I'm guessing you've never used a lathe, milling machine, shear, press brake, injection molding machine, or other serious piece of equipment to make something from scratch.
That's kinda the point. There are a lot of items that require moderately high precision but aren't produced in large enough quantities for huge economies of scale to kick in (or for there to be a lot of competition between different producers.)
However 3D printers, given a high enough quality which this particular example seems to possess, will allow individuals to print out new parts for the price of materials plus electricity, with the cost of the printer amortized over the number of uses they find for it. (Assuming they can find or create a design for whatever they need.)
Such miscellaneous parts aren't necessarily overpriced now given current methods of production, but they will get much cheaper once this technology becomes common.
If we're going to be talking about the celebration of ray guns, someone should really mention James Alan Gardner's Hugo and Nebula nominated short story, "The Ray-Gun: A Love Story" which can be read online here. Since TFA didn't do it, i guess that someone has to be me.
That seems a little uncalled for. I mean, i don't like the teabaggers any more than the next person (well, presuming the next person is sane at least) but charging people in a game based on their political affiliation doesn't really seem appropriate.
... oh, wait, we're talking about FPS games. You mean the _original_ kind of teabagger don't you? *headdesk*
(And yes, that really was the process my brain went through when i first read that.)
Or maybe it's like any other competitive sport, there are people who enjoy watching it being played at a higher level than they themselves are able to participate at?
We saw this news late last night, so after we went to bed i installed the app on my phone and we watched the first ten minutes of Zombieland. Basic playback worked great (at least on WiFi) but i didn't actually try out the controls at all.
I was somewhat dismayed right after the download when i saw the app was around 20 megs in size (i'm on the original Nexus, so main memory app space is at a premium) but was rather relieved when the move to SD card option reduced the size down to about 800 kb. (For those who don't pay attention to such things that's a pretty amazing ratio. A lot of apps will only move half the data or less to the SD card.)
I don't think Google cares about who they sell ads to, as long as they sell them.
This is one of the problems with freedom. Do i want stupid ads for stupid products that take advantage of stupid people to be showing up? (Assuming i don't use an ad-blocker *cough*) Or do i want Google to review every ad submitted to them and pass them through a morality filter based on what _Google_ thinks is appropriate?
If you want any kind of "freedom" in any arena then you have to accept that it's going to allow a lot of crap to occur as well as all the good stuff. It ought to be obvious that as soon as you start trying to restrict the crap, you're reducing the freedom of the system as well, yet somehow people still keep insisting that's the right thing to do without realizing the downsides. And sooner or later (usually sooner) what one group of people gets blocked as "crap" is actually something another group of people wants.
My girlfriend really hates that about Burnout Paradise. She has one of the older games and she'll just start up one of those crashy races (Road Rage maybe?) and play that for awhile. We got Burnout Paradise and she was pissed off that she can't just start a Road Rage game, she has to wander around looking for the right kind of intersection, and then when she's done with it she's in some entirely new part of the city and has to find a new intersection of the right kind. I have to say that i agree with her on that, though i don't feel as strongly about it since i wasn't a fan of the series before. Would it really have been that hard for them to give us an optional menu to just jump to whatever type of event we wanted?
I guess perhaps we're just not typical "Western gamers"?
You seem to have wandered off track a bit about the storylines though. Sure Burnout and Batman and other games are getting more open worlds, but the storylines are still the same. And how many times am i going to play a space marine saving the world from an alien threat? The gameplay can remain static while the storyline changes and vice versa. If anything what people have complained the most about in the latest Final Fantasy games is Squenix trying to change the gameplay _too_ much.
Is that actually true? Or is that just what the Japanese marketing teams say is true? You know, the same kind of marketing teams that say americans want stuff Darker and Edgier, or that we want our facebook/twitter feeds spammed with everything we do in a game, or that we want our Civ games more accessible? Did Japanese gamers _actually_ want Vaan and Panelo, or was that just what the marketing people said?
Marketing is really good at distilling what they think we think is cool down into something completely wrong. They tells us that's what we want, most of us say "this is dumb" and don't buy it. The games/movies/whatever flop and eventually someone does something interesting rather than design by committee following the latest "what's hot or not" chart. The new thing takes off and all of the sudden that's the cool new thing which needs to be copied and exaggerated to death.
Then again, the massive success of the Transformers movies *gag* shows that the marketers aren't always wrong i guess =P
I agree with you about 100% on FF12. I thought the story was good (though it certainly could have been better if they'd stuck with Basch as the protagonist) and it was pretty, and i liked having a relatively open world. However the combat bored me to tears. Rather, it bored me into stopping halfway(?) through the game when the story went on hiatus during the various fetch quest stuff and the gameplay was left trying to maintain my interest by itself.
I did eventually pick it up again and force myself through to the ending shortly before FF13 came out, and i'm glad i did for the sake of the story, but even FF13's combat system was better than FF12. At least in FF13 i had _something_ to do during combat, even if 95% of it was automated.
Once again, you seem to be ranting and railing against a point i never made.
Big points to Android fans...not to developers who actually pour resources and money and expect a return on their investment.
...
And major developers have overwhelmingly chosen to spend money on iOS and users have overwhelmingly decided that they value iOS apps enough to spend money....
I fully acknowledge that A: "Big name" developers spend more money developing apps for iPhone and B: iPhone users spend more money buying apps for iPhone.
However all that proves is that more money is spent on iPhone apps, so developers are more willing to invest money working on it. (Although one does wonder how much of a chicken and the egg situation that is.)
On the other hand, i was only concerned about people arguing that the iPhone is better than Android in general. Personally when i hear people arguing about which is better the impression i get is that the common understanding is "better for the user."
As such, how much money is spent on the app market may be indicative of in some way of the popularity of a particular platform, but it's far from proof of superiority, especially in a situation where a varying amount of the content is free. Which brings us to the next part of your argument...
So what value do users get in crappy apps?
...
So would you rather have a bunch of screensaver "apps" and emulators or professional produced content by companies willing and able to spend serious money?
You're following up your non-sequitor about how much developers spend/make on the iPhone market with the completely unfounded claim that "less expensive" = "more crappy". There is certainly a tendency in that direction when referring to physical products produced for a cost and sold for a profit. However you seem to be intent on attacking the whole basis of the OSS movement, as well as the whole idea of small independent studios. Your ID indicates you're not new to Slashdot, so... WTF? I mean, i've seen debates on the value of free software before, but it seems a bit out there to just include an assumption like that in an entirely different argument. Windows is better than Linux because it costs more. Call of Duty must be much better than both Portal and Minecraft because more was spent on developing it, it costs more, and it made more money. Clearly everything available on SourceForge is crap. Audacity sucks. BitTorrent is useless. Any software you don't hand over cold hard cash for is worthless, and invariably the more cash you give up the better software you get.
Back to a serious note, i'm not going to claim that big name content producers can't create good content by spending lots of cash, but some of the best software i've ever used has been available for free. And some of the worst crap i've ever seen has been produced by big name producers and has sold amazingly well for reasons i don't really understand. Making huge amounts of money didn't make it any less crap however.
(Also, it's amusing that you're using Roxio as an argument when their software is on Android but they _refuse_ to let people pay them money for it. It's amazing the number of people in the android app store leaving comments begging them to provide a paid version with no ads. Kinda makes you wonder what they're thinking.)
And finally, back to the point i originally made, which you seem to be trying to divert the conversation from as much as possible...
So where did you have time to find enough straw to build that argument?
What straw? The GP AC said that this new Android feature was useless because iPhone already had it. I noted an observance that, according to people who appeared to by iPhone fans, when Android lacked a feature iPhone had it was a problem, and when Android gained th
Uh, you seem to be comparing *ahem* apples to oranges to grapes.
One of the big points about Android has always been the preponderance of free apps. So showing that people spend more on iOS apps than they do on Android apps proves absolutely nothing about either the popularity or the value (for the consumer, not the developers) of the iPhone vs Android. It also proves nothing about whether the iPhone apps are better than the Android apps or not. In a free market people vote with their dollars, or with the decision to not spend those dollars. You're not going to get very far arguing on Slashdot that something people pay money for is better inherently because money was spent on it. (Windows costs money and Linux doesn't therefore...)
And i find it amusing that i stated that perhaps Apple fans would change their argument from "more apps = better product" to "better apps = better product", moving the goalposts because the first position was proven wrong (at least in terms of supporting their preferred hypothesis.) And here you are responding immediately to argue exactly that exact point. Did you make the argument that "more apps = better product" in the past? If at some point in the future if Android apps start selling more than iPhone apps will you switch to some other argument (star ratings perhaps?) without ever acknowledging that the previous argument was incorrect? I don't know the answer to that in terms of you personally, but that certainly seems to be the way the community of iPhone fans are reacting in general.
So if iOS does X and Android doesn't, it's "Apple is better because it does X." Now that Android does X it's "so what? Apple already does X." As long as Android can't do it, it's a horribly deficiency, but as soon as Android can do it it's no big deal.
I wonder if the same "logic" will apply to the app stores. Up until now every time an Android story comes up someone posts about how "it's the apps stupid" and goes on about how iOS is the best because it has the most apps. Well Android passed iOS in the number of free apps last month, and is expected to pass iOS in the total number of apps sometime later this year. When that happens will the same people who were arguing that it was the number of apps that mattered switch to some other argument? (Presumably that although iOS has less apps, its apps are better?)
Known Space ends up being pretty big and - Kzinti aside - pretty safe for humans.
Well, except for that whole massive explosion at the core of the galaxy thing, but we've got a couple tens of thousands of years to figure that out, right?:)
Some of the generated landscapes can be impressive, and of course what people then do with it is often even more impressive. Yes everything is blocky, but a lot of stuff is built to such a large scale that it ends up looking like pixel-art.
So it's a game that allows its users to create incredibly impressive stuff. Stuff that a lot of people like looking at and find beautiful/awe-inspiring/disgusting or in some other way emotionally moving. How is that not as close to what "real" art is supposed to do as we can reasonably define?
And before anyone decides to argue that most of that is user created content and not part of the game itself as originally shipped, how can you contemplate whether video games are art without considering the interactive part of "interactive entertainment"?
I can currently fill up my tank for about $40 (9 gallons * $4.20 or so a gallon.) With my Prius (which apparently i shouldn't have bought) that gets me about 400 miles a tank, which lasts me around two weeks.
Now i certainly could get that down to one refill a week if i tried some alternate forms of transportation. Let's see, the commute to work is definitely well over half of my fuel usage so i'd have to start there. I don't have a bike, but if i was willing to buy one and learn how to use it Google maps says i could get to work in.... a little over an hour and a half (although the suggested route is two hours for some reason.) Okay, scratch that, how about public transit? Google says... two hours and ten minutes.
So if i wanted to save $40 a month in gas i could spend over three hours a day biking or over four hours a day riding the bus. I actually had to do the bus thing for a week or two between when my old car got totaled and when i bought the Prius. It really sucked. And even if that wasn't far longer than i'm willing to spend on my commute google says the bus fare would come to $5 each way, and from what i can tell getting a pass would cost more than $40 a month.
I could move closer, but it would be hard to find anyplace as cheap where i'm living now that was closer, and anyways any distance i cut off my commute would just lengthen my girlfriend's commute by a similar amount, providing a net gain of nothing.
I'm obviously not in the best situation for alternate forms of transit, but i don't think i'm in the worst case either. If you want large numbers of people to use public transit or bike we'd have to entirely restructure our cities or actually spend money on building more public transit. As it is i'm saving far more money from having switched to the kind of electric/hybrid car you say isn't worth it than i would from the alternatives you do suggest.
Well that's certainly a lot more informative than what Sony had to tell their users about what was compromised and whether it was encrypted, hashed, or totally clear.
Did Tamagotchi fail? Or did it just *ahem* evolve into Pokemon and Nintendogs?
And what kind of an example is Tamagotchi in the first place? Tamagotchi wasn't a tech, it was just a particular application of an existing tech that had been around a long time, in fact by that point it was practically retro. All it did was make the little hand-held LCD games that had gone out of vogue around the release of the GameBoy briefly popular again by coming up with a novel new style of game.
I haven't used MySQL at all, so i can't speak directly to it. However i did spend most of today trying to get Oracle set up for the new guy in the office. When we realized we had installed the wrong reason (we needed x86 rather than x64 for reasons that would take too long to go into) it took 15-30 minutes and several false starts just to figure out how to uninstall the old version. Oracle's installers suck. Oracle's "deinstallers" suck even more. Once you've got Oracle installed you find that their drivers are finicky. Then you find that the API is limited, the error messages are often ambiguous, the help available online is limited, and Oracle's website sucks.
I feel kind of ashamed saying it, but from the perspective of both a user and a programmer Microsoft SQL is better in just about every way. Maybe Oracle is much better for DBAs who have to support huge enterprise databases rather than tiny test databases, i dunno, but the face Oracle presents to everyone else is a sadistic one. This has been double so since Microsoft deprecated Oracle support in ADO. I thought supporting Oracle was painful before, but then i had to deal with ODAC! Half of me wants to curse Microsoft for the pain that put me through, while the other half forlornly hopes that perhaps that will convince people to stop using Oracle and it will die. (Unfortunately it's my job to suffer so our users don't notice the difference, and i'm sure there are a lot of other programmers in the same position, so it probably won't happen.)
It's clearly a very personal and obviously biased opinion, but when someone doing anything at all related to SQL says that Oracle is really helping them out, i want to laugh and laugh and laaaaaaugh. And then start crying.
*sigh* I should go to sleep now. I have to get up early tomorrow, go into work, and deal with Oracle some more. *shudder*
Microsoft can't seem to get a handle on updating phone firmware, and Sony can't create a secure network for their game systems to save their life. Both of them have areas of their business at risk from the smartphone and tablet revolution. Perhaps the two of them should team up on a phone/game system hybrid for MASSIVE DAMAGE!
Just like the other half-dozen or so solar cell improvements I've read about over the past few years.
They're taking the extra time to combine all the improvements together, so it gets delayed a little every time a new discovery is made. But when they're finished we should have solar cells that are 320% efficient at converting the sun's energy to electricity!
I am admittedly very hazy on the whole hacker terminology thing, but isn't the difference between a white hat and a black hat not what they hack, but what they do with the results? So did Geohot actually _do_ anything nasty with the hacked student IDs? Or did he get in trouble just for hacking them?
It's even remotely possible that the person(s) who hacked PSN are white hat(s), if they don't actually release the stolen data and just intend to use the event to show how broken Sony's infrastructure is. Geohot is urging them to take that route (regardless of whatever their original intentions were) but i'm pretty sure if they were going to abuse the data they've already done so by now.
The credit card i registered on PSN was the Sony branded credit card i got when they had the special offer to get $100 off a new PS3. I used that deal to pick up my first PS3. Then a little over a year later (right after the warranty expired of course) i ended up using most of the points i'd accumulated with that account to get a PS3 Slim after my first PS3 got the yellow light of death.
You know what? This entire generation of consoles has been kinda filled with fail. Even my Wii managed to get a disk reader error that i needed to take it in for, and recently it's started getting corrupted memory. Anyone else remember the days when you would just buy a console and expect it to, you know, work?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing you've never used a lathe, milling machine, shear, press brake, injection molding machine, or other serious piece of equipment to make something from scratch.
That's kinda the point. There are a lot of items that require moderately high precision but aren't produced in large enough quantities for huge economies of scale to kick in (or for there to be a lot of competition between different producers.)
However 3D printers, given a high enough quality which this particular example seems to possess, will allow individuals to print out new parts for the price of materials plus electricity, with the cost of the printer amortized over the number of uses they find for it. (Assuming they can find or create a design for whatever they need.)
Such miscellaneous parts aren't necessarily overpriced now given current methods of production, but they will get much cheaper once this technology becomes common.
And referenced in a /. story today, i guess this never happened either?
We may not be doing a great job at actually communicating effectively, but we're doing about the exact opposite of trying to obfuscate our location.
If we're going to be talking about the celebration of ray guns, someone should really mention James Alan Gardner's Hugo and Nebula nominated short story, "The Ray-Gun: A Love Story" which can be read online here. Since TFA didn't do it, i guess that someone has to be me.
And perhaps a teabaggers fee for the FPS genre.
That seems a little uncalled for. I mean, i don't like the teabaggers any more than the next person (well, presuming the next person is sane at least) but charging people in a game based on their political affiliation doesn't really seem appropriate.
... oh, wait, we're talking about FPS games. You mean the _original_ kind of teabagger don't you? *headdesk*
(And yes, that really was the process my brain went through when i first read that.)
The alternate earth people in Robert J Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax series used turbines like that to power implanted personal computers.
Or maybe it's like any other competitive sport, there are people who enjoy watching it being played at a higher level than they themselves are able to participate at?
We saw this news late last night, so after we went to bed i installed the app on my phone and we watched the first ten minutes of Zombieland. Basic playback worked great (at least on WiFi) but i didn't actually try out the controls at all.
I was somewhat dismayed right after the download when i saw the app was around 20 megs in size (i'm on the original Nexus, so main memory app space is at a premium) but was rather relieved when the move to SD card option reduced the size down to about 800 kb. (For those who don't pay attention to such things that's a pretty amazing ratio. A lot of apps will only move half the data or less to the SD card.)
I don't think Google cares about who they sell ads to, as long as they sell them.
This is one of the problems with freedom. Do i want stupid ads for stupid products that take advantage of stupid people to be showing up? (Assuming i don't use an ad-blocker *cough*) Or do i want Google to review every ad submitted to them and pass them through a morality filter based on what _Google_ thinks is appropriate?
If you want any kind of "freedom" in any arena then you have to accept that it's going to allow a lot of crap to occur as well as all the good stuff. It ought to be obvious that as soon as you start trying to restrict the crap, you're reducing the freedom of the system as well, yet somehow people still keep insisting that's the right thing to do without realizing the downsides. And sooner or later (usually sooner) what one group of people gets blocked as "crap" is actually something another group of people wants.
My girlfriend really hates that about Burnout Paradise. She has one of the older games and she'll just start up one of those crashy races (Road Rage maybe?) and play that for awhile. We got Burnout Paradise and she was pissed off that she can't just start a Road Rage game, she has to wander around looking for the right kind of intersection, and then when she's done with it she's in some entirely new part of the city and has to find a new intersection of the right kind. I have to say that i agree with her on that, though i don't feel as strongly about it since i wasn't a fan of the series before. Would it really have been that hard for them to give us an optional menu to just jump to whatever type of event we wanted?
I guess perhaps we're just not typical "Western gamers"?
You seem to have wandered off track a bit about the storylines though. Sure Burnout and Batman and other games are getting more open worlds, but the storylines are still the same. And how many times am i going to play a space marine saving the world from an alien threat? The gameplay can remain static while the storyline changes and vice versa. If anything what people have complained the most about in the latest Final Fantasy games is Squenix trying to change the gameplay _too_ much.
Is that actually true? Or is that just what the Japanese marketing teams say is true? You know, the same kind of marketing teams that say americans want stuff Darker and Edgier, or that we want our facebook/twitter feeds spammed with everything we do in a game, or that we want our Civ games more accessible? Did Japanese gamers _actually_ want Vaan and Panelo, or was that just what the marketing people said?
Marketing is really good at distilling what they think we think is cool down into something completely wrong. They tells us that's what we want, most of us say "this is dumb" and don't buy it. The games/movies/whatever flop and eventually someone does something interesting rather than design by committee following the latest "what's hot or not" chart. The new thing takes off and all of the sudden that's the cool new thing which needs to be copied and exaggerated to death.
Then again, the massive success of the Transformers movies *gag* shows that the marketers aren't always wrong i guess =P
I agree with you about 100% on FF12. I thought the story was good (though it certainly could have been better if they'd stuck with Basch as the protagonist) and it was pretty, and i liked having a relatively open world. However the combat bored me to tears. Rather, it bored me into stopping halfway(?) through the game when the story went on hiatus during the various fetch quest stuff and the gameplay was left trying to maintain my interest by itself.
I did eventually pick it up again and force myself through to the ending shortly before FF13 came out, and i'm glad i did for the sake of the story, but even FF13's combat system was better than FF12. At least in FF13 i had _something_ to do during combat, even if 95% of it was automated.
Big points to Android fans...not to developers who actually pour resources and money and expect a return on their investment.
And major developers have overwhelmingly chosen to spend money on iOS and users have overwhelmingly decided that they value iOS apps enough to spend money....
I fully acknowledge that A: "Big name" developers spend more money developing apps for iPhone and B: iPhone users spend more money buying apps for iPhone.
However all that proves is that more money is spent on iPhone apps, so developers are more willing to invest money working on it. (Although one does wonder how much of a chicken and the egg situation that is.)
On the other hand, i was only concerned about people arguing that the iPhone is better than Android in general. Personally when i hear people arguing about which is better the impression i get is that the common understanding is "better for the user."
As such, how much money is spent on the app market may be indicative of in some way of the popularity of a particular platform, but it's far from proof of superiority, especially in a situation where a varying amount of the content is free. Which brings us to the next part of your argument...
So what value do users get in crappy apps?
...
So would you rather have a bunch of screensaver "apps" and emulators or professional produced content by companies willing and able to spend serious money?
You're following up your non-sequitor about how much developers spend/make on the iPhone market with the completely unfounded claim that "less expensive" = "more crappy". There is certainly a tendency in that direction when referring to physical products produced for a cost and sold for a profit. However you seem to be intent on attacking the whole basis of the OSS movement, as well as the whole idea of small independent studios. Your ID indicates you're not new to Slashdot, so... WTF? I mean, i've seen debates on the value of free software before, but it seems a bit out there to just include an assumption like that in an entirely different argument. Windows is better than Linux because it costs more. Call of Duty must be much better than both Portal and Minecraft because more was spent on developing it, it costs more, and it made more money. Clearly everything available on SourceForge is crap. Audacity sucks. BitTorrent is useless. Any software you don't hand over cold hard cash for is worthless, and invariably the more cash you give up the better software you get.
Back to a serious note, i'm not going to claim that big name content producers can't create good content by spending lots of cash, but some of the best software i've ever used has been available for free. And some of the worst crap i've ever seen has been produced by big name producers and has sold amazingly well for reasons i don't really understand. Making huge amounts of money didn't make it any less crap however.
(Also, it's amusing that you're using Roxio as an argument when their software is on Android but they _refuse_ to let people pay them money for it. It's amazing the number of people in the android app store leaving comments begging them to provide a paid version with no ads. Kinda makes you wonder what they're thinking.)
And finally, back to the point i originally made, which you seem to be trying to divert the conversation from as much as possible...
So where did you have time to find enough straw to build that argument?
What straw? The GP AC said that this new Android feature was useless because iPhone already had it. I noted an observance that, according to people who appeared to by iPhone fans, when Android lacked a feature iPhone had it was a problem, and when Android gained th
Uh, you seem to be comparing *ahem* apples to oranges to grapes.
One of the big points about Android has always been the preponderance of free apps. So showing that people spend more on iOS apps than they do on Android apps proves absolutely nothing about either the popularity or the value (for the consumer, not the developers) of the iPhone vs Android. It also proves nothing about whether the iPhone apps are better than the Android apps or not. In a free market people vote with their dollars, or with the decision to not spend those dollars. You're not going to get very far arguing on Slashdot that something people pay money for is better inherently because money was spent on it. (Windows costs money and Linux doesn't therefore...)
And i find it amusing that i stated that perhaps Apple fans would change their argument from "more apps = better product" to "better apps = better product", moving the goalposts because the first position was proven wrong (at least in terms of supporting their preferred hypothesis.) And here you are responding immediately to argue exactly that exact point. Did you make the argument that "more apps = better product" in the past? If at some point in the future if Android apps start selling more than iPhone apps will you switch to some other argument (star ratings perhaps?) without ever acknowledging that the previous argument was incorrect? I don't know the answer to that in terms of you personally, but that certainly seems to be the way the community of iPhone fans are reacting in general.
So if iOS does X and Android doesn't, it's "Apple is better because it does X." Now that Android does X it's "so what? Apple already does X." As long as Android can't do it, it's a horribly deficiency, but as soon as Android can do it it's no big deal.
I wonder if the same "logic" will apply to the app stores. Up until now every time an Android story comes up someone posts about how "it's the apps stupid" and goes on about how iOS is the best because it has the most apps. Well Android passed iOS in the number of free apps last month, and is expected to pass iOS in the total number of apps sometime later this year. When that happens will the same people who were arguing that it was the number of apps that mattered switch to some other argument? (Presumably that although iOS has less apps, its apps are better?)
Known Space ends up being pretty big and - Kzinti aside - pretty safe for humans.
Well, except for that whole massive explosion at the core of the galaxy thing, but we've got a couple tens of thousands of years to figure that out, right? :)
The missing quotes! You've released them! You have freed us from collectively jumping off of cliff metaphors! Thank you brave warrior!
And i will expand on what you said to point out that there are some really beautiful things in Minecraft. Also some incredibly bizarre things and some horrifying things as well of course.
Some of the generated landscapes can be impressive, and of course what people then do with it is often even more impressive. Yes everything is blocky, but a lot of stuff is built to such a large scale that it ends up looking like pixel-art.
So it's a game that allows its users to create incredibly impressive stuff. Stuff that a lot of people like looking at and find beautiful/awe-inspiring/disgusting or in some other way emotionally moving. How is that not as close to what "real" art is supposed to do as we can reasonably define?
And before anyone decides to argue that most of that is user created content and not part of the game itself as originally shipped, how can you contemplate whether video games are art without considering the interactive part of "interactive entertainment"?
I can currently fill up my tank for about $40 (9 gallons * $4.20 or so a gallon.) With my Prius (which apparently i shouldn't have bought) that gets me about 400 miles a tank, which lasts me around two weeks.
Now i certainly could get that down to one refill a week if i tried some alternate forms of transportation. Let's see, the commute to work is definitely well over half of my fuel usage so i'd have to start there. I don't have a bike, but if i was willing to buy one and learn how to use it Google maps says i could get to work in.... a little over an hour and a half (although the suggested route is two hours for some reason.) Okay, scratch that, how about public transit? Google says... two hours and ten minutes.
So if i wanted to save $40 a month in gas i could spend over three hours a day biking or over four hours a day riding the bus. I actually had to do the bus thing for a week or two between when my old car got totaled and when i bought the Prius. It really sucked. And even if that wasn't far longer than i'm willing to spend on my commute google says the bus fare would come to $5 each way, and from what i can tell getting a pass would cost more than $40 a month.
I could move closer, but it would be hard to find anyplace as cheap where i'm living now that was closer, and anyways any distance i cut off my commute would just lengthen my girlfriend's commute by a similar amount, providing a net gain of nothing.
I'm obviously not in the best situation for alternate forms of transit, but i don't think i'm in the worst case either. If you want large numbers of people to use public transit or bike we'd have to entirely restructure our cities or actually spend money on building more public transit. As it is i'm saving far more money from having switched to the kind of electric/hybrid car you say isn't worth it than i would from the alternatives you do suggest.
Well that's certainly a lot more informative than what Sony had to tell their users about what was compromised and whether it was encrypted, hashed, or totally clear.
Did Tamagotchi fail? Or did it just *ahem* evolve into Pokemon and Nintendogs?
And what kind of an example is Tamagotchi in the first place? Tamagotchi wasn't a tech, it was just a particular application of an existing tech that had been around a long time, in fact by that point it was practically retro. All it did was make the little hand-held LCD games that had gone out of vogue around the release of the GameBoy briefly popular again by coming up with a novel new style of game.
I haven't used MySQL at all, so i can't speak directly to it. However i did spend most of today trying to get Oracle set up for the new guy in the office. When we realized we had installed the wrong reason (we needed x86 rather than x64 for reasons that would take too long to go into) it took 15-30 minutes and several false starts just to figure out how to uninstall the old version. Oracle's installers suck. Oracle's "deinstallers" suck even more. Once you've got Oracle installed you find that their drivers are finicky. Then you find that the API is limited, the error messages are often ambiguous, the help available online is limited, and Oracle's website sucks.
I feel kind of ashamed saying it, but from the perspective of both a user and a programmer Microsoft SQL is better in just about every way. Maybe Oracle is much better for DBAs who have to support huge enterprise databases rather than tiny test databases, i dunno, but the face Oracle presents to everyone else is a sadistic one. This has been double so since Microsoft deprecated Oracle support in ADO. I thought supporting Oracle was painful before, but then i had to deal with ODAC! Half of me wants to curse Microsoft for the pain that put me through, while the other half forlornly hopes that perhaps that will convince people to stop using Oracle and it will die. (Unfortunately it's my job to suffer so our users don't notice the difference, and i'm sure there are a lot of other programmers in the same position, so it probably won't happen.)
It's clearly a very personal and obviously biased opinion, but when someone doing anything at all related to SQL says that Oracle is really helping them out, i want to laugh and laugh and laaaaaaugh. And then start crying.
*sigh* I should go to sleep now. I have to get up early tomorrow, go into work, and deal with Oracle some more. *shudder*
Microsoft can't seem to get a handle on updating phone firmware, and Sony can't create a secure network for their game systems to save their life. Both of them have areas of their business at risk from the smartphone and tablet revolution. Perhaps the two of them should team up on a phone/game system hybrid for MASSIVE DAMAGE!
Just like the other half-dozen or so solar cell improvements I've read about over the past few years.
They're taking the extra time to combine all the improvements together, so it gets delayed a little every time a new discovery is made. But when they're finished we should have solar cells that are 320% efficient at converting the sun's energy to electricity!
I am admittedly very hazy on the whole hacker terminology thing, but isn't the difference between a white hat and a black hat not what they hack, but what they do with the results? So did Geohot actually _do_ anything nasty with the hacked student IDs? Or did he get in trouble just for hacking them?
It's even remotely possible that the person(s) who hacked PSN are white hat(s), if they don't actually release the stolen data and just intend to use the event to show how broken Sony's infrastructure is. Geohot is urging them to take that route (regardless of whatever their original intentions were) but i'm pretty sure if they were going to abuse the data they've already done so by now.
You know what's "funny"?
The credit card i registered on PSN was the Sony branded credit card i got when they had the special offer to get $100 off a new PS3. I used that deal to pick up my first PS3. Then a little over a year later (right after the warranty expired of course) i ended up using most of the points i'd accumulated with that account to get a PS3 Slim after my first PS3 got the yellow light of death.
You know what? This entire generation of consoles has been kinda filled with fail. Even my Wii managed to get a disk reader error that i needed to take it in for, and recently it's started getting corrupted memory. Anyone else remember the days when you would just buy a console and expect it to, you know, work?