It's not just D&D, it's all the D&D-inspired games that came after it. (Hint: if your game has "levels" or "classes" in it, you lose.)
Yes, in Baldur's Gate the "plot" starts out interesting. But the xp-based character development makes no sense. Why are you asking me, a level 1 idiot, to go on this mission when any of the five guards over there could complete it effortlessly? (This kind of thing is totally ridiculous in MMORPGs...) If you eliminated level progression from the game it wouldn't hurt a bit... except that (sadly) in most RPGs your characters are more interesting than the world, the story, or anything else, and so most of a player's interest turns out to be in allocating scarce resources (e.g. magic items) amongst his/her paper dolls and not so much on the story.
The really sad thing is, the tedium doesn't eventually allow you to do "interesting" stuff. It just leads to more tedium. E.g. in World of Warcraft at level 5 you are asked to go kill 15 guys, collect 5 things, and then talk to Fred. At level 65 you're asked to kill 25 guys, collect 15 things, and talk to Fred's big brother. What's really sad is that the 25 guys look just like the 15 guys, only slightly bigger and tinted a different color.
A certain amount of the tedium works as progressive disclosure of complexity. A WoW character may, at level 70, have 35 distinct, useful abilities, and giving a player all 35 at once to figure out would be overwhelming. But spreading out those 35 over three months is a little bit too much. (By contrast, I used to think Final Fantasy games -- which take maybe 60 hours to complete -- had way too much hamburger's helper.)
Another issue is the relative poverty of game engines. EverQuest pretty much had one quest mechanism: quests consisted of gathering items and then turning them in. To handle a "kill N skeletons" quest you made people collect items from 10 dead skeletons. World of Warcraft has, in essence, three quest mechanisms: kill, collect, and go somewhere. If you've done one kill quest, every other one will basically be the same but with different scenery. By contrast, Baldur's Gate, NWN, and Fallout had very flexible "quest" systems, but even they start seeming very repetitive after a while.
In the end though, it's pretty much pure economics. Folks won't feel they've gotten good value for money if they can finish a game too quickly, and making a game interesting for 60h, let alone 6000h, is just too expensive, so repetition is the key.
To end this random rant on a positive note: if MMORPGs can leverage player creativity better (say, the way Second Life does, only with some kind of point to it) then maybe interesting content won't be a scarce resource which needs to be strung out with tedium to keep players interested.
To steal Apples' crown you need a device which shows innovation and style
Yes and it needs to be clueful innovation.
MicroSD cards...? Why? SD cards are cheap, huge, and ubiquitous. They're also pretty tiny. Why support the idiotic, small, expensive MicroSD cards? Heck you could just put two SD slots in your player and not have any internal RAM. Photographers would buy the damn things.
Interface -- support the iPod hardware interface, or develop something better, and STICK TO IT. Sony "innovates" by producing dozens of ugly designs with mutually incompatible hardware interfaces. No-one is going to build random MP3 player hookups into cars... Frankly, all of Apple's rivals should settle on a single hardware interface give car and other accessory makes a single plug they can provide for every MP3 player. Then a simple adapter will let all their players hook up to iPod interfaces and new cars can easily accommodate both iPods and everyone else. Soon Apple's connector will be old news.
The fact that this hasn't happened shows that Apple's rivals are just as greedy as Apple and a lot more stupid.
Big corporations are no different. I've personally been involved -- peripherally in several cases, directly in another -- in development projects for large corporates who burn tens of millions on projects that anyone on the project can tell, years ahead of "delivery", are doomed.
The really sad thing is that by "architecting" a "complete" solution you spend ridiculous amounts of money and get nothing, while if you did something simple and organic and simply pushed outward from there you'd get somewhere, e.g.
VPN Wiki Custom Security Layer Server Farm
OR
VPN Lots of random web servers, wikis, whatever the heck you want -- each with its own security Google turnkey search box (no doubt Google has an option for clients who won't allow remote admin)
Neither of these would be "perfect", but the architected system they came up with is perfectly useless.
Shame on everyone who reported it without checking the facts.
Nah, they're just on to the next unchecked story. This is old "news"... why beat a dead horse... er... try to unring a bell? We all know that the Macbook was hacked remotely, we found WMDs in Iraq, Saddam Hussein was directly involved in 9/11, and John Kerry inflicted wounds on himself to get a Purple Heart.
Pretty much the only story that's ever been "corrected" successfully was George W. Bush's being AWOL from the National Guard. He was AWOL, but because *some* of the evidence turned out to be bogus, this was somehow construed as meaning he wasn't AWOL. The glove didn't fit, so we must acquit
You wrote a totally false statement and repeated that statement several times with made up facts.
You facts aren't made up, just misleading. The $1200 Mac is a Core Duo with Mac OS X, the $1200 Intel is a Pentium D with Windows MCE.
So you get a faster clock, but less performance -- and the Mac can be upgraded to new chips whereas the PC is using an end-of-life architecture and a retarded version of Windows.
Note that this is "40% showing signs of clinical addiction" not "40% play WoW a lot".
Personally, by these criteria I was addicted to EverQuest for long stretches, but I've never been addicted to WoW. It also says to me that Blizzard has a better business model than EQ; people forget that what a game developer wants is to sell as many subscriptions as possible, not to make people play as many hours as possible. The ideal game would have everyone subscribing and no-one actually playing; players cost you money (bandwidth, server capacity, customer service).
Indeed, Blizzard's master-stroke (from a business point of view) is having compelling instance dungeons which can only be done once per week. WoW is full of "points of diminishing return" in that, it doesn't matter how often you play, your primary toon can only do the current bleeding-edge instance once-per-week. Obviously, the truly addicted max out multiple toons, but their primary toon will only ever be able to get so far so fast. It thus follows that they only need to release one new bleeding edge dungeon every six months to keep a lot of people hooked. This is very bad from my point of view (I hate doing the same content over and over) but it's obviously working well for Blizzard.
An LCD screen should be reviewed based on the qualities of the goddamned screen.
True, but the way the article was written each side tries to defend its position round by round. While the pro-Newton side made that argument in the screen round, Newton was judged to have lost that round.
Basically the argument isn't SF vs. Fantasy it's everything versus "Lowest Common Demoninator Concensus Fantasy", i.e. fantasy with trees, demons, orcs, elves, dwarves, magick spells, bows and arrows, warhorses, et al. It's not "Wizard of the Pigeons" fantasy, it's not "Winnie the Pooh" fantasy, it's not even "Byzantium with Vampires" magic (like "The Dragon Waiting"), or, say, "The Land" as in "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever".
Basically, it's Dungeons & Dragons.
If you stray too far from the implied "kitchen sink of stolen ideas and no real characyer" that is D&D, you fail. This is because every gamer is familiar and comfortable with it, probably likes some little corner of it (oooh bards...), and you don't need to explain anything. Sure, you may have an elaborate back story -- but no-one cares.
Indeed, you not only can't stray far from the D&D world, you can't stray far from D&D assumptions and concepts. E.g. "race = destiny" (orcs are evil, elves are good -- with occasional exceptions), "experienced people have lots of hit points", "being 90% dead has no impact on your ability to run, fight, or cast spells", and so on. Not only has nobody successfully challenged the D&D setting, any attempt to stray from these howlers has also failed.
If all you are looking for is a group of characters who will interact with each other, show after show after show, for some undetermined amount of time, then you are correct... That's the main difference of B5. The seasons weren't just a collection of arbitrary cliffhangers, they were chapters of a continuing story, leading up to a specific climax.
I think you're thinking of Dallas not Hill Street Blues.
B5 was not fundamentally a story about a group of characters; it was a story about a particular event (the war between the First Ones and the younger races).
The original arc was supposed to end where season 4 ended, so in fact the particular event you mention (or at least its resolution and climax) was originally going to be left out (or maybe be put in a movie). The event you talk about was tacked on, rather badly, to provide a reason for season 5, the original seasons 4 and 5 having been compressed into season 4. There are plenty of shows that have covered similar ground, some well (Holocaust, Roots) and other not so well (North and South, Wings of War). In general, they have covered far more complex and interesting material at a far less turgid pace and without prosthetic foreheads.
Science Fiction and Fantasy is all too often about events of epic scope (wars at the end of time, the liberation of a galaxy, a gathering of eternal heroes pitted against the Ultimate Evil, whatever). Usually this epic sweep is at the cost of any real understanding of human (let alone alien) nature. This kind of grandiosity is not what makes literature, movies, or television shows great. It's what makes them pathetic.
Here's a hint -- when the bad guys are Just Evil with no discernable motive, your story sucks. Babylon 5 wasn't quite that bad, but it was close.
When Office is gone, There's always X-Box. And when X-Box is gone, There's always Windows (now with Open Source!) And when Win-dows is gone, There's always Zune! And when Zune is gone, There's always mom. Hi mom!
Hmm, maybe this comment would be better in a thread on the situation in the mid-east.
Yes, but French# kicks English's ass. With its support for objects, closures, regexp,.NET, hashes, and funny quotation marks, you'll find your productivity go through the roof. And French# 1.5 is adding garbage collection...
A persecution complex hardly indicates bad science. Consider Galileo. It's quite possible for a scientist to have a persecution complex and be right.
If you know anything about how science (as a career) works, you'll know that if you're on the unpopular-but-correct side of an argument, be prepared for your life to suck for decades. The folks who are on the popular side will stop your articles from getting into good (or any) publications, so your career will tank, you won't be able to get tenure, yada yada yada. It's not like most successful live like millionaires; think about how you'd feel if you investigated a subject, formed what you thought was a good hypothesis, all of which took you years, wrote it up for publication, and then you got shat on by your colleagues for the next twenty years. You'd feel persecuted too.
The inability of unpopular but valid theoretical physicists to get published has gotten quite a bit of coverage lately.
Incidentally -- we haven't seen any black holes. We've just inferred their presence. Just as this MECO's presence is being inferred. This is all so incredibly tenuous that both (all) sides can claim the data supports their theory.
A little history: Finland (.fi) was attacked by the Soviet Union during WWII. As a result they ended up becoming allied with Nazi Germany (enemy of my enemy, etc.). After WWII, because they were on the wrong side (i.e. Axis) they got screwed (territory stolen from them by the USSR was not given back). So I imagine that there is some undercurrent of ill feeling in Finland, that Nazi sympathies are not unknown, and a lot of the "conventional wisdom" we have here (Nazi / antisemitism = unacceptable, Israel = good, etc.) is not something one can take for granted. Consider that before WWII extreme anti-Jewish attitudes were perfectly acceptable in American drawing rooms. Heck, in the 50's my (Jewish) aunt and uncle became Unitarians so they could move into a restricted neighborhood in suburban Washington D.C. and he could advance in his career.
Even so, if this IRC transcript is accurate, he seems to be well beyond the pale.
It has the distinction of being possibly the best planned series of any kind in history
Science Fiction folks need to understand that there have only been a half dozen SF series worth criticizing. Babylon 5 was certainly one of the best SF series, but when you consider the number of excellent mainstream TV shows, such as Hill Street Blues (which Babylon 5, like so many ensemble shows, owes much of its structure to) it has to compete with, which were both stunningly well planned and executed, B5 pales in comparison.
Yes, B5 had a five year story arc, but when it had to be compressed into four years it suffered badly. They then cobbled together a lackluster fifth season. Better shows have developed arcs which could cope with being axed after the first year or running indefinitely. And Babylon 5's pace was glacial for much of its first three seasons.
These 20 minute shows could be good, but I wouldn't hold my breath. I doubt they started out pitching for a 20 minute direct to DVD project; so this is a TV series pitch that they couldn't sell.
"Tom's Hardware has put out a nice recap of where computer graphics have been and where they are headed in the near future."
No. It's an article more-or-less solely devoted to discussing the issue of power consumption in new and upcoming graphics cards. It doesn't describe the state of the union or even have much to say about any shiny new toys beyond their likely impact on power consumption.
It's an interesting article, but not the article that goes with its title nor the Slashdot summary.
In almost every case I know of harsh software protection leads to cracked versions being easier and more convenient to use.
I remember a really great AMIGA game called Carrier Command which had very tough copy protection -- none of my disk copiers would back up my legitimate copy. Unfortunately, it looks like the copy protection code was added after testing, and the save/load game feature didn't work. A few months after I bought Carrier Command a friend gave me a cracked copy. It was tiny (it occupied 1/4 of the space on disk), launched faster (on-the-fly decompression), and save/load game worked.
I think he's overly pessimistic and his solutions aren't novel (what he proposes as a solution is already happening, and all we're seeing is the games industry stratifying into blockbuster, arthouse, and indie streams like the movie industry), but he does articulate a lot of what's wrong with the industry.
The only thing I disagree with is the death of the PowerPC remarks. I expect Apple to keep at least one G5 in its product line (e.g. the dual 2.3, perhaps a single CPU dual core 2.5) to support those needing fast PowerPC boxes until all key software, such as Adobe's product line, has migrated.
There are plenty of folks around who will buy the new pro machines who are using, say, Final Cut Pro, Motion, or Shake. A lot of high end 3d software is probably going to be announced jointly with any new pro machines (e.g. Maya, Lightwave; Blender just released an Intel binary). Unity has been universal for a few months now.
Wow. Lots of hate in that last rant. Brought in the Republicans, too, eh? Are you sure you don't want to bring Haliburton into this somehow?
The fact that the DoJ lawsuit against Microsoft disappeared when the Republicans came into power is just pure coincidence. I'm a conspiracy theorist. Incidentally, if you read "Hard Drive" (the first Gates biography) you'll see how Microsoft avoided losing control of DOS (which it really didn't own) early on. All conspiracy theories of course.
Debeers doesn't "dump". They do the exact opposite. Harvest all the diamonds and then let them trickle out to the market.
But you might like to find out how they obtain and retain that control. When large new sources of diamonds became available, the owners of those sources could not make money despite the huge disparity between the cost of mining diamonds and the artificially maintained market price, and eventually were forced to sell out to deBeers.
But you're right about Sony's plans. There's a fine line between "legitimate" use of loss-leaders (Gillette's razor blade handles being the most well-known example) and dumping pure and simple. I'd say that Microsoft's record speaks for itself however -- when will IE start being sold at a profit? Microsoft can cheerfully continue to lose money all over the place so long as 95% or more of PCs sell with an OEM Windows license...
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just D&D, it's all the D&D-inspired games that came after it. (Hint: if your game has "levels" or "classes" in it, you lose.)
... except that (sadly) in most RPGs your characters are more interesting than the world, the story, or anything else, and so most of a player's interest turns out to be in allocating scarce resources (e.g. magic items) amongst his/her paper dolls and not so much on the story.
Yes, in Baldur's Gate the "plot" starts out interesting. But the xp-based character development makes no sense. Why are you asking me, a level 1 idiot, to go on this mission when any of the five guards over there could complete it effortlessly? (This kind of thing is totally ridiculous in MMORPGs...) If you eliminated level progression from the game it wouldn't hurt a bit
The really sad thing is, the tedium doesn't eventually allow you to do "interesting" stuff. It just leads to more tedium. E.g. in World of Warcraft at level 5 you are asked to go kill 15 guys, collect 5 things, and then talk to Fred. At level 65 you're asked to kill 25 guys, collect 15 things, and talk to Fred's big brother. What's really sad is that the 25 guys look just like the 15 guys, only slightly bigger and tinted a different color.
A certain amount of the tedium works as progressive disclosure of complexity. A WoW character may, at level 70, have 35 distinct, useful abilities, and giving a player all 35 at once to figure out would be overwhelming. But spreading out those 35 over three months is a little bit too much. (By contrast, I used to think Final Fantasy games -- which take maybe 60 hours to complete -- had way too much hamburger's helper.)
Another issue is the relative poverty of game engines. EverQuest pretty much had one quest mechanism: quests consisted of gathering items and then turning them in. To handle a "kill N skeletons" quest you made people collect items from 10 dead skeletons. World of Warcraft has, in essence, three quest mechanisms: kill, collect, and go somewhere. If you've done one kill quest, every other one will basically be the same but with different scenery. By contrast, Baldur's Gate, NWN, and Fallout had very flexible "quest" systems, but even they start seeming very repetitive after a while.
In the end though, it's pretty much pure economics. Folks won't feel they've gotten good value for money if they can finish a game too quickly, and making a game interesting for 60h, let alone 6000h, is just too expensive, so repetition is the key.
To end this random rant on a positive note: if MMORPGs can leverage player creativity better (say, the way Second Life does, only with some kind of point to it) then maybe interesting content won't be a scarce resource which needs to be strung out with tedium to keep players interested.
And someone has produced a pretty credible knockoff with a couple of bonus features 99% of users won't use or care about.
1) It looks quite nice.
2) It probably won't sell very well anyway.
3) Apple's replacement for the Nano will quite likely be nicer in ways Sandisk hasn't anticipated.
Oh well, let's see what they produce 18 months from now.
To steal Apples' crown you need a device which shows innovation and style
Yes and it needs to be clueful innovation.
MicroSD cards...? Why? SD cards are cheap, huge, and ubiquitous. They're also pretty tiny. Why support the idiotic, small, expensive MicroSD cards? Heck you could just put two SD slots in your player and not have any internal RAM. Photographers would buy the damn things.
Interface -- support the iPod hardware interface, or develop something better, and STICK TO IT. Sony "innovates" by producing dozens of ugly designs with mutually incompatible hardware interfaces. No-one is going to build random MP3 player hookups into cars... Frankly, all of Apple's rivals should settle on a single hardware interface give car and other accessory makes a single plug they can provide for every MP3 player. Then a simple adapter will let all their players hook up to iPod interfaces and new cars can easily accommodate both iPods and everyone else. Soon Apple's connector will be old news.
The fact that this hasn't happened shows that Apple's rivals are just as greedy as Apple and a lot more stupid.
Big corporations are no different. I've personally been involved -- peripherally in several cases, directly in another -- in development projects for large corporates who burn tens of millions on projects that anyone on the project can tell, years ahead of "delivery", are doomed.
The really sad thing is that by "architecting" a "complete" solution you spend ridiculous amounts of money and get nothing, while if you did something simple and organic and simply pushed outward from there you'd get somewhere, e.g.
VPN
Wiki
Custom Security Layer
Server Farm
OR
VPN
Lots of random web servers, wikis, whatever the heck you want -- each with its own security
Google turnkey search box (no doubt Google has an option for clients who won't allow remote admin)
Neither of these would be "perfect", but the architected system they came up with is perfectly useless.
Shame on everyone who reported it without checking the facts.
... why beat a dead horse ... er ... try to unring a bell? We all know that the Macbook was hacked remotely, we found WMDs in Iraq, Saddam Hussein was directly involved in 9/11, and John Kerry inflicted wounds on himself to get a Purple Heart.
Nah, they're just on to the next unchecked story. This is old "news"
Pretty much the only story that's ever been "corrected" successfully was George W. Bush's being AWOL from the National Guard. He was AWOL, but because *some* of the evidence turned out to be bogus, this was somehow construed as meaning he wasn't AWOL. The glove didn't fit, so we must acquit
Actually once you install flip4mac, Windows Media behaves, in general, better on Macs than PCs.
You wrote a totally false statement and repeated that statement several times with made up facts.
You facts aren't made up, just misleading. The $1200 Mac is a Core Duo with Mac OS X, the $1200 Intel is a Pentium D with Windows MCE.
So you get a faster clock, but less performance -- and the Mac can be upgraded to new chips whereas the PC is using an end-of-life architecture and a retarded version of Windows.
Note that this is "40% showing signs of clinical addiction" not "40% play WoW a lot".
Personally, by these criteria I was addicted to EverQuest for long stretches, but I've never been addicted to WoW. It also says to me that Blizzard has a better business model than EQ; people forget that what a game developer wants is to sell as many subscriptions as possible, not to make people play as many hours as possible. The ideal game would have everyone subscribing and no-one actually playing; players cost you money (bandwidth, server capacity, customer service).
Indeed, Blizzard's master-stroke (from a business point of view) is having compelling instance dungeons which can only be done once per week. WoW is full of "points of diminishing return" in that, it doesn't matter how often you play, your primary toon can only do the current bleeding-edge instance once-per-week. Obviously, the truly addicted max out multiple toons, but their primary toon will only ever be able to get so far so fast. It thus follows that they only need to release one new bleeding edge dungeon every six months to keep a lot of people hooked. This is very bad from my point of view (I hate doing the same content over and over) but it's obviously working well for Blizzard.
Linux Worms
An LCD screen should be reviewed based on the qualities of the goddamned screen.
True, but the way the article was written each side tries to defend its position round by round. While the pro-Newton side made that argument in the screen round, Newton was judged to have lost that round.
Basically the argument isn't SF vs. Fantasy it's everything versus "Lowest Common Demoninator Concensus Fantasy", i.e. fantasy with trees, demons, orcs, elves, dwarves, magick spells, bows and arrows, warhorses, et al. It's not "Wizard of the Pigeons" fantasy, it's not "Winnie the Pooh" fantasy, it's not even "Byzantium with Vampires" magic (like "The Dragon Waiting"), or, say, "The Land" as in "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever".
Basically, it's Dungeons & Dragons.
If you stray too far from the implied "kitchen sink of stolen ideas and no real characyer" that is D&D, you fail. This is because every gamer is familiar and comfortable with it, probably likes some little corner of it (oooh bards...), and you don't need to explain anything. Sure, you may have an elaborate back story -- but no-one cares.
Indeed, you not only can't stray far from the D&D world, you can't stray far from D&D assumptions and concepts. E.g. "race = destiny" (orcs are evil, elves are good -- with occasional exceptions), "experienced people have lots of hit points", "being 90% dead has no impact on your ability to run, fight, or cast spells", and so on. Not only has nobody successfully challenged the D&D setting, any attempt to stray from these howlers has also failed.
If all you are looking for is a group of characters who will interact with each other, show after show after show, for some undetermined amount of time, then you are correct... That's the main difference of B5. The seasons weren't just a collection of arbitrary cliffhangers, they were chapters of a continuing story, leading up to a specific climax.
I think you're thinking of Dallas not Hill Street Blues.
B5 was not fundamentally a story about a group of characters; it was a story about a particular event (the war between the First Ones and the younger races).
The original arc was supposed to end where season 4 ended, so in fact the particular event you mention (or at least its resolution and climax) was originally going to be left out (or maybe be put in a movie). The event you talk about was tacked on, rather badly, to provide a reason for season 5, the original seasons 4 and 5 having been compressed into season 4. There are plenty of shows that have covered similar ground, some well (Holocaust, Roots) and other not so well (North and South, Wings of War). In general, they have covered far more complex and interesting material at a far less turgid pace and without prosthetic foreheads.
Science Fiction and Fantasy is all too often about events of epic scope (wars at the end of time, the liberation of a galaxy, a gathering of eternal heroes pitted against the Ultimate Evil, whatever). Usually this epic sweep is at the cost of any real understanding of human (let alone alien) nature. This kind of grandiosity is not what makes literature, movies, or television shows great. It's what makes them pathetic.
Here's a hint -- when the bad guys are Just Evil with no discernable motive, your story sucks. Babylon 5 wasn't quite that bad, but it was close.
To misquote Laurie Andserson:
When Office is gone,
There's always X-Box.
And when X-Box is gone,
There's always Windows (now with Open Source!)
And when Win-dows is gone,
There's always Zune!
And when Zune is gone,
There's always mom.
Hi mom!
Hmm, maybe this comment would be better in a thread on the situation in the mid-east.
Yes, but French# kicks English's ass. With its support for objects, closures, regexp, .NET, hashes, and funny quotation marks, you'll find your productivity go through the roof. And French# 1.5 is adding garbage collection...
Oh and food just tastes better coded in French#.
A persecution complex hardly indicates bad science. Consider Galileo. It's quite possible for a scientist to have a persecution complex and be right.
If you know anything about how science (as a career) works, you'll know that if you're on the unpopular-but-correct side of an argument, be prepared for your life to suck for decades. The folks who are on the popular side will stop your articles from getting into good (or any) publications, so your career will tank, you won't be able to get tenure, yada yada yada. It's not like most successful live like millionaires; think about how you'd feel if you investigated a subject, formed what you thought was a good hypothesis, all of which took you years, wrote it up for publication, and then you got shat on by your colleagues for the next twenty years. You'd feel persecuted too.
The inability of unpopular but valid theoretical physicists to get published has gotten quite a bit of coverage lately.
Incidentally -- we haven't seen any black holes. We've just inferred their presence. Just as this MECO's presence is being inferred. This is all so incredibly tenuous that both (all) sides can claim the data supports their theory.
Interesting.
A little history: Finland (.fi) was attacked by the Soviet Union during WWII. As a result they ended up becoming allied with Nazi Germany (enemy of my enemy, etc.). After WWII, because they were on the wrong side (i.e. Axis) they got screwed (territory stolen from them by the USSR was not given back). So I imagine that there is some undercurrent of ill feeling in Finland, that Nazi sympathies are not unknown, and a lot of the "conventional wisdom" we have here (Nazi / antisemitism = unacceptable, Israel = good, etc.) is not something one can take for granted. Consider that before WWII extreme anti-Jewish attitudes were perfectly acceptable in American drawing rooms. Heck, in the 50's my (Jewish) aunt and uncle became Unitarians so they could move into a restricted neighborhood in suburban Washington D.C. and he could advance in his career.
Even so, if this IRC transcript is accurate, he seems to be well beyond the pale.
It has the distinction of being possibly the best planned series of any kind in history
Science Fiction folks need to understand that there have only been a half dozen SF series worth criticizing. Babylon 5 was certainly one of the best SF series, but when you consider the number of excellent mainstream TV shows, such as Hill Street Blues (which Babylon 5, like so many ensemble shows, owes much of its structure to) it has to compete with, which were both stunningly well planned and executed, B5 pales in comparison.
Yes, B5 had a five year story arc, but when it had to be compressed into four years it suffered badly. They then cobbled together a lackluster fifth season. Better shows have developed arcs which could cope with being axed after the first year or running indefinitely. And Babylon 5's pace was glacial for much of its first three seasons.
These 20 minute shows could be good, but I wouldn't hold my breath. I doubt they started out pitching for a 20 minute direct to DVD project; so this is a TV series pitch that they couldn't sell.
"Tom's Hardware has put out a nice recap of where computer graphics have been and where they are headed in the near future."
No. It's an article more-or-less solely devoted to discussing the issue of power consumption in new and upcoming graphics cards. It doesn't describe the state of the union or even have much to say about any shiny new toys beyond their likely impact on power consumption.
It's an interesting article, but not the article that goes with its title nor the Slashdot summary.
In almost every case I know of harsh software protection leads to cracked versions being easier and more convenient to use.
I remember a really great AMIGA game called Carrier Command which had very tough copy protection -- none of my disk copiers would back up my legitimate copy. Unfortunately, it looks like the copy protection code was added after testing, and the save/load game feature didn't work. A few months after I bought Carrier Command a friend gave me a cracked copy. It was tiny (it occupied 1/4 of the space on disk), launched faster (on-the-fly decompression), and save/load game worked.
Read this article "Death to the Games Industry" in "The Escapist".
I think he's overly pessimistic and his solutions aren't novel (what he proposes as a solution is already happening, and all we're seeing is the games industry stratifying into blockbuster, arthouse, and indie streams like the movie industry), but he does articulate a lot of what's wrong with the industry.
The only thing I disagree with is the death of the PowerPC remarks. I expect Apple to keep at least one G5 in its product line (e.g. the dual 2.3, perhaps a single CPU dual core 2.5) to support those needing fast PowerPC boxes until all key software, such as Adobe's product line, has migrated.
There are plenty of folks around who will buy the new pro machines who are using, say, Final Cut Pro, Motion, or Shake. A lot of high end 3d software is probably going to be announced jointly with any new pro machines (e.g. Maya, Lightwave; Blender just released an Intel binary). Unity has been universal for a few months now.
Actually Maya, Max, and Cinema4D seem to be converging UI-wise. A lot of third party tools have been borrowing their UIs from Maya and Max.
Blender and Lightwave are odd men out.
Surely this was intended, at least in part, as a joke.
Wow. Lots of hate in that last rant. Brought in the Republicans, too, eh? Are you sure you don't want to bring Haliburton into this somehow?
The fact that the DoJ lawsuit against Microsoft disappeared when the Republicans came into power is just pure coincidence. I'm a conspiracy theorist. Incidentally, if you read "Hard Drive" (the first Gates biography) you'll see how Microsoft avoided losing control of DOS (which it really didn't own) early on. All conspiracy theories of course.
Debeers doesn't "dump". They do the exact opposite. Harvest all the diamonds and then let them trickle out to the market.
But you might like to find out how they obtain and retain that control. When large new sources of diamonds became available, the owners of those sources could not make money despite the huge disparity between the cost of mining diamonds and the artificially maintained market price, and eventually were forced to sell out to deBeers.
But you're right about Sony's plans. There's a fine line between "legitimate" use of loss-leaders (Gillette's razor blade handles being the most well-known example) and dumping pure and simple. I'd say that Microsoft's record speaks for itself however -- when will IE start being sold at a profit? Microsoft can cheerfully continue to lose money all over the place so long as 95% or more of PCs sell with an OEM Windows license...