Broadband is like money. Anyone who says it isn't important has never had enough of it.
If you've had access to a connection with real bandwidth - something like the 1Gbit connections you get in good university computer labs - then you know what the internet can really be like: every loads instantly, videos play with no buffering or delay, 10Mb downloads take a couple of seconds, latency for gaming hovers around 20ms, and so on. But if all you've had is Earthlink or AOL DSL (which is NOT always on, but instead basically dials up via PPPOE on demand), then you've never really experienced broadband at all.
*sniff*, did you have to make it sound so awesome? =(
I just think this underscores that politics in many "democracies", but particularly in the US, is deeply corrupt...Oh, this is all about bribery and influence-peddling. We can do this.
The US doesn't have a monopoly on bribery. After visiting Hong Kong my brother told me that 20% of the money spent on commercial projects like apartment complexes or office buildings goes towards bribes and kickbacks. They actually budget for bribes over there.
America isn't perfect...especially over the last 5 years...but maybe the next revolution will end political corruption in the same way organized crime was curtailed in the 60s and 70s. Two of America's greatest senators...John McCain and Russ Feingold, nearly managed to push a campaign finance reform bill through congress in 2001. They failed, but it shows that some people at the top do care about making America a better place, and that they are working towards making it happen.
my guess is that the EA code monkeys only work for bananas, not out of will to make amazing games.
Actually these are probably great elephant programmers who love to make games and code for peanuts but are worked 80hrs a week. Oh, and Interface Programmers, quality assurance, field testing, etc. are nowhere to be found in the budget.
Well written post, I agree with all of your points.
Companies like EA really do stand to benefit from making their games cleaner. Most of what makes games sell is word of mouth, not marketing or space on retail shelves. When I've played a great game I tell people about it, when I see a potentially great game ruined with cheesy design decisions and abysmal quality control I tell people about it.
The best way to advertise and thus boost sales for a game is to take pride in quality! EA should listen to their customers, especially the ones who are bitching! If one person complains about something there are 10,000 others pulling their hair out over the same issue! =(
How expensive can it really be to keep a few competant programmers working these problems?
You know what, screw you. If their product sucks don't buy it.
How are you supposed to know it sucks until you buy it?
The FPS+vehicles genre is something millions of people have been waiting to see improved, EA and DICE disappointed a lot of people by neglecting design and quality control. There should be some level of pride and responsibility in the things you build. The menu system alone is horrible, it looks like something from 1995. DICE probably gave one intern a week to build it, pathetic and inexcusable. Sadly there just aren't any alternatives to BF2 which off the same level of graphics+gameplay...if there were such a game many people would gladly switch.
BF2 is a travesty. The gameplay is sluggish, most of the weapons aren't acurate...the recoil algorithm is ridiculous, even with the MG in prone position...the interface is atrocious...it's still full of unaddressed(read ignored) bugs. The game has more problems than I care to list. Instead of focusing on new and better ways to take cash from their customers, these jokers should be fixing the broken product many paid good money for.
You forgot the tired old "and he'll stay President for life" screed.
It's not about the man, it's about the ignorance that keeps people like him in office. Just because he's out in a few years doesn't mean another, possibly worse candidate, couldn't easily fill his shoes. It's all up to the american voting public, which isn't very comforting.
This is silly: the law needs to start taking into account the qualitative differences between things like telephones, email inboxes, blogs, and IM accounts.
It's not silly, it's exactly what the U.S. deserves. The author seems to think that the things like this happen by mistake, and that the government needs 'technical guidance' to make the right decisions.
Does it occur to you guys that they know exactly what they're doing? That they're deliberately dismantling one of the few remaining open forums left standing? This is how democracy slowly erodes into fascism(or wal-mart), and despite what many of you may believe about the republican party, it exists to erode democracy(read protections for the little guy) to make life easier for the rich and powerful(the top 1%).
Any of you who support or voted for Bush, I hope you see exactly what you've been supporting by this signing. He's nothing but a morally bankrupt hand that signs bills for the rich and powerful at the expense of your hard earned (by previous generations) rights as citizens.
When are the thousands of political naive Slashdot readers going to wake up? I know you'd prefer to debug a circuit or write software but it's hard to do those things in jail! Yes politics is boring, but left alone the government will steal your cake! Aren't you getting frustrated reading about the US, Canada, Australia and even 'liberal' european countries serving the rights of their citizens to big business on a silver platter? We need to find a way to reverse this process!
1) Create an indexed customer review structure like newegg's 2) Implement a strong moderation system like Wikipedia's 3) Find a way to compensate and reward outstanding reviewers. 4) Make this service easily accesible and simple to use. 5)... 6) Consumers profit huge.
If a system like that became popular(and useable) it would force game publishers to hire better talent and more of it, instead of using 30% of their production budget to brainwash us into buying their 3rd rate products.
Q) What do patent lawyers and terrorists have in common?
A) The more fear, uncertainty, and doubt they spread...the better they do.
Most software patent claims are defensive. They are made in anticipation of being sued at some future date over an implemented algorithm. If companies had reassurance that such a thing was impossible they wouldn't be making the patent claims...and a lot of lawyers would be out of work. It's a very old form of racketeering. You have to pay for 'protection' from other organized criminals by hiring your own organized criminal to prepare your defence. Of course, as most of us know 99% of these so-called "software patents" can be found in introductory computer science textbooks...and of course, only the organized criminals (IP laywers) benefit from this process.
So, just like terrorists...the lawyers have snuck their way in and they are hijacking our industry. The apathy, ignorance, and lack of perception at the higher levels of government have allowed it to happen. Then again, when the majority of legislators are themselves lawyers it's not hard to see the cronyism in action.
Al Gore spent 25+ years of his life championing freedom of information, accessibility, using the internet to lower barriers of entry and to disempower corrupt structures like gangs of wrongful IP prosecutors turning a buck through the patent system...sadly > 50% of the voting american public didn't consider these freedoms a priority in 2000.
Software patents are a scandal, and they won't go away as long as the political failings underneath them are ignored.
Good to know someone else feels the same. I thought I was the only one insane (or is it really SANE!?) enough to believe that.
I agree with you guys. Even if there was no 'conspiracy', they shamelessly capitalized on 9/11 and continue to do the things mentioned by the grandparent poster. Bush getting reelected was the most heartbreaking political event of my life (so far).
The free sharing of resources and pooling of indexed harddisks, what a tragedy.
The grandest vision of the early ftp/http devs has come to pass, and now everyone wants to put the ship back in the bottle. Screw all of you naysayers, this is what the internet was for...the free sharing of information.
I'm sorry so many of you think abundance is such a threat to your livelyhood.
Maybe you should back politcal change in the form of progressive solutions instead of trying to cram decades of legacy materialistic thinking down the proverbial throats of your children's future.
However, it wouldn't be so upsetting if this game wasn't so well done in every other aspect.
Simply amazing. If they had put the extra months into it, this wouldn't be a 9.0, the game would be as close to 10 as I think we're capable of reaching as imperfect beings...
The interface still needs work.
- You can't esc -> quit until end of turn, a major pain. - You can't *easily* set your custom game settings as a preference. - I haven't figured out how to disable the 'clouds' layer when zooming far above the world.
There's a dozen other interface gripes I have with this game that I can't recall at the moment...it's disappointing too because Sid claimed they put special attention towards improving the interface. They failed imo. Civ4 uses the same archaic menu system from Civ3.
According to general consensus on game sites, World of Warcraft is too short, too easy, too dumbed down, and has horrible problems with the end-game.
Which is exactly correct.
Blizzard managed to woo the 14-yr olds off of their X-Box's...which is worth noting, but most veteran fantasy gamers find WoW to be hollow and short-lived. The interface is brilliant, some of the gameplay mechanisms are awesome...but they drop the ball huge on the end-game.
Just like Diablo was the fast-food version of single player RPGs, WoW is the fast-food version of MMORPGs.
The MPA is demanding jail time for the maintainers of websites offering unlicensed song scores and lyrics. The MPA President has stated that closing websites and imposing fines is not enough, stating that by 'throw [ing]in some jail time I think we'll be a little more effective' in its crusade.
Is it still too early to wish assassination on guys like this?
According to University President Scott Cowen of Tulane University, the School of Engineering will be greatly reduced. I have to wonder, as a student who can graduate in May 2007 (the deadline for those students to still receive a degree in any of the cut majors) with a Computer Science degree, but wants to stay an extra year, should I transfer to another university, graduate on time, or switch majors?
Don't worry, programming jobs in the US are being reduced faster than the staff at your CS department.
Your Rights Online: EFF Has Outlived Its Usefulness?
That's complete BS. We need more organizations like the EFF and more funding to support them. The internet should be become the greatest interactive public library in history, not a logjammed pollbooth laden series of checkpoints and chokestops.
AAC, the memorizing is a terrible way to learn chemistry (actually it's a bad way to learn anything). you'll never learn anything by memorizing rules. the best thing to do is learn what's going on underneath, then you won't need to know 50 different reactions
Unfortunately the quantum physics that govern those electron bonds is incalculably difficult. A hydrogen or helium atom is one thing, but 'understanding' why complex organic molecules behave the way they do is beyond the scope of analytical quantum physics.
It's a natural geek reaction to throw their FAITH in technology and science at those class of problems that have humans at their base (social problems), instead of confronting them on their own terms (dealing with people and all the messyness that that implies). If we would ONLY have enough computing power, and ENOUGH hard drives, and ENOUGH...you see were I'm going. Part of the problem with this FAITH is that the solution is essentially viewed as consequence free. While the real world is "no such thing as something for nothing" no matter how much P2P hides that fact. So what technology will we use to overcome latency, and how much will that add to the price, and how much to the complexity...and all because geeks hate dealing with other humans.
I want to say that I found your comments to be very thought provoking, and are forcing me to take a long hard look at myself...seriously.
That having been said however, I'm sure you also understand that FAITH in technology derives from some very real technological successes. Grain harvesting has been vastly improved and is now almost automated, medicines have made extinct a host of diseases...productivity has increased dramatically through technological means...unfortunately you're right about social problems. Human beings are impossible to satisfy, and social problems abound. It's also unfortunate that it's 2005 and we still can't make a robot smart enough to clean a kitchen, or work a payroll office. Even if we could build such things we'd probably still be slaves to unscrupulous humans.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Wasteland is the godfather of all post-apocalyptic RPGs. If you haven't played it, try giving it a few hours.
2) Burntime is another people might enjoy, it's a challenging mix of post-apocalyptic RPG and RTS.
Broadband is like money. Anyone who says it isn't important has never had enough of it.
If you've had access to a connection with real bandwidth - something like the 1Gbit connections you get in good university computer labs - then you know what the internet can really be like: every loads instantly, videos play with no buffering or delay, 10Mb downloads take a couple of seconds, latency for gaming hovers around 20ms, and so on. But if all you've had is Earthlink or AOL DSL (which is NOT always on, but instead basically dials up via PPPOE on demand), then you've never really experienced broadband at all.
*sniff*, did you have to make it sound so awesome? =(
One genre I think that has been vastly underused is the cyberpunk genre. The last decent one I remember playing was Shadowrun on the SNES.
If you like cyberpunk check out System Shock II.
If someone is smart enough to design a game that can do steps 1 and 2, then they deserve step 3.
I just think this underscores that politics in many "democracies", but particularly in the US, is deeply corrupt...Oh, this is all about bribery and influence-peddling. We can do this.
The US doesn't have a monopoly on bribery. After visiting Hong Kong my brother told me that 20% of the money spent on commercial projects like apartment complexes or office buildings goes towards bribes and kickbacks. They actually budget for bribes over there.
America isn't perfect...especially over the last 5 years...but maybe the next revolution will end political corruption in the same way organized crime was curtailed in the 60s and 70s. Two of America's greatest senators...John McCain and Russ Feingold, nearly managed to push a campaign finance reform bill through congress in 2001. They failed, but it shows that some people at the top do care about making America a better place, and that they are working towards making it happen.
my guess is that the EA code monkeys only work for bananas, not out of will to make amazing games.
Actually these are probably great elephant programmers who love to make games and code for peanuts but are worked 80hrs a week. Oh, and Interface Programmers, quality assurance, field testing, etc. are nowhere to be found in the budget.
Well written post, I agree with all of your points.
Companies like EA really do stand to benefit from making their games cleaner. Most of what makes games sell is word of mouth, not marketing or space on retail shelves. When I've played a great game I tell people about it, when I see a potentially great game ruined with cheesy design decisions and abysmal quality control I tell people about it.
The best way to advertise and thus boost sales for a game is to take pride in quality! EA should listen to their customers, especially the ones who are bitching! If one person complains about something there are 10,000 others pulling their hair out over the same issue! =(
How expensive can it really be to keep a few competant programmers working these problems?
You know what, screw you. If their product sucks don't buy it.
How are you supposed to know it sucks until you buy it?
The FPS+vehicles genre is something millions of people have been waiting to see improved, EA and DICE disappointed a lot of people by neglecting design and quality control. There should be some level of pride and responsibility in the things you build. The menu system alone is horrible, it looks like something from 1995. DICE probably gave one intern a week to build it, pathetic and inexcusable. Sadly there just aren't any alternatives to BF2 which off the same level of graphics+gameplay...if there were such a game many people would gladly switch.
BF2 is a travesty. The gameplay is sluggish, most of the weapons aren't acurate...the recoil algorithm is ridiculous, even with the MG in prone position...the interface is atrocious...it's still full of unaddressed(read ignored) bugs. The game has more problems than I care to list. Instead of focusing on new and better ways to take cash from their customers, these jokers should be fixing the broken product many paid good money for.
DICE and EA will get nothing more from me.
You forgot the tired old "and he'll stay President for life" screed.
It's not about the man, it's about the ignorance that keeps people like him in office. Just because he's out in a few years doesn't mean another, possibly worse candidate, couldn't easily fill his shoes. It's all up to the american voting public, which isn't very comforting.
This is silly: the law needs to start taking into account the qualitative differences between things like telephones, email inboxes, blogs, and IM accounts.
It's not silly, it's exactly what the U.S. deserves. The author seems to think that the things like this happen by mistake, and that the government needs 'technical guidance' to make the right decisions.
Does it occur to you guys that they know exactly what they're doing? That they're deliberately dismantling one of the few remaining open forums left standing? This is how democracy slowly erodes into fascism(or wal-mart), and despite what many of you may believe about the republican party, it exists to erode democracy(read protections for the little guy) to make life easier for the rich and powerful(the top 1%).
Any of you who support or voted for Bush, I hope you see exactly what you've been supporting by this signing. He's nothing but a morally bankrupt hand that signs bills for the rich and powerful at the expense of your hard earned (by previous generations) rights as citizens.
When are the thousands of political naive Slashdot readers going to wake up? I know you'd prefer to debug a circuit or write software but it's hard to do those things in jail! Yes politics is boring, but left alone the government will steal your cake! Aren't you getting frustrated reading about the US, Canada, Australia and even 'liberal' european countries serving the rights of their citizens to big business on a silver platter? We need to find a way to reverse this process!
1) Create an indexed customer review structure like newegg's ...
2) Implement a strong moderation system like Wikipedia's
3) Find a way to compensate and reward outstanding reviewers.
4) Make this service easily accesible and simple to use.
5)
6) Consumers profit huge.
If a system like that became popular(and useable) it would force game publishers to hire better talent and more of it, instead of using 30% of their production budget to brainwash us into buying their 3rd rate products.
Share Your Most Dangerous Idea
This one is really scary so put away the kids, the scary idea is:
Sharing
*gasp*
Q) What do patent lawyers and terrorists have in common?
A) The more fear, uncertainty, and doubt they spread...the better they do.
Most software patent claims are defensive. They are made in anticipation of being sued at some future date over an implemented algorithm. If companies had reassurance that such a thing was impossible they wouldn't be making the patent claims...and a lot of lawyers would be out of work. It's a very old form of racketeering. You have to pay for 'protection' from other organized criminals by hiring your own organized criminal to prepare your defence. Of course, as most of us know 99% of these so-called "software patents" can be found in introductory computer science textbooks...and of course, only the organized criminals (IP laywers) benefit from this process.
So, just like terrorists...the lawyers have snuck their way in and they are hijacking our industry. The apathy, ignorance, and lack of perception at the higher levels of government have allowed it to happen. Then again, when the majority of legislators are themselves lawyers it's not hard to see the cronyism in action.
Al Gore spent 25+ years of his life championing freedom of information, accessibility, using the internet to lower barriers of entry and to disempower corrupt structures like gangs of wrongful IP prosecutors turning a buck through the patent system...sadly > 50% of the voting american public didn't consider these freedoms a priority in 2000.
Software patents are a scandal, and they won't go away as long as the political failings underneath them are ignored.
Good to know someone else feels the same. I thought I was the only one insane (or is it really SANE!?) enough to believe that.
I agree with you guys. Even if there was no 'conspiracy', they shamelessly capitalized on 9/11 and continue to do the things mentioned by the grandparent poster. Bush getting reelected was the most heartbreaking political event of my life (so far).
The free sharing of resources and pooling of indexed harddisks, what a tragedy.
The grandest vision of the early ftp/http devs has come to pass, and now everyone wants to put the ship back in the bottle. Screw all of you naysayers, this is what the internet was for...the free sharing of information.
I'm sorry so many of you think abundance is such a threat to your livelyhood.
Maybe you should back politcal change in the form of progressive solutions instead of trying to cram decades of legacy materialistic thinking down the proverbial throats of your children's future.
However, it wouldn't be so upsetting if this game wasn't so well done in every other aspect.
Simply amazing. If they had put the extra months into it, this wouldn't be a 9.0, the game would be as close to 10 as I think we're capable of reaching as imperfect beings...
The interface still needs work.
- You can't esc -> quit until end of turn, a major pain.
- You can't *easily* set your custom game settings as a preference.
- I haven't figured out how to disable the 'clouds' layer when zooming far above the world.
There's a dozen other interface gripes I have with this game that I can't recall at the moment...it's disappointing too because Sid claimed they put special attention towards improving the interface. They failed imo. Civ4 uses the same archaic menu system from Civ3.
According to general consensus on game sites, World of Warcraft is too short, too easy, too dumbed down, and has horrible problems with the end-game.
Which is exactly correct.
Blizzard managed to woo the 14-yr olds off of their X-Box's...which is worth noting, but most veteran fantasy gamers find WoW to be hollow and short-lived. The interface is brilliant, some of the gameplay mechanisms are awesome...but they drop the ball huge on the end-game.
Just like Diablo was the fast-food version of single player RPGs, WoW is the fast-food version of MMORPGs.
Lyrics aren't facts. They are creative works.
So is every word in the english language you legalese spouting bitch.
The MPA is demanding jail time for the maintainers of websites offering unlicensed song scores and lyrics. The MPA President has stated that closing websites and imposing fines is not enough, stating that by 'throw [ing]in some jail time I think we'll be a little more effective' in its crusade.
Is it still too early to wish assassination on guys like this?
According to University President Scott Cowen of Tulane University, the School of Engineering will be greatly reduced. I have to wonder, as a student who can graduate in May 2007 (the deadline for those students to still receive a degree in any of the cut majors) with a Computer Science degree, but wants to stay an extra year, should I transfer to another university, graduate on time, or switch majors?
Don't worry, programming jobs in the US are being reduced faster than the staff at your CS department.
Your Rights Online: EFF Has Outlived Its Usefulness?
That's complete BS. We need more organizations like the EFF and more funding to support them. The internet should be become the greatest interactive public library in history, not a logjammed pollbooth laden series of checkpoints and chokestops.
Any ET that Bush can shoot down isn't worth knowing anyway.
AAC, the memorizing is a terrible way to learn chemistry (actually it's a bad way to learn anything). you'll never learn anything by memorizing rules. the best thing to do is learn what's going on underneath, then you won't need to know 50 different reactions
Unfortunately the quantum physics that govern those electron bonds is incalculably difficult. A hydrogen or helium atom is one thing, but 'understanding' why complex organic molecules behave the way they do is beyond the scope of analytical quantum physics.
It's a natural geek reaction to throw their FAITH in technology and science at those class of problems that have humans at their base (social problems), instead of confronting them on their own terms (dealing with people and all the messyness that that implies). If we would ONLY have enough computing power, and ENOUGH hard drives, and ENOUGH...you see were I'm going. Part of the problem with this FAITH is that the solution is essentially viewed as consequence free. While the real world is "no such thing as something for nothing" no matter how much P2P hides that fact. So what technology will we use to overcome latency, and how much will that add to the price, and how much to the complexity...and all because geeks hate dealing with other humans.
I want to say that I found your comments to be very thought provoking, and are forcing me to take a long hard look at myself...seriously.
That having been said however, I'm sure you also understand that FAITH in technology derives from some very real technological successes. Grain harvesting has been vastly improved and is now almost automated, medicines have made extinct a host of diseases...productivity has increased dramatically through technological means...unfortunately you're right about social problems. Human beings are impossible to satisfy, and social problems abound. It's also unfortunate that it's 2005 and we still can't make a robot smart enough to clean a kitchen, or work a payroll office. Even if we could build such things we'd probably still be slaves to unscrupulous humans.