First the universe comes into being once again when Chuck wakes up. He processes to scare the time-space fabric out of his way until he reaches the kitchen where he stares down the coffee pot till it spontaniously brews coffee. Grabbing a chicken from his hen house out back he round house kicks it catching the subsequently, and prefectly made sunny side up eggs in his mouth after they have flown around the world in 14 seconds. He boldly enters his home through a revolving door which his slams upon glancing at the paper's headline "Chuck Norris Botnet".
He waits momentarily while the planet shifts upwards to place Chuck into his sofa as he grabs the phone. The phone out of sheer terror immediately dials the Italian PM who's normal black phone begins to glow a dark burgandy. Trembling the Italian PM picks up the phone when suddently Chuck grabs him by the throat THROUGH the phone stating simply, "I am about to give Italy a taste of my boot if you do not bring me this program by noon."
Stammering the PM says, "But that's madness, it's 11:58 AM here!"
Chuck smiles, "Madness? THIS IS NORRIS!" and round-house kicks the PM, again through the phone, so hard he finally lands in Sparta.
The programmer was never head from again... he apaprently caught the first computer-to-human transmittable virus called the NORRIS-1C virus which causes you to spontaniously explode as if round house kicked...
How can we invest so much time and debate arguing tax laws that tax it citizens more then 10 fold the rate that we had when we overthrew a king due to taxes? Obviously our voting track record and solidly confirmed we are the government's bitches so why waste the energy you could better spend working harder for the King.. errr government.
Understanding Linear Algebra and Calculus allows for Mathematical solutions that can drastically cut down on the amount of coded recursion, looping, and needless flow control (if-then-else, case,select,switch,etc...)
Wasn't the concepts of First Sale Doctrine (which is hardly an American in origin) supposed to protect against this Digital Pesantry? Next thing you know Pepsi will be suing people for improperly drinking their soda due to EULA viloations (Must be served cold in a Pepsi branded glass with 6.8 ounces of ice per 1/5th litre of soda.)
There is nothing now preventing ANY manufacturer prohibiting any non-sanctions periphrials. Nope you can only use SONY headphones with our Sony Walkmans, you can only use Ford manufactured tires on a Ford, you can only use the king's paper for legal documents... err wait... we did do that... didn't the Americans fight a war over that kind of behavior?
you miss read, all that aside, due to word and dword alignments, even under compression an executable on 64 bit architecture may have to send a 64 bit wide instruction rather then 32 bit wide so executables often will simply be larger due to padding issues (tech and arch differences aside.) I was suprised by the fact they weren't defacto twice the size but the amount of code that must be fixed width (and byte aligned) is less then I expected (I would assume compiler optimizations.)
Your ram is refreshed on a regular basis to maintain the information (All that CAS and other timing metrics). Regardless of the electrical requirements, lets just use 1 unit for 0 and 2 units for 1 over the course of a few seconds the normal distribution of 0s and 1s is going to pretty much give a consistent draw of X amount of electricity, used or otherwise.
Modern OS systems tend to randomize where in memory applications reside now and with buffer overflow boundaries and randomized data in unallocated space you can pretty much just pick a given draw of power to the stick of ram regardless of the actual usage. Once there is an OS running you can pretty much disregard per-bit power consumption with conventional ram. Perhaps with solid state and phase change type memory architectures and perhaps the memristor may change that dynamic such that it is something the OS will need to manage but from a security standpoint I'd rather have random crap in unallocated space rather then all 0s. It makes identifying unused memory harder to spot to a rogue application and from a termal standpoint I'd rather have consistent temperatures across a stick of ram rather then inconsistent temperatures because we have no data being stored at the time.
Windows 7/Vista do search indexing, defragmentation in the background at low disk priority.
Not only that but also obeys NCQ\TCQ reordering, and auditing is enabled on Vista and W7 along with Last Accessed timestamping (so any AV, defragging in the background will trigger additional IO ops to update said timestamps on literally any file that gets touched.)
Disable last access time stamps, disable NCQ\TCQ support (unless you have a real workstation or server) and disable auditing and watch that backlog vanish.
If only we could mod submissions... you are so right wanting a -1, Wrong mod.
First off there is nothing that correlates increased IO to the performance scenario.
IO != Bandwidth reqs.
First off if you want to increase your disk IO 10 fold, turn on security auditing and the last accessed time stamp tracking. Every time a file is scanned, indexed, etc additional IO is generated. XP vs Vista\Linux\W7 doesn't have any auditing turned on by default. No shit the IO goes up. There is a reason most Linux distros mount drives for desktops with a no access option to disable last access time stamps.
The backlog as they call it (Disk Queue Depth) is also now artifically higher as W7 actually behaves with NCQ\TCQ and a wide variety of disk enchancements. Buffering read\write instructions then reordering them artificially inflates the queue depth on a desktop as there isn't the volume of traffic to warrent a purge. That is why I turn NCQ\TCQ OFF on my desktops. It's akin to bitching about Raid-10 doesn't make maps in Counter-Strike load any faster. Only this dolt would re-invent the Raid is not for desktops\gaming machines argument.
For Virtual Memory since there is a higher number of standing services then XP I would expect more idle activity to be swapped out so % utilization of the swap file is meaningless unless you normalized that metric (e.g. boot the OS with no additional applications and record what % of the swap file is used normally when idle).
As any Linux user can state using as much of your RAM for buffers and cache is a good thing so long as you can grab it back for applications as needed.
32 vs 64 bit? 64 bit applications are inheritly larger. Compare two identically configured 32\64 bit kernels, the 64 bit is larger (I would assume twice as large but so far it only works out to about 15-20% larger so far that I've seen. I would guess due to byte alignment issues).
So far nothing in the article amounts to anything more then the ravings of a consultant that is more then willing to help for a small fee, get your "problem" under control.
No it really didn't. Han could have been plucked out of any Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon radio serial. The Princess had virtually no character development. The Aunt and Uncle of Luke didn't have enough screen time. Obi Wan, despite Alec's performance didn't have much development beyond touching foreheads and babbling on about the Force. Vader didn't have any development and neither did Boba Fett. The only decent character was Luke that had any real development, motivation, etc.
Breakdown of poor character development:
A: How does a princess from a planet that doesn't have any weapons becomes a member of a rebellion? And if it is a peaceful planet why would they care one way or another about the Empire? She was a prop with no identity except to be saved in the first movie. Then a prop to rescue Han in the second movie, then to be rescued again from tree huggers....
B: Why is Han partnered up with a 7 foot tall carpet?
C: Where the fuck did Billy D Williams character come into this out of nowhere. We still don't know how Han got the Falcon...
D: Why was Uncle Owen so bitchie about Ben Kenobi?
E: If all the Jedi are dead and no one knows Obi Wan is alive, why does Leia know to seek him out?
F: Where is Toshie's Station and why would Luke want to go to the academy if he is so juiced later on to join the rebellion? (Pre-uncle\aunt deaths...)
G: What is the reasoning behind Hans shifting loyalty? What takes a smuggler from a life of crime to joining a rebellion against the Empire. We never see any reasoning for Han to dislike the Empire versus the Republic as far as the life of a smuggler goes...
I mean shit I could go on and pick apart the original 3 as badly as that guy picked apart the prequels... sans the trapped hooker in the basement.
They persist because of nostalgic hype, nothing more. They are, at best, average movies. The prequels are also average films.
From an objective viewpoint:
Episode 4 had some of the worst camera work and got lucky on the opening sequence and the two suns shot. Greatly improved on episode 5 and the best camera work came on 6. The camera work was also excellent in Ep 1 and 3. Shoddy in the second one.
Lighting was greatly improved in the prequels also and more consistent use of thematic coloring of light.
Greatest crime of the prequels was bad acting all around and bad dialog.
Translation: In sampling the number of published books and inventory we see a dramatic change pre-sequel vs. post-sequel.
If a book store kept an inventory of 2000 Star Wars related book prior to Ep 1-3 then afterwards only maintain an inventory in the 150 count 3 scenarios are possible:
A: the demand dropped so low they no longer stock a large number of copies per title.
B: The number of published titles dropped so low that maintaining the same number of copies per title drastically reduced the number of works.
C: A combination of both.
If there are 10 title with 3 copies each there would be 30 books on the shelf.
If there are 4 titles with 3 copies you get 12 total books.
If there are 2 titles with 2 copies of each you get 4 total books.
Like wise heading up this afternoon to the bookstore I counted 89 Star Wars books. Converly there were 130 Shannara books and just for shits and giggles I counted 61 Dr. Who books. I checked Star Trek and stopped counting after 300.
Despite having approval on the novels (at least, that's what I've heard), Lucas let a lot of things go into the novels that he later contradicted with the prequels. I feel tremendous sympathy for these novelists scrambling to reconcile what has been written and things that are now, for good or ill, considered canon.
Re: GP's comments about the MMO, I got the impression that Bioware and the Old Republic era works have a much better odor among fans. I know that my husband, who is a much bigger fan than I am, is chomping at the bit for TOR to come out. (And I assure you, he is definitely anti-prequel. He's currently running a D6 WEG Star Wars tabletop game in which he has repeatedly hammered home to the players that the events of the prequels are NOT what happened in his game.)
Yes and they could just as easily screw up TOR as they did that first steaming pile. The question is how many of the fans, burned by the movies, burned by the first MMO are going to put down their money. I'm not arguing the % volume, I am interested in the % change from the last one. Going from 90% to 85% is huge in a demographic change versus say 90% to 89%. Gratz to hear PnP is still alive, truely a dying artform for story telling...
How many of you believe that spacefaring races that travel among the stars will still have princesses?
The same number of hand go up that think that in the 21st century we'd still have kings, queens, princesses, sultans, and warlords.
The same number of hands that didn't find the feudal society Frank Herbert presented in the Dune series jarring but oddly fitting...
There has always been an elite in societies and there will likely always be elites in society. They may not call them King or Queen but in the end your head may roll if you piss them off;)
The "first" film was the best because you were 12 years old at the time. Talk to a 12 year old now and they love pod races.
Nostalgia is a lie. I liked Jedi the most because it appealed to me at my age at that time.
We hate the prequels because we expected to see them like we were all 10 years old again. The problem was we are all now in our 30s for example trying to watch a film made for young kids and expecting to see it like a young kid. The fact is the prequels were not made for us, they were made for kids and teens. The same way the original 3 were made. Have a 30 year old watch Star Wars for the first time and, on the few times I've been able to find someone who has never seen it, gotten the same 'meh' response I had to the Phantom Menace.
We like Firefly\Serentity because we can RELATE to it better. That is the key. My nephew loves the first 3 movies and is rather 'meh' about the last 3.
For all those "stop raping my childhood"... it's not your childhood. Your childhood is gone, past, finished... you are an adult now and you can't go back. it's now you children's childhood so "stop suppressing their childhood by trying to force your childhood upon them."
Let them reinvent Transformers, Thundercats, Voltron, Star Wars, Star Trek, Gobots, Silverhawks, Speed Racer, DBZ, and anything else they want to. None of you seem pissed that Barbie keeps getting rebooted every generation or would you prefer she stayed in the Kitchen barefoot and pregnate while Ken worked his union job driving a bus and threatening to punch Barbie "To the moon?"
Your computer runs on smoke. Once you let the smoke out, you can't put it back in thus your computer has stopped working.
Or in the old days: "Once you let the cat out of the bag..."
The fact was Lucas proved you can in fact destroy a successful cannon of work. Most of the hard core Star Wars fans I knew growing up washed their hands of the whole thing (some even went to the dark side... Trek...)
The whole "Joss Whedon is my master now" was a slap in the face to Lucas I'm sure but I think it is too late for damage control. The MMO crew I play with were chomping at the bit to beta test damn near everything out there with one exception.... the new Star Wars MMO coming out. With the first 3 films plus that train wreck of an MMO and it's subsequent "fixes" the franchise is dead. The inital 3 month subscription figures will be telling on how bad the damage has been.
Warhammer and most AAA MMOs should clear around 500,000 copies in the first 90 days and should clear at least 200,000 in pre-orders. Watching this new MMO release may gauge how much damage the franchise has taken over the years.
Comic runs, novels, etc are all factored into the success. Prior to the first 3 films in the series at the local book store there was an entire section (4 shelves high, arm span length) of Star Wars books. Now it is a single shelf post-prequels. That strikes me as significant damage. That puts the book count equal to Terry Brooks Shannara series and they haven't even gotten a film yet (which is suprising, the first three books strike me as very film\mini-series friendly. In fact now that I think of it the first book The Sword of Shannara would make a pretty good 3 season series or 4 part mini-series. The special effect requirement for his works is actually rather low until Scions...)
Here is a problem that has risen from social networking and what not and I can point the finger at Blizzard.
In WoW they came up with all this great new data mining and achievements. We end up with gear scores and Wow Heroes etc.
Now I have a friend that just decided to start playing back in October. He signs up and starts playing on Elune for instance. In 3 months he never was invited into a single group. Ever. Why? "He didn't have any heirloom gear" and "His gear score is too low." etc... The digital equivalent of "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer."
At far as what I've seen most of this social networking crap is only going to frustrate new players and build walls to keep new players out. Most game related social networking results in Clique building and tribal nonsense. I survived the ACiD, TRiBE, iCE ANSI wars in the BBS era. I witnessed the grand flame wars of Usenet. I saw the clan wars in the MMO days, I saw the Guild fights in the early days of the MMOs culminating in the rise of the Uber guilds. The one thing I can say with certainty is "The more 'social' networking tools the more 'anti-social' people behave." or another way to say it is "Social networking is the fertilizer on the asshole crop". I am also fond of "Shit floats in the waters of user content" but that is a bit off topic.
I fear that, from what I've seen, Bnet's new social networking tools is going to be more about shutting people out rather then bringing people together.
You are assuming conventional life forms already in existence. Engineering an organism that could function on Mars isn't hardly science fiction anymore. Think of the sheer volume of silicon dioxide on Mars. Engineering an organism that could in a secondary or teritary process crack additional oxygen out of the material is viable. Even developing a synthetic organism to mine an object in that environment is considerably more likely then engineering an organism that could function on asteroids.
Lets look at anerobic bacteria and see what we can get. Water maybe a general catalyst for life here but we are close enough to engineering our own life forms that the possiblility is very close.
Even non-organic "life forms" (nano-bots, etc.) could be deployed over vast distances to facilitate terraforming. The question is energy and there is still a lot of potential energy resources. Hell throw a microwave transmitter in orbit and beam down raw energy for other devices. With no conventional life there "no harm, no foul" if the energy transmission misses once in a while.
Yes but from a study standpoint who cares! Fire it up and watch, imagine the data you could get!
Re:Whine all you want, it's still an awesome game
on
BioShock 2 Released
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Screw the critics. I love BioShock. The storyline, the drama, the graphics, the subtle all-pervading insanity.
How are deformed mask wearing cannibals subtle? Seems pretty obvious the level of insainty.
"Ooh, the concept appears unbalanced."... "Waah, it's not as believable as the original."... You know what? Put down the MacBook and the horn-rimmed glasses, back away from the Frappuccino, slowly, and STFU with all the art-school metaphysical crap.
I fail to see what a Mac Book, coffee products, or the rest of that bigotry has to do with the game.
The original kicked ass, pure and simple. How many other games offer that combination of determination and sadness, beautiful scenery and horrifying monsters, fast action and beautiful cutscenes?
99% of most games. I can't think of a Final Fantasy game for instance that didn't provide everything you just mentioned.
The environments, the puzzles, the music and sound effects - BioShock created an amazing world to rival Alice and Firefly, and engaged the player immediately and completely. Enough plot twists to make M. Night Shyamalan green with envy, culminating with finding out the truth about the voice on the radio, and the awesome "Man Vs Slave" cutscene.
The story is basic and most saw the double cross in the first 5 minutes. Atlas was far too much in the know to be as benign has he claimed to be.
The scenery is standard 30,40,50 thematics used in Fallout and a variety of other post-apocalyptic settings shooting for a Film Noir feel (see Dark City as a good example of the reuse of that era for effect.) I kept waiting for a Pip Boy ad.
The graphical elements were further more a re-use of Jules Vern crap and the Little Sister could be either The Stepford Wives or Village of the Damn. Take your pick. Both rather one dimensional.
The time line is inconsistent with more anacronisms within it's own lore is was barely tolerable.
The degeneration of the Plasmid users was nothing more then a set piece of zombie fantasy. The quickest and CHEAPEST way in a story to detach from conventional society is to use "The Zombie" be it fast running cannibals (28 Days) to the slow lumbering doomwalkers (Night of the Living Dead) they are cheap tools used to remove conventional society (almost as cheap as a nuclear apocalypse) from the world. Add in some uncanny valley-like responses from the audience by keeping them semi-human (rather then 80% rotting we want to unnerve the audience by keeping them 'fresh') for cheap effects.
The character development was non-existent save for a single woman pining over the leader described through audio tapes. Hell Borderlands had twice the character development with just the Tannis character alone.
Don't know about the critics, but I personally have enough faith in the sequel to have pre-ordered it. Especially considering all the bonus stuff that's included.:D
Sadly video games have come a long way in the ability to tell a story... but they have a long way to go. Enjoy it for what it is, a game. It is far from literature that people will be reading\playing in a 100 years...
Ahh nothing gets a people's mind off their own corruption and failing nation like a good old fashion cold war.
People are easily united against a common foe.
Nothing like calling up China and saying, "Hey that Cold War thing with Russia was real good for the economy. Wanna play the bad guy for a generation or two?"
The purpose of this isn't really to teraform Mars. That is way too far off in the future.
Actually terraforming a planet with plant life isn't necessarily a slow process at all. If we agree on the idea of human made global warming we have made substantial changes to a planet's ecosystem in a short amount of time.
Given the growth rate of a variety of micro organisms and small less complicated plant life we can induce a massive change in Mar's ecosystem in a short amount of time.
Here is a simple example. Given the growth rate of a species of plant that can survive on Mars. X rate of growth over Y distance. Without any natural predators the upper limit of that growth is R based on resources. Until we hit R in general we are talking near exponential growth (not taking into account localize competition with thins out the existing population.) Given this basic idea the mobility of plant life on Mars could be substantial (We are talking a radius increase of hundreds of miles per year.) You could literally cover an entire planet in a plant (again barring predators and R limits) with the lifetime of a human being.
Obviously there are a multitude of inhibitors to such growth but, if we can confirm there is no existing life on Mars there is nothing preventing us from launching a giant rocket to Mars fill with a good cocktail of microbes, algeas, etc and seed bombing the piss outta the planet and letting natural selection establish an ecosystem. I argue the opposite. Make the planet into a giant industrial factory where raw pollutants are just dumped out the window. Anything capable of living in that environment would have to thrive on said wastes.
Slashdot Mirror
First the universe comes into being once again when Chuck wakes up. He processes to scare the time-space fabric out of his way until he reaches the kitchen where he stares down the coffee pot till it spontaniously brews coffee. Grabbing a chicken from his hen house out back he round house kicks it catching the subsequently, and prefectly made sunny side up eggs in his mouth after they have flown around the world in 14 seconds. He boldly enters his home through a revolving door which his slams upon glancing at the paper's headline "Chuck Norris Botnet".
He waits momentarily while the planet shifts upwards to place Chuck into his sofa as he grabs the phone. The phone out of sheer terror immediately dials the Italian PM who's normal black phone begins to glow a dark burgandy. Trembling the Italian PM picks up the phone when suddently Chuck grabs him by the throat THROUGH the phone stating simply, "I am about to give Italy a taste of my boot if you do not bring me this program by noon."
Stammering the PM says, "But that's madness, it's 11:58 AM here!"
Chuck smiles, "Madness? THIS IS NORRIS!" and round-house kicks the PM, again through the phone, so hard he finally lands in Sparta.
The programmer was never head from again... he apaprently caught the first computer-to-human transmittable virus called the NORRIS-1C virus which causes you to spontaniously explode as if round house kicked...
How can we invest so much time and debate arguing tax laws that tax it citizens more then 10 fold the rate that we had when we overthrew a king due to taxes? Obviously our voting track record and solidly confirmed we are the government's bitches so why waste the energy you could better spend working harder for the King.. errr government.
Understanding Linear Algebra and Calculus allows for Mathematical solutions that can drastically cut down on the amount of coded recursion, looping, and needless flow control (if-then-else, case,select,switch,etc...)
Obviously the teachers and the rest of their union thugs have never heard of illegal wiretapping, oh wait they're use to being above the law...
Wasn't the concepts of First Sale Doctrine (which is hardly an American in origin) supposed to protect against this Digital Pesantry? Next thing you know Pepsi will be suing people for improperly drinking their soda due to EULA viloations (Must be served cold in a Pepsi branded glass with 6.8 ounces of ice per 1/5th litre of soda.)
There is nothing now preventing ANY manufacturer prohibiting any non-sanctions periphrials. Nope you can only use SONY headphones with our Sony Walkmans, you can only use Ford manufactured tires on a Ford, you can only use the king's paper for legal documents... err wait... we did do that... didn't the Americans fight a war over that kind of behavior?
you miss read, all that aside, due to word and dword alignments, even under compression an executable on 64 bit architecture may have to send a 64 bit wide instruction rather then 32 bit wide so executables often will simply be larger due to padding issues (tech and arch differences aside.) I was suprised by the fact they weren't defacto twice the size but the amount of code that must be fixed width (and byte aligned) is less then I expected (I would assume compiler optimizations.)
Chuck Norris can make a 4-peg red block using only three, single peg yellow blocks and a ROUND HOUSE KICK!
(That is for your red-shift geeks out there)
Your ram is refreshed on a regular basis to maintain the information (All that CAS and other timing metrics). Regardless of the electrical requirements, lets just use 1 unit for 0 and 2 units for 1 over the course of a few seconds the normal distribution of 0s and 1s is going to pretty much give a consistent draw of X amount of electricity, used or otherwise.
Modern OS systems tend to randomize where in memory applications reside now and with buffer overflow boundaries and randomized data in unallocated space you can pretty much just pick a given draw of power to the stick of ram regardless of the actual usage. Once there is an OS running you can pretty much disregard per-bit power consumption with conventional ram. Perhaps with solid state and phase change type memory architectures and perhaps the memristor may change that dynamic such that it is something the OS will need to manage but from a security standpoint I'd rather have random crap in unallocated space rather then all 0s. It makes identifying unused memory harder to spot to a rogue application and from a termal standpoint I'd rather have consistent temperatures across a stick of ram rather then inconsistent temperatures because we have no data being stored at the time.
Windows 7/Vista do search indexing, defragmentation in the background at low disk priority.
Not only that but also obeys NCQ\TCQ reordering, and auditing is enabled on Vista and W7 along with Last Accessed timestamping (so any AV, defragging in the background will trigger additional IO ops to update said timestamps on literally any file that gets touched.)
Disable last access time stamps, disable NCQ\TCQ support (unless you have a real workstation or server) and disable auditing and watch that backlog vanish.
If only we could mod submissions... you are so right wanting a -1, Wrong mod.
First off there is nothing that correlates increased IO to the performance scenario.
IO != Bandwidth reqs.
First off if you want to increase your disk IO 10 fold, turn on security auditing and the last accessed time stamp tracking. Every time a file is scanned, indexed, etc additional IO is generated. XP vs Vista\Linux\W7 doesn't have any auditing turned on by default. No shit the IO goes up. There is a reason most Linux distros mount drives for desktops with a no access option to disable last access time stamps.
The backlog as they call it (Disk Queue Depth) is also now artifically higher as W7 actually behaves with NCQ\TCQ and a wide variety of disk enchancements. Buffering read\write instructions then reordering them artificially inflates the queue depth on a desktop as there isn't the volume of traffic to warrent a purge. That is why I turn NCQ\TCQ OFF on my desktops. It's akin to bitching about Raid-10 doesn't make maps in Counter-Strike load any faster. Only this dolt would re-invent the Raid is not for desktops\gaming machines argument.
For Virtual Memory since there is a higher number of standing services then XP I would expect more idle activity to be swapped out so % utilization of the swap file is meaningless unless you normalized that metric (e.g. boot the OS with no additional applications and record what % of the swap file is used normally when idle).
As any Linux user can state using as much of your RAM for buffers and cache is a good thing so long as you can grab it back for applications as needed.
32 vs 64 bit? 64 bit applications are inheritly larger. Compare two identically configured 32\64 bit kernels, the 64 bit is larger (I would assume twice as large but so far it only works out to about 15-20% larger so far that I've seen. I would guess due to byte alignment issues).
So far nothing in the article amounts to anything more then the ravings of a consultant that is more then willing to help for a small fee, get your "problem" under control.
Star Wars had great characters
No it really didn't. Han could have been plucked out of any Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon radio serial. The Princess had virtually no character development. The Aunt and Uncle of Luke didn't have enough screen time. Obi Wan, despite Alec's performance didn't have much development beyond touching foreheads and babbling on about the Force. Vader didn't have any development and neither did Boba Fett. The only decent character was Luke that had any real development, motivation, etc.
Breakdown of poor character development:
A: How does a princess from a planet that doesn't have any weapons becomes a member of a rebellion? And if it is a peaceful planet why would they care one way or another about the Empire? She was a prop with no identity except to be saved in the first movie. Then a prop to rescue Han in the second movie, then to be rescued again from tree huggers....
B: Why is Han partnered up with a 7 foot tall carpet?
C: Where the fuck did Billy D Williams character come into this out of nowhere. We still don't know how Han got the Falcon...
D: Why was Uncle Owen so bitchie about Ben Kenobi?
E: If all the Jedi are dead and no one knows Obi Wan is alive, why does Leia know to seek him out?
F: Where is Toshie's Station and why would Luke want to go to the academy if he is so juiced later on to join the rebellion? (Pre-uncle\aunt deaths...)
G: What is the reasoning behind Hans shifting loyalty? What takes a smuggler from a life of crime to joining a rebellion against the Empire. We never see any reasoning for Han to dislike the Empire versus the Republic as far as the life of a smuggler goes...
I mean shit I could go on and pick apart the original 3 as badly as that guy picked apart the prequels... sans the trapped hooker in the basement.
They persist because of nostalgic hype, nothing more. They are, at best, average movies. The prequels are also average films.
From an objective viewpoint:
Episode 4 had some of the worst camera work and got lucky on the opening sequence and the two suns shot. Greatly improved on episode 5 and the best camera work came on 6. The camera work was also excellent in Ep 1 and 3. Shoddy in the second one.
Lighting was greatly improved in the prequels also and more consistent use of thematic coloring of light.
Greatest crime of the prequels was bad acting all around and bad dialog.
Episode 1 (from a 8 year old) greedy aliens working for the bad guys plans are stopped by the Jedi while meeting a slave kid that becomes Vader.
Translation: In sampling the number of published books and inventory we see a dramatic change pre-sequel vs. post-sequel.
If a book store kept an inventory of 2000 Star Wars related book prior to Ep 1-3 then afterwards only maintain an inventory in the 150 count 3 scenarios are possible:
A: the demand dropped so low they no longer stock a large number of copies per title.
B: The number of published titles dropped so low that maintaining the same number of copies per title drastically reduced the number of works.
C: A combination of both.
If there are 10 title with 3 copies each there would be 30 books on the shelf.
If there are 4 titles with 3 copies you get 12 total books.
If there are 2 titles with 2 copies of each you get 4 total books.
Like wise heading up this afternoon to the bookstore I counted 89 Star Wars books. Converly there were 130 Shannara books and just for shits and giggles I counted 61 Dr. Who books. I checked Star Trek and stopped counting after 300.
Despite having approval on the novels (at least, that's what I've heard), Lucas let a lot of things go into the novels that he later contradicted with the prequels. I feel tremendous sympathy for these novelists scrambling to reconcile what has been written and things that are now, for good or ill, considered canon.
Re: GP's comments about the MMO, I got the impression that Bioware and the Old Republic era works have a much better odor among fans. I know that my husband, who is a much bigger fan than I am, is chomping at the bit for TOR to come out. (And I assure you, he is definitely anti-prequel. He's currently running a D6 WEG Star Wars tabletop game in which he has repeatedly hammered home to the players that the events of the prequels are NOT what happened in his game.)
Yes and they could just as easily screw up TOR as they did that first steaming pile. The question is how many of the fans, burned by the movies, burned by the first MMO are going to put down their money. I'm not arguing the % volume, I am interested in the % change from the last one. Going from 90% to 85% is huge in a demographic change versus say 90% to 89%. Gratz to hear PnP is still alive, truely a dying artform for story telling...
Can I get a show of hands?
How many of you believe that spacefaring races that travel among the stars will still have princesses?
The same number of hand go up that think that in the 21st century we'd still have kings, queens, princesses, sultans, and warlords.
The same number of hands that didn't find the feudal society Frank Herbert presented in the Dune series jarring but oddly fitting...
There has always been an elite in societies and there will likely always be elites in society. They may not call them King or Queen but in the end your head may roll if you piss them off ;)
The "first" film was the best because you were 12 years old at the time. Talk to a 12 year old now and they love pod races.
Nostalgia is a lie. I liked Jedi the most because it appealed to me at my age at that time.
We hate the prequels because we expected to see them like we were all 10 years old again. The problem was we are all now in our 30s for example trying to watch a film made for young kids and expecting to see it like a young kid. The fact is the prequels were not made for us, they were made for kids and teens. The same way the original 3 were made. Have a 30 year old watch Star Wars for the first time and, on the few times I've been able to find someone who has never seen it, gotten the same 'meh' response I had to the Phantom Menace.
We like Firefly\Serentity because we can RELATE to it better. That is the key. My nephew loves the first 3 movies and is rather 'meh' about the last 3.
For all those "stop raping my childhood"... it's not your childhood. Your childhood is gone, past, finished... you are an adult now and you can't go back. it's now you children's childhood so "stop suppressing their childhood by trying to force your childhood upon them."
Let them reinvent Transformers, Thundercats, Voltron, Star Wars, Star Trek, Gobots, Silverhawks, Speed Racer, DBZ, and anything else they want to. None of you seem pissed that Barbie keeps getting rebooted every generation or would you prefer she stayed in the Kitchen barefoot and pregnate while Ken worked his union job driving a bus and threatening to punch Barbie "To the moon?"
Your computer runs on smoke. Once you let the smoke out, you can't put it back in thus your computer has stopped working.
Or in the old days: "Once you let the cat out of the bag..."
The fact was Lucas proved you can in fact destroy a successful cannon of work. Most of the hard core Star Wars fans I knew growing up washed their hands of the whole thing (some even went to the dark side... Trek...)
The whole "Joss Whedon is my master now" was a slap in the face to Lucas I'm sure but I think it is too late for damage control. The MMO crew I play with were chomping at the bit to beta test damn near everything out there with one exception.... the new Star Wars MMO coming out. With the first 3 films plus that train wreck of an MMO and it's subsequent "fixes" the franchise is dead. The inital 3 month subscription figures will be telling on how bad the damage has been.
Warhammer and most AAA MMOs should clear around 500,000 copies in the first 90 days and should clear at least 200,000 in pre-orders. Watching this new MMO release may gauge how much damage the franchise has taken over the years.
Comic runs, novels, etc are all factored into the success. Prior to the first 3 films in the series at the local book store there was an entire section (4 shelves high, arm span length) of Star Wars books. Now it is a single shelf post-prequels. That strikes me as significant damage. That puts the book count equal to Terry Brooks Shannara series and they haven't even gotten a film yet (which is suprising, the first three books strike me as very film\mini-series friendly. In fact now that I think of it the first book The Sword of Shannara would make a pretty good 3 season series or 4 part mini-series. The special effect requirement for his works is actually rather low until Scions...)
I was wondering if anyone would catch that reference!
Here is a problem that has risen from social networking and what not and I can point the finger at Blizzard.
In WoW they came up with all this great new data mining and achievements. We end up with gear scores and Wow Heroes etc.
Now I have a friend that just decided to start playing back in October. He signs up and starts playing on Elune for instance. In 3 months he never was invited into a single group. Ever. Why? "He didn't have any heirloom gear" and "His gear score is too low." etc... The digital equivalent of "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer."
At far as what I've seen most of this social networking crap is only going to frustrate new players and build walls to keep new players out. Most game related social networking results in Clique building and tribal nonsense. I survived the ACiD, TRiBE, iCE ANSI wars in the BBS era. I witnessed the grand flame wars of Usenet. I saw the clan wars in the MMO days, I saw the Guild fights in the early days of the MMOs culminating in the rise of the Uber guilds. The one thing I can say with certainty is "The more 'social' networking tools the more 'anti-social' people behave." or another way to say it is "Social networking is the fertilizer on the asshole crop". I am also fond of "Shit floats in the waters of user content" but that is a bit off topic.
I fear that, from what I've seen, Bnet's new social networking tools is going to be more about shutting people out rather then bringing people together.
You are assuming conventional life forms already in existence. Engineering an organism that could function on Mars isn't hardly science fiction anymore. Think of the sheer volume of silicon dioxide on Mars. Engineering an organism that could in a secondary or teritary process crack additional oxygen out of the material is viable. Even developing a synthetic organism to mine an object in that environment is considerably more likely then engineering an organism that could function on asteroids.
Lets look at anerobic bacteria and see what we can get. Water maybe a general catalyst for life here but we are close enough to engineering our own life forms that the possiblility is very close.
Even non-organic "life forms" (nano-bots, etc.) could be deployed over vast distances to facilitate terraforming. The question is energy and there is still a lot of potential energy resources. Hell throw a microwave transmitter in orbit and beam down raw energy for other devices. With no conventional life there "no harm, no foul" if the energy transmission misses once in a while.
Yes but from a study standpoint who cares! Fire it up and watch, imagine the data you could get!
Screw the critics. I love BioShock. The storyline, the drama, the graphics, the subtle all-pervading insanity.
How are deformed mask wearing cannibals subtle? Seems pretty obvious the level of insainty.
"Ooh, the concept appears unbalanced." ... "Waah, it's not as believable as the original." ... You know what? Put down the MacBook and the horn-rimmed glasses, back away from the Frappuccino, slowly, and STFU with all the art-school metaphysical crap.
I fail to see what a Mac Book, coffee products, or the rest of that bigotry has to do with the game.
The original kicked ass, pure and simple. How many other games offer that combination of determination and sadness, beautiful scenery and horrifying monsters, fast action and beautiful cutscenes?
99% of most games. I can't think of a Final Fantasy game for instance that didn't provide everything you just mentioned.
The environments, the puzzles, the music and sound effects - BioShock created an amazing world to rival Alice and Firefly, and engaged the player immediately and completely. Enough plot twists to make M. Night Shyamalan green with envy, culminating with finding out the truth about the voice on the radio, and the awesome "Man Vs Slave" cutscene.
The story is basic and most saw the double cross in the first 5 minutes. Atlas was far too much in the know to be as benign has he claimed to be.
The scenery is standard 30,40,50 thematics used in Fallout and a variety of other post-apocalyptic settings shooting for a Film Noir feel (see Dark City as a good example of the reuse of that era for effect.) I kept waiting for a Pip Boy ad.
The graphical elements were further more a re-use of Jules Vern crap and the Little Sister could be either The Stepford Wives or Village of the Damn. Take your pick. Both rather one dimensional.
The time line is inconsistent with more anacronisms within it's own lore is was barely tolerable.
The degeneration of the Plasmid users was nothing more then a set piece of zombie fantasy. The quickest and CHEAPEST way in a story to detach from conventional society is to use "The Zombie" be it fast running cannibals (28 Days) to the slow lumbering doomwalkers (Night of the Living Dead) they are cheap tools used to remove conventional society (almost as cheap as a nuclear apocalypse) from the world. Add in some uncanny valley-like responses from the audience by keeping them semi-human (rather then 80% rotting we want to unnerve the audience by keeping them 'fresh') for cheap effects.
The character development was non-existent save for a single woman pining over the leader described through audio tapes. Hell Borderlands had twice the character development with just the Tannis character alone.
Don't know about the critics, but I personally have enough faith in the sequel to have pre-ordered it. Especially considering all the bonus stuff that's included. :D
Sadly video games have come a long way in the ability to tell a story... but they have a long way to go. Enjoy it for what it is, a game. It is far from literature that people will be reading\playing in a 100 years...
Ahh nothing gets a people's mind off their own corruption and failing nation like a good old fashion cold war.
People are easily united against a common foe.
Nothing like calling up China and saying, "Hey that Cold War thing with Russia was real good for the economy. Wanna play the bad guy for a generation or two?"
The public doesn't fund any research you insensitive clod the goverment does. It's the goverment's money not yours...
Seriously when in any debate with a politician have you heard "We need to be careful how we spend THEIR money..." Never, it is always "OUR money".
Now go pay homage to dear leader! OBEY!
The purpose of this isn't really to teraform Mars. That is way too far off in the future.
Actually terraforming a planet with plant life isn't necessarily a slow process at all. If we agree on the idea of human made global warming we have made substantial changes to a planet's ecosystem in a short amount of time.
Given the growth rate of a variety of micro organisms and small less complicated plant life we can induce a massive change in Mar's ecosystem in a short amount of time.
Here is a simple example. Given the growth rate of a species of plant that can survive on Mars. X rate of growth over Y distance. Without any natural predators the upper limit of that growth is R based on resources. Until we hit R in general we are talking near exponential growth (not taking into account localize competition with thins out the existing population.) Given this basic idea the mobility of plant life on Mars could be substantial (We are talking a radius increase of hundreds of miles per year.) You could literally cover an entire planet in a plant (again barring predators and R limits) with the lifetime of a human being.
Obviously there are a multitude of inhibitors to such growth but, if we can confirm there is no existing life on Mars there is nothing preventing us from launching a giant rocket to Mars fill with a good cocktail of microbes, algeas, etc and seed bombing the piss outta the planet and letting natural selection establish an ecosystem. I argue the opposite. Make the planet into a giant industrial factory where raw pollutants are just dumped out the window. Anything capable of living in that environment would have to thrive on said wastes.