I'm anxious to see how Nintendo changes their direction with their next-gen console to solve some of these problems. These are tough times, and three consoles creates a saturated market.
Backwards compatibility (must have.) A second left shoulder button (must have.) Perhaps a better second analog stick. Some people have complained about the d-pad, but i don't have any complaints there. Develop a better online gaming presence, regardless of how important or not it is to the average gamer the lack is a PR killer. Get out just before or soon after the PS3/XBox2.
And most important, find a way to kick the (undeserved) just for kids image.
I was going to say that Gladiator looked pretty cool, but then i realized i was thinking of Gladius by LucasArts, which is still on for Gamecube. So yeah, screw Acclaim.
Wasn't it just a few days ago that people with high resolution screens were complaing that GameSpot or some such enforced a certain line length, thereby reducing the page to a thin column in the browser? And now you're complaining that this site _doesn't_ enforce line lenghts? Make up your minds!
It's been awhile since i read it, but i had the impression that the nuking of abilities only happened in some cases, ie it might be something that could be corrected for given time and experimentation (presumably on non-sentient subjects if possible)
The fact that some of them didn't want to get unFocused just reinforces the point that even with the extreme disadvantages there would be at least a few people who might still think it was worthwhile.
Like i said then, companies might be wise to decide not to use it at all. However private individuals are still a completly different matter.
Even if they're not selling anything, people have come to expect email to be delivered in real-time. With so many anti-spam techniques that don't introduce an unnecessary delay and are more effective I'm just not sure why this method--with lower success and an unnecessary delay--is a worthwhile approach.
Oh come on, i rarely expect anyone i personally email who i've never talked to before to respond immediatly. I've got good friends who i email relatively regularly that i'll be lucky to get a response from in a month! Ir someone i don't know takes a day or two to respond i won't even know if it's because they've got their delay time set high or they're just slow at reponding, and after the first excchange the dealy goes away. I think you're seriously overstating the downside to this.
There is actually a very good science fiction book by Vernor Vinge, A Deepness In the Sky that deals with almost exactly the same technology. However in this case the "programming" takes a longer period of time and lasts permantly until reversed. The civilization that develops it keeps huge think tanks of artifical-idiot-savant slaves, who effectively worked as living creative computers for their masters.
Although i greatly enjoy Vernor Vinge's work (I would strongly recoment reading A Fire Upon the Deep first, although it's not neccessary) this book did have one quirk that really pissed me off. When a cure was discovered, all the slaves were freed, and the technology was then treated as anathema. They believed that the technology was so evil that they should just get rid of it.
Say what?
I agree, turning people into mental slaves is a horrible thing, and taking a week(?) or more to induce or cure the state made it not super practical for anything else. But saying that since one use for it is bad, the entire technology should be outlawed? That seems an odd view for someone who supports science to take.
If this technology existed and research was continued, the up and down time might be reduced significantly. Even if not, i could probably sign a contract with a company that i would spend a week undergoing the treatment, work for them for a month, spend a week being returned to normal, and then spend several months off, yet get paid as if i was working the whole time. I'd be perfectly happy with such an arangement, and i bet a lot of other people would too.
Obviously this technology in this article seems to be the exact opposite. Warm up time seems to be measured in minutes. If it is further developed, it would be quite feasible to put this thing on when you got into work, work for five or six hours, then take it off and go home again, yet have gotten in several days worth of work compared to normal conditions.
You have a semi-valid point. Companies might not want to install this software, or at most set the retry period to an hour or so. Really six or twelve hours ought to be fine, it's reasonable to expect any buisness to take one buisness day in getting back to you.
But regardless, the majority of people getting spammed are not selling anything, so why would this be a problem for them?
The companies that port the games are only willing to port things that they think they can make money on. Most of the stuff i listed is very much a fringe market in the US. The reason they aren't available to buy is because the game companies don't think enough people will buy them to justify the cost.
Given that one of Heinlein's books is titled "The Man Who Sold the Moon," i think he saw both sides of the issue. However i'm not sure if sales people as motivators of technology was more of a "vision," or just a concession to reality.
it can be argued that the North American market is most open-minded when it comes to it's games. Software from all over the world can enjoy great success there, from just about any genre.
Except for dating sims, mahjong games, a lot of the dancing type games other than DDR, Vib Ribbon, a lot of strategy games, a lot of the RPGs other than Final Fantasy (and even those are only gradually improving from a really spotty porting record) and i'm sure there are a lot more that i'm not thinking of.
Who exactly has the right of free response? What happens when a person or group slanders a generalized group?
For example, the next time the RIAA goes on some spiel on a European website about how people who d/l mp3s are evil pirates who are destorying the recording industries profits, robbing artists of house and home, and eat babies on the side, who has the right of response?
Can any person who is willing to admit that they have traded mp3s force the RIAA or whichever site hosted the article to include a counter-response? If so, just the first person who responds? Or every response they get? Or would the file-traders need to form some kind of official group to make the response? Or does the RIAA get away with it because they're slandering a nebulous group rather than a specific individual?
This will likely have a chilling effect on Internet communication
Because well all know that having to listen to the other guy talk back to you totally kills that whole communication thing. Nothing like having to consider both sides of an issue to ruin your pleasant complacency.
Besides, everyone would rather pay up or remove offending information due to libel suits instead, right?
Mozilla and Netscape and all should really make more noise about their pop-up blocking ability. If more people knew about that a lot of people would probably switch over.
They might want to push the tabs a little more too. The tabs put me off a bit when i first started using Netscape, and i went back to IE for awhile. But then i got sick enough of the pop-ups that it was worth "dealing" with the tabs, and it turned out that i eventually ended up liking quite a bit once i got used to them.
A: Why do you assume that the set of people who want to play FFCC has an insignifcant overlap with the set of people who want to play FFX-2? They are different kinds of games for different kinds of systems, but a lot of people liked both FF and SoM, and a lot of people have both consoles.
B: I agree, there's no reason i have to buy the game as soon as it comes out, but you're completly missing the point.
I am much less likely to want to buy both games the instant they come out if they come out on the same day than if they come out at different times. If i had the chance to buy one right away and play it and maybe finish it, then i'd be far more likely to buy the second right away when it came out.
The point being made is NOT that it's bad for the consumer, but that it's a bad buisness decision for Square Enix. The less people who buy both games shortly after they come out, the less money they make since the price will start dropping.
If Square Enix were to announce that they would be giving away both games for free i would simialrly wonder what the hell they were thinking, but that would not stop me from realizing the large advantage to be gained as a consumer and taking advantage of the situation.
Well, I was able to understand what he was saying, but it sounded... imprecise. As Brendan Byrd said elsewhere in this thread [slashdot.org], the Architect was generally extremely careful in word choice, which makes a metaphorical usage of "design" sound odd.
I thought of it more as a comment about the nature of the Architect himself. He is an architect, a builder of things, he sees all things, but especially humans, as a design, a made thing, whether by himself or others.
Everything you say is correct, but I still don't see how it explains why the "anomaly" would cause "fluctuations" in "even the most simplistic equations". I mean, everything you say just comes down to "the problem is choice", as Neo said. But, while this is a good plot device, it's not intuitively plausible. What kind of special issues does choice raise? Sure, humans are unpredictable, but what exactly are the nature of the "fluctuations" that the humans are able to induce?
I think it's kind of hard to answer that question without understanding the programming behind the Matrix, which we clearly can't know in any real sense.
As a programmer i know that one bug can often cause another, and fixing the bug can often cause an entirely different bug. In order to contain the humans, they have induced an intended "bug" into the system, the ability of the humans to choose to reject the matrix. However making that change led to further bugs and problems and what have you. Like i said, it's impossible to say what problems or why without knowing the (presumably incredibly complex) code.
I was somewhat thinking of the code as a still pond of water, with the ability to choose a pebble dropped in the middle. Whether "fluctuations in even the most simplistic equations" is meant to be taken literally or not, i think it gives the idea of a systemic self-propogating set of "anomolies" that they have only a basic control over. And rather than having an uncountable number of little anomolies rippling through the Matrix, they'd rather manipulate things a bit so they only have to deal with one big anomoly, of which Neo is the avatar.
I was running along those lines myself. Regardless of whether or not the Machines are using human brains to power their calculations, certainly the easiest way to run the Matrix is to make it largely based off of human expectations. A great deal of genetics and a great deal of training causes us to expect something to fall if we see nothing supporting it, causes us to expect objects not to go through each other, causes us to have a certain belief about how far a person can jump.
Rather than doing the computations itself the Matrix might just "ask" any observing/participating humans what the expected results are, and only step in if it thinks something is wrong with the results.
Therefore Neo and the others have to not only _know_ that it is possible to exceed the constraints of reality, they have to _believe_ it so intensely and/or in such a way that the Matrix just takes their word for it and goes with those results.
Well taking over the machine world would certainly be one way of getting out of the matrix. In fact now that he's gone rogue it might be the _only_ way. If he tried to "emigrate" back normally they'd probably delete him.
Neo would want to stop that from happening because Smith hates humans, and you don't want someone like that being in charge of the whole thing. Smith in turn would want to kill Neo, straight out of pure hatred, or just through knowledge that eventually they'll end up at odds anyways.
I have not read the full article, so i don't know if this math is true, but it's not hard to understand.
Let's take a simplified version:
Year 1:
10 people own Console X
All of those people buy 2 games each
20 games are sold
Year 3:
100 people own Console X
All of those people buy 1 game each
100 games are sold
So five times as many games are being sold, but individualy consumers are buying half as many games.
Another example, based off the first:
Year 1:
10 people own Console X
2 games are developed
Each of those games sells 10 copies each, for 20 games sold total
Year 3:
100 people own Console X
20 games are developed
Each of those games sells 5 copies each, for 100 games sold total
More games sold, but individually, each title is selling less.
So it's quite possible to have the average title selling less copies and the average console owner buying less games, but still have the number of games sold go up.
PS: I don't know if that's what he meant or not, but he didn't say there were less titles, he said there were less "worthwhile NEW titles."
Slashdot Mirror
Backwards compatibility (must have.) A second left shoulder button (must have.) Perhaps a better second analog stick. Some people have complained about the d-pad, but i don't have any complaints there. Develop a better online gaming presence, regardless of how important or not it is to the average gamer the lack is a PR killer. Get out just before or soon after the PS3/XBox2.
And most important, find a way to kick the (undeserved) just for kids image.
I was going to say that Gladiator looked pretty cool, but then i realized i was thinking of Gladius by LucasArts, which is still on for Gamecube. So yeah, screw Acclaim.
Wasn't it just a few days ago that people with high resolution screens were complaing that GameSpot or some such enforced a certain line length, thereby reducing the page to a thin column in the browser? And now you're complaining that this site _doesn't_ enforce line lenghts? Make up your minds!
The fact that some of them didn't want to get unFocused just reinforces the point that even with the extreme disadvantages there would be at least a few people who might still think it was worthwhile.
Even if they're not selling anything, people have come to expect email to be delivered in real-time. With so many anti-spam techniques that don't introduce an unnecessary delay and are more effective I'm just not sure why this method--with lower success and an unnecessary delay--is a worthwhile approach.
Oh come on, i rarely expect anyone i personally email who i've never talked to before to respond immediatly. I've got good friends who i email relatively regularly that i'll be lucky to get a response from in a month! Ir someone i don't know takes a day or two to respond i won't even know if it's because they've got their delay time set high or they're just slow at reponding, and after the first excchange the dealy goes away. I think you're seriously overstating the downside to this.
Although i greatly enjoy Vernor Vinge's work (I would strongly recoment reading A Fire Upon the Deep first, although it's not neccessary) this book did have one quirk that really pissed me off. When a cure was discovered, all the slaves were freed, and the technology was then treated as anathema. They believed that the technology was so evil that they should just get rid of it.
Say what?
I agree, turning people into mental slaves is a horrible thing, and taking a week(?) or more to induce or cure the state made it not super practical for anything else. But saying that since one use for it is bad, the entire technology should be outlawed? That seems an odd view for someone who supports science to take.
If this technology existed and research was continued, the up and down time might be reduced significantly. Even if not, i could probably sign a contract with a company that i would spend a week undergoing the treatment, work for them for a month, spend a week being returned to normal, and then spend several months off, yet get paid as if i was working the whole time. I'd be perfectly happy with such an arangement, and i bet a lot of other people would too.
Obviously this technology in this article seems to be the exact opposite. Warm up time seems to be measured in minutes. If it is further developed, it would be quite feasible to put this thing on when you got into work, work for five or six hours, then take it off and go home again, yet have gotten in several days worth of work compared to normal conditions.
Do you have any evidence to back that up? I doubt that all cartoonists are capable of making a life like drawing of something.
But regardless, the majority of people getting spammed are not selling anything, so why would this be a problem for them?
At the beginning of the 24th century... oh fuck it, nevermind.
The companies that port the games are only willing to port things that they think they can make money on. Most of the stuff i listed is very much a fringe market in the US. The reason they aren't available to buy is because the game companies don't think enough people will buy them to justify the cost.
"You plastered your Teather System across my Space Elevator!"
"You got your Space Elevator caught in my Teather System!"
Given that one of Heinlein's books is titled "The Man Who Sold the Moon," i think he saw both sides of the issue. However i'm not sure if sales people as motivators of technology was more of a "vision," or just a concession to reality.
Except for dating sims, mahjong games, a lot of the dancing type games other than DDR, Vib Ribbon, a lot of strategy games, a lot of the RPGs other than Final Fantasy (and even those are only gradually improving from a really spotty porting record) and i'm sure there are a lot more that i'm not thinking of.
Marketing.
So instead of saying the space race is heating up, we should say "It looks like the space meander is idling on luke-warm"?
For example, the next time the RIAA goes on some spiel on a European website about how people who d/l mp3s are evil pirates who are destorying the recording industries profits, robbing artists of house and home, and eat babies on the side, who has the right of response?
Can any person who is willing to admit that they have traded mp3s force the RIAA or whichever site hosted the article to include a counter-response? If so, just the first person who responds? Or every response they get? Or would the file-traders need to form some kind of official group to make the response? Or does the RIAA get away with it because they're slandering a nebulous group rather than a specific individual?
Because well all know that having to listen to the other guy talk back to you totally kills that whole communication thing. Nothing like having to consider both sides of an issue to ruin your pleasant complacency.
Besides, everyone would rather pay up or remove offending information due to libel suits instead, right?
They might want to push the tabs a little more too. The tabs put me off a bit when i first started using Netscape, and i went back to IE for awhile. But then i got sick enough of the pop-ups that it was worth "dealing" with the tabs, and it turned out that i eventually ended up liking quite a bit once i got used to them.
B: I agree, there's no reason i have to buy the game as soon as it comes out, but you're completly missing the point.
I am much less likely to want to buy both games the instant they come out if they come out on the same day than if they come out at different times. If i had the chance to buy one right away and play it and maybe finish it, then i'd be far more likely to buy the second right away when it came out.
The point being made is NOT that it's bad for the consumer, but that it's a bad buisness decision for Square Enix. The less people who buy both games shortly after they come out, the less money they make since the price will start dropping.
If Square Enix were to announce that they would be giving away both games for free i would simialrly wonder what the hell they were thinking, but that would not stop me from realizing the large advantage to be gained as a consumer and taking advantage of the situation.
I've been hearing radio ads promoting the .la domain for months, possibly even a year.
I thought of it more as a comment about the nature of the Architect himself. He is an architect, a builder of things, he sees all things, but especially humans, as a design, a made thing, whether by himself or others.
I think it's kind of hard to answer that question without understanding the programming behind the Matrix, which we clearly can't know in any real sense.
As a programmer i know that one bug can often cause another, and fixing the bug can often cause an entirely different bug. In order to contain the humans, they have induced an intended "bug" into the system, the ability of the humans to choose to reject the matrix. However making that change led to further bugs and problems and what have you. Like i said, it's impossible to say what problems or why without knowing the (presumably incredibly complex) code.
I was somewhat thinking of the code as a still pond of water, with the ability to choose a pebble dropped in the middle. Whether "fluctuations in even the most simplistic equations" is meant to be taken literally or not, i think it gives the idea of a systemic self-propogating set of "anomolies" that they have only a basic control over. And rather than having an uncountable number of little anomolies rippling through the Matrix, they'd rather manipulate things a bit so they only have to deal with one big anomoly, of which Neo is the avatar.
Rather than doing the computations itself the Matrix might just "ask" any observing/participating humans what the expected results are, and only step in if it thinks something is wrong with the results.
Therefore Neo and the others have to not only _know_ that it is possible to exceed the constraints of reality, they have to _believe_ it so intensely and/or in such a way that the Matrix just takes their word for it and goes with those results.
Neo would want to stop that from happening because Smith hates humans, and you don't want someone like that being in charge of the whole thing. Smith in turn would want to kill Neo, straight out of pure hatred, or just through knowledge that eventually they'll end up at odds anyways.
Let's take a simplified version:
Year 1:
10 people own Console X
All of those people buy 2 games each
20 games are sold
Year 3:
100 people own Console X
All of those people buy 1 game each
100 games are sold
So five times as many games are being sold, but individualy consumers are buying half as many games.
Another example, based off the first:
Year 1:
10 people own Console X
2 games are developed
Each of those games sells 10 copies each, for 20 games sold total
Year 3:
100 people own Console X
20 games are developed
Each of those games sells 5 copies each, for 100 games sold total
More games sold, but individually, each title is selling less.
So it's quite possible to have the average title selling less copies and the average console owner buying less games, but still have the number of games sold go up.
PS: I don't know if that's what he meant or not, but he didn't say there were less titles, he said there were less "worthwhile NEW titles."