LAN Party or Online Gaming? Conclusion, you are not going to get laid.
Oh well, this is an old holy war, no new insights have been uncovered, both sides still firmly believe they a right and the rest of the world just goes on having sex without them.
And me? Well I am commiting on something I don't care about and not getting any. You guys might be losers but I am your KING!
In games I usually play with a darker skin for the simple reason that white skins generally just don't look too good. (am I the only one who in NWN1 had all females with light skin look like they had a 5 o'clock shadow)
I also often play a female, for no other reason then that I prefer the look.
But what I mainly play is "me". For instance I rarely take the romance options for the female character I play because either they are stupid or as a hetero male that is a bit to close to being gay and we can't have that can we? Why if I felt for that hunky piece of man meat and melted away in his strong arms.... Right, who is up for some rugby. Just us men, groping each other on the field Damn...
In the first two GTA you played probably a non-descript white guy. Later that turned into an italian and finally a black guy.
But in these cases it is more then a skin. I play my olive skinned female woodelf as a chaotic good "lesbian". In these GTA games I am the mafia italian and the gangmember black guy. There is NO option for me to play the game except as in these roles. Well except not to play.
As a non-criminal, the role of a mafia gang-member is already a bit of a stretch. I do not have a fantasy about being a criminal at all and certainly not with the background of the GTA criminals. The mafia member in Mafia (pretty similar game in many ways) was however sympathetic to me.
The black dude? Sorry, zero connect. Nothing he does (and the game asks me to do) agrees with me. He is scum with not a single redeeming value. Worse, he ain't even very good at it.
The problem is that you ain't even allowed to think you are playing the bad guy. I liked Tie-Fighter (until it dragged into you being sorta the good guy after all because there was an even bigger evil then you), when you were serving the empire fighting that rebel scum. I happily play the nazi side in a WW2 game but don't expect of me to see them as anything but soldiers serving one of the greatest evils.
It is not about black/mafia culture either in GTA. In NWN2 they make a whole point about religion and those who do not believe in a god or only fake it are said to go to a form of hell after their deaths. Well FUCK THEM. My religion is nothing and so be it. I am playing a role and that does not involve kowtowing to some beard in the sky, even if in that universe they are real.
I will not play a religious freak.
But did I not enjoy the GTA games? As a movie, yes. I played them as watching a movie. Perhaps that may have been the idea and I am just wrong in thinking you have to be the character. But it was one of those movies were you do not care if the hero dies, and perhaps even cheer as he buys the farm. The anti-hero if you like.
I am quite certain that people who want "blacks" in video games do not want them ala GTA. Or maybe they do.
Am I just an idiot for wanting to play a character I can agree with? Just ask your average male to play a homosexual. Lesbian? SURE, but MALE homosexual. EEEEEEK!
It is offcourse typical that the article talks about blacks when there are so many more races and for that matter many more underrepresented groups. When was the last time you played a lesbian jewish asian hermaphrodite. Oh, yeah, last week. God I love NWN2.
Deus EX (both versions) gave you a choice of skin color (but not sex)allowing you to choose your race. Provided you wanted to play from a small selection of the genetic variation of either africa, europe or asia. For instance, no aboriginals or indians etc etc.
It also made the barest of impact on the game. So why was it there? The apperance of PC correctness as you say. Keep it.
Do I care about race in a game, no, it is just a skin. But the person I am supposed to be in that game got to be something I can indentify with. That I cannot identify with the black gangmember in GTA has nothing to do with his race. If the game had been set in japan with an asian gangmember it would not have connected for me either.
it is WHAT the character does that matters, not wich texturemap has been applied. Mmmm, perhaps actions should be more important then apperances in games. Nah, if that worked we would have it in real life already.
To me at least this is as old as windows and perhaps it has always been true. A new OS reduces the performance of your computer when it comes to games.
Remember Windows 3.1 and before? The fast majority of games in those days were DOS games. Simple reason, the whole GUI was not needed and back then the OS and the GUI were still clearly seperated between DOS and Windows.
Same is true for linux, you can get far better performance for a single purpose graphical app doing things directly then going through X. Offcourse you loose the GUI but so what. Most games have their own anyway.
So when Windows 95 arrived a game like Quake would perform a lot better without it for the plain simple reason that with Windows 95 loaded you lost a shitload of memory to something you did not use that could have been used by the game.
Same thing with all those niceties added to the OS. Everyone knows you should disable as much as possible if you are serious about gamers meaning you effectively trim the OS back to what was offered with 95. No XP themes, no pre-loaded apps, no helpers. Nothing that either takes CPU cycles, memory or both.
Vista is the same story again. More "bloat" is added wich may or may not be what you want (but since these people who complain installed Vista they seem to want it) and when you are in a game that bloat is probably useless. When you are playing a game you just want the OS to do what is needed to keep the game running and nothing more. But that don't sell new OS'es. That don't have everyone gushing about how pretty this new OS is. Hell, you want an OS that gives you just the games, get a freaking Console, you weirdo!
Every new windows version gives early adopters problems.
You would PC gamers would know this. Did anyone here actually thing Neverwinter Nights 2 was going to be perfect straight from the DVD? If so, I want what you are smoking.
As for the whole DirectX 10 question, I remember a turn-based strategy game Battle Isle or something that was the first game I saw that was 95 only. It had been badly delayed because 95 had been badly delayed.
Tying your product to another product that has yet to sell is risky. Especially if said product has a track history of not being to nice at launch to the consumers of your product.
But hey, these dudes got VISTA! That got to be worth a couple if inches of ePenis.
Okay, for the americans. Say you are from one of those states no european has ever heard of, dakota or something. Now imagine if the guy in the news constantly was your senator and NOT the president of the whole United States.
Well that is europe. We a system that can be compared a tiny bit with yours except that the level of goverment that people know about is one level lower.
This effectivly makes the european level of goverment entirely unaccountable. Elections for the EU are nothing more then a opinion poll on the national goverment. You do NOT have EU parties. It is the local national parties that send people up for election. So it is used the same as local elections, just a way to see how the "real" national goverment is doing.
Except for one fatal mistake the EU made. The referendum on the constitution of the EU. It was slammed down by the dutch. It was the first time the dutch really were given a change to say something about europe and the answer was NO.
The problem wasn't even the constitution itself. It was how the politicians tried to win us over. It was downright insulting. Our prime-minister even warned us that it could lead to world war 3 if it was rejected.
The whole tone was, that they knew best and we should just do as they say. Disconnect? Ivory tower? Insanity?
Well whatever, it is still there, the whole thing is still on the agenda and not a single thing has been done to even attempt to find out why the dutch are so upset about europe let alone remedy it?
What are the reasons we are so upset? Well, the euro screwed us, and all the politicians say is that we are wrong when we claim prices went up and salaries went down because of it. When shown receipts before and after the change for the same item this is not even denied. The politicians know it ain't so, and facts have nothing to do with it. Other part is that Holland pays the most contribution, granted it is a rich nation, but we also get less and less to say.
The EU got a slap on the wrist, an important piece of legislation was refused and they did nothing.
Do you really think they are going to give a shit what a few geeks think?
The EU parlement is not just disconnected from the people, it is not just corrupt to the very core of its existence, it is not just ignored by those who are supposed to check it (the press), it is not just so incredibly complex that it could never work even if all the member states wanted it to work. It is all of them and then something.
The sum of its wrongness is greater then all of its parts.
The EU is a joke. But it is also needed. It keeps nations that hate each others guts from fighting each other. It also keeps individual nations from going to far with their local laws. For every insane EU law there are a dozen cases of people finding justice in the european courts of human rights.
But that basic problem is that the EU goverment goes unwatched. It simply isn't on peoples radar, neither the voters or the press. So massive conflicts of interests like in this case simply go unchecked.
Remember one thing about the human race. Democracy does not come natural to us. We tend to fall into monarchy. Human beings love to have an elite class on top that rules them and can get away with anything. Look at the US. No royalty, so elevate the rich to that class. Look at countries like france of russia, that slew their nobles in bloody revolt and were better for it, and now once again pine to have their royals back in place.
Will the EU goverment listen? They are. They are listening to voters that don't care and a press that can't be bothered and they know they are safe to do whatever they want.
And they are save, because it is a sure bet that it will be a long time before the next referendum is held in holland on anything, let alone the EU.
Small economic cars about freedom too, not costs. The freedom to use your hard earned money on other more important things. The freedom to not be a slave to the petrol tank. The freedom of your entire nation not to be slaves to the oil producing countries. Hell, even Bush gets this.
Want to count the number of SUV's on the road? and if you think the US is bad check europe, in a place like holland were american style SUV's are impractical (too big to fit), not needed because the journey time is shorter and fuel costs are even higher you just cannot get people to not buy them.
PEOPLE, do NOT care.
In general most people just ain't any good about doing what is best for them. I know, I am too fat. Not exactly american style hippo man but still, a bit too close to love handles. I hate it and I do absolutly nothing about it. I know I should, I am getting too old to be able to eat anything I want. My year of birth keeps popping up more and more at the beginning of a 8 letter sequence and 1 dash. you know 1971-2007. Didn't used to be the case, used to be only old people die, now young people like me are dropping of left right and center, it does something when you hear someone has died of a heartattack and they were several years younger then you.
And still I do not diet.
People drive huge suv's when the fuel price is exploding, the greenhouse effect is running amok and eat lard while they waddle down the driveway and you expect them to worry about the license of the code to their software?
Ah, to be young again. So naive. So stupid. Lets, see, to be that naive, you must be what. a 3 day old fluffy kitten?
You are correct offcourse, just that nobody cares. Give in to your apathy and your journey to adulthood will be complete, from wich it is just a short trip to the grave.
Did you actually read the article? Yes? Then notice how he says it is actually more expensive for him to download a program then to buy it. That is pure download. With the "modern" distribution method of bittorrent he is probably going to have to do some uploading. Wich is going to cost him even more.
So he is NOT going to get proper releases by proper groups who do it just for the thrill of it. HIS pirated software comes from pure and simple profit motivated criminals.
It is the difference between free software (as in the GPL and similar) and those "free" pieces of software that your family installs and you then spend the weekend trying to clear out. Do you know the hardest bit of getting people to use proper software like Firefox? How the fuck do I explain that this massive program is one hundred percent free while I have been warning them for years to stay away from all those "free" software offers. It is like telling kids not to accept candy from strangers and then to tell them to accept candy from Santa, a fat guy in disguise who creeps into the house in the middle of the night.
I would have expected someone on slashdot to know the difference between pirated software for free download, and piracted software pressed onto CD/DVD and sold on the street. The first only ISP's make money on (well and the computer hardware industry and the people laying the cables and the people who sell those people sandwiches. Lots of people actually but not the software industry and that is what counts since they pay the big bribes, eh donations) were was I? Oh yeah, that kind of piracy is profit free.
But the pirated CD makers are doing it for money and just as MS sells space on its CD's for just a few more cents (as do many so called legit companies) so will pirate software distributors. Do you want to sell a CD for 4 dollars OR 4 dollars plus a bit for including some spyware/trojan?
Ask Dell, they answered that question with a resounding yes wich is why their computers are spyware infested pieces of crap. It is why ANY browser you care to try on windows comes with paid for links. Yes, even firefox.
So again, just because you who can afford software can download clean pirated software does not mean someone who can only afford pirated software has access to clean versions.
Or put another way, stop being american, other parts of the world are different.
Everyone knows that the color of a person reflects on their intelligence. Blond hair? Room temperature IQ. It is a fact.
Well, we act like it anyway. We know it is a joke and yet, can you truly honestly say that if you are introduced to a brunette and a blond you do not instantly make an judgement on their IQ?
The problem is not as simple as racism. Well, unless you are an tv-show host. I think it is closer to a negative spiral.
Blondes are stupid, so teachers spend less time on them, so they receive less education, so they truly are more stupid. Blondes then learn that being stupid can work so pretend to be even more stupid to "fit in" wich reinforces the idea that blondes are stupid.
There are others as well. People with glasses can't be athletic. Redheads are feisty. Very simple outward apperances (remember, glasses are nowadays optional so that super athlete may have contacts or laser surgery) that nonetheless most of us use instinctevely.
Oh you can claim you are above them but you are not.
I know you are not. You refer to American black people. Think you are PC? Well actually it is a horrible genetic slur against millions of americans. The "half-breeds". Simple fact is that millions of so-called blacks are in fact the result of interbreeding between different genetic races. If one parent is black and the other white why is their offspring called black? Is one gene superior to the other or something? In theory, since a popular racist theory is that "blacks" are strong and "whites" are smart, then at least some "greys" should be the combination of the best qualities of both and be superior to either. That is afterall how farmers create new animals/crops, mixing the best of two breeds to create a new superior animal/crop.
And why would a grey need black rolemodels at all? Why wouldn't a white rolemodel be just as good?
For that matter what is wrong with a yellow rolemodel, or a red one or a light brown one? Can I only have a rolemodel with extreme freckles?
By the very fact that you claim blacks need black rolemodels you are a racist yourselve. You are saying a rolemodel should be chosen based on their race and that is the essence of racism, to judge a person by their race in ANYWAY.
Can you only admire a person of your own race, surely not, do you then suggest that blacks are not capable of admiring a person of another race?
First is the most obvious difference between a sub crew and a mars space mission crew. Size. Even small subs have several dozen crew members. This makes for totally different group dynamics then a group of half a dozen people.
Then there is the size of the vessel itself. Subs are HUGE by comparison. I am sure how you could possibly call a boomer cramped. Yes space is at a premium BUT you could go for a run. A short one but it is possible. Space is far more cramped.
Then there is intelligence. While I only know people in the surface navy I can honestly say that they do not strike me as rocket scientists. On the other hand I presume that NASA would prefer to put people on mars with an IQ above room temperature. Lets face it, there is a big difference between the needs of a mars explorer and even the most demanding position on a submarine. This is again due to size. A submarine could carry a doctor with almost no other duties. In space, your would need a doctor who can be a pilot and an engineer all at once. And would have to be a pilot of extra-ordinary capability landing a bleeding edge ship on an unknown planet and an engineer working with cutting edge equipment. A bit different then maintaining a navy sub.
Distance. While subs MAY submerge for months they do not have to. How long does it take a sub to surface from its greatest depth? A sub that stays submerged for 3 months is NOT away from civilations for that amount of time. The distance from the rest of humanity is ONLY the time it takes to surface. The only thing that gets close are those missions were the sub sails under the ice sheets and the ice is too thick to break through.
Simply put, if a crew member gets injured or goes berserk he can be taken of the sub at a moments notice. In space, 3 months would just be the start of the journey. If someone breaks then you cannot even return yet until you arrived at mars and go through the procedure for the return trip.
It is not that submarine crews are bad, but just as the article mentioned, that current space space shuttle crews are perhaps not best suited for long duration exploration.
I recall a story of one astronaut in the days of the moon race who broke something just before he was supposed to be launched playing football. Yeah, very manly and studly. But do you think such a person who does something as stupid as that is suited to sitting cooped up for two years? if he had broken something in space being stupid he would have been a few days away from rescue but more importantly, only a few days worth of effort would have been lost if the mission had failed because of it.
If something goes wrong at the end of the first year of a mars mission that is an entire year down the drain.
Back to your submarine crew, be honest here, how many of them have gotten themselves sick/injured demanding that someone else replace them, they had to be taken off or could not go on a tour?
You can go into any electronics store (well, okay, apple store excluded) and buy plenty of non-iPod mp3 players. For that matter, the iPod works PERFECTLY fine with just mp3's loaded. The iPod in noway forces you to use "iTunes the store" (its use of iTunes the software is another story for wich Jobs will no doubt be shot when the revolution comes but that is just my personal bitter hatred of the piece of crap).
No go into a electronics store and try to get a computer without windows. Not even a computer with another OS, just one without windows.
See the difference? The simple fact is that size makes a difference, Apple can do a lot more stuff simply because it is to small to have any real effect. It is the same reason Dell is not under the same scrutiny as MS, sure almost every computer seems to be Dell, but you can still buy plenty of others. Majority of the market does not mean you got a monopoly, wich is proven by the fact that Dell recently lost top position to HP.
Now if you said iTunes (the store) tries to lock you in then you are correct to a degree. While there are ways to convert the aac music to non-drm crippled formats, to a certain degree once you bought an iTunes track you are locked into using a player capable of playing it if you want to listen to it.
This is slightly similar to the way that buying a VHS tape locked you into buying VHS players as long as you want to watch that tape (including the use of DRM to make copies degrade) except that with a purely digital format there is no real excuse.
I will only eat in restaurants that have a double door to the kitchen and a rabid security guard preventing entry. Everyone knows that the best kitchens never allow you to see what goes on inside. That is un-hygienic.
Neither do I ever check under the hood of my car. My wife insisted on that, she assured me she made sure the brakes work just fine afer she adjusted them with the box-cutter. So that is alright and she waved me goodbye so nicely, together with the poolboy, as I drove away for a week trip across the mountains.
Checking the work of a software company? Pah, next thing you will be insisting that the bible is translated into your native tongue so you can read it for yourselve and not have to rely on your religious leader to tell you what is inside it. INFIDEL!
Well duh. Only proper official bombs look like bombs. Well even that isn't true because that would suggest every explosive device has the same form/look. They don't. Bombs that are just designed to go boom just look like whatever shape suits their purpose best.
Their main purpose you might think is to blow up but think about it. Do you want an bomb dropped from aircraft to be the best shape for exploding OR to fall through the air in a predictable path?
Now, what shape/look would a terrorist bomb have? If you had to stick on in a public place would you just carry a box of TNT with TNT written on it with you onto a train and hope nobody notices OR would you try to hide it in someway. Make it look like something else.
Camouflage can work in two ways. Blending in OR pretending to be something different. Perhaps even standing out in such a way that everybody ignores you. If you had to be on the street unnoticed in broad daylight what would work better, a camo outfit OR looking like a homeless beggar?
If I had to stick several bombs in public places disguising them as annoying ad displays would be an intresting trick.
Ask those people killed by boobytraps wether they thought X looked like a bomb were X is whatever blew them into little bite sized chunks.
What would you more easily dismiss as being dangerous. A box in a place were there shouldn't be one OR a ad display in a public place when these bloody things seem to popup everywhere.
9/11 happened with innocent box-cutters when everyone knows they are harmless. If the hijackers had carried machine guns they might not have succeeded (then again, this is airport security we are talking about).
Opinion B: This is all some kind of big brother slamming down on a poor little company that just tried to advertise its movies?
HELLO? Am I the only one sick and tired of ads intruding every little corner of our lives? The places they stuck these lightboards are public, meaning they belong to us all and in general you are not allowed to advertise in such places. So do you think every public place should be covered in whatever ad campaign some company has running? You would end up with a paper mache city before the month is out.
Since when is advertising a good thing? A 2 million dollar fine to run an advert campaign in an illegal place? Trivial, if this is all its costs then be prepared for a lot more crap like this. Oh wait, we already had crap like this because big companies know they are only going to get a slap on the wrist for doing stuff like this so if they have a bigenough budget they just think of it as another item on the budget sheet.
Or to put it into slashdot terms, Time Warner put up unwanted popups all over the city. I know slashdot has been losing some of its geek status recently but surely even here popups have not become a good thing have they?
Go ahead, I won't tell anyone. Just remember, that after you have tried your favorite distro for 30days and continue to use it you are legally obliged to A: have sex with me if you are an attractive female or B: provide one C: A picture of one D: roll a female blood elf and talk dirty to me.
Offcourse you could not do that, but that would the PSA on your ass (Penquin Software Alliance), they are killers.
Or to put another way, the poster you commented to doesn't want to BUY the wrong Vista version and then have to pay yet more to get the correct version. With linux, he don't need to pay and he can try whatever version he wants for free for as long as he wants. Oh and more easily since quite a few disto's are now burn and play.
You mention it yourselve, the CD. What not everyone knows that the CD owns a lot to philips. The minidisk was a direct competitor to a Philips product, so was betamax.
Blu-Ray? Another Philips-Sony partnership. Mmmm, so by some extremely wide logic Blu-Ray must be a winner based on past performance.
Ask yourselve this, all of you who do not use windows as your preferred desktop, isn't the reason you don't use Windows exactly the same as this guys reason not to use linux?
It is to me at least. I am old enough to have worked with both unixes and dos and the home computers but like so many have had to live with the fact that the Wintel machines won the majority of the market.
Until one day when enough was enough back in the 98SE days and I just had to reboot once to often. Not that that itself was a problem, I like every other MS software user had gotten used to it, the problem was that 98SE had gotten just a little bit to stable. Stable enough at least for it to be used as my primary music player. So then every reboot, every crash meant that not only did I loose my work but also my background music.
The loss of work I had learned to deal with, but since other dedicated music players do not crash this hurt.
So with the help of a linux geek I installed a very old PC with a linux distro and made it my music player. Now windows could crash and demand reboots all it wanted, the music went on and on and on and on. Cue, me moving my browsing to the linux machine. No more IE crashes taking all your hard searching with it.
Slowly, windows was replaced were nowadays my windows machine is just a game machine, for no other reason that over more then a decade I just have never been able to get windows to run properly. Just the same problem this guy has with linux.
It all depends on the person I think and their hardware. For some reaon my game machine seems to be burdened with a load of hardware that simply is not supported by the XP install disc. This always happens to me and is one of the reasons I can't help but laugh at stories about how hard it is to get drivers for linux. Because all those run-from-cd distro's seem to have no trouble at all with that machine, not Ubuntu, not Knoppix, not Mephis, just windows.
My windows game machine right now is in "wich fucking setting is going to be switched randomly during this boot". You know the one, when you find the machine boots in XP style when you selected the classic mode, when icons from the quicklaunch disappear or rearrange themselves.
But are my complaints about windows not the exact same as this guys complaints about linux? For some reason, the unix design works better for me, it clicks or something.
With linux when something is wrong I can fix it, with windows, I have no idea.
Could it possibly be that different products appeal to different people? Nah, this guy is a troll and idiot because he prefers windows over linux. Fine but then the same goes in reverse. Since I can't getwindows to run and given up and went back to a unix (lets not forget who came first) I am a quitter too.
Go ahead, try to come up with something new. A new class? A new race maybe? You might notice that in WoW all the playable races are humanoid. Good, now check slightly deeper, do you notice how all the equipment seems to work on them all? Could it be because it is simply a case of scaling the body and appendages rather then coming up with unique art for each and every race?
Imagine a centaur race. Brilliant. Fast, capable of being a mount to another player, large carrying capacity and definitly a different looking critter. Hell, they exist in the game already so it is possible. But oops. You need an entire new set of clothing/armour art, new moves and worse, you might even have to deal with the fact that horses just don't climb ladders to well or manouver in convined spaces.
Much easier to make everyone just a slight variant of human beings were they all got exactly the same performance anyway. Notice how tiny dwarfs run just as fast and jump just as high as a mighty orc?
Ah, but classes, now there you can go imaginative? Well, just try it. You got your basic tank. Up close combat, you can vary slightly between the level of armour vs dodging but that is it. You got someone who gets up close and personal. With that the ranger is next. He stays away from the enemy. You can give him all kinds of things to shoot/throw but basically it is a ranged character.
You are going to need someway to heal your wounds. A priest? A druid? A doctor? A medic? Don't matter what you call it, it is the dude who restores hitpoints.
You might want to add someone with lots of damage capabilty, say NUKE like. Oh but we need balance, so that person should probably be a bit vulnerable. So no close fighting skills to speak off. A ranged magic user? Doesn't matter what you then call it a sorcerer, a wizard or a jedi force specced character, it is a nuker. Heavy damage but vulnerable to direct combat.
Oh you can mix and match, bit of a healer, bit of a close combat, tada, one paladin.
The simple thing is that it has been done. People have sat and thought about this and came up with all the classes that you can come up with. Sure you can name them something different but then you sooner or later will have to admit that "our brilliant new class of the new enlightened order of Aeonites is what you would otherwise call a rogue.... oh okay a thief".
Maybe you can come up with an exciting new class but sooner or later you are going to have to let me know how to play it. Try doing that without saying anything like "it is cross between a X and a Y".
Old and familiar works because you don't have to waste time building everything up. Imagine the following.
"Old and familiar": You enter the tavern and your eye is immidiatly drawn to a beautifull full figured woman with chestnut colored hair and a smile to die for.
"New and exciting": Threatase (the term used to describe to multitude of combined entitities that for lack of a better term is "you" except that that would totally fail to explain it but since the real you controlling this make believe Threatase is a you anyway why bother) fascialte (I suppose a more corporal entiry would use the word enter but being a being of pure thought such a base move is beneath you) the TryK (what a creature concerned only with base needs could never understand) etc etc etc.
Sure, I introduced lots of new things before I got tired of it. Much simpler to just go with the old and familiar. What the fuck is goldplated latinum anyway? Yeah it is new, but mostly it sounds silly and I got absolutly no reference of why it is supposed to be so valuable. Star Trek writers could possible explain it but not in a 45 minute episode.
But yes I agree, did the tiefling in NWN2 really have to be a rogue. The first tiefling in computer games was nice and new and refreshing and we wanted more but not a carbon copy.
Yes I loved all the new races in Planescape Torment and reading their descriptions but that was a game of a bygone era. Nowadays deadli
Why exactly do so many websites insist on using 1 pixel fonts (width of lines of the characters is what I am talking about) on a pure wbite background?
It is EXTREMELY poor for readability. Perhaps it dates back from the old days of DOS when you just had one font size so webdesigners never adjusted to the fact they could adjust it. Perhaps all webdesigners got perfect vision. Perhaps webdesigners all work with very low resolutions on really big screens.
Whatever the reason as I get older I am now totally depended on Opera's excellent zoom function. Any reasonably designed page will easily adjust and use a larger character size, if you zoom in enough even going so far as actually use more then 1 pixel for the character lines. Amazing.
It is slightly harder to override the default black on white without getting weird effects but I put up with it to save my eyes from strain.
Does this relate to games? Well yes. Console gamers are sorta lucky here because they had to play their games on the crap resolution TV's that forced game companies to use HUGE fonts. Just check out console to PC ports to see the effect. Granted KOTOR got the worst of both worlds. It kept the same resolution for the menu so you had lousy readbility and a gigantic amount of wasted screenspace.
Anyway, yes I think games must change if they want to appeal to the aging gamer. But I don't think this is just a case of using big fonts or controls that fit in an adult male hands.
Save points are a pain in the ass if you got something called a life (or rather have lost something called a life by getting married and having kids). You simply don't have the time to sit down and play a level all the way through in one sitting when you get older and have other responsibilties.
Same with games that seem to want to insist on enforcing replay. Why exactly do so many console games force me to play it through on easy mode first before unlocking the higher difficulty settings? I payed for the game, I decide how I play it. Imagine if DVD makers could determine you had to sit through the movie in one go or that you first had to watch the theather release before you could see the directors cut.
What I don't think will dissappear is for instance twitch games that as you get older get harder to play, although some old people will be able to out twitch any teenager, for the same reason that teen movies still exist when most movie go'ers ain't teens.
But if you audience in theory is any age group above X then you would be a fool to make the game a pain in the ass to play by using difficult to read fonts. Or maybe not. Just look at the web. Again the same question, why does every webpage use the same tiny font on a white background against all the usability guidelines?
Search for "lidice" and "game" and you got your "realistic" ww2 game were you play the nazi's in a masacre. This is the internet. Everything you can imagine has already been done.
This is Will Wright. He doesn't do flops. Well except for the flops. But he sure as hell ain't Peter Molyneux who has a deserved reputation of coming up with lots of ideas but failing to deliver.
Will Wright games flop because they are too out there or just not fun but they deliver what was promised. SimCopter did exactly what it said on the box, just that nobody seemed to give a shit. So it flopped just like a lot of the other SimX games did when Maxis pumped them out by the bucketload. BUT for all their weirdness and niche market appeal they did "work" and did what they were supposed to do. More or less.
B&W and Dungeon Keeper and Fable were all games were Peter Molyneux was going to do lots and lots of stuff that was going to change gaming forever and then we ended up with games that not only didn't change gaming but in many ways actually were worse then other games in the same genre. (Wich romance method do you prefer? Fable or Kotor? Wich fame, Fable or Baldur's gate statues?)
Will Wright at least in my memory has never hyped his games in similar way until now. Were peter has failed us many times and I at least therefore am very skeptical of anything he says, Will Wright is for me a guy who so far has deliverd fun but (to me) limited appeal games that did what he said they would do. So I have no reason to doubt him.
Doesn't mean it will be a success but I think it is very unfair of you to compare Spore to Black & White.
Remember this is NOT a normal title, this is a game by The Sims guy. And that title is an absolute blockbuster and for a very large part on the PC. Not the consoles. Ever heard of "expansion packs"? Go to your local game store and try to find some for the PC. Shouldn't be too hard, it is about 1 maybe 2 shelves full. Now try to do the same for the console versions.
EA hopes that Spore will be another The Sims. That means a game that can be played by the non-hardcore gamer (read unlikely to pirate) on the PC they got anyway's (I am pretty sure that you have a PC as you can be pretty sure I have one. But neither of us can make any educated guess as to wich game console we own if any, if you can't see why you and I very likely have a PC then you don't belong here).
There are more PC's out there then ALL the consoles combined. There is a reason after all that it is MS that can afford to subsidise it's game console to such an extreme.
If Spore is indeed capable of running on older hardware as The Sims was/is then it could possible repeat its success. An important thing to remember is that The Sims was never ported. Or rather the game was but not THE GAME. A large part of The Sims "experience" is the user made content. Clothes, furniture, models etc etc made by users for users. User made content by the way wich often makes use of the latest feature in the expansion packs making sure that even if all your game content is from users you still need to buy the packs.
This part of The Sims was never copied on the consoles. Maybe this will change but only if the console companies get their head out of their asses.
The PC is the biggest POTENTIAL market because of install base. It is just that most of the game industy is totally incapable of tapping into that market. Will Wright certainly has proven capable in the past. As have others. What are the most played games? FPS? RTS? RPG? No, flash card games on the web. Played on a PC. (or mac or linux box).
The PC market ain't what it used to be but I think this is more due to the game companies then the market itself. You currently have all these stories about the 360 and PS3 and Wii production and how they won't(didn't) have enough for launch. Now ask yourselve this during all this time how many machins have the various PC makers pumped out? All potential market. Count the number of 360's, the only console capable of meeting the specs of a 2 year old PC vs the number of PC's no older then two years (to ensure capable hardware). Now ask yourselve again, wich is the biggest potential market that a Will Wright game could tap into?
Says it all really. You bought an Apple or an IBM PC back in the days when dinosaurs walked the earth and work was uphill in the snow both ways.
While the Apple II was indeed a personal computer it was not a PC. The IBM Personal Computer was. The capital letters make all the difference. Think of it as the different between a Jeep and jeep. One is the brand and a type, the other is just a type. No their ain't any real difference but in the history of the personal computer I think most people have come to understand that it is PC (IBM PC Compatible (actually Intel compatible hardware and Microsoft software) vs Mac (Apple machines + their OS).
This makes things easier. People nowadays talk about a PC (windows machine) Mac (OS-X machine) or a Linux box (Obviously a Linux machine). Note that the actuall hardware inside is off little interest anymore. Yeah yeah you can hold a long rant about how your Linux box or Mac is also a PC but all you are doing is making things confusing.
As for the game coming out on the Mac, haven't most of the sim games come out sooner or later?
If you pay for your OS by CPU and you got a rack's full of them the cost start to add up. Fast. Hardware you can't do without and you always need to pay someone to maintain them but if in one small move you can just elimante a huge sum from your costs you will find yourselve very motivated to do so.
Apple offers exactly zero advantages in this aspect. In fact it is only disadvantages that Apple offers. With Apple you actually have to PAY for upgrades/service-packs. Just ask a OS-X user who has been there from the start and legally upgraded the OS over the past years for the total cost. MS software all of sudden ain't that expensive anymore.
Now compare it to the linux cost of staying up-to-date. Oh and remember, if you got enough machines that licensing costs matter you already have someone working for you who is compotent enough to do it without say a RedHat or Novell holding your hand for a per-cpu support fee.
Free as in freedom is nice and very noble, but free as in no-cost is very important too.
The silly thing people forget because they obviously failed accountancy is that the free to get upgrades from "linux" or the free service-packs but paid upgrades from MS or the entirely paid upgrades from Apple ALL cost roughly the same to install. Unless offcourse you think that you can afford to run thousands of servers with a lesser windows admin then a unix admin. Wich to me is like saying that your family car doesn't need as good a mechanic to fix the brakes as a F1 car. Pay for a good admin, keeps your servers from ending up a burning heap on the side of the road.
Just a few years ago the phrase Wintel was used to describe the absolute control of the desktop by Microsoft and Intel made extremely clear by the fact that Dell (and many others) wouldn't sell you anything else.
Now Intel is laying of people left right and center. No it hasn't collapsed and the next round or even this round of the CPU wars might see it take up the lead again BUT the time that Intel ruled the desktop and you only bought "Intel Inside" is gone.]
Who would have predicted that? Well, anyone who built their own machines for gaming yeah. Anyone who actually knows something about cpu's and could see that Intel was driving itself into a corner. Yet I read very few reports from analysists predicting this.
Does this mean the same might happen to Microsoft? No, not at all. Totally different market. In way, it is thanks to microsoft that AMD could do what it did. If MS had not supported AMD chips then AMD wouldn't have had a chance in hell. (How fast would an cpu run if only had the generic x86 instructions?)
Software is different. I don't matter wich CPU I have to run my apps on but it damn well matters wich OS I have.
But still. One part of Wintel is now gone. Dell now sells AMD machines as well. The Intel Inside logo has gone the way of the dodo. It is not the first time a mighty name in the desktop market has fallen. Oldies like me might remember that PC games used to be IBM-PC-compatible games. When was the last time you saw an IBM PC?
Predictions are all well and good but they rarely take into account that fact of "shit happens". No I can't see exactly how Windows will loose massive market share anytime soon but who knows what might happen. What if Vista bombs like ME did? What if big companies decide they were screwed by MS software assurance plan and determine that they need an alternative strategy?
Vista is talked about a lot and a lot of people talk about not adopting it but very few take it as far as trying to think of what it would mean if Vista becomes another ME. That was a massive failure for MS but tolerable because it was only ever meant for the consumer market. Vista is supposed to be taken up by both consumers AND business. What if it doesn't get picked up? XP is getting rather old and since that was just a skin for 2000 we are talking some rather wonky code by now. MS is stalling with an SP3 for XP because it wants people to go to Vista instead. But what if the market just refuses. Won't be the first time MS is forced to do an extra SP to support an OS they rather don't want to support anymore. This would cost a lot of money, MS got plenty but without a take up of Vista and people just using the free service packs it would start to loose money. Worse, is Office Vista tied to Vista the OS? No Vista OS pickup could mean no Office Vista pickup. Two of its milkcows shot down.
Is any of this likely? Was it likely that Dell would sell AMD and AMD would outsell Intel? Shit happens. Probably won't, but it might and to be honest I think any attempt to predict it is going to be as accurate as a cointoss.
Here is a question, wich needs to be destoyed before throwing away. Patient data on a paper chart, puch-card, a computer tape or on a HD? Can you guess the answer? All of i offcourse.
There is nothing new about loosing a box of paper records vs a stack of backup tapes. Just that it just seems looking back people used to have more common sense. Simple thing really, the old paper records at the local townhall were in a FUCKING SAFE. The new computer system has internet. Can you see the difference? One gets locked up every night and can only be accessed by standing in front of really big metal block right in the middle of the floor were all your collegues and all visitors can see you and the new one is accessible to the entire world 24/7 year round if only they can get past that wonderfull security delivered by companies that think Microsoft sells Operating Systems.
This incident is just the last in long line were the security of data is just not taken serious enough. Nothing to do with tech, just human nature. Put lots of valueble stuff in one place and then pay someone minimal wage to make sure it is treated properly.
The GBA had them, although not officially and you had to open the whole machine but it did solve the scratched screen problem easily and cheaply. Just buy a new one for a couple of bucks, fiddle a bit and you had clear vision again. Granted the GBA case itself was robust enough and who cares anyway if that gets marred because it ain't a fashion accesory that makes a statement about you! (at least I hope not since mine was pink)
If you could easily replace the transparant part of the iPod then all the scrathing problems would be gone. Why is it so difficult for the IT companies to learn the lessons from real life? Have you ever seen a helmet in wich the faceplate can't be easily exchanged? Transparent plastic scratches so you make it easy to swap out. Homer simpson would get this but not Steve Jobs. For me this simple design flaw explains all the problems that exist with IT.
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Oh well, this is an old holy war, no new insights have been uncovered, both sides still firmly believe they a right and the rest of the world just goes on having sex without them.
And me? Well I am commiting on something I don't care about and not getting any. You guys might be losers but I am your KING!
In games I usually play with a darker skin for the simple reason that white skins generally just don't look too good. (am I the only one who in NWN1 had all females with light skin look like they had a 5 o'clock shadow)
I also often play a female, for no other reason then that I prefer the look.
But what I mainly play is "me". For instance I rarely take the romance options for the female character I play because either they are stupid or as a hetero male that is a bit to close to being gay and we can't have that can we? Why if I felt for that hunky piece of man meat and melted away in his strong arms.... Right, who is up for some rugby. Just us men, groping each other on the field Damn...
In the first two GTA you played probably a non-descript white guy. Later that turned into an italian and finally a black guy.
But in these cases it is more then a skin. I play my olive skinned female woodelf as a chaotic good "lesbian". In these GTA games I am the mafia italian and the gangmember black guy. There is NO option for me to play the game except as in these roles. Well except not to play.
As a non-criminal, the role of a mafia gang-member is already a bit of a stretch. I do not have a fantasy about being a criminal at all and certainly not with the background of the GTA criminals. The mafia member in Mafia (pretty similar game in many ways) was however sympathetic to me.
The black dude? Sorry, zero connect. Nothing he does (and the game asks me to do) agrees with me. He is scum with not a single redeeming value. Worse, he ain't even very good at it.
The problem is that you ain't even allowed to think you are playing the bad guy. I liked Tie-Fighter (until it dragged into you being sorta the good guy after all because there was an even bigger evil then you), when you were serving the empire fighting that rebel scum. I happily play the nazi side in a WW2 game but don't expect of me to see them as anything but soldiers serving one of the greatest evils.
It is not about black/mafia culture either in GTA. In NWN2 they make a whole point about religion and those who do not believe in a god or only fake it are said to go to a form of hell after their deaths. Well FUCK THEM. My religion is nothing and so be it. I am playing a role and that does not involve kowtowing to some beard in the sky, even if in that universe they are real.
I will not play a religious freak.
But did I not enjoy the GTA games? As a movie, yes. I played them as watching a movie. Perhaps that may have been the idea and I am just wrong in thinking you have to be the character. But it was one of those movies were you do not care if the hero dies, and perhaps even cheer as he buys the farm. The anti-hero if you like.
I am quite certain that people who want "blacks" in video games do not want them ala GTA. Or maybe they do.
Am I just an idiot for wanting to play a character I can agree with? Just ask your average male to play a homosexual. Lesbian? SURE, but MALE homosexual. EEEEEEK!
It is offcourse typical that the article talks about blacks when there are so many more races and for that matter many more underrepresented groups. When was the last time you played a lesbian jewish asian hermaphrodite. Oh, yeah, last week. God I love NWN2.
Deus EX (both versions) gave you a choice of skin color (but not sex)allowing you to choose your race. Provided you wanted to play from a small selection of the genetic variation of either africa, europe or asia. For instance, no aboriginals or indians etc etc.
It also made the barest of impact on the game. So why was it there? The apperance of PC correctness as you say. Keep it.
Do I care about race in a game, no, it is just a skin. But the person I am supposed to be in that game got to be something I can indentify with. That I cannot identify with the black gangmember in GTA has nothing to do with his race. If the game had been set in japan with an asian gangmember it would not have connected for me either.
it is WHAT the character does that matters, not wich texturemap has been applied. Mmmm, perhaps actions should be more important then apperances in games. Nah, if that worked we would have it in real life already.
To me at least this is as old as windows and perhaps it has always been true. A new OS reduces the performance of your computer when it comes to games.
Remember Windows 3.1 and before? The fast majority of games in those days were DOS games. Simple reason, the whole GUI was not needed and back then the OS and the GUI were still clearly seperated between DOS and Windows.
Same is true for linux, you can get far better performance for a single purpose graphical app doing things directly then going through X. Offcourse you loose the GUI but so what. Most games have their own anyway.
So when Windows 95 arrived a game like Quake would perform a lot better without it for the plain simple reason that with Windows 95 loaded you lost a shitload of memory to something you did not use that could have been used by the game.
Same thing with all those niceties added to the OS. Everyone knows you should disable as much as possible if you are serious about gamers meaning you effectively trim the OS back to what was offered with 95. No XP themes, no pre-loaded apps, no helpers. Nothing that either takes CPU cycles, memory or both.
Vista is the same story again. More "bloat" is added wich may or may not be what you want (but since these people who complain installed Vista they seem to want it) and when you are in a game that bloat is probably useless. When you are playing a game you just want the OS to do what is needed to keep the game running and nothing more. But that don't sell new OS'es. That don't have everyone gushing about how pretty this new OS is. Hell, you want an OS that gives you just the games, get a freaking Console, you weirdo!
Every new windows version gives early adopters problems.
You would PC gamers would know this. Did anyone here actually thing Neverwinter Nights 2 was going to be perfect straight from the DVD? If so, I want what you are smoking.
As for the whole DirectX 10 question, I remember a turn-based strategy game Battle Isle or something that was the first game I saw that was 95 only. It had been badly delayed because 95 had been badly delayed.
Tying your product to another product that has yet to sell is risky. Especially if said product has a track history of not being to nice at launch to the consumers of your product.
But hey, these dudes got VISTA! That got to be worth a couple if inches of ePenis.
Okay, for the americans. Say you are from one of those states no european has ever heard of, dakota or something. Now imagine if the guy in the news constantly was your senator and NOT the president of the whole United States.
Well that is europe. We a system that can be compared a tiny bit with yours except that the level of goverment that people know about is one level lower.
This effectivly makes the european level of goverment entirely unaccountable. Elections for the EU are nothing more then a opinion poll on the national goverment. You do NOT have EU parties. It is the local national parties that send people up for election. So it is used the same as local elections, just a way to see how the "real" national goverment is doing.
Except for one fatal mistake the EU made. The referendum on the constitution of the EU. It was slammed down by the dutch. It was the first time the dutch really were given a change to say something about europe and the answer was NO.
The problem wasn't even the constitution itself. It was how the politicians tried to win us over. It was downright insulting. Our prime-minister even warned us that it could lead to world war 3 if it was rejected.
The whole tone was, that they knew best and we should just do as they say. Disconnect? Ivory tower? Insanity?
Well whatever, it is still there, the whole thing is still on the agenda and not a single thing has been done to even attempt to find out why the dutch are so upset about europe let alone remedy it?
What are the reasons we are so upset? Well, the euro screwed us, and all the politicians say is that we are wrong when we claim prices went up and salaries went down because of it. When shown receipts before and after the change for the same item this is not even denied. The politicians know it ain't so, and facts have nothing to do with it. Other part is that Holland pays the most contribution, granted it is a rich nation, but we also get less and less to say.
The EU got a slap on the wrist, an important piece of legislation was refused and they did nothing.
Do you really think they are going to give a shit what a few geeks think?
The EU parlement is not just disconnected from the people, it is not just corrupt to the very core of its existence, it is not just ignored by those who are supposed to check it (the press), it is not just so incredibly complex that it could never work even if all the member states wanted it to work. It is all of them and then something.
The sum of its wrongness is greater then all of its parts.
The EU is a joke. But it is also needed. It keeps nations that hate each others guts from fighting each other. It also keeps individual nations from going to far with their local laws. For every insane EU law there are a dozen cases of people finding justice in the european courts of human rights.
But that basic problem is that the EU goverment goes unwatched. It simply isn't on peoples radar, neither the voters or the press. So massive conflicts of interests like in this case simply go unchecked.
Remember one thing about the human race. Democracy does not come natural to us. We tend to fall into monarchy. Human beings love to have an elite class on top that rules them and can get away with anything. Look at the US. No royalty, so elevate the rich to that class. Look at countries like france of russia, that slew their nobles in bloody revolt and were better for it, and now once again pine to have their royals back in place.
Will the EU goverment listen? They are. They are listening to voters that don't care and a press that can't be bothered and they know they are safe to do whatever they want.
And they are save, because it is a sure bet that it will be a long time before the next referendum is held in holland on anything, let alone the EU.
Small economic cars about freedom too, not costs. The freedom to use your hard earned money on other more important things. The freedom to not be a slave to the petrol tank. The freedom of your entire nation not to be slaves to the oil producing countries. Hell, even Bush gets this.
Want to count the number of SUV's on the road? and if you think the US is bad check europe, in a place like holland were american style SUV's are impractical (too big to fit), not needed because the journey time is shorter and fuel costs are even higher you just cannot get people to not buy them.
PEOPLE, do NOT care.
In general most people just ain't any good about doing what is best for them. I know, I am too fat. Not exactly american style hippo man but still, a bit too close to love handles. I hate it and I do absolutly nothing about it. I know I should, I am getting too old to be able to eat anything I want. My year of birth keeps popping up more and more at the beginning of a 8 letter sequence and 1 dash. you know 1971-2007. Didn't used to be the case, used to be only old people die, now young people like me are dropping of left right and center, it does something when you hear someone has died of a heartattack and they were several years younger then you.
And still I do not diet.
People drive huge suv's when the fuel price is exploding, the greenhouse effect is running amok and eat lard while they waddle down the driveway and you expect them to worry about the license of the code to their software?
Ah, to be young again. So naive. So stupid. Lets, see, to be that naive, you must be what. a 3 day old fluffy kitten?
You are correct offcourse, just that nobody cares. Give in to your apathy and your journey to adulthood will be complete, from wich it is just a short trip to the grave.
Did you actually read the article? Yes? Then notice how he says it is actually more expensive for him to download a program then to buy it. That is pure download. With the "modern" distribution method of bittorrent he is probably going to have to do some uploading. Wich is going to cost him even more.
So he is NOT going to get proper releases by proper groups who do it just for the thrill of it. HIS pirated software comes from pure and simple profit motivated criminals.
It is the difference between free software (as in the GPL and similar) and those "free" pieces of software that your family installs and you then spend the weekend trying to clear out. Do you know the hardest bit of getting people to use proper software like Firefox? How the fuck do I explain that this massive program is one hundred percent free while I have been warning them for years to stay away from all those "free" software offers. It is like telling kids not to accept candy from strangers and then to tell them to accept candy from Santa, a fat guy in disguise who creeps into the house in the middle of the night.
I would have expected someone on slashdot to know the difference between pirated software for free download, and piracted software pressed onto CD/DVD and sold on the street. The first only ISP's make money on (well and the computer hardware industry and the people laying the cables and the people who sell those people sandwiches. Lots of people actually but not the software industry and that is what counts since they pay the big bribes, eh donations) were was I? Oh yeah, that kind of piracy is profit free.
But the pirated CD makers are doing it for money and just as MS sells space on its CD's for just a few more cents (as do many so called legit companies) so will pirate software distributors. Do you want to sell a CD for 4 dollars OR 4 dollars plus a bit for including some spyware/trojan?
Ask Dell, they answered that question with a resounding yes wich is why their computers are spyware infested pieces of crap. It is why ANY browser you care to try on windows comes with paid for links. Yes, even firefox.
So again, just because you who can afford software can download clean pirated software does not mean someone who can only afford pirated software has access to clean versions.
Or put another way, stop being american, other parts of the world are different.
Everyone knows that the color of a person reflects on their intelligence. Blond hair? Room temperature IQ. It is a fact.
Well, we act like it anyway. We know it is a joke and yet, can you truly honestly say that if you are introduced to a brunette and a blond you do not instantly make an judgement on their IQ?
The problem is not as simple as racism. Well, unless you are an tv-show host. I think it is closer to a negative spiral.
Blondes are stupid, so teachers spend less time on them, so they receive less education, so they truly are more stupid. Blondes then learn that being stupid can work so pretend to be even more stupid to "fit in" wich reinforces the idea that blondes are stupid.
There are others as well. People with glasses can't be athletic. Redheads are feisty. Very simple outward apperances (remember, glasses are nowadays optional so that super athlete may have contacts or laser surgery) that nonetheless most of us use instinctevely.
Oh you can claim you are above them but you are not.
I know you are not. You refer to American black people. Think you are PC? Well actually it is a horrible genetic slur against millions of americans. The "half-breeds". Simple fact is that millions of so-called blacks are in fact the result of interbreeding between different genetic races. If one parent is black and the other white why is their offspring called black? Is one gene superior to the other or something? In theory, since a popular racist theory is that "blacks" are strong and "whites" are smart, then at least some "greys" should be the combination of the best qualities of both and be superior to either. That is afterall how farmers create new animals/crops, mixing the best of two breeds to create a new superior animal/crop.
And why would a grey need black rolemodels at all? Why wouldn't a white rolemodel be just as good?
For that matter what is wrong with a yellow rolemodel, or a red one or a light brown one? Can I only have a rolemodel with extreme freckles?
By the very fact that you claim blacks need black rolemodels you are a racist yourselve. You are saying a rolemodel should be chosen based on their race and that is the essence of racism, to judge a person by their race in ANYWAY.
Can you only admire a person of your own race, surely not, do you then suggest that blacks are not capable of admiring a person of another race?
Lovely thing racism, isn't it?
First is the most obvious difference between a sub crew and a mars space mission crew. Size. Even small subs have several dozen crew members. This makes for totally different group dynamics then a group of half a dozen people.
Then there is the size of the vessel itself. Subs are HUGE by comparison. I am sure how you could possibly call a boomer cramped. Yes space is at a premium BUT you could go for a run. A short one but it is possible. Space is far more cramped.
Then there is intelligence. While I only know people in the surface navy I can honestly say that they do not strike me as rocket scientists. On the other hand I presume that NASA would prefer to put people on mars with an IQ above room temperature. Lets face it, there is a big difference between the needs of a mars explorer and even the most demanding position on a submarine. This is again due to size. A submarine could carry a doctor with almost no other duties. In space, your would need a doctor who can be a pilot and an engineer all at once. And would have to be a pilot of extra-ordinary capability landing a bleeding edge ship on an unknown planet and an engineer working with cutting edge equipment. A bit different then maintaining a navy sub.
Distance. While subs MAY submerge for months they do not have to. How long does it take a sub to surface from its greatest depth? A sub that stays submerged for 3 months is NOT away from civilations for that amount of time. The distance from the rest of humanity is ONLY the time it takes to surface. The only thing that gets close are those missions were the sub sails under the ice sheets and the ice is too thick to break through.
Simply put, if a crew member gets injured or goes berserk he can be taken of the sub at a moments notice. In space, 3 months would just be the start of the journey. If someone breaks then you cannot even return yet until you arrived at mars and go through the procedure for the return trip.
It is not that submarine crews are bad, but just as the article mentioned, that current space space shuttle crews are perhaps not best suited for long duration exploration.
I recall a story of one astronaut in the days of the moon race who broke something just before he was supposed to be launched playing football. Yeah, very manly and studly. But do you think such a person who does something as stupid as that is suited to sitting cooped up for two years? if he had broken something in space being stupid he would have been a few days away from rescue but more importantly, only a few days worth of effort would have been lost if the mission had failed because of it.
If something goes wrong at the end of the first year of a mars mission that is an entire year down the drain.
Back to your submarine crew, be honest here, how many of them have gotten themselves sick/injured demanding that someone else replace them, they had to be taken off or could not go on a tour?
In space, there is no med-evac.
You can go into any electronics store (well, okay, apple store excluded) and buy plenty of non-iPod mp3 players. For that matter, the iPod works PERFECTLY fine with just mp3's loaded. The iPod in noway forces you to use "iTunes the store" (its use of iTunes the software is another story for wich Jobs will no doubt be shot when the revolution comes but that is just my personal bitter hatred of the piece of crap).
No go into a electronics store and try to get a computer without windows. Not even a computer with another OS, just one without windows.
See the difference? The simple fact is that size makes a difference, Apple can do a lot more stuff simply because it is to small to have any real effect. It is the same reason Dell is not under the same scrutiny as MS, sure almost every computer seems to be Dell, but you can still buy plenty of others. Majority of the market does not mean you got a monopoly, wich is proven by the fact that Dell recently lost top position to HP.
Now if you said iTunes (the store) tries to lock you in then you are correct to a degree. While there are ways to convert the aac music to non-drm crippled formats, to a certain degree once you bought an iTunes track you are locked into using a player capable of playing it if you want to listen to it.
This is slightly similar to the way that buying a VHS tape locked you into buying VHS players as long as you want to watch that tape (including the use of DRM to make copies degrade) except that with a purely digital format there is no real excuse.
In short, DRM is evil. Shocking eh?
I will only eat in restaurants that have a double door to the kitchen and a rabid security guard preventing entry. Everyone knows that the best kitchens never allow you to see what goes on inside. That is un-hygienic.
Neither do I ever check under the hood of my car. My wife insisted on that, she assured me she made sure the brakes work just fine afer she adjusted them with the box-cutter. So that is alright and she waved me goodbye so nicely, together with the poolboy, as I drove away for a week trip across the mountains.
Checking the work of a software company? Pah, next thing you will be insisting that the bible is translated into your native tongue so you can read it for yourselve and not have to rely on your religious leader to tell you what is inside it. INFIDEL!
This newsstory has all the experts out in force.
Opinion A: These things don't look like bombs.
Well duh. Only proper official bombs look like bombs. Well even that isn't true because that would suggest every explosive device has the same form/look. They don't. Bombs that are just designed to go boom just look like whatever shape suits their purpose best.
Their main purpose you might think is to blow up but think about it. Do you want an bomb dropped from aircraft to be the best shape for exploding OR to fall through the air in a predictable path?
Now, what shape/look would a terrorist bomb have? If you had to stick on in a public place would you just carry a box of TNT with TNT written on it with you onto a train and hope nobody notices OR would you try to hide it in someway. Make it look like something else.
Camouflage can work in two ways. Blending in OR pretending to be something different. Perhaps even standing out in such a way that everybody ignores you. If you had to be on the street unnoticed in broad daylight what would work better, a camo outfit OR looking like a homeless beggar?
If I had to stick several bombs in public places disguising them as annoying ad displays would be an intresting trick.
Ask those people killed by boobytraps wether they thought X looked like a bomb were X is whatever blew them into little bite sized chunks.
What would you more easily dismiss as being dangerous. A box in a place were there shouldn't be one OR a ad display in a public place when these bloody things seem to popup everywhere.
9/11 happened with innocent box-cutters when everyone knows they are harmless. If the hijackers had carried machine guns they might not have succeeded (then again, this is airport security we are talking about).
Opinion B: This is all some kind of big brother slamming down on a poor little company that just tried to advertise its movies?
HELLO? Am I the only one sick and tired of ads intruding every little corner of our lives? The places they stuck these lightboards are public, meaning they belong to us all and in general you are not allowed to advertise in such places. So do you think every public place should be covered in whatever ad campaign some company has running? You would end up with a paper mache city before the month is out.
Since when is advertising a good thing? A 2 million dollar fine to run an advert campaign in an illegal place? Trivial, if this is all its costs then be prepared for a lot more crap like this. Oh wait, we already had crap like this because big companies know they are only going to get a slap on the wrist for doing stuff like this so if they have a bigenough budget they just think of it as another item on the budget sheet.
Or to put it into slashdot terms, Time Warner put up unwanted popups all over the city. I know slashdot has been losing some of its geek status recently but surely even here popups have not become a good thing have they?
And offcourse the linux has to be Gentoo, the real man distro.
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge -uPv world
Do you feel lucky punk?
Go ahead, I won't tell anyone. Just remember, that after you have tried your favorite distro for 30days and continue to use it you are legally obliged to A: have sex with me if you are an attractive female or B: provide one C: A picture of one D: roll a female blood elf and talk dirty to me.
Offcourse you could not do that, but that would the PSA on your ass (Penquin Software Alliance), they are killers.
Or to put another way, the poster you commented to doesn't want to BUY the wrong Vista version and then have to pay yet more to get the correct version. With linux, he don't need to pay and he can try whatever version he wants for free for as long as he wants. Oh and more easily since quite a few disto's are now burn and play.
You mention it yourselve, the CD. What not everyone knows that the CD owns a lot to philips. The minidisk was a direct competitor to a Philips product, so was betamax.
Blu-Ray? Another Philips-Sony partnership. Mmmm, so by some extremely wide logic Blu-Ray must be a winner based on past performance.
Ask yourselve this, all of you who do not use windows as your preferred desktop, isn't the reason you don't use Windows exactly the same as this guys reason not to use linux?
It is to me at least. I am old enough to have worked with both unixes and dos and the home computers but like so many have had to live with the fact that the Wintel machines won the majority of the market.
Until one day when enough was enough back in the 98SE days and I just had to reboot once to often. Not that that itself was a problem, I like every other MS software user had gotten used to it, the problem was that 98SE had gotten just a little bit to stable. Stable enough at least for it to be used as my primary music player. So then every reboot, every crash meant that not only did I loose my work but also my background music.
The loss of work I had learned to deal with, but since other dedicated music players do not crash this hurt.
So with the help of a linux geek I installed a very old PC with a linux distro and made it my music player. Now windows could crash and demand reboots all it wanted, the music went on and on and on and on. Cue, me moving my browsing to the linux machine. No more IE crashes taking all your hard searching with it.
Slowly, windows was replaced were nowadays my windows machine is just a game machine, for no other reason that over more then a decade I just have never been able to get windows to run properly. Just the same problem this guy has with linux.
It all depends on the person I think and their hardware. For some reaon my game machine seems to be burdened with a load of hardware that simply is not supported by the XP install disc. This always happens to me and is one of the reasons I can't help but laugh at stories about how hard it is to get drivers for linux. Because all those run-from-cd distro's seem to have no trouble at all with that machine, not Ubuntu, not Knoppix, not Mephis, just windows.
My windows game machine right now is in "wich fucking setting is going to be switched randomly during this boot". You know the one, when you find the machine boots in XP style when you selected the classic mode, when icons from the quicklaunch disappear or rearrange themselves.
But are my complaints about windows not the exact same as this guys complaints about linux? For some reason, the unix design works better for me, it clicks or something.
With linux when something is wrong I can fix it, with windows, I have no idea.
Could it possibly be that different products appeal to different people? Nah, this guy is a troll and idiot because he prefers windows over linux. Fine but then the same goes in reverse. Since I can't getwindows to run and given up and went back to a unix (lets not forget who came first) I am a quitter too.
Go ahead, try to come up with something new. A new class? A new race maybe? You might notice that in WoW all the playable races are humanoid. Good, now check slightly deeper, do you notice how all the equipment seems to work on them all? Could it be because it is simply a case of scaling the body and appendages rather then coming up with unique art for each and every race?
Imagine a centaur race. Brilliant. Fast, capable of being a mount to another player, large carrying capacity and definitly a different looking critter. Hell, they exist in the game already so it is possible. But oops. You need an entire new set of clothing/armour art, new moves and worse, you might even have to deal with the fact that horses just don't climb ladders to well or manouver in convined spaces.
Much easier to make everyone just a slight variant of human beings were they all got exactly the same performance anyway. Notice how tiny dwarfs run just as fast and jump just as high as a mighty orc?
Ah, but classes, now there you can go imaginative? Well, just try it. You got your basic tank. Up close combat, you can vary slightly between the level of armour vs dodging but that is it. You got someone who gets up close and personal. With that the ranger is next. He stays away from the enemy. You can give him all kinds of things to shoot/throw but basically it is a ranged character.
You are going to need someway to heal your wounds. A priest? A druid? A doctor? A medic? Don't matter what you call it, it is the dude who restores hitpoints.
You might want to add someone with lots of damage capabilty, say NUKE like. Oh but we need balance, so that person should probably be a bit vulnerable. So no close fighting skills to speak off. A ranged magic user? Doesn't matter what you then call it a sorcerer, a wizard or a jedi force specced character, it is a nuker. Heavy damage but vulnerable to direct combat.
Oh you can mix and match, bit of a healer, bit of a close combat, tada, one paladin.
The simple thing is that it has been done. People have sat and thought about this and came up with all the classes that you can come up with. Sure you can name them something different but then you sooner or later will have to admit that "our brilliant new class of the new enlightened order of Aeonites is what you would otherwise call a rogue.... oh okay a thief".
Maybe you can come up with an exciting new class but sooner or later you are going to have to let me know how to play it. Try doing that without saying anything like "it is cross between a X and a Y".
Old and familiar works because you don't have to waste time building everything up. Imagine the following.
"Old and familiar": You enter the tavern and your eye is immidiatly drawn to a beautifull full figured woman with chestnut colored hair and a smile to die for.
"New and exciting": Threatase (the term used to describe to multitude of combined entitities that for lack of a better term is "you" except that that would totally fail to explain it but since the real you controlling this make believe Threatase is a you anyway why bother) fascialte (I suppose a more corporal entiry would use the word enter but being a being of pure thought such a base move is beneath you) the TryK (what a creature concerned only with base needs could never understand) etc etc etc.
Sure, I introduced lots of new things before I got tired of it. Much simpler to just go with the old and familiar. What the fuck is goldplated latinum anyway? Yeah it is new, but mostly it sounds silly and I got absolutly no reference of why it is supposed to be so valuable. Star Trek writers could possible explain it but not in a 45 minute episode.
But yes I agree, did the tiefling in NWN2 really have to be a rogue. The first tiefling in computer games was nice and new and refreshing and we wanted more but not a carbon copy.
Yes I loved all the new races in Planescape Torment and reading their descriptions but that was a game of a bygone era. Nowadays deadli
It is EXTREMELY poor for readability. Perhaps it dates back from the old days of DOS when you just had one font size so webdesigners never adjusted to the fact they could adjust it. Perhaps all webdesigners got perfect vision. Perhaps webdesigners all work with very low resolutions on really big screens.
Whatever the reason as I get older I am now totally depended on Opera's excellent zoom function. Any reasonably designed page will easily adjust and use a larger character size, if you zoom in enough even going so far as actually use more then 1 pixel for the character lines. Amazing.
It is slightly harder to override the default black on white without getting weird effects but I put up with it to save my eyes from strain.
Does this relate to games? Well yes. Console gamers are sorta lucky here because they had to play their games on the crap resolution TV's that forced game companies to use HUGE fonts. Just check out console to PC ports to see the effect. Granted KOTOR got the worst of both worlds. It kept the same resolution for the menu so you had lousy readbility and a gigantic amount of wasted screenspace.
Anyway, yes I think games must change if they want to appeal to the aging gamer. But I don't think this is just a case of using big fonts or controls that fit in an adult male hands.
Save points are a pain in the ass if you got something called a life (or rather have lost something called a life by getting married and having kids). You simply don't have the time to sit down and play a level all the way through in one sitting when you get older and have other responsibilties.
Same with games that seem to want to insist on enforcing replay. Why exactly do so many console games force me to play it through on easy mode first before unlocking the higher difficulty settings? I payed for the game, I decide how I play it. Imagine if DVD makers could determine you had to sit through the movie in one go or that you first had to watch the theather release before you could see the directors cut.
What I don't think will dissappear is for instance twitch games that as you get older get harder to play, although some old people will be able to out twitch any teenager, for the same reason that teen movies still exist when most movie go'ers ain't teens.
But if you audience in theory is any age group above X then you would be a fool to make the game a pain in the ass to play by using difficult to read fonts. Or maybe not. Just look at the web. Again the same question, why does every webpage use the same tiny font on a white background against all the usability guidelines?
Search for "lidice" and "game" and you got your "realistic" ww2 game were you play the nazi's in a masacre. This is the internet. Everything you can imagine has already been done.
Will Wright games flop because they are too out there or just not fun but they deliver what was promised. SimCopter did exactly what it said on the box, just that nobody seemed to give a shit. So it flopped just like a lot of the other SimX games did when Maxis pumped them out by the bucketload. BUT for all their weirdness and niche market appeal they did "work" and did what they were supposed to do. More or less.
B&W and Dungeon Keeper and Fable were all games were Peter Molyneux was going to do lots and lots of stuff that was going to change gaming forever and then we ended up with games that not only didn't change gaming but in many ways actually were worse then other games in the same genre. (Wich romance method do you prefer? Fable or Kotor? Wich fame, Fable or Baldur's gate statues?)
Will Wright at least in my memory has never hyped his games in similar way until now. Were peter has failed us many times and I at least therefore am very skeptical of anything he says, Will Wright is for me a guy who so far has deliverd fun but (to me) limited appeal games that did what he said they would do. So I have no reason to doubt him.
Doesn't mean it will be a success but I think it is very unfair of you to compare Spore to Black & White.
EA hopes that Spore will be another The Sims. That means a game that can be played by the non-hardcore gamer (read unlikely to pirate) on the PC they got anyway's (I am pretty sure that you have a PC as you can be pretty sure I have one. But neither of us can make any educated guess as to wich game console we own if any, if you can't see why you and I very likely have a PC then you don't belong here).
There are more PC's out there then ALL the consoles combined. There is a reason after all that it is MS that can afford to subsidise it's game console to such an extreme.
If Spore is indeed capable of running on older hardware as The Sims was/is then it could possible repeat its success. An important thing to remember is that The Sims was never ported. Or rather the game was but not THE GAME. A large part of The Sims "experience" is the user made content. Clothes, furniture, models etc etc made by users for users. User made content by the way wich often makes use of the latest feature in the expansion packs making sure that even if all your game content is from users you still need to buy the packs.
This part of The Sims was never copied on the consoles. Maybe this will change but only if the console companies get their head out of their asses.
The PC is the biggest POTENTIAL market because of install base. It is just that most of the game industy is totally incapable of tapping into that market. Will Wright certainly has proven capable in the past. As have others. What are the most played games? FPS? RTS? RPG? No, flash card games on the web. Played on a PC. (or mac or linux box).
The PC market ain't what it used to be but I think this is more due to the game companies then the market itself. You currently have all these stories about the 360 and PS3 and Wii production and how they won't(didn't) have enough for launch. Now ask yourselve this during all this time how many machins have the various PC makers pumped out? All potential market. Count the number of 360's, the only console capable of meeting the specs of a 2 year old PC vs the number of PC's no older then two years (to ensure capable hardware). Now ask yourselve again, wich is the biggest potential market that a Will Wright game could tap into?
"So PC means no Mac".
Says it all really. You bought an Apple or an IBM PC back in the days when dinosaurs walked the earth and work was uphill in the snow both ways.
While the Apple II was indeed a personal computer it was not a PC. The IBM Personal Computer was. The capital letters make all the difference. Think of it as the different between a Jeep and jeep. One is the brand and a type, the other is just a type. No their ain't any real difference but in the history of the personal computer I think most people have come to understand that it is PC (IBM PC Compatible (actually Intel compatible hardware and Microsoft software) vs Mac (Apple machines + their OS).
This makes things easier. People nowadays talk about a PC (windows machine) Mac (OS-X machine) or a Linux box (Obviously a Linux machine). Note that the actuall hardware inside is off little interest anymore. Yeah yeah you can hold a long rant about how your Linux box or Mac is also a PC but all you are doing is making things confusing.
As for the game coming out on the Mac, haven't most of the sim games come out sooner or later?
Apple offers exactly zero advantages in this aspect. In fact it is only disadvantages that Apple offers. With Apple you actually have to PAY for upgrades/service-packs. Just ask a OS-X user who has been there from the start and legally upgraded the OS over the past years for the total cost. MS software all of sudden ain't that expensive anymore.
Now compare it to the linux cost of staying up-to-date. Oh and remember, if you got enough machines that licensing costs matter you already have someone working for you who is compotent enough to do it without say a RedHat or Novell holding your hand for a per-cpu support fee.
Free as in freedom is nice and very noble, but free as in no-cost is very important too.
The silly thing people forget because they obviously failed accountancy is that the free to get upgrades from "linux" or the free service-packs but paid upgrades from MS or the entirely paid upgrades from Apple ALL cost roughly the same to install. Unless offcourse you think that you can afford to run thousands of servers with a lesser windows admin then a unix admin. Wich to me is like saying that your family car doesn't need as good a mechanic to fix the brakes as a F1 car. Pay for a good admin, keeps your servers from ending up a burning heap on the side of the road.
Now Intel is laying of people left right and center. No it hasn't collapsed and the next round or even this round of the CPU wars might see it take up the lead again BUT the time that Intel ruled the desktop and you only bought "Intel Inside" is gone.]
Who would have predicted that? Well, anyone who built their own machines for gaming yeah. Anyone who actually knows something about cpu's and could see that Intel was driving itself into a corner. Yet I read very few reports from analysists predicting this.
Does this mean the same might happen to Microsoft? No, not at all. Totally different market. In way, it is thanks to microsoft that AMD could do what it did. If MS had not supported AMD chips then AMD wouldn't have had a chance in hell. (How fast would an cpu run if only had the generic x86 instructions?)
Software is different. I don't matter wich CPU I have to run my apps on but it damn well matters wich OS I have.
But still. One part of Wintel is now gone. Dell now sells AMD machines as well. The Intel Inside logo has gone the way of the dodo. It is not the first time a mighty name in the desktop market has fallen. Oldies like me might remember that PC games used to be IBM-PC-compatible games. When was the last time you saw an IBM PC?
Predictions are all well and good but they rarely take into account that fact of "shit happens". No I can't see exactly how Windows will loose massive market share anytime soon but who knows what might happen. What if Vista bombs like ME did? What if big companies decide they were screwed by MS software assurance plan and determine that they need an alternative strategy?
Vista is talked about a lot and a lot of people talk about not adopting it but very few take it as far as trying to think of what it would mean if Vista becomes another ME. That was a massive failure for MS but tolerable because it was only ever meant for the consumer market. Vista is supposed to be taken up by both consumers AND business. What if it doesn't get picked up? XP is getting rather old and since that was just a skin for 2000 we are talking some rather wonky code by now. MS is stalling with an SP3 for XP because it wants people to go to Vista instead. But what if the market just refuses. Won't be the first time MS is forced to do an extra SP to support an OS they rather don't want to support anymore. This would cost a lot of money, MS got plenty but without a take up of Vista and people just using the free service packs it would start to loose money. Worse, is Office Vista tied to Vista the OS? No Vista OS pickup could mean no Office Vista pickup. Two of its milkcows shot down.
Is any of this likely? Was it likely that Dell would sell AMD and AMD would outsell Intel? Shit happens. Probably won't, but it might and to be honest I think any attempt to predict it is going to be as accurate as a cointoss.
There is nothing new about loosing a box of paper records vs a stack of backup tapes. Just that it just seems looking back people used to have more common sense. Simple thing really, the old paper records at the local townhall were in a FUCKING SAFE. The new computer system has internet. Can you see the difference? One gets locked up every night and can only be accessed by standing in front of really big metal block right in the middle of the floor were all your collegues and all visitors can see you and the new one is accessible to the entire world 24/7 year round if only they can get past that wonderfull security delivered by companies that think Microsoft sells Operating Systems.
This incident is just the last in long line were the security of data is just not taken serious enough. Nothing to do with tech, just human nature. Put lots of valueble stuff in one place and then pay someone minimal wage to make sure it is treated properly.
If you could easily replace the transparant part of the iPod then all the scrathing problems would be gone. Why is it so difficult for the IT companies to learn the lessons from real life? Have you ever seen a helmet in wich the faceplate can't be easily exchanged? Transparent plastic scratches so you make it easy to swap out. Homer simpson would get this but not Steve Jobs. For me this simple design flaw explains all the problems that exist with IT.