By your logic, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein should have taken the word of the US president over some tipster coming to them with slanderous information that clearly could not be true.
If you want to pretend to be a journalist, you got to dig when someone claims something. Try to find the truth. NOT just swallow it hook, line and sinker.
If you swallow, and then someone else tries to point out your wrong and you then attack them without AGAIN trying to find out the truth, you are not just amzingly stupid, the question has to be asked wether you aren't part of the lie.
Who is to say he didn't change his tune when SCO's bribes stopped coming?
The guy has two options, either he is amazing incompetent or he is corrupt.
As for Forbes being a business magazine, they should certainly know that plenty of businesses are build on a fairy tail, and that CEO's lie all the time, this was POST bubble, and POST enron. Even Forbes must have heard of those.
If anything, the words of CEO about his company are ALWAYS to be distrusted, after all, he has an interest.
You seem to have lack an understanding of what a journalist is supposed to be.
That instantly parch a country that has been soaking the rest of the year, apparently not enough rain falls in the UK to fill the reservoirs enough for those short periods of dryness.
It is kinda amazing this country once ruled the world. Says a lot about the world really.
Here they go and make linux MORE secure by adding code to it, opensource code so it is known to be safe, while spying on windows users.
This proofs it, Linux users are true patriots who love their country and will defend it with their lives and therefore can be trusted with their freedoms, while windows users are all terrorists who hate our freedom and way of live and need to be spyed upon.
Makes sense. If you see someone using windows, report them to the proper authorities, the freedom of the world depends on it.
Friends do not let friends use Windows.
This is a message will auto-destroy a windows box in 10 seconds.
Unless someone is doing a lost of posting, it seems real enough alright.
Also, lets face it. It smells true. MS ain't that smart, it truly seems like they would think it a good idea to install indexing software on every desktop in a network and have it index all the shares.
Because slashdot ain't what it used to be, I shall now explain why this is bad. It would be like EVERY computer, trying to be its own internet search engine and spidering the net for itself.
You don't do that. You index your own files, and use a central index for everything else.
However MS ain't that smart and thinks that you should index locally everything on the network. This is really a fundemental flaw in their design of this tool. It really shouldn't be allowed to index the network without explicit permission.
So why the forced update? It seems to have given itself extra permission so that it was installed without admins having thecapacity to block it. Well, remember who we are dealing with. This is MS. The company that knows best. Their may be an evil plot, or it may simply be that the Desktop Search constained a serious security hole that needed to be patched, so they even installed it on non-desktop machines.
Frankly trying to explain MS is like explaing the actions of a mad man.
We will never know why MS truly did this, stupid blunder, evil plot, insanity?
And no, it won't drive people to linux. This is just another anecdote in the long miserable live of a windows admin. I suppose, I don't do windows, and gladly take a lesser paycheck for that (although oddly enough I get payed more then all the windows admins I know, but hey, life ain't fair). Linux, for the money and the babes. Oh okay, not the babes, but the free beer is nice.
America ain't communist, and communism seems to be on the decline. So it is kind of hard to disprove that the red-scare tactics didn't work.
Same really with the no-fly lists. Before the no-fly lists four aircraft where hijacked, and afterwards?
The US goverment has been critized for not stopping 9/11 by not spying more on the people involved, and now it is being critized for spying too much.
The sad fact is that effective goverment isn't possible. You really can't prevent things from happening, only try to minimize the damage once it happens.
Take Katrina/New Orleans, if the goverment had spend a fortune on proper dykes they would have been lambasted for wasting money on things only needed in extreme conditions that only happen once every hundred years. Had they send in a large force immidiatly and had the disaster turned out to be less, they would have been blasted for overreacting.
You get it even smaller scales as well, people complain about the fireservice coming with wailing siren and a huge truck for a small garbage fire, waking everyone in the area. If they had send a guy with a bucket of water on a cycle and the blaze had proven to much, people would have said they hadn't responded with enough manpower.
It is so hard to get things right, and so easy to critize when you don't actually have to take responsibilty.
Say the no-fly list is abandoned today, and tomorrow an aircraft is hijacked by one of the people on it, will you explain to the world why?
Run for goverment, get yourselve in a position of responsibility and then you too can enjoy being scrutinzed by every idiot with an opinion.
Sure the no-fly list has a lot of things wrong with it, but to those who support it, it seems to work. It got them re-elected, and there ain't been no hijackings since.
Its unix was never a top contender. It sure as hell ain't a Solaris. SCO ain't no IBM, it ain't even a HP. If you want cheap, there is Red Hat or any of the other Linux distros. So what is the value of UnixWare/OpenServer?
You don't get the support of IBM, you don't get the sheer robustness of Solaris, you don't get the opensource from Linux, you just pay more then Linux, get less support then from IBM, and a WHOLE lot less robust not just then Solaris, but ALL the other unixes as well. SCO unix is a dump. NOBODY LIKES IT.
The only thing that has going for it that it has a large install base for historical reasons, point-of-sale (cash register systems, fast food checkouts), who are often reluctant to switch. IT in this sector is always a mess, things never work, are always delayed and cost a fortune, so when a system finally operates, they don't want to change (nor need too, cash register technology really doesn't advance that much).
Don't forget that SCO hasn't been doing any development on their closed source unix versions, they were a linux shop too once.
Basically current IT strategy (HA) is for everyone who can to move away from SCO. Get that crap out of there at the next upgrade cycle. It never was a good product, has been neglected and the company has proved to be lead by the truly insane. They SUED their OWN PAYING customers. You don't do that.
Even you advice against using SCO "Whatever SCO (the company) has done to Linux, SCO's UNIX systems were alright." We disagree on that you think they were once alright, but even you admit that your are talking PAST tense.
As for selling it all of, WHAT IP? They have been proven in court not to own Unix, what IP have they got left?
So why are they doing it? Who is to say they do? MS been behind other finance deals related to SCO. For MS blowing 36 mill is nothing. Spare change. Could they be trying to buy SCO to continue the fight againt Linux? They done it before, and Ballmer is still on the warpath.
The Sims IS hardcore. So harcore that people buy expansions after expansion while it is THEM that create the real content, pay for sites hosting user made content and spend ages working around all the shortcomings of the original product.
First update for most people? To get rid of the cartoony look of the characters and get some realistic faces in there.
The Sims community is as hardcore as the flightsim crowd. This is NOT a casual game. Casual gaming is web-based. Games you can pick up and play AND finish in a few minutes. The Sims AIN'T.
In fact the only difference between The Sims, flightsims, trains sims and the "traditional" hardcore crowd of FPS lovers, is that the first group can speak proper english and has touched a member of the sex they find attractive.
But in time and money spend on the game, in many ways the former group is even more hardcore.
So what does he want Spore to be? A tetris type game OR a The Sims?
I get this time and time again, websites that are 99% reads, with a few scattered writes, yet people insisting we need a "proper" database for that. ACID? Transactions? Rollback? FOR WHAT!
Worsed example ever, simple webpage that allowed people to post their phone number to take part in a price draw. ANY kind of database is overkill for that and yet I had to argue against the proper IT guy wanting another oracle license for the server that would host it.
Geez, the only reason I used a database was to make it easier to search for duplicates, so I could tell the user if they had already entered.
Note that this post has how big business doesn't use MySql. Apparently google doesn't count.
Offcourse it makes sense, if you work in an enviroment where you boss wasted money on Oracle, his boss wasted money on Oracle, you are hardly likely to make them look like fools and use a free product. Costs savings? Yeah, the bosses will be into that, the moment they fire you and save your salary for making them look bad.
And when dutch forces called for support to stop a genocide, the americans didn't send any. The genocide happens, the dutch got the blaim and the americans showed that as ever make a lousy partner.
Check the history a little bit closer. THe US role is not something to be proud off.
Innovation, production? The US didn't have these before WW2 either, in fact, they didn't have the first DURING WW2 either. That is right, check your history, the US wasn't the innovator. The jet engine came from england, the rockets after WW2 from germany, nukes were made by immigrants, and its land war tech was way behind the USSR and even germany.
But when the americans finally accepted that WW2 was ineffitable and got their asses into gear they suddenly managed to get their production up to record speed (and with it their economy) and even get some tech going. But make no mistake pre-WW2 the US was NOT a powerhouse. If anything it was considered as backwards as russia. A land of peasants, unworthy of the attentions of the rest of the world.
At the opening shots of WW2 american tech was inferior to the axis nations AND its allies. What suprised everyone, and won the western front was its amazing capacity to get its industry converted to war and crank up the production to unprecedented levels.
Who is to say the US can't do that again?
Sure sure, empires fall. It happens, but every empire that lasted for hundreds of years will have had people proclaim its downfall for every single one of those years. If you keep saying something long enough, eventually it will come true. Tomorrow, the sun will explode. Keep on saying it, someday, it will be true. I wouldn't bother placing any bets however.
But WW3 won't happen, unless you think it is already happening. None of the powers are willing to go to war at the moment, because there is more profit in global peace with localised war. The current conflict involves a group of people who by nature can't ever mount an effective fighting force (religious extremists never can fight, Israel military might does not come from Orthodox jews, it comes from normal jews, christians and yes muslims and even sane people who are willing to fight for their country) vs the entire rest of the world who views religion as something you use, not obey blindly.
Just consider how many muslims in the west talk big, but do nothing because Allah may be great, but Big Brother (reality tv) is greater and you got to pay of that loan for that big screen tv. If there really was such great support for the cause, you could certainly do a lot better then a few meager bombings, most of which fail. When a dozen people in a country of 60 million decide to blow something up, that is not something to be too concerned about. PETA got more activists. Greenpeace manages to organize bigger raids with more results. Remember those assaults in the US on Abortion Clinics? Hell, even the KKK managed to keep their terror campaign alive for longer. Muslim terrorists, pathetic. Check the history of the IRA for how you really do it.
No, the US will one day fall, but not in our life-time. The current war is just another Vietnam, sucks to be Iraq but the US isn't that affected by it. Huge debt? So what, who is going to collect? Who is going to the US? Europe (nah, we are to busy fight8ng amongs ourselves) Russia? They are laughing their heads off, they like the US getting its ass kicked in afghanistan, vengeance is a dish best served cold in a hot desert.
China? Please, they got their own populace to oppress.
Remember the space race, all of sudden it was to land a man on the moon. That was IT, goal completed, end of race. Nevermind that the USSR then went on to spend year after year with a continues manned space presence breaking record after record while the americans blew up, that didn't count. That was the goal the americans said had to be reached, that is what they reached first, therefore they won.
It is amazing really, american standups never got tired of joking of Mir when it was in its final stages (nevermind that it never had any accidents) but mention the Nasa blowing up schoolteachers and ooooh, that is too nasty.
I think it is due to american tv. When I grew up in Holland if you wanted to watch another tv station,depending on where you lived, you had to watch a foreign channel (English, german or belgian). Most of europe gets far more exposure to foreign culture then americans ever get.
Back in days long past the Discovery channel would occasionally air a program that would look at things from an other perspective. A look at the russian side of WW2 for instance, not lately, nowadays they air a program on choppers and loudly claim that ejection seats are impossible in choppers. Might come as a suprise to the russians who have had them for ages.
Americans can't/don't/won't look outside. They can't, it is not the american way.
Because the EU release had the answers in the box. They knew a non-american wasn't going to know the answer. Offcourse, you had to actually pay for the game.
Several people list their favorite games, as if that is a sign of the games greatness. There will be people who list shit as their favorite appertizer, doesn't mean it is a great food.
This story is about that Pong was the "perfect" game and that modern games by their increasing complexity are less then it. It therefore is off little point to argue that you like a modern game. That is NOT the argument. IF you listed those games as being superior to pong and then argued why you would have a point.
It is possible to like something that is less then something else. Redheads are best, but it is possible to love a brunette or care about a raven-haired beauty. (Blondes? Meh)
Is pong the greatest? Not in my world view, I don't like that type of game, I prefer more options, more choice, more sense of being able to improve myself rather then just having to move faster then a computer can move a ball around the screen.
Because lets be honest, the original pong was tennis. Oh, yeah, that is original. Putting a real life game into a video format, that is the pinical of creativity. Except it wasn't tennis, you can run all around the court, if you play against a wall in REAL tennis the ball speed doesn't increase to supersonic no matter how long you play. It is a very very simple version of tennis.
This is the greatest game ever? No. Pong is like those earliest movies, like the one showing a train rushing towards the camera, it may have awed us back then, but we have moved on. We expect more now.
It is possible to look at something, say "that was a great product" and then add, "for its time" and finish with "good thing we now know better". The T-ford (this is slashdot, got to have a car anology) was great car for the age and certainly had huge impact on the world, but nobody in his right mind would call it the greatest car ever OR insist that all cars since have been on a downwards slide.
I think the problem is because we want to make list in our minds to order things, and it just don't work that way. There is no greatest game. Not a single product in any category that stands alone at the top. The closest you could come is an unordered list of games that had a great impact on the industry or on those who played it. In gaming that last part is already a big killer, I don't do consoles, so anyone with a greatest game on a console will just draw a big blank look from me. Who is Zelda?
I can't deny that Final Fantasy has had a huge impact, but having played a few of them for a bit on handhelds I sure as hell wouldn't list them as great games (Grow up and get a real western game you console kiddie) because they don't appeal to me.
Same offcourse might go in reverse for someone else (Who is April Ryan?)
Pong was one of the first, that is about it. Greatest? No, not in my book. If you truly think it is the greatest explain to me why and do it without simply bashing everything else.
Well, actually on a school trip (town I lived in was far to consevative for anything fun). So do I think pong is the greatest game ever?
If you are mentally retarded, yes.
Sure the game is simple, but is that enough? While a simple slice of bread with cheese might be an enjoyable meal, you sure as hell wouldn't want to live on it for the rest of your life. Variety is the spice of life.
Pong has no variation, until time immortal you will have the same paddle that moves at the same speed and a ball that bounces at the same angle at ever increasing speed. At a given point the speed becomes so great that it becomes impossible to move the paddle fast enough and you loose.
Call me silly but I want a little more from my games. GRANTED, an awfull lot of modern games sadly don't. Take MMO's.You do damage, the enemy moves damage, sooner or later you come across an enemy that does more damage then you, and you need to level up. Then you move on a bit, till you find another monster that does more damage then you, forcing you to level up again.
At no point does the actual battle change, just the numbers involved.
FPS are often the same, you have a pistol, you kill small monsters, you find a shotgun, you kill slightly bigger monsters. It is rare indeed to find a FPS were weapons is a choice of tactics. Were you are not just fighting the same battle over and over again.
A prime example might be Supreme Commander/Total Annihilation, they even made it part of the story.Time and time again you are a single unit, sent to a battle field with far too few resources and have to build the exact same base, while taking care of first a few scouts, then a few light units and then slowly moving up to the occasional air dropped assault party.
I wouldn't say that games are in a downward spiral, more a flatline. BUT there are exceptions, what they are I leave up to your individual tastes, but if pong is your greatest game ever, I seriously suspect your IQ can't be that high. It is like saying Peek-A-Boo is the greatest non-computer game.
I don't think it is generations, I think it has to do how well you deal with complexity in live. There are two kinds of people in this world. Those that push the shiny red button,and those that don't even see it and complain loudly that it is all so complex.
The first group wants to be pushed, wants to see new things, wants change, wants improvements. The second group has trouble enough with what little they already know and wishes everything to stay the same because it is easier.
Both are "right" if you can even say that, but both groups will ALWAYS be in each others hairs. Yes age does tend to move you into the second group because even if you were once all excited about everything new, living will tend to wear that down as you realize things don't really change and well, what you got is good enough and GET OF MY DAMN LAWN syndrome sets in.
Celebrating pong is the ultimate end result. You are an old codger, senile and ridiculed. DOn't worry, it will happen to all of us.
This helicopter, which HASN'T crashed, is made out of the bits of a plane that did. A Boeing 747, that is made with all that modern tech and those high safety standards.
So tell me again, what is riskier? Remember, that quality western aircraft consist entirely of parts made by the lowest bidder, checked by a company under constant pressure to cut costs, and operated by an airline desperate to squeeze every last mile out of a decades old machine.
Odd thing is that an amateur will often take more care then a proffesional, after all, it ain't the pro who actually got to fly his own deathtrap. Just check aviation history how many real aircraft accidents are down to design flaws. Including choppers whose blades explode if hit by lightening, denied for years by the helicopter industry of being possible.
The problem with the shuttle is simple, it was never supposed to be like this. The basic idea started when funding for the space program was still high, and the current shuttle design was supposed to be a trial for a new SET of tools for NASA. The space shuttle as it currently exists was never meant to be. Instead the original vision saw a need for a small craft to ferry personal to and from space, combined with a heavy cargo lifter. The current space shuttle was a support vehicle for that, mostly designed to deal with repairing and recovering satelites. It was to be used when you want the cargo and the people together and you don't need much cargo. (The space shuttle will ALWAYS be limited because it has to carry the cargo inside)
As funding was cut the space shuttle was lumbered with more and more tasks (the shuttle was never meant to be a lab, a permenant space station was supposed to be the lab) and was used for far longer then it was designed to be. In fact it came to replace everything else.
The russians on the other hand simply kept the same design, a small rocket for personell, and a big one for cargo and have them meet up in space. Practical.
IF the americans had kept up the original vision they would have had an amazing fleet of spacecraft and owned space by now, but reagonomics and a loss of will just never made that vision come true and so the russian method of cheap and reliable proved more effective.
The americans ended up with a people carrier for commuting, too big for one person, too small to move house in. THe russians got an old truck and an old motorcycle, excellent for moving house and commuting at a fraction of the costs.
Basically the space shuttle just never got the missions it was designed for, recovering and repairing sattelites. Remember that story about the satelite that went to the sun and then crashed? THAT was a space shuttle mission, pick the thing up in orbit and land it softly. IF space production had ever taken off, that would have been a space shuttle mission, get your goods back home in one piece.
It was NEVER meant to be a heavy lifter OR a personal transport. Oh, and it was never meant to serve this long.
According to David Pogue, in his book Piloting Palm, Casio was a particularly difficult partner to work with. Their relative inexperience with software and hardware development (the company's major portable products were digital wristwatches, calculators and inexpensive pocket organizers) made them irrationally intolerant of any bugs, no matter how minor or how unlikely to affect the user.
Can you imagine what IT would be like if Casio had created the PC? Why, it might actually work.
Amazing that IT has managed to train us so well to the existence of bugs in final products that we laugh at a company that seems to think bugs are unacceptable.
Truly amazing how we come to accept that the software we use is not functioning correctly.
Realism? Okay, how about this. In the real world if I am in a nightclub area I can see all kinds of neon signs for brands of beer. In game, there will be ONE advertiser. One brand. Realistic? No.
In the real world people deface ads. Will an advertiser allow that? No.
In the real world I ignore ads, they are part of the background noise, if that is the way they are in games, then what is the point. No, they might start with a small poster but it will get bigger and bigger and bigger. Walk around in Second Life for a while to see what runaway advertising means.
This won't make games more realistic, not ad all, if that were the case then racing games would NOT have to seek a license to place the real ads on the track, they would be paid to do so. But an advertiser is going to want his ad to more then a blurr as you pass by if he is going to pay for it.
Do you really want female hygiene ads during your assault on the beaches of normandy? That is where this is heading. Same as ads everywhere else are getting more and more intrusive.
How big is that picture of your daughter? I seen a real world example of it. A 4mb image, that somehow only seemed to result in a small photo of about a 100x100 pixels. Yeah, that ain't suspicious AT ALL. Doesn't set of any alarm bells. Nope.
That is the entire problem with the idea, how do you get enough information inside and still not raise suspicion. It is different for coded messages, keep the code small and it can easily fit but to leak information, you need to start including megabytes of documents in image files that are typically less then a 100kb or do you think nobody will find it odd if you keep a 10megapixel uncompressed image of your daughter on your stick?
Remember, if it is a small amount of data you can get it out easily, memorize it. But if you are talking industrial espionage you are talking blueprint, documents, databases.
The researcher claimed that he found traces of the programs in question. TRACES. Meaning they were removed. Now think about this, why does someone remove software. Because they want to hide it OR because they tried it and found it useless?
Sure, there are uses, but as said, only for situations where the data is small enough to logically fit inside. Child porn image nesting in a harmless image seems about the most logical use, you could easily create a site that serves "harmless" wallpapers but are really childporn. Except one tiny problem, how do you distribute it? Open access, bit risky getting the highly illegal content out there, who knows who might be bored and start snooping. Limited access? Then who are you hiding from?
The problem with the child porn idea is that it ain't going to fool anybody for long. Contrary to popular believe the police ain't stupid, if they suspect childporn and find nothing but a large collection of regular images that ALL seem to be just a bit too large, then just maybe, they are going to investigate further.
As for use in distribution, encryption is far easier, if I know you then I can just send the file encrypted and nobody will be the wiser. If I don't know you and post it blindly on a public site, how are you going to know how to get the content out?
I know that the idea is that one of the elements of hiding is NOT to increase the filesize, but unless I am missing something, if you want to hide 1mb of data, you are going to need at least 1mb of other data to do the hiding in. For a nice database dump, that is a LOT of pictures of your daughter.
Quickly get on the phone to Ferrari, they are about to go bust, they make a niche product and Paul Hindt claims that means there is no market.
Believe it or not everything has to be mass market to be a success. In fact the only requirement for a product to be successfull is for it to sell for more then it costs to produce. IF this company can produce say a thousand devices and sell them at a profit, they have made a... can you guess it, thats right, a profit.
If they are not, well then they will join a long line of companies that failed, this includes companies with a niche product and companies with a mass-market product.
Just dive into the world of add-ons for MS FLight Simulator. Talk about a niche market, flight sims ain't all that popular, you specialize in a specific product and then produce add-ons that cost a fortune. Yet some companies have been around for ages, selling special hardware designed for ONE game.
If you want to be even more niche, try MS Train Simulator. Even less appeal then a flight simulator, and it too has companies selling special control units.
Since these companies been around for ages now, somehow they must have made that niche market work for them.
As for coding for it, considering that the most popular first person shooters can be heavily modded already, it ain't all that hard to translate impacts in the game that otherwise might be used to alter the HUD to send a message to a usb device.
We just had an article about a great game, The Longest Journey. As great as it is, it is kinda hard to imagine it having spectaror modes, presence, chat or persistent profiles and whatever. There are tons of games like that. Not all gaming is FPS.
Who cares anyway? Do you really want to see how another person does in a single player session? Sure, some games it might work, racing games where you can compare times. And then only in those racing games that are "equal".
I really don't need or want to know how fast some kid with nothing better to do can run through a level. What is the point, not only doesn't it matter to me, boasting about it like boasting that you managed to come in 3 seconds last time you were with a girl. Eh, yeah, good kid, but as you get older you might realize speed isn't everything.
What I do fear is that with piracy offline gaming might die. Simply put, MMO's are the only effective anti-piracy measure so far. Soon Blizzard will release their first solo game since their huge sucess WoW. It might be intresting to see how it does financially, cost of development vs income from sales. Offcourse it is not a completly fair comparisson as StarCraft 2 will be about multiplayer as well and that might very well need a piracy proof system as well but still.
I can however all to easily see a future meeting at Blizzard that goes slightly like this. Right, we got two games, the MMO cost us X to develop and made us XXXXXXXXX and the single player game cost us X and made us XX. Guess people what kinda game we are going to make next.
The world doesn't revolve around you. Learn to accept this.
More precisly, it doesn't revolve around your demographic, there are enough persons who are willing to play a monthly fee and who want to play in a multiplayer enviroment.
Different tastes, is that so hard to accept? No, it doesn't mean you are old, just means you have an over-inflated ego. Frankly that isn't age dependent.
Every single story about MMO's you get some person complaing about monthy fees and somehow the world is supposed to care. Here is a newsflash for you. Blizzard is RAKING it in. WoW should be closing in on the billion dollar revenue mark by now. That is hard to ignore. Game companies that struggle while they see thousands of people downloading their games for free and here is a company with an OLD OLD OLD game still raking it in. You think these companies care about you? They got a choice, spend fortune developing a single player game that will be obsolete in months, hopefully get them a onetime income and maybe some sparechange for the value release with tons of players using their forums for support a full week before the game is actually OUT (pirates move fast, and leechers have no shame) OR spend that money on an MMO and get a ton of cash each and every month. Gee, difficult one.
If you think Half-Life, God of War or any mario game has story telling in it, then you don't know story telling.
The story in those games is nothing more then the intro to the killing. You play these games for the shooting/platforming, NOT the story. TLJ you play for the story, NOT the puzzles.
A long cutscene does not make for storytelling. It is the english language at fault again for not giving us enough words to detail the difference between a story that simply sets us in motion, and a story that moves us.
Take half-life, who IS Gordon Freeman, why did he choose this career, why is he going inside. Why doesn't he say anything. Who IS HE, WHY is HE.
Compare that with April Ryan, we know she is an art student that she struggles with finding a way to express herself, that she broke of relations with her family over her father (the original is less clear on why then the sequel). That she is a bit of a dreamer, at once wishing for the world to be more, but also afraid to loose what she has.
Play the game yourselve and then tell me again that Gordon Freeman is an equal personality to April Ryan.
Hell, play other classics like Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father and tell me this compares to the storytelling in the games you mention.
Frankly kid, read a book, and learn what real storytelling is.
Slashdot Mirror
Come on, we need to know, what is the default editor, vi or emacs? We need to know.
By your logic, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein should have taken the word of the US president over some tipster coming to them with slanderous information that clearly could not be true.
If you want to pretend to be a journalist, you got to dig when someone claims something. Try to find the truth. NOT just swallow it hook, line and sinker.
If you swallow, and then someone else tries to point out your wrong and you then attack them without AGAIN trying to find out the truth, you are not just amzingly stupid, the question has to be asked wether you aren't part of the lie.
Who is to say he didn't change his tune when SCO's bribes stopped coming?
The guy has two options, either he is amazing incompetent or he is corrupt.
As for Forbes being a business magazine, they should certainly know that plenty of businesses are build on a fairy tail, and that CEO's lie all the time, this was POST bubble, and POST enron. Even Forbes must have heard of those.
If anything, the words of CEO about his company are ALWAYS to be distrusted, after all, he has an interest.
You seem to have lack an understanding of what a journalist is supposed to be.
That instantly parch a country that has been soaking the rest of the year, apparently not enough rain falls in the UK to fill the reservoirs enough for those short periods of dryness.
It is kinda amazing this country once ruled the world. Says a lot about the world really.
Here they go and make linux MORE secure by adding code to it, opensource code so it is known to be safe, while spying on windows users.
This proofs it, Linux users are true patriots who love their country and will defend it with their lives and therefore can be trusted with their freedoms, while windows users are all terrorists who hate our freedom and way of live and need to be spyed upon.
Makes sense. If you see someone using windows, report them to the proper authorities, the freedom of the world depends on it.
Friends do not let friends use Windows.
This is a message will auto-destroy a windows box in 10 seconds.
Unless someone is doing a lost of posting, it seems real enough alright.
Also, lets face it. It smells true. MS ain't that smart, it truly seems like they would think it a good idea to install indexing software on every desktop in a network and have it index all the shares.
Because slashdot ain't what it used to be, I shall now explain why this is bad. It would be like EVERY computer, trying to be its own internet search engine and spidering the net for itself.
You don't do that. You index your own files, and use a central index for everything else.
However MS ain't that smart and thinks that you should index locally everything on the network. This is really a fundemental flaw in their design of this tool. It really shouldn't be allowed to index the network without explicit permission.
So why the forced update? It seems to have given itself extra permission so that it was installed without admins having thecapacity to block it. Well, remember who we are dealing with. This is MS. The company that knows best. Their may be an evil plot, or it may simply be that the Desktop Search constained a serious security hole that needed to be patched, so they even installed it on non-desktop machines.
Frankly trying to explain MS is like explaing the actions of a mad man.
We will never know why MS truly did this, stupid blunder, evil plot, insanity?
And no, it won't drive people to linux. This is just another anecdote in the long miserable live of a windows admin. I suppose, I don't do windows, and gladly take a lesser paycheck for that (although oddly enough I get payed more then all the windows admins I know, but hey, life ain't fair). Linux, for the money and the babes. Oh okay, not the babes, but the free beer is nice.
America ain't communist, and communism seems to be on the decline. So it is kind of hard to disprove that the red-scare tactics didn't work.
Same really with the no-fly lists. Before the no-fly lists four aircraft where hijacked, and afterwards?
The US goverment has been critized for not stopping 9/11 by not spying more on the people involved, and now it is being critized for spying too much.
The sad fact is that effective goverment isn't possible. You really can't prevent things from happening, only try to minimize the damage once it happens.
Take Katrina/New Orleans, if the goverment had spend a fortune on proper dykes they would have been lambasted for wasting money on things only needed in extreme conditions that only happen once every hundred years. Had they send in a large force immidiatly and had the disaster turned out to be less, they would have been blasted for overreacting.
You get it even smaller scales as well, people complain about the fireservice coming with wailing siren and a huge truck for a small garbage fire, waking everyone in the area. If they had send a guy with a bucket of water on a cycle and the blaze had proven to much, people would have said they hadn't responded with enough manpower.
It is so hard to get things right, and so easy to critize when you don't actually have to take responsibilty.
Say the no-fly list is abandoned today, and tomorrow an aircraft is hijacked by one of the people on it, will you explain to the world why?
Run for goverment, get yourselve in a position of responsibility and then you too can enjoy being scrutinzed by every idiot with an opinion.
Sure the no-fly list has a lot of things wrong with it, but to those who support it, it seems to work. It got them re-elected, and there ain't been no hijackings since.
Its unix was never a top contender. It sure as hell ain't a Solaris. SCO ain't no IBM, it ain't even a HP. If you want cheap, there is Red Hat or any of the other Linux distros. So what is the value of UnixWare/OpenServer?
You don't get the support of IBM, you don't get the sheer robustness of Solaris, you don't get the opensource from Linux, you just pay more then Linux, get less support then from IBM, and a WHOLE lot less robust not just then Solaris, but ALL the other unixes as well. SCO unix is a dump. NOBODY LIKES IT.
The only thing that has going for it that it has a large install base for historical reasons, point-of-sale (cash register systems, fast food checkouts), who are often reluctant to switch. IT in this sector is always a mess, things never work, are always delayed and cost a fortune, so when a system finally operates, they don't want to change (nor need too, cash register technology really doesn't advance that much).
Don't forget that SCO hasn't been doing any development on their closed source unix versions, they were a linux shop too once.
Basically current IT strategy (HA) is for everyone who can to move away from SCO. Get that crap out of there at the next upgrade cycle. It never was a good product, has been neglected and the company has proved to be lead by the truly insane. They SUED their OWN PAYING customers. You don't do that.
Even you advice against using SCO "Whatever SCO (the company) has done to Linux, SCO's UNIX systems were alright." We disagree on that you think they were once alright, but even you admit that your are talking PAST tense.
As for selling it all of, WHAT IP? They have been proven in court not to own Unix, what IP have they got left?
So why are they doing it? Who is to say they do? MS been behind other finance deals related to SCO. For MS blowing 36 mill is nothing. Spare change. Could they be trying to buy SCO to continue the fight againt Linux? They done it before, and Ballmer is still on the warpath.
That is the most likely scenario to me.
The Sims IS hardcore. So harcore that people buy expansions after expansion while it is THEM that create the real content, pay for sites hosting user made content and spend ages working around all the shortcomings of the original product.
First update for most people? To get rid of the cartoony look of the characters and get some realistic faces in there.
The Sims community is as hardcore as the flightsim crowd. This is NOT a casual game. Casual gaming is web-based. Games you can pick up and play AND finish in a few minutes. The Sims AIN'T.
In fact the only difference between The Sims, flightsims, trains sims and the "traditional" hardcore crowd of FPS lovers, is that the first group can speak proper english and has touched a member of the sex they find attractive.
But in time and money spend on the game, in many ways the former group is even more hardcore.
So what does he want Spore to be? A tetris type game OR a The Sims?
I get this time and time again, websites that are 99% reads, with a few scattered writes, yet people insisting we need a "proper" database for that. ACID? Transactions? Rollback? FOR WHAT!
Worsed example ever, simple webpage that allowed people to post their phone number to take part in a price draw. ANY kind of database is overkill for that and yet I had to argue against the proper IT guy wanting another oracle license for the server that would host it.
Geez, the only reason I used a database was to make it easier to search for duplicates, so I could tell the user if they had already entered.
Note that this post has how big business doesn't use MySql. Apparently google doesn't count.
Offcourse it makes sense, if you work in an enviroment where you boss wasted money on Oracle, his boss wasted money on Oracle, you are hardly likely to make them look like fools and use a free product. Costs savings? Yeah, the bosses will be into that, the moment they fire you and save your salary for making them look bad.
And when dutch forces called for support to stop a genocide, the americans didn't send any. The genocide happens, the dutch got the blaim and the americans showed that as ever make a lousy partner.
Check the history a little bit closer. THe US role is not something to be proud off.
Innovation, production? The US didn't have these before WW2 either, in fact, they didn't have the first DURING WW2 either. That is right, check your history, the US wasn't the innovator. The jet engine came from england, the rockets after WW2 from germany, nukes were made by immigrants, and its land war tech was way behind the USSR and even germany.
But when the americans finally accepted that WW2 was ineffitable and got their asses into gear they suddenly managed to get their production up to record speed (and with it their economy) and even get some tech going. But make no mistake pre-WW2 the US was NOT a powerhouse. If anything it was considered as backwards as russia. A land of peasants, unworthy of the attentions of the rest of the world.
At the opening shots of WW2 american tech was inferior to the axis nations AND its allies. What suprised everyone, and won the western front was its amazing capacity to get its industry converted to war and crank up the production to unprecedented levels.
Who is to say the US can't do that again?
Sure sure, empires fall. It happens, but every empire that lasted for hundreds of years will have had people proclaim its downfall for every single one of those years. If you keep saying something long enough, eventually it will come true. Tomorrow, the sun will explode. Keep on saying it, someday, it will be true. I wouldn't bother placing any bets however.
But WW3 won't happen, unless you think it is already happening. None of the powers are willing to go to war at the moment, because there is more profit in global peace with localised war. The current conflict involves a group of people who by nature can't ever mount an effective fighting force (religious extremists never can fight, Israel military might does not come from Orthodox jews, it comes from normal jews, christians and yes muslims and even sane people who are willing to fight for their country) vs the entire rest of the world who views religion as something you use, not obey blindly.
Just consider how many muslims in the west talk big, but do nothing because Allah may be great, but Big Brother (reality tv) is greater and you got to pay of that loan for that big screen tv. If there really was such great support for the cause, you could certainly do a lot better then a few meager bombings, most of which fail. When a dozen people in a country of 60 million decide to blow something up, that is not something to be too concerned about. PETA got more activists. Greenpeace manages to organize bigger raids with more results. Remember those assaults in the US on Abortion Clinics? Hell, even the KKK managed to keep their terror campaign alive for longer. Muslim terrorists, pathetic. Check the history of the IRA for how you really do it.
No, the US will one day fall, but not in our life-time. The current war is just another Vietnam, sucks to be Iraq but the US isn't that affected by it. Huge debt? So what, who is going to collect? Who is going to the US? Europe (nah, we are to busy fight8ng amongs ourselves) Russia? They are laughing their heads off, they like the US getting its ass kicked in afghanistan, vengeance is a dish best served cold in a hot desert.
China? Please, they got their own populace to oppress.
Remember the space race, all of sudden it was to land a man on the moon. That was IT, goal completed, end of race. Nevermind that the USSR then went on to spend year after year with a continues manned space presence breaking record after record while the americans blew up, that didn't count. That was the goal the americans said had to be reached, that is what they reached first, therefore they won.
It is amazing really, american standups never got tired of joking of Mir when it was in its final stages (nevermind that it never had any accidents) but mention the Nasa blowing up schoolteachers and ooooh, that is too nasty.
I think it is due to american tv. When I grew up in Holland if you wanted to watch another tv station,depending on where you lived, you had to watch a foreign channel (English, german or belgian). Most of europe gets far more exposure to foreign culture then americans ever get.
Back in days long past the Discovery channel would occasionally air a program that would look at things from an other perspective. A look at the russian side of WW2 for instance, not lately, nowadays they air a program on choppers and loudly claim that ejection seats are impossible in choppers. Might come as a suprise to the russians who have had them for ages.
Americans can't/don't/won't look outside. They can't, it is not the american way.
Because the EU release had the answers in the box. They knew a non-american wasn't going to know the answer. Offcourse, you had to actually pay for the game.
He, I can mod my Wii? Never knew that, thanks.
You would be suprised how many people learn about filesharing from the medias attack on it.
Several people list their favorite games, as if that is a sign of the games greatness. There will be people who list shit as their favorite appertizer, doesn't mean it is a great food.
This story is about that Pong was the "perfect" game and that modern games by their increasing complexity are less then it. It therefore is off little point to argue that you like a modern game. That is NOT the argument. IF you listed those games as being superior to pong and then argued why you would have a point.
It is possible to like something that is less then something else. Redheads are best, but it is possible to love a brunette or care about a raven-haired beauty. (Blondes? Meh)
Is pong the greatest? Not in my world view, I don't like that type of game, I prefer more options, more choice, more sense of being able to improve myself rather then just having to move faster then a computer can move a ball around the screen.
Because lets be honest, the original pong was tennis. Oh, yeah, that is original. Putting a real life game into a video format, that is the pinical of creativity. Except it wasn't tennis, you can run all around the court, if you play against a wall in REAL tennis the ball speed doesn't increase to supersonic no matter how long you play. It is a very very simple version of tennis.
This is the greatest game ever? No. Pong is like those earliest movies, like the one showing a train rushing towards the camera, it may have awed us back then, but we have moved on. We expect more now.
It is possible to look at something, say "that was a great product" and then add, "for its time" and finish with "good thing we now know better". The T-ford (this is slashdot, got to have a car anology) was great car for the age and certainly had huge impact on the world, but nobody in his right mind would call it the greatest car ever OR insist that all cars since have been on a downwards slide.
I think the problem is because we want to make list in our minds to order things, and it just don't work that way. There is no greatest game. Not a single product in any category that stands alone at the top. The closest you could come is an unordered list of games that had a great impact on the industry or on those who played it. In gaming that last part is already a big killer, I don't do consoles, so anyone with a greatest game on a console will just draw a big blank look from me. Who is Zelda?
I can't deny that Final Fantasy has had a huge impact, but having played a few of them for a bit on handhelds I sure as hell wouldn't list them as great games (Grow up and get a real western game you console kiddie) because they don't appeal to me.
Same offcourse might go in reverse for someone else (Who is April Ryan?)
Pong was one of the first, that is about it. Greatest? No, not in my book. If you truly think it is the greatest explain to me why and do it without simply bashing everything else.
Well, actually on a school trip (town I lived in was far to consevative for anything fun). So do I think pong is the greatest game ever?
If you are mentally retarded, yes.
Sure the game is simple, but is that enough? While a simple slice of bread with cheese might be an enjoyable meal, you sure as hell wouldn't want to live on it for the rest of your life. Variety is the spice of life.
Pong has no variation, until time immortal you will have the same paddle that moves at the same speed and a ball that bounces at the same angle at ever increasing speed. At a given point the speed becomes so great that it becomes impossible to move the paddle fast enough and you loose.
Call me silly but I want a little more from my games. GRANTED, an awfull lot of modern games sadly don't. Take MMO's.You do damage, the enemy moves damage, sooner or later you come across an enemy that does more damage then you, and you need to level up. Then you move on a bit, till you find another monster that does more damage then you, forcing you to level up again.
At no point does the actual battle change, just the numbers involved.
FPS are often the same, you have a pistol, you kill small monsters, you find a shotgun, you kill slightly bigger monsters. It is rare indeed to find a FPS were weapons is a choice of tactics. Were you are not just fighting the same battle over and over again.
A prime example might be Supreme Commander/Total Annihilation, they even made it part of the story.Time and time again you are a single unit, sent to a battle field with far too few resources and have to build the exact same base, while taking care of first a few scouts, then a few light units and then slowly moving up to the occasional air dropped assault party.
I wouldn't say that games are in a downward spiral, more a flatline. BUT there are exceptions, what they are I leave up to your individual tastes, but if pong is your greatest game ever, I seriously suspect your IQ can't be that high. It is like saying Peek-A-Boo is the greatest non-computer game.
I don't think it is generations, I think it has to do how well you deal with complexity in live. There are two kinds of people in this world. Those that push the shiny red button,and those that don't even see it and complain loudly that it is all so complex.
The first group wants to be pushed, wants to see new things, wants change, wants improvements. The second group has trouble enough with what little they already know and wishes everything to stay the same because it is easier.
Both are "right" if you can even say that, but both groups will ALWAYS be in each others hairs. Yes age does tend to move you into the second group because even if you were once all excited about everything new, living will tend to wear that down as you realize things don't really change and well, what you got is good enough and GET OF MY DAMN LAWN syndrome sets in.
Celebrating pong is the ultimate end result. You are an old codger, senile and ridiculed. DOn't worry, it will happen to all of us.
This helicopter, which HASN'T crashed, is made out of the bits of a plane that did. A Boeing 747, that is made with all that modern tech and those high safety standards.
So tell me again, what is riskier? Remember, that quality western aircraft consist entirely of parts made by the lowest bidder, checked by a company under constant pressure to cut costs, and operated by an airline desperate to squeeze every last mile out of a decades old machine.
Odd thing is that an amateur will often take more care then a proffesional, after all, it ain't the pro who actually got to fly his own deathtrap. Just check aviation history how many real aircraft accidents are down to design flaws. Including choppers whose blades explode if hit by lightening, denied for years by the helicopter industry of being possible.
The problem with the shuttle is simple, it was never supposed to be like this. The basic idea started when funding for the space program was still high, and the current shuttle design was supposed to be a trial for a new SET of tools for NASA. The space shuttle as it currently exists was never meant to be. Instead the original vision saw a need for a small craft to ferry personal to and from space, combined with a heavy cargo lifter. The current space shuttle was a support vehicle for that, mostly designed to deal with repairing and recovering satelites. It was to be used when you want the cargo and the people together and you don't need much cargo. (The space shuttle will ALWAYS be limited because it has to carry the cargo inside)
As funding was cut the space shuttle was lumbered with more and more tasks (the shuttle was never meant to be a lab, a permenant space station was supposed to be the lab) and was used for far longer then it was designed to be. In fact it came to replace everything else.
The russians on the other hand simply kept the same design, a small rocket for personell, and a big one for cargo and have them meet up in space. Practical.
IF the americans had kept up the original vision they would have had an amazing fleet of spacecraft and owned space by now, but reagonomics and a loss of will just never made that vision come true and so the russian method of cheap and reliable proved more effective.
The americans ended up with a people carrier for commuting, too big for one person, too small to move house in. THe russians got an old truck and an old motorcycle, excellent for moving house and commuting at a fraction of the costs.
Basically the space shuttle just never got the missions it was designed for, recovering and repairing sattelites. Remember that story about the satelite that went to the sun and then crashed? THAT was a space shuttle mission, pick the thing up in orbit and land it softly. IF space production had ever taken off, that would have been a space shuttle mission, get your goods back home in one piece.
It was NEVER meant to be a heavy lifter OR a personal transport. Oh, and it was never meant to serve this long.
According to David Pogue, in his book Piloting Palm, Casio was a particularly difficult partner to work with. Their relative inexperience with software and hardware development (the company's major portable products were digital wristwatches, calculators and inexpensive pocket organizers) made them irrationally intolerant of any bugs, no matter how minor or how unlikely to affect the user.
Can you imagine what IT would be like if Casio had created the PC? Why, it might actually work.
Amazing that IT has managed to train us so well to the existence of bugs in final products that we laugh at a company that seems to think bugs are unacceptable.
Truly amazing how we come to accept that the software we use is not functioning correctly.
Realism? Okay, how about this. In the real world if I am in a nightclub area I can see all kinds of neon signs for brands of beer. In game, there will be ONE advertiser. One brand. Realistic? No.
In the real world people deface ads. Will an advertiser allow that? No.
In the real world I ignore ads, they are part of the background noise, if that is the way they are in games, then what is the point. No, they might start with a small poster but it will get bigger and bigger and bigger. Walk around in Second Life for a while to see what runaway advertising means.
This won't make games more realistic, not ad all, if that were the case then racing games would NOT have to seek a license to place the real ads on the track, they would be paid to do so. But an advertiser is going to want his ad to more then a blurr as you pass by if he is going to pay for it.
Do you really want female hygiene ads during your assault on the beaches of normandy? That is where this is heading. Same as ads everywhere else are getting more and more intrusive.
How big is that picture of your daughter? I seen a real world example of it. A 4mb image, that somehow only seemed to result in a small photo of about a 100x100 pixels. Yeah, that ain't suspicious AT ALL. Doesn't set of any alarm bells. Nope.
That is the entire problem with the idea, how do you get enough information inside and still not raise suspicion. It is different for coded messages, keep the code small and it can easily fit but to leak information, you need to start including megabytes of documents in image files that are typically less then a 100kb or do you think nobody will find it odd if you keep a 10megapixel uncompressed image of your daughter on your stick?
Remember, if it is a small amount of data you can get it out easily, memorize it. But if you are talking industrial espionage you are talking blueprint, documents, databases.
The researcher claimed that he found traces of the programs in question. TRACES. Meaning they were removed. Now think about this, why does someone remove software. Because they want to hide it OR because they tried it and found it useless?
Sure, there are uses, but as said, only for situations where the data is small enough to logically fit inside. Child porn image nesting in a harmless image seems about the most logical use, you could easily create a site that serves "harmless" wallpapers but are really childporn. Except one tiny problem, how do you distribute it? Open access, bit risky getting the highly illegal content out there, who knows who might be bored and start snooping. Limited access? Then who are you hiding from?
The problem with the child porn idea is that it ain't going to fool anybody for long. Contrary to popular believe the police ain't stupid, if they suspect childporn and find nothing but a large collection of regular images that ALL seem to be just a bit too large, then just maybe, they are going to investigate further.
As for use in distribution, encryption is far easier, if I know you then I can just send the file encrypted and nobody will be the wiser. If I don't know you and post it blindly on a public site, how are you going to know how to get the content out?
I know that the idea is that one of the elements of hiding is NOT to increase the filesize, but unless I am missing something, if you want to hide 1mb of data, you are going to need at least 1mb of other data to do the hiding in. For a nice database dump, that is a LOT of pictures of your daughter.
Quickly get on the phone to Ferrari, they are about to go bust, they make a niche product and Paul Hindt claims that means there is no market.
Believe it or not everything has to be mass market to be a success. In fact the only requirement for a product to be successfull is for it to sell for more then it costs to produce. IF this company can produce say a thousand devices and sell them at a profit, they have made a... can you guess it, thats right, a profit.
If they are not, well then they will join a long line of companies that failed, this includes companies with a niche product and companies with a mass-market product.
Just dive into the world of add-ons for MS FLight Simulator. Talk about a niche market, flight sims ain't all that popular, you specialize in a specific product and then produce add-ons that cost a fortune. Yet some companies have been around for ages, selling special hardware designed for ONE game.
If you want to be even more niche, try MS Train Simulator. Even less appeal then a flight simulator, and it too has companies selling special control units.
Since these companies been around for ages now, somehow they must have made that niche market work for them.
As for coding for it, considering that the most popular first person shooters can be heavily modded already, it ain't all that hard to translate impacts in the game that otherwise might be used to alter the HUD to send a message to a usb device.
We just had an article about a great game, The Longest Journey. As great as it is, it is kinda hard to imagine it having spectaror modes, presence, chat or persistent profiles and whatever. There are tons of games like that. Not all gaming is FPS.
Who cares anyway? Do you really want to see how another person does in a single player session? Sure, some games it might work, racing games where you can compare times. And then only in those racing games that are "equal".
I really don't need or want to know how fast some kid with nothing better to do can run through a level. What is the point, not only doesn't it matter to me, boasting about it like boasting that you managed to come in 3 seconds last time you were with a girl. Eh, yeah, good kid, but as you get older you might realize speed isn't everything.
What I do fear is that with piracy offline gaming might die. Simply put, MMO's are the only effective anti-piracy measure so far. Soon Blizzard will release their first solo game since their huge sucess WoW. It might be intresting to see how it does financially, cost of development vs income from sales. Offcourse it is not a completly fair comparisson as StarCraft 2 will be about multiplayer as well and that might very well need a piracy proof system as well but still.
I can however all to easily see a future meeting at Blizzard that goes slightly like this. Right, we got two games, the MMO cost us X to develop and made us XXXXXXXXX and the single player game cost us X and made us XX. Guess people what kinda game we are going to make next.
The world doesn't revolve around you. Learn to accept this.
More precisly, it doesn't revolve around your demographic, there are enough persons who are willing to play a monthly fee and who want to play in a multiplayer enviroment.
Different tastes, is that so hard to accept? No, it doesn't mean you are old, just means you have an over-inflated ego. Frankly that isn't age dependent.
Every single story about MMO's you get some person complaing about monthy fees and somehow the world is supposed to care. Here is a newsflash for you. Blizzard is RAKING it in. WoW should be closing in on the billion dollar revenue mark by now. That is hard to ignore. Game companies that struggle while they see thousands of people downloading their games for free and here is a company with an OLD OLD OLD game still raking it in. You think these companies care about you? They got a choice, spend fortune developing a single player game that will be obsolete in months, hopefully get them a onetime income and maybe some sparechange for the value release with tons of players using their forums for support a full week before the game is actually OUT (pirates move fast, and leechers have no shame) OR spend that money on an MMO and get a ton of cash each and every month. Gee, difficult one.
If you think Half-Life, God of War or any mario game has story telling in it, then you don't know story telling.
The story in those games is nothing more then the intro to the killing. You play these games for the shooting/platforming, NOT the story. TLJ you play for the story, NOT the puzzles.
A long cutscene does not make for storytelling. It is the english language at fault again for not giving us enough words to detail the difference between a story that simply sets us in motion, and a story that moves us.
Take half-life, who IS Gordon Freeman, why did he choose this career, why is he going inside. Why doesn't he say anything. Who IS HE, WHY is HE.
Compare that with April Ryan, we know she is an art student that she struggles with finding a way to express herself, that she broke of relations with her family over her father (the original is less clear on why then the sequel). That she is a bit of a dreamer, at once wishing for the world to be more, but also afraid to loose what she has.
Play the game yourselve and then tell me again that Gordon Freeman is an equal personality to April Ryan.
Hell, play other classics like Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father and tell me this compares to the storytelling in the games you mention.
Frankly kid, read a book, and learn what real storytelling is.