I've wondered why the hybrids in california don't come with solar cells on top. Sure, you couldn't depend on it, but like you said, you could probably pick up a few MPG here and there on sunny days.
And better yet, instead of writing a multi-meg PDF in the first place, write a couple hundred K of text document and link any graphs or pictures which are absolutly necessary. He probably could have saved 90% of the energy costs involved in downloading and reading his document that way.
Will the PSTwo have a decent DVD player that can handle _all_ dual layered disks? Not that i'm going to bother upgrading unless my PS2 falls apart more than a couple months before the PS3 release, but it would be nice to know that after four years they could finally get the thing working right.
I'm also curious what Sony will do about the names if they ever decide to revamp the PSX or PS2 a second time. PSOne-2 and PSTwo-2? They could just leave the names alone i guess, but they only seem willing to reuse names on entirely different products.
"but this is sure to be a hot topic amongst fans and critics of the series alike"
Well i'm a fan and critic of the series, and my response is pretty much "eh."
I'd be interested in a sequel or remake for 4, 5 or 6, and i'd be horrified by a sequel for 8, and annoyed by a sequel for 11 (which never deserved a mainline number in the first place, should have been FF: Online, like Tactics and all the other side games.)
7 though? Doesn't really matter if it's a crappy cell phone game, a bunch of Vincent fan service, or a "TRUE sequel to FF7," i'm not that excited.
Come to think of it though, that must be it. The guys got FF 10.2, the girls get FF 7.2. I'm sure if they could think of a way to justify it the party would consist of Vincent, Cloud, and Sephiroth.
I realize that space flight is incredibly complex, but is it really that much more complex than regular flight? Why does it seem that space flight is constantly plagued with problems?
The problem isn't (necessarily, though i'm not sure of it) that spaceflight is that much more complex. The problem is that there is a much smaller margin of error.
Airplanes can have roofs peel back, engines fall off, and all other of pretty bad things happen, and yet the planes often manage to come in for a safe landing anyways. A spacecraft has a (comparitively) small hole poked in it by some foam and the entire thing disintegrates during reentry.
Spacecraft deal with more extreme conditions and are much farther away from help, so even when something small goes wrong it can go _really_ wrong.
The fact that it's a "green" energy is really just a nice side effect. India is presumably doing it because it's much cheaper than trying to fix a the massive problems in their power grid.
When we've actually take the time to focus on it, we've been able to improve technology to do a lot more stuff with the same or less amount of energy, while at the same time improving our methods of generating and storing energy. This is making distributed energy generation feasible for people who want to live off the grid or for people who have no effective grid in the first place.
In other words this is a boon both for activists and poor countries with crappy infrastructure. It may mean that even if the US and other developed countries fall down on the job, some second or third world country may get around to building an energy web just by following the path of least resistance.
That sounds good in theory, but things don't really work that way, especially in America.
In America a company or individual is required to defend their copyrights or they risk losing their rights to them.
This means that in America if you write to a company or author asking to use their work they're almost guaranteed to say no. Even if they don't actually mind, since you've brought it to their attention in a legal sense they're usually afraid of the legal complications and just say no by default. I imagine a company as large as Square Enix doesn't even bother reading through the entire letter before sending back a refusal.
However if you just quietly work on the project, don't publicize it very much, and don't attempt to make money off it, some authors/companies are willing to look the other way since they have plausible deniablity about its existance.
So either Square Enix actually didn't know about the remake's existance, or they did know but were being nice, right up until the game got just a little too popular and well recieved.
Those half would have to agree and be in the right states to make a difference. The only thing they do agree on is that the system is broken.
Those half are in _every_ state. As for agreeing, sure they don't agree now, but...
The only people who can change the system are in power because of it. The system cannot be changed by working within the system. Third party candidates cannot win.
Says who? Third party candidates don't win because no one votes for them. If the half the people who don't vote "because the system is broken" started voting for third party candidates some of those candidates would start winning, and the system wouldn't be as broken anymore. People who choose not to vote are still part of the broken system.
And furthermore, third parties _have_ won before. There have been several times in America's history when there have been viable third parties. The Republicans started out as a third party. There's a strong tendency for the system to return to a two party system after that, but that just means you need to pick the right third party, which has an actual intent to change the system, preferably to some kind of concensus format.
What do you base this on? I fail to see how continuing to elect one of the two major parties, by whatever margin, will change anything.
It's called psychology. Two things would happen in that scenario. First of all, there are a lot of people who grit their teeth and vote for one of the two main parties because they want the lesser evil to win. The third party candidates might have some attractive ideas, however they don't currently have a chance in hell of winning. However if third party candiates start getting double digits and the Republicans and Democrats drop down into the 20s, then a _lot_ of these people are going to start looking across the no longer great divide and start switching camp when they realize those third parties now have a chance.
Second of all, the two main parties would would realize they were in a not so good position and probably start taking drastic action to get more voters. I don't know if they'd try to become even more similar, or would actually start differentiating from each other again, or what, but there would certainly be some kind of change. I can't guarantee that the change would be in the direction you would prefer, but hey, that's life. At least you would have made a change though.
You want to believe they are lazy whiners because it's easier than admitting there might be something bigger wrong.
Hey! You're pretty good at that reading minds thing yourself! Oh, but wait, you aren't, because i _do_ think there is something bigger wrong. A system that statistically encourages a two party system is a big problem, however half of the population choosing not to vote is a big problem too.
I'm not inclined to give the people who don't vote a lot of credit, because i hear a lot of whining about how the system is broken but i neither see nor hear anything about attempts to fix it. Voting in and of itself does _not_ support the system. Voting for one of the two main candidates supports the system. Voting for a third party candidate does not. Personally i think the people who voted for Nader in the last election were fools (both because Bush getting elected was a diaster for their agenda and because although the Green party has some good ideas, Nader himself is a hypocritcal political bastard, no different from Gore, Bush, or Kerry.) However despite my disagreement with how they chose to vote, they did a lot more to change the system and get a lot more credit in my mind than the people who sat on their assess and did nothing.
So either go out and vote for some third party, come up with another viable (and legal) solution for changing the system, or just stop whining.
however I'm prety sure that the topic of discussion is the presidental race which I will not participate in in case the guy I voted for wins making me partially responsible for their crimes.
Then why not vote for one of the _other_ candidates? It's really not that hard.
If half the people have lost faith in the system, it's the system that is broken, not the people.
There's a slight flaw in what you're saying. It only takes half the people to change the system. Instead of sitting on their asses complaining about how the system is broken, why don't they do the small amount of work necessary to find some third party candidate who is interested in changing the systtem?
Even if not everybody picked the same third party candidate, if all the whiners and lazy people got off their asses and voted and the Republicans and Democrats started "winning" the elections with 26% of the vote, you would start seeing some changes pretty damn fast.
They haven't lost faith in the system, they're just lazy or poor losers and they're blaming the system for their own problems.
Wow, you're right. Certainly in about the one in Luca at least. I _guess_ that thing in in Macalania could be a crystal.
So they started out as the four (or eight) elemental crystals that provided order to the world, and then became something you could equip in weapons or store memories in, and now they've become lawn ornaments.
"So it's come to this. And hasn't it been a long way down?"
You're missing the point. In fact you're missing several points.
First point, i claimed i didn't know enough technical details about sound systems to make any judgement about them, and you responded by saying i didn't know what i was talking about. If i was wrong about what the number of channels means, then clearly i was _right_ about how little i know, which is what i was _really_ talking about.
Second point, as a reasonably average person most of that technobabble you were just saying doesn't make sense to me. Of course i was kind of just skimming over it and i'm sure if i took the time to read through it carefully i could figure it out. However that's not going to happen because Third point, i don't really care. If a computer can play a CD about as well as my $100 (at least when i got it five or so years ago) stereo system, then that's good enough for me. All modern PCs do that just fine, and even my laptop does a perfectly good job i use headphones or another set of speakers rather than the internal speakers, so i don't really need to know the details.
And Fourth point, you're busy trying to quantify the sound hardware. However what can't be very well quantified by most people is the actual sound output. If i tried to describe to you the first ten or so seconds of the last song i was listening to about an hour ago, i could tell you: "it was an industrial song that started with some kind of synthesizer tone, kind of low and bassy, going 'doo doo doo do do, doo doo doo do do' for a couple measures and then another synthesizer tone except higher came in with 'doodeedidoodoo, doo doodeedidoodoo', and it sounded about as clear as everything does on my stereo," exactly how much would that tell you about the song itself?
On the other hand i could give you a much better description of the video game i was playing about six hours ago:
"it uses a slightly anime style for the characters, not cell-shaded, but the characters are all fairly short and slightly deformed, with typical big eye, small mouth, representation. The skeletal animations of the characters are pretty good, and the facial animations are very expresive, but they're also very simple. They seem to be just a few frames of animation painted on a mostly smooth face. Cutscenes are rendered with the in-game engine but still look pretty good, except for an occasional object collision problem, especially with clothing or carried objects such as swords. You usually don't see any obvious polys; the characters are very well done and most of the background objects look good as well, but occasionally there's things like sets of shelves that are just a box with a texture of shelves on top which look a little obvious and out of place. There are lots of edge-trailing effects in combat, as well as some good spell effects."
I could go on to describe the characters themselves, and the ships, and the towns, and lots of other things i've seen in the game, but you get the point.
As for the sound however, well, i could tell you:
"It has good music, there's a cool martial sounding theme when you get into big ship battles, and some catchy jungle music for the jungle area and middle eastern music for the desert area. And there are lots of sound effects in combat."
That's about it. I can tell you that i like it, but i'd probably have to take a couple classes in musicology to be able to describe what exactly i like about it or about anything it didn't do well or any other details at all, and that's just too much work. Most people naturally know how to describe things they see, describing things they hear is much harder aside from generic "it's good," or "it's bad," or "it has a good beat."
All of this boils down to my original claim, which is certainly true for myself and i think holds true for others as well, that sound just isn't as important as visuals and the break even point for the cost/benefit ratio happens a lot sooner for audio technology. I can't describe how good or bad the audio in a game or other media is ver
It's possible we've become more focused on visual media in recent history. However if a sadistic alien kidnapped you and was going to drop you naked in a jungle after performing an operation that either made you blind, deaf, or removed all sense of touch in your hands, which would you pick?
For me it would be a toss-up between hearing and touch. It's hard to say since i have no idea how much complete loss of feeling in my hands would screw with manual dexterity. A human who can't use tools effectively has lost a large part of their advantage over other animals. However being blind would certainly be my _last_ choice. If i were deaf i might be more at risk from predators, but being blind would probably make it almost impossible to feed myself in a strange enviroment. And even if i did hear a predator coming i wouldn't be in much of a position to do anything about it if i couldn't see it or see an escape path.
I really doubt prehistoric blind people were anywhere near as likely to survive as prehistoric deaf people. If you went blind for some reason and didn't have a family/tribe willing to support you you were probably dead meat within a few days or weeks at most.
That's not a fair comparison.
A fairer comparison would be the effect of the number of parallel pipelines in the gpu on image quality.
And either you or i have just proved my point. Even some (and i would like to think a lot) average non-audiophile tech geeks have no idea what goes into a good sound system. People talk about dolby and thx and number of channels, and i have no clue what it means. I just make sure when i buy a new computer that it has a sound card or integrated sound system thing, and comes with speakers.
A fairer comparison would be knowing the sample rate, bitrate
Isn't that a factor of the software, not the hardware? Or does the hardware have a bitrate too? I thought speakers were analog.
See, if you talk about 640x480 vs 1024x768 and such i know what you're talking about. I can visualize what that means. If you tell me it has support for pixel shaders i didn't originally know what it meant but after being shown some lighting effects i had a pretty good idea. You can tell me that some set of numbers attached to the esoteric qualities you just spouted off means good sound, and if i listened to such a setup i might agree that it sounded good, but i still would be able to identify which particular aspects sounded different from "non-good" and how they related to the stats you were talking about.
I said it was a usefull tool, but it's not our primary tool. Sound can let you know that something is coming, but if you want to actually aim at it with any degree of accuracy you need to be able to see it. We have adequate hearing, a lot of animals have better hearing, and some, bats in particular, have _much_ better hearing.
We've got left and right and rear speakers now which make identifiable sounds rather than beeps. We can now make a sound that is associated with a particular creature and make it seem like it comes from a particular direction. We can also clearly reproduce speech. However that's about the extent to which we can usefully describe such things. "He said something" or "i heard a grunt from the left." Not so coincidentally that's also the point where interest in further devlopments, both as a consumer and a producer, drops off significantly.
Please describe to me in detail how the "Grhhh" of a grunt differs from a "Grhhh" made by some other creature. Then describe in detail how the "Grhhh' sounds better or worse than the "Grhhh"s in similar games with inferior and superior sound systems.
You can tell me how a creature in Doom looks different than a creature in Doom3 _far_ easier than you can tell me how the two sound different. We have lots of words for describing the size, shape, color, and other visual effects of things we see. For sounds the best we can usually do is to try and imitate it, and if we're trying to communicate it in written form we're usually reduced to maybe a vague guess at pitch and some lame onomatopoeia.
And anyways, i don't believe we evolved as night hunters. We evolved as omnivourous scavengers. Hunting came after we developed tools, long after most of our evolution had happened. Besides, if we had evolved for night hunting we would have developed eyes like cats. Instead we don't have good enough hearing to effectively target something, but we have enough to identify when something, potentially a predator, is coming our way.
You forgot the glue that binds every Final Fantasy premise: an ally character named Cid.
And the "some kind of crystal" thing. Unfortunatly Square has been falling down on that one a bit after FF9. And did FF8 have any? I really can't remember much about that game.
The problem is that humans have a much easier time, well, visualizing graphics than they do sound. And the fact that we refer to visualizing abstract concepts rather than "auditorializing" them should be a hint.
Humans have focused on pretty much just two senses; sight and touch, especially with respect to our hands. If we want to identify something we almost always look at it or pick it up and feel it.
Our sense of smell/taste is notoriously crappy compared to many other animals and unless something is particularly smelly we usually don't pay much attention to that aspect. Our hearing is adequate and is very usefull for communicating language and for tertiary analysis but it isn't usually what we focus on.
We have very exact words for defining shape and size and color. We can say a secreen is X by Y pixels and if we have a general idea of the pixel size that gives many people a pretty good sense of the size and quality of the image. We can say it can display Z colors and although that's a little more inexact it still gives us a reasonably good idea.
On the other hand our words for describing audio in common usage are generally less specific and hace less conotation. If you say that a sound system has seven channels then i and a lot of other non-audiophiles will have very little idea what exactly that means or how it differes from more or less channels. I expect two monitors with the same stats to look pretty similar, but for audio equipment you need to go listen to it to find out which is good and which is bad.
All of which means that when making games or any other mixed media product you will get more bang for your buck if you invest more in video over sound. People will notice it more and be able to describe it better when talking to their friends or writing reviews. Good audio can certainly make a game a lot better, but how many people buy a game just because it has good audio vs. just because it has good graphics? There are certainly a few, i myself happen to know a single hardcore audiophile who builds his own speakers and such, but they're not that common.
Um, who said it wasn't above 115db? Clearly if they had been following the rules in the first place it wouldn't be a problem. According to this page it starts hurting at 125 db, so the sound may very well be above that when you're holding the phone against your ear, which would place it well off the end of the safety chart.
That eliminates the vast majority of SF from being SF:)
Where exactly do you draw the line? Obviously hyperspace must be out, but what about wormhole travel? What about sub-light travel between planets? We certainly haven't proven we can construct that kind of ship. Geneticaly engineering people to have psychic powers would be out i presume. But what about engineering people to be ten times as strong as a normal person? It's plausible, but as far as i know no one has proven that it's possible.
No, unambiguously true according to the particular definition that was quoted. We spend the most time following Deckard, so he is the hero, morality doesn't play into at all. Roy Batty may or may not have been acting "heroic," but _that_ analysis is based on a moral interpretation of what a hero is/means.
Admitedly almost no one uses that particular definition of hero anymore, protagonist currently covers that definition, but since the AC specified the definition being used they're completly correct. Of course it was presumably meant as a nitpicky joke, so it's silly to waste time dissecting it as much as we are:)
As for how Ford acted the part, you can just as easily that he didn't act anything. The action star hated being in the film. (or more precisely, the director).
Do you have any sources for that? The story i always heard (and admitedly, i don't have any direct sources either) was that Harison Ford liked the movie and thought it was good the way it was, but the people in charge insisted that he do the voiceover. He figured that if he did a really crappy job on the voiceover that they would decide not to use it and the movie would be released without it, but they went ahead and used it anyways.
I've heard the story a couple time, though it could just be a well spread urban legend.
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I've wondered why the hybrids in california don't come with solar cells on top. Sure, you couldn't depend on it, but like you said, you could probably pick up a few MPG here and there on sunny days.
And better yet, instead of writing a multi-meg PDF in the first place, write a couple hundred K of text document and link any graphs or pictures which are absolutly necessary. He probably could have saved 90% of the energy costs involved in downloading and reading his document that way.
I'm also curious what Sony will do about the names if they ever decide to revamp the PSX or PS2 a second time. PSOne-2 and PSTwo-2? They could just leave the names alone i guess, but they only seem willing to reuse names on entirely different products.
Well i'm a fan and critic of the series, and my response is pretty much "eh."
I'd be interested in a sequel or remake for 4, 5 or 6, and i'd be horrified by a sequel for 8, and annoyed by a sequel for 11 (which never deserved a mainline number in the first place, should have been FF: Online, like Tactics and all the other side games.)
7 though? Doesn't really matter if it's a crappy cell phone game, a bunch of Vincent fan service, or a "TRUE sequel to FF7," i'm not that excited.
Come to think of it though, that must be it. The guys got FF 10.2, the girls get FF 7.2. I'm sure if they could think of a way to justify it the party would consist of Vincent, Cloud, and Sephiroth.
It was maybe funny once. Most of us are probably around several dozen now if not more.
The problem isn't (necessarily, though i'm not sure of it) that spaceflight is that much more complex. The problem is that there is a much smaller margin of error.
Airplanes can have roofs peel back, engines fall off, and all other of pretty bad things happen, and yet the planes often manage to come in for a safe landing anyways. A spacecraft has a (comparitively) small hole poked in it by some foam and the entire thing disintegrates during reentry.
Spacecraft deal with more extreme conditions and are much farther away from help, so even when something small goes wrong it can go _really_ wrong.
How about the part where he contrasts the entire female gender with engineers and other technical people?
"These are very different and instantly understandable for tech geeks like us."
Apparently there are no women tech geeks. I guess their "funny way of looking at the world" precludes it.
and gives some justification for Lucas issuing the updated versions of the trilogy
Let me guess...
1. To bring the films more in line with his "original" artistic vision.
2. ???
3. Profit!
When we've actually take the time to focus on it, we've been able to improve technology to do a lot more stuff with the same or less amount of energy, while at the same time improving our methods of generating and storing energy. This is making distributed energy generation feasible for people who want to live off the grid or for people who have no effective grid in the first place.
In other words this is a boon both for activists and poor countries with crappy infrastructure. It may mean that even if the US and other developed countries fall down on the job, some second or third world country may get around to building an energy web just by following the path of least resistance.
In America a company or individual is required to defend their copyrights or they risk losing their rights to them.
This means that in America if you write to a company or author asking to use their work they're almost guaranteed to say no. Even if they don't actually mind, since you've brought it to their attention in a legal sense they're usually afraid of the legal complications and just say no by default. I imagine a company as large as Square Enix doesn't even bother reading through the entire letter before sending back a refusal.
However if you just quietly work on the project, don't publicize it very much, and don't attempt to make money off it, some authors/companies are willing to look the other way since they have plausible deniablity about its existance.
So either Square Enix actually didn't know about the remake's existance, or they did know but were being nice, right up until the game got just a little too popular and well recieved.
Those half are in _every_ state. As for agreeing, sure they don't agree now, but...
The only people who can change the system are in power because of it. The system cannot be changed by working within the system. Third party candidates cannot win.
Says who? Third party candidates don't win because no one votes for them. If the half the people who don't vote "because the system is broken" started voting for third party candidates some of those candidates would start winning, and the system wouldn't be as broken anymore. People who choose not to vote are still part of the broken system.
And furthermore, third parties _have_ won before. There have been several times in America's history when there have been viable third parties. The Republicans started out as a third party. There's a strong tendency for the system to return to a two party system after that, but that just means you need to pick the right third party, which has an actual intent to change the system, preferably to some kind of concensus format.
What do you base this on? I fail to see how continuing to elect one of the two major parties, by whatever margin, will change anything.
It's called psychology. Two things would happen in that scenario. First of all, there are a lot of people who grit their teeth and vote for one of the two main parties because they want the lesser evil to win. The third party candidates might have some attractive ideas, however they don't currently have a chance in hell of winning. However if third party candiates start getting double digits and the Republicans and Democrats drop down into the 20s, then a _lot_ of these people are going to start looking across the no longer great divide and start switching camp when they realize those third parties now have a chance.
Second of all, the two main parties would would realize they were in a not so good position and probably start taking drastic action to get more voters. I don't know if they'd try to become even more similar, or would actually start differentiating from each other again, or what, but there would certainly be some kind of change. I can't guarantee that the change would be in the direction you would prefer, but hey, that's life. At least you would have made a change though.
You want to believe they are lazy whiners because it's easier than admitting there might be something bigger wrong.
Hey! You're pretty good at that reading minds thing yourself! Oh, but wait, you aren't, because i _do_ think there is something bigger wrong. A system that statistically encourages a two party system is a big problem, however half of the population choosing not to vote is a big problem too.
I'm not inclined to give the people who don't vote a lot of credit, because i hear a lot of whining about how the system is broken but i neither see nor hear anything about attempts to fix it. Voting in and of itself does _not_ support the system. Voting for one of the two main candidates supports the system. Voting for a third party candidate does not. Personally i think the people who voted for Nader in the last election were fools (both because Bush getting elected was a diaster for their agenda and because although the Green party has some good ideas, Nader himself is a hypocritcal political bastard, no different from Gore, Bush, or Kerry.) However despite my disagreement with how they chose to vote, they did a lot more to change the system and get a lot more credit in my mind than the people who sat on their assess and did nothing.
So either go out and vote for some third party, come up with another viable (and legal) solution for changing the system, or just stop whining.
Then why not vote for one of the _other_ candidates? It's really not that hard.
There's a slight flaw in what you're saying. It only takes half the people to change the system. Instead of sitting on their asses complaining about how the system is broken, why don't they do the small amount of work necessary to find some third party candidate who is interested in changing the systtem?
Even if not everybody picked the same third party candidate, if all the whiners and lazy people got off their asses and voted and the Republicans and Democrats started "winning" the elections with 26% of the vote, you would start seeing some changes pretty damn fast.
They haven't lost faith in the system, they're just lazy or poor losers and they're blaming the system for their own problems.
So they started out as the four (or eight) elemental crystals that provided order to the world, and then became something you could equip in weapons or store memories in, and now they've become lawn ornaments.
"So it's come to this. And hasn't it been a long way down?"
First point, i claimed i didn't know enough technical details about sound systems to make any judgement about them, and you responded by saying i didn't know what i was talking about. If i was wrong about what the number of channels means, then clearly i was _right_ about how little i know, which is what i was _really_ talking about.
Second point, as a reasonably average person most of that technobabble you were just saying doesn't make sense to me. Of course i was kind of just skimming over it and i'm sure if i took the time to read through it carefully i could figure it out. However that's not going to happen because Third point, i don't really care. If a computer can play a CD about as well as my $100 (at least when i got it five or so years ago) stereo system, then that's good enough for me. All modern PCs do that just fine, and even my laptop does a perfectly good job i use headphones or another set of speakers rather than the internal speakers, so i don't really need to know the details.
And Fourth point, you're busy trying to quantify the sound hardware. However what can't be very well quantified by most people is the actual sound output. If i tried to describe to you the first ten or so seconds of the last song i was listening to about an hour ago, i could tell you:
"it was an industrial song that started with some kind of synthesizer tone, kind of low and bassy, going 'doo doo doo do do, doo doo doo do do' for a couple measures and then another synthesizer tone except higher came in with 'doodeedidoodoo, doo doodeedidoodoo', and it sounded about as clear as everything does on my stereo,"
exactly how much would that tell you about the song itself?
On the other hand i could give you a much better description of the video game i was playing about six hours ago:
"it uses a slightly anime style for the characters, not cell-shaded, but the characters are all fairly short and slightly deformed, with typical big eye, small mouth, representation. The skeletal animations of the characters are pretty good, and the facial animations are very expresive, but they're also very simple. They seem to be just a few frames of animation painted on a mostly smooth face. Cutscenes are rendered with the in-game engine but still look pretty good, except for an occasional object collision problem, especially with clothing or carried objects such as swords. You usually don't see any obvious polys; the characters are very well done and most of the background objects look good as well, but occasionally there's things like sets of shelves that are just a box with a texture of shelves on top which look a little obvious and out of place. There are lots of edge-trailing effects in combat, as well as some good spell effects."
I could go on to describe the characters themselves, and the ships, and the towns, and lots of other things i've seen in the game, but you get the point.
As for the sound however, well, i could tell you:
"It has good music, there's a cool martial sounding theme when you get into big ship battles, and some catchy jungle music for the jungle area and middle eastern music for the desert area. And there are lots of sound effects in combat."
That's about it. I can tell you that i like it, but i'd probably have to take a couple classes in musicology to be able to describe what exactly i like about it or about anything it didn't do well or any other details at all, and that's just too much work. Most people naturally know how to describe things they see, describing things they hear is much harder aside from generic "it's good," or "it's bad," or "it has a good beat."
All of this boils down to my original claim, which is certainly true for myself and i think holds true for others as well, that sound just isn't as important as visuals and the break even point for the cost/benefit ratio happens a lot sooner for audio technology. I can't describe how good or bad the audio in a game or other media is ver
For me it would be a toss-up between hearing and touch. It's hard to say since i have no idea how much complete loss of feeling in my hands would screw with manual dexterity. A human who can't use tools effectively has lost a large part of their advantage over other animals. However being blind would certainly be my _last_ choice. If i were deaf i might be more at risk from predators, but being blind would probably make it almost impossible to feed myself in a strange enviroment. And even if i did hear a predator coming i wouldn't be in much of a position to do anything about it if i couldn't see it or see an escape path.
I really doubt prehistoric blind people were anywhere near as likely to survive as prehistoric deaf people. If you went blind for some reason and didn't have a family/tribe willing to support you you were probably dead meat within a few days or weeks at most.
And either you or i have just proved my point. Even some (and i would like to think a lot) average non-audiophile tech geeks have no idea what goes into a good sound system. People talk about dolby and thx and number of channels, and i have no clue what it means. I just make sure when i buy a new computer that it has a sound card or integrated sound system thing, and comes with speakers.
A fairer comparison would be knowing the sample rate, bitrate
Isn't that a factor of the software, not the hardware? Or does the hardware have a bitrate too? I thought speakers were analog.
See, if you talk about 640x480 vs 1024x768 and such i know what you're talking about. I can visualize what that means. If you tell me it has support for pixel shaders i didn't originally know what it meant but after being shown some lighting effects i had a pretty good idea. You can tell me that some set of numbers attached to the esoteric qualities you just spouted off means good sound, and if i listened to such a setup i might agree that it sounded good, but i still would be able to identify which particular aspects sounded different from "non-good" and how they related to the stats you were talking about.
We've got left and right and rear speakers now which make identifiable sounds rather than beeps. We can now make a sound that is associated with a particular creature and make it seem like it comes from a particular direction. We can also clearly reproduce speech. However that's about the extent to which we can usefully describe such things. "He said something" or "i heard a grunt from the left." Not so coincidentally that's also the point where interest in further devlopments, both as a consumer and a producer, drops off significantly.
Please describe to me in detail how the "Grhhh" of a grunt differs from a "Grhhh" made by some other creature. Then describe in detail how the "Grhhh' sounds better or worse than the "Grhhh"s in similar games with inferior and superior sound systems.
You can tell me how a creature in Doom looks different than a creature in Doom3 _far_ easier than you can tell me how the two sound different. We have lots of words for describing the size, shape, color, and other visual effects of things we see. For sounds the best we can usually do is to try and imitate it, and if we're trying to communicate it in written form we're usually reduced to maybe a vague guess at pitch and some lame onomatopoeia.
And anyways, i don't believe we evolved as night hunters. We evolved as omnivourous scavengers. Hunting came after we developed tools, long after most of our evolution had happened. Besides, if we had evolved for night hunting we would have developed eyes like cats. Instead we don't have good enough hearing to effectively target something, but we have enough to identify when something, potentially a predator, is coming our way.
And the "some kind of crystal" thing. Unfortunatly Square has been falling down on that one a bit after FF9. And did FF8 have any? I really can't remember much about that game.
Humans have focused on pretty much just two senses; sight and touch, especially with respect to our hands. If we want to identify something we almost always look at it or pick it up and feel it.
Our sense of smell/taste is notoriously crappy compared to many other animals and unless something is particularly smelly we usually don't pay much attention to that aspect. Our hearing is adequate and is very usefull for communicating language and for tertiary analysis but it isn't usually what we focus on.
We have very exact words for defining shape and size and color. We can say a secreen is X by Y pixels and if we have a general idea of the pixel size that gives many people a pretty good sense of the size and quality of the image. We can say it can display Z colors and although that's a little more inexact it still gives us a reasonably good idea.
On the other hand our words for describing audio in common usage are generally less specific and hace less conotation. If you say that a sound system has seven channels then i and a lot of other non-audiophiles will have very little idea what exactly that means or how it differes from more or less channels. I expect two monitors with the same stats to look pretty similar, but for audio equipment you need to go listen to it to find out which is good and which is bad.
All of which means that when making games or any other mixed media product you will get more bang for your buck if you invest more in video over sound. People will notice it more and be able to describe it better when talking to their friends or writing reviews. Good audio can certainly make a game a lot better, but how many people buy a game just because it has good audio vs. just because it has good graphics? There are certainly a few, i myself happen to know a single hardcore audiophile who builds his own speakers and such, but they're not that common.
Um, who said it wasn't above 115db? Clearly if they had been following the rules in the first place it wouldn't be a problem. According to this page it starts hurting at 125 db, so the sound may very well be above that when you're holding the phone against your ear, which would place it well off the end of the safety chart.
"A lot" is two words. You wouldn't say "alittle", would you?
Eh, they're probably right about alittle bit once in awhile.
Where exactly do you draw the line? Obviously hyperspace must be out, but what about wormhole travel? What about sub-light travel between planets? We certainly haven't proven we can construct that kind of ship. Geneticaly engineering people to have psychic powers would be out i presume. But what about engineering people to be ten times as strong as a normal person? It's plausible, but as far as i know no one has proven that it's possible.
Admitedly almost no one uses that particular definition of hero anymore, protagonist currently covers that definition, but since the AC specified the definition being used they're completly correct. Of course it was presumably meant as a nitpicky joke, so it's silly to waste time dissecting it as much as we are :)
Do you have any sources for that? The story i always heard (and admitedly, i don't have any direct sources either) was that Harison Ford liked the movie and thought it was good the way it was, but the people in charge insisted that he do the voiceover. He figured that if he did a really crappy job on the voiceover that they would decide not to use it and the movie would be released without it, but they went ahead and used it anyways.
I've heard the story a couple time, though it could just be a well spread urban legend.