3d Studio MAX doesn't run on linux. Or unix. Or anything but Windows. With a multithreaded rendering engine and network rendering capabilities, one of these Cray boxes is to MAX what a beefed out Onyx was for Alias back in the day - steaming loads of awesome.
(same question, reiterated - "why would IRIX be the preferred OS for $hardware?"
Simple - your application runs on it, and not something else. There's more to computing than an OS.:P
Re:Ignorance vs. the Unknown
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LHC Success!
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· Score: 1
One person proposed that possibility, and it was thoroughly refuted before the test
This being why I heart slashdot.:)
Teller's "hypothesis" is one of those things that's entered the public consciousness and continues to lurk around in the septic tank like an alligator with a bad case of diarrhea. And much like "alligators in the sewers," it's (almost entirely) bunk - but that doesn't keep the idea from spreading, mutating, being taken out of context, misattributed, and generally catapulted straight up into the higher pantheons of urban myth.
Which - despite getting sucked into it a bit myself, as you've pointed out - was the point I was trying to make. We (again, as a species) have a tendency to let pesky things like "facts" slide when our imaginations get fired up.
Ignorance vs. the Unknown
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LHC Success!
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Just remember - when they tested the first atomic bomb, they didn't know if it would ignite the atmosphere or not.
Fortunately, it didn't.
We (as a species) haven't done anything on the scale of the LHC before - and since the whole point of the device is to learn more about stuff we don't (relatively) know much about, there's bound to be WILD speculation about the potential results.
The loons get airplay because the loony airplay gets the ratings - and TV/radio is about ad revenue first and actual content second.;p
Conversely, I booted an Ubuntu livecd on a Powerbook G4 - an established, FIXED, KNOWN hardware configuration, and right off the top the damned thing was useless without a mouse plugged in to get me some right click love.
Fail. Bigtime.
Nevermind the SCREAMING BUTTHURT I've had TRYING to get various linux distros to recognize various brands of SCSI cards in my old PPC 603s.
Linux may work awesome if you're using commodity hardware you can find in the bottom of a shopping basket as you walk into a Fry's, but gods forbid the developers should ever bother to tweak their driver code for a platform that has a one-button trackpad. Or worse, SCSI.
Or even worse - suppose you have an older SGI and want to (a) run something that isn't IRIX and (b) have video support. Pick one.
The driver coding goes where the cheap, plentiful hardware is. Which winds up leaving a number of potential users out in the cold, because the people who are TRYING to try linux just can't get the shit to work even half as well as the older, shittier, markedly less featureful operating systems.
(Conversely, I ran an obsd 3.x install on a Quadra 650 and damn if it didn't recognize the mobo AAUI and BOTH NuBus NICs as well as all other onboard hardware. Now that's quality!)
Dell's a major MS OEM - they're swimming in Windows licenses, and they have all of the necessary infrastructure in place to brew the necessary driver configs required to get a working machine out the door with minimal hassle.
As anyone who's ever installed Linux knows, it's an incredibly rare event when Everything Works On The First Try - in this case, Dell probably had to eat the cost (paying developers,or a basement cube farm tasked with Making It Work, etc) to make sure their brew of Ubuntu works properly and featurefully on the Mini 9.
They (probably) don't need to do that with Windows - so they're passing the cost on to the consumer.
That or they know that the hardc0re *nix users are going to buy the cheapest version and compile their own OS on the thing, so they're selling it with their own flavor of linux for buzzword compliance.
2. While a firefox extension that does this is definitely a boon, it's a long way from being "supported by default" in the browsers that I spend the most time in - Safari and Firefox, across a total of some four or five machines. When you have a lot of different installs to deal with, extensions become cumbersome to deal with, especially if they don't work with a new build of FF.
C. Finally. I've wanted a feature like this since I browsed my first porn site gallery of thumbnails in 1996.
... yes and no. I've found bookmark and history management to be difficult at best and asinine at worst on IE, Mozilla, Firefox, Camino, and Opera the last time I used it (which was in the late 90s, admittedly).
I like Safari quite a bit, warts and all - though I still use Firefox for certain websites due to its superior ability to remember log/pass for * - Safari does a few things "right" for me that no other browser does.... things I'm seriously wishing Firefox et al would pick up on.
First, the bookmark and history management is great. It's its own window instead of a fixed-maximum-width sidebar like Firefox's history sidebar, and while FF's history pop-up window does show the page title and url, it's doing it in a separate window. Clutter.
Second, and I'm sure it's only a matter of time before other browsers pick this up - RESIZABLE TEXT FIELDS. I can drag the "comment" field of the slashdot Post Comment dialogue to be any size larger than its original scale, and it's not just slashdot I can do it on. I spend a good amount of time editing posts in a CMS, so the ability to resize the text input fields has quickly gone from a "huh!" to a "must have!"
Now if only Safari would let me search inside said text fields (being why I still use firefox for webmail) and had a more robust (read: useable) log/pass manager...
Of course, Chrome could have all of this and fix my long-standing "why hasn't anybody done this?!" of being able to select a block of text containing multiple links and open all links in new tabs with one click, and it could have finally "fixed" open-in-new-window to force-new-window-into-new-tab, but..... it's a Windows Beta. So I can't try it out. Insensitive clods.
Right. By the time the drives get to that price/capacity, SATA will be down to, what, 750g-1tb 2.5" drives for 50$-100$? Less?
From everything I've gathered, the only major benefit to an SSD is that I won't swear as much when I accidentally drop my laptop while it's running. That and given the alleged longevity, they'd make a great drop-in replacement for laptops that are notoriously painful to perform user maintenance on, like the 12" Powerbook G4 (ever try to upgrade or replace the hdd on one of those? Butthurt!). Otherwise, the price/performance trend looks like it'll be favoring Ye Olde Spinny Bits for some time to come.
Games have, forever and a day, always come with some kind of copy protection. And it's always been easy to circumvent. The point I was making - the one you've obviously missed - is that some game companies would add in little extras like the code wheel or seemingly nonsensical bits of the manual, and then have in-game bits that relied on the materials shipped with the game, effectively both providing an "extended" form of copy protection and, more importantly, expanding the game beyond the confines of the computer monitor.
I actually enjoyed that part, as I'd photocopied the box art on a hunch and suddenly realized it had paid off. What pissed me off to no end (I was loving the game up until this point and feeling guilty about not buying it) was the fucking button-masher sequence in which you either hammer the buttons at five times the speed of light or The Girl Dies. After ten or twenty tries, managing to never come close, not even once, I said fuck it and gave up on the game, unfinished.
Unfortunately elements of the same creative team went on to work on Lunar Knights for the Nintendo DS, which features the same sort of thing - a main body game that's fun to play, not too hard, not too easy, really enjoyable.... but to progress through it you have to MASTER this ASSRAPINGLY HARD twitch-shooter that controls like a bucket of dead squid and "features" worse-than-merciless gameplay, not enough shielding, not enough lives, not enough weaponry, and absolutely NO "oh, you really suck ass at this, but you're good at the other part... so we'll go easy on you" switch. Ultimately, LK was an unplayable mix of decent adventure game and impossibly awful twitch shooter. Two things that should never, ever be combined.
I'm sure more than a few/.ers remember the old PC role playing games, with their code wheels and the occasional prompting for "word 4 of paragraph 3 of page 8 of the manual." and whatnot. They were the cheap equivalent of a hardware dongle and while slightly more difficult to duplicate than the 3.5 disks (or CDs) the games came on, in my opinion they gave a great "value added" feel to the experience. Hell, even Metal Gear Solid had something like this - one of the access codes you needed to proceed with the game was printed on the back of the game case. Bugger if you were playing a burned copy!
These methods are ultimately better than a CD check or similar, as they actually engage the player and give them a reason to keep the game packaging around. Unfortunately these days, game packaging is disgustingly minimal - the days of the latest Square RPG coming with giant fold-out maps and equally large fold-outs of bestiary stats and item lists (anyone remember the original Final Fantasy NES packaging? That bigass poster Dragon Warrior came with?) are long gone... ultimately leaving the gamer with "less hassle" as the only reason to buy the game or software instead of downloading it.
I'm not into multiplayer online gaming or mods, custom models, etceteras (probably due to my roots as a console gamer) - I don't want forty multiplayer modes as the "value added" bit for a few hours of single player - I want a keychain fob or a tchotchkey for my tower or something I can hang on my wall. In the box, not available from the company's online store for even more money, thank you.
As long as bits have to be read, piracy will always be an issue. I say stop whinging about it and put in a little extra effort to reward the people that want to give you their money!
... is that if nobody in local politics gives a ghost of a crap about whatever you care about, you can have the satisfaction of donating to someone who's trying to make headway on the problem somewhere.
Admittedly, the potential for abuse is massive. However, if efforts like this succeed and continue to succeed, it'll eventually cause "traditional" politicians to notice.
Seriously. If I want a story, I'll buy a book. I played Diablo because it was a fun little point-and-kill dungeon crawler with phat lootz. I stopped playing Warcraft III because the game kept shitting its story all over me, forcing me to stop cold and wait... and wait... and wait... for it to get the hell out of the way so I could get on with the action.
It's nice if a game has a well thought out backstory and a story that doesn't get in the way of actually enjoying the game itself.... but when a game's story starts to bloat into the Interactive Fiction realm, then it's time to stop billing the damned thing as a game.
Heck, everyone I've ever talked to about Diablo over the last ten years and it's in a stray slashdot comment that I find the first mention of story.
It's one thing for an app to be useable/useful/have a good gooey. Firefox is a good example of all three.
Then there's the horric case of The GIMP - a great paint application. Seriously. The MASSIVE fail point? Linux users bill it as OMG PHOTOSHOPS. As opposed to OMG SUPAR PAINT APP. Gimp is about as Photoshop as an internal combustion engine is a nuclear reactor. The common perception problem is that to just about EVERYONE, Image Manipulation == Photoshop. Which really isn't the case. The GIMP is much more of a painting application along the lines of Corel Draw or Painter.... but the programming-based userbase is deeply sucked into the idea that pixel-pushing === photoshop. Hence the GIMP being marketed as a Photoshop-alike, when in reality the applications have almost nothing to do with each other.
My point, ultimately, is that a huge amount of FOSS is great... but is indirectly crippled by misrepresentation. If you pick up the GIMP because it's been billed as FOSS Photoshop and get burned - and never use it again - the fault isn't the application. It's the advocates failure to understand the specific needs of the targeted market.
1. Money isn't the problem. Desire is the problem. We use "waaaaaaah, it's TOO EXPENSIVE!!!!" as a crutch but the fact is that if we really, really wanted to go to Mars, we'd up and go. It's no big rush because currently there's no competition in manned space exploration. And there won't be until China puts up its own space station or spaceplane. When they start getting serious about space, and start making serious advances, then you can bet it'll light a torch under our asses in a way that "because it's THERE!" never has. The desire to do a thing because it's there is a small part curiosity and a huge part competition - we want to do the thing first, dammit. And barring any major changes in global politics, we could do Mars in 20 years or 30 and still be there first.
With that broad of a view, that big of a price tag, and that little competition, it's no wonder everyone whines about the cost.
2.A. It's not a suicide mission. It's one hell of a technical challenge, in which all of the 'living in space' work done on the ISS and the technical work being done with the unmanned probes will eventually pay off in a big way. We've had a hard time with landing reliably on Mars - that whole "atmosphere" thing really seems to throw the rocket scientists for a loop. Get that licked and you're set.
2.B. Yes, the "it's okay to suck" subtext of Political Correctness has seeped into the social bloodstream and caused the proles to gibber and quake and piss their pants in terror at the sight of a standard pothole barricade because it MIGHT BE THE IRAQS OR THE TERRISTS. And while our culture revels (revels with great ropey jets of semen) at just how incredibly beautiful and unique our snowflake of inadequacy is, I hope the Chinese pick up on it, kick it into gear, and stick a man on the moon or something. Right now (well, the last ten to fifteen and probably next twenty or thirty years) is a golden window for them to hand us our asses on a silver platter, and f*ck if we don't deserve it.
we are a very long way from the moon in the sense of the energy it takes to keep punting supplies out to a lunar orbit.
We don't have the capability because we've never, ever, had a reason to develop it. Start planning to stick the ISS in a lunar orbit (or hell, even a lagrange point) and you can bet the booster technology - having been given the necessary incentive - will rapidly rise to the task.
Rocketry's stuck where it is because we as a species haven't aspired to do anything that'll push it along.
And really, if we wind up abandoning the thing anyway, better to retire it into a parking orbit around the moon than to de-orbit it into the ocean.
Agreed. This kind of capitalistic darwinism has gone beyond sucking the country dry and has passed into total economic terrorism.
Thanks to the rampant, selfish, gold parachute greed of the boomers and their yuppie hellspawn, I fear CEOs more than I will ever fear Al Qaeda. They can (and do) screw up my life - and the lives of millions of others - much more thoroughly, and they stand to gain much more from doing so.... and they have nothing to lose.
... I bought a Playstation for FF7. Got it, played it, hated it. The story was palatable (despite a loathsome protagonist), but I hated - HATED - the incessant load time and the overly streamlined gameplay. Yeah, the game was a breakthrough for streaming off of the disk, but it basically swapped "loading..." for gameplay that felt like it was slow motion underwater sludge. I traded my playstation for a laptop. Years later I tried 8 and didn't care for it; 9 and didn't care for it, the anthologies and didn't care for them thanks to load time... then I bought a DS, played all of the old Final Fantasies that I loved in GBA mode (without load time), and have been enjoying Square's portable titles ever since - particularly The World Ends With You, which seems to have finally struck a balance between gameplay and story. The DS version of FF3 is playable, but managed to bring the incessant "loading..." sludginess the playstation titles have along for the ride, which hurts the replay value for me.
Did I buy the DS for Squenix titles? No. I bought it for Castlevania titles. But the Square games are so much more satisfying when I can grind on the bus or in the bathroom instead of spending dozens of hours welded to my couch. Gaming in general is more satisfying when I can pick it up and put it down - turn it on and turn it off - without waiting and waiting for it to load.
Re:It makes a lot of sense, surprised people notic
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Acer Bets Big On Linux
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Photoshop.
Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, InDesign. AutoCAD, Revit, Maya, 3d Studio MAX.
Yeah, the "typical" "office" machine is Office and a web browser, and linux is fine for that - but for users in the "creative" fields, 'choice' is still a matter of how much ram you can jam into a laptop that's going to be running XP, Vista, or OS X for its entire service life.
The human genome is incredibly complex - like any piece of code, there's bound to be bugs somewhere. The only real difference between a thorough security audit and doctors discovering a new type of cancer is that the silicon's much easier to reboot or patch than a tumor is to excise.
Yeah, they threw some Gibson into the blender with Morrison. X number of parts of Sprawl helps obfuscate source material a bit.
And the "burly brawl" is where hollywood action movies finally died for me. It started with the Gungan/Battle Droid thing in the "first" star wars movie (I actually fell asleep during it in the theater, it was that awesome), and wound up with a fight scene that was too "big", too obviously choreographed, too obviously digitally souped up, and worst of all, too damned long. Bad as that was, the Dragonball Z ending of the third Matrix film was just salt on open wounds - I had the misfortune of seeing it in the theater (a friend dragged me and paid), and I was the only one out of 300 or so people actually laughing (instead of, say.... gasping in awe or whatever the intended effect was).
Clearly, despite being a lifelong fan of science fiction, I am in no way the target audience these guys are trying to reach.
Seriously. The Matrix is entertaining until you read The Invisibles and realize that The Matrix is effectively a rewrite with a post apocalypse sci-fi skin slapped on it with Lawrence Fishburne as a corporate casual King Mob and Keanu Reeves as Jack Frost. Grant Morrison (more enthusiastically) has said as much. V For Vendetta was a horrifying perversion of the Alan Moore comic.... and now here comes The Wachowski Take on an old anime almost universally regarded as cheesy.
I'm smelling a pattern here.
The only thing the Wachowskis have done that wasn't swiped from somebody else - in my experience - is to make "fight" scenes into long, boring Violence Ballet - the second Matrix movie is the first time I can recall hitting "skip" during a fight scene - I don't care how good your effects work, camera work, and choreography is - if the end result is boring, it's just good looking boring.
Speed Racer? Not interested. And not just because I'm sick of the incessant Obviously CG Orgy that Hollywood has been autfellating itself with since the mid 90s. I just can't in good conscience support this "style" of derivative, unoriginal, high-budget film making. It makes my brain itch.
OSX also offers no default lock-screen option like windows does
Open Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access. Select Preferences, Show Status in Menu Bar.
That's hardly DEFAULT, now is it? Having it there is one thing - burying it is another.
The login window / screensaver bogging down or locking up is yet another story.:P Any way you cut it, a "locked screen" on Windows feels a lot more responsive than the screensaver "workaround" that OS X uses.
Slashdot Mirror
3d Studio MAX doesn't run on linux. Or unix. Or anything but Windows. With a multithreaded rendering engine and network rendering capabilities, one of these Cray boxes is to MAX what a beefed out Onyx was for Alias back in the day - steaming loads of awesome.
(same question, reiterated - "why would IRIX be the preferred OS for $hardware?"
Simple - your application runs on it, and not something else. There's more to computing than an OS. :P
This being why I heart slashdot. :)
Teller's "hypothesis" is one of those things that's entered the public consciousness and continues to lurk around in the septic tank like an alligator with a bad case of diarrhea. And much like "alligators in the sewers," it's (almost entirely) bunk - but that doesn't keep the idea from spreading, mutating, being taken out of context, misattributed, and generally catapulted straight up into the higher pantheons of urban myth.
Which - despite getting sucked into it a bit myself, as you've pointed out - was the point I was trying to make. We (again, as a species) have a tendency to let pesky things like "facts" slide when our imaginations get fired up.
Just remember - when they tested the first atomic bomb, they didn't know if it would ignite the atmosphere or not.
Fortunately, it didn't.
We (as a species) haven't done anything on the scale of the LHC before - and since the whole point of the device is to learn more about stuff we don't (relatively) know much about, there's bound to be WILD speculation about the potential results.
The loons get airplay because the loony airplay gets the ratings - and TV/radio is about ad revenue first and actual content second. ;p
Conversely, I booted an Ubuntu livecd on a Powerbook G4 - an established, FIXED, KNOWN hardware configuration, and right off the top the damned thing was useless without a mouse plugged in to get me some right click love.
Fail. Bigtime.
Nevermind the SCREAMING BUTTHURT I've had TRYING to get various linux distros to recognize various brands of SCSI cards in my old PPC 603s.
Linux may work awesome if you're using commodity hardware you can find in the bottom of a shopping basket as you walk into a Fry's, but gods forbid the developers should ever bother to tweak their driver code for a platform that has a one-button trackpad. Or worse, SCSI.
Or even worse - suppose you have an older SGI and want to (a) run something that isn't IRIX and (b) have video support. Pick one.
The driver coding goes where the cheap, plentiful hardware is. Which winds up leaving a number of potential users out in the cold, because the people who are TRYING to try linux just can't get the shit to work even half as well as the older, shittier, markedly less featureful operating systems.
(Conversely, I ran an obsd 3.x install on a Quadra 650 and damn if it didn't recognize the mobo AAUI and BOTH NuBus NICs as well as all other onboard hardware. Now that's quality!)
Dell's a major MS OEM - they're swimming in Windows licenses, and they have all of the necessary infrastructure in place to brew the necessary driver configs required to get a working machine out the door with minimal hassle.
As anyone who's ever installed Linux knows, it's an incredibly rare event when Everything Works On The First Try - in this case, Dell probably had to eat the cost (paying developers,or a basement cube farm tasked with Making It Work, etc) to make sure their brew of Ubuntu works properly and featurefully on the Mini 9.
They (probably) don't need to do that with Windows - so they're passing the cost on to the consumer.
That or they know that the hardc0re *nix users are going to buy the cheapest version and compile their own OS on the thing, so they're selling it with their own flavor of linux for buzzword compliance.
Two points:
1. SWEET! and thank you! <3.
2. While a firefox extension that does this is definitely a boon, it's a long way from being "supported by default" in the browsers that I spend the most time in - Safari and Firefox, across a total of some four or five machines. When you have a lot of different installs to deal with, extensions become cumbersome to deal with, especially if they don't work with a new build of FF.
C. Finally. I've wanted a feature like this since I browsed my first porn site gallery of thumbnails in 1996.
Agreed. For my needs and workflow, it's the best thing to happen to web browsers since tabs! :)
... yes and no. I've found bookmark and history management to be difficult at best and asinine at worst on IE, Mozilla, Firefox, Camino, and Opera the last time I used it (which was in the late 90s, admittedly).
I like Safari quite a bit, warts and all - though I still use Firefox for certain websites due to its superior ability to remember log/pass for * - Safari does a few things "right" for me that no other browser does.... things I'm seriously wishing Firefox et al would pick up on.
First, the bookmark and history management is great. It's its own window instead of a fixed-maximum-width sidebar like Firefox's history sidebar, and while FF's history pop-up window does show the page title and url, it's doing it in a separate window. Clutter.
Second, and I'm sure it's only a matter of time before other browsers pick this up - RESIZABLE TEXT FIELDS. I can drag the "comment" field of the slashdot Post Comment dialogue to be any size larger than its original scale, and it's not just slashdot I can do it on. I spend a good amount of time editing posts in a CMS, so the ability to resize the text input fields has quickly gone from a "huh!" to a "must have!"
Now if only Safari would let me search inside said text fields (being why I still use firefox for webmail) and had a more robust (read: useable) log/pass manager...
Of course, Chrome could have all of this and fix my long-standing "why hasn't anybody done this?!" of being able to select a block of text containing multiple links and open all links in new tabs with one click, and it could have finally "fixed" open-in-new-window to force-new-window-into-new-tab, but..... it's a Windows Beta. So I can't try it out. Insensitive clods.
I think you need to get to 128GB for around $200
Right. By the time the drives get to that price/capacity, SATA will be down to, what, 750g-1tb 2.5" drives for 50$-100$? Less?
From everything I've gathered, the only major benefit to an SSD is that I won't swear as much when I accidentally drop my laptop while it's running. That and given the alleged longevity, they'd make a great drop-in replacement for laptops that are notoriously painful to perform user maintenance on, like the 12" Powerbook G4 (ever try to upgrade or replace the hdd on one of those? Butthurt!). Otherwise, the price/performance trend looks like it'll be favoring Ye Olde Spinny Bits for some time to come.
You're twisting the point.
Games have, forever and a day, always come with some kind of copy protection. And it's always been easy to circumvent. The point I was making - the one you've obviously missed - is that some game companies would add in little extras like the code wheel or seemingly nonsensical bits of the manual, and then have in-game bits that relied on the materials shipped with the game, effectively both providing an "extended" form of copy protection and, more importantly, expanding the game beyond the confines of the computer monitor.
Something DRM of any type of media doesn't do.
I actually enjoyed that part, as I'd photocopied the box art on a hunch and suddenly realized it had paid off. What pissed me off to no end (I was loving the game up until this point and feeling guilty about not buying it) was the fucking button-masher sequence in which you either hammer the buttons at five times the speed of light or The Girl Dies. After ten or twenty tries, managing to never come close, not even once, I said fuck it and gave up on the game, unfinished.
Unfortunately elements of the same creative team went on to work on Lunar Knights for the Nintendo DS, which features the same sort of thing - a main body game that's fun to play, not too hard, not too easy, really enjoyable.... but to progress through it you have to MASTER this ASSRAPINGLY HARD twitch-shooter that controls like a bucket of dead squid and "features" worse-than-merciless gameplay, not enough shielding, not enough lives, not enough weaponry, and absolutely NO "oh, you really suck ass at this, but you're good at the other part... so we'll go easy on you" switch. Ultimately, LK was an unplayable mix of decent adventure game and impossibly awful twitch shooter. Two things that should never, ever be combined.
I'm sure more than a few /.ers remember the old PC role playing games, with their code wheels and the occasional prompting for "word 4 of paragraph 3 of page 8 of the manual." and whatnot. They were the cheap equivalent of a hardware dongle and while slightly more difficult to duplicate than the 3.5 disks (or CDs) the games came on, in my opinion they gave a great "value added" feel to the experience. Hell, even Metal Gear Solid had something like this - one of the access codes you needed to proceed with the game was printed on the back of the game case. Bugger if you were playing a burned copy!
These methods are ultimately better than a CD check or similar, as they actually engage the player and give them a reason to keep the game packaging around. Unfortunately these days, game packaging is disgustingly minimal - the days of the latest Square RPG coming with giant fold-out maps and equally large fold-outs of bestiary stats and item lists (anyone remember the original Final Fantasy NES packaging? That bigass poster Dragon Warrior came with?) are long gone... ultimately leaving the gamer with "less hassle" as the only reason to buy the game or software instead of downloading it.
I'm not into multiplayer online gaming or mods, custom models, etceteras (probably due to my roots as a console gamer) - I don't want forty multiplayer modes as the "value added" bit for a few hours of single player - I want a keychain fob or a tchotchkey for my tower or something I can hang on my wall. In the box, not available from the company's online store for even more money, thank you.
As long as bits have to be read, piracy will always be an issue. I say stop whinging about it and put in a little extra effort to reward the people that want to give you their money!
... is that if nobody in local politics gives a ghost of a crap about whatever you care about, you can have the satisfaction of donating to someone who's trying to make headway on the problem somewhere.
Admittedly, the potential for abuse is massive. However, if efforts like this succeed and continue to succeed, it'll eventually cause "traditional" politicians to notice.
Diablo has a story?!
Seriously. If I want a story, I'll buy a book. I played Diablo because it was a fun little point-and-kill dungeon crawler with phat lootz. I stopped playing Warcraft III because the game kept shitting its story all over me, forcing me to stop cold and wait... and wait... and wait... for it to get the hell out of the way so I could get on with the action.
It's nice if a game has a well thought out backstory and a story that doesn't get in the way of actually enjoying the game itself.... but when a game's story starts to bloat into the Interactive Fiction realm, then it's time to stop billing the damned thing as a game.
Heck, everyone I've ever talked to about Diablo over the last ten years and it's in a stray slashdot comment that I find the first mention of story.
Crazy.
.... it's BILLING.
It's one thing for an app to be useable/useful/have a good gooey. Firefox is a good example of all three.
Then there's the horric case of The GIMP - a great paint application. Seriously. The MASSIVE fail point? Linux users bill it as OMG PHOTOSHOPS. As opposed to OMG SUPAR PAINT APP. Gimp is about as Photoshop as an internal combustion engine is a nuclear reactor. The common perception problem is that to just about EVERYONE, Image Manipulation == Photoshop. Which really isn't the case. The GIMP is much more of a painting application along the lines of Corel Draw or Painter.... but the programming-based userbase is deeply sucked into the idea that pixel-pushing === photoshop. Hence the GIMP being marketed as a Photoshop-alike, when in reality the applications have almost nothing to do with each other.
My point, ultimately, is that a huge amount of FOSS is great... but is indirectly crippled by misrepresentation. If you pick up the GIMP because it's been billed as FOSS Photoshop and get burned - and never use it again - the fault isn't the application. It's the advocates failure to understand the specific needs of the targeted market.
1. Money isn't the problem. Desire is the problem. We use "waaaaaaah, it's TOO EXPENSIVE!!!!" as a crutch but the fact is that if we really, really wanted to go to Mars, we'd up and go. It's no big rush because currently there's no competition in manned space exploration. And there won't be until China puts up its own space station or spaceplane. When they start getting serious about space, and start making serious advances, then you can bet it'll light a torch under our asses in a way that "because it's THERE!" never has. The desire to do a thing because it's there is a small part curiosity and a huge part competition - we want to do the thing first, dammit. And barring any major changes in global politics, we could do Mars in 20 years or 30 and still be there first.
With that broad of a view, that big of a price tag, and that little competition, it's no wonder everyone whines about the cost.
2.A. It's not a suicide mission. It's one hell of a technical challenge, in which all of the 'living in space' work done on the ISS and the technical work being done with the unmanned probes will eventually pay off in a big way. We've had a hard time with landing reliably on Mars - that whole "atmosphere" thing really seems to throw the rocket scientists for a loop. Get that licked and you're set.
2.B. Yes, the "it's okay to suck" subtext of Political Correctness has seeped into the social bloodstream and caused the proles to gibber and quake and piss their pants in terror at the sight of a standard pothole barricade because it MIGHT BE THE IRAQS OR THE TERRISTS. And while our culture revels (revels with great ropey jets of semen) at just how incredibly beautiful and unique our snowflake of inadequacy is, I hope the Chinese pick up on it, kick it into gear, and stick a man on the moon or something. Right now (well, the last ten to fifteen and probably next twenty or thirty years) is a golden window for them to hand us our asses on a silver platter, and f*ck if we don't deserve it.
we are a very long way from the moon in the sense of the energy it takes to keep punting supplies out to a lunar orbit.
We don't have the capability because we've never, ever, had a reason to develop it. Start planning to stick the ISS in a lunar orbit (or hell, even a lagrange point) and you can bet the booster technology - having been given the necessary incentive - will rapidly rise to the task.
Rocketry's stuck where it is because we as a species haven't aspired to do anything that'll push it along.
And really, if we wind up abandoning the thing anyway, better to retire it into a parking orbit around the moon than to de-orbit it into the ocean.
PKD nailed it; Gibson et al embellished it; Shadowrun broadened the scope a bit.
The only thing we're missing are, arguably, the dragons.
(and I haven't kept up since first ed. but I know what you mean all too well)
Agreed. This kind of capitalistic darwinism has gone beyond sucking the country dry and has passed into total economic terrorism.
Thanks to the rampant, selfish, gold parachute greed of the boomers and their yuppie hellspawn, I fear CEOs more than I will ever fear Al Qaeda. They can (and do) screw up my life - and the lives of millions of others - much more thoroughly, and they stand to gain much more from doing so.... and they have nothing to lose.
... I bought a Playstation for FF7. Got it, played it, hated it. The story was palatable (despite a loathsome protagonist), but I hated - HATED - the incessant load time and the overly streamlined gameplay. Yeah, the game was a breakthrough for streaming off of the disk, but it basically swapped "loading..." for gameplay that felt like it was slow motion underwater sludge. I traded my playstation for a laptop. Years later I tried 8 and didn't care for it; 9 and didn't care for it, the anthologies and didn't care for them thanks to load time... then I bought a DS, played all of the old Final Fantasies that I loved in GBA mode (without load time), and have been enjoying Square's portable titles ever since - particularly The World Ends With You, which seems to have finally struck a balance between gameplay and story. The DS version of FF3 is playable, but managed to bring the incessant "loading..." sludginess the playstation titles have along for the ride, which hurts the replay value for me.
Did I buy the DS for Squenix titles? No. I bought it for Castlevania titles. But the Square games are so much more satisfying when I can grind on the bus or in the bathroom instead of spending dozens of hours welded to my couch. Gaming in general is more satisfying when I can pick it up and put it down - turn it on and turn it off - without waiting and waiting for it to load.
Photoshop.
Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, InDesign. AutoCAD, Revit, Maya, 3d Studio MAX.
Yeah, the "typical" "office" machine is Office and a web browser, and linux is fine for that - but for users in the "creative" fields, 'choice' is still a matter of how much ram you can jam into a laptop that's going to be running XP, Vista, or OS X for its entire service life.
The human genome is incredibly complex - like any piece of code, there's bound to be bugs somewhere. The only real difference between a thorough security audit and doctors discovering a new type of cancer is that the silicon's much easier to reboot or patch than a tumor is to excise.
Yeah, they threw some Gibson into the blender with Morrison. X number of parts of Sprawl helps obfuscate source material a bit.
And the "burly brawl" is where hollywood action movies finally died for me. It started with the Gungan/Battle Droid thing in the "first" star wars movie (I actually fell asleep during it in the theater, it was that awesome), and wound up with a fight scene that was too "big", too obviously choreographed, too obviously digitally souped up, and worst of all, too damned long. Bad as that was, the Dragonball Z ending of the third Matrix film was just salt on open wounds - I had the misfortune of seeing it in the theater (a friend dragged me and paid), and I was the only one out of 300 or so people actually laughing (instead of, say.... gasping in awe or whatever the intended effect was).
Clearly, despite being a lifelong fan of science fiction, I am in no way the target audience these guys are trying to reach.
Seriously. The Matrix is entertaining until you read The Invisibles and realize that The Matrix is effectively a rewrite with a post apocalypse sci-fi skin slapped on it with Lawrence Fishburne as a corporate casual King Mob and Keanu Reeves as Jack Frost. Grant Morrison (more enthusiastically) has said as much. V For Vendetta was a horrifying perversion of the Alan Moore comic.... and now here comes The Wachowski Take on an old anime almost universally regarded as cheesy.
I'm smelling a pattern here.
The only thing the Wachowskis have done that wasn't swiped from somebody else - in my experience - is to make "fight" scenes into long, boring Violence Ballet - the second Matrix movie is the first time I can recall hitting "skip" during a fight scene - I don't care how good your effects work, camera work, and choreography is - if the end result is boring, it's just good looking boring.
Speed Racer? Not interested. And not just because I'm sick of the incessant Obviously CG Orgy that Hollywood has been autfellating itself with since the mid 90s. I just can't in good conscience support this "style" of derivative, unoriginal, high-budget film making. It makes my brain itch.
Open Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access. Select Preferences, Show Status in Menu Bar.
That's hardly DEFAULT, now is it? Having it there is one thing - burying it is another.
The login window / screensaver bogging down or locking up is yet another story.