Yes. I think a better question would be "why do the people who enjoy work have fun doing it?"
I've been relatively fortunate in terms of the jobs I've had, but in my experience fun was basically the default result of skilled people working in a relaxed environment doing things that they liked.
I would think that a lack of fun is not an indication that there needs to be management-approved funny websites on the intranet, but that something is wrong with the department or company. Maybe the workload is too high. Maybe pay is too low. Maybe there are too many overly negative people.
There seems to be some kind of mentality in corporate managers that they need more complicated solutions to problems, when really they could just ask their staff - privately and confidentially - and get better answers. Are your employees seeming down? Ask them why, and make it clear that what they say is off the record. Do you want to know what they're spending the most time working on? Ask them instead of spending millions of dollars on fancy applications that give you a bar graph to look at.
Personally, I'm waiting for the Director's Cut of the Bible. I hear the studio finally coughed up the money for the Lilith effects shots, so we'll get to hear the unedited version of this line that includes a qualification for people made from mud instead of dust.
Also, it would be totally sweet for the sequel if they played off this in an Indiana Jones-style climax where a bunch of people are cut down by the wrath of God. The men would explode into clouds of dust a la the Nazi who drank from the wrong Grail, and the women would collapse inwards until only a single rib remained.
Do you feel like a sellout for, well, selling L0pht to Symantec?
I'm sure that when you sell your company for a swimming pool full of cash, you automatically earn the ability to drown any such feelings in a sea of hot girls/boys and recreational psychoactives.
Please explain how a crypto export ban is designed to control the US population.
Well, literally it restricts what US citizens can do in some way.
More specifically, it means that businesses can't make money selling export-banned products to the rest of the world. I assume it also means that researchers can't collaborate on projects related to banned technology with foreigners.
On the previous generation of DRM'd CDs, if you declined the EULA, it wouldn't install the playback software, but it would install some sort of driver that would prevent you from listening to or ripping the protected disc. The infamous Velvet Revolver album was like this.
I am wondering if that's what's going on here - if you decline the EULA, you are saying "I don't agree to the terms of the player," but the protection system is installed so that you can't decline the EULA, then rip the CD.
Obviously it's still no justification for installing software without your permission, but it's not as insidious as literally doing what you tell the installer NOT to do.
No web browser -- although is that really a bad thing? I need not mention the browser options on a PC here.
I'm with you so far, but then...
No HDMI support. The PC already has it.
The PC can't play Xbox 360 games. I think the author is concerned that people with HDMI-input-only TVs are going to end up getting the short end of the stick in terms of a digital connection for their Xbox.
No WMV-HD or MPEG-4 AVI playback. PC has it.
Not everyone has a PC hooked up to their TV. I did, when I had a small apartment. But now that I have a separate room for my computer gear versus regular entertainment electronics, I don't have a way to watch anything other than plain-Jane DVDs in my living room. Eventually I'll get around to building a quiet media PC, but it's not something I can afford for awhile.
I won't own a 360 for awhile either, but it would have been nice to finally have a piece of hardware that could play the WMV-HD T2 DVD I got years ago with the Ultimate Edition.
Now, my nits to pick with the article:
Mistake #11: No pressure sensitive face buttons
The travel distance on console controller buttons is so small that I don't see the point. A friend of mine loved this PS2 feature in Baldur's Gate, but I think it would be more hassle than it's worth.
The system-wide video calibration is a really good point, though. Pretty much every console I've ever owned could have used that. The transaction security is also important, although not to me because I hate online gaming and refuse to buy into the nickel-and-dime-to-death model that MS is pushing on the 360.
Yeah, I think that's the only way it could work on film.
Card's description of the game is as if Ender is experiencing it for himself, rather than playing it on a 2D screen. I've had a few gaming experiences that were intense enough that *I* could forget I wasn't really in the game world, but it wouldn't make for compelling viewing by a third party.
When I first heard about an Ender's Game film, this was actually one of my biggest concerns, because I had this image in my mind of the game (which is obviously very important) being rendered like Super Mario Brothers, with everything all pixellated sprites.
The simple fact remains that with PC gaming you don't usually have to buy a new $500 system to play that new game you so desperately want to play.
I've always had to.
Case in point - right now I have an Athlon 1700+-based system I build a few years ago (my PS2 would have been a year old at the time). I really want to play Oblivion when it comes out, but my GeForce4 burned itself up last year and I've been running an old Voodoo 5000.
I have to buy a new video card, because the Voodoo is ancient and doesn't support DX9. So that's $150-$200. However, the Athlon 1700+ is pretty long in the tooth and won't play the game properly, so I have to replace that too ($150). Which means replacing the motherboard ($100) (which would be necessary anyway since my current one doesn't have a PCI-E slot), which means replacing the RAM ($100). While I can keep my case, PSU, keyboard, mouse, monitors, hard drive, CD/DVD drives, and sound card, I'm still looking at at least $500.
I'm sure there will always be a profitable niche market for certain genres on the PC - FPS (particularly online), MMOG, and RTS. But what I think the article means is that less popular genres like adventure are effectively dead there. The console market has many more customers, so if your title sells to 1% of console gamers it's much more profitable than 1% of PC gamers.
Of course, casual PC games (like Popcap) are going to be a good way to make cash too. But less mainstream games (e.g. Legacy of Kain) don't sell enough copies on the PC to break even, let alone make money. On consoles, they do very well, partly because there are so many more potential buyers.
Also, I think publishers tend to favour consoles because it means they can eliminate their tech support department. If anything goes wrong with a console game, it's either a defective console or a defective disk. No patches, no troubleshooting drivers, etc.
There is nothing in the 360's launch lineup that makes me go "wow! I've never seen anything that cool before, and I have to have it."
Exactly. The 360 launch titles have the same problem as the original Xbox - they're a bunch of mediocre titles that would be the filler games if the console had been out for 1-2 years. The possible exception is PGR3, although not for me. I played PGR once, and while it was pretty, I didn't find it fun at all. At least there's no Azurik this time, but still.
There used to be two "launch window" titles I was interested in - Oblivion, and Chrome Hounds. I'm going to be playing Oblivion on the PC instead, to avoid being nickeled-and-dimed to death by the forced Live component, and one game is not enough to convince me to buy a $400 console.
Besides, there's still plenty of current-gen stuff I haven't gotten around to yet, and now I can get it for 1/3 the price of a 360 game.
So, VEIL is basically the Captain Power toys from the 80s? Rad. I can't wait for all the characters in movies and television to have the seizure-inducing red bits on their armour.
Seriously, though, am I the only one that sees a conflict of interest in legally requiring patented, proprietary technology to be used by everyone who manufactures a particular class of device?
Can you imagine someone spending a few grand on AV and then being too cheap to buy a DVD?
Yes, actually. I have a friend like that. Giant plasma TV. Homebuilt theatre in his basement. One or more terabytes of storage for video ripped from Netflix rentals.
The fact that people are actually taking this "make videogames accessible to the handicapped" seriously indicates that we've gone off the deep end in this country. Life isn't equal and it never will be.
Agreed.
The sense of entitlement in America is getting ludicrous.
My granddad lost his leg on an oceanographic expedition. Did he whine and moan about it, or get a prosthetic and learn to do everything he cared about using it instead? I think part of the reason we're falling behind in the world is that we've lost that attitude.
Maybe I should go petition the Air Force and NASA to make their jet fighters and the Space Shuttle accessible to pilots with terrible eyesight.
Up next: Disabled fans shut out of paintball fields and mountaineering.
The alternative appears to have been shutting the game down. Either way, the people who preferred the old interface lose it. I don't see what the problem is.
You have lots of people working on research projects. Please stop letting them issue press releases announcing their WORLD-SHATTERING PRODUCT OF TEH FUTURE!!!!! when it's really only a preliminary experiment that is as yet completely unable to shatter the world.
If you are sitting on the console of your server using the GUI, I would suggest that you are not a very experienced sysadmin.
I usually RDP into servers to do admin work because otherwise it's painfully slow. They're in another state, and doing things over RDP is 5-10x faster than if I'm running the console on my workstation.
Obviously not all software is like this. I use a remote console for our Checkpoint firewalls, and it's just as fast as from the server.
My year-plus old copy of Official XBox Magazine had more coverage than IGN and Gamespot combined of an unreleased game I was interested in a few weeks ago.
I don't watch TV, but a good way to tell if this really is a hoax on the audience would be to wait for some decent footage of the windows. If it has parallax and looks real, then the series is probably being shot on a green-screen set, and the pretend cadets are just pretending to see something through the pretend windows.
IMO if they are using display screens, it will be glaringly obvious to television viewers when they're shown at anything like close range.
Average joe however might only occasionally get pirate games off someone he knows so therefore may still actually buy games.
This is a creature I have never met. Everyone I know who pirates games talks about "buying the ones that are good enough," but none of them actually do it. As soon as the technology exists to bootleg games, they do so exclusively.
I know for a fact that this is what put a lot of developers off of the PS1 before it was commercially dead. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a significant factor in the end of the Dreamcast as well.
You are still comparing things too literally. This is why I said that it had the spirit of the series, even though it wasn't consistent with it.
E.g.:
That isn't the Relical in War, and that isn't Aeon climbing up into it (I think that's Aeon's father).
The design of the floaty thing in War is nearly identical to the floaty thing in the movie. It's also got an opening on the underside, from which long things trail, and a Monican climbs up. The purpose is different, but visually it's the same. That's what I meant.
The original series has almost no consistency, or internal logic. It's more like a dream than a standard story-telling. I see the film as just another variation on that dream.
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Yes. I think a better question would be "why do the people who enjoy work have fun doing it?"
I've been relatively fortunate in terms of the jobs I've had, but in my experience fun was basically the default result of skilled people working in a relaxed environment doing things that they liked.
I would think that a lack of fun is not an indication that there needs to be management-approved funny websites on the intranet, but that something is wrong with the department or company. Maybe the workload is too high. Maybe pay is too low. Maybe there are too many overly negative people.
There seems to be some kind of mentality in corporate managers that they need more complicated solutions to problems, when really they could just ask their staff - privately and confidentially - and get better answers. Are your employees seeming down? Ask them why, and make it clear that what they say is off the record. Do you want to know what they're spending the most time working on? Ask them instead of spending millions of dollars on fancy applications that give you a bar graph to look at.
It has the perfect cross-marketing endorsement potential as well.
for dust you are and to dust you will return
Personally, I'm waiting for the Director's Cut of the Bible. I hear the studio finally coughed up the money for the Lilith effects shots, so we'll get to hear the unedited version of this line that includes a qualification for people made from mud instead of dust.
Also, it would be totally sweet for the sequel if they played off this in an Indiana Jones-style climax where a bunch of people are cut down by the wrath of God. The men would explode into clouds of dust a la the Nazi who drank from the wrong Grail, and the women would collapse inwards until only a single rib remained.
Do you feel like a sellout for, well, selling L0pht to Symantec?
I'm sure that when you sell your company for a swimming pool full of cash, you automatically earn the ability to drown any such feelings in a sea of hot girls/boys and recreational psychoactives.
Please explain how a crypto export ban is designed to control the US population.
Well, literally it restricts what US citizens can do in some way.
More specifically, it means that businesses can't make money selling export-banned products to the rest of the world. I assume it also means that researchers can't collaborate on projects related to banned technology with foreigners.
On the previous generation of DRM'd CDs, if you declined the EULA, it wouldn't install the playback software, but it would install some sort of driver that would prevent you from listening to or ripping the protected disc. The infamous Velvet Revolver album was like this.
I am wondering if that's what's going on here - if you decline the EULA, you are saying "I don't agree to the terms of the player," but the protection system is installed so that you can't decline the EULA, then rip the CD.
Obviously it's still no justification for installing software without your permission, but it's not as insidious as literally doing what you tell the installer NOT to do.
Boy, you just fell off the wrong tree and hit every branch on the way down.
No, he's right if you take it literally. It will be travelling well above escape velocity. Obviously it's going to slow down somehow.
No MSN music. The PC already has it.
No web browser -- although is that really a bad thing? I need not mention the browser options on a PC here.
I'm with you so far, but then...
No HDMI support. The PC already has it.
The PC can't play Xbox 360 games. I think the author is concerned that people with HDMI-input-only TVs are going to end up getting the short end of the stick in terms of a digital connection for their Xbox.
No WMV-HD or MPEG-4 AVI playback. PC has it.
Not everyone has a PC hooked up to their TV. I did, when I had a small apartment. But now that I have a separate room for my computer gear versus regular entertainment electronics, I don't have a way to watch anything other than plain-Jane DVDs in my living room. Eventually I'll get around to building a quiet media PC, but it's not something I can afford for awhile.
I won't own a 360 for awhile either, but it would have been nice to finally have a piece of hardware that could play the WMV-HD T2 DVD I got years ago with the Ultimate Edition.
Now, my nits to pick with the article:
Mistake #11: No pressure sensitive face buttons
The travel distance on console controller buttons is so small that I don't see the point. A friend of mine loved this PS2 feature in Baldur's Gate, but I think it would be more hassle than it's worth.
The system-wide video calibration is a really good point, though. Pretty much every console I've ever owned could have used that. The transaction security is also important, although not to me because I hate online gaming and refuse to buy into the nickel-and-dime-to-death model that MS is pushing on the 360.
Make it a virtual reality / holodeck type game.
Yeah, I think that's the only way it could work on film.
Card's description of the game is as if Ender is experiencing it for himself, rather than playing it on a 2D screen. I've had a few gaming experiences that were intense enough that *I* could forget I wasn't really in the game world, but it wouldn't make for compelling viewing by a third party.
When I first heard about an Ender's Game film, this was actually one of my biggest concerns, because I had this image in my mind of the game (which is obviously very important) being rendered like Super Mario Brothers, with everything all pixellated sprites.
The simple fact remains that with PC gaming you don't usually have to buy a new $500 system to play that new game you so desperately want to play.
I've always had to.
Case in point - right now I have an Athlon 1700+-based system I build a few years ago (my PS2 would have been a year old at the time). I really want to play Oblivion when it comes out, but my GeForce4 burned itself up last year and I've been running an old Voodoo 5000.
I have to buy a new video card, because the Voodoo is ancient and doesn't support DX9. So that's $150-$200. However, the Athlon 1700+ is pretty long in the tooth and won't play the game properly, so I have to replace that too ($150). Which means replacing the motherboard ($100) (which would be necessary anyway since my current one doesn't have a PCI-E slot), which means replacing the RAM ($100). While I can keep my case, PSU, keyboard, mouse, monitors, hard drive, CD/DVD drives, and sound card, I'm still looking at at least $500.
I'm sure there will always be a profitable niche market for certain genres on the PC - FPS (particularly online), MMOG, and RTS. But what I think the article means is that less popular genres like adventure are effectively dead there. The console market has many more customers, so if your title sells to 1% of console gamers it's much more profitable than 1% of PC gamers.
Of course, casual PC games (like Popcap) are going to be a good way to make cash too. But less mainstream games (e.g. Legacy of Kain) don't sell enough copies on the PC to break even, let alone make money. On consoles, they do very well, partly because there are so many more potential buyers.
Also, I think publishers tend to favour consoles because it means they can eliminate their tech support department. If anything goes wrong with a console game, it's either a defective console or a defective disk. No patches, no troubleshooting drivers, etc.
There is nothing in the 360's launch lineup that makes me go "wow! I've never seen anything that cool before, and I have to have it."
Exactly. The 360 launch titles have the same problem as the original Xbox - they're a bunch of mediocre titles that would be the filler games if the console had been out for 1-2 years. The possible exception is PGR3, although not for me. I played PGR once, and while it was pretty, I didn't find it fun at all. At least there's no Azurik this time, but still.
There used to be two "launch window" titles I was interested in - Oblivion, and Chrome Hounds. I'm going to be playing Oblivion on the PC instead, to avoid being nickeled-and-dimed to death by the forced Live component, and one game is not enough to convince me to buy a $400 console.
Besides, there's still plenty of current-gen stuff I haven't gotten around to yet, and now I can get it for 1/3 the price of a 360 game.
So, VEIL is basically the Captain Power toys from the 80s? Rad. I can't wait for all the characters in movies and television to have the seizure-inducing red bits on their armour.
Seriously, though, am I the only one that sees a conflict of interest in legally requiring patented, proprietary technology to be used by everyone who manufactures a particular class of device?
Can you imagine someone spending a few grand on AV and then being too cheap to buy a DVD?
Yes, actually. I have a friend like that. Giant plasma TV. Homebuilt theatre in his basement. One or more terabytes of storage for video ripped from Netflix rentals.
One of the great mysteries of the universe: who at Sun though it was a good idea to put the caps lock key below the caps lock key?
So... Sun keyboards have dual caps lock keys? For twice the caps locking capability?
The fact that people are actually taking this "make videogames accessible to the handicapped" seriously indicates that we've gone off the deep end in this country. Life isn't equal and it never will be.
Agreed.
The sense of entitlement in America is getting ludicrous.
My granddad lost his leg on an oceanographic expedition. Did he whine and moan about it, or get a prosthetic and learn to do everything he cared about using it instead? I think part of the reason we're falling behind in the world is that we've lost that attitude.
Maybe I should go petition the Air Force and NASA to make their jet fighters and the Space Shuttle accessible to pilots with terrible eyesight.
Up next: Disabled fans shut out of paintball fields and mountaineering.
The alternative appears to have been shutting the game down. Either way, the people who preferred the old interface lose it. I don't see what the problem is.
You have lots of people working on research projects. Please stop letting them issue press releases announcing their WORLD-SHATTERING PRODUCT OF TEH FUTURE!!!!! when it's really only a preliminary experiment that is as yet completely unable to shatter the world.
It's probably a reference to The Royal Game of Ur.
Windows Update does not refuse security related updates for non-authentic copies of Windows.
However, SP2 itself will not install on pirated copies of Windows.
I tried putting SP2 on one of my neighbours' computers, and it refused because it knew the serial number was one used by pirates.
If you can't install SP2, you can't have all of the up-to-date security. So the GP is correct.
If you are sitting on the console of your server using the GUI, I would suggest that you are not a very experienced sysadmin.
I usually RDP into servers to do admin work because otherwise it's painfully slow. They're in another state, and doing things over RDP is 5-10x faster than if I'm running the console on my workstation.
Obviously not all software is like this. I use a remote console for our Checkpoint firewalls, and it's just as fast as from the server.
and up-to-the-minute news.
My year-plus old copy of Official XBox Magazine had more coverage than IGN and Gamespot combined of an unreleased game I was interested in a few weeks ago.
I don't watch TV, but a good way to tell if this really is a hoax on the audience would be to wait for some decent footage of the windows. If it has parallax and looks real, then the series is probably being shot on a green-screen set, and the pretend cadets are just pretending to see something through the pretend windows.
IMO if they are using display screens, it will be glaringly obvious to television viewers when they're shown at anything like close range.
Average joe however might only occasionally get pirate games off someone he knows so therefore may still actually buy games.
This is a creature I have never met. Everyone I know who pirates games talks about "buying the ones that are good enough," but none of them actually do it. As soon as the technology exists to bootleg games, they do so exclusively.
I know for a fact that this is what put a lot of developers off of the PS1 before it was commercially dead. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a significant factor in the end of the Dreamcast as well.
You are still comparing things too literally. This is why I said that it had the spirit of the series, even though it wasn't consistent with it.
E.g.:
That isn't the Relical in War, and that isn't Aeon climbing up into it (I think that's Aeon's father).
The design of the floaty thing in War is nearly identical to the floaty thing in the movie. It's also got an opening on the underside, from which long things trail, and a Monican climbs up. The purpose is different, but visually it's the same. That's what I meant.
The original series has almost no consistency, or internal logic. It's more like a dream than a standard story-telling. I see the film as just another variation on that dream.
...the virus backstory for the movie is from the original Liquid TV short as well. So is Trevor researching a cure for it.