If we assume that Mario is about 5' 5" (never gotten the impression that the dude, sans mushroom, was too tall) then this ape would actually be about Donkey Kong sized.
people always think I'm dumb for going cheap (second hand, bottom-tier, whatever) on cars and computers and electronics, but any brand that's produced in numbers high enough to get the product into best buys and comp usas is made like crap. they might have more features or something, but they're just as likely to break on you.
unless you're willing to pay the price for industrial grade products or for (in the case of some things, like audio) hard-core hobbiest stuff, you're just getting a plastic box of electronics produced in the third world and glued together by an assembly line. "quality control" (has there ever been a better piece of PHB-speak?) helps a little bit, but not much)
price hasn't equaled quality since your grandpa's day when everything was built out of painted steel and machined parts.
"We've underestimated in the past ergo we'll always underestimate in the future."
It's a bit like saying that alarmist environmentalists were wrong in predicting end of the world (water wars etc.) scenarios for hitting 5+ billion people, and therefore those scenarios are an impossibility even when the world hits 15, 20, or 30 billion people. It's still a (huge) problem, but the initial estimates were (way) off.
IPv4 has fewer addresses than there are people in the world. That's clearly not sufficient. IPv6 has more addresses than there would need to be to address trillions of devices for each star in the universe. By the time we really start pushing the limits on that capability, I doubt we'll be using anything remotely similar to current packet and router based networking. And if we've mastered interstellar travel and faster than light communication (currently, to the best of knowledge, a major-league, time-paradox-inducing impossibility) we'll be able to coordinate a mildly annoying upgrade from a late 20th century protocol that has stuck around for one reason or another.
However, overkill is great. Overkill means you barely need oversight since there's so much more frontier than settled space, your chances of stepping on someone's toes are miniscule. Imagine if we had that much radio badnwidth.
It was the first FPS that was easy to both play and network by non-geeks. Plug a few Xboxes into the ethernet jacks in your dorm building and suddenly you've got a 16 player game going. It's not about being the first with the technology, it's about being the first to make the technology easy and popular.
Also, Halo was the second console FPS to have decent game play and actually feel designed for a console controller (Goldeneye being the first)
Sure I could rattle off a million reasons why other FPSes before it were better games, but in 2002, it was the only FPS I could play with my friends.
You know, I had a chance to start College at age 14, not quite 8, but still. I'm really glad I didn't take it.
Sure, highschool sucked. But highschool sucked for a whole lotta people. I read a lot on my own time, and I don't think humanity was deprived of any potential fruits of my intellect while I was spending my efforts avoiding football games and vainly attempting to figure out how to talk to girls.
When I started college at the normal age, I had a blast and did well academically.
I remember reading an article about what prodigies were up to 20 years later (looking at what happened to a bunch of kids who'd gone into college before puberty, which apparently there was a rash of in the 70s) and none of them were doing anything *that* earth-shaking. All smart men and women, sure, but no nobel prizes.
Think of it this way: You're a professor starting a new research project. Which early PhD student do you want to be your research assistant, the 24 year old with an apartment and a settled life, or some kid who'se just started the roughest years of puberty? They both have the same amount of education, and the kid is way more impressive *for his age* but what the hell do you care about someone being impressive for their age? You want work to get done. I really suspect this kind of thing happens more to stoke parental egos than anything else. It just doesn't make that much sense to get so far off of the clock that your society expects of you.
There are a whole lot of square pegs out there, and the standard education system is nothing but round holes. Some parents give their kids pills or push them onto the chearleading team in order to make them round pegs. Some parents look around frantically for square holes for their precious square pegs. I personally am a big believer in the value of spending a few years getting whacked in the head by a hammer as society tries to cram you down the damn round hole. The adult world isn't that much different, and you learn to deal with it without developing a massive ego or the belief that nothing is right if it doesn't feel like a special magical little cradle created just for unique little you.
Hate to tell you this dude, my dad has a whole shelf full of his grandparents books from the 1890s and thenabouts. Most of them: crappy, commercial, and pretty trashy. Most of the classics you read in school were commercial failures, frequently published with university or patron's aid (much like the high-brow fiction of today), then, as now, commercial and artistic successes like Dickens were the exception.
And as far as immersing yourself in things not OK in the real world, I'd hardly hold up written fiction (or cinema, or opera, or mythology or...) as a good example of the "right" way of doing things.
Hey I was going to make that point! You stole my idea...
(Point of joke: casual language frequently uses words in ways that aren't 100% dictionary or, in this case, IP law, correct. Don't flip your shit. For instance when one of my roommates says "Hey, why's the internet so slow?" I respond "Oh, I'm stealing a bunch of movies and shit on bittorrent, I'll pause it until tonight." not "Oh, I'm illegally violating the intellectual property rights of Hollywood Studios and others in order to gain access to their copyrighted works.")
Actually I AM more or less Joe Clueless with my Linux system (Ubuntu) but since I can get everything automatically from a software repository tested and maintained by experts, there's no chance I'll download and install anything malicious. (If some random email attachment asks me to give my root password, I'd certainly know something is fishy)
I think the biggest long term security problem with ALL proprietary operating systems is that there's so much basic functionality that's not shipped with the operating system, you have to troll the 3rd World Bazaar of the internet to find simple utilities.
It was a joke dude. I think all he meant by "Old England" was that the next game will be in a setting without drive bys, hookers, murders, and drug running.
(Not that victorian england lacked these things or their equivalents, a crime game set in pre-modern times could be really REALLY cool. The slums of old industrial london were downright brutal. Read your Dickens)
Nethack kind of needs to get over itself. It's nice and all, but its hardly the absolute first and last word in gaming. I was hooked off an on through college, finally ascended my senior year, and have since tried to get back into it by playing other classes and doing challenges, but it just doesn't excite me.
And nethack is hardly the game you should be throwing out in this debate. The author is crying for bold new creative games that defy genre, and Nethack has been evolutionarily evolved from a 25 year old formula. Nethack is the Madden whatever the hell they're up to now of its genre.
Or maybe they just recognize that all that fiber is a valuable asset that is for the moment very undervalued. I'm sure they'll have something to do with some of it, but it might just be a smart investment.
The people we need to target are the teenagers and college students who would be pirating the new version of windows. Say instead of finding a torrent, and applying whatever crack you need to get around windows DRM, try out Ubuntu.
These kids are responsible for a large number of desktops, since they have computer illiterate family and friends.
There's a target market of entry-level geeks we should be going after.
It doesn't matter if you've got a portable Cray with a blindingly bright XGA screen that gets 800 hours of playtime on fairy dust, if there aren't any good games, it isn't worth buying.
Nintendo is doing what they always do, putting fun, addictiveness, and play control ahead of all other considerations. As a result they have a "technically inferior" product that is a much greater pleasure to own and use.
In other countries you can still go see a local movie for less than an average workers hourly wage, you don't see commercials in theaters, and snacks don't cost 8 times their normal value. They seem to be doing OK.
I imagine that this is because in other countries movies aren't expected to be a multi-billion dollar industry. The films are small affairs usually telling believable stories about peoples lives rather than the ridiculous contrived nonsense that hollywood pumps out.
It's not quite 100% fair to put all the blame on parents. It's impossible to keep pop culture away from kids, unless you want to live like some conservative christains do and move to a rural area and homeschool your children. Even if you refuse to allow them GTA, half of their friends will have it.
I'd be much quicker to defend the games industry if they gave any indication of being remotely concerned about the effects of what they sell on their customers.
We of course get pissed, because as adults its inconvenient to have red tape around the products we like, but the tone around here seems to be pretty knee jerk in the assumption that there can't possibly be any harm to the games we love, so it's a pretty dumb debate with one side looking for an easy scape-goat and the other refusing to hear any arguments they don't like.
Slashdot Mirror
and don't you come back, no. -- Moore.
If we assume that Mario is about 5' 5" (never gotten the impression that the dude, sans mushroom, was too tall) then this ape would actually be about Donkey Kong sized.
You know, just sayin'
thank you.
people always think I'm dumb for going cheap (second hand, bottom-tier, whatever) on cars and computers and electronics, but any brand that's produced in numbers high enough to get the product into best buys and comp usas is made like crap. they might have more features or something, but they're just as likely to break on you.
unless you're willing to pay the price for industrial grade products or for (in the case of some things, like audio) hard-core hobbiest stuff, you're just getting a plastic box of electronics produced in the third world and glued together by an assembly line. "quality control" (has there ever been a better piece of PHB-speak?) helps a little bit, but not much)
price hasn't equaled quality since your grandpa's day when everything was built out of painted steel and machined parts.
Bad logic.
"We've underestimated in the past ergo we'll always underestimate in the future."
It's a bit like saying that alarmist environmentalists were wrong in predicting end of the world (water wars etc.) scenarios for hitting 5+ billion people, and therefore those scenarios are an impossibility even when the world hits 15, 20, or 30 billion people. It's still a (huge) problem, but the initial estimates were (way) off.
IPv4 has fewer addresses than there are people in the world. That's clearly not sufficient. IPv6 has more addresses than there would need to be to address trillions of devices for each star in the universe. By the time we really start pushing the limits on that capability, I doubt we'll be using anything remotely similar to current packet and router based networking. And if we've mastered interstellar travel and faster than light communication (currently, to the best of knowledge, a major-league, time-paradox-inducing impossibility) we'll be able to coordinate a mildly annoying upgrade from a late 20th century protocol that has stuck around for one reason or another.
However, overkill is great. Overkill means you barely need oversight since there's so much more frontier than settled space, your chances of stepping on someone's toes are miniscule. Imagine if we had that much radio badnwidth.
*T*ap dancing... oh! tap dancing...
see, I had my glasses off for a second and I read that as...
well, nevermind
Halo:
It was the first FPS that was easy to both play and network by non-geeks. Plug a few Xboxes into the ethernet jacks in your dorm building and suddenly you've got a 16 player game going. It's not about being the first with the technology, it's about being the first to make the technology easy and popular.
Also, Halo was the second console FPS to have decent game play and actually feel designed for a console controller (Goldeneye being the first)
Sure I could rattle off a million reasons why other FPSes before it were better games, but in 2002, it was the only FPS I could play with my friends.
You know, I had a chance to start College at age 14, not quite 8, but still. I'm really glad I didn't take it.
Sure, highschool sucked. But highschool sucked for a whole lotta people. I read a lot on my own time, and I don't think humanity was deprived of any potential fruits of my intellect while I was spending my efforts avoiding football games and vainly attempting to figure out how to talk to girls.
When I started college at the normal age, I had a blast and did well academically.
I remember reading an article about what prodigies were up to 20 years later (looking at what happened to a bunch of kids who'd gone into college before puberty, which apparently there was a rash of in the 70s) and none of them were doing anything *that* earth-shaking. All smart men and women, sure, but no nobel prizes.
Think of it this way: You're a professor starting a new research project. Which early PhD student do you want to be your research assistant, the 24 year old with an apartment and a settled life, or some kid who'se just started the roughest years of puberty? They both have the same amount of education, and the kid is way more impressive *for his age* but what the hell do you care about someone being impressive for their age? You want work to get done. I really suspect this kind of thing happens more to stoke parental egos than anything else. It just doesn't make that much sense to get so far off of the clock that your society expects of you.
There are a whole lot of square pegs out there, and the standard education system is nothing but round holes. Some parents give their kids pills or push them onto the chearleading team in order to make them round pegs. Some parents look around frantically for square holes for their precious square pegs. I personally am a big believer in the value of spending a few years getting whacked in the head by a hammer as society tries to cram you down the damn round hole. The adult world isn't that much different, and you learn to deal with it without developing a massive ego or the belief that nothing is right if it doesn't feel like a special magical little cradle created just for unique little you.
Yeah, I don't have to pay for health insurance either.
I just hope I don't get sick.
Look, I'm not saying an armed anarchist revolution right friggin' now is the *best* solution, I'm just saying it's *a* solution.
It'll be a cold day in hell before I let the RIAA or MPAA near my A. Hole.
Hate to tell you this dude, my dad has a whole shelf full of his grandparents books from the 1890s and thenabouts. Most of them: crappy, commercial, and pretty trashy. Most of the classics you read in school were commercial failures, frequently published with university or patron's aid (much like the high-brow fiction of today), then, as now, commercial and artistic successes like Dickens were the exception.
And as far as immersing yourself in things not OK in the real world, I'd hardly hold up written fiction (or cinema, or opera, or mythology or...) as a good example of the "right" way of doing things.
Hey I was going to make that point! You stole my idea...
(Point of joke: casual language frequently uses words in ways that aren't 100% dictionary or, in this case, IP law, correct. Don't flip your shit. For instance when one of my roommates says "Hey, why's the internet so slow?" I respond "Oh, I'm stealing a bunch of movies and shit on bittorrent, I'll pause it until tonight." not "Oh, I'm illegally violating the intellectual property rights of Hollywood Studios and others in order to gain access to their copyrighted works.")
Hey now, all citizens AND equivalent legal entities are still equal.
Some entities are just more equal than others.
To the best of my knowledge the only long-term negative effect that has been lab-proven is that the smoke is pretty shitty on one's lungs.
Brownies and vaporizers people: it's just responsible.
Actually I AM more or less Joe Clueless with my Linux system (Ubuntu) but since I can get everything automatically from a software repository tested and maintained by experts, there's no chance I'll download and install anything malicious. (If some random email attachment asks me to give my root password, I'd certainly know something is fishy)
I think the biggest long term security problem with ALL proprietary operating systems is that there's so much basic functionality that's not shipped with the operating system, you have to troll the 3rd World Bazaar of the internet to find simple utilities.
I guess that would involve some heavier petting then?
And mercury from burning coal gets in the air that flows all around the world.
There aren't any clean cheap ways of generating large amounts of electricity.
It was a joke dude. I think all he meant by "Old England" was that the next game will be in a setting without drive bys, hookers, murders, and drug running.
(Not that victorian england lacked these things or their equivalents, a crime game set in pre-modern times could be really REALLY cool. The slums of old industrial london were downright brutal. Read your Dickens)
Nethack kind of needs to get over itself. It's nice and all, but its hardly the absolute first and last word in gaming. I was hooked off an on through college, finally ascended my senior year, and have since tried to get back into it by playing other classes and doing challenges, but it just doesn't excite me.
And nethack is hardly the game you should be throwing out in this debate. The author is crying for bold new creative games that defy genre, and Nethack has been evolutionarily evolved from a 25 year old formula. Nethack is the Madden whatever the hell they're up to now of its genre.
Or maybe they just recognize that all that fiber is a valuable asset that is for the moment very undervalued. I'm sure they'll have something to do with some of it, but it might just be a smart investment.
The people we need to target are the teenagers and college students who would be pirating the new version of windows. Say instead of finding a torrent, and applying whatever crack you need to get around windows DRM, try out Ubuntu.
These kids are responsible for a large number of desktops, since they have computer illiterate family and friends.
There's a target market of entry-level geeks we should be going after.
Yeah, it's got Lumines and ummm...
Emulators... and overpriced movies...
It doesn't matter if you've got a portable Cray with a blindingly bright XGA screen that gets 800 hours of playtime on fairy dust, if there aren't any good games, it isn't worth buying.
Nintendo is doing what they always do, putting fun, addictiveness, and play control ahead of all other considerations. As a result they have a "technically inferior" product that is a much greater pleasure to own and use.
In other countries you can still go see a local movie for less than an average workers hourly wage, you don't see commercials in theaters, and snacks don't cost 8 times their normal value. They seem to be doing OK.
I imagine that this is because in other countries movies aren't expected to be a multi-billion dollar industry. The films are small affairs usually telling believable stories about peoples lives rather than the ridiculous contrived nonsense that hollywood pumps out.
Ok, Mr. Know it all, who invented the Theremin then? Betcha don't know that one!
It's not quite 100% fair to put all the blame on parents. It's impossible to keep pop culture away from kids, unless you want to live like some conservative christains do and move to a rural area and homeschool your children. Even if you refuse to allow them GTA, half of their friends will have it.
I'd be much quicker to defend the games industry if they gave any indication of being remotely concerned about the effects of what they sell on their customers.
We of course get pissed, because as adults its inconvenient to have red tape around the products we like, but the tone around here seems to be pretty knee jerk in the assumption that there can't possibly be any harm to the games we love, so it's a pretty dumb debate with one side looking for an easy scape-goat and the other refusing to hear any arguments they don't like.