Having virtual farm is pointless if you can have a real one.
So I guess you don't play military shooters either because you could join the real army? Just because you could do something in real life, doesn't mean it is practical or worth the effort. Let alone the fact that most games portraying "real-world" activities have as much to do with the real world as an alien shooter.
And more important - what fun is doing chores?!
This, this and this link explain quite well why the chores of FarmVille are "fun".
The reason why you get clone after clone is simply that games have become SO expensive that risking anything isn't working anymore.
Yes, but thats kind of my point. Only ideas that actually work are worth a ton, ideas that don't are not. Filtering the good ones from the bad ones is the hard and risky part. Once an idea is fully realized however it becomes reasonably easy to just reimplement a clone of it.
This isn't even just the case with big titles, it is pretty much the same thing with indie titles. Most of them are just clones of other successful games, a fresh idea is rare, even when the development costs are low.
When you're doing computer games, you get drowned in ideas.
And yet most games are uninspired clones of somebody else's game. A rough idea without a clue on how to put it into reality is indeed not all that useful, on the other side an idea that is so fully fledged out so that you can just go and implement it is basically what has been driving the game industry for the last 30 years. Of course developing that fully fledged out idea often means to actually implementing the game, as you can't guess all the problems beforehand that might appear, but what drives the industry is really the ideas, not reuse of the actual implementation.
Case in point: Mario64, before that game nobody really had a clue on how to do game controls in 3D, after that basically every platform game cloned that control scheme. Another thing, motion control, Nintendo had an idea and sold ton of consoles thanks to it. Then came Sony and basically stole it. The motion control in the SIXAXIS controller is every bit as solid as in the Wiimote, yet they had no idea what to do with it and it completly flopped. The idea of motion control itself was useless, the idea of combining motion controls with simple accessible casual gamer titles on the other side is worth millions.
That of course doesn't mean that implementations are useless, quite the opposite, a butchered implementation will ruin even the best ideas, but without a solid idea you really can't write a game.
Ideas are ten a penny, it's the implementation that matters.
Not quite, the concept that idea and implementation are somehow on opposing sides is already wrong. They are both very important parts of a fully finished product and you can't have one without the other.
Assume Wikipedia was using a more draconian license that restricted monetary gain. Then it would become a much less valuable as source material.
That's nonsense, Wikipedia's license applies to redistribution, not use. You would have as much freedom with Wikipedia using non-commercial license as with any regular old book, you could use and quote it all you like, just not do plain verbatim copies of it. Or have you stopped using regular books to while working on your research grants too?
Do we really want more of that?
Depends, once up on a time there was some use for allowing commercial redistribution of freely licensed stuff, as otherwise you wouldn't have all the Linux distributions. But with the Internet being pretty much commonplace everywhere now there is much less need for physical redistribution, so using a non-commercial licenses could make a good bit more sense, as they would stop people from grabbing free stuff, slapping some ads on it and making money from that.
To sniff the history plain HTML/CSS is already enough, no need for Javascript. The trouble here is really the bi-directional communication with the server, not if the language is Turing-complete or not. Plugging holes in non-Turning languages is however of course a good bit easier.
While I agree that there is still money to be made with older works, copyright should be there to encourage the creation of new works, not just let publishers go lazy with their huge back catalogs. Also keep in mind that many of the companies that created the original works are now defunct, so the rights holder is making the money and not the original creator.
Er, if neither of the Kinect cameras is focused on the background, then it's going to be blurry no matter what.
Unless you want to do extreme close ups, focus isn't much of an issue, as the depth-of-field of any webcam and things like Kinect is rather large. The blurring of the background you have in cinema, doesn't happen by accident, but by design, if you just point your regular webcam at the scene you wouldn't get that. The bigger problem would be resolution, as anything further away would naturally have an ever lower resolution then stuff in the foreground. So you couldn't freely float around a room without things getting mushy, but panning around an object should be perfectly fine.
Because those mythical $400 gamings PCs only exist in theory, not in practice. Neither can you go out and buy those PC in your average store nor is there an OS that is "TV ready" for games. Nobody wants to mouse around in menus from the couch to get his gamepad properly configured, people want to insert the DVD and be ready to play. There is that whole "Games for Windows" thing that forces developers to support the Xbox360 controller out of the box, but quite a few games don't support that and Microsoft support for the Xbox360 controller has also been lackluster at best (drivers suck, no Chatpad support, etc.).
now if video cards run under linux were more than just framebuffers we might go someplace.
Linux already had pretty solid 3D support going all the way back to the Vodoo1 days. Yeah, sometimes you needed to take a little care to buy a card that actually worked in Linux and not just the next best random piece of junk, but that isn't really that that much different from Windows where when you don't take care you might be stuck with some unusable on-board graphics solution.
If 3D hardware would be the problem of Linux gaming, it would have been solved ages ago.
you could already get graphics cards for the PC that had more capabilities.
Yeah, but you couldn't buy games that made use of them. The problem with the PC isn't raw power, it never was. The problem is that hardly anybody has the latest and greatest, thus PC games have to be developed to scale down to some lowest common denominator and thus all that extra power can only be used for decoration, not for gameplay critical stuff. On top of that it is impossible to optimize PC games to the same degree as console games, so you burn quite a good chunk of that extra power just due to lack of optimizations. And of course the PC that can beat a console on launch day will cost you well beyond the thousand dollar mark, while you can buy the console for a few hundred.
The problem is from what I understand (I don't have an Xbox) is that they allow other symbols that are equally as offensive to others.
The swastika is actually banned by law in a few countries in Europe and every game that makes use of them will be modified before release to have them removed. The latest Wolfenstein got a recall in 2009 because they missed one incarnation of the swastika in the game. Sounds like a good reason to not have them in Xbox Live to avoid conflict with the law, other symbols won't have that issue.
Quake didn't have a lighting engine, it only used precompiled lightmaps
Quake could handle dynamic light sources just fine, shoot a rocket through a corridor and things would light up. It had static lightmaps in addition to that. One limitation was that it couldn't handle colored light sources, those came in Quake2.
and any use of a limited set of colours was not a technical limit of the engine.
If you are working with only 256 colors you have to limit your palette, as each logical color needs multiple shades in the palette.
My personal dream would be a distribution where the user end is getting upgraded often and fast while stuff under the hood gets overhauled less often.
Another thing I would love to see is a distribution where I can decide when I want to upgrade (or downgrade), not some random other guy. Far to often I have run into situations where a new piece of software contained a bug that didn't exist a version earlier, but with standard apt-get there really isn't a proper way to downgrade, let alone installing two different versions of the software side by side.
Using source has a workaround or hunting down for an old.deb package of course helps, but I would much prefer if the package management would be flexible to deal with that by itself and not require ways to work around it.
That's the case regardless of the game being set in WWII, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq or wherever.
You can have both sides play the good guys, but each of them seeing the other side as the bad guys. Americans Army did that or so I heard, I haven't played it myself.
They should have stuck to their guns and left things the way they were.
That whole thing looked like a publicity stunt from the start. Controversy and their "resolution" puts you in the news, thats plenty of good payoff for changing a handful of letters in your game.
The movie '1968 Tunnel Rats' was pretty good in that aspect, portraying both sides of the war, without having either one as the bad guys. Just normal people killing each other.
The alternative to text messages here isn't a phone call, but no contact to 911 at all (example is given right in the summary). Doesn't sound that problematic when seen this way. Also this isn't just about texting, but about using capabilities of mobile phones in general, live video streaming could be quite handy in many emergencies.
How often did your system crash? As the trouble with XFS isn't when everything goes to plan, but when it doesn't and the system goes down unexpected for one reason or another.
as wikipedia would say. XFS is no more prone to data corruption than any other journalled filesystem in the event of unexpected halts.
Little anecdote: Using reiserfs and ext3 on LVM I had zero data corruption over the last five years. After switching to XFS, also on LVM, I had data corruption on the very first day of using it and again and again in the coming weeks. XFS basically killed files on every second crash (which where the fault of faulty OpenGL drivers). Switching back to ext3, zero data corruption since.
I'll never touch XFS again and I really can't see the point of it. Why have journaling in the first place when you have to restore from a backup after a crash anyway?
Thats not really Apples fault, quite the opposite actually. Apple where the ones who put the iPad at an affordable $500 while you average Windows based tablet, who have been around for ages, always have been hanging around the $1000-$2000 mark, out of reach for any consumer.
Sure it would be nicer if tablets would be even more cheap and that will certainly happen, especially with the Kindle already at $140, but that will take a while.
What can you do with an iPad that I can't do with linux on any other tablet from 5 years ago?
There simply where no affordable tablets 5 years ago, let alone special Linux distributions to use on them. Heck, even today it is rather hard to find any solid offering outside of the iPad. Plenty of manufacturers are surely trying to rush to the tablet market, but their still rather unfinished products clearly show that they weren't exactly prepared for the tablet market to finally take off.
Slashdot Mirror
Having virtual farm is pointless if you can have a real one.
So I guess you don't play military shooters either because you could join the real army? Just because you could do something in real life, doesn't mean it is practical or worth the effort. Let alone the fact that most games portraying "real-world" activities have as much to do with the real world as an alien shooter.
And more important - what fun is doing chores?!
This, this and this link explain quite well why the chores of FarmVille are "fun".
Gamers play games, it's not that hard a club to break into.
If you define the word that way, sure, doesn't change the fact that there are completly different kinds of gamers.
Farmville is to regular games basically what teleshoping is to blockbuster movies, both put pictures on the screen, yet completly different.
What journalistic value is there in releasing this stuff?
If it has no value, how come the leak is making it to the headlines every day?
The reason why you get clone after clone is simply that games have become SO expensive that risking anything isn't working anymore.
Yes, but thats kind of my point. Only ideas that actually work are worth a ton, ideas that don't are not. Filtering the good ones from the bad ones is the hard and risky part. Once an idea is fully realized however it becomes reasonably easy to just reimplement a clone of it.
This isn't even just the case with big titles, it is pretty much the same thing with indie titles. Most of them are just clones of other successful games, a fresh idea is rare, even when the development costs are low.
When you're doing computer games, you get drowned in ideas.
And yet most games are uninspired clones of somebody else's game. A rough idea without a clue on how to put it into reality is indeed not all that useful, on the other side an idea that is so fully fledged out so that you can just go and implement it is basically what has been driving the game industry for the last 30 years. Of course developing that fully fledged out idea often means to actually implementing the game, as you can't guess all the problems beforehand that might appear, but what drives the industry is really the ideas, not reuse of the actual implementation.
Case in point: Mario64, before that game nobody really had a clue on how to do game controls in 3D, after that basically every platform game cloned that control scheme. Another thing, motion control, Nintendo had an idea and sold ton of consoles thanks to it. Then came Sony and basically stole it. The motion control in the SIXAXIS controller is every bit as solid as in the Wiimote, yet they had no idea what to do with it and it completly flopped. The idea of motion control itself was useless, the idea of combining motion controls with simple accessible casual gamer titles on the other side is worth millions.
That of course doesn't mean that implementations are useless, quite the opposite, a butchered implementation will ruin even the best ideas, but without a solid idea you really can't write a game.
Ideas are ten a penny, it's the implementation that matters.
Not quite, the concept that idea and implementation are somehow on opposing sides is already wrong. They are both very important parts of a fully finished product and you can't have one without the other.
Assume Wikipedia was using a more draconian license that restricted monetary gain. Then it would become a much less valuable as source material.
That's nonsense, Wikipedia's license applies to redistribution, not use. You would have as much freedom with Wikipedia using non-commercial license as with any regular old book, you could use and quote it all you like, just not do plain verbatim copies of it. Or have you stopped using regular books to while working on your research grants too?
Do we really want more of that?
Depends, once up on a time there was some use for allowing commercial redistribution of freely licensed stuff, as otherwise you wouldn't have all the Linux distributions. But with the Internet being pretty much commonplace everywhere now there is much less need for physical redistribution, so using a non-commercial licenses could make a good bit more sense, as they would stop people from grabbing free stuff, slapping some ads on it and making money from that.
To sniff the history plain HTML/CSS is already enough, no need for Javascript. The trouble here is really the bi-directional communication with the server, not if the language is Turing-complete or not. Plugging holes in non-Turning languages is however of course a good bit easier.
While I agree that there is still money to be made with older works, copyright should be there to encourage the creation of new works, not just let publishers go lazy with their huge back catalogs. Also keep in mind that many of the companies that created the original works are now defunct, so the rights holder is making the money and not the original creator.
Er, if neither of the Kinect cameras is focused on the background, then it's going to be blurry no matter what.
Unless you want to do extreme close ups, focus isn't much of an issue, as the depth-of-field of any webcam and things like Kinect is rather large. The blurring of the background you have in cinema, doesn't happen by accident, but by design, if you just point your regular webcam at the scene you wouldn't get that. The bigger problem would be resolution, as anything further away would naturally have an ever lower resolution then stuff in the foreground. So you couldn't freely float around a room without things getting mushy, but panning around an object should be perfectly fine.
Because those mythical $400 gamings PCs only exist in theory, not in practice. Neither can you go out and buy those PC in your average store nor is there an OS that is "TV ready" for games. Nobody wants to mouse around in menus from the couch to get his gamepad properly configured, people want to insert the DVD and be ready to play. There is that whole "Games for Windows" thing that forces developers to support the Xbox360 controller out of the box, but quite a few games don't support that and Microsoft support for the Xbox360 controller has also been lackluster at best (drivers suck, no Chatpad support, etc.).
now if video cards run under linux were more than just framebuffers we might go someplace.
Linux already had pretty solid 3D support going all the way back to the Vodoo1 days. Yeah, sometimes you needed to take a little care to buy a card that actually worked in Linux and not just the next best random piece of junk, but that isn't really that that much different from Windows where when you don't take care you might be stuck with some unusable on-board graphics solution.
If 3D hardware would be the problem of Linux gaming, it would have been solved ages ago.
you could already get graphics cards for the PC that had more capabilities.
Yeah, but you couldn't buy games that made use of them. The problem with the PC isn't raw power, it never was. The problem is that hardly anybody has the latest and greatest, thus PC games have to be developed to scale down to some lowest common denominator and thus all that extra power can only be used for decoration, not for gameplay critical stuff. On top of that it is impossible to optimize PC games to the same degree as console games, so you burn quite a good chunk of that extra power just due to lack of optimizations. And of course the PC that can beat a console on launch day will cost you well beyond the thousand dollar mark, while you can buy the console for a few hundred.
The problem is from what I understand (I don't have an Xbox) is that they allow other symbols that are equally as offensive to others.
The swastika is actually banned by law in a few countries in Europe and every game that makes use of them will be modified before release to have them removed. The latest Wolfenstein got a recall in 2009 because they missed one incarnation of the swastika in the game. Sounds like a good reason to not have them in Xbox Live to avoid conflict with the law, other symbols won't have that issue.
Quake didn't have a lighting engine, it only used precompiled lightmaps
Quake could handle dynamic light sources just fine, shoot a rocket through a corridor and things would light up. It had static lightmaps in addition to that. One limitation was that it couldn't handle colored light sources, those came in Quake2.
and any use of a limited set of colours was not a technical limit of the engine.
If you are working with only 256 colors you have to limit your palette, as each logical color needs multiple shades in the palette.
My personal dream would be a distribution where the user end is getting upgraded often and fast while stuff under the hood gets overhauled less often.
Another thing I would love to see is a distribution where I can decide when I want to upgrade (or downgrade), not some random other guy. Far to often I have run into situations where a new piece of software contained a bug that didn't exist a version earlier, but with standard apt-get there really isn't a proper way to downgrade, let alone installing two different versions of the software side by side.
Using source has a workaround or hunting down for an old .deb package of course helps, but I would much prefer if the package management would be flexible to deal with that by itself and not require ways to work around it.
That's the case regardless of the game being set in WWII, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq or wherever.
You can have both sides play the good guys, but each of them seeing the other side as the bad guys. Americans Army did that or so I heard, I haven't played it myself.
They should have stuck to their guns and left things the way they were.
That whole thing looked like a publicity stunt from the start. Controversy and their "resolution" puts you in the news, thats plenty of good payoff for changing a handful of letters in your game.
Know any example of everybody being good guys?
The movie '1968 Tunnel Rats' was pretty good in that aspect, portraying both sides of the war, without having either one as the bad guys. Just normal people killing each other.
This sounds very problematic.
The alternative to text messages here isn't a phone call, but no contact to 911 at all (example is given right in the summary). Doesn't sound that problematic when seen this way. Also this isn't just about texting, but about using capabilities of mobile phones in general, live video streaming could be quite handy in many emergencies.
How often did your system crash? As the trouble with XFS isn't when everything goes to plan, but when it doesn't and the system goes down unexpected for one reason or another.
as wikipedia would say. XFS is no more prone to data corruption than any other journalled filesystem in the event of unexpected halts.
Little anecdote: Using reiserfs and ext3 on LVM I had zero data corruption over the last five years. After switching to XFS, also on LVM, I had data corruption on the very first day of using it and again and again in the coming weeks. XFS basically killed files on every second crash (which where the fault of faulty OpenGL drivers). Switching back to ext3, zero data corruption since.
I'll never touch XFS again and I really can't see the point of it. Why have journaling in the first place when you have to restore from a backup after a crash anyway?
What? There were $300-500 tablets five years ago
Please name those products.
And there were PDAs cheaper than that, offering the same sort of form factor as the iPhone/iTouch.
A PDA is not a tablet.
So I won't be able to give $20 to a friend without: 1) being tracked; and 2) giving a cut to some payment processor like PayPal? I'd rather use cash.
Anonymous electronic payment exists, they would simply have to implement a solution that makes use of it.
1. Too expensive (Apple)
Thats not really Apples fault, quite the opposite actually. Apple where the ones who put the iPad at an affordable $500 while you average Windows based tablet, who have been around for ages, always have been hanging around the $1000-$2000 mark, out of reach for any consumer.
Sure it would be nicer if tablets would be even more cheap and that will certainly happen, especially with the Kindle already at $140, but that will take a while.
What can you do with an iPad that I can't do with linux on any other tablet from 5 years ago?
There simply where no affordable tablets 5 years ago, let alone special Linux distributions to use on them. Heck, even today it is rather hard to find any solid offering outside of the iPad. Plenty of manufacturers are surely trying to rush to the tablet market, but their still rather unfinished products clearly show that they weren't exactly prepared for the tablet market to finally take off.