Why doesn't GTA count? What about Battlefield 1942?
Polish...yup, no other game has polish.
Again, what about GTA? That made the ps2 in those ways in which you said other games except Halo couldn't.
Story...yeah...Thief, SystemShock...no story.
Character...you gotta be kidding me. Halo is not the only FPS with a decent (yeah, MC is only decent) lead character...there are many FPS' with better ones.
Artwork...oh, jeez. The FPS is the opne single genre which lives on it's graphics...which means the application of tech to create beautifull artwork. HAlo is far from being unique in that respect.
You obviously aint played the original Prince of Persia. Or Thief...or many other FPS' (or RPG's, RTS etc).
Poor Halo fanboy, blinded by a simple game...I'm not saying Halo was bad (Silent cartographer and onwards was though), but it's not as good or unique as you try to make it out to be.
Dunno about that; Bungie's stated pretty clearly that Halo is to end a trilogy, with H3 being the big finale which ties things up. I would maybe expect some derivatives from the universe being farmed out to other studios, but I think Bungie might juyst be a bit sick of Halo itself for a while...MS might be many things, but it recognises the value of new IP (even if it kinda seems Bungie might not...Marathon->Halo:P).
I agree...but did you see the article about the guys at Delft uni? They've built and operated a silicon circuit which can 'trap' a qubit. Dunno about exact decoherence rates (I'll ask), but the circuit works, and becasue it is pure silicon, it can be massproduced NOW. And no supercooling neccessary!
Your original statement: "There is not such a generator for any dataset, such that the generator can be described using less bytes than the size of the dataset in question."
Now you say: "You think my proof says that you can't find a program to create a dataset which is smaller than the dataset, for some specified dataset X. Clearly this is false, as you can compress many datasets. However, there are some datasets which cannot be compressed at all using any method. My proof, although probably not nearly perfect, does show this."
"Any" dataset or "some"...which is it? That is a crucial (and somewhat monumentally huge) difference. I did understand your post, btw. I had an exam on the subject of mathematical proofs of a computanional nature just two months back. I scored an 8/10, which in european terms is pretty damn good (US equivalent would be an A). Maybe because I was slightly drunk at the time of my posting I wasn't as clear in what I was pointing out. Sorry about that.
Sorry...the list I posted above is 'not much smoke'? Corruption (no bid contracts), widespread spying on it's own people (something which was done in the cold war east and 'frowned upon'/condemned by the west) thereby breaking constitutional law, interfering with scienctific reports (20 nobel laureates are not wrong...they signed a statement to the effect that the whitehouse is politicicing science in the US to further their agenda). I'm not even mentioning gross mismanagement on national and internatuional levels (how's New Orleans? Or Iraq? Where's Osama?), because that's not my point. Diebold and an un-accountable election system is.
You're operating on the outdated assumption that for an authoratarian regime to be in place, the proof positive is 'disapearance of dissenters'. You've failed to realise that that is just not neccessary anymore. Very few people need to be dissapeared...just ignored. The US fails all '14 points of fascism', corruprion and mismanagement is proven to exist and worst of all there has been up to now NO ACCOUNTABILITY.
"'Course, you're also a person that thinks a media that never says a good word about the current administration "favors" them,"
Never said that. Thanks for putting words into my mouth. But now we're there...what good has this administration done? Seriously...what good bills have they sponsored? What emergency have they handled well? Have they helped more US citizens get a job which pays a living wage? Have they made the educational changes the US so desperately needs? Have they made the woprld a safer place? Does that outweigh the crimes they have committed? Is that even relevant, as they have committed economic crimes and war crimes?
War crimes: the looting after the fall of Baghdad is 'fialing to police'. It is a war crime. Torture...a war crime. Widespread tapping of americans without a warrant...that is a crime against the constitution. No bid military contracts...against military code. Outing a secret agent...treason.
For the above there has been no accounting. There is a longer list. Even if the current whitehouse had done many good things (and I know of... none, really, on an economic, social, educational or geopolitical level) THAT DOES NOT EXCUSE THE CRIMES.
So...dismiss me because I can't focus on the good they have done (seriously...what good?) or the bias I have. But answer this one question; how can you excuse the crimes on record? How are those just 'smoke'? Is it seriously only once dissapearances are regular (as opposed to the now documented CIA torture flights) that you will draw the line?
True, but I think this is more a direct result of Nintendo saying they'll release dev kits for $2000. Only then did MS realise what that could mean.
What's more insidious than that is the fact that they've snagged some game uni's to brainwas^H^H^Hindoctrinat^H^H^H^Hteach their students ONLY xbox360 development.
Ah, but there's the rub: employees will have at home what they have at the office, to ensure compatibility, so they can work at home. His son/daughter is only gonna get a Vista pc if that doesn't interfere with daddy/mommies work at the office...which if the office works with XP, it will, so no Vista for the kiddies.
"After all, as a DirectX developer, you also get to release your games for the Xbox without too much hazzle,"
Hehe...not really. They (MS) said that, but look at reality. "Oh, yeah, now it's XNA which is gonna make it so easy to port stuff...". How many times are you gonna accept being lied to?
's not neccesarily a proof....it's incomplete. There may be limits (your proof might be wrong, until you reach a minimum lenght, at which point your proof does hold). Disproof is the fact that I can write a program of a few bytes which creates a larger program.
"and 2) most compression techniques use a dictionary of common used words."
Well, shit. I'm no compressionist/encryptologist/whatever, but that was my first thought when I read the article/blurb. I even started looking into median word lenghts for a language and bit lenghts versus word letter lenghts in a language and average texts. Did a nice little plain unecoded word-bitlenght/corresponding dictionary-number bitlenght comparison to see when you would get compression (and some looking into encoding to see how best to keep short words short when encoded)......and you tell me I coulda just checked j.random compression link found on google to see that has been implemented long before:(
People like you really don't get it. WHat you talk of is an ENTRENCHED r4epressive government. What with t5he government lying to you about what does and does not really happen, it's outright disregard of accepted law (Geneva, wiretapping etc) or even preservation of it's people (Kyoto...debate what you want, but not implementing has meant that you ain't done shit...which is way less than Kyoto.), it's blatant corruption (HALIBURTON and no-bid contracts...how blatant can you get?), the outing of it's own intelligence agents, FREE SPEECH ZONES! etc etc etc...
And there's you, saying that where there is smoke, there needn't be fire, or there won't be a fire, or maybe it's just clouds.
In the beginning of repression, it's not even/that/ obvious as now in the US; that only comes later. Hell, in the US, a lot of it might not even be neccessary, what with the legal system stacked, the media owned by 5 companies which are favourable to the current administration, widespread gerymandering and an election system (Diebold) which is BROKEN and has already been abused.
No, there's no fire...just, erm...cinders in the air.
Holographic storage. Use two lasers and a crystal cube; one laser energised a rectangular slice through the block, the second writes the data on that plane. Move the first laser a bit to the side to move the plane and use different enegies with the second laser to hit that plane...also move the latter laser to write bits on the plane.
It's high precision movement and wavelenght variable lasers which are difficult to mass produce...but this stuff has existed in lab settings for years now.
I just hope they get off that CD formfactor quickly and introduce sugar-cube sized media in teh future....much more practicable to carry around than a large disc.
It ain't that bad YET!?! When you have doublethink in real life, you're pretty much there. Think I'm overstating? Kerry had a spotless military record, Bush's was...amazingly appaling, to say the least. And still, Bush managed to run part of his campaign on a 'Kerry is a military pussy' platform. And many other political races are won that way...somehow making Rove's opponents strenghts work against them.
As for the surveilance...well, that's pretty much an established fact. There's this whole 'war is peace' thing...you've got an attorney general doing his damndest to legalise torture...deep administration ties to the military-industrial complex (you know, that thing many people including ex-presidents have been warning against) and established energy concerns (which is the only one which didn't make 1984, iirc).
Then there's laws which favour drug companies, allowing them to not be sued through riders included in the USA PATRIOT ACT or the freaking national budget. And lets not forget the 8 billion dollar entertainment industry somehow getting the government to regulate a I-don't-know-how-many-hundreds-of-billions dollar electronics industry.
Face it...Wells was right, only his definition of government didn't include the current state of fascism (merging of corporations and state) the USA finds itself in nowadays.
I wanted to be a futurist, once upon a time. It sounded great to really think on the future, extrapolate trends, use statistical analysis on actual market data and economic data, to have to read up on all kinds of tech (physics, bio, chemical, electrical etc etc); all this to advise a multinational/governments on what divergent scenarios they could expect, which eventualities to have in mind.
Until I actually met a futurist...and then started looking for information on futurists...and god forbid saw viedo's of the most respected futurists at a futurists convention. And then I discovered that most futurists are absolute nutjobs. We're talking cult of personality for the emotionaly disturbed. Meaning most of them are of the 'Starchild Lovemaker' hippy variety, with only a tangential understanding of technology. They have no idea what tech actually is, and how it works. They're as clueless as all the idiots who invested in those internet bubble IPO's who said burning thru millions was a great idea, and that profitability was not important for a publicaly traded company or one which was getting venture capital funding. These futurists jumped on memes they had no integral understanding of, just mumbling phrases which caught their imagination.
And then I saw 'trendwatchers'; 'alternative' losers who actually got paid money to roam around the poor areas of asia to spot stuff they could steal and 'incorporate' into the latest western fads. Even less of what I wanted to do.
Now I still want to do what I mentioned above...only in that purely relevant realm, using actual logic and analysis to actualy be usefull. Cause remember; it wasn't futurists who predicted the internet, the fall of the Berlin wall/USSR, the impact of electronics or even the wars due to teh scarcity of water.
Anyway....more ontopic: my guess is the singularity will be quite a ways away, because whilst it is true we're getting more and more new tech, and developing tech-trees faster and faster, there's a mayor hurdles. Cross-pollination. Linking the different tech's to produce even more powerfull tech. 'Search' is just part of the problem (and a huge one even at that); it's very7 very hard just to know what is known! What research has already been done on nanotechnology? Oh, you mean nanomaterial? Or physics on the meso-scale? Or nano-chemistry? Or, or or.... . And which part of that is usefull to me, to the stuff I'm doing? That's HARD! And then there's intergration of two disparate fields into one tech....for example you need biology and electrical engineering to create your biochipthingy. Two very different field with different terminologies...now learn what they mean and connect them with an engineer and a biologist:) Not easy.
So that's that for the singularity...humans at the moment just can'tr cope with all the wildly divergent and fragmented information out there, and that problem is only going to get worse. I expect the Singularity is in reality going to be some kind of 'Diffussion' instead. That's state will last for a long time before we digg ourselves out of that hole before the real Singularity can occur.
Mediocre? Sorry, but that is n otapplicable here; his game sold millions of copies. By definition, he is good at what he does (ie make video games which sell/people like). Sure, it might not be high Art (thank god for that...Art is usually boring and only for the elite top 2 % of snobs...look at James Joyce's Ulyses)...just remember that Shakespeare was a soap opera writer too.
His credentials established, you might want to read what the guy has written: all he said was "I have made a story heavy game, and whilst I like playing those kind of games, I have found that at the moment I really don't like making them. Therefore I am now making a game based on gameplay only."
The kind of game like, well, maybe like Extra Extend, or Rez, or even Streetfighter II, or Dance Dance Revolution (go Google). You know, games which have no story, but the gameplay is just fun. Sure, GREAT games can have an amazing story and great gameplay...but then there's also Tetris: pure gameplay.
As for your comment on public domain; standing on the shoulders of giants, man...never heard of that?
Option 1 has always been true. Not since the quantum crisis have scientists been that arrogant to assume that their theories are set in stone; we're constantly refining the models to fit reality better and better. Hell, even if we finally accomodate all the forces into one model, we'll assume that that model will eventually be surpased by one which is better and more precise. Modern science is based on the fact that we realise we're pretty much never 100% correct.
I'm with you. IMO they made some serious mistakes. First and formost is the cost. Secondly we have something which ties in directly to the first, which is the inclusion of (of all things) an mp3 player. Is it some new dictum that all new hardware will evolve to a point where it includes an mp3 player?
Anyway, it's too expensive. I'm an early adopter, but I will not pay that kind of money for a mere ereader. A portable screen like this should cost 300 euro's max...and that's for the first run of the tech. But then they have to go and include an mp3 player?!? WTF? WHY? I do not want one on my ebook reader. Either make an all purpose device like a palmpilot with this screen or just make a simple no-frills reader. Preferably just the reader, as everyone and his dog has a better mp3 player. It increases cost and size (chip, jack) and drains the battery. AND PEOPLE WHO WANT THIS THING TO READ ON DON'T WANT AN MP3 PLAYER! THEY WANT TO READ BOOKS!
I mean, shoot, my phone has an mp3 player which I never use, as does my palmpilot (which I do use the mp3 function on). I love the screen on this thing....but just not for that money. My guess is they'll never re-coop their investment, as they screwed up their market research on who wants one of these things and what they want on it. They should have diverted the mp3 R&D towards creating a html help (.chm) reader for this thing, as that's what it's sorely missing.
Not only that, but you got frustrated using the/keyboard/? In that day and age, when the first GTA came out, keyboard was de rigeur. You wanted to drive with the mouse instead? You're crazy....driving with a mouse must have been possibly the worst control mechanism you could come up with for a top-down driving game.
"The problems people cite as reasons not to explore have always been with us, read Tacitus, Sun Tzu or the Hammurabi column for proof."
Huh? I don't get this...I've read Sun Tzu and the Hammurabbi code (Tacitus is on my T3, waiting untill I finnish a Brin book, maybe finally bother with Thoreau); one is a treatise on how to [not] wage war, the other is the oldest code of law found. I agree with your comment, but those three authors have NOTHING to do with what you're saying, as far as I can tell.
Slashdot Mirror
Why doesn't GTA count? What about Battlefield 1942?
Polish...yup, no other game has polish.
Again, what about GTA? That made the ps2 in those ways in which you said other games except Halo couldn't.
Story...yeah...Thief, SystemShock...no story.
Character...you gotta be kidding me. Halo is not the only FPS with a decent (yeah, MC is only decent) lead character...there are many FPS' with better ones.
Artwork...oh, jeez. The FPS is the opne single genre which lives on it's graphics...which means the application of tech to create beautifull artwork. HAlo is far from being unique in that respect.
You obviously aint played the original Prince of Persia. Or Thief...or many other FPS' (or RPG's, RTS etc).
Poor Halo fanboy, blinded by a simple game...I'm not saying Halo was bad (Silent cartographer and onwards was though), but it's not as good or unique as you try to make it out to be.
Dunno about that; Bungie's stated pretty clearly that Halo is to end a trilogy, with H3 being the big finale which ties things up. I would maybe expect some derivatives from the universe being farmed out to other studios, but I think Bungie might juyst be a bit sick of Halo itself for a while...MS might be many things, but it recognises the value of new IP (even if it kinda seems Bungie might not...Marathon->Halo :P).
I agree...but did you see the article about the guys at Delft uni? They've built and operated a silicon circuit which can 'trap' a qubit. Dunno about exact decoherence rates (I'll ask), but the circuit works, and becasue it is pure silicon, it can be massproduced NOW. And no supercooling neccessary!
Your original statement: "There is not such a generator for any dataset, such that the generator can be described using less bytes than the size of the dataset in question."
Now you say: "You think my proof says that you can't find a program to create a dataset which is smaller than the dataset, for some specified dataset X. Clearly this is false, as you can compress many datasets. However, there are some datasets which cannot be compressed at all using any method. My proof, although probably not nearly perfect, does show this."
"Any" dataset or "some"...which is it? That is a crucial (and somewhat monumentally huge) difference. I did understand your post, btw. I had an exam on the subject of mathematical proofs of a computanional nature just two months back. I scored an 8/10, which in european terms is pretty damn good (US equivalent would be an A). Maybe because I was slightly drunk at the time of my posting I wasn't as clear in what I was pointing out. Sorry about that.
"So there's smoke... but it's not much"
... none, really, on an economic, social, educational or geopolitical level) THAT DOES NOT EXCUSE THE CRIMES.
Sorry...the list I posted above is 'not much smoke'? Corruption (no bid contracts), widespread spying on it's own people (something which was done in the cold war east and 'frowned upon'/condemned by the west) thereby breaking constitutional law, interfering with scienctific reports (20 nobel laureates are not wrong...they signed a statement to the effect that the whitehouse is politicicing science in the US to further their agenda). I'm not even mentioning gross mismanagement on national and internatuional levels (how's New Orleans? Or Iraq? Where's Osama?), because that's not my point. Diebold and an un-accountable election system is.
You're operating on the outdated assumption that for an authoratarian regime to be in place, the proof positive is 'disapearance of dissenters'. You've failed to realise that that is just not neccessary anymore. Very few people need to be dissapeared...just ignored. The US fails all '14 points of fascism', corruprion and mismanagement is proven to exist and worst of all there has been up to now NO ACCOUNTABILITY.
"'Course, you're also a person that thinks a media that never says a good word about the current administration "favors" them,"
Never said that. Thanks for putting words into my mouth. But now we're there...what good has this administration done? Seriously...what good bills have they sponsored? What emergency have they handled well? Have they helped more US citizens get a job which pays a living wage? Have they made the educational changes the US so desperately needs? Have they made the woprld a safer place? Does that outweigh the crimes they have committed? Is that even relevant, as they have committed economic crimes and war crimes?
War crimes: the looting after the fall of Baghdad is 'fialing to police'. It is a war crime. Torture...a war crime. Widespread tapping of americans without a warrant...that is a crime against the constitution. No bid military contracts...against military code. Outing a secret agent...treason.
For the above there has been no accounting. There is a longer list. Even if the current whitehouse had done many good things (and I know of
So...dismiss me because I can't focus on the good they have done (seriously...what good?) or the bias I have. But answer this one question; how can you excuse the crimes on record? How are those just 'smoke'? Is it seriously only once dissapearances are regular (as opposed to the now documented CIA torture flights) that you will draw the line?
True, but I think this is more a direct result of Nintendo saying they'll release dev kits for $2000. Only then did MS realise what that could mean.
What's more insidious than that is the fact that they've snagged some game uni's to brainwas^H^H^Hindoctrinat^H^H^H^Hteach their students ONLY xbox360 development.
Ah, but there's the rub: employees will have at home what they have at the office, to ensure compatibility, so they can work at home. His son/daughter is only gonna get a Vista pc if that doesn't interfere with daddy/mommies work at the office...which if the office works with XP, it will, so no Vista for the kiddies.
"After all, as a DirectX developer, you also get to release your games for the Xbox without too much hazzle,"
Hehe...not really. They (MS) said that, but look at reality. "Oh, yeah, now it's XNA which is gonna make it so easy to port stuff...". How many times are you gonna accept being lied to?
's not neccesarily a proof....it's incomplete. There may be limits (your proof might be wrong, until you reach a minimum lenght, at which point your proof does hold). Disproof is the fact that I can write a program of a few bytes which creates a larger program.
"and 2) most compression techniques use a dictionary of common used words."
...and you tell me I coulda just checked j.random compression link found on google to see that has been implemented long before :(
Well, shit. I'm no compressionist/encryptologist/whatever, but that was my first thought when I read the article/blurb. I even started looking into median word lenghts for a language and bit lenghts versus word letter lenghts in a language and average texts. Did a nice little plain unecoded word-bitlenght/corresponding dictionary-number bitlenght comparison to see when you would get compression (and some looking into encoding to see how best to keep short words short when encoded)...
People like you really don't get it. WHat you talk of is an ENTRENCHED r4epressive government. What with t5he government lying to you about what does and does not really happen, it's outright disregard of accepted law (Geneva, wiretapping etc) or even preservation of it's people (Kyoto...debate what you want, but not implementing has meant that you ain't done shit...which is way less than Kyoto.), it's blatant corruption (HALIBURTON and no-bid contracts...how blatant can you get?), the outing of it's own intelligence agents, FREE SPEECH ZONES! etc etc etc...
/that/ obvious as now in the US; that only comes later. Hell, in the US, a lot of it might not even be neccessary, what with the legal system stacked, the media owned by 5 companies which are favourable to the current administration, widespread gerymandering and an election system (Diebold) which is BROKEN and has already been abused.
And there's you, saying that where there is smoke, there needn't be fire, or there won't be a fire, or maybe it's just clouds.
In the beginning of repression, it's not even
No, there's no fire...just, erm...cinders in the air.
Or you could just string 100 one gig SD cards on a chain and use that as a necklace...viola, 100 gig as jewelery :)
PS: why not just divide the area (1cm) by the amount of bits for the area of a bit (and then compare to the radius [=lenght/width] of a metalic atom)?
Holographic storage. Use two lasers and a crystal cube; one laser energised a rectangular slice through the block, the second writes the data on that plane. Move the first laser a bit to the side to move the plane and use different enegies with the second laser to hit that plane...also move the latter laser to write bits on the plane.
It's high precision movement and wavelenght variable lasers which are difficult to mass produce...but this stuff has existed in lab settings for years now.
I just hope they get off that CD formfactor quickly and introduce sugar-cube sized media in teh future....much more practicable to carry around than a large disc.
Read up on fascism (merging of state and corporation), Orwell and the spanish civil war.
No privacy? Cool....I'm coming to your house and watching next time you and your wife are having sex.
Oh, but why would you not want me there? Do you have something to hide, you bedroom terrorist?
Do you even get the point I'm making here?
It ain't that bad YET!?! When you have doublethink in real life, you're pretty much there. Think I'm overstating? Kerry had a spotless military record, Bush's was...amazingly appaling, to say the least. And still, Bush managed to run part of his campaign on a 'Kerry is a military pussy' platform. And many other political races are won that way...somehow making Rove's opponents strenghts work against them.
As for the surveilance...well, that's pretty much an established fact. There's this whole 'war is peace' thing...you've got an attorney general doing his damndest to legalise torture...deep administration ties to the military-industrial complex (you know, that thing many people including ex-presidents have been warning against) and established energy concerns (which is the only one which didn't make 1984, iirc).
Then there's laws which favour drug companies, allowing them to not be sued through riders included in the USA PATRIOT ACT or the freaking national budget. And lets not forget the 8 billion dollar entertainment industry somehow getting the government to regulate a I-don't-know-how-many-hundreds-of-billions dollar electronics industry.
Face it...Wells was right, only his definition of government didn't include the current state of fascism (merging of corporations and state) the USA finds itself in nowadays.
I take it that 3rd point is the equivalent of projecting 'the 3d' to the 2d plane of the monitor?
I wanted to be a futurist, once upon a time. It sounded great to really think on the future, extrapolate trends, use statistical analysis on actual market data and economic data, to have to read up on all kinds of tech (physics, bio, chemical, electrical etc etc); all this to advise a multinational/governments on what divergent scenarios they could expect, which eventualities to have in mind.
:) Not easy.
Until I actually met a futurist...and then started looking for information on futurists...and god forbid saw viedo's of the most respected futurists at a futurists convention. And then I discovered that most futurists are absolute nutjobs. We're talking cult of personality for the emotionaly disturbed. Meaning most of them are of the 'Starchild Lovemaker' hippy variety, with only a tangential understanding of technology. They have no idea what tech actually is, and how it works. They're as clueless as all the idiots who invested in those internet bubble IPO's who said burning thru millions was a great idea, and that profitability was not important for a publicaly traded company or one which was getting venture capital funding. These futurists jumped on memes they had no integral understanding of, just mumbling phrases which caught their imagination.
And then I saw 'trendwatchers'; 'alternative' losers who actually got paid money to roam around the poor areas of asia to spot stuff they could steal and 'incorporate' into the latest western fads. Even less of what I wanted to do.
Now I still want to do what I mentioned above...only in that purely relevant realm, using actual logic and analysis to actualy be usefull. Cause remember; it wasn't futurists who predicted the internet, the fall of the Berlin wall/USSR, the impact of electronics or even the wars due to teh scarcity of water.
Anyway....more ontopic: my guess is the singularity will be quite a ways away, because whilst it is true we're getting more and more new tech, and developing tech-trees faster and faster, there's a mayor hurdles. Cross-pollination. Linking the different tech's to produce even more powerfull tech. 'Search' is just part of the problem (and a huge one even at that); it's very7 very hard just to know what is known! What research has already been done on nanotechnology? Oh, you mean nanomaterial? Or physics on the meso-scale? Or nano-chemistry? Or, or or.... . And which part of that is usefull to me, to the stuff I'm doing? That's HARD! And then there's intergration of two disparate fields into one tech....for example you need biology and electrical engineering to create your biochipthingy. Two very different field with different terminologies...now learn what they mean and connect them with an engineer and a biologist
So that's that for the singularity...humans at the moment just can'tr cope with all the wildly divergent and fragmented information out there, and that problem is only going to get worse. I expect the Singularity is in reality going to be some kind of 'Diffussion' instead. That's state will last for a long time before we digg ourselves out of that hole before the real Singularity can occur.
Mediocre? Sorry, but that is n otapplicable here; his game sold millions of copies. By definition, he is good at what he does (ie make video games which sell/people like).
Sure, it might not be high Art (thank god for that...Art is usually boring and only for the elite top 2 % of snobs...look at James Joyce's Ulyses)...just remember that Shakespeare was a soap opera writer too.
His credentials established, you might want to read what the guy has written: all he said was "I have made a story heavy game, and whilst I like playing those kind of games, I have found that at the moment I really don't like making them. Therefore I am now making a game based on gameplay only."
The kind of game like, well, maybe like Extra Extend, or Rez, or even Streetfighter II, or Dance Dance Revolution (go Google). You know, games which have no story, but the gameplay is just fun. Sure, GREAT games can have an amazing story and great gameplay...but then there's also Tetris: pure gameplay.
As for your comment on public domain; standing on the shoulders of giants, man...never heard of that?
It all starts from observation of reality...those laws of nature have to fit the observables.
Option 1 has always been true. Not since the quantum crisis have scientists been that arrogant to assume that their theories are set in stone; we're constantly refining the models to fit reality better and better. Hell, even if we finally accomodate all the forces into one model, we'll assume that that model will eventually be surpased by one which is better and more precise. Modern science is based on the fact that we realise we're pretty much never 100% correct.
I'm with you. IMO they made some serious mistakes. First and formost is the cost. Secondly we have something which ties in directly to the first, which is the inclusion of (of all things) an mp3 player. Is it some new dictum that all new hardware will evolve to a point where it includes an mp3 player?
Anyway, it's too expensive. I'm an early adopter, but I will not pay that kind of money for a mere ereader. A portable screen like this should cost 300 euro's max...and that's for the first run of the tech. But then they have to go and include an mp3 player?!? WTF? WHY? I do not want one on my ebook reader. Either make an all purpose device like a palmpilot with this screen or just make a simple no-frills reader. Preferably just the reader, as everyone and his dog has a better mp3 player. It increases cost and size (chip, jack) and drains the battery. AND PEOPLE WHO WANT THIS THING TO READ ON DON'T WANT AN MP3 PLAYER! THEY WANT TO READ BOOKS!
I mean, shoot, my phone has an mp3 player which I never use, as does my palmpilot (which I do use the mp3 function on). I love the screen on this thing....but just not for that money. My guess is they'll never re-coop their investment, as they screwed up their market research on who wants one of these things and what they want on it. They should have diverted the mp3 R&D towards creating a html help (.chm) reader for this thing, as that's what it's sorely missing.
GTA was a pc game. It was made for it and designed for it. Console exlusivity didn't happen until Sony came along.
Memory constraints...heard of them?
/keyboard/? In that day and age, when the first GTA came out, keyboard was de rigeur. You wanted to drive with the mouse instead? You're crazy....driving with a mouse must have been possibly the worst control mechanism you could come up with for a top-down driving game.
Not only that, but you got frustrated using the
"The problems people cite as reasons not to explore have always been with us, read Tacitus, Sun Tzu or the Hammurabi column for proof."
Huh? I don't get this...I've read Sun Tzu and the Hammurabbi code (Tacitus is on my T3, waiting untill I finnish a Brin book, maybe finally bother with Thoreau); one is a treatise on how to [not] wage war, the other is the oldest code of law found. I agree with your comment, but those three authors have NOTHING to do with what you're saying, as far as I can tell.