Perhaps you should go reread the moderator guidelines. Disagreeing with someone in a civilized manner is not flamebait. It's certainly possible that i'm wrong, but i presented a logical argument with some evidence to back it up and wasn't calling anyone names.
Could someone wiser than i in the way of the moderators please explain what's wrong with pointing out that Sony, like pretty much every company in existence, has a history of not always getting things quite perfect on the first iteration of a hardware release? Did i just piss off some PS3 fanboys or is there some flaw in what i said that i'm not aware of? "I have a 60GB PS3 and there's not a BD or a special feature out there that it won't play. Nor will there ever be" is a pretty tall claim to be making, at least as far as the second part of the statement goes. The PS3 is a great piece of machinery, but i doubt that it will be the last Blu-Ray player i ever need to get.
I have a 60GB PS3 and there's not a BD or a special feature out there that it won't play. Nor will there ever be.
Um, how do you figure that? It's not like the early versions of the PS2 didn't have tons of problems with a fairly wide selection of DVDs. Sure you can argue that since Sony is in charge of both the Blu-Ray format and the PS3 that such problems will be less likely, but they wouldn't be coming out with the 2.0 version if there weren't either problems that needed to be fixed or new functionality they want to add that the old players won't be able to handle, and there's no way they can magically make old PS3s handle the changes. They might be fixable with a driver upgrade... or they might not. (I was told that it wasn't possible to upgrade my 1.xx PS2 to 2.xx, i actually had to trade it in on a new PS2, which my local EB Games kindly did free of charge.)
"A place where someone suggesting the formation of a group called the Parents Television Council would be looked at like a mentally ill person?"
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with a group called the "Parents Television Council." However in a sane world such a council would focus on encouraging the development of "clean" "harmless" (and more importantly, simple and fun) programming for children and working with amenable companies on the production of the same. They would not be running around telling the rest of us what kind of programming adults should be watching and what kind of content marketed towards adults should be produced.
"Microsoft says they learned from their mistakes, and have been deconstructing Windows to remove bloat, and make the whole thing run faster."
Be realistic, remove bloat? This is Microsoft you're talking about.
...
"Admit your mistake and move on quickly."
Has Microsoft ever admitted to making a mistake?
Call me skeptical, but experience does teach an individual.
A foolish consistency and all that, i know, but i think if you're going to say they can learn in one case you have to admit that they _might_ learn in the other case as well. (At least if they get their nose rubbed in it for long enough.)
There is only one possible response to this development. Genetically engineered monkey-pirates. If that's not enough they've always got zombie-monkey-pirates in reserve.
"Because when I search for something on Wikipedia, I am looking for a different sort of result than if I search for it on LiveJournal, Blogger, or the Web at large. Currently, I generally find it. (Thanks Wikipedia admins!)"
I went to LosCon a couple weekends ago attended a concert by a filk artist named Alexander James Adams. I was impressed by their performance and when i got home i tried looking them up on wikipedia. It turns out that they _had_ a page but it got deleted. Thanks Wikipedia admins for reducing the usability of Wikipedia by one more little bit. And it's certainly not the first time i've tried to look up information of interest to me and found that pages about it have been deleted, this is just the most recent specific example i could remember.
And how did deleting that page increase your ability to search for something and find it? It's not like you need to shuffle through however many million pages there are by hand, that's what the search function is for. Or is there some other "Alexander James Adams" you're desperate to search for and that's one less disambiguation page you need to deal with? (If so, i hate to tell you but the Alexander James Adams you're looking for got deleted too.)
That's a fundamental "flaw" in the nature of critics. Everyone has different opinions about the same thing, so there will always be critics who agree with your opinions and critics who disagree. The best way to deal with that is find one or more critics who you consistently understand. Not necessarily agree with, but understand. I know someone who managed to find a movie critic who almost always had the exact opposite opinion about movies as they did. However since they know the critic's opinion is almost always the opposite of their own it still makes the critic an accurate predictor of which movies they'll like.
I should have spent a little longer investigating the issue before posting. After examining the source i found a link to paypal using an gif from ebay as the image for the button. However ebay is blocked by websense, so the button isn't showing up at all. I could try to reconstruct the link myself since paypay itself doesn't seem to be blocked for some reason, but it looks like it involves some big ass encryption key, so it's probably easier just to wait for the filter to go down during lunch and order then.
I see a description of the program, a link to "Find out more" about the T-mobile wireless, and a link to "Please review our terms and conditions," (which is incidentally missing the link to go with the "to review our privacy policy please click here link.")
I don't see any link for actually placing an order though. I suppose i could try calling the number at the bottom during lunch though.
When I was your age, we only had one RTS called Dune 2. It didn't even have a frickin' colon in it's name! We had to lay the frickin' concrete before we could build the goram tank plant and even THINK about havin' a rush of anythin'!
Perhaps you're so old that your memory is starting to go (47 by your math i guess) but you couldn't actually rush _anything_ in Dune 2. There was no way to select multiple units at one time, neither drag-select nor ctrl-select had been implemented yet. You had to click on a unit, tell it where to go, click on another unit, tell it where to go, etc, so instead of a whatever-rush you'd end up with a whatever-trickle.
And back in my day we didn't _need_ no frickin concrete in Dune 2, we'd just build on the bare rock without it and then repair the damaged structure! With our bare hands! In a sandstorm!
Zerg-rushing has been in use long before you picked up the mouse and keyboards son.
I hate to tell you, but "Lords of the Realm 2" came out two years before "Starcraft," so i doubt there were very many Zerg rushing around at that point:)
"Microsoft will retain an equity interest in Bungie, at the same time continuing its long-standing publishing agreement between Microsoft Game Studios and Bungie for the Microsoft-owned "Halo" intellectual property as well as other future properties developed by Bungie."
My understanding is that Microsoft has "first refusal" on the publishing rights for anything Bungie makes in the future. But Bungie will be able to work on whatever they want. Which means they could decide to make their next game for the Wii, and Microsoft would have the option to publish it. A Nintendo game with "Microsoft" in big letters on the box. How weird would that be?!?
Okay guys, i'll probably get flamed/modded to hell (so to speak) for saying it, but here are the rules:
Religious faith is the belief in something in the absence of evidence. Scientific reasoning is the process of using evidence to "prove" things about the observably universe. (Nothing is ever absolutely proven of course, our certainty can approach but never reach 100%.)
This means that any religious person who walks up to a scientific person who is minding their own business and tries to prove to them that one or more gods exists is a dumbass. And any scientific person who walks up to a religious person who is minding their own business and tries to prove to them that their faith is incorrect is _also_ a dumbass. (Note of course that a person doesn't have to be one or the other, they can be both, or probably even neither.)
Religion isn't right, it's not even wrong. This would be a horrible flaw in a scientific theory, but religion is not science. As long as the distinct members of both camps can agree to leave each other alone there is no reason why it has to be a big issue. Now figuring out whether someone is "minding their own business" or not can be a little tricky, but here's a good rule of thumb, if they're aggressive and say "here's why you should believe X" feel free to use whatever arguments you want to rip them a new one. On the other hand if they're polite and say "this is why I believe X" or "I feel that X is important" than perhaps you should show them a little respect.
I say this as a scientifically minded atheist who has no problem with religious types as long as they leave me alone about the issue. Now loud-mouthed aggressive Fundies who think they know how everyone else should be behaving on the other hand...
I'm confused, what do you think the issue is? The first question is what do they get out of blogs, the second question is their main reason for reading blogs. The two don't have to result in the same numbers, in fact since one person can have multiple answers to the first question but should theoretically have only one to the second means that the results should be very different.
Whenever i think of hard games i always thing of Legacy of the Wizard for the NES. I haven't actually taken the chance to try it again but at the time, when i was in early jr. high i think, it seemed incredibly complex. It was a dungeon crawling adventure game that made really good use of puzzles that required finding items in the dungeon to solve. Item A would be blocked by puzzle 1, which you needed item B to solve, but that was blocked by puzzle 2... and there were five or six different characters, each with slightly different abilities and who could each use a slightly different set of items. Figuring out the right character to use in which order with which combination of items was nuts. And then of course once you finally figured out the right combination for a particular area you had to actually solve the puzzle while dodging the enemies... I don't think i ever got anywhere close to the end of the game.
I for one am _very_ disappointed in Microsoft! Haven't they learned anything?!?
If you want a movie studio to support your next generation media format you don't pay them for the support! You just buy the studio! This kind of inefficiency in leveraging market share is totally unacceptable!
"for this is actually to solve the problem of human death because cancer cells are for all intents and purposes, immune to death since they block the shortening of the telomere with in their own cell structures, I can't remember what it is called but supposedly the science behind this would be to look at applying this ability to ourselves to block the degradation of our own telomeres, thus preventing old age death."
Oh, that part is easy. You can even buy the stuff on the open market now. Unfortunately just eliminating cellular senescence isn't enough by itself to make you immortal. In fact there are worries that just restoring your telomeres without any other kind of treatment might make you more likely to get... cancer!:)
It was determined then that, even when the ratings are being enforced, anyone can get into an R-rated movie as long as a parent comes along. Church groups took advantage of that loophole, and on occasion, younger members of the congregation suffered for it.
Uh, that's not a "loophole," nor was it some kind of secret. It's an intended feature and a well known one, or at least it should be. The purpose of ratings is to inform people, especially parents, about the contents of a movie so they can make appropriate choices about whether they want to watch the movie or let their kids watch it. R rated movies are considered serious enough that parents should have to go along if they want their kids to see it (how much of this is a concern about letting the kids see it unsupervised and how much is a concern about guaranteeing that it really is okay with the parents i don't know) but just declaring unilaterally that kids couldn't watch them even with their parents permission would defeat the entire point of ratings.
When i was young my parents took my sister and i to see "Coming to America" because they thought it was a good movie and that a little partial frontal nudity wasn't going to hurt anyone. They never would have taken us to see something rated R for violence at that age. It doesn't surprise me that christian groups would decide that showing kids extreme violence is okay as long as it's in a religious context (have you seen the catholic crucifixes? eeewww!) I agree that it probably wasn't a good idea in many cases, but it's not really my place to say what they can and can't take their kids to see, any more than it was their place to say what my parents could take me to see when i was under 17.
Now Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time are considered all-time classics, even by 'purists', even by old hands like me. Should Mario have stayed true to his 2D roots to satisfy purists? Should Zelda have stayed top-down? Certainly not.
I don't know if i'm a "purist," but i guess i'm an "old hand" since i got (or rather convinced my parents to get) a NES when it first came out when i was 10. I thought Mario 64 was an awesome game, and although i think the 2D Metroids were better Metroid Prime is also a lot of fun. However i thought that Ocarina of Time and its 3D sequels were pretty mediocre. In my opinion Mario and Metroid are doing just fine in 3D, but Zelda damn well should have stayed top-down.
Purism of that kind leads to stagnation; while the occasional throwback like New SMB is wonderful, games have to evolve or become stale.
So now we're just doomed unless we figure out how to make 4D games once 3D becomes stale? Evolving games doesn't mean mindless obsession to the best graphics and the newest trends. It means improving the gameplay. 2D and 3D present inherently different kinds of gameplay which are both good for different purposes and different kinds of games. Neither one is necessarily better than the other and 2D games are just as capable of continuing to evolve in their own way as 3D games are.
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Yes! See? That is a _perfect_ example of actual flamebait! Thank you so much for helping us out Mr. AC! :)
Perhaps you should go reread the moderator guidelines. Disagreeing with someone in a civilized manner is not flamebait. It's certainly possible that i'm wrong, but i presented a logical argument with some evidence to back it up and wasn't calling anyone names.
Could someone wiser than i in the way of the moderators please explain what's wrong with pointing out that Sony, like pretty much every company in existence, has a history of not always getting things quite perfect on the first iteration of a hardware release? Did i just piss off some PS3 fanboys or is there some flaw in what i said that i'm not aware of? "I have a 60GB PS3 and there's not a BD or a special feature out there that it won't play. Nor will there ever be" is a pretty tall claim to be making, at least as far as the second part of the statement goes. The PS3 is a great piece of machinery, but i doubt that it will be the last Blu-Ray player i ever need to get.
I have a 60GB PS3 and there's not a BD or a special feature out there that it won't play. Nor will there ever be.
Um, how do you figure that? It's not like the early versions of the PS2 didn't have tons of problems with a fairly wide selection of DVDs. Sure you can argue that since Sony is in charge of both the Blu-Ray format and the PS3 that such problems will be less likely, but they wouldn't be coming out with the 2.0 version if there weren't either problems that needed to be fixed or new functionality they want to add that the old players won't be able to handle, and there's no way they can magically make old PS3s handle the changes. They might be fixable with a driver upgrade... or they might not. (I was told that it wasn't possible to upgrade my 1.xx PS2 to 2.xx, i actually had to trade it in on a new PS2, which my local EB Games kindly did free of charge.)
You were going to post that perhaps this will be good news for Terry Pratchett fans! We're getting a little closer to the world of Rainbows End every day :)
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with a group called the "Parents Television Council." However in a sane world such a council would focus on encouraging the development of "clean" "harmless" (and more importantly, simple and fun) programming for children and working with amenable companies on the production of the same. They would not be running around telling the rest of us what kind of programming adults should be watching and what kind of content marketed towards adults should be produced.
Be realistic, remove bloat? This is Microsoft you're talking about.
"Admit your mistake and move on quickly."
Has Microsoft ever admitted to making a mistake?
Call me skeptical, but experience does teach an individual.
A foolish consistency and all that, i know, but i think if you're going to say they can learn in one case you have to admit that they _might_ learn in the other case as well. (At least if they get their nose rubbed in it for long enough.)
There is only one possible response to this development. Genetically engineered monkey-pirates. If that's not enough they've always got zombie-monkey-pirates in reserve.
I went to LosCon a couple weekends ago attended a concert by a filk artist named Alexander James Adams. I was impressed by their performance and when i got home i tried looking them up on wikipedia. It turns out that they _had_ a page but it got deleted. Thanks Wikipedia admins for reducing the usability of Wikipedia by one more little bit. And it's certainly not the first time i've tried to look up information of interest to me and found that pages about it have been deleted, this is just the most recent specific example i could remember.
And how did deleting that page increase your ability to search for something and find it? It's not like you need to shuffle through however many million pages there are by hand, that's what the search function is for. Or is there some other "Alexander James Adams" you're desperate to search for and that's one less disambiguation page you need to deal with? (If so, i hate to tell you but the Alexander James Adams you're looking for got deleted too.)
That's a fundamental "flaw" in the nature of critics. Everyone has different opinions about the same thing, so there will always be critics who agree with your opinions and critics who disagree. The best way to deal with that is find one or more critics who you consistently understand. Not necessarily agree with, but understand. I know someone who managed to find a movie critic who almost always had the exact opposite opinion about movies as they did. However since they know the critic's opinion is almost always the opposite of their own it still makes the critic an accurate predictor of which movies they'll like.
I should have spent a little longer investigating the issue before posting. After examining the source i found a link to paypal using an gif from ebay as the image for the button. However ebay is blocked by websense, so the button isn't showing up at all. I could try to reconstruct the link myself since paypay itself doesn't seem to be blocked for some reason, but it looks like it involves some big ass encryption key, so it's probably easier just to wait for the filter to go down during lunch and order then.
I don't see any link for actually placing an order though. I suppose i could try calling the number at the bottom during lunch though.
Perhaps you're so old that your memory is starting to go (47 by your math i guess) but you couldn't actually rush _anything_ in Dune 2. There was no way to select multiple units at one time, neither drag-select nor ctrl-select had been implemented yet. You had to click on a unit, tell it where to go, click on another unit, tell it where to go, etc, so instead of a whatever-rush you'd end up with a whatever-trickle.
And back in my day we didn't _need_ no frickin concrete in Dune 2, we'd just build on the bare rock without it and then repair the damaged structure! With our bare hands! In a sandstorm!
I hate to tell you, but "Lords of the Realm 2" came out two years before "Starcraft," so i doubt there were very many Zerg rushing around at that point :)
My understanding is that Microsoft has "first refusal" on the publishing rights for anything Bungie makes in the future. But Bungie will be able to work on whatever they want. Which means they could decide to make their next game for the Wii, and Microsoft would have the option to publish it. A Nintendo game with "Microsoft" in big letters on the box. How weird would that be?!?
Religious faith is the belief in something in the absence of evidence. Scientific reasoning is the process of using evidence to "prove" things about the observably universe. (Nothing is ever absolutely proven of course, our certainty can approach but never reach 100%.)
This means that any religious person who walks up to a scientific person who is minding their own business and tries to prove to them that one or more gods exists is a dumbass. And any scientific person who walks up to a religious person who is minding their own business and tries to prove to them that their faith is incorrect is _also_ a dumbass. (Note of course that a person doesn't have to be one or the other, they can be both, or probably even neither.)
Religion isn't right, it's not even wrong. This would be a horrible flaw in a scientific theory, but religion is not science. As long as the distinct members of both camps can agree to leave each other alone there is no reason why it has to be a big issue. Now figuring out whether someone is "minding their own business" or not can be a little tricky, but here's a good rule of thumb, if they're aggressive and say "here's why you should believe X" feel free to use whatever arguments you want to rip them a new one. On the other hand if they're polite and say "this is why I believe X" or "I feel that X is important" than perhaps you should show them a little respect.
I say this as a scientifically minded atheist who has no problem with religious types as long as they leave me alone about the issue. Now loud-mouthed aggressive Fundies who think they know how everyone else should be behaving on the other hand...
I'm confused, what do you think the issue is? The first question is what do they get out of blogs, the second question is their main reason for reading blogs. The two don't have to result in the same numbers, in fact since one person can have multiple answers to the first question but should theoretically have only one to the second means that the results should be very different.
Whenever i think of hard games i always thing of Legacy of the Wizard for the NES. I haven't actually taken the chance to try it again but at the time, when i was in early jr. high i think, it seemed incredibly complex. It was a dungeon crawling adventure game that made really good use of puzzles that required finding items in the dungeon to solve. Item A would be blocked by puzzle 1, which you needed item B to solve, but that was blocked by puzzle 2... and there were five or six different characters, each with slightly different abilities and who could each use a slightly different set of items. Figuring out the right character to use in which order with which combination of items was nuts. And then of course once you finally figured out the right combination for a particular area you had to actually solve the puzzle while dodging the enemies... I don't think i ever got anywhere close to the end of the game.
I for one am _very_ disappointed in Microsoft! Haven't they learned anything?!?
If you want a movie studio to support your next generation media format you don't pay them for the support! You just buy the studio! This kind of inefficiency in leveraging market share is totally unacceptable!
Oh, that part is easy. You can even buy the stuff on the open market now. Unfortunately just eliminating cellular senescence isn't enough by itself to make you immortal. In fact there are worries that just restoring your telomeres without any other kind of treatment might make you more likely to get... cancer! :)
Uh, that's not a "loophole," nor was it some kind of secret. It's an intended feature and a well known one, or at least it should be. The purpose of ratings is to inform people, especially parents, about the contents of a movie so they can make appropriate choices about whether they want to watch the movie or let their kids watch it. R rated movies are considered serious enough that parents should have to go along if they want their kids to see it (how much of this is a concern about letting the kids see it unsupervised and how much is a concern about guaranteeing that it really is okay with the parents i don't know) but just declaring unilaterally that kids couldn't watch them even with their parents permission would defeat the entire point of ratings.
When i was young my parents took my sister and i to see "Coming to America" because they thought it was a good movie and that a little partial frontal nudity wasn't going to hurt anyone. They never would have taken us to see something rated R for violence at that age. It doesn't surprise me that christian groups would decide that showing kids extreme violence is okay as long as it's in a religious context (have you seen the catholic crucifixes? eeewww!) I agree that it probably wasn't a good idea in many cases, but it's not really my place to say what they can and can't take their kids to see, any more than it was their place to say what my parents could take me to see when i was under 17.
I've got a theory, it could be bunnies...
I don't know if i'm a "purist," but i guess i'm an "old hand" since i got (or rather convinced my parents to get) a NES when it first came out when i was 10. I thought Mario 64 was an awesome game, and although i think the 2D Metroids were better Metroid Prime is also a lot of fun. However i thought that Ocarina of Time and its 3D sequels were pretty mediocre. In my opinion Mario and Metroid are doing just fine in 3D, but Zelda damn well should have stayed top-down.
Purism of that kind leads to stagnation; while the occasional throwback like New SMB is wonderful, games have to evolve or become stale.
So now we're just doomed unless we figure out how to make 4D games once 3D becomes stale? Evolving games doesn't mean mindless obsession to the best graphics and the newest trends. It means improving the gameplay. 2D and 3D present inherently different kinds of gameplay which are both good for different purposes and different kinds of games. Neither one is necessarily better than the other and 2D games are just as capable of continuing to evolve in their own way as 3D games are.
No, he is only _one_ of the games industries. Just like we are reading this on one of the Internets.
Indignant explanation of the correct usage of "begging the question" coming in 3, 2, 1...