sensible way to ease people from a free service into a pay service. Let's face it, though, there are plenty of people who would always complain about being charged for "free" services, no matter how reasonable the request.
Company: "But if we don't charge you, we'll go out of business, and then you'll definitely have no way to reach your Email/Files/etc."
Some Users:"Tough, I was only using your site for trivial stuff anyway, so I'll never pay for it, however, I'll complain to high heaven if you want to charge me. Grr..."
The game making kit M.U.G.E.N is available. If you've ever wanted to try your hand at making a Street Fighter II or King of the Fighters type game. The kit comes with a tiny demo game. (One character versus his evil clone.) A lot of people on the internet copy the art and moves from popular fighting games to make characters and levels.
Chu Chu Rocket is a lot like lemmings (with mice being led to rocketships instead of lemmings being led to the exit). I don't think it is available for PC yet, though. (It's for Dreamcast and GB Advance.)
Hmmm... what you don't understand is that in a previous era, the "air power" era, it was thought that bombers and bombers alone could win wars. See the idea, is that if you kept bombing a country until all its infrastructure was destroyed and its civilian population was decimated and demoralized, you could win a war without having to have a conventional victory in the field.
In fact, I think that WWII put an end to this idea, but if you think about it it was only because both the Allied and Axis powers had access to air power. However, it sort of held on for years after that. Even today, you hear people saying that we should just drop nukes on Afghanistan until they surrendered regardless of the civilian cost. (Well, in the part of the country where I live, anyway.)
The truth is that these robots are less scary than bombers and missiles because presumably they will be more precise and will hit combatents not non-combatents. (I mean, they pretty much have to be more precise than the H-Bomb, which has way to high an order of magnitude.)
The whole idea that "we can win this war without ever putting our people in jeopardy," characterized the entire colonial period in which poorly armed native people were crushed, mostly with only token resistance, by advanced, mechanized armies. Heck, even the victory of the United States over the Confederate States is considered to be due to the fact that U.S. soldiers were less vulnerable than Confederate Soldiers because of the greater industrial capacity of the North. (Heck, one of the biggest things in that war was shoes, often Confederate soldiers weren't supplied with decent shoes.) The United States thought that the Confederate army would have to surrender very quickly for that reason and went into that war thinking it would be cost free. (People even went as spectators to the early battles, thinking it would be fun to watch.)
The real problem is this statement:
If we don't have to send in soldiers anymore then the American public will be easily distracted from our hideously hypocritical foreign policy decisions since they don't actually have to worry about their sons and daughters.
If the American people don't have a problem with the cynical realpolitik reasons that our government sometimes goes to war, then they won't oppose the foriegn policies that get us into wars. This is the real problem.
I'm sure that after we design killer robots, spies from hostile foriegn powers will get the information out. Who knows? Maybe WWIII will be fought mainly between robot armies with humans on the sidelines.
ED-209: Drop your gun! You have 10 seconds to comply
Dick Jones: I'd do as he says. (chuckling)
hapless victim drops gun
ED-209: (growls) You now have 5 seconds to comply....
Re:Skynet, here we come
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Robot Wars
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· Score: 1
Movies about friendly happy A.I. are less popular with the core audience for Science Fiction than scary, killer A. I. (Note, I'm not being scientific here, just generally speaking about my own subjective, personal impressions. It's possible I missed all the popular happy-A.I. movies that have come out.) I'm also not talking about anime, just American movies like 2001 or Terminator.
I can point to more movies about friendly, happy aliens than I can about friendly, happy A. I.'s. (Although I still think that bug eyed monsters have the edge in alien movies, too.)
Books, and computer games (remember Floyd?) seem to be more balanced when it comes to A. I.'s.
I've been wishing I could get a job with the government and help create horrible robotic insects that killed their victims and mutilated their corpses. (Or maybe something like those hunter-killer orbs in Phantasm) I figure it would serve as an effective deterrent to enemy fighters....
BTW... the above is an example of my warped sense of humor not any job I've actually applied for... really...
But there was a bug in the site's Web mail that was kind of fun, though it was a known security issue rather than a deliberately placed easter egg. Basically, if you used the Web mail to send another Web mail account a Javascript, the Javascript would execute upon opening the mail. I don't know if we ever got around to fixing it, the company was in the process of disintigrating when we finally got the Web mail working and we were planning to replace it with a branded HushMail anyway.
I don't know if this issue has ever shown up in any other Web mail sites, but there has been a CERT advisory about it. If you send a non-malicious Javascript, it is kind of cute. Of course, I'm sure there are malevolent people out there who could use it for nasty stuff.
The dot com bust has given added credence to those who actually advocate this kind of enforced conformity - they point to a free form, more open dot com workplaces as a symptom or cause of the crash, and are using it to crush any new proposal to create a more humanized, comfortable workplace.
Well, see when I worked at a dot.com startup, the problems they had were caused by fraud on the part of some unscrupulous characters we had working in upper management. Those people were eventually fired (well, eased out with sweet deals), but the damage was done.
I said it to my boss, many times while I was there. "The problem is, you can't treat investment as income."
The reality is the dot.com crash should be brought into perspective now that the same sloppy accounting that caused it is bringing down the big guys. (The biggest gripe people have about Enron is what happened to people's investment in their 401Ks. Treating investment as income again.)
In Ancient Rome, educated Greeks would often sell themselves into slavery to wealthy Romans. However, the thing to remember that these slaves were planning to earn their freedom. They weren't planning to stay slaves forever. If the slave managed to earn his (and I mean his) freedom in this case, he would not only be a free man but a Roman citizen and a client of his former owner. This comparison to the H1-B system is not hyperbolie.
It beat the conditions they had at home in Greece, but it really was slavery.
Unfortunately, Americans, being very provincial, tend to think only in terms of American style slavery, in which manumission was rare and unexpected. (Oh, and no one was really sure what to do with free slaves, except repatriate them to Africa.)
For more information on Roman style slavery, try reading the Masters of Rome series by Colleen McCullough.
The real problem with comparing things to the H1-B system is that there isn't anything exactly like the H1-B system. It somewhat resembles both indentured servitude and Roman style slavery.
Of course, it is difficult to compare the H1-B system to anything else, since it is a modern invention with its own rules and peculiarities. However, to dismiss a comparison with slavery, especially non-American slavery simply reflects a lack of knowledge of the history of the ancient world.
You sacrifice hardware compatibility if you go for a Micros~1 free system. This is a fact. If you decide to be MS free, you have to be committed enough to buy hardware that is compatible with your system. This will require research before buying any piece of hardware. Impulse buying is pretty much out, since the PC hardware you buy at your local computer store was made for Windows PCs, not Linux PCs. (Of course, you can do it, most stores are pretty good on hardware returns. However, you can't expect it to work just because you really want it to, unless you plan to reverse engineer a driver yourself.) This is why I have a Windows drive as well as a Linux drive. (I mean, I paid for Windows 98 whether I wanted it or not, I might as well use it when it makes sense.) Even in this case, when I wanted to use the Internet, I had to pluck out my incompatible internal winmodem and replace it with an external US Robotics modem if I wanted to use Linux on the Internet. (Which I did, because I knew the internal modem was junk anyway.)
Even more frustrating is my experience with my Sidewinder joypad. It worked with the previous version of Mandrake but it doesn't work for me with Mandrake Gaming Edition. I did do a little searching on it to try to get it to work, but I came to the conclusion that I didn't need it particularly and I hardly ever used it under the previous version of Mandrake. I just thought it was ironic that I had more problems with it when I upgraded to Mandrake Gaming Edition then I had with the previous non-gaming edition of Mandrake.
None of this has made me want to get rid of Linux, but it has hampered me from making my system MS-free. (Mind you, I have no intention of buying a new version of Windows as an upgrade. When I replace my desktop PC, I'm sure I'll be stuck with the latest version of Windows.) Hardware is not going to "just work," it won't until Linux supplants Windows as the desktop OS of choice.
I still prefer Linux to Windows, but then I like programming unlike the author of the article. I bought a Mac Powerbook, and I find myself using it most of the time for computer related stuff. But if I want to download programs onto my GP 32, I still boot my computer into Windows. (Though I will check again soon to see if the Mac or Linux software is out for it.)
Of course, sometimes the PC hardware won't just work with your Mac either, but people are more accepting of PC hardware being incompatible with their Macs.
Re:At some point, games peak
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High Score
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In my opinion, there has been a change in the way that video games, I mean especially console games, are marketed that has led to the current decline in video game quality. There has been a decline in overall video game quality, in my opinion.
The most important thing about video games currently is how they look. In the old days, games balanced user interface and graphics. Some games might have bad graphics but have great UIs, and some games might have good graphics and lousy UIs, but generally speaking there was a level of balance. Then came the whole "3D era" (which I actually consider the polygon era) which was ushered in by Nintendo and Sony (Sega were late to the party, adding "3D" capability to their systems at the last minute). In this period, the most important thing about a game was that it used polygons, not how it played. The fact is, I have yet to play a platformer or Street Fighter type of fighting game that was actually better because it was done in polygons. I also wonder what the point of doing certain types of games, like RPGs, in polygons when they seemed to work so well with detailed sprite graphics (I also think that polygons are detrimental to the appearance of RPGs).
Part of this is taste. If you like sprite graphics you aren't going to like polygon graphics until they look just like sprite graphics. It's sort of like the difference between people who prefer traditional cel animation to something like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.
Marketing comes into this because the ability to push polygons and do math related to that became the benchmark that replaced bits. (It could have been worse, though, Sega wanted the benchmark to be how well a game system could do "Full Motion Video" see the large number of horrid FMV games for the Sega CD.) Even now, when people compare systems, they talk about things like polygon counts and bump mapping. (During the SNES/Genesis wars, bits and megaherz were the things people used, hence Sega's infamous "blast processing" marketing campaign.)
Incidentally, I realize that some people (probably the majority) prefer polygon graphics to sprite graphics. It's a matter of taste, but I prefer sprite graphics. (Though there are a few polygon games I really like like Sacrifice and System Shock II.)
Re:Sounds like an interesting book
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High Score
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Somehow I suspect this is more of the reviewer inserting his own 'golly gee look how technology is changing our lives' world view... but you never know.
Well, note that it is a John Katz review. He's famous for articles in which he injects the whole "this changed world wide culture, etc." even if he's talking about pocket lint.
Re:where is gaming going next?
on
High Score
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· Score: 1
Well, at the Ybor City Gameworks (Tampa Bay) they have a ladies night every Thursday (ladies play free on Thursdays and they have other stuff.) Oh, and they have a full bar.
Of course, they aren't my type of arcade games, too modern. But at least they have one Capcom vs. SNK machine for old guys like me, and a few older games...
Rutgers used to have a killer arcade, I wonder if they still do? That was back when you had to stand in line for Street Fighter II.
It was a lot of fun. Of course, that was back in the 16-Bit era, when Sega and Nintendo fought for supremacy and the Play Station was still concieved as the CD add on for the SNES. Basically, it involved standing in front of a kiosk at the mall (in this case inside a Captron store), handing out stickers and talking up the games. I also got to choose which games to display (although Nintendo preferred it if you gave preference to their own games. The Nintendo rep mentioned it when she noticed I liked to show off "Prince of Persia," but I was a big fan of that game at the time.). Oh, and I think I got whatever New Jersey's minimum wage was at the time, which was considerably less than $100 per day. (Still, my memory has started playing tricks on me with advancing age...)
I did pretty well at it, and won a Mario Paint. (It was all location, Christmas time at one of the busiest malls in New Jersey.)
Of course, this version of a Nintendo demostrator sounds like a real life rip off of the Sega game, "The Typing of the Dead." In that game, if you've never seen it, the Agents have Dreamcasts with big batteries attached to their back and Dreamcast keyboards in front as they kill off zombies with a well typed phrase. (Too bad "Typing of the Dead" isn't coming out, as far as I know, for Gamecube. They could package it with the keyboard peripheral they are supposed to release...)
<wistful sigh>... well, now I'm off to sleep (well, to watch an episode of Trigun and then sleep) I have to go to my boring Web $TITLE job tommorrow... Hope those kids enjoy their time as Nintendo demonstrators... </wistful sigh>
Of course, you could always take a Gameboy outside, you really need full sunlight or equivalent to play it.
When I was a kid, playing outside sucked, but then I did grow up very near the Urban Deathmaze which may have colored my thinking.... (Please note, Urban Deathmaze is meant with the utmost affection, I love New York! Heck, I remember when my Mom took me to the great electronic games expo there, they had Vectrex's!)
A mindbogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a brush, but very ravenous.
It's obvious that IEEE has gotten its malevolent ravening monsters confused. Certainly, the DMCA is an evil, ravening beast. Unfortunately, simply not being able to see it won't make it blind to you.
Indeed, in this case, changing the paperwork is a disservice to the people who sign it. It served as a "Beware of the Leopard," type sign. You know, as in "there is a horrible ravenous beast out there that may decide to eat you if you draw its attention." Now, of course, the ravening beast is still out there, and will still eat you if you draw its attention.
It would be sort of as if a park had formerly had a sign near a lake saying, "Beware Alligators," and then one day took it down.
When asked, the park director says, "Oh, well, we were getting fewer people coming to the park, it seems that people didn't want to swim in the lake when they knew they might be eaten by and alligator."
"Oh, so you've gotten rid of the alligators, then."
"Well, no, but now people aren't afraid to swim in the lake any more."
However, there, as with everywhere else, you must contend with the Micros~1 OS monopoly. None of my Japanese games are Mac compatible, I don't know how big that market is, to say nothing of Office software.
Slashdot Mirror
The correct way to handle H1B visas is to make them into real greencards and eliminate them as sojourner visas. Hey, I don't want my cousin-in-law to be forced to go back to Thailand when her H1B visa ends.
Your other quote just points out another problem with the H1B process:
This will actually distort the process, since government officials tend not to want to eliminate revenue whatever the source. (However, I wouldn't object to it as much if H1Bs were brought in as real immigrants and not sojourners.)One last thing, your quote:
We shouldn't just accept abuses, we should take care of them however we can. One way would be to fast track H1Bs to real greencards. In this way, we would eliminate certain deficiencies in the program that allow for abuses.The same goes for most imported fighting games.
In fact, this is such a stupid arguement I'm not interested in hearing anything else you have to say, ever. Welcome to my kill file....
Of course, as the ad says, mod chips also allow people to play copied games, but this is far from their only purpose. (Mods used to come out for cartridge systems by Sega and Nintendo as well, though it was often enough to just resize the cartridge slot.)
If he was convicted of mod-chipping seperately from selling pirated games, it is a big deal. Sony says the case was, "precedent setting." Therefore, I doubt the conviction was based on his selling of pirated games, which are already illegal.
Just one more reason not to do business with Sony. I'll accept anti-piracy measures. Iw ill never accept reion coding and I will not support a company that participates in it, especially with such vigor as Sony.
Assumption: You haven't seen "Mushroom Samba."
"Mushroom Samba" is my favorite episode of Cowboy Bebop, and it is a big Ed episode.
Of course, I can wonder if they might not of shown it on Cartoon Network due to the heavy drug use. I saw it on one of my brother's DVDs
Well, predictably, Animenation sent the message "if you want to continue to use your Animenation Email account, you must pay a fee."
Here's the funny thing. I used to work at a .com that provided Web based Email, so this makes a lot of sense to me. Why give something away if it is costing you money to do so? It was one part of our business plan that never made sense to me. We didn't even have any method for people to make donations.
Part of the problem is that non-technical people don't realize that these things cost money, because they had been free up until now. It reminds me of the one character in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls who resented having to pay for air on the Moon. Outrageous that he had to pay for something that he had come to think of as free.
Now, the Apple thing is a special case for two reasons. It is expensive, $100.00 is a big jump from free, and Mac owners probably thought of it as part of the bundled software they got with their Mac. (Honestly, I never used it so I didn't care, I'm on dialup, and even post meltdown I still have lots of free accounts. I pay for Web space at Tripod even though I hardly use it. I get my real Email from AT&T and use Hotmail as my spam-trap. So, while I remember signing up for iTools I haven't looked at it since then.)
The reality is that many free Web based services that I used to use that were really cool, like zKey or Workspot have either started charging or gone to .com Heaven. (Or, sometimes, first the former and then the latter.) It is irritating when you suddenly find you can't get to your Email or to files you stored on a remote drive. However, that's the price you pay when stuff is free. (Bad customer relations is what companies like Apple pay when they don't have a sensible way to ease people from a free service into a pay service. Let's face it, though, there are plenty of people who would always complain about being charged for "free" services, no matter how reasonable the request.
Company: "But if we don't charge you, we'll go out of business, and then you'll definitely have no way to reach your Email/Files/etc."
Some Users:"Tough, I was only using your site for trivial stuff anyway, so I'll never pay for it, however, I'll complain to high heaven if you want to charge me. Grr..."
The game making kit M.U.G.E.N is available. If you've ever wanted to try your hand at making a Street Fighter II or King of the Fighters type game. The kit comes with a tiny demo game. (One character versus his evil clone.) A lot of people on the internet copy the art and moves from popular fighting games to make characters and levels.
Chu Chu Rocket is a lot like lemmings (with mice being led to rocketships instead of lemmings being led to the exit). I don't think it is available for PC yet, though. (It's for Dreamcast and GB Advance.)
In fact, I think that WWII put an end to this idea, but if you think about it it was only because both the Allied and Axis powers had access to air power. However, it sort of held on for years after that. Even today, you hear people saying that we should just drop nukes on Afghanistan until they surrendered regardless of the civilian cost. (Well, in the part of the country where I live, anyway.)
The truth is that these robots are less scary than bombers and missiles because presumably they will be more precise and will hit combatents not non-combatents. (I mean, they pretty much have to be more precise than the H-Bomb, which has way to high an order of magnitude.)
The whole idea that "we can win this war without ever putting our people in jeopardy," characterized the entire colonial period in which poorly armed native people were crushed, mostly with only token resistance, by advanced, mechanized armies. Heck, even the victory of the United States over the Confederate States is considered to be due to the fact that U.S. soldiers were less vulnerable than Confederate Soldiers because of the greater industrial capacity of the North. (Heck, one of the biggest things in that war was shoes, often Confederate soldiers weren't supplied with decent shoes.) The United States thought that the Confederate army would have to surrender very quickly for that reason and went into that war thinking it would be cost free. (People even went as spectators to the early battles, thinking it would be fun to watch.)
The real problem is this statement:
If the American people don't have a problem with the cynical realpolitik reasons that our government sometimes goes to war, then they won't oppose the foriegn policies that get us into wars. This is the real problem.I'm sure that after we design killer robots, spies from hostile foriegn powers will get the information out. Who knows? Maybe WWIII will be fought mainly between robot armies with humans on the sidelines.
Dick Jones: I'd do as he says. (chuckling)
hapless victim drops gun
ED-209: (growls) You now have 5 seconds to comply....
I can point to more movies about friendly, happy aliens than I can about friendly, happy A. I.'s. (Although I still think that bug eyed monsters have the edge in alien movies, too.)
Books, and computer games (remember Floyd?) seem to be more balanced when it comes to A. I.'s.
I've been wishing I could get a job with the government and help create horrible robotic insects that killed their victims and mutilated their corpses. (Or maybe something like those hunter-killer orbs in Phantasm) I figure it would serve as an effective deterrent to enemy fighters....
BTW... the above is an example of my warped sense of humor not any job I've actually applied for... really...
I don't know if this issue has ever shown up in any other Web mail sites, but there has been a CERT advisory about it. If you send a non-malicious Javascript, it is kind of cute. Of course, I'm sure there are malevolent people out there who could use it for nasty stuff.
Excuse me, I mean less than $10.00
I bet you can buy it for less than $20.00 now...
I said it to my boss, many times while I was there. "The problem is, you can't treat investment as income."
The reality is the dot.com crash should be brought into perspective now that the same sloppy accounting that caused it is bringing down the big guys. (The biggest gripe people have about Enron is what happened to people's investment in their 401Ks. Treating investment as income again.)
Oh, and you should also try reading William Whyte's The Organization Man, it helps bring modern corporate life into perspective, even though it is an old book.
It beat the conditions they had at home in Greece, but it really was slavery.
Unfortunately, Americans, being very provincial, tend to think only in terms of American style slavery, in which manumission was rare and unexpected. (Oh, and no one was really sure what to do with free slaves, except repatriate them to Africa.)
For more information on Roman style slavery, try reading the Masters of Rome series by Colleen McCullough.
The real problem with comparing things to the H1-B system is that there isn't anything exactly like the H1-B system. It somewhat resembles both indentured servitude and Roman style slavery.
American style slavery was really more like feudalism, almost no hope of freedom or every raising your social status.
Of course, it is difficult to compare the H1-B system to anything else, since it is a modern invention with its own rules and peculiarities. However, to dismiss a comparison with slavery, especially non-American slavery simply reflects a lack of knowledge of the history of the ancient world.
Even more frustrating is my experience with my Sidewinder joypad. It worked with the previous version of Mandrake but it doesn't work for me with Mandrake Gaming Edition. I did do a little searching on it to try to get it to work, but I came to the conclusion that I didn't need it particularly and I hardly ever used it under the previous version of Mandrake. I just thought it was ironic that I had more problems with it when I upgraded to Mandrake Gaming Edition then I had with the previous non-gaming edition of Mandrake.
None of this has made me want to get rid of Linux, but it has hampered me from making my system MS-free. (Mind you, I have no intention of buying a new version of Windows as an upgrade. When I replace my desktop PC, I'm sure I'll be stuck with the latest version of Windows.) Hardware is not going to "just work," it won't until Linux supplants Windows as the desktop OS of choice.
I still prefer Linux to Windows, but then I like programming unlike the author of the article. I bought a Mac Powerbook, and I find myself using it most of the time for computer related stuff. But if I want to download programs onto my GP 32, I still boot my computer into Windows. (Though I will check again soon to see if the Mac or Linux software is out for it.)
Of course, sometimes the PC hardware won't just work with your Mac either, but people are more accepting of PC hardware being incompatible with their Macs.
The most important thing about video games currently is how they look. In the old days, games balanced user interface and graphics. Some games might have bad graphics but have great UIs, and some games might have good graphics and lousy UIs, but generally speaking there was a level of balance. Then came the whole "3D era" (which I actually consider the polygon era) which was ushered in by Nintendo and Sony (Sega were late to the party, adding "3D" capability to their systems at the last minute). In this period, the most important thing about a game was that it used polygons, not how it played. The fact is, I have yet to play a platformer or Street Fighter type of fighting game that was actually better because it was done in polygons. I also wonder what the point of doing certain types of games, like RPGs, in polygons when they seemed to work so well with detailed sprite graphics (I also think that polygons are detrimental to the appearance of RPGs).
Part of this is taste. If you like sprite graphics you aren't going to like polygon graphics until they look just like sprite graphics. It's sort of like the difference between people who prefer traditional cel animation to something like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.
Marketing comes into this because the ability to push polygons and do math related to that became the benchmark that replaced bits. (It could have been worse, though, Sega wanted the benchmark to be how well a game system could do "Full Motion Video" see the large number of horrid FMV games for the Sega CD.) Even now, when people compare systems, they talk about things like polygon counts and bump mapping. (During the SNES/Genesis wars, bits and megaherz were the things people used, hence Sega's infamous "blast processing" marketing campaign.)
This is important because companies have been known to emphasize polygon games while giving short shrift to decent sprite based games. Sega suppressed Eternal Champions for Saturn because they didn't want that sprite based game to compete with Virtua Fighter. Sony has been known to suppress games that use sprite graphics in the US market for this reason. I'm not even sure if the N64 can do sprite based action games, although Ogre Battle seems to be sprite based.
Incidentally, I realize that some people (probably the majority) prefer polygon graphics to sprite graphics. It's a matter of taste, but I prefer sprite graphics. (Though there are a few polygon games I really like like Sacrifice and System Shock II.)
Of course, they aren't my type of arcade games, too modern. But at least they have one Capcom vs. SNK machine for old guys like me, and a few older games ...
Rutgers used to have a killer arcade, I wonder if they still do? That was back when you had to stand in line for Street Fighter II.
This is why I like the Slashdot friend system. To me, all of your comments are at 5 :-)
I did pretty well at it, and won a Mario Paint. (It was all location, Christmas time at one of the busiest malls in New Jersey.)
Of course, this version of a Nintendo demostrator sounds like a real life rip off of the Sega game, "The Typing of the Dead." In that game, if you've never seen it, the Agents have Dreamcasts with big batteries attached to their back and Dreamcast keyboards in front as they kill off zombies with a well typed phrase. (Too bad "Typing of the Dead" isn't coming out, as far as I know, for Gamecube. They could package it with the keyboard peripheral they are supposed to release...)
<wistful sigh> ... well, now I'm off to sleep (well, to watch an episode of Trigun and then sleep) I have to go to my boring Web $TITLE job tommorrow... Hope those kids enjoy their time as Nintendo demonstrators... </wistful sigh>
Augmented Reality: A New Way of Seeing
Unfortunately, it will be a while before the technology becomes inexpensive and readily available:
MEMS the Word
Of course, you could always take a Gameboy outside, you really need full sunlight or equivalent to play it.
When I was a kid, playing outside sucked, but then I did grow up very near the Urban Deathmaze which may have colored my thinking.... (Please note, Urban Deathmaze is meant with the utmost affection, I love New York! Heck, I remember when my Mom took me to the great electronic games expo there, they had Vectrex's!)
Besides, Video Tape is so much more dangerous than video games, there is this one tape making the rounds in Japan that will kill you seven days after you watch it...
Indeed, in this case, changing the paperwork is a disservice to the people who sign it. It served as a "Beware of the Leopard," type sign. You know, as in "there is a horrible ravenous beast out there that may decide to eat you if you draw its attention." Now, of course, the ravening beast is still out there, and will still eat you if you draw its attention.
It would be sort of as if a park had formerly had a sign near a lake saying, "Beware Alligators," and then one day took it down.
When asked, the park director says, "Oh, well, we were getting fewer people coming to the park, it seems that people didn't want to swim in the lake when they knew they might be eaten by and alligator."
"Oh, so you've gotten rid of the alligators, then."
"Well, no, but now people aren't afraid to swim in the lake any more."
iMac Girl
However, there, as with everywhere else, you must contend with the Micros~1 OS monopoly. None of my Japanese games are Mac compatible, I don't know how big that market is, to say nothing of Office software.