Out of your three links about "arab-americans", only one of them is actually an american at all, Steven Hatfill, who was being investigated for the Anthrax letters in 2001. But he was never put in prison, and he doesn't even appear to be Arab-American. Did anyone actually even read your links?
He was being investigated because a) he was a bioengineer b) he was on on record before the letters saying that terrorists could use anthrax letters and c) the anthrax used was biologically descended from the strains grown at a lab where he worked. The government would have been negligent if they HADN'T investigated him!
Your rights aren't being restricted, you're being inconvenienced because you have a different parenting opinion than a lot of people. At a certain point, societies are about shared values that have to be protected if the society is going to work. If you really have a different opinion, you just have to personally assert this fact, rather than stores just letting kids buy violent video games, alcohol or pornography.
I don't think this is a rights issue. Being in the minority always has disadvantages associated with it, and this is one of those cases. You still can raise your kids however you want, but because you are in the minority, someone is always going to ask you "are you sure?"
If you can't afford XP, numbers-wise it's most likely that you're running Windows 98-ME.:-|
I don't recall accessibility guidelines requiring cross-browser compatibility, except that it works in a text-only browser or a text-only version of the site is provided. I have not seen anyone actually state wether this was the case. If they do not provide a text-only version, they are automatically in violation, as a government agency.
I read your comment before I read the article, and my first thought was "of course, they mean if you are spending 15 dollars a month on an online game subscription, that's 15 dollars that you can't use to buy another game." But then I read the article, and just like you're saying, they are asking, "is WoW hurting the game industry because every 15 dollars a month spent on it is 15 dollars a month that's not spent on an inferior game."
So, if given a choice between a good game and a mediocre game, people will spend the money on the good game? NO FUCKING DUH. This being a characteristic of a _correctly_ functioning market, it's good simply because quality is being rewarded, which should weed out the bad development houses. In the long run, games should only improve. Why don't they do an article on EA using its market clout forcing shit down everyone's throats? _That's_ bad for the industry.
It was a cool idea, but after a while you figured out that there wasn't that much to actually do. I eventually got bored of it and left. Cheating was getting bad at about the time I left, and when I can back a while later, all the fucking cheaters (the same people who played 24 hours a day) had become "gamecops", deputized under Stefan to keep order, which is a real morale killer. Then they started charging for it, and one of the guys I knew from the beginning got thrown in jail for attempted child abduction of someone he met in the game. They changed all the graphics, and it was never as cool as when it was Zelda.
If you compare two general-purpose computers or embedded systems, they will generally contain the same type of components in them, things that will be abstracted away by your programming language and OS. If you look at the old game consoles, this was not the case for several reasons.
Firstly, you were not necessarily programming to a standard library, and you weren't necessarily programming in C or C++. You didn't get those abstractions.
Also, you were programming to specific hardware that was built into the unit to try to squeeze extra performance out of the hardware limits. So you end up with things like the tile engines. Every one of them has different modes that mean that the screen is a different resolution, the color depth is different, the color usage is different, the memory structure to store and display it is different, all your sprites are different pixel sizes and can have different numbers of sprites, all with their own limitations on how many you can have per line, etc.
Keep in mind that you never have enough power to do what you want to accomplish. So, if you build a game to the best of the hardware abilities of a system, you have just irrevocably made a commitment to that hardware platform. As soon as you want to port it to a different system, you hav e to resize all your sprites, change the color pallete around, change the gameplay to accommodate the smaller number of sprites for the other system, and optimize the assembler for that CPU. You get less memory, so now you have to come up with a way to swap sprites in and out of tile RAM without interrupting gameplay.
This shit is hard. Now, I can't speak for newer game systems except by what I've heard, but I do know for example, that some games from one system to the next still have to be pared down because of overall VRAM, texture and and system memory limitations from one machine to the other. On a PC, you might just code for the lowest common denominator, but that doesn't work on consoles. This is just a guess, I really can't speak to that. But at least in the past, there was a very good reason it was hard for game programmers to make "portable" code. The machines you were coding for were completely different at the implementation level of game coding. No one was even making cross-platform libraries for coding. There especially was not libraries for things like multithreading (the saturn had two CPUs, but the lack of good libraries for coding for the Saturn's unique features was one of the reasons that Saturn games never lived up to the expectations for the hardware. I wonder if this will be the same for Sony and their Cell architecure. It sounds like the same thing all over again, except that this time we have good general purpose libraries that will be ported to the system. Hopefully there will be people that know how to use them.)
I'm getting zero connected seeds on the Windows version, anyone else having problems with it? I registered and all, but I don't think that matters here.
I'm wondering if the big change he is referring to is an MMORPG version of Zelda. Let me be the first to say KICKASS, and I will probably live in there if they make it.
Somone already did something like this. Back around 1998, some guy made a multiplayer online version of Legend of Zelda-a Link to the Past by reusing all the SNES game sprites and tiles. It was pretty cool. After a while, Nintendo caught on and sent them a cease-and-desist, and they changed the name to GRAAL, and slowly changed all the graphics. I guess that people still play Graal to this day. It was a good idea. I hope Nintendo does this.
I sit across from a spec writer that has a 450 Mhz Pentium 3. She's running Office 2003 with Infopath, the whole shebang no problems. She only uses MS Office, oh, all day for everything she does.
It's not as fast as Office 97, but it's still perfectly usable.
Because they invented the hardware on which your game runs.
This is not an answer. Why is the publisher entitled to _all_ profits when they did not put up _all_ capital? IF you say "Because they can", well of course, but this would be exploitation, and it's obvious why artists would be against that:-|
As for the other two points, distribution doesn't change anything in the point (I left it off for brevity), and of course an artist has the ability to enter other artistic fields where they are capable of representing themselves.
I understand your point, but I think the problem is that publishers are treating artists like a commodity, when in reality their relationship is more like partners because art is capital because art is not interchangeable.
I just had an Attache die after it went through the washer and drier. It has a single weak point, a resistor or something is soldered onto one side of the circuit board. It detached in the wash, probably from drier heat I suppose. I was able to recover the files by having a friend copy my files to the hard drive while I carefully held the resistor back in place (thank God.)
Keys typically don't have problems going through the wash. I can't speak for all USB drives, but at least the Attache has a problem with this.
"Producers" need "creators" more than vice-versa. An artist without representation can represent himself, but a publisher without artists doesn't have anything to sell.
Anyway, it seems like a fair trade to me if the artist gets to keep their creations. The publisher's capital is cold hard cash, and the creator's capital is creations. Creative works aren't interchangeable like money, so the Creator is taking a much larger risk of getting screwed if they don't get to own what they put on the table. If I was the guy who designed tetris, I don't think it would be very fair that my idea for the one of the most popular games of all time should solely compensate the guy who just happened to have a distribution monopoly. I would demand a return on my investment, namely, that I gave them the right to distribute my awesome game idea that's making THEM a ton of money. Why do they deserve the return on my investment? Why do I NOT deserve it?
They are being programmed by the thousands in Flash. I have seen tons of cool little games made by one or two people that were far more fun than anything I could buy for sixty dollars for the PS2. However, there's a problem:
I'm a programmer myself, and my dissatisfaction with Flash is that it's ASS-SLOW. I tried writing an action-style game in it, and it choked after an unacceptably low amount of onscreen action was occurring. If Adobe/Macromedia/whoever would fix this, it would make a FANTASTIC game engine. It's easy to program for, and the output looks great.
I realize that Flash isn't ported to any video game consoles, but if you want to see indie games, they're on the PC in Flash. If Flash was ported to CE/Java so it worked on handhelds alone, and it would be a huge market.
"You Linux fanatics get on Microsoft for bundling apps with their OS"
Small correction, most of the time it's not us Linux fantics, whoever this may be, but law enforcement agencies that get on MS for abusing their monopoly.
Do you actually BELIEVE this? How did you manage to post to Slashdot without ever actually reading anything here? Even the most cursory examination of ANY Slashdot article talking about Microsoft would have blown this "correction" to smithereens.
Last time I checked, the government here in the US at least, has been deficient in this regard, while the bundling bitching goes on unabated on Slashdot. For the record, as a Linux user (NOT a zealot), I am somewhat critical of MS bundling apps, at least to intentionally blow another company out of the water.
Nintendo did this more or less with Yoshi's island back in I think 1998.
If Yoshi ate a "puffball" in a particular level, everything would go all wavy, the music would turn warbled and distorted, and Yoshi would teeter around like he was drunk while you attempted to move him.
It wasn't on a continuous scale however, just on/off.
Jesus Christ, what idiots modded you up for this OBVIOUSLY wrong statement? 2000 years? Most women in Europe didn't get the right to participate in government in any way until the 20th century.
You know what, every time anyone makes a joke about nazis killing jews or japanese getting nuked or Sept. 11, that's all cool with the majority of the Slashdot crowd. The defense posts always are plentiful and modded +5 Insightful. But boy, when the prison-rape jokes come out, there's a big turnaround.
It's an interesting disparity, it seems a lot of Slashdotters can yuk it up when six million other people die, but the thought of one person getting plugged in prison really, really bothers them. I wonder what this says about Slashdotters?
Let's hope his new cellmate's orders weren't. Wouldn't it be a shame if he found out a majority of his Viagra orders were delivered to federal prisons.
Slashdot Mirror
Out of your three links about "arab-americans", only one of them is actually an american at all, Steven Hatfill, who was being investigated for the Anthrax letters in 2001. But he was never put in prison, and he doesn't even appear to be Arab-American. Did anyone actually even read your links?
He was being investigated because a) he was a bioengineer b) he was on on record before the letters saying that terrorists could use anthrax letters and c) the anthrax used was biologically descended from the strains grown at a lab where he worked. The government would have been negligent if they HADN'T investigated him!
There's lots of reasons why a Windows site might be hosted on Linux, the least of which is, who cares, web hosting is web hosting.
Your rights aren't being restricted, you're being inconvenienced because you have a different parenting opinion than a lot of people. At a certain point, societies are about shared values that have to be protected if the society is going to work. If you really have a different opinion, you just have to personally assert this fact, rather than stores just letting kids buy violent video games, alcohol or pornography.
I don't think this is a rights issue. Being in the minority always has disadvantages associated with it, and this is one of those cases. You still can raise your kids however you want, but because you are in the minority, someone is always going to ask you "are you sure?"
If you can't afford XP, numbers-wise it's most likely that you're running Windows 98-ME. :-|
I don't recall accessibility guidelines requiring cross-browser compatibility, except that it works in a text-only browser or a text-only version of the site is provided. I have not seen anyone actually state wether this was the case. If they do not provide a text-only version, they are automatically in violation, as a government agency.
Penny Arcade
I read your comment before I read the article, and my first thought was "of course, they mean if you are spending 15 dollars a month on an online game subscription, that's 15 dollars that you can't use to buy another game." But then I read the article, and just like you're saying, they are asking, "is WoW hurting the game industry because every 15 dollars a month spent on it is 15 dollars a month that's not spent on an inferior game."
So, if given a choice between a good game and a mediocre game, people will spend the money on the good game? NO FUCKING DUH. This being a characteristic of a _correctly_ functioning market, it's good simply because quality is being rewarded, which should weed out the bad development houses. In the long run, games should only improve. Why don't they do an article on EA using its market clout forcing shit down everyone's throats? _That's_ bad for the industry.
It was a cool idea, but after a while you figured out that there wasn't that much to actually do. I eventually got bored of it and left. Cheating was getting bad at about the time I left, and when I can back a while later, all the fucking cheaters (the same people who played 24 hours a day) had become "gamecops", deputized under Stefan to keep order, which is a real morale killer. Then they started charging for it, and one of the guys I knew from the beginning got thrown in jail for attempted child abduction of someone he met in the game. They changed all the graphics, and it was never as cool as when it was Zelda.
If you compare two general-purpose computers or embedded systems, they will generally contain the same type of components in them, things that will be abstracted away by your programming language and OS. If you look at the old game consoles, this was not the case for several reasons.
Firstly, you were not necessarily programming to a standard library, and you weren't necessarily programming in C or C++. You didn't get those abstractions.
Also, you were programming to specific hardware that was built into the unit to try to squeeze extra performance out of the hardware limits. So you end up with things like the tile engines. Every one of them has different modes that mean that the screen is a different resolution, the color depth is different, the color usage is different, the memory structure to store and display it is different, all your sprites are different pixel sizes and can have different numbers of sprites, all with their own limitations on how many you can have per line, etc.
Keep in mind that you never have enough power to do what you want to accomplish. So, if you build a game to the best of the hardware abilities of a system, you have just irrevocably made a commitment to that hardware platform. As soon as you want to port it to a different system, you hav e to resize all your sprites, change the color pallete around, change the gameplay to accommodate the smaller number of sprites for the other system, and optimize the assembler for that CPU. You get less memory, so now you have to come up with a way to swap sprites in and out of tile RAM without interrupting gameplay.
This shit is hard. Now, I can't speak for newer game systems except by what I've heard, but I do know for example, that some games from one system to the next still have to be pared down because of overall VRAM, texture and and system memory limitations from one machine to the other. On a PC, you might just code for the lowest common denominator, but that doesn't work on consoles. This is just a guess, I really can't speak to that. But at least in the past, there was a very good reason it was hard for game programmers to make "portable" code. The machines you were coding for were completely different at the implementation level of game coding. No one was even making cross-platform libraries for coding. There especially was not libraries for things like multithreading (the saturn had two CPUs, but the lack of good libraries for coding for the Saturn's unique features was one of the reasons that Saturn games never lived up to the expectations for the hardware. I wonder if this will be the same for Sony and their Cell architecure. It sounds like the same thing all over again, except that this time we have good general purpose libraries that will be ported to the system. Hopefully there will be people that know how to use them.)
OK, within minutes of posting this, a seed has connected. Thanks, whoever you are.
I'm getting zero connected seeds on the Windows version, anyone else having problems with it? I registered and all, but I don't think that matters here.
I'm wondering if the big change he is referring to is an MMORPG version of Zelda. Let me be the first to say KICKASS, and I will probably live in there if they make it.
Somone already did something like this. Back around 1998, some guy made a multiplayer online version of Legend of Zelda-a Link to the Past by reusing all the SNES game sprites and tiles. It was pretty cool. After a while, Nintendo caught on and sent them a cease-and-desist, and they changed the name to GRAAL, and slowly changed all the graphics. I guess that people still play Graal to this day. It was a good idea. I hope Nintendo does this.
I sit across from a spec writer that has a 450 Mhz Pentium 3. She's running Office 2003 with Infopath, the whole shebang no problems. She only uses MS Office, oh, all day for everything she does.
It's not as fast as Office 97, but it's still perfectly usable.
This is not an answer. Why is the publisher entitled to _all_ profits when they did not put up _all_ capital? IF you say "Because they can", well of course, but this would be exploitation, and it's obvious why artists would be against that :-|
As for the other two points, distribution doesn't change anything in the point (I left it off for brevity), and of course an artist has the ability to enter other artistic fields where they are capable of representing themselves.
I understand your point, but I think the problem is that publishers are treating artists like a commodity, when in reality their relationship is more like partners because art is capital because art is not interchangeable.
I just had an Attache die after it went through the washer and drier. It has a single weak point, a resistor or something is soldered onto one side of the circuit board. It detached in the wash, probably from drier heat I suppose. I was able to recover the files by having a friend copy my files to the hard drive while I carefully held the resistor back in place (thank God.)
Keys typically don't have problems going through the wash. I can't speak for all USB drives, but at least the Attache has a problem with this.
Buy USED CDs. The RIAA doesn't get a cut of that sale. The music's the same, as long as the CD's playable. No DRM and cheaper too, my friend.
I get all my CDs this way. You can even support local businesses and your community this way, instead of enriching a multinational corporation.
I think Microsoft has prior art on this one.
*ducks*
"Producers" need "creators" more than vice-versa. An artist without representation can represent himself, but a publisher without artists doesn't have anything to sell.
Anyway, it seems like a fair trade to me if the artist gets to keep their creations. The publisher's capital is cold hard cash, and the creator's capital is creations. Creative works aren't interchangeable like money, so the Creator is taking a much larger risk of getting screwed if they don't get to own what they put on the table. If I was the guy who designed tetris, I don't think it would be very fair that my idea for the one of the most popular games of all time should solely compensate the guy who just happened to have a distribution monopoly. I would demand a return on my investment, namely, that I gave them the right to distribute my awesome game idea that's making THEM a ton of money. Why do they deserve the return on my investment? Why do I NOT deserve it?
They are being programmed by the thousands in Flash. I have seen tons of cool little games made by one or two people that were far more fun than anything I could buy for sixty dollars for the PS2. However, there's a problem:
I'm a programmer myself, and my dissatisfaction with Flash is that it's ASS-SLOW. I tried writing an action-style game in it, and it choked after an unacceptably low amount of onscreen action was occurring. If Adobe/Macromedia/whoever would fix this, it would make a FANTASTIC game engine. It's easy to program for, and the output looks great.
I realize that Flash isn't ported to any video game consoles, but if you want to see indie games, they're on the PC in Flash. If Flash was ported to CE/Java so it worked on handhelds alone, and it would be a huge market.
Small correction, most of the time it's not us Linux fantics, whoever this may be, but law enforcement agencies that get on MS for abusing their monopoly.
Do you actually BELIEVE this? How did you manage to post to Slashdot without ever actually reading anything here? Even the most cursory examination of ANY Slashdot article talking about Microsoft would have blown this "correction" to smithereens.
Last time I checked, the government here in the US at least, has been deficient in this regard, while the bundling bitching goes on unabated on Slashdot. For the record, as a Linux user (NOT a zealot), I am somewhat critical of MS bundling apps, at least to intentionally blow another company out of the water.
Wait a minute. Capcom makes fighting games???
Nintendo did this more or less with Yoshi's island back in I think 1998.
If Yoshi ate a "puffball" in a particular level, everything would go all wavy, the music would turn
warbled and distorted, and Yoshi would teeter around like he was drunk while
you attempted to move him.
It wasn't on a continuous scale however, just on/off.
OK, the winner here has to be the 3DO, launching at like EIGHT HUNDRED DOLLARS. It would have been a ripoff if it had retailed at 50.
Jesus Christ, what idiots modded you up for this OBVIOUSLY wrong statement? 2000 years? Most women in Europe didn't get the right to participate in government in any way until the 20th century.
You know what, every time anyone makes a joke about nazis killing jews or japanese getting nuked or Sept. 11, that's all cool with the majority of the Slashdot crowd. The defense posts always are plentiful and modded +5 Insightful. But boy, when the prison-rape jokes come out, there's a big turnaround.
It's an interesting disparity, it seems a lot of Slashdotters can yuk it up when six million other people die, but the thought of one person getting plugged in prison really, really bothers them. I wonder what this says about Slashdotters?
Let's hope his new cellmate's orders weren't. Wouldn't it be a shame if he found out a majority of his Viagra orders were delivered to federal prisons.