Mario64 was highly innovative, no doubt about that, it basically invented the core mechanics of 3D gameplay (just look at early Saturn titles to see the difference). However Mario64 is some 15 years, the newer Mario Galaxy was just a minor upgrade to Mario64, without really doing anything to ground braking, Mario Galaxy 2 was just a straight up sequel to the first one. In 2D the situation looks even worse. Yoshi Island was an amazing game and quite a big change from MarioWorld, but todays NewSuperMarioBros? Thats more a downgrade, then an update, lacking many fast features and riding completely on the nostalgia train. Same deal with Zelda:TP, OoT was a great step to move Zelda into 3D, TP is just the same old stuff with improved graphics and the new Zelda, while not yet released, again looks extremely similar to TP, just with a new shader applied.
When it comes to their classic franchises these days, Nintendo riding the sequel train just like everybody else.
After it hit slashdot and got a article written about, yeah, it might end up in some cache, but in general the ability of the Internet to store everything forever is vastly overrated. When it comes to small scale private stuff just deleting it makes it in general go away forever, as there is nobody there bothering to reupload it or even store it in the first place. Sony vs Hotz is a bad example, as that had tons of publicity and is of public interest.
That is basically nothing more then a popular myth set into the world by people to lazy to implement proper security measures, as proper security measures is what makes things easy to use, not hard. Good security measures add transparency and accountability and gives the user control, instead of handling things like a magic black box where everything can happen with no way to know what and how.
That of course doesn't mean that user education isn't necessary, some things can't be fixed by software/hardware, such as the user manually giving out his data, but you certainly can design a software system that doesn't give any random app full access to your whole address book or other private data (and no, a simple "Wanna give full access [Yes] [No]" is not a proper solution).
I was referring to the usual home setup of a router and a home network of multiple computers, not a webpage hoster and when it comes to home routers it makes a big difference if only your router is available to the public or every computer (frequently unpatched) in the network.
Why do you want NAT? What does it achieve that a simple firewall does not?
Security and privacy by default. If you misconfigure your NAT chances are that nothing will work, if you misconfigure your firewall chance are that you are wide open to the whole world, maybe without even knowing it.
And yes, better software defaults and IPv6 privacy extensions will take care of that in the long run, but for the time being, it is far easier to accidentally export your whole network to the public with IPv6 then it is with IPv4.
Or it could be the exact opposite: Make it impossible to share game saves at all and only allow you to play the games as intended by the developer. Wouldn't even be a new thing, there are already quite a few games on consoles out that have copy protected save games (in the name of protecting achievements and other bullshit reasons).
Speaking of save games in the cloud: Does anybody know how OnLive handles the situation? Do they allow any kind of save game sharing at all?
Zooming still works like crap in Firefox on Linux, as it doesn't support filtering and thus all graphics look like crap when zoomed, thus increasing the font size gives much better result if the webpage can handle it (which a lot don't, thanks to CSS crap, table based layouts never had those problems).
Has the double screen actually enhanced any games? The touchscreen, sure thats important, but having two small screen instead of a big one really seems to provide little to no benefit in most games.
it is all to easy for an "adventure" title to fall into the morass of being a mixture of grindingly dull and unrealistic pixel hunts
That problem has been mostly solved for modern point&click adventures, as most of them allow you to simply highlight all interactive objects with the press of a button, quest logs also seem to have become far more common and some even come simply with a build in walk through.
The first two are just M, not AO. The Witcher seems to exist in an AO version, but not on Steam. Indigo Prophecy Uncut is also AO, but also only on Steam in its cut M version.
At home you can basically twiddle your thumbs and wait till your provider gives you IPv6, if that happens go buy a new IPv6 capable router and everything will be fine without extra work (at least in theory).
If you want to toy with IPv6 right now, you can install a tunnel. In Ubuntu that basically means:
sudo apt-get install miredo
and you are done for a single client. When using UFW you have to enable IPv6 in/etc/default/ufw also or it will be blocked. If you want multiple clients you have to install radvd and configure that, the other hosts in your network will pick the connection up automatically due to IPv6s auto configuration capabilities.
Thing is, people (usually those with a vested interest in IPv6) have been saying this for at least the past 10 years.
And they were right. We have been running out of IPv4 addresses since basically the Internet got into consumer hands. Guess why you never, not even 10 years ago, got multiple IPs from your ISP without paying extra. There simply weren't enough of them, it always was a strictly limited resource and thus NAT and other crude workarounds had to be invented. The difference now is that we are no longer in a phase where IPv4 are a limited resource, but in a phase where IPv4 addresses simply have run out.
IPv4 plus NAT (and DHCP) is a perfectly good solution,
There are more people in the world then IPv4 addresses. Thus it is not an issue about putting your toaster behind NAT, which might be an acceptable workaround, but putting *everything* of your home network behind an ISP provided NAT. Have fun in that setup trying to get two hosts communicating with each other when both are behind a NAT that you don't even have control over.
In Star Trek there are multiple instances where people get cloned, merged, split and whatever in teleporter accidents. None of those is really much compatible with some super natural unique soul, unless of course souls can be copied, changed, merged and just jumbled around like regular matter.
That completely depends on what you are looking for in your Sci-Fi. Star Trek certainly doesn't much go into the Hard Sci-Fi direction, but it is absolutely great when it comes to the philosophical side of things. Take the transporter, not the most realistic device ever, but you can write a lot of great stories with it that explore individuality, soul (or lack there of) and all those other qualities that one normally make a human unique.
Outer Limits had a ton of nice episodes, so did all of Star Trek, Stargate SG1 wasn't bad either and when you go outside of American television http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes is absolutely fantastic.
How do you write a NPOV article, if the only people who have correct information about a topic are those personally connected with the subject?
You don't. If you can't find enough info about something to write an article, you simply don't write one. If on the other side you do find enough info, then there is no reason to go around deleting it.
The effort to write that one useful article is nothing compared to effort that would be needed to sift through the crap.
You are again entering straw man territory. Of course you should not allow crap, but crap is something very different then just something you don't consider important.
They would have a field day in a Wikipedia without notability rules (it's bad enough as it is).
And yet in my use of Wikipedia I have tripped over far more articles I was interested in that got deleted or cut down back to uselessness then over plain old vandalism. If the cleanup is a bigger problem then the problem its trying to fix something is going wrong.
And it's completely reasonable to say, that if nobody bothered to get an article about something through the editorial process of a single media source that's more than locally important
There is a ton of stuff that exists on the Internet about which you could write well sourced articles, but you aren't allowed to because those things haven't yet entered mainstream press.
As said, see homebrew, it exists, is easy to verify by everybody with the given hardware, yet the main stream press is pretty ignorant about it. Yes, you can write an article about it, but with just the information of the mainstream press it will be a completly useless one.
But okay, then, if not my molar, a song by a garage band that got played once or twice on a local radio and performed at a village fair before the band broke up. How about that?
Thats perfectly good for an article, because it is something where there is a reasonable expectation that somebody might actually look that up one day ("Hey, I always wondered what happened to that band") and there is a reasonable chance to find at least some info about it. Of course general Wikipedia rules should apply, i.e. not have the band members themselves write the article and be proper NPOV, not advertisment, etc.
If some third party comes along and writes a reasonable good article, there is no reason to destroy their work.
filter that keeps the useless crap out
Except that they don't filter crap out, but stuff that doesn't follow the arbitrary notability rules, even if its a decent article.
That said, in the English language Wikipedia the problem isn't quite that bad, you still can find a lot of niche knowledge, even so the notability rules can get sometimes in the way and leads to more destructive work, then constructive one.
In the German Wikipedia on the other side the problem is pretty much out of control, not only is it destroying good articles on a regular basis, but it also lead to absurdly written articles such as Jean-Luc Picard, as fictional characters are considered non-notable for an own article, people had to collect all fictional characters to a single page.
Would you agree that if I made an effort to write an article about how I had my molars removed, this should be published in Wikipedia?
Classic straw man argument. No, an article about your molar removal should not be in Wikipedia, because it never ever was part of public knowledge.
A game released to a wide audience, to which you can find numerous references, which in turn make it part of public knowledge, is something completly different and thus should be part of Wikipedia. I am not so much bothered by Wikipedia requiring references, but by what they consider reliable references.
there's no way of telling that a user "Alex1648" (for example) is a genuine old gaming enthusiast as opposed to a 15-year old troll who made a story about it last Monday and set up a website.
Nonsense, just get a few gamers together and have them look over the article. If none of them has ever heard about it, then there is a reasonable chance that it is made up, on the other side if everybody agrees that its real thing, just a little obscure, no problem, just stick one of those banners over it that says that it could use more references.
Classic example of this is homebrew: You will have no shortage of people with experience with it, you won't have an issue finding numerous webpages, wikis and forums discussing it in detail, but you will have a very hard time finding a detailed source about the topic that Wikipedia considers reliable, as the mainstream gaming press prefers to ignore that topic as good as it can to not lose its good relationship with the game companies.
And if nobody but MUD players argues that this-or-this title was "massively influential", an uninvolved person would reasonably argue that maybe, just maybe, they're overstating its influence.
Simply move that section to the talk page and let it live there till somebody finds some evidence.
And none of those features (except the interface, obviously) happen with non-notable topics.
Then stick one of those templates {{Refimprove}} or whatever templates at the top of the page. Deletions should be reserved for pages where there is indication that the given information is wrong, not for pages where everybody agrees that the information is correct and just missing a reference to something printed on dead trees.
Wikipedia seeks to create a summary of all human knowledge in the form of an online encyclopedia. Since it has virtually unlimited disk space it can have far more topics than can be covered by any conventional print encyclopedias.
Ok, so how the fuck does the whole "randomly delete stuff that doesn't make it over an arbitrary notability hurdle" fit into that premise? How is deleting stuff from Wikipedia and moving it to a commercially hosted website outside of Wikipedia fixing the issue?
I am certainly not going to donate any more money when the stuff I am interesting in has to be found in a Wiki that isn't even part of Wikipedia.
Nobody is accessing Wikipedia by looking at an index of all the pages it contains, but by using search and search doesn't care if there are millions of other unrelated pages around.
And no, the "rest of the internet" is not the solution, people go to Wikipedia because they want a consistent interface, NPOV, references and all those other qualities that the rest of the internet does generally not provide.
Slashdot Mirror
Mario64 was highly innovative, no doubt about that, it basically invented the core mechanics of 3D gameplay (just look at early Saturn titles to see the difference). However Mario64 is some 15 years, the newer Mario Galaxy was just a minor upgrade to Mario64, without really doing anything to ground braking, Mario Galaxy 2 was just a straight up sequel to the first one. In 2D the situation looks even worse. Yoshi Island was an amazing game and quite a big change from MarioWorld, but todays NewSuperMarioBros? Thats more a downgrade, then an update, lacking many fast features and riding completely on the nostalgia train. Same deal with Zelda:TP, OoT was a great step to move Zelda into 3D, TP is just the same old stuff with improved graphics and the new Zelda, while not yet released, again looks extremely similar to TP, just with a new shader applied.
When it comes to their classic franchises these days, Nintendo riding the sequel train just like everybody else.
After it hit slashdot and got a article written about, yeah, it might end up in some cache, but in general the ability of the Internet to store everything forever is vastly overrated. When it comes to small scale private stuff just deleting it makes it in general go away forever, as there is nobody there bothering to reupload it or even store it in the first place. Sony vs Hotz is a bad example, as that had tons of publicity and is of public interest.
That is basically nothing more then a popular myth set into the world by people to lazy to implement proper security measures, as proper security measures is what makes things easy to use, not hard. Good security measures add transparency and accountability and gives the user control, instead of handling things like a magic black box where everything can happen with no way to know what and how.
That of course doesn't mean that user education isn't necessary, some things can't be fixed by software/hardware, such as the user manually giving out his data, but you certainly can design a software system that doesn't give any random app full access to your whole address book or other private data (and no, a simple "Wanna give full access [Yes] [No]" is not a proper solution).
I was referring to the usual home setup of a router and a home network of multiple computers, not a webpage hoster and when it comes to home routers it makes a big difference if only your router is available to the public or every computer (frequently unpatched) in the network.
Why do you want NAT? What does it achieve that a simple firewall does not?
Security and privacy by default. If you misconfigure your NAT chances are that nothing will work, if you misconfigure your firewall chance are that you are wide open to the whole world, maybe without even knowing it.
And yes, better software defaults and IPv6 privacy extensions will take care of that in the long run, but for the time being, it is far easier to accidentally export your whole network to the public with IPv6 then it is with IPv4.
Would also be a great way to share saved games.
Or it could be the exact opposite: Make it impossible to share game saves at all and only allow you to play the games as intended by the developer. Wouldn't even be a new thing, there are already quite a few games on consoles out that have copy protected save games (in the name of protecting achievements and other bullshit reasons).
Speaking of save games in the cloud: Does anybody know how OnLive handles the situation? Do they allow any kind of save game sharing at all?
Zooming still works like crap in Firefox on Linux, as it doesn't support filtering and thus all graphics look like crap when zoomed, thus increasing the font size gives much better result if the webpage can handle it (which a lot don't, thanks to CSS crap, table based layouts never had those problems).
Has the double screen actually enhanced any games? The touchscreen, sure thats important, but having two small screen instead of a big one really seems to provide little to no benefit in most games.
it is all to easy for an "adventure" title to fall into the morass of being a mixture of grindingly dull and unrealistic pixel hunts
That problem has been mostly solved for modern point&click adventures, as most of them allow you to simply highlight all interactive objects with the press of a button, quest logs also seem to have become far more common and some even come simply with a build in walk through.
The first two are just M, not AO. The Witcher seems to exist in an AO version, but not on Steam. Indigo Prophecy Uncut is also AO, but also only on Steam in its cut M version.
At home you can basically twiddle your thumbs and wait till your provider gives you IPv6, if that happens go buy a new IPv6 capable router and everything will be fine without extra work (at least in theory).
If you want to toy with IPv6 right now, you can install a tunnel. In Ubuntu that basically means:
sudo apt-get install miredo
and you are done for a single client. When using UFW you have to enable IPv6 in /etc/default/ufw also or it will be blocked. If you want multiple clients you have to install radvd and configure that, the other hosts in your network will pick the connection up automatically due to IPv6s auto configuration capabilities.
Thing is, people (usually those with a vested interest in IPv6) have been saying this for at least the past 10 years.
And they were right. We have been running out of IPv4 addresses since basically the Internet got into consumer hands. Guess why you never, not even 10 years ago, got multiple IPs from your ISP without paying extra. There simply weren't enough of them, it always was a strictly limited resource and thus NAT and other crude workarounds had to be invented. The difference now is that we are no longer in a phase where IPv4 are a limited resource, but in a phase where IPv4 addresses simply have run out.
IPv4 plus NAT (and DHCP) is a perfectly good solution,
There are more people in the world then IPv4 addresses. Thus it is not an issue about putting your toaster behind NAT, which might be an acceptable workaround, but putting *everything* of your home network behind an ISP provided NAT. Have fun in that setup trying to get two hosts communicating with each other when both are behind a NAT that you don't even have control over.
In Star Trek there are multiple instances where people get cloned, merged, split and whatever in teleporter accidents. None of those is really much compatible with some super natural unique soul, unless of course souls can be copied, changed, merged and just jumbled around like regular matter.
That completely depends on what you are looking for in your Sci-Fi. Star Trek certainly doesn't much go into the Hard Sci-Fi direction, but it is absolutely great when it comes to the philosophical side of things. Take the transporter, not the most realistic device ever, but you can write a lot of great stories with it that explore individuality, soul (or lack there of) and all those other qualities that one normally make a human unique.
Outer Limits had a ton of nice episodes, so did all of Star Trek, Stargate SG1 wasn't bad either and when you go outside of American television http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes is absolutely fantastic.
Apparently the latest model of attracting viewers is to keep throwing mysteries and questions on them, without any plan to ever answer them.
Pretty much, its not even a secret, he talks about it in great length in his TED talk.
How do you write a NPOV article, if the only people who have correct information about a topic are those personally connected with the subject?
You don't. If you can't find enough info about something to write an article, you simply don't write one. If on the other side you do find enough info, then there is no reason to go around deleting it.
The effort to write that one useful article is nothing compared to effort that would be needed to sift through the crap.
You are again entering straw man territory. Of course you should not allow crap, but crap is something very different then just something you don't consider important.
They would have a field day in a Wikipedia without notability rules (it's bad enough as it is).
And yet in my use of Wikipedia I have tripped over far more articles I was interested in that got deleted or cut down back to uselessness then over plain old vandalism. If the cleanup is a bigger problem then the problem its trying to fix something is going wrong.
And it's completely reasonable to say, that if nobody bothered to get an article about something through the editorial process of a single media source that's more than locally important
There is a ton of stuff that exists on the Internet about which you could write well sourced articles, but you aren't allowed to because those things haven't yet entered mainstream press.
As said, see homebrew, it exists, is easy to verify by everybody with the given hardware, yet the main stream press is pretty ignorant about it. Yes, you can write an article about it, but with just the information of the mainstream press it will be a completly useless one.
But okay, then, if not my molar, a song by a garage band that got played once or twice on a local radio and performed at a village fair before the band broke up. How about that?
Thats perfectly good for an article, because it is something where there is a reasonable expectation that somebody might actually look that up one day ("Hey, I always wondered what happened to that band") and there is a reasonable chance to find at least some info about it. Of course general Wikipedia rules should apply, i.e. not have the band members themselves write the article and be proper NPOV, not advertisment, etc.
If some third party comes along and writes a reasonable good article, there is no reason to destroy their work.
filter that keeps the useless crap out
Except that they don't filter crap out, but stuff that doesn't follow the arbitrary notability rules, even if its a decent article.
That said, in the English language Wikipedia the problem isn't quite that bad, you still can find a lot of niche knowledge, even so the notability rules can get sometimes in the way and leads to more destructive work, then constructive one.
In the German Wikipedia on the other side the problem is pretty much out of control, not only is it destroying good articles on a regular basis, but it also lead to absurdly written articles such as
Jean-Luc Picard, as fictional characters are considered non-notable for an own article, people had to collect all fictional characters to a single page.
Would you agree that if I made an effort to write an article about how I had my molars removed, this should be published in Wikipedia?
Classic straw man argument. No, an article about your molar removal should not be in Wikipedia, because it never ever was part of public knowledge.
A game released to a wide audience, to which you can find numerous references, which in turn make it part of public knowledge, is something completly different and thus should be part of Wikipedia. I am not so much bothered by Wikipedia requiring references, but by what they consider reliable references.
The existence is not in question here, relevance is.
Why does relevance matter when the facts are correct?
But there aren't any to begin with. Why would a topic like that deserve metion in an encyclopedia?
Because somebody made the effort to actually write an article about it. Why should anything else matter for Wikipedia?
Introducing conspiracy theories doesn't really improve your argument.
That's not a conspiracy theory, thats plain old fact.
there's no way of telling that a user "Alex1648" (for example) is a genuine old gaming enthusiast as opposed to a 15-year old troll who made a story about it last Monday and set up a website.
Nonsense, just get a few gamers together and have them look over the article. If none of them has ever heard about it, then there is a reasonable chance that it is made up, on the other side if everybody agrees that its real thing, just a little obscure, no problem, just stick one of those banners over it that says that it could use more references.
Classic example of this is homebrew: You will have no shortage of people with experience with it, you won't have an issue finding numerous webpages, wikis and forums discussing it in detail, but you will have a very hard time finding a detailed source about the topic that Wikipedia considers reliable, as the mainstream gaming press prefers to ignore that topic as good as it can to not lose its good relationship with the game companies.
And if nobody but MUD players argues that this-or-this title was "massively influential", an uninvolved person would reasonably argue that maybe, just maybe, they're overstating its influence.
Simply move that section to the talk page and let it live there till somebody finds some evidence.
And none of those features (except the interface, obviously) happen with non-notable topics.
Then stick one of those templates {{Refimprove}} or whatever templates at the top of the page. Deletions should be reserved for pages where there is indication that the given information is wrong, not for pages where everybody agrees that the information is correct and just missing a reference to something printed on dead trees.
Lets look up Wikipedia on Wikipedia:
Ok, so how the fuck does the whole "randomly delete stuff that doesn't make it over an arbitrary notability hurdle" fit into that premise? How is deleting stuff from Wikipedia and moving it to a commercially hosted website outside of Wikipedia fixing the issue?
I am certainly not going to donate any more money when the stuff I am interesting in has to be found in a Wiki that isn't even part of Wikipedia.
Thats something Wikipedia could easily solve, just backup all the webpages that get referenced.
Nobody is accessing Wikipedia by looking at an index of all the pages it contains, but by using search and search doesn't care if there are millions of other unrelated pages around.
And no, the "rest of the internet" is not the solution, people go to Wikipedia because they want a consistent interface, NPOV, references and all those other qualities that the rest of the internet does generally not provide.