"You said: "I don't like what they've done, but the good they have done outweighs it."
Thought I answered that, maybe I didn't. They make killer games instead of 'me too' games. In other words, the game market cannot survive if nobody attempts to be the best at what they can do. People are asking me not to buy Blizzard games becaues of BNETD getting shut down. It's sad that it happened, but if I have to choose between that and a supporting a company that makes good games, well I've told you my choice.
Sorry.
As for your question about art, I didn't understand what you meant. I do think I haven't been that clear on what I meant, though. I'm a digital artist/animator. Both the game industry and the movie/tv industry value my skills. It's in my best interest that they both do well. The funny thing is that they want to pass the SSSCA which would seriously inhibit my ability to grow my skills that are valued in their world. It's very important to me that they DONT pass that legislation, but it is also important to me that movies like Lord of the Rings get made.
So what do I do? Boycott the industy, thus hurting my own success. Or do I boycott the industry and maintain my rights. I think there is middle ground.
Getting back to the topic of this thread, I agree that punishing Blizzard by not buying the game is not the right approach. I think the best thing you can do is flat out express to them what your concerns are. Getting inundated with "I disapprove of your actions..." email is going to do more to get your point across than simply not buying a game. Blizzard has no idea why you're not buying a game, but it does cost them money in order to listen to and respond to your complaint.
I forgot that if you go against the flow here, you get modded down. So let me reclaim my karma points:
"MICROSOFT SUCKS! They don't do anything right."
"LINUX RULES! Linux is in fact, not imperfect. The flaws in it are really the users's fault."
"BLIZZARD IS EVIL! The fact that they make great games is of little consequence."
"OPEN SOURCE IS GREAT!! Microsoft is evil because they don't use it, yet the benefits are quite obvious! I mean look how great Linux is! Just be sure to see my earlier note on it."
There, I should get my Karma back. Sorry for having an individual opinions!
I agree with you there. I was hooked on Q3F (http://www.q3f.com) for months.
Think WC3 will support mods? Im glad Game companies have mainly embraced that practice. If the Game Industry was like the RIAA... *shudder* we'd be playing Pong with a Britney Spears background.
"Whatever man. I ain't buying SHIT from Blizzard. See, I believe in acting on my beliefs, not just spouting off shit on/."
In other words, you have twisted priorities. 'Im going to punish Blizzard by not buying this game.'
Which is fine, go do that. I'm not, though. And you better not tell me I'm a bad guy for it . You see, the games industry is about making games better. A company like Blizzard sets out to do a game, and they don't do it until they know it's ready to go. Arguably, Blizzard's games are really high quality.
It is more important to me that Blizzard continue to keep making games. It's important to me as a game player and important to me as an artist. I don't want to work at a company that says "ooo here's a good game, how can we quickly make a game just like it?"
So I *am* going to support Blizzard. I don't like what they've done, but the good they have done outweighs it.
Disagree with me if you like, but don't accuse me of being hypocritical because I'm supporting higher quality standards in the industry.
It's like the Lord of the Rings example. LOTR is a good movie! We *want* the MPAA to make good movies. If the movies weren't supported, we'd all still be using VHS instead of DVD. Think about that. It's a balance of priorities.
Well yeah, if you oversimplify anything, it sounds uninteresting doesn't it?
The problem with most genres is that few companies seek to truely innovate. "We need the next Quake Killer!! Okay, we'll Quake, add 2 more new features, it'll drastically change the game!" -- the market suffers from that. Westwood's Command and Conquer series somewhat suffers from 'cookiecutter-itis' where they rehash the game a few times too often.
It's easy to say "well, I guess the genre is dead because it's all more of the same", but when you do that, you're forgetting about games like StarCraft and Age of Empires. Those weren't just subtle upates to the theme, but drastically different strategies can be used in those games.
I would agree with you that RTS is basically dead when all the companies make 'me-too' products, but when Blizzard comes along and reinvents the genre, I wouldn't be willing to call it dead yet. If anything, it'll inject fresh life into it. From what I've read so far, Blizzard has been hard at work making this into a new type of game. It will be really disappointing if they prove me wrong.
Why don't you go write them a letter instead of caling me a whore. With all the crappy games out there, making a good one into a success by buying one is far more important to me.
"Gee, we only sold 400,000 copies, must be because we shut that site down."
They can trace that IP you mentioned to your house (theoretically, anyway). If somebody else recieves it, it still goes to your house. Somebody could make the same argument that post office mail could be recieved by your room mate. It's really not that different.
There are cases where it's a lot harder to trace. You could have a friend download it, and then you could get it from him. That's fine. That would break what I'm saying, I agree with you etc etc etc. In most cases tho, unless somebody has a convoluted setup like this, it should be fairly easy to say "it's really likely he got this message."
In any case, I'm not trying to say that it would work in every single case. I never made that claim. There are some cases it'll work and some that won't. There's really no point in debating what you could do to get around it. It wouldn't be all that hard to do. Question is: do you want to try to get around it, not can you.
Wouldn't the IP address get traced back? Seems like unless somebody is trying reaaaaaaaally really hard to avoid getting that mail... (guilty? Heh)... then it wouldn't be that hard to prove they got it, if it ever went that far. I see what you are saying, though. I have my email forwarded a couple of times before I actually get it. (a rube-goldberg setup to get my phone to beep when I get email...) It'd be harder to prove, in that case, I got a mail... or maybe it'd actually be easier. Who knows heh.
It's hard to get around the net without getting traced.
I got unsolicited mail (post office mail) addressed to 'NanoGator Animation, Inc.'. I know where they got this info. When I registerred my domain, I sarcastially put that as the billing info. That is the only time I have ever used that name.
I've come up with ideas ad nauseum about how to fight spam, but so far the solutions either require really limiting your capabilities, or threaten to force spam to come through other ways such as Instant Messaging. Maybe we're fighting the wrong battle. What are some other approaches to fighting spam?
One approach to fighting spam would be to devalue it. Anybody know how we could do this? One idea I had was to generate a bunch of fake lists and actually sell those to would be mass-solicitors. Tainted addresses would increase suspicion of whether or not it'd be worth buying a list.
Another one would be to generate so much spam that everybody is forced to take steps against it. I realize this would initially do more harm than good, but if our mailbox did get 1400 mail mesasges a day like mentioned in a previous article, then it would make unsolicited mail far less interesting. I'm willing to switch to IM (or a private email network) for a month or two to blow it out heh.
Anybody else have ideas about how to devalue spam? If we brainstormed a few ideas, something really interesting might pop up.
The difference between today and tomorrow.
on
Simpsons Guide to Math
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Okay... so something interesting to YOU didn't make it. I'll give you the Nasa one, but I have to side with Slashdot's decision on the rest of them.
Simpsons: Fun, interesting to talk about with my friends. Flexible ceramics? ZZzzz. How many years before we see something result from that?
Resident Evil movie: tempted to see that, Slashdot saved me money today. 1mm Microscope: Woopie. We'll see results from that in what, 5-10 years?
Self heating can: lots of us bachelors don't like to cook. This could also be quite useful in survival gear. It's going to be out SOON. (According to their marketing brocure...). The Google one you mentioned made it.
Please help my project? Due date NOW.
See the pattern? I'm not in any way saying that ultimately the news you suggested is less important, but the big difference is time. If something is going to happen years from now, then it has lower prescedence on what's happening today.
Simpsons explained Black holes to me...
on
Simpsons Guide to Math
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
There was a show on Black Holes on the Discovery Channel one day. They used the 3D episode of the Simpsons to illustrate how a black hole works.
I haveta admit, I carried away a lot more about black holes because of that episode. For example, I had always heard that 'time and space are curved', but could never really picture it until they explained it using footage from that show.
Us right brained people don't like books a whole lot. Math equations put us into screensaver mode. So when we get a visual like that, it suddenly clicks into place.
Kudos to Discovery Channel and the Simpsons for giving me the foundation ability to understand the more sophisticated theories about time and space.
"Now that I understand the memory in the GC a little better I can see how a game would be a bit dificult to fit on the GC, especially a port"
Don't forget that the GC has the 6:1 texture compression... sounds to me like they could have easily done it if they got it on PS2, but I will definiitely check out those links and absorb some more info.
"Thanks for the fun conversation. Its amazing what you can still learn even when you think you know a lot about a subject:) "
I've never considered running Amiga before, what are some of the highlights of runnning it? Is it just so people can tinker around, or can you do things with it where Linux/Windows isn't cutting it?
I'm genuinely curious, not being a negative smart ass.
"Only Sony wouldn't simply scale back their stand to just some demo-presentation but make a point of packing up and going, effectively letting microsofts move backfire."
In other words, Sony wouldn't play on a level playing field with MS, so they wouldn't play at all.
Yep, I definitely agree with that.;) Heaven forbid they can't break the rules to compete with a better product.
You're right, heh I forgot there was actually a day when mice didn't have wheels.
My optical one has been dropped more than I'd like to admit, and it's fine. I think the fewer moving parts really help that. The first MS Optical mouse, though, had a design flaw in it where it was pinching the cord too hard where it meets the case. After a while, the mouse'd just go out. Taking that thing apart to figure out what was wrong was a PITA.
The latest models seem to be fine though. The parts were always fine, but the original casing had a flaw in it.
Just wanted t othank you for the link. Very interesting!
Mice have come a long way, haven't they? Complain about MS all you want, but their 'Wheel Mouse Optical' is awesome. A must have for any 3D Artist or Photoshop Guru. Glad it's wood and not plastic though. I'd hate to file for workman's comp over a splinter in my hand...
Hmm that's odd. Nintendo's site says that the GC has 40 megs of 'System ram'. I think the PS2 is fairly close to that, but their VRAM was only 4 megs so that really crippled the machine. On top of that, the GC has S3C Texture Compression that provides 6:1 compression, all in hardware. The PS2 lacks texture compression.
I have no doubt they canned Max Payne on the GCN, but it's startling to hear that it was a system limitation the PS2 didn't have. Maybe he was ill-informed? I dunno. Heh.
Interesting stuff, though. You educated me, thank you.:)
Slashdot Mirror
... can they install Linux on it?
"You said: "I don't like what they've done, but the good they have done outweighs it."
Thought I answered that, maybe I didn't. They make killer games instead of 'me too' games. In other words, the game market cannot survive if nobody attempts to be the best at what they can do. People are asking me not to buy Blizzard games becaues of BNETD getting shut down. It's sad that it happened, but if I have to choose between that and a supporting a company that makes good games, well I've told you my choice.
Sorry.
As for your question about art, I didn't understand what you meant. I do think I haven't been that clear on what I meant, though. I'm a digital artist/animator. Both the game industry and the movie/tv industry value my skills. It's in my best interest that they both do well. The funny thing is that they want to pass the SSSCA which would seriously inhibit my ability to grow my skills that are valued in their world. It's very important to me that they DONT pass that legislation, but it is also important to me that movies like Lord of the Rings get made.
So what do I do? Boycott the industy, thus hurting my own success. Or do I boycott the industry and maintain my rights. I think there is middle ground.
Getting back to the topic of this thread, I agree that punishing Blizzard by not buying the game is not the right approach. I think the best thing you can do is flat out express to them what your concerns are. Getting inundated with "I disapprove of your actions..." email is going to do more to get your point across than simply not buying a game. Blizzard has no idea why you're not buying a game, but it does cost them money in order to listen to and respond to your complaint.
I, for one, don't feel like overreacting.
I forgot that if you go against the flow here, you get modded down. So let me reclaim my karma points:
"MICROSOFT SUCKS! They don't do anything right."
"LINUX RULES! Linux is in fact, not imperfect. The flaws in it are really the users's fault."
"BLIZZARD IS EVIL! The fact that they make great games is of little consequence."
"OPEN SOURCE IS GREAT!! Microsoft is evil because they don't use it, yet the benefits are quite obvious! I mean look how great Linux is! Just be sure to see my earlier note on it."
There, I should get my Karma back. Sorry for having an individual opinions!
I agree with you there. I was hooked on Q3F (http://www.q3f.com) for months.
... *shudder* we'd be playing Pong with a Britney Spears background.
Think WC3 will support mods? Im glad Game companies have mainly embraced that practice. If the Game Industry was like the RIAA
"Whatever man. I ain't buying SHIT from Blizzard. See, I believe in acting on my beliefs, not just spouting off shit on /."
In other words, you have twisted priorities. 'Im going to punish Blizzard by not buying this game.'
Which is fine, go do that. I'm not, though. And you better not tell me I'm a bad guy for it . You see, the games industry is about making games better. A company like Blizzard sets out to do a game, and they don't do it until they know it's ready to go. Arguably, Blizzard's games are really high quality.
It is more important to me that Blizzard continue to keep making games. It's important to me as a game player and important to me as an artist. I don't want to work at a company that says "ooo here's a good game, how can we quickly make a game just like it?"
So I *am* going to support Blizzard. I don't like what they've done, but the good they have done outweighs it.
Disagree with me if you like, but don't accuse me of being hypocritical because I'm supporting higher quality standards in the industry.
It's like the Lord of the Rings example. LOTR is a good movie! We *want* the MPAA to make good movies. If the movies weren't supported, we'd all still be using VHS instead of DVD. Think about that. It's a balance of priorities.
Well yeah, if you oversimplify anything, it sounds uninteresting doesn't it?
The problem with most genres is that few companies seek to truely innovate. "We need the next Quake Killer!! Okay, we'll Quake, add 2 more new features, it'll drastically change the game!" -- the market suffers from that. Westwood's Command and Conquer series somewhat suffers from 'cookiecutter-itis' where they rehash the game a few times too often.
It's easy to say "well, I guess the genre is dead because it's all more of the same", but when you do that, you're forgetting about games like StarCraft and Age of Empires. Those weren't just subtle upates to the theme, but drastically different strategies can be used in those games.
I would agree with you that RTS is basically dead when all the companies make 'me-too' products, but when Blizzard comes along and reinvents the genre, I wouldn't be willing to call it dead yet. If anything, it'll inject fresh life into it. From what I've read so far, Blizzard has been hard at work making this into a new type of game. It will be really disappointing if they prove me wrong.
Why don't you go write them a letter instead of caling me a whore. With all the crappy games out there, making a good one into a success by buying one is far more important to me.
"Gee, we only sold 400,000 copies, must be because we shut that site down."
Talk about Karma Whore.
They can trace that IP you mentioned to your house (theoretically, anyway). If somebody else recieves it, it still goes to your house. Somebody could make the same argument that post office mail could be recieved by your room mate. It's really not that different.
There are cases where it's a lot harder to trace. You could have a friend download it, and then you could get it from him. That's fine. That would break what I'm saying, I agree with you etc etc etc. In most cases tho, unless somebody has a convoluted setup like this, it should be fairly easy to say "it's really likely he got this message."
In any case, I'm not trying to say that it would work in every single case. I never made that claim. There are some cases it'll work and some that won't. There's really no point in debating what you could do to get around it. It wouldn't be all that hard to do. Question is: do you want to try to get around it, not can you.
Wouldn't the IP address get traced back? Seems like unless somebody is trying reaaaaaaaally really hard to avoid getting that mail... (guilty? Heh) ... then it wouldn't be that hard to prove they got it, if it ever went that far. I see what you are saying, though. I have my email forwarded a couple of times before I actually get it. (a rube-goldberg setup to get my phone to beep when I get email...) It'd be harder to prove, in that case, I got a mail... or maybe it'd actually be easier. Who knows heh.
It's hard to get around the net without getting traced.
Doh! *Slaps his forehead* heh
Glad I don't intend to sell it. THanks for educating me!
Think if I just changed the billing info I'd be ok?
Depending on how anal they get, they could go to your ISP and demand the logs of your access into your POP account.
There are cases where this may not be practical, but in most cases you'll be able to tell if the message was ever retrieved or not.
Certainly by saying "You automatically lose if you don't acknowledge..." would be enough to get most mail dodgers interested in recieving it.
I got unsolicited mail (post office mail) addressed to 'NanoGator Animation, Inc.'. I know where they got this info. When I registerred my domain, I sarcastially put that as the billing info. That is the only time I have ever used that name.
I've come up with ideas ad nauseum about how to fight spam, but so far the solutions either require really limiting your capabilities, or threaten to force spam to come through other ways such as Instant Messaging. Maybe we're fighting the wrong battle. What are some other approaches to fighting spam?
One approach to fighting spam would be to devalue it. Anybody know how we could do this? One idea I had was to generate a bunch of fake lists and actually sell those to would be mass-solicitors. Tainted addresses would increase suspicion of whether or not it'd be worth buying a list.
Another one would be to generate so much spam that everybody is forced to take steps against it. I realize this would initially do more harm than good, but if our mailbox did get 1400 mail mesasges a day like mentioned in a previous article, then it would make unsolicited mail far less interesting. I'm willing to switch to IM (or a private email network) for a month or two to blow it out heh.
Anybody else have ideas about how to devalue spam? If we brainstormed a few ideas, something really interesting might pop up.
Okay... so something interesting to YOU didn't make it. I'll give you the Nasa one, but I have to side with Slashdot's decision on the rest of them.
Simpsons: Fun, interesting to talk about with my friends. Flexible ceramics? ZZzzz. How many years before we see something result from that?
Resident Evil movie: tempted to see that, Slashdot saved me money today. 1mm Microscope: Woopie. We'll see results from that in what, 5-10 years?
Self heating can: lots of us bachelors don't like to cook. This could also be quite useful in survival gear. It's going to be out SOON. (According to their marketing brocure...). The Google one you mentioned made it.
Please help my project? Due date NOW.
See the pattern? I'm not in any way saying that ultimately the news you suggested is less important, but the big difference is time. If something is going to happen years from now, then it has lower prescedence on what's happening today.
There was a show on Black Holes on the Discovery Channel one day. They used the 3D episode of the Simpsons to illustrate how a black hole works.
I haveta admit, I carried away a lot more about black holes because of that episode. For example, I had always heard that 'time and space are curved', but could never really picture it until they explained it using footage from that show.
Us right brained people don't like books a whole lot. Math equations put us into screensaver mode. So when we get a visual like that, it suddenly clicks into place.
Kudos to Discovery Channel and the Simpsons for giving me the foundation ability to understand the more sophisticated theories about time and space.
I basically agree. I don't have any more comments to make really, but I thought I'd at least let you know that. :)
"Now that I understand the memory in the GC a little better I can see how a game would be a bit dificult to fit on the GC, especially a port"
:) "
:)
Don't forget that the GC has the 6:1 texture compression... sounds to me like they could have easily done it if they got it on PS2, but I will definiitely check out those links and absorb some more info.
"Thanks for the fun conversation. Its amazing what you can still learn even when you think you know a lot about a subject
I feel the same way. Cheers friend.
Poor choice of words :P
In my strange world, I consider software to be different from a product, don't ask me why cos I have no idea.
If I had the abillity to edit Slashdot posts, I would have changed that already since people didn't understand I just made a silly mistake.
... I use Opera. Although if too many people start using it, I'll haveta find something else.
Bitchin! Anybody runnin Lightwave on it yet? ;)
I've never considered running Amiga before, what are some of the highlights of runnning it? Is it just so people can tinker around, or can you do things with it where Linux/Windows isn't cutting it?
I'm genuinely curious, not being a negative smart ass.
"Only Sony wouldn't simply scale back their stand to just some demo-presentation but make a point of packing up and going, effectively letting microsofts move backfire."
;) Heaven forbid they can't break the rules to compete with a better product.
In other words, Sony wouldn't play on a level playing field with MS, so they wouldn't play at all.
Yep, I definitely agree with that.
You're right, heh I forgot there was actually a day when mice didn't have wheels.
My optical one has been dropped more than I'd like to admit, and it's fine. I think the fewer moving parts really help that. The first MS Optical mouse, though, had a design flaw in it where it was pinching the cord too hard where it meets the case. After a while, the mouse'd just go out. Taking that thing apart to figure out what was wrong was a PITA.
The latest models seem to be fine though. The parts were always fine, but the original casing had a flaw in it.
Just wanted t othank you for the link. Very interesting!
Mice have come a long way, haven't they? Complain about MS all you want, but their 'Wheel Mouse Optical' is awesome. A must have for any 3D Artist or Photoshop Guru. Glad it's wood and not plastic though. I'd hate to file for workman's comp over a splinter in my hand...
Here's something interesting:
"24 MB MoSys 1T-SRAM, Approximately 10ns Sustainable Latency
A-Memory
16MB (81MHz DRAM)"
From Nintendo's site... I wonder how that compares to PS2's RAM. Isn't it like 32 main and 4 vram or something like that?
Hmm that's odd. Nintendo's site says that the GC has 40 megs of 'System ram'. I think the PS2 is fairly close to that, but their VRAM was only 4 megs so that really crippled the machine. On top of that, the GC has S3C Texture Compression that provides 6:1 compression, all in hardware. The PS2 lacks texture compression.
:)
I have no doubt they canned Max Payne on the GCN, but it's startling to hear that it was a system limitation the PS2 didn't have. Maybe he was ill-informed? I dunno. Heh.
Interesting stuff, though. You educated me, thank you.