That's why people still buy software, DVDs, CDs, etc., with crippling copy protection.
What crippling copy protection is that? I haven't had any trouble duplicating any of those things. DVDs are the "hardest," and DVD Shrink does those for me automatically on the rare occasions when e.g. I want to de-regioncode Wonderful Days so it plays on the DVD player in my living room.
The copy "protection" on current media is at worst an inconvenience. I rarely notice it, and when I do it's more like having to pat the RIAA/MPAA on the head and give them a gold star sticker for effort.
If they implement the things they *really* want, like Divx-style remote authentication, self-destructing players, et cetera, that will be a different story. People are not going to accept those kinds of restricitons on the things they buy.
Is it still the case that you can't get AA experience at 60?
I'm pretty sure AA doesn't discriminate based on age. You might want to consider other support options if you're not religious, but my granddad was the only atheist senior citizen I've ever met.
Games give players the illusion that they are one of the characters, so most of them are going to become more emotionally attached to what goes on in the story (assuming there is one with any substance, of course).
Now if only more of them can be scripted by quality writers, and voiced by professional actors instead of the Capcom Troupe.
Parent is correct, grandparent is wrong..NET apps built against version n of the runtime are always compatible with versions >n. That's all I care about, because it means I can just install the latest version and everything will work.
Seriously, every single "enterprise"-class commercial app that we use which is written in Java is like this. These are the ones that cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So in exchange for their privacy, they'll always have the perfect defence and counterattack ready if someone starts slinging Trac-Balls at them? Sounds like a deal to me.
Some trivia from one of my electroacoustic music professors back at university:
Apparently it's so hard to get a genuine ricochet that Hollywood has 2 or 3 recorded sounds of it that all the foley/FX people have been using since the black & white era.
We have not had a strike on US soil in four years.
This would be a more impressive figure it if included one or both of:
- An indication of how many aborted and/or prevented attacks there actually were during those four years.
- Some way of knowing how the numbers would change based on a more elegant and well-planned response.
Two countries that supported terrorism no longer exist.
Which countries are those? Did I miss the US invading countries other than Afghanistan and Iraq? Because those are still there, minus a tiny handful of their overall populations.
I think "shock and awe" was a valid description.
Yes, and I think theoretically it's a great strategy - just like it was when it was called a Blitzkrieg. But that doesn't mean it was the right thing to do in that particular situation.
Go ahead an tell me Iraq would be better off long-term with Saddam in charge.
I'm not a citizen of Iraq. The question should be "as a US citizen, am *I* better off long-term without Saddam in charge, given the cost?" and I think the answer is obviously "no."
Was he a vile person? Yes. There are lots of them in the world - including here in America.
Are the Iraqis mostly appreciative that he's gone? Probably. I think the lack of a significant anti-Saddam resistance before the invasion is an indication that it didn't matter enough to them that we should have cared either.
I think we had things right back in WWII. We stayed out of it until we were really sure it was necessary, and then we used overwhelming force to stomp all over the countries that deserved it. "Measure twice, cut once."
Designing to open standards, avoiding unnecessary vendor lock-in and maximising interoperability are Good Things.
I don't think the grandparent was arguing about that. It's just not always practical to do what's theoretically best in a business environment.
Here's a real-world example:
One of the systems my group supports is MS SMS. We wanted to add a front-end to the web reporting system to make it easy for people to pull up some specific kinds of information. The caveat is that my group is engineering, so we can't spend as much dev time as a dedicated dev group.
So, we basically had three choices:
- Throw some ASP.NET stuff together in the Visual Studio form designer.
- Spend a few extra weeks hand-coding based on open standards, then testing on a bunch of browsers no one in the company uses (I use Firefox, but I'm the only one).
- Request that the actual web app dev team make it properly. ETA: 2 years.
Obviously we went with the first choice, because it was the most practical of the three.
And what other unnecessary links to Live are they planning?
My theory after reading the Oblivion article (and others) is "as many as possible." I think MS is actively encouraging it.
The short-term reason is so they can make money every time you spend a dollar to get the fancy armour in Oblivion, or paint job in PGR3.
But the long-term reason is that they will be able to turn off the Live component of the games you bought when the sequel comes out, forcing you to upgrade.
It's not the price that puts me off, but what the monthly subscription model implies - no end to the game, and no way to play once it becomes unpopular and they turn off the servers.
I like games with a story arc. I like to buy them, play through the story, and have them be over. But that isn't really possible with a subscription model. People might play through 2 or 3 times if there are multiple paths, but they won't keep playing for 2-3 years.
I also like to replay the games I really like years down the road. When I was at university in 1999, I dug up my old copy of Wasteland and replayed it. That was awesome. Would I be able to do that in 2020 with World of Warcraft? I doubt it, even disregarding that it wouldn't have the same "story."
I was reading a gaming magazine today, and it had coverage of a bunch of XBox 360 games. Nearly all of them require Live to get the full experience, even for things that shouldn't - like collecting the high-end items in Oblivion. I guess I won't be playing that one, as much as I liked Morrowind.
All of this stuff looks shiny and neat, until it becomes unpopular and the back-end infrastructure gets turned off. The Steel Battalion fans just found that out for themselves - Capcom is shutting down the servers, which is going to break a good chunk of the OFFLINE single-player game.
"Do you want to be treated like an 1d107 n00b on startup?"
Every time MS announces a new version of Windows, I hope that it will include the "I'm not a fucking moron" button.
This button would show up when you log on as a super-user instead of the "manage my servar! w00t!" window.
It would show all files, stop the "this is teh important foldar!" message when you go to things like %systemroot%, switch to details view in Explorer, show all file extensions, show icons on the desktop, switch to the classic start menu, disable themes, etc.
I like to run multiple instances of applications. If I tell my OS I want another copy of something open, I don't want it to switch to the one that's already running.
It would be even worse to make some applications behave the current way, and others switch to the instance that's already running. This is what a lot of MS apps do now, and it's really annoying.
You can tell if they use infrared (IR) instead because you see red streaks between some of the solar panel tiles. Some of the wiring between the tiles appearently reflects heavier in IR.
Interesting. They have that colour swatch thing on the sundial as well, but it's not as easy to use as I thought it would be.
Something else I noticed is that Mars is apparently much more uniform across wide bands of the spectrum than Earth. I had downloaded a bunch of the rover imagery to experiment with false colour systems. It was disappointing that squishing all of the spectral bands into the human range gave me a picture nearly identical to the RGB alone.
NASA doesn't invent colours from nothing, but that's not necessarily the same as saying that their images represent what you'd see with your eyes if you were on Mars.
Both Mars rovers have cameras which are sensitive from the near-IR to the UV. The greyscale images are taken by putting a bandpass filter over the lens, and usually they'll take the same shot with 3-7 different filters.
Three of the filters correspond to roughly the same frequencies that the receptors in your eyes are sensitive to. So they can approximate what it would look like in person by assigning the three images taken using those filters to the R, G, and B channels in a digital image.
There is a bit more processing involved. Human eyes are more sensitive to green than red or blue, so the additional processing is probably to take that into account.
But anyway, the short answer is that generally the Mars images are as "true" in terms of colour as what you'd get with a colour digital camera here, setting aside that the three channels are taken at slightly different times.
There are a few exceptions, in that I believe sometimes they may substitute the nearest infrared band for red. If you have to pick one or the other, near IR is useful because it scatters less in an atmosphere.
Other NASA images (like from the Hubble) are made the same way, they just assign completely different spectra to the three channels (assuming they're using an RGB model, which isn't a given). For example, maybe they'll assign radio waves to the red channel, IR to green, and X-rays to blue. Again, they're not *inventing* colours, even though it's not what you'd see with your own eyes. It's like pitch-shifting bat squeeks down into the audible range so humans can hear them.
So I ask, what exactly are people expecting, creatively that they are not getting now?
Nothing.
It's the overdone, familiar genres that make money. Therefore those are what most people are expecting.
There is a vocal minority of gamers who complain that there are so few innovative games out there, but when they're actually released, they sell like crap:
- P.N.03 (and its cancelled sibling Dead Phoenix) for the Gamecube - Rez and Ico for the PS2 - Beyond Good and Evil - Battlezone and Sacrifice for the PC
The only kind of oddball games I can think of that sold well recently were the original Soul Reaver (which seems to have been a fluke - its sequels didn't match its success), and the Metroid franchise, which is pretty much its own formula now anyway.
What makes tons of money?
- The newest FPS - The newest licensed sports game - The newest racing game - The newest fighting game - The newest knockoff of whatever is popular at the moment (e.g. GTA clones now, RTS games a few years ago) - Knockoffs of 25-year-old arcade games for cellphones - Movie licenses
All of these have an implied "good" attached, e.g. Fight Club the Shitty Game is not going to outsell Soul Calibur 2 just because it's newer.
If unusual games were profitable, there wouldn't be a shortage of them.
but most of the time its just so they can include a readme.
I started zipping the A/V files on my websites a few years ago. It wasn't to make them smaller, it was because MS changed the default behaviour of IE to stream them directly instead of downloading them.
My bandwidth usage skyrocketed because people would stream the same files over and over again.
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That's why people still buy software, DVDs, CDs, etc., with crippling copy protection.
What crippling copy protection is that? I haven't had any trouble duplicating any of those things. DVDs are the "hardest," and DVD Shrink does those for me automatically on the rare occasions when e.g. I want to de-regioncode Wonderful Days so it plays on the DVD player in my living room.
The copy "protection" on current media is at worst an inconvenience. I rarely notice it, and when I do it's more like having to pat the RIAA/MPAA on the head and give them a gold star sticker for effort.
If they implement the things they *really* want, like Divx-style remote authentication, self-destructing players, et cetera, that will be a different story. People are not going to accept those kinds of restricitons on the things they buy.
and it can feature recognize Jehovah's Witnesses.
SENTRY GUN (vocoder effect): Please put down your religious crusade. You have twenty seconds to comply.
DICK JONES: I suggest you do as it says, Mr. Kinney.
Is it still the case that you can't get AA experience at 60?
I'm pretty sure AA doesn't discriminate based on age. You might want to consider other support options if you're not religious, but my granddad was the only atheist senior citizen I've ever met.
Games give players the illusion that they are one of the characters, so most of them are going to become more emotionally attached to what goes on in the story (assuming there is one with any substance, of course).
Now if only more of them can be scripted by quality writers, and voiced by professional actors instead of the Capcom Troupe.
Quit using the Microsoft Java tools.
Where did I mention MS? These are all Sun JRE requirements, not MS.
Parent is correct, grandparent is wrong. .NET apps built against version n of the runtime are always compatible with versions >n. That's all I care about, because it means I can just install the latest version and everything will work.
you must be doing something really wrong.
It's not me, it's the vendors' developers.
Seriously, every single "enterprise"-class commercial app that we use which is written in Java is like this. These are the ones that cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Why you wouldn't use an existing and mature cross platform language that is non-microsoft is beyond me.
C# doesn't require that you have version 1.4.01_04 of the runtime installed for one app, 1.4.01_03 installed for a second, and 1.5.02_01 for a third.
Java is an awesome language, but the runtime-version-specific nature of *every* Java app we have at work ruins it in my mind.
I nominate "Berserker" from Clerks as the Vista theme.
Sweet!
So in exchange for their privacy, they'll always have the perfect defence and counterattack ready if someone starts slinging
Trac-Balls at them? Sounds like a deal to me.
And how does a "microrobot" mean that we're "one step closer to a nanorobot"?
Building microrobots that are programmed to build nanorobots is probably easier than building nanorobots directly.
No, there is a far more sinister reason for my signature. But, that is for another time and another place...
You bought it for your children and now they'll only eat food that comes from R'leyh?
Ricochets mostly happen in Hollywood movies.
Some trivia from one of my electroacoustic music professors back at university:
Apparently it's so hard to get a genuine ricochet that Hollywood has 2 or 3 recorded sounds of it that all the foley/FX people have been using since the black & white era.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade?
I was thinking Crimson Skies myself.
We have not had a strike on US soil in four years.
This would be a more impressive figure it if included one or both of:
- An indication of how many aborted and/or prevented attacks there actually were during those four years.
- Some way of knowing how the numbers would change based on a more elegant and well-planned response.
Two countries that supported terrorism no longer exist.
Which countries are those? Did I miss the US invading countries other than Afghanistan and Iraq? Because those are still there, minus a tiny handful of their overall populations.
I think "shock and awe" was a valid description.
Yes, and I think theoretically it's a great strategy - just like it was when it was called a Blitzkrieg. But that doesn't mean it was the right thing to do in that particular situation.
Go ahead an tell me Iraq would be better off long-term with Saddam in charge.
I'm not a citizen of Iraq. The question should be "as a US citizen, am *I* better off long-term without Saddam in charge, given the cost?" and I think the answer is obviously "no."
Was he a vile person? Yes. There are lots of them in the world - including here in America.
Are the Iraqis mostly appreciative that he's gone? Probably. I think the lack of a significant anti-Saddam resistance before the invasion is an indication that it didn't matter enough to them that we should have cared either.
I think we had things right back in WWII. We stayed out of it until we were really sure it was necessary, and then we used overwhelming force to stomp all over the countries that deserved it. "Measure twice, cut once."
Designing to open standards, avoiding unnecessary vendor lock-in and maximising interoperability are Good Things.
I don't think the grandparent was arguing about that. It's just not always practical to do what's theoretically best in a business environment.
Here's a real-world example:
One of the systems my group supports is MS SMS. We wanted to add a front-end to the web reporting system to make it easy for people to pull up some specific kinds of information. The caveat is that my group is engineering, so we can't spend as much dev time as a dedicated dev group.
So, we basically had three choices:
- Throw some ASP.NET stuff together in the Visual Studio form designer.
- Spend a few extra weeks hand-coding based on open standards, then testing on a bunch of browsers no one in the company uses (I use Firefox, but I'm the only one).
- Request that the actual web app dev team make it properly. ETA: 2 years.
Obviously we went with the first choice, because it was the most practical of the three.
What magazine was that in?
Official Xbox Magazine.
And what other unnecessary links to Live are they planning?
My theory after reading the Oblivion article (and others) is "as many as possible." I think MS is actively encouraging it.
The short-term reason is so they can make money every time you spend a dollar to get the fancy armour in Oblivion, or paint job in PGR3.
But the long-term reason is that they will be able to turn off the Live component of the games you bought when the sequel comes out, forcing you to upgrade.
There is still a huge fan base of SC and Diablo players. Will those servers be online in five years? I think that's unlikely.
Anyway, it's beside the point because both of those games are still fully playable offline.
Is WoW really worth that much?
It's not the price that puts me off, but what the monthly subscription model implies - no end to the game, and no way to play once it becomes unpopular and they turn off the servers.
I like games with a story arc. I like to buy them, play through the story, and have them be over. But that isn't really possible with a subscription model. People might play through 2 or 3 times if there are multiple paths, but they won't keep playing for 2-3 years.
I also like to replay the games I really like years down the road. When I was at university in 1999, I dug up my old copy of Wasteland and replayed it. That was awesome. Would I be able to do that in 2020 with World of Warcraft? I doubt it, even disregarding that it wouldn't have the same "story."
I was reading a gaming magazine today, and it had coverage of a bunch of XBox 360 games. Nearly all of them require Live to get the full experience, even for things that shouldn't - like collecting the high-end items in Oblivion. I guess I won't be playing that one, as much as I liked Morrowind.
All of this stuff looks shiny and neat, until it becomes unpopular and the back-end infrastructure gets turned off. The Steel Battalion fans just found that out for themselves - Capcom is shutting down the servers, which is going to break a good chunk of the OFFLINE single-player game.
"Do you want to be treated like an 1d107 n00b on startup?"
Every time MS announces a new version of Windows, I hope that it will include the "I'm not a fucking moron" button.
This button would show up when you log on as a super-user instead of the "manage my servar! w00t!" window.
It would show all files, stop the "this is teh important foldar!" message when you go to things like %systemroot%, switch to details view in Explorer, show all file extensions, show icons on the desktop, switch to the classic start menu, disable themes, etc.
Instead, you pop up the existing GAIM instance.
No. Seriously.
I like to run multiple instances of applications. If I tell my OS I want another copy of something open, I don't want it to switch to the one that's already running.
It would be even worse to make some applications behave the current way, and others switch to the instance that's already running. This is what a lot of MS apps do now, and it's really annoying.
You can tell if they use infrared (IR) instead because you see red streaks between some of the solar panel tiles. Some of the wiring between the tiles appearently reflects heavier in IR.
Interesting. They have that colour swatch thing on the sundial as well, but it's not as easy to use as I thought it would be.
Something else I noticed is that Mars is apparently much more uniform across wide bands of the spectrum than Earth. I had downloaded a bunch of the rover imagery to experiment with false colour systems. It was disappointing that squishing all of the spectral bands into the human range gave me a picture nearly identical to the RGB alone.
NASA doesn't invent colours from nothing, but that's not necessarily the same as saying that their images represent what you'd see with your eyes if you were on Mars.
Both Mars rovers have cameras which are sensitive from the near-IR to the UV. The greyscale images are taken by putting a bandpass filter over the lens, and usually they'll take the same shot with 3-7 different filters.
Three of the filters correspond to roughly the same frequencies that the receptors in your eyes are sensitive to. So they can approximate what it would look like in person by assigning the three images taken using those filters to the R, G, and B channels in a digital image.
There is a bit more processing involved. Human eyes are more sensitive to green than red or blue, so the additional processing is probably to take that into account.
But anyway, the short answer is that generally the Mars images are as "true" in terms of colour as what you'd get with a colour digital camera here, setting aside that the three channels are taken at slightly different times.
There are a few exceptions, in that I believe sometimes they may substitute the nearest infrared band for red. If you have to pick one or the other, near IR is useful because it scatters less in an atmosphere.
Other NASA images (like from the Hubble) are made the same way, they just assign completely different spectra to the three channels (assuming they're using an RGB model, which isn't a given). For example, maybe they'll assign radio waves to the red channel, IR to green, and X-rays to blue. Again, they're not *inventing* colours, even though it's not what you'd see with your own eyes. It's like pitch-shifting bat squeeks down into the audible range so humans can hear them.
So I ask, what exactly are people expecting, creatively that they are not getting now?
Nothing.
It's the overdone, familiar genres that make money. Therefore those are what most people are expecting.
There is a vocal minority of gamers who complain that there are so few innovative games out there, but when they're actually released, they sell like crap:
- P.N.03 (and its cancelled sibling Dead Phoenix) for the Gamecube
- Rez and Ico for the PS2
- Beyond Good and Evil
- Battlezone and Sacrifice for the PC
The only kind of oddball games I can think of that sold well recently were the original Soul Reaver (which seems to have been a fluke - its sequels didn't match its success), and the Metroid franchise, which is pretty much its own formula now anyway.
What makes tons of money?
- The newest FPS
- The newest licensed sports game
- The newest racing game
- The newest fighting game
- The newest knockoff of whatever is popular at the moment (e.g. GTA clones now, RTS games a few years ago)
- Knockoffs of 25-year-old arcade games for cellphones
- Movie licenses
All of these have an implied "good" attached, e.g. Fight Club the Shitty Game is not going to outsell Soul Calibur 2 just because it's newer.
If unusual games were profitable, there wouldn't be a shortage of them.
but most of the time its just so they can include a readme.
I started zipping the A/V files on my websites a few years ago. It wasn't to make them smaller, it was because MS changed the default behaviour of IE to stream them directly instead of downloading them.
My bandwidth usage skyrocketed because people would stream the same files over and over again.