No kidding. As a console collector, I've got probably twice as many systems as he mentioned, and expected the article to be incomplete. It's far worse than that.
His article completely glosses over the fact that consoles trounced "computers" (and by that he means IBM PC clones) for most of history as far as quality and quantity of games as well as technology. He fast-forwarded up to Doom and got to the point where Wintel machines were a contender. For nearly twenty years before that (and the IBM PC wasn't around for half of that), consoles were king, and the computers that were in the same league (like the Commodore 64 and the Atari 8-bits) don't even get a mention.
History gets revised all the time, but compressing an entire industry into "there once was the Atari 2600 and now there's the Xbox", and not even talking about the former is ridiculous.
Want to hear something funny? I bet more people will buy an Atari 2600 this week than an Xbox. Neither one is available at any store around here, and collectors buy Atari stuff all the time!
One of these days I'll finish photographing my collection and set up a nice web site. Until then, you can find out a lot more about the history of consoles at the history of video games homepage, which is great but no longer being updated.
I am a mentor and have been for years. I worked under my own mentors before that. The problem is it has gotten increasingly hard to do this because of politics- and this is at a university, mind you. I can only imagine what it's like at places even more pound-foolish.
I like to hire students to work for me when they're pretty fresh. Mostly because I want to keep them around for a few years, but also because I'm hoping they've picked up fewer bad habits already. The planned arc is I keep them for three years or so, then they graduate and either come on full-time or go make the big bucks elsewhere (usually the latter, as you'd guess).
The problem is that people above me in the administration Don't Get It. They think it's a waste of resources to pay students who are a) busy enough with school that they can't work a lot of hours, b) only hang around a couple of years, and c) go take all our mojo and use it elsewhere.
My usual response is ``Excuse me? I thought it said "university" on the front door. We're supposed to be filling up their heads and unleashing them on the world.''
I then explain that you can't find people ready-made to work here, or I think as systems administrators or large project developers in general. They need to learn by doing it. It's that cycle people whine about, you can't get a job without experience, etc. Well, here's an in, folks. I'm just looking for people who are willing and able to learn.
This is my third department and fifth set of higher ups. Fortunately the first set of which Got It, or I wouldn't have come up in a good environment myself. It's been an ongoing battle with the subsequent regimes to keep things going.
I think the problem (like a lot of problems in computer related fields these days) is the public perception that because computers are commonplace (unlike fifteen years ago when I started), all things related to them are easy and competent workers are plentiful. Wrong and wrong, as slashdotters know.
A similar problem is with the students themselves who tend to underestimate the scale of the problems or overestimate their abilities. That's nothing new, though- been there myself- and both of those are pretty easy to improve, given a good environment. If only I could really provide one.:-(
Not to sound like the silverback hacker I am, but I fear for the future. If a university like this one can't provide a good breeding ground for technical people, who will?
I haven't given up hope yet, but I'm getting close. Anyone got venture capital for setting up a geek incubator? If the university won't guide eager students, somebody else should. Set up shop near each of your major universities and you'd get first pick of each year's crop of disciples for feeding to headhunters or whatever other businesses you have.
If it's cool and credible enough, people will work for you for peanuts (people offer to work here for free all the time). What're headhunters paying these days? Between that and pimping out whatever they're doing on the job to get experience, this could even make money.
Sparse info? Just call them up and ask. Geez. They answered my questions without any trouble at all. I didn't have as many as most people I see posting here because I'm a longtime Palm user, but I wanted to know about cradle compatibility.
Visors aren't compatible with any existing Palm cradles, BTW.
I'd like to know too. I slayed my Palm Pro after a couple of year of nonstop use. I've already ordered a Visor Deluxe to replace it, but it's been a sad couple of months without my little computer.:-(
CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST is a far superior movie to THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. If they had copied, it would have been a blessing.
CH begins with a professor being hired by a New York City TV station to go down to Colombia to look for a missing documentary film crew. The crew is clearly modeled after an Italian mondo film crew, but the setting is changed to America (although it's an Italian movie- pretty common, actually).
He heads down South and after a journey finds their film and the remainder of their remains. He assumes they were killed by bloodthirsty savages.
He takes their footage back to NYC and assembles some of it for the TV guys to watch. It's grisly, but the big revelation is that the crew, in order to make a more juicy film, tortured and abused the natives. They were killed in revenge.
CH plays with the ideas of movie reality versus "real" reality. If the crew had made it back OK, they would've edited their movie to reflect what they were trying to show. The raw footage was more truthful.
It also was made as a criticism of mondo film and even news programs that are allowed to show anything they want because it's true, while fiction is heavily censored. Well, in Italy in 1979 at least.
TBWP didn't have that much to say and didn't frame the recovered footage as well. You could edit the "Curse of the Blair Witch" TV special and the movie together into a better feature- and one that would look a lot more like CH.
For more about CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, read KILLING FOR CULTURE, or buy the laserdisc. You can get the book from Amazon and the disc from houseofhorrors.com.
Yeah, and the BBFC bites. Freedom of speech doesn't exist in the UK and that bites too. That's why we kicked their limey asses in the Revolution.:-)
Legislated age restrictions in the cinema are bad enough, but the "video nasties" stuff is so far out that I doubt many Americans would even believe it. (Nothing gets released on video without BBFC approval, often resulting in serious cuts and sometimes outright banning of films.)
I hope you guys are looking forward to THE EXORCIST coming out on video this fall. It only took 25 years. That's only one of many examples of your wonderful government protecting you from art and literature.
The UK is not a model to emulate for movie censorship. Hell, censorship is the wrong model, period. We don't do that here, we just make it difficult for people to make money if the MPAA doesn't like them.:-(
Law? No, it's not. For all the complaints to the contrary, we don't have movie censorship here in the US. It's policy and nothing more. We dodged the "law" bullet with the ratings system, and I hope it stays that way.
As bad as people think the ratings system is, real laws of any sort would be much much worse.
Slashdot Mirror
No kidding. As a console collector, I've got probably twice as many systems as he mentioned, and expected the article to be incomplete. It's far worse than that.
His article completely glosses over the fact that consoles trounced "computers" (and by that he means IBM PC clones) for most of history as far as quality and quantity of games as well as technology. He fast-forwarded up to Doom and got to the point where Wintel machines were a contender. For nearly twenty years before that (and the IBM PC wasn't around for half of that), consoles were king, and the computers that were in the same league (like the Commodore 64 and the Atari 8-bits) don't even get a mention.
History gets revised all the time, but compressing an entire industry into "there once was the Atari 2600 and now there's the Xbox", and not even talking about the former is ridiculous.
Want to hear something funny? I bet more people will buy an Atari 2600 this week than an Xbox. Neither one is available at any store around here, and collectors buy Atari stuff all the time!
One of these days I'll finish photographing my collection and set up a nice web site. Until then, you can find out a lot more about the history of consoles at the history of video games homepage, which is great but no longer being updated.
ab
I am a mentor and have been for years. I worked under my own mentors before that. The problem is it has gotten increasingly hard to do this because of politics- and this is at a university, mind you. I can only imagine what it's like at places even more pound-foolish.
I like to hire students to work for me when they're pretty fresh. Mostly because I want to keep them around for a few years, but also because I'm hoping they've picked up fewer bad habits already. The planned arc is I keep them for three years or so, then they graduate and either come on full-time or go make the big bucks elsewhere (usually the latter, as you'd guess).
The problem is that people above me in the administration Don't Get It. They think it's a waste of resources to pay students who are a) busy enough with school that they can't work a lot of hours, b) only hang around a couple of years, and c) go take all our mojo and use it elsewhere.
My usual response is ``Excuse me? I thought it said "university" on the front door. We're supposed to be filling up their heads and unleashing them on the world.''
I then explain that you can't find people ready-made to work here, or I think as systems administrators or large project developers in general. They need to learn by doing it. It's that cycle people whine about, you can't get a job without experience, etc. Well, here's an in, folks. I'm just looking for people who are willing and able to learn.
This is my third department and fifth set of higher ups. Fortunately the first set of which Got It, or I wouldn't have come up in a good environment myself. It's been an ongoing battle with the subsequent regimes to keep things going.
I think the problem (like a lot of problems in computer related fields these days) is the public perception that because computers are commonplace (unlike fifteen years ago when I started), all things related to them are easy and competent workers are plentiful. Wrong and wrong, as slashdotters know.
A similar problem is with the students themselves who tend to underestimate the scale of the problems or overestimate their abilities. That's nothing new, though- been there myself- and both of those are pretty easy to improve, given a good environment. If only I could really provide one. :-(
Not to sound like the silverback hacker I am, but I fear for the future. If a university like this one can't provide a good breeding ground for technical people, who will?
I haven't given up hope yet, but I'm getting close. Anyone got venture capital for setting up a geek incubator? If the university won't guide eager students, somebody else should. Set up shop near each of your major universities and you'd get first pick of each year's crop of disciples for feeding to headhunters or whatever other businesses you have.
If it's cool and credible enough, people will work for you for peanuts (people offer to work here for free all the time). What're headhunters paying these days? Between that and pimping out whatever they're doing on the job to get experience, this could even make money.
When you want a branch here, give me a call.
It's exactly the same as the Criterion LaserDisc. That's cool and all, but I'm not going to give them much credit for copying it to a new format.
I'm even less interested in reading a belated review of the disc here, months after it came out DVD and years after the LD.
Next time, review something new.
If you had an unencrypted game and the encrypted version you could figure out the key, I'm thinking.
Developers were given a copy of Cybermorph on floppy. If it's the same as the release version, there you go.
(I know because I'm a Jaguar developer!)
Sparse info? Just call them up and ask. Geez. They answered my questions without any trouble at all. I didn't have as many as most people I see posting here because I'm a longtime Palm user, but I wanted to know about cradle compatibility.
Visors aren't compatible with any existing Palm cradles, BTW.
I'd like to know too. I slayed my Palm Pro after a couple of year of nonstop use. I've already ordered a Visor Deluxe to replace it, but it's been a sad couple of months without my little computer. :-(
CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST is a far superior movie to THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. If they had copied, it would have been a blessing.
CH begins with a professor being hired by a New York City TV station to go down to Colombia to look for a missing documentary film crew. The crew is clearly modeled after an Italian mondo film crew, but the setting is changed to America (although it's an Italian movie- pretty common, actually).
He heads down South and after a journey finds their film and the remainder of their remains. He assumes they were killed by bloodthirsty savages.
He takes their footage back to NYC and assembles some of it for the TV guys to watch. It's grisly, but the big revelation is that the crew, in order to make a more juicy film, tortured and abused the natives. They were killed in revenge.
CH plays with the ideas of movie reality versus "real" reality. If the crew had made it back OK, they would've edited their movie to reflect what they were trying to show. The raw footage was more truthful.
It also was made as a criticism of mondo film and even news programs that are allowed to show anything they want because it's true, while fiction is heavily censored. Well, in Italy in 1979 at least.
TBWP didn't have that much to say and didn't frame the recovered footage as well. You could edit the "Curse of the Blair Witch" TV special and the movie together into a better feature- and one that would look a lot more like CH.
For more about CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, read KILLING FOR CULTURE, or buy the laserdisc. You can get the book from Amazon and the disc from houseofhorrors.com.
Yeah, and the BBFC bites. Freedom of speech doesn't exist in the UK and that bites too. That's why we kicked their limey asses in the Revolution. :-)
:-(
Legislated age restrictions in the cinema are bad enough, but the "video nasties" stuff is so far out that I doubt many Americans would even believe it. (Nothing gets released on video without BBFC approval, often resulting in serious cuts and sometimes outright banning of films.)
I hope you guys are looking forward to THE EXORCIST coming out on video this fall. It only took 25 years. That's only one of many examples of your wonderful government protecting you from art and literature.
The UK is not a model to emulate for movie censorship. Hell, censorship is the wrong model, period. We don't do that here, we just make it difficult for people to make money if the MPAA doesn't like them.
Law? No, it's not. For all the complaints to the contrary, we don't have movie censorship here in the US. It's policy and nothing more. We dodged the "law" bullet with the ratings system, and I hope it stays that way.
As bad as people think the ratings system is, real laws of any sort would be much much worse.
I don't like anyone disruptive in movies. It's gotten a lot worse as of late, and, yes, kids are worse than adults by far.
I think what we really need is bouncers- uh, ushers- in movie theaters that eject >anyone making noise or running around.
Maybe then I wouldn't feel so strongly about this, but as it is, I say send the kids home. They can watch it on video or HBO.
Don't tell them to use the term "cracker" either. Use a more correct term like "criminal", "intruder", "trespasser", "violator", or "motherfucker".