I am not of the opinion that games suck with no creativity; rather that every 6 months someone makes a big stink about how they think they suck. Personally, I think the gaming industry is moving along okay. I do see a trend that prevents new companies to enter the market - but I think this is mostly driven by the fact that it takes a LOT of effort to make modern games.
The same old tired arguements like this tend to reappear in 6 month cycles. "New games suck. No creativity."
I call bullshit.
In the entire history of video games, there's *always* been the leading games with something new, and dozens or hundreds of copies. How many games appeared that were similar to Pac-Man? How many games were similar to Pole Position? How many games were just like Mario Bros?
You can't point at today's games and say there's a problem. This has always been a "problem" (I don't think it really is one.) When a successful formula is created, a lot of people follow because it's what people want. FPS's became immensely popular - and people wanted more. Game publishers were happy to accomodate them.
Think about it in terms of the technical aspects. A game like Doom wasn't really very original. You killed monsters in an A-Z fashion to the end of the game. The only reason it gets recognition is because it was one of the first mainstream FPS games. But it was really evolutionary - we have two eyes, we see in 3D, and so it makes sense to make 3D games as soon as computers are fast enough. There were lots of 3D games BEFORE Doom - especially in the arcades (albiet many of them utilizing vector diaplys.)
It's all been a big process of building on top of the ideas that other people came up with. This isn't a bad thing, it's a GOOD thing. Little steps. There will be a fair share of crappy games, but that's always been the case.
To say there's been no creativity in games of recent times is to admit that you haven't played any.
I mean, what do you expect from games? If you're looking for the Holodeck, you need a reality check.
EA is responsible for breaking Ultima, including UO and Ultima 9. Ultima was probably the best computer RPG of all time before EA.
EA also ended Wing Commander. Wing Commander II and III were amazingly great games. WC4 and the movie just ended it. Instead of going for quality, they went for quantity and fast-to-market. So they blew it - again.
If RG hadn't sold out, and kept Origin as an independent company, all of this might be a lot different.
Additionally, as a footnote, news of x86-64 and Windows XP 64-bit has been out for quite some time now. You can't possibly use the surprised facor as an arguement for lazy companies or companies that don't want to support their existing user base. Five years is plenty of time for any company to prepare as much as they would need to.
I'm sure you realize that I don't really hate mac users - I put that up in defiance of some other poster that was bitching at me and I just never took it down. You'd be surprised on how many people have I have on my foe list because of that sig =)
Moving forward, I would expect nearly all NEW hardware to support both systems. This is really what I was getting at, I guess I wasn't specific enough.
Still, I do believe that it's not nearly as hard moving from x86 32-bit windows drivers to x86 64-bit windows drivers as it would be to go from x86 to something completely different like Itanium. Walk in the park type difference, probably.
So, as long as *new* hardware, with new drivers, are written for Vista, we'll almost surely get both 32 and 64 bit drivers.
Vista for x64 will release at the same time as Vista x86 32 bit. Like Windows XP x64, Vista x64 will be fully 64-bit capable with a compatibility layer for 32-bit stuff.
There will probably be some stipulations for driver signing on Vista that the vendors must support both platforms. Which is good, because it really doesn't take too much for fix drivers to work on x86-64. Most Linux distributions for AMD64 have had the full compliment of drivers for years.
This is an excellent point, and I hope some people can grasp that sometimes you WANT to be able to point at something and make it go, and you don't need to be able to make it go from 200ft away in a seperate building.
I've always had great success connecting IrDA devices to each other, so I really don't know why so many people dislike it.
Some people say IrDA sucks, but in the short time that my notebooks had them I always had them work very well. Line of sight obviously required, but never once have I pointed one IrDA device at another one and had it NOT work.
I've seen one too many hacked up script, server hanging by a thread, major changes deployed during production hours, condescending attitude bullshit UNIX admins in my time as an IT admin that I have no more respect for them then any Windows admin.
Ohh you can type fsck? Big fucking deal. You're not special. I love the command line and it's an awesome way get things done but it's also an awesome way for a dipshit admin to fuck everything up with little undocumented custom scripts and programs *everywhere.*
You generally don't get into that deep of shit even with the worst of Windows setups. Sure, it's quite easy to fuck it all up, but it's also an order of magnitude easier to clean up after a shitty Windows admin.
I like all stuff, Unix/Linux/Windows/Whatever. A Bad IT person is bad no matter what, and a good one is good whether they're on Windows or Solaris.
So, you're *basically* agreeing with this guy, yet you insult him a number of times on unrelated matters such as capitalization.
Way to Slashdot!
I do agree that he seems to not realize you can selectively create a CC license that would certainly allow you to recieve revenue for your work, or place controls on how the content is used. But you didn't have to be a dick about it.
It might be way beyond old, but it's also way beyond true.
The article never says they're going for "Internet Google." Of course, the article title on Slashdot does. If you say anything bad about Google, you get 10 people bitching at you, and modded down, no matter how rational you are.
If you say something good about KDE, you get 5 people telling you how bloat it is, and how Gnome is better. If you say something negative about OSX, you better get a new phone number because some OSX fanatic will probably track you down and kill you.
It's the same old shit every day on Slashdot, and for the supposedly more intelligent people that work with computer systems every day, it's a lot like a herd of lemmings.
But I still read it, because if you have the sack you can sift through all the crap sheepish posts and get some really thoughtful ones. And that, at least for me, makes it worth it for now.
They didn't say P2P directly, but this was a quote from the article:
"Much of the growth over the last few years has come about because of the rise in the popularity of file-sharing that encourages people to swap and share large media files"
To me, that is a strong insinuation of tools like BitTorrent, the MP3/Video file sharing software like Kazaa, etc. Of course, it could mean any number of things, but I do believe that e-mail would have been in it's own catagory no matter what people are sending to each other over it.
I do admit, however, that even though I read the article I did kinda overlook the fact that they were mostly talking about growth, and not necessarily percentages of current usage. In other words, even if e-mail was 40% of all traffic, it's growth might have only been 10%, whereas if file sharing was 10% of all traffic and now it's 30%, it has a 150% growth rate.
This is particularly true in contract situations. Contract positions are very popular (at least around here) right now, and while the pay is pretty good, employers will sometimes keep these contractors on for a year or more, and never provide any training. They'll send the "real" employees on training for weeks at a time, and in the meantime you're supposed to just know it without any. Don't they want well trained people working on their systems?
I think a lot of the mentality is that training, from a company perspective, is doing you a favor. But really it's supposed to be helping THEM, and it will, if you're a trained worker.
Oh well. That's why we all have little computer labs at home.
I guess their wording is probably poor, because when someone says "because of the rise in the popularity of file-sharing that encourages people to swap and share large media files" it doesn't sound like this is people downloading from web sites.
I agree about the modem users - the internet at large is really (and finally, in some cases) moving away from catering to dial-up users. The unfortunate part is that it leaves a whole lot of people behind that Verizon or the other telcos decided not to service.
But they did say sharing large files. A photo or sound bite isn't a large file, and e-mail attachments are just e-mails, which would have been recorded as such.
I agree that it doesn't necessarily mean p2p, but when they say people sharing large files it definitely indicates as much.
"Much of the growth over the last few years has come about because of the rise in the popularity of file-sharing that encourages people to swap and share large media files, said Mr Mauldin. "
Sounds like another "Well, it's on the news all the time so it must be sucking up a lot of bandwidth."
I don't really buy it. There's so many more millions of users that don't do large file download/uploads then do, and I think that the total bandwidth of all these people logging in, checking e-mail, browsing the web, etc is a lot more substantial then any "large large media files" shared amongst a select few.
I could be wrong of course, but last I checked HTTP was still the #1 protocol in use, and there's no data here to prove that p2p is sucking up more bandwidth then that.
Inversely, if you're not in a big city and you DON'T have a car, you'll remain poor. For good or bad, our society here practically demands that you have a mode of personal transportation. There's going to be some exceptions, obviously. But as a general rule it's very hard to find decent work without the ability to commute several miles.
If you tried hard enough, it might be possible to use a combination of busses, trains, and other forms of transportation to get around but your commute time might be several hours a day.
Yea, they keep saying things are getting better but anyone that's actually paid attention to the prices at the supermarket, the gas station, and the price of clothes you'd think we were in an inflation crisis.
I make pretty good money in IT but when I see the prices on a box of generic cereal in the $4.00 range, the price of milk in the $2.50/gal range, and sugar costing $3.50/bag I wonder how anyone not making $80 grand a year can afford any of this stuff, including the gas it takes to get there.
The market might be rising but so are prices, and fast.
The Exchange 5.5/NT4 to Windows 2000/Exchange 2000 was a very difficult move for many admins. AD is new, Exchange 2000 is new, and they are not compatible with Exchange 5.5 and NT4. They included the ADC for migration, which is basically just an LDAP sync tool with some extra goodies for Exchange directory information.
The ADC is actually very good, but you really need to understand how it works and how to deploy it properly. It's most definately not a simple procedure and the documentation has a lot to be desired.
That's great for North Jersey folks, but the point holds - people say we don't have fast broadband because of land mass, yet even the most populated places have no access to it.
Not even DSL is available to a lot of the houses in my city - the Northeast is very heavily populated yet there's an absurd amount of people with no broadband options. Rhode Island is the second most densely populated state in the US (in back of Jersey) and all we have is limited DSL and cable modems. As much as I don't like Cox, if it weren't for them we'd be screwed. Then again, if it weren't for them keeping the competiton out, maybe we would have better options..
A lot of these other countries are subsidizing the cost of laying out the fiber and cables to help promote very high speed internet. They get tax breaks and other goodies. They're promoting competition. In the US, a small handful of companies run the show, and they make sure everyone else is kept out.
It's not land mass that's the issue, it's the companies running the services. While I do agree that it's very expensive to expand and upgrade communications equipment, our government could easily step in a foster some growth in this area if they want to keep the US competitive so all our jobs don't end up overseas.
ps. Verizon's FIOS service is supposedly available here, too, but I've not found one address in the state that has it availablle. I guess you have to live next door to the CO so they can run you a cable. I mean, if Verizon can't even upgrade a few old voice coils to open up DSL to thousands of potential subscribers, can I believe that they're going to run fiber?
Slashdot Mirror
I am not of the opinion that games suck with no creativity; rather that every 6 months someone makes a big stink about how they think they suck. Personally, I think the gaming industry is moving along okay. I do see a trend that prevents new companies to enter the market - but I think this is mostly driven by the fact that it takes a LOT of effort to make modern games.
The same old tired arguements like this tend to reappear in 6 month cycles. "New games suck. No creativity."
I call bullshit.
In the entire history of video games, there's *always* been the leading games with something new, and dozens or hundreds of copies. How many games appeared that were similar to Pac-Man? How many games were similar to Pole Position? How many games were just like Mario Bros?
You can't point at today's games and say there's a problem. This has always been a "problem" (I don't think it really is one.) When a successful formula is created, a lot of people follow because it's what people want. FPS's became immensely popular - and people wanted more. Game publishers were happy to accomodate them.
Think about it in terms of the technical aspects. A game like Doom wasn't really very original. You killed monsters in an A-Z fashion to the end of the game. The only reason it gets recognition is because it was one of the first mainstream FPS games. But it was really evolutionary - we have two eyes, we see in 3D, and so it makes sense to make 3D games as soon as computers are fast enough. There were lots of 3D games BEFORE Doom - especially in the arcades (albiet many of them utilizing vector diaplys.)
It's all been a big process of building on top of the ideas that other people came up with. This isn't a bad thing, it's a GOOD thing. Little steps. There will be a fair share of crappy games, but that's always been the case.
To say there's been no creativity in games of recent times is to admit that you haven't played any.
I mean, what do you expect from games? If you're looking for the Holodeck, you need a reality check.
EA is responsible for breaking Ultima, including UO and Ultima 9. Ultima was probably the best computer RPG of all time before EA.
EA also ended Wing Commander. Wing Commander II and III were amazingly great games. WC4 and the movie just ended it. Instead of going for quality, they went for quantity and fast-to-market. So they blew it - again.
If RG hadn't sold out, and kept Origin as an independent company, all of this might be a lot different.
Additionally, as a footnote, news of x86-64 and Windows XP 64-bit has been out for quite some time now. You can't possibly use the surprised facor as an arguement for lazy companies or companies that don't want to support their existing user base. Five years is plenty of time for any company to prepare as much as they would need to.
Not to mention, it's not like the graveyard shift at a datacenter is going to attract those born-with-skillz people anyways.
Some people expect too much.
I'm sure you realize that I don't really hate mac users - I put that up in defiance of some other poster that was bitching at me and I just never took it down. You'd be surprised on how many people have I have on my foe list because of that sig =)
Moving forward, I would expect nearly all NEW hardware to support both systems. This is really what I was getting at, I guess I wasn't specific enough.
Still, I do believe that it's not nearly as hard moving from x86 32-bit windows drivers to x86 64-bit windows drivers as it would be to go from x86 to something completely different like Itanium. Walk in the park type difference, probably.
So, as long as *new* hardware, with new drivers, are written for Vista, we'll almost surely get both 32 and 64 bit drivers.
Vista for x64 will release at the same time as Vista x86 32 bit. Like Windows XP x64, Vista x64 will be fully 64-bit capable with a compatibility layer for 32-bit stuff.
There will probably be some stipulations for driver signing on Vista that the vendors must support both platforms. Which is good, because it really doesn't take too much for fix drivers to work on x86-64. Most Linux distributions for AMD64 have had the full compliment of drivers for years.
This is an excellent point, and I hope some people can grasp that sometimes you WANT to be able to point at something and make it go, and you don't need to be able to make it go from 200ft away in a seperate building.
I've always had great success connecting IrDA devices to each other, so I really don't know why so many people dislike it.
Some people say IrDA sucks, but in the short time that my notebooks had them I always had them work very well. Line of sight obviously required, but never once have I pointed one IrDA device at another one and had it NOT work.
..
Maybe I'm just too stupid to break IrDA
I've seen one too many hacked up script, server hanging by a thread, major changes deployed during production hours, condescending attitude bullshit UNIX admins in my time as an IT admin that I have no more respect for them then any Windows admin.
Ohh you can type fsck? Big fucking deal. You're not special. I love the command line and it's an awesome way get things done but it's also an awesome way for a dipshit admin to fuck everything up with little undocumented custom scripts and programs *everywhere.*
You generally don't get into that deep of shit even with the worst of Windows setups. Sure, it's quite easy to fuck it all up, but it's also an order of magnitude easier to clean up after a shitty Windows admin.
I like all stuff, Unix/Linux/Windows/Whatever. A Bad IT person is bad no matter what, and a good one is good whether they're on Windows or Solaris.
So, you're *basically* agreeing with this guy, yet you insult him a number of times on unrelated matters such as capitalization.
Way to Slashdot!
I do agree that he seems to not realize you can selectively create a CC license that would certainly allow you to recieve revenue for your work, or place controls on how the content is used. But you didn't have to be a dick about it.
"Now if I could just stop /. from making me a moderator several times per week. "
You can, it's in user preferences =)
(I'm sure you knew this.)
It might be way beyond old, but it's also way beyond true.
The article never says they're going for "Internet Google." Of course, the article title on Slashdot does. If you say anything bad about Google, you get 10 people bitching at you, and modded down, no matter how rational you are.
If you say something good about KDE, you get 5 people telling you how bloat it is, and how Gnome is better. If you say something negative about OSX, you better get a new phone number because some OSX fanatic will probably track you down and kill you.
It's the same old shit every day on Slashdot, and for the supposedly more intelligent people that work with computer systems every day, it's a lot like a herd of lemmings.
But I still read it, because if you have the sack you can sift through all the crap sheepish posts and get some really thoughtful ones. And that, at least for me, makes it worth it for now.
They didn't say P2P directly, but this was a quote from the article:
"Much of the growth over the last few years has come about because of the rise in the popularity of file-sharing that encourages people to swap and share large media files"
To me, that is a strong insinuation of tools like BitTorrent, the MP3/Video file sharing software like Kazaa, etc. Of course, it could mean any number of things, but I do believe that e-mail would have been in it's own catagory no matter what people are sending to each other over it.
I do admit, however, that even though I read the article I did kinda overlook the fact that they were mostly talking about growth, and not necessarily percentages of current usage. In other words, even if e-mail was 40% of all traffic, it's growth might have only been 10%, whereas if file sharing was 10% of all traffic and now it's 30%, it has a 150% growth rate.
This is particularly true in contract situations. Contract positions are very popular (at least around here) right now, and while the pay is pretty good, employers will sometimes keep these contractors on for a year or more, and never provide any training. They'll send the "real" employees on training for weeks at a time, and in the meantime you're supposed to just know it without any. Don't they want well trained people working on their systems?
I think a lot of the mentality is that training, from a company perspective, is doing you a favor. But really it's supposed to be helping THEM, and it will, if you're a trained worker.
Oh well. That's why we all have little computer labs at home.
I mean, sheesh. Relax, drink a beer.
Being non-confrontational requires actually *BEING* non-confrontational - you can't just say "I'm trying not be" and have it not be.
I was going to respond to you, but you're a real condescending prick so I'm not even going to bother.
Good day.
I guess their wording is probably poor, because when someone says "because of the rise in the popularity of file-sharing that encourages people to swap and share large media files" it doesn't sound like this is people downloading from web sites.
I agree about the modem users - the internet at large is really (and finally, in some cases) moving away from catering to dial-up users. The unfortunate part is that it leaves a whole lot of people behind that Verizon or the other telcos decided not to service.
But they did say sharing large files. A photo or sound bite isn't a large file, and e-mail attachments are just e-mails, which would have been recorded as such.
I agree that it doesn't necessarily mean p2p, but when they say people sharing large files it definitely indicates as much.
"Much of the growth over the last few years has come about because of the rise in the popularity of file-sharing that encourages people to swap and share large media files, said Mr Mauldin. "
Sounds like another "Well, it's on the news all the time so it must be sucking up a lot of bandwidth."
I don't really buy it. There's so many more millions of users that don't do large file download/uploads then do, and I think that the total bandwidth of all these people logging in, checking e-mail, browsing the web, etc is a lot more substantial then any "large large media files" shared amongst a select few.
I could be wrong of course, but last I checked HTTP was still the #1 protocol in use, and there's no data here to prove that p2p is sucking up more bandwidth then that.
Inversely, if you're not in a big city and you DON'T have a car, you'll remain poor. For good or bad, our society here practically demands that you have a mode of personal transportation. There's going to be some exceptions, obviously. But as a general rule it's very hard to find decent work without the ability to commute several miles.
If you tried hard enough, it might be possible to use a combination of busses, trains, and other forms of transportation to get around but your commute time might be several hours a day.
Yea, they keep saying things are getting better but anyone that's actually paid attention to the prices at the supermarket, the gas station, and the price of clothes you'd think we were in an inflation crisis.
I make pretty good money in IT but when I see the prices on a box of generic cereal in the $4.00 range, the price of milk in the $2.50/gal range, and sugar costing $3.50/bag I wonder how anyone not making $80 grand a year can afford any of this stuff, including the gas it takes to get there.
The market might be rising but so are prices, and fast.
Could you repeat the end? I only got up to the comma before my mind drifted away.
The Exchange 5.5/NT4 to Windows 2000/Exchange 2000 was a very difficult move for many admins. AD is new, Exchange 2000 is new, and they are not compatible with Exchange 5.5 and NT4. They included the ADC for migration, which is basically just an LDAP sync tool with some extra goodies for Exchange directory information.
The ADC is actually very good, but you really need to understand how it works and how to deploy it properly. It's most definately not a simple procedure and the documentation has a lot to be desired.
That's great for North Jersey folks, but the point holds - people say we don't have fast broadband because of land mass, yet even the most populated places have no access to it.
Not even DSL is available to a lot of the houses in my city - the Northeast is very heavily populated yet there's an absurd amount of people with no broadband options. Rhode Island is the second most densely populated state in the US (in back of Jersey) and all we have is limited DSL and cable modems. As much as I don't like Cox, if it weren't for them we'd be screwed. Then again, if it weren't for them keeping the competiton out, maybe we would have better options..
A lot of these other countries are subsidizing the cost of laying out the fiber and cables to help promote very high speed internet. They get tax breaks and other goodies. They're promoting competition. In the US, a small handful of companies run the show, and they make sure everyone else is kept out.
It's not land mass that's the issue, it's the companies running the services. While I do agree that it's very expensive to expand and upgrade communications equipment, our government could easily step in a foster some growth in this area if they want to keep the US competitive so all our jobs don't end up overseas.
ps. Verizon's FIOS service is supposedly available here, too, but I've not found one address in the state that has it availablle. I guess you have to live next door to the CO so they can run you a cable. I mean, if Verizon can't even upgrade a few old voice coils to open up DSL to thousands of potential subscribers, can I believe that they're going to run fiber?