Sorry, but we are, after all, the ones who were forced to buy MS products with our computers at monopoly prices.
And even if we hadn't been thusly extorted, there's still a little matter of recompense for decades of grief and loss caused by insecure, unstable software.
Call the $10 billion a downpayment on Microsoft's Reparations.;-)
Any technology that threatens this, the purest form of American motorist communication, is a technology we cannot afford.
That said, I suppose the increasing size of the American ass is going to render the point moot, anyway. Video killed the radio star, but McDonalds killed mooning...
From USA TODAY, here's Gates making the case for Longhorn:
Well it's hard to describe, a little bit. Say you have two PCs today. It's a huge pain that your Favorites on this machine are different than on this machine. Moving your files from this machine to this machine, getting your e-mail, your calendar -- it's painful.
Listen, you bifocaled criminal. I've had plenty of "huge" pains using your products. But I don't think I'm going to go back to them just because I can now be assured that my "Favorites" are the same on all my machines!
While this seems like a silly lawsuit, it says something about the nature of certain games and their relationship to movies.
From the publisher's point of view, you can see the attraction of a well-known franchise. Here's Star Trek, with legions of fans. The publisher, being a bean counter first and foremost, isn't really disposed to thinking, "I wonder what makes ST work," or "I wonder if we can translate what makes ST work on TV and in film to games," or "When are people going to get tired of this ST stuff, anyway?" No, the point is to pay the licensing fee and milk the sucker for all it's worth.
And so this banal relationship begins. The games are ciphers; they depend on the movies and TV to create and sustain the characters that they will borrow for skin deep, formulaic exploitation.
But - heh - what happens if the TV and cinematic franchise has been doing the same thing, cannibalizing its own better past for years until the cash cow is picked clean? Then the bean counters have a problem, don't they. Maybe they should have run their tricorder over the deal a few more times before signing.
It's been a long time since the groundbreaking days of Warcraft and Diablo, more than enough time for Blizzard to have lost its edge and gone on auto-pilot. The sad fact is that these talented guys won't be missed; the increasingly bland Blizzard line can be managed by anyone. Maybe they recognized as much...
"Nothing more than trashing the Mac"
on
G5 Benchmark Roundup
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Well, I wanted to judge for myself, so I went to White's site and read the piece. An excerpt:
The G5 is impressive enough without cooking up any numbers or twisting any words. When I looked at its specifications, all I could say through my gaping jaw was a reverent "wow." This baby is a monster, with 64-bit processing, a 1GHz front-side bus for each processor, a couple of 2GHz chips, and lots more. If Apple actually ships this box in August, it will be a formidable contender in the content creation arena, no question about it. I don't want to take anything away from this exciting announcement that shows us that finally Apple has abandoned those old shopworn cell-phone chips from Motorola and put together first-class hardware that can do justice to the exquisite OS X and its attending software masterpieces like Final Cut Pro 4. This is going to be a huge improvement for pixel pushers of every stripe, and for digital video editors, animators and compositors in particular.
Some "trashing" that was. Yes, he goes on to deflate Apple's PR, but that's entirely different from being anti-Apple. He's clearly impressed by the hardware and the OS -- just not by the inflated claims made by the marketing department. Can you understand the difference?
Bill Gates, dissin' dystopia
on
Gates and Security
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Arguments about Orwell's vision have ranged back and forth for over half a century, but seldom have bean counting billionaires been consulted for their opinion. Smothering markets and twisting buyers' arms are properly seen as better skills for advancement in either big business or the mob than for understanding society or literature. Of course, in the age of the MBA president, you might say that bean counting has replaced any more nuanced or enlightened lens for looking at our problems - and when society turns to the savagery of corporate conservatism for answers, I'd have to agree. We're living in a time when the official line is that *only* billionaires understand us.
That said, Gates is uniquely placed, in a way, to offer his 2 zillion cents. Sitting atop his pile, having broken markets, governments and the law itself on the anvil of his net worth, while simultaneously having been the single largest source of the world's computer security problems, he has helped to bring about the conditions for our further slide into Orwellian social control. That's because Microsoft's decades of slothful security have taught society to view PCs in a state of perpetual tremulous FUD. Marrying that fear to the trauma stoked endlessly by government in its post-911 efforts to brutalize democratic sensibilities is kind of an inevitable career move for Gates (and not only because he can't peddle operating systems like before). After you've taught everyone to fear, what do you do for an encore?
Teach them obedience. Orwell understood that.
Calling it the biggest technological and cultural challenge the country has faced, Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates said that communications interoperability must top the Homeland Security Department's to-do list.
Actually, the biggest technological and cultural challenge our republic has faced is seeing if it can survive the Homeland Security Department - the Room 101 that our excited billionaires are building.
Personally, I can accept nothing less than having my nation's army be in full software licensing compliance while it bombs, invades and occupies other countries. It's the law! - I think you're some kind of deviated prevert. I think General Ripper found out about your preversion, and that you were organizing some kind of mutiny of preverts.
As long as we're doing psychoanalysis from the hip, let's not forget: Think Different. The Mac mantra is a pitch to the outsider who stands apart from, and in judgment of, mainstream society. (Yet who makes a decent penny at it, of course. Call them The Well-Dressed Rebels.)
You don't have to be Carl Jung to see that the taunting of Mac owners by PC fans is a patterned ritual, akin to the jocks giving the artists a hard time in school; or that, in the reverse, Mac owners berating the vanilla plainness of the PC world is a prototypical underdog's gripe about the herd.
The really funny thing, and what makes it so amusing for me to play this game (I own a PC and a Mac - so there, prlrlrrlrlrlb!), is that this stuff is obviously deeply personal to so many. It's close to the psychological metal, you migth say. The hardware and the OS are just handy symbols for having at it - for, as you nicely put it, "competing, not computing." It's a terribly amusing hobby, and I'm grateful to everyone here who blows their top in pissing matches.;-)
Lying is a strong word, misleading would be a better one, or even misdirection. That's what marketing is. Creating a non-existant need for you to want their product.
Sure, marketing's often dirty. But you're confusing Apples and oranges.
This is a case where the need is not perceived but real - and felt quite keenly both by the manufacturer and its market. The present deception has sprung from Apple's desperation over its declining Powermac sales as well as its users' reluctance to buy what has been widely-perceived (fairly or not) as outmoded, inferior hardware. Apple knew it needed a hit to revive sales. Apple consumers weren't going to buy until Apple had that hit.
Why did Apple lie? Not to create perceived need, but to appear capable of meeting very real needs everyone alreadly agreed upon. Apple has merely been caught lying about size; apparently, it has a case of benchmark envy.;-)
Have to agree - it was something of a letdown, far from the exciting introduction of Jaguar. I don't know whether Apple's lacking imagination now or just facing the limitation that most of its installed user base doesn't have sufficiently powerful hardware to make a more adventurous OS upgrade viable.
If the new G5 hardware sells at all - far from a certainty in this economy - we can expect cooler stuff down the road. For the time being, I'll take a pass on Panther - Jaguar's doing just fine on my machine.
The Apple Store web site is closed right now. They say that they'll be back up within the hour. (Once they are, that may be one of the best places to get solid specs on the new systems.)
Thanks, but if they don't stack up well against the specs on the rumor sites, I'll just stick with those.;-)
The piles concept is pretty cool - taking the gee-whiz aspect of the dock and putting the information more usefully in a smaller physical space. There's also something about it that seems cleverly obvious, like a brilliant idea that took too long to get here; it's a stack, after all.;-)
Sure, arguably the bulk of US law enforcement already serves the propertied classes, ever scurrying on missions to keep the privileged from the clutches of the unprivileged. Rarely is the reverse ever true. Just witness the Enron scandal: not even Fox-TV watching Americans are brainwashed enough to escape realizing what a swindle occurred there, but just watch as our corporate media report how "difficult" it is to police corporate crime because the issues are so "complicated" - true only insomuch as the criminal laws have been skewed to make such prosecutions unlikely, this for the benefit of so-called free enterprise.
The current legislation proposes something very old-fashioned: the privatization, in a sense, of our law enforcement. Oh, the FBI would still be publicly funded, but essentially their mission would be reconstituted to make them the private police force of immensely wealthy copyright holders. We'd have a situation analogous in substance to 19th century America, with its strike-breaking private cops doing the bidding of their factory masters. Not only would the FBI be the servant of the music, movie and software companies, flattening any and all freedoms that thwart the perfect and unfettered progress of business (while also forging the kinds of interconnectedness that would make it politically and legally hard ever to police those industries).
But more drastically, the FBI would become a tool used to correct a failure of the marketplace: it would become the bludgeon that stops the consumer revolt that is embodied in online file trading - expunging, through intrusion and harassment, any impulse but that of proper obedience. Is a generation of future American debtors missing the lesson of arbeit macht frei? Then the FBI will be called in to teach them the fundamentals!
Mind, this is of a piece with Hatch's outburst last week about destroying downloaders' computers. Such is Washington's obsequiousness before the power it serves, and so deep runs its contempt for the freedoms of average citizens. (It's all fine and good to trot out your defense secretary to call freedom "messy" when it's overseas; but here, of course, here we send in the G-Men.) The Net has allowed the little person a measure of freedom not dreamt of in the corridors of our oligarchy. I don't expect our rulers to rest until they've brought this democratic, not to say anarchical, spirit to heel.
Dixon proceeds to deliver a eulogy to the 3G phone's impact on our lives. "Let's say there's a big terrorist bomb in London and say there are 500,000 video phones there and it's well known that CNN, Sky and the BBC pay for video clips, and you're just walking past. Within one second you can press record and the send button to CNN and suddenly your video could be on CNN live."
So, what the blowhard at the London Business School is saying is that in our terrorism-filled future, everyone's an entrepreneur. Everyone with a 3G phone, of course.
Good evening, and welcome to America's Funniest Home Terrorism Videos!
This may be the most deeply cynical post-911 spin yet to crawl out of the right wing mind. It makes our own Homeland Security honchos, with their fever dreams of Total Information Awareness, seem amateurish. Think big, fellas. It's time to unite the policy of scaring the public out of its wits with the glories of trickle-down economics. Dare to dream of a future in which technology allows us all to get a piece of the action in the next big terrorist attack!
May it please the court to hear this testimony...
on
The Buttocks Have It
·
· Score: 4, Funny
The seat itself will not make a fundamental assessment of the mental or physical state of its load but will merely point out the discrepancies, leaving it to the cabin staff to work out whether 45B is jumpy because they're scared of flying or because they're planning to take over the plane.
(Excerpts from the prosecution testimony submitted to the court by Northwest Airlines Smart Seat #423aY9)
...At approximately 13:54h, two highly suspicious buttocks settled upon me creating a sensation in my sensi-cups beyond all imagining. I compare it to being asked to lay under twin inflatable Walmart children's swimming pools filled with seven-layer jello salad while that lady from the Ebay ads does belly-flops in them. I've assessed a lot of butts in my time, but none, to be sure, immediately struck me as being so bouncy with evil.
Lightning fast calculations conducted by my WinCE Special Edition Ass Patriot software came up showing POSITIVE in multiple categories for a BGI (Butt Guilt Indicator) value of.00457, or a full.00257 above the standard benchmarks for PI (Posterior Innocence).
Without hesitation I silently activated the vibra-alert pager of Senior Chief Air Attendant Kitty M., who, according to protocol, approached the owner of the buttocks in a nonchalant, oblique manner with the offer of a bag of complimentary Freedom Nuts (unsalted).
The peanuts were accepted and, judging from my continuous real-time nether feed, consumed in two large gulps. At 13:59h, rumbling ensued. At 14:01h, I registered a seismic event that I would rather not discuss. By 14:02h, airline security had been alerted and at 14:06h three agents boarded the plane cleverly disguised as a troupe of disgraced former Citigroup executives. Slyly, they engaged in covert-ops conversation, as follows:
Agent #1: Beautiful part is, I'm spending more time with Gale and the kids.
Agent #2: Golden. Mind if I run with that tip?
Agent #3: Ha ha ha. The best tips are the ones that help society to be more productive and honest!
At 14:10h, the suspect was seized, hooded, cuffed, pinned, tagged, numbered, bagged, and escorted from the plane in accordance with the Zero Tolerance for Terrorist Tushes Act passed last term by Congress.
It is the considered opinion of this chair that the buttocks in question presented a substantial and credible threat to the safety of the passengers and crew, and should be dealt with in the harshest fashion, up to and including electrocution. Nor is this chair displeased to report that the On Call passenger who claimed the terrorist's seat turned out to be a 22-year old aerobics instructor from Cincinnati who spent the flight reading fellatio tips in the latest Cosmopolitan. And squirming ever so nicely. Ain't freedom sweet?
It's tempting to smugly say that any day Microsoft products are discontinued is a good day. But you never want to see people abandoning your platform - even, and especially, your arch enemy, whose support was nothing less than an acknowledgement of your relevancy and a bridge for former Microsoft victims transitioning to OS X. What's more, producing Mac IE bound Redmond to a minor form of cross-platform standardization; now it is freer to make more mischief. As LBJ once said of why he wouldn't fire J. Edgar Hoover, "Son, when you've got a skunk, it's better to have him inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in."
And in this case in particular, there is still no complete Applecentric solution. As any honest Safari user must admit, you still have to fire up an alternative browser sometimes -- occasionally when Java gives Safari fits, or regularly if you do things like banking. I don't terribly mind the beta limitations, given the larger benefits (launch and rendering times, tabs, popup suppression). But the onus is now upon Apple to put its browser where its mouth is.
"I think people are generally false. Even sitting here with you, we are putting on a front. But in A. O. you can really let your true character out. If I want to be a pervert, I am able to do that in A. O. and be a pervert right off the bat."
I grok that perv stuff, baby. Still, rumor has it the Internet will allow you to be a pervert without paying monthly fees. Also, you won't have to wear robes or carry a staff around, and you can accomplish it in somewhat less than 7 hours per day.
If we want to convince music companies that the computer is a viable distribution model and that we want those distributed files fairly unfettered by copy protection, than this goes against all that.
I don't see how. It's not the burden of consumers not to disappoint the music industry. Rather, it's the burden of the music industry not to disappoint consumers.
It makes Apple look bad, and we're at the point where Apple is really our best hope for a scheme which we like.
Well, it is in the nature of some hacks to make the hackee look bad, but I wouldn't say this is one of those. Actually, Apple's castration of iTunes made Apple look far too willing to please its new partners at the expense of users.
What's more, it's too early to say Apple is the "best hope" in this emerging market. And emerging it is: just because kids learned how to swap music online before stodgy music executives signed off on the deal doesn't mean that we're anywhere near the point of last best hopes. Don't be surprised if the notoriously fickle music industry gives it a go with Apple before moving onto other, probably bigger, players.
Well, I like your post, even if I wish I had your problem with a surfeit of immersion in games. As you will have guessed, it's just the opposite malady for me.
I came of age in gaming around the same time as you. The charm of earlier, simpler gaming is just that for me - charm. I've tried revisiting my quarter-cramming days through MAME, but it merely reminds me of taking the Iowa Basics Test in grade school. Fill the oval nicely...
Weirdly (or not - this being Slashdot, yuk yuk) I have emerged in adulthood with a case of arrested development exacerbated by the need for orders of complexity in my entertainment.;-) In game design, it means I'm really not satisfied by linearity or easily perceptible limits - I want the design to reveal itself obliquely and subtly. One exception, I guess, is DM in the original Quake, where clear limits ingeniously open up a vast world of play. (Q1 is the Darwinian breathalyzer of gaming. How many other games scale up so viciously in their talent curve, or combine strategy and tactics while allowing for player style?)
For me being busy means there's even more pressure for games to be as deep as possible - more hypno-bang for the buck. I realize not everyone - in fact a distinct minority - wants this. But it makes it all the sweeter when a multifaceted gem like, say, Arx Fatalis or Morrowind appears.
To the many good critiques here, I'll add just two points: churn and politics. First churn.
Game publishers want to move volumes of product, and games that help this tend to be if not disposable than at least shorter rather than longer-lived. That means quick, linear scenarios - the kind best suited, of course, to the 12-year old target demographic. Despite their evolutionary polygonal distance from their forerunner in the old Atari Berserk, these are still only simple mazes for going zap! in. And a consequence of that aesthetic choice is that complexity goes out the window, along with ambiguiety, variety in problem-solving, and other open-ended criteria that most of us equate with "originality."
That said, three major games suggest a countervailing force: the Sims and the GTA3 franchises, and Morrowind. These are major commercial successes that flout the platform-hopping, find-key-open-door rattrap of most games, and point to a more dynamic and nuanced form of gameplay. If this continues, good things will follow.
Ironically enough for a form that traffics in sensation rather than ideas, another tendency to consider is political. Apart from horror and sci fi, there has long been a social and political context in video games. At the risk of simplifying, lots of games through the 70s and 80s reflected utopian leftist values - big bad corporations were always either releasing giant robots or leaving a scorched earth in which vigilante players had to set things to right (with a gun, naturally). Looking over gaming history you see this trend start to level off as gaming moves out of the garage and into the boardroom. Today, in many games, the enemy has been humanized (some would say dehumanized) as a projection of grim right wing urges: Arab or Vietnamese soldiers who must be eradicated in the service of "freedom" or "justice". (How congenial a trend this is to our rulers can be seen in the US Army even deploying its own game.) So our values - or at least as construed by those who control big-money game publishing - can also drive a lot of me-too game making.
Slashdot Mirror
And even if we hadn't been thusly extorted, there's still a little matter of recompense for decades of grief and loss caused by insecure, unstable software.
Call the $10 billion a downpayment on Microsoft's Reparations. ;-)
"Will Moderate For Sex"
That said, I suppose the increasing size of the American ass is going to render the point moot, anyway. Video killed the radio star, but McDonalds killed mooning...
From the publisher's point of view, you can see the attraction of a well-known franchise. Here's Star Trek, with legions of fans. The publisher, being a bean counter first and foremost, isn't really disposed to thinking, "I wonder what makes ST work," or "I wonder if we can translate what makes ST work on TV and in film to games," or "When are people going to get tired of this ST stuff, anyway?" No, the point is to pay the licensing fee and milk the sucker for all it's worth.
And so this banal relationship begins. The games are ciphers; they depend on the movies and TV to create and sustain the characters that they will borrow for skin deep, formulaic exploitation.
But - heh - what happens if the TV and cinematic franchise has been doing the same thing, cannibalizing its own better past for years until the cash cow is picked clean? Then the bean counters have a problem, don't they. Maybe they should have run their tricorder over the deal a few more times before signing.
It's been a long time since the groundbreaking days of Warcraft and Diablo, more than enough time for Blizzard to have lost its edge and gone on auto-pilot. The sad fact is that these talented guys won't be missed; the increasingly bland Blizzard line can be managed by anyone. Maybe they recognized as much...
Some "trashing" that was. Yes, he goes on to deflate Apple's PR, but that's entirely different from being anti-Apple. He's clearly impressed by the hardware and the OS -- just not by the inflated claims made by the marketing department. Can you understand the difference?
That said, Gates is uniquely placed, in a way, to offer his 2 zillion cents. Sitting atop his pile, having broken markets, governments and the law itself on the anvil of his net worth, while simultaneously having been the single largest source of the world's computer security problems, he has helped to bring about the conditions for our further slide into Orwellian social control. That's because Microsoft's decades of slothful security have taught society to view PCs in a state of perpetual tremulous FUD. Marrying that fear to the trauma stoked endlessly by government in its post-911 efforts to brutalize democratic sensibilities is kind of an inevitable career move for Gates (and not only because he can't peddle operating systems like before). After you've taught everyone to fear, what do you do for an encore?
Teach them obedience. Orwell understood that.
Calling it the biggest technological and cultural challenge the country has faced, Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates said that communications interoperability must top the Homeland Security Department's to-do list.
Actually, the biggest technological and cultural challenge our republic has faced is seeing if it can survive the Homeland Security Department - the Room 101 that our excited billionaires are building.
Personally, I can accept nothing less than having my nation's army be in full software licensing compliance while it bombs, invades and occupies other countries. It's the law!
-
I think you're some kind of deviated prevert. I think General Ripper found out about your preversion, and that you were organizing some kind of mutiny of preverts.
That $400.00 up-front cost means that I don't have to spend my time - my extremely expensive and finite time -
Definition of extremely expensive and finite time: the condition of being too busy for twelve paragraph posts.
You don't have to be Carl Jung to see that the taunting of Mac owners by PC fans is a patterned ritual, akin to the jocks giving the artists a hard time in school; or that, in the reverse, Mac owners berating the vanilla plainness of the PC world is a prototypical underdog's gripe about the herd.
The really funny thing, and what makes it so amusing for me to play this game (I own a PC and a Mac - so there, prlrlrrlrlrlb!), is that this stuff is obviously deeply personal to so many. It's close to the psychological metal, you migth say. The hardware and the OS are just handy symbols for having at it - for, as you nicely put it, "competing, not computing." It's a terribly amusing hobby, and I'm grateful to everyone here who blows their top in pissing matches. ;-)
Sure, marketing's often dirty. But you're confusing Apples and oranges.
This is a case where the need is not perceived but real - and felt quite keenly both by the manufacturer and its market. The present deception has sprung from Apple's desperation over its declining Powermac sales as well as its users' reluctance to buy what has been widely-perceived (fairly or not) as outmoded, inferior hardware. Apple knew it needed a hit to revive sales. Apple consumers weren't going to buy until Apple had that hit.
Why did Apple lie? Not to create perceived need, but to appear capable of meeting very real needs everyone alreadly agreed upon. Apple has merely been caught lying about size; apparently, it has a case of benchmark envy. ;-)
If the new G5 hardware sells at all - far from a certainty in this economy - we can expect cooler stuff down the road. For the time being, I'll take a pass on Panther - Jaguar's doing just fine on my machine.
Thanks, but if they don't stack up well against the specs on the rumor sites, I'll just stick with those. ;-)
The current legislation proposes something very old-fashioned: the privatization, in a sense, of our law enforcement. Oh, the FBI would still be publicly funded, but essentially their mission would be reconstituted to make them the private police force of immensely wealthy copyright holders. We'd have a situation analogous in substance to 19th century America, with its strike-breaking private cops doing the bidding of their factory masters. Not only would the FBI be the servant of the music, movie and software companies, flattening any and all freedoms that thwart the perfect and unfettered progress of business (while also forging the kinds of interconnectedness that would make it politically and legally hard ever to police those industries).
But more drastically, the FBI would become a tool used to correct a failure of the marketplace: it would become the bludgeon that stops the consumer revolt that is embodied in online file trading - expunging, through intrusion and harassment, any impulse but that of proper obedience. Is a generation of future American debtors missing the lesson of arbeit macht frei? Then the FBI will be called in to teach them the fundamentals!
Mind, this is of a piece with Hatch's outburst last week about destroying downloaders' computers. Such is Washington's obsequiousness before the power it serves, and so deep runs its contempt for the freedoms of average citizens. (It's all fine and good to trot out your defense secretary to call freedom "messy" when it's overseas; but here, of course, here we send in the G-Men.) The Net has allowed the little person a measure of freedom not dreamt of in the corridors of our oligarchy. I don't expect our rulers to rest until they've brought this democratic, not to say anarchical, spirit to heel.
My Mac, on the other hand...well, it's for annoyances like making a living. ;-)
So, what the blowhard at the London Business School is saying is that in our terrorism-filled future, everyone's an entrepreneur. Everyone with a 3G phone, of course.
Good evening, and welcome to America's Funniest Home Terrorism Videos!
This may be the most deeply cynical post-911 spin yet to crawl out of the right wing mind. It makes our own Homeland Security honchos, with their fever dreams of Total Information Awareness, seem amateurish. Think big, fellas. It's time to unite the policy of scaring the public out of its wits with the glories of trickle-down economics. Dare to dream of a future in which technology allows us all to get a piece of the action in the next big terrorist attack!
(Excerpts from the prosecution testimony submitted to the court by Northwest Airlines Smart Seat #423aY9)
Lightning fast calculations conducted by my WinCE Special Edition Ass Patriot software came up showing POSITIVE in multiple categories for a BGI (Butt Guilt Indicator) value of .00457, or a full .00257 above the standard benchmarks for PI (Posterior Innocence).
Without hesitation I silently activated the vibra-alert pager of Senior Chief Air Attendant Kitty M., who, according to protocol, approached the owner of the buttocks in a nonchalant, oblique manner with the offer of a bag of complimentary Freedom Nuts (unsalted).
The peanuts were accepted and, judging from my continuous real-time nether feed, consumed in two large gulps. At 13:59h, rumbling ensued. At 14:01h, I registered a seismic event that I would rather not discuss. By 14:02h, airline security had been alerted and at 14:06h three agents boarded the plane cleverly disguised as a troupe of disgraced former Citigroup executives. Slyly, they engaged in covert-ops conversation, as follows:
Agent #1: Beautiful part is, I'm spending more time with Gale and the kids.
Agent #2: Golden. Mind if I run with that tip?
Agent #3: Ha ha ha. The best tips are the ones that help society to be more productive and honest!
At 14:10h, the suspect was seized, hooded, cuffed, pinned, tagged, numbered, bagged, and escorted from the plane in accordance with the Zero Tolerance for Terrorist Tushes Act passed last term by Congress.
It is the considered opinion of this chair that the buttocks in question presented a substantial and credible threat to the safety of the passengers and crew, and should be dealt with in the harshest fashion, up to and including electrocution. Nor is this chair displeased to report that the On Call passenger who claimed the terrorist's seat turned out to be a 22-year old aerobics instructor from Cincinnati who spent the flight reading fellatio tips in the latest Cosmopolitan. And squirming ever so nicely. Ain't freedom sweet?
And in this case in particular, there is still no complete Applecentric solution. As any honest Safari user must admit, you still have to fire up an alternative browser sometimes -- occasionally when Java gives Safari fits, or regularly if you do things like banking. I don't terribly mind the beta limitations, given the larger benefits (launch and rendering times, tabs, popup suppression). But the onus is now upon Apple to put its browser where its mouth is.
I grok that perv stuff, baby. Still, rumor has it the Internet will allow you to be a pervert without paying monthly fees. Also, you won't have to wear robes or carry a staff around, and you can accomplish it in somewhat less than 7 hours per day.
What's more, it's too early to say Apple is the "best hope" in this emerging market. And emerging it is: just because kids learned how to swap music online before stodgy music executives signed off on the deal doesn't mean that we're anywhere near the point of last best hopes. Don't be surprised if the notoriously fickle music industry gives it a go with Apple before moving onto other, probably bigger, players.
Weapons of mass instruction.
I came of age in gaming around the same time as you. The charm of earlier, simpler gaming is just that for me - charm. I've tried revisiting my quarter-cramming days through MAME, but it merely reminds me of taking the Iowa Basics Test in grade school. Fill the oval nicely...
Weirdly (or not - this being Slashdot, yuk yuk) I have emerged in adulthood with a case of arrested development exacerbated by the need for orders of complexity in my entertainment. ;-) In game design, it means I'm really not satisfied by linearity or easily perceptible limits - I want the design to reveal itself obliquely and subtly. One exception, I guess, is DM in the original Quake, where clear limits ingeniously open up a vast world of play. (Q1 is the Darwinian breathalyzer of gaming. How many other games scale up so viciously in their talent curve, or combine strategy and tactics while allowing for player style?)
For me being busy means there's even more pressure for games to be as deep as possible - more hypno-bang for the buck. I realize not everyone - in fact a distinct minority - wants this. But it makes it all the sweeter when a multifaceted gem like, say, Arx Fatalis or Morrowind appears.
Game publishers want to move volumes of product, and games that help this tend to be if not disposable than at least shorter rather than longer-lived. That means quick, linear scenarios - the kind best suited, of course, to the 12-year old target demographic. Despite their evolutionary polygonal distance from their forerunner in the old Atari Berserk, these are still only simple mazes for going zap! in. And a consequence of that aesthetic choice is that complexity goes out the window, along with ambiguiety, variety in problem-solving, and other open-ended criteria that most of us equate with "originality."
That said, three major games suggest a countervailing force: the Sims and the GTA3 franchises, and Morrowind. These are major commercial successes that flout the platform-hopping, find-key-open-door rattrap of most games, and point to a more dynamic and nuanced form of gameplay. If this continues, good things will follow.
Ironically enough for a form that traffics in sensation rather than ideas, another tendency to consider is political. Apart from horror and sci fi, there has long been a social and political context in video games. At the risk of simplifying, lots of games through the 70s and 80s reflected utopian leftist values - big bad corporations were always either releasing giant robots or leaving a scorched earth in which vigilante players had to set things to right (with a gun, naturally). Looking over gaming history you see this trend start to level off as gaming moves out of the garage and into the boardroom. Today, in many games, the enemy has been humanized (some would say dehumanized) as a projection of grim right wing urges: Arab or Vietnamese soldiers who must be eradicated in the service of "freedom" or "justice". (How congenial a trend this is to our rulers can be seen in the US Army even deploying its own game.) So our values - or at least as construed by those who control big-money game publishing - can also drive a lot of me-too game making.