Is the human mind even capable of conceiving the CPU/GPU resources that a company would have to possess to be able to transmit everything to the dumb terminal, which is only transmitting/processing keyboard/mouse input?
The "server" room in this example would also be hotter than a thousand suns. Also, the subscription cost would be more on the order of 100 a month rather than 15.
So, yeah, get used to dealing with people hacking things client side.
I seem to remember at one point one of you mentioned the possibility of a program, animated or otherwise.
Are you still entertaining the possibility of jumping to other media? For what it's worth, Too Damn Late is an excellent title for a late night talk show.
The vast, vast majority of even the *good* weblogs are simply rehashes of information the author found elsewhere...Someone agreeing or disagreeing with a news story, and telling the world why, is not journalism. It's a letter to the editor.
A minor distinction needs to be made, but it's the whole reason the legacy media is so pissed off at teh interweb.
It's not a letter to the editor. It's an entirely different editor.
When drudge links a story to his front page, it's a front page item, regardless of whether the Washington Times originally ran it on page a1 or c17. It removes the ability of editors to shape news that they don't like.
The best example of this is still drudge outing Isikoffs Newsweek story about a particular intern, that was in the process of being spiked.
The fact that bloggers are now fact checking the mainstream media doesn't please them either, as it displays how accurate the mainstream media isn't. Kind of embarrassing to be corrected by someone who has "no journalistic integrity".
I guess someone in a particular, large building in NYC reads slashdot. Flamebait indeed.
Why should the internet have a international government? Does the international phone system?
If the nation of chad wants to block web access to foo, let them implement the filters to do so, on computers that reside under their national boundries.
Do YOU look forward to the day when you get a cease and decist order from the UN, or uniTelcomgov, or whatever, because something you put on your webpage is offensive to someone in Tehran? Maybe you won't get a cease and desist. Maybe your ISP will be threatened to have their "internet supplier" permit revoked if they don't take said content down immediatley?
If you don't think that's a likely scenario, you're not thinking the issue through. There are any number of regimes that would be pleased as punch to go about blocking access to information by making you take it offline, rather than have to worry about firewalls, filters, and stopping proxies. Doing stuff is hard. Complaining about it to a central authority is easy.
But hey, in the name of getting rid of junk mail, lets all cede our national and individual sovereignity to foreign bodies!
A very surprising choice in artists for these ads though.
Evan Dorkin, Jay Stephens, and the inimitable R Stevens are hardly easy sells to represent a marketing campaign for such a cornerstone franchise as the sims (whatever version it be), for such a large company as EA. I'm most familiar with Mahfood and Dorkin, but I would have loved to see the following scene play out.
Executive #1:So we're cool on this slate of artists right? Johnson, didn't you object to Franks suggestion to include Dorkin?
Johnson tosses a copy of Milk and Cheese on the boardroom table. Executive #2 looks at an open page and drops her jaw.
Frank: No really, this will come of family friendly with an edge the younger generation can...uh...identify with.
However he sold it, I know Frank's sweating this. That said, EA has possibly the most ruthlessly efficient marketing machine mankind has ever seen, so they probably already focus grouped me as a positive, without my even knowing it.
...all us religious types are uptight Dean Wermer lookalikes who shake our fists at this "science" and "methodology" you crazy kids talk about nowadays.
Read "Inherit the Wind". I'm a catholic, and I have no problem rectifying evolution and the big bang with creationism. Something had to set those events into motion neh? Could it not have been grand design? Offtopic, I know, but I'll be tuning in, and I doubt I will suffer any theological distress over such scary topics as chemistry and astrophyics.
In the future, try to be as tolerant as you would undoubtedly have your in-laws be.
If I want to buy an Intel proc. it will have been half constructed in Ireland to avoid corporation tax. That's not a fault of capitalism, that's a fault of government regulation/tariff.
Then it will be built some more in Malaysia - low labour cost. Next it will go to a distribution centre somewhere in Europe (where is not so important). Then on to a wholesaler in Ireland again...I am actually leaving out many loops here Im sure - its even worse! I'd like to know how this is a bad thing. Chip is designed wherever. It's then mass produced in an area with a low cost of labor. It is then shipped to distibution points, to be shipped to your local computer equiptment store, where you, and hundreds of others can pick up the product. Please, improve this process. After all, the logistics of distributing millions of processors is childs play.
Why? Because you (probably, and I) work in a sosiety whereby... your taxes and labour - basically your combined contribution to society - is NOT being spent on the greater good of society - rather it is being spent on a processor that is on a permant holiday travel around the world, taking in all the sights. That chip isn't on a holiday, it is getting to it's destination in the most efficient/auditable fashion possible. Furthermore, I fail to see how my tax money is supporting Intel's shipping cost. intel needs chip shipped. Intel contracts with shipping company to ship chip in exchange for payment. Government tax money isn't going to the shipping, nor is it going to intel. If Ireland has ornerous laws set up to force companies who do business there to undergo some arcane shipping route, then perhaps you should inquire as to what government is doing. Please stop confusing government and capitalism. They are not the same thing. Capitalism has been with us since man first traded five apples for one pointy stick. We just call it the barter system because the cavemen in this example did not change the two things through an intermediary (CASH).
Capitalism must be taken back into the fiery chasm from whence it came. Yeah, lets replace it with a system wherein your beloved government decides what gets produced, in what quantity, and who gets it! That's a much better solution! And I'm sure there will be no massive supply problems at all this time, since of course we've worked out the kinks from the LAST time we tried it.
Two reasons to never put your wallet in your back pocket.
#1. If you're an average office guy, and spend a decent part of the day in a chair, be it in a car, or in the office, that wallet is throwing off your center of balance while sitting. Keep it in your inside jacket pocket. #2. Roughly 95% of the worlds populace carries the wallet in the back pocket. Thieves know exactly where it is, and can snatch at will. Keep it in your inside jacket pocket.
OCR was a good idea when Hard drive capacity was less fantastic then it is today. The idea of taking a page of handwritten text, and scanning it magically into a supersmall text file was attractive. But OCR wasn't terribly accurate, and to make it so would require quite a bit of R&D. All of a sudden software houses need to hire handwriting analysts.
In the meantime, Harddrive capacity grew, and all of a sudden, the difference between a 4k text file and a 35k jpg became negligable. The only real benefit OCR offered was the ability to spellcheck, search for words within the document. Given that OCR was prone to creating nonsensical non-words, as well as changing a word like "which" into "mitch", even these benefits became less frequently used.
I'm convinced the most common phrase associated with OCR programs is "eh, just save it as a.jpg".
Madden University: More Madden online tips and hints than players knew existed can be found here... Madden University will be updated weekly with the latest online strategies and host various columns from well known community luminaries.
The Importance of Going long By John Johnson, Madden U. luminary
First and ten. 3rd and long. 2nd and short. What do these seemingly different situations share in common? The quarterback always gets the ball before anyone else. Why hand off to the running back for another tedious 4 downs, when you can bomb to the endzone on first and ten from the 20, right after the kickoff? Go long. Remember, if you've got a 25% chance to complete the pass, and you've got four downs, why bother with minutae?
This has been yet another "Hard-core" strategy, that you just can't find on the Gamefaqs message board.
With all due respect, the games Nintendo makes run on nintendo spec'd hardware. Don't underestimate the hardwares role in defining what the developer can and cannot do. Would zelda TOOT have been the same game on the PS1? Hells no. Would F-zero GC be the same game if it were for Xbox? I strongly submit it would not, despite the Xbox's superior hardware. Nintendo is one thing, if nothing else. A profitable company. More money in then money out.
If I were nintendo, I would invite Mr Gates to tea, a tour of the nintendo facilities, tell him a joke, ask how his stay in Japan was, and then thank him, but decline his no doubt flattering cash offer.
Sir,
I must thank you for motivating me to get that program up and running again. at 1600x1200, on moderate hardware, it's everything I always wanted it to be.
And as for the qualification (I don't know what posessed them to put that in), the key is to master the 180. The rest is pretty simple to put together. Run a lap, pull a slalom, then the 180, the 360, reverse 180, brake test.
The qualifier is perhaps the dumbest idea ever in the history of videogames, but it does result in the most tremendous curse of triumphant explatives ever, and that is worth something, I think.
Give it a shot again, and beat the qualifier. Or just race around San Francisco. Either option works.
I just loaded it up to see which of us was correct, and sure enough, it tops out at 1024x768.
Even now though, knowing I am probably wrong, I can't help but think I got the game past 1024x768, by accident if nothing else. The reason I think this is the center terminal, where it shows stats, at 800x600, there is only one terminal, at 1024x768 there are 2 terminals, and I can picture in my minds eye seeing those 2 terminals at a higher rez, with way too small text.
Alpha centauri, on my p1.6, at 1280x1024 is immensely satisfying.
I'd also like to throw a vote to FreeSpace2, which I just re-installed, and my 9600 just toasts that game. With all details on, this game is still beautiful.
Other games I make a point to re-install after hardware updates are NHL2002, which will forever hold a spot in my heart, and if I can get slightly on the shady side of legality here, re-playing various N64 games via Project64, and ps1 Final Fantasys through PSXemu has been quite rewarding. You wouldn't think that upping the resolution would do much for a game designed with a fixed rez in mind, but it, along with some of the filters really clears out the jaggies. You'll learn to disdain Slippy all over again.
Recent games which I know are going to go in the re-re-install list are Republic: The revolution, and Neverwinter nights.
The PC versions of Driver and Porshe unleashed would also be in this list, if XP would deign to run them. I'm not about to set up a win98 partition.
Personal Preference, I'm guessing. I smoke, and I started smoking basics back when they were the cheapest brand. They are no longer the cheapest, and they certainly aren't the best, but I still smoke them because I've grown accustomed to them.
OSes are no different. There may be tools that do just about the same thing, but they don't "taste" the same.
I don't know that such education could change a gamer's personal politics but, like any education, it certainly increases the accuracy of their BS detector.
I think you nailed it at the end there. Playing Civilization makes a person neither a general, nor a historian. But as you say, if a journo spouts a half baked, trendy meme on a topic they know little about (More troops=necessarily better/quicker/safer outcome), the smell of falsehood is readily apparant to anyone who knows better from experiences they've had playing Civ, or Gettysburg.
Essentially, I just think that journalists are inclined to think that people will believe anything you shovel towards them, whatever the media, because journalists happen to be holding a shovel. And so they lament this other form of media, which occasionally contradicts them, or, dare I say, fosters active thought, rather than passive acceptance.
I wonder if/why so many of the attendees were lonely males?
This is a convention for members of a particular trade. It's not necessarily that the guy is lonely, it's more that the wife is back home, in a different city/state/country.
Booth babes have been around long before videogames, and they will outlast us all. They are there because sex sells. The guys that get a picture taken are mainly subscribing to the "while the cat's away" philosophy, in my opinion.
I've been to E3, and it's not all that different from a car show. Lots of attractive ladies, loud music, flashing lights, and guys trying to score with a good looking chick because the wife will never find out.
I've seen a few undeniably sad pasty lonely guys get their picture taken with a booth babe, but it's not as though you walk into the convention center and are overwhelmed by the stench of lonelyness and asthma meds. Is the geek stereotype accurate sometimes? Sure, but it's overused.
Re-entry is difficult. Going into space and landing in one piece is itself difficult. The shuttle is a wonder of the engineering world, and you won't hear me say anything to deny that. But it is not cost-effective.
The moral of my story is, we have a wonderful example of what government does well in the crash program to get to space. We have a wonderful example of what government does well, and what it doesn't, in the space shuttle. We are delivering payloads into space with regularity. Mission accomplished. Now, lets take a breath, and come up with solutions that work elegantly. It doesn't have to be done by tuesday. But lets get it right. The profit motive is a powerful force, that can be used to great effect in this task.
I'm not saying that keeping a shuttle from burning up while going through the atmosphere is an easy task, and yes, those tiles had to come from a subcontractor somewhere.
But I was not talking about subcontractors. I'm talking about a private company building and operating their own craft.
A subcontractor is given a task by the government, say to keep the shuttle from burning up. The private company doesn't care how cumbersome the solution is, so long as they keep the contract. In fact, from their standpoint, the more tiles the better, because they are selling the things, not operating the craft.
If that same company, staffed by the same people, were building something they had to maintain, while keeping a profit margin, I doubt they come up with the same solution as the sub-contractor supplying tiles to the government.
The thing is, Scaled has spent over $20M already. The $10M is obviously a big help, if they win- but it isn't the primary motivating factor. It couldn't be- you don't spend $20M to win $10M.
All you say is true, but this can be viewed as a retroactive subsidy towards R&D. If a company like Scaled has some plans to exploit this potentially lucrative market, the prospect of potentially spending 10 million if you win is much more palatable then a gauranteed expenditure of 20 million in R&D. Demanding success of the prize recipient also removes the risk of fraud by questionable contractors.
As has been mentioned, the aviation industry has progressed rapidly through such "contests", particularly the lockheed martins, et all. Stealth didn't become so common because private industry wanted it, or because government invented it. The government set the challenge, and let Private industry worry about keeping the margins low.
Finally, we've all,as you do in your post, griped enough about NASA expenditures to know this is a good idea. I'm inclined to think that a private company would not have come up with a re-entry shield that is composed of hundreds of ceramic tiles, all of which have to be inspected pre and post launch. It would simply not be cost effective. We already ran the crash program to space. Now lets run the slow, sensible one. Get private industry involved. Allow the profit motive in the lifting stage, not just the payload stage.
The sooner we ween space transport off of the government teat, the sooner we stop hearing about all the better ways government can spend money on this or that social program. If all that can be done is to remove that chestnut from the debate, I say it's worth it.
Also consider that the original ROM sizes of these games were so miniscule that the entire game, plus an NES emulator, could be quickly sent over the pipe from Animal Crossing, and fit entirely in the GBA's built-in RAM.
Your argument gets a little sympathy with me. Again, a perfect port is off the table given the screen size, so it would be nice to bump the product up a little, such as removing the slowdown. One area I think they could have really cleaned up on with this release was to include a third, fourth, fifth quest, etc. Given the relative simplicity of the maps, it wouldn't have killed them to add a few more quests.
But I've wanted a portable zelda1 since I bought an SP, and I couldn't find it in my heart to go the GP32 route.
Slashdot Mirror
Is the human mind even capable of conceiving the CPU/GPU resources that a company would have to possess to be able to transmit everything to the dumb terminal, which is only transmitting/processing keyboard/mouse input?
The "server" room in this example would also be hotter than a thousand suns. Also, the subscription cost would be more on the order of 100 a month rather than 15.
So, yeah, get used to dealing with people hacking things client side.
I seem to remember at one point one of you mentioned the possibility of a program, animated or otherwise.
Are you still entertaining the possibility of jumping to other media? For what it's worth, Too Damn Late is an excellent title for a late night talk show.
The vast, vast majority of even the *good* weblogs are simply rehashes of information the author found elsewhere...Someone agreeing or disagreeing with a news story, and telling the world why, is not journalism. It's a letter to the editor.
A minor distinction needs to be made, but it's the whole reason the legacy media is so pissed off at teh interweb.
It's not a letter to the editor. It's an entirely different editor.
When drudge links a story to his front page, it's a front page item, regardless of whether the Washington Times originally ran it on page a1 or c17. It removes the ability of editors to shape news that they don't like.
The best example of this is still drudge outing Isikoffs Newsweek story about a particular intern, that was in the process of being spiked.
The fact that bloggers are now fact checking the mainstream media doesn't please them either, as it displays how accurate the mainstream media isn't. Kind of embarrassing to be corrected by someone who has "no journalistic integrity".
I guess someone in a particular, large building in NYC reads slashdot. Flamebait indeed.
Why should the internet have a international government? Does the international phone system?
If the nation of chad wants to block web access to foo, let them implement the filters to do so, on computers that reside under their national boundries.
Do YOU look forward to the day when you get a cease and decist order from the UN, or uniTelcomgov, or whatever, because something you put on your webpage is offensive to someone in Tehran? Maybe you won't get a cease and desist. Maybe your ISP will be threatened to have their "internet supplier" permit revoked if they don't take said content down immediatley?
If you don't think that's a likely scenario, you're not thinking the issue through. There are any number of regimes that would be pleased as punch to go about blocking access to information by making you take it offline, rather than have to worry about firewalls, filters, and stopping proxies. Doing stuff is hard. Complaining about it to a central authority is easy.
But hey, in the name of getting rid of junk mail, lets all cede our national and individual sovereignity to foreign bodies!
A very surprising choice in artists for these ads though.
Evan Dorkin, Jay Stephens, and the inimitable R Stevens are hardly easy sells to represent a marketing campaign for such a cornerstone franchise as the sims (whatever version it be), for such a large company as EA. I'm most familiar with Mahfood and Dorkin, but I would have loved to see the following scene play out.
Executive #1:So we're cool on this slate of artists right? Johnson, didn't you object to Franks suggestion to include Dorkin?
Johnson tosses a copy of Milk and Cheese on the boardroom table. Executive #2 looks at an open page and drops her jaw.
Frank: No really, this will come of family friendly with an edge the younger generation can...uh...identify with.
However he sold it, I know Frank's sweating this. That said, EA has possibly the most ruthlessly efficient marketing machine mankind has ever seen, so they probably already focus grouped me as a positive, without my even knowing it.
...all us religious types are uptight Dean Wermer lookalikes who shake our fists at this "science" and "methodology" you crazy kids talk about nowadays.
Read "Inherit the Wind". I'm a catholic, and I have no problem rectifying evolution and the big bang with creationism. Something had to set those events into motion neh? Could it not have been grand design?
Offtopic, I know, but I'll be tuning in, and I doubt I will suffer any theological distress over such scary topics as chemistry and astrophyics.
In the future, try to be as tolerant as you would undoubtedly have your in-laws be.
Instapundit is hands down my go-to political weblog.
It offers a nice round-up of links from the blogosphere, along with the his own commentary.
It's run by Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, and social liberal, everything else conservative.
The beauty of blogs is that Bias is readily apparent, and seldom denied, unlike oh, say, some cats in the mainream media.
If I want to buy an Intel proc. it will have been half constructed in Ireland to avoid corporation tax.
... your taxes and labour - basically your combined contribution to society - is NOT being spent on the greater good of society - rather it is being spent on a processor that is on a permant holiday travel around the world, taking in all the sights.
That's not a fault of capitalism, that's a fault of government regulation/tariff.
Then it will be built some more in Malaysia - low labour cost. Next it will go to a distribution centre somewhere in Europe (where is not so important). Then on to a wholesaler in Ireland again...I am actually leaving out many loops here Im sure - its even worse!
I'd like to know how this is a bad thing. Chip is designed wherever. It's then mass produced in an area with a low cost of labor. It is then shipped to distibution points, to be shipped to your local computer equiptment store, where you, and hundreds of others can pick up the product. Please, improve this process. After all, the logistics of distributing millions of processors is childs play.
Why? Because you (probably, and I) work in a sosiety whereby
That chip isn't on a holiday, it is getting to it's destination in the most efficient/auditable fashion possible. Furthermore, I fail to see how my tax money is supporting Intel's shipping cost. intel needs chip shipped. Intel contracts with shipping company to ship chip in exchange for payment. Government tax money isn't going to the shipping, nor is it going to intel. If Ireland has ornerous laws set up to force companies who do business there to undergo some arcane shipping route, then perhaps you should inquire as to what government is doing.
Please stop confusing government and capitalism. They are not the same thing. Capitalism has been with us since man first traded five apples for one pointy stick. We just call it the barter system because the cavemen in this example did not change the two things through an intermediary (CASH).
Capitalism must be taken back into the fiery chasm from whence it came.
Yeah, lets replace it with a system wherein your beloved government decides what gets produced, in what quantity, and who gets it! That's a much better solution! And I'm sure there will be no massive supply problems at all this time, since of course we've worked out the kinks from the LAST time we tried it.
Two reasons to never put your wallet in your back pocket.
#1. If you're an average office guy, and spend a decent part of the day in a chair, be it in a car, or in the office, that wallet is throwing off your center of balance while sitting. Keep it in your inside jacket pocket.
#2. Roughly 95% of the worlds populace carries the wallet in the back pocket. Thieves know exactly where it is, and can snatch at will. Keep it in your inside jacket pocket.
Poverty is not in and of itself a virtue.
Wealth is not in and of itself a vice.
Envy is in every way a vice (or worse).
Some people have parents that can afford ponies.
Some parents, like my own, can't.
Some people, such as myself, have loving families.
Some people don't.
Life is a mixed bag, and bitching about it just cheapens yourself, and causes you to overlook the good bits.
OCR was a good idea when Hard drive capacity was less fantastic then it is today. The idea of taking a page of handwritten text, and scanning it magically into a supersmall text file was attractive. But OCR wasn't terribly accurate, and to make it so would require quite a bit of R&D. All of a sudden software houses need to hire handwriting analysts.
.jpg".
In the meantime, Harddrive capacity grew, and all of a sudden, the difference between a 4k text file and a 35k jpg became negligable. The only real benefit OCR offered was the ability to spellcheck, search for words within the document. Given that OCR was prone to creating nonsensical non-words, as well as changing a word like "which" into "mitch", even these benefits became less frequently used.
I'm convinced the most common phrase associated with OCR programs is "eh, just save it as a
Madden University: More Madden online tips and hints than players knew existed can be found here... Madden University will be updated weekly with the latest online strategies and host various columns from well known community luminaries.
The Importance of Going long
By John Johnson, Madden U. luminary
First and ten. 3rd and long. 2nd and short. What do these seemingly different situations share in common? The quarterback always gets the ball before anyone else. Why hand off to the running back for another tedious 4 downs, when you can bomb to the endzone on first and ten from the 20, right after the kickoff?
Go long. Remember, if you've got a 25% chance to complete the pass, and you've got four downs, why bother with minutae?
This has been yet another "Hard-core" strategy, that you just can't find on the Gamefaqs message board.
No, you don't get a slashdot post now, because you are an anonymous jackass with no money.
Bill Gates, on the other hand, is an Prominent Jackass, with a LOT of money.
Hence the article.
With all due respect, the games Nintendo makes run on nintendo spec'd hardware. Don't underestimate the hardwares role in defining what the developer can and cannot do. Would zelda TOOT have been the same game on the PS1? Hells no. Would F-zero GC be the same game if it were for Xbox? I strongly submit it would not, despite the Xbox's superior hardware.
Nintendo is one thing, if nothing else. A profitable company. More money in then money out.
If I were nintendo, I would invite Mr Gates to tea, a tour of the nintendo facilities, tell him a joke, ask how his stay in Japan was, and then thank him, but decline his no doubt flattering cash offer.
Sir, I must thank you for motivating me to get that program up and running again. at 1600x1200, on moderate hardware, it's everything I always wanted it to be.
And as for the qualification (I don't know what posessed them to put that in), the key is to master the 180. The rest is pretty simple to put together. Run a lap, pull a slalom, then the 180, the 360, reverse 180, brake test.
The qualifier is perhaps the dumbest idea ever in the history of videogames, but it does result in the most tremendous curse of triumphant explatives ever, and that is worth something, I think.
Give it a shot again, and beat the qualifier. Or just race around San Francisco. Either option works.
I just loaded it up to see which of us was correct, and sure enough, it tops out at 1024x768.
Even now though, knowing I am probably wrong, I can't help but think I got the game past 1024x768, by accident if nothing else. The reason I think this is the center terminal, where it shows stats, at 800x600, there is only one terminal, at 1024x768 there are 2 terminals, and I can picture in my minds eye seeing those 2 terminals at a higher rez, with way too small text.
Or maybe it was just a wonderful dream.
Alpha centauri, on my p1.6, at 1280x1024 is immensely satisfying.
I'd also like to throw a vote to FreeSpace2, which I just re-installed, and my 9600 just toasts that game. With all details on, this game is still beautiful.
Other games I make a point to re-install after hardware updates are NHL2002, which will forever hold a spot in my heart, and if I can get slightly on the shady side of legality here, re-playing various N64 games via Project64, and ps1 Final Fantasys through PSXemu has been quite rewarding. You wouldn't think that upping the resolution would do much for a game designed with a fixed rez in mind, but it, along with some of the filters really clears out the jaggies. You'll learn to disdain Slippy all over again.
Recent games which I know are going to go in the re-re-install list are Republic: The revolution, and Neverwinter nights.
The PC versions of Driver and Porshe unleashed would also be in this list, if XP would deign to run them. I'm not about to set up a win98 partition.
According to the index, on page 22.
I highly recommend anyone looking for 45 minutes of hilarity to pick up this book.
guess I'd ask why you want to do such a thing?
Personal Preference, I'm guessing. I smoke, and I started smoking basics back when they were the cheapest brand. They are no longer the cheapest, and they certainly aren't the best, but I still smoke them because I've grown accustomed to them.
OSes are no different. There may be tools that do just about the same thing, but they don't "taste" the same.
I don't know that such education could change a gamer's personal politics but, like any education, it certainly increases the accuracy of their BS detector.
I think you nailed it at the end there. Playing Civilization makes a person neither a general, nor a historian. But as you say, if a journo spouts a half baked, trendy meme on a topic they know little about (More troops=necessarily better/quicker/safer outcome), the smell of falsehood is readily apparant to anyone who knows better from experiences they've had playing Civ, or Gettysburg.
Essentially, I just think that journalists are inclined to think that people will believe anything you shovel towards them, whatever the media, because journalists happen to be holding a shovel. And so they lament this other form of media, which occasionally contradicts them, or, dare I say, fosters active thought, rather than passive acceptance.
I wonder if/why so many of the attendees were lonely males?
This is a convention for members of a particular trade. It's not necessarily that the guy is lonely, it's more that the wife is back home, in a different city/state/country.
Booth babes have been around long before videogames, and they will outlast us all. They are there because sex sells. The guys that get a picture taken are mainly subscribing to the "while the cat's away" philosophy, in my opinion.
I've been to E3, and it's not all that different from a car show. Lots of attractive ladies, loud music, flashing lights, and guys trying to score with a good looking chick because the wife will never find out.
I've seen a few undeniably sad pasty lonely guys get their picture taken with a booth babe, but it's not as though you walk into the convention center and are overwhelmed by the stench of lonelyness and asthma meds. Is the geek stereotype accurate sometimes? Sure, but it's overused.
Is your moral of the story "Don't Even Try"?
Now really, when did I ever say that?
Re-entry is difficult. Going into space and landing in one piece is itself difficult. The shuttle is a wonder of the engineering world, and you won't hear me say anything to deny that. But it is not cost-effective.
The moral of my story is, we have a wonderful example of what government does well in the crash program to get to space. We have a wonderful example of what government does well, and what it doesn't, in the space shuttle. We are delivering payloads into space with regularity. Mission accomplished. Now, lets take a breath, and come up with solutions that work elegantly. It doesn't have to be done by tuesday. But lets get it right. The profit motive is a powerful force, that can be used to great effect in this task.
I'm not saying that keeping a shuttle from burning up while going through the atmosphere is an easy task, and yes, those tiles had to come from a subcontractor somewhere.
But I was not talking about subcontractors. I'm talking about a private company building and operating their own craft.
A subcontractor is given a task by the government, say to keep the shuttle from burning up. The private company doesn't care how cumbersome the solution is, so long as they keep the contract. In fact, from their standpoint, the more tiles the better, because they are selling the things, not operating the craft.
If that same company, staffed by the same people, were building something they had to maintain, while keeping a profit margin, I doubt they come up with the same solution as the sub-contractor supplying tiles to the government.
The thing is, Scaled has spent over $20M already. The $10M is obviously a big help, if they win- but it isn't the primary motivating factor. It couldn't be- you don't spend $20M to win $10M.
All you say is true, but this can be viewed as a retroactive subsidy towards R&D. If a company like Scaled has some plans to exploit this potentially lucrative market, the prospect of potentially spending 10 million if you win is much more palatable then a gauranteed expenditure of 20 million in R&D. Demanding success of the prize recipient also removes the risk of fraud by questionable contractors.
As has been mentioned, the aviation industry has progressed rapidly through such "contests", particularly the lockheed martins, et all. Stealth didn't become so common because private industry wanted it, or because government invented it. The government set the challenge, and let Private industry worry about keeping the margins low.
Finally, we've all,as you do in your post, griped enough about NASA expenditures to know this is a good idea. I'm inclined to think that a private company would not have come up with a re-entry shield that is composed of hundreds of ceramic tiles, all of which have to be inspected pre and post launch. It would simply not be cost effective. We already ran the crash program to space. Now lets run the slow, sensible one. Get private industry involved. Allow the profit motive in the lifting stage, not just the payload stage.
The sooner we ween space transport off of the government teat, the sooner we stop hearing about all the better ways government can spend money on this or that social program. If all that can be done is to remove that chestnut from the debate, I say it's worth it.
Also consider that the original ROM sizes of these games were so miniscule that the entire game, plus an NES emulator, could be quickly sent over the pipe from Animal Crossing, and fit entirely in the GBA's built-in RAM.
Your argument gets a little sympathy with me. Again, a perfect port is off the table given the screen size, so it would be nice to bump the product up a little, such as removing the slowdown. One area I think they could have really cleaned up on with this release was to include a third, fourth, fifth quest, etc. Given the relative simplicity of the maps, it wouldn't have killed them to add a few more quests.
But I've wanted a portable zelda1 since I bought an SP, and I couldn't find it in my heart to go the GP32 route.