Sell people what they want to buy.
It's funny how it works out. When GT4 came out a few weeks ago I stopped by my local Gamespot, only to be told, that they had "none at all", with a smirk, even though I could see dozens in a box behind the counter.
Well, OK, I said. Went to EB Games, asked if they had any, the salesperson asked if I preordered - "Nope." - funny, he still gave me a game. So he obviously wasn't worried about some irate customer coming in and not getting the game they preordered - this must be some sort of new, crazy marketing scheme - letting people give you money for a product instead of telling them no.
I remember reading somewhere that the whole preorder thing is a total scam run by the stores to get a hold of money to drop into MMA's and the like. Anyone have any facts on that?
It's the new Michael Crichton book, and is an action/thriller as most of his are, except it deals with a band of ecoterrorists and the people trying to thwart them.
What's interesting is how many graphs, charts, and footnotes he has in there that point to the idea that global warming really isn't occuring.
I just got done reading it, and it was a pretty good story. Haven't had time to look at any of the footnotes first hand yet, but seems to present a pretty strong argument.
One of the big points he makes in the appendix is that all these studies are biased in some way or another, and that unless there are true double blind studies done, it will stay that way. Industry of course wants to discredit global warming, and beaurocrats want to see reports like this. It's silly to think either end is going to be totally honest.
Once you have the kind of money BG has, well, way way way before you even have that much, the normal laws of money dictating your activity really stop applying so much. Somewhere around 300M, it really becomes virtually impossible to buy enough additional things and actually enjoy them. There really is only so much value an extra dollar, or million, or billion can do for you, and the dropoff happens pretty early on.
So, no, its not like this is an amazing contribution from him, because he'll never need that 750 million, but also, it's not like his primary goal nowadays is greed - because he already has more money than he could ever ever spend. He is motivated by ego maybe, or sheer agression and love of the business and its trappings.
In terms of the tax argument, sure he gets benefits from doing that, but honestly, do you really think taxes are high on bill's list of things? Sure hey pays more yearly than most of us ever will make, but so what? He's so far beyond needing any of that money that he has been afforded the freedom to do what he wants to do, when he wants, and how, regardless of the monetary consequences.
So when he does things, they need to be judged apart from his wealth - if they are right, they are right, if they are wrong, they are wrong. He can't plead either way that he has to do it for the money. If Bill really really thought, you know, I want to be loved, I'm going to get into OSS and put so much money behind it..... he could, easily. But he obviously doesn't believe that. And I believe its an honest process in his head, even if his logic is flawed and he might be dishonest to prove his points - but is HE threatened by OSS? I dont really think so. Maybe some % of his vast fortune, but not enough to affect his lifestyle, goals, or activities in any way.
As team physician you must successfully manage the intake of performance enhancing drugs, moving blocks of power pills, rotating energy enhancers to line up properly with your stack of super steroids. All the while, under the threat of your opponent getting an amphetamine bonus booster and burying you under mountains of low protein, carb rich snack bars.
Yeah just have to chime in again here, IE's implementation of CSS is so much significantly worse than Safari, Moz & Opera that I consider it a totally separate stage of developing my sites. First I go through and develop for the browsers that agree on 95% of how to render the CSS.... then IE gets at least twice as much time of bug fixing in order to identify how it's going to screw up this time.
The problem with IE that I see being the largest is its ubiquitous nature, and the fat that it was so friendly towards bad html coding. A lot of people got used to testing sites in it, because - hey - most of the time they'd work great. Then when these people started switching over to more standards-based design practices they saw how screwed up everything got. Using IE as the basis for reference it's easy to blame the others. The only problem with that is IE ignores SO many aspects of the CSS standards that it really is apples v. oranges.
Zeldman talks about it in his book some - Designing with Web Standards - one of my favorite sections is about the infamous box model problem - it's great, because to most uninitiated, the original IE broken box model actually makes much more sense... but its not the rules:/
My friends and I, really a bunch of game playing nerds all kind of have the same feeling that not only are the first consoles in a generation out the worst, they take JUST as long as the next ones to develop games that are good. I.E. The first batch of games suck (take PS2, the only really killer game of the first round was GT3), even the 2nd round isn't great. By the time the 3rd round comes out the studios are designing for multiple platforms already.
My best bud has a hacked XBOX with a 120 gig hard drive and all kinds of emulation and extra stuff. While clearly an awesome machine in terms of performance and this kind of modding options, we still play games on the Gamecube with as much frequency - why? Focus on the GAMEPLAY. Nintendo knows how to make good games, not for kids, but for people who like fun. Microsoft is doing a lot of selling on features, not benefits.
I picked up this book about 2 months ago and it really is one of the best buys on my shelf. Zeldman's book and his sites are wounderful resources that not only contain a good deal of info themselves but point you in the right direction to a really great community of like minded, forward thinking developers.
XHTML & CSS are tough sometimes, and Zeldman's realistic approach to transitioning to a standard web language is refreshing - he's not a zealot.
I hope more web designers will jump on board this movement - if we ever want to get paid really well and escape the image of the teen with frontpage coding his uncle's website we need to embrace these kind of ideas.
If the average inmate is as bad as GTA as I am it should be a massive deterrent to crime. I suck so much its unbelievable - although I can snipe and strafe and murder with the best of them in CS or UT, I cannot hit the broadside of a barn with a shotgun in GTA3 - I dont think i've ever completed an entire mission without a cheat code in any of the games.
Give them this game! Rockstar, make a harder version for criminals, one with alternate paths like community college and construction careers.
Stories like this, and the everquest-baby-death and all others are so old at this point it really is hardly worth anyone even getting upset on either side.
Nobody will ever actually successfully scapegoat a videogame company or rock band, all it serves to do is create more press and probably sales. Any real censorship isn't going to come from cases like this, but rather from PATRIOT-style laws.
Conversely, no amount of sensible talk will convince any loser criminal/flunkie that they control their own lives. If all else fails they will blame satan or their parents.
Fact of the matter is it's a mixture of all things, but most importantly: nobody cares. Random violence and stupidity has always been with man, and it will continue to be! At least as long as it makes for good ratings.
I remember reading a while ago about the comparison between the computer-learns-human style of doing things vs. human-learns-computer.
The examples I believe were the current Palm OS with its logical if somewhat odd "grafitti" system. It was compared to the old Newtons which attempted to learn the user's handwriting, as well as the new tablet pc's.
Basically the long and short of it was that the order of % correctness went newton > tablet > palm. Although the tablet pc's do a pretty good job interpreting, they still "make mistakes" when someone's writing gets really sloppy. On the other hand after a minimum of time the average user can use graffiti with a high level of accuracy and can understand the malformations of a sigil that might produce an error while being made.
All in all though it seems most of these attempts to "learn" what a user may do are misplaced. I try to keep my "websites" directory very well organized, as well as my "print work" directory, but both vary in structure from each other, even before my own mistakes and idiosyncratic files. And my applications directory is a completely different story... and lets not even get started on consumer media. Shouldn't this all be handled by XML soon anyway?
We've still got the world's best massively parellel computers in our noggins. Pattern recognition OWNZ.
It seems people have a lot of slightly varying opinions on this, with a lot saying that yest vietnam was somehow different. It seems to me what we're looking at is the dissonance of the idea of what we believe to be a just nation (The US) fighting a just ware (democracy v. communism) losing. Giving up. Bad guys winning.
It's hard to rectify that! There's definitely a 'historical narrative' that our history books and culture in general want to adhere to, a la Hegel & Marx. We believe subconsciously we are all on the right side of history... but really right and wrong have little to do with what happens in war.
In reality Vietnam got botched for a huge variety of reasons - and it had very little to do with whether or not the US motives were noble - just as no war is won based on its motives. They're won by the side with the most committment and dedication to winning.
Anyway, what I would ask is what do Germans think about WW2 games? The portrayals of Germany ranges from totally morally equivalent with the Allies (in most of the tank/strategy type games) to comically evil in Wolfenstein. Is it difficult for a german to play a game as a regular Wehrmacht general and not envison the Deaths-Head clad SS?
Why don't we have FPS civil war games? They are ALL strategy, and morally ambiguous at best (as all top-down strategy games are, its their nature). Why not a FPS with the missions being Sherman's march to the sea? Why not WWII bomber games with Dresden as a mission?
The more I think about it the more it seems the whole topic is silly. They are games, they all avoid the really nasty stuff. Civilians don't get killed en masse, combat is either totally abstract or comical. Even MoH ( a great game, I love it) falls into the Duke Nukem cliche of one super tough soldier killing hundreds, thousands even of enemies.
Our culture in general has some really complex issues dealing with when war/terrorism/death become acceptable forms of entertainment. It's like the southpark episode where AIDS is old enough to become acceptable joke material. I think people should take a step back and recognize that they are playing games about shooting PEOPLE. If they can't stomach that then they shouldn't play any war game - if they can then they need to recognize that the games aren't real, they aren't even a close approximation of real, and it isn't in the budget to get the facts straight.
What about Star Trek's Data?
on
AI in Sci-Fi
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
His primary motivation seemed to be to achieve a human level of emotion. To actually feel. This seems kind of logical to me : it sure would get boring fast without any desire to do anything because it would impart a sense of satisfaction or happiness. AI machines would probably want to have hobbies and interests just like us - of course - the concept of "wanting" is emotional itself. Hmm.
However, much more work, refinement, and especially regulation and simplification is necessary before the game is managableAnd 19 years and dozens of rule books later, the quest continues.....:-)
2nd Edition got out of hand, and 3rd ED is a joke. Can't games come up with something better? You bet! -Contributions welcome!
Pinwheels Role Playing System
Slashdot Mirror
Sell people what they want to buy. It's funny how it works out. When GT4 came out a few weeks ago I stopped by my local Gamespot, only to be told, that they had "none at all", with a smirk, even though I could see dozens in a box behind the counter. Well, OK, I said. Went to EB Games, asked if they had any, the salesperson asked if I preordered - "Nope." - funny, he still gave me a game. So he obviously wasn't worried about some irate customer coming in and not getting the game they preordered - this must be some sort of new, crazy marketing scheme - letting people give you money for a product instead of telling them no. I remember reading somewhere that the whole preorder thing is a total scam run by the stores to get a hold of money to drop into MMA's and the like. Anyone have any facts on that?
It's the new Michael Crichton book, and is an action/thriller as most of his are, except it deals with a band of ecoterrorists and the people trying to thwart them. What's interesting is how many graphs, charts, and footnotes he has in there that point to the idea that global warming really isn't occuring. I just got done reading it, and it was a pretty good story. Haven't had time to look at any of the footnotes first hand yet, but seems to present a pretty strong argument. One of the big points he makes in the appendix is that all these studies are biased in some way or another, and that unless there are true double blind studies done, it will stay that way. Industry of course wants to discredit global warming, and beaurocrats want to see reports like this. It's silly to think either end is going to be totally honest.
Once you have the kind of money BG has, well, way way way before you even have that much, the normal laws of money dictating your activity really stop applying so much. Somewhere around 300M, it really becomes virtually impossible to buy enough additional things and actually enjoy them. There really is only so much value an extra dollar, or million, or billion can do for you, and the dropoff happens pretty early on. So, no, its not like this is an amazing contribution from him, because he'll never need that 750 million, but also, it's not like his primary goal nowadays is greed - because he already has more money than he could ever ever spend. He is motivated by ego maybe, or sheer agression and love of the business and its trappings. In terms of the tax argument, sure he gets benefits from doing that, but honestly, do you really think taxes are high on bill's list of things? Sure hey pays more yearly than most of us ever will make, but so what? He's so far beyond needing any of that money that he has been afforded the freedom to do what he wants to do, when he wants, and how, regardless of the monetary consequences. So when he does things, they need to be judged apart from his wealth - if they are right, they are right, if they are wrong, they are wrong. He can't plead either way that he has to do it for the money. If Bill really really thought, you know, I want to be loved, I'm going to get into OSS and put so much money behind it..... he could, easily. But he obviously doesn't believe that. And I believe its an honest process in his head, even if his logic is flawed and he might be dishonest to prove his points - but is HE threatened by OSS? I dont really think so. Maybe some % of his vast fortune, but not enough to affect his lifestyle, goals, or activities in any way.
I was ready to pitch the whole thing to MLB:
As team physician you must successfully manage the intake of performance enhancing drugs, moving blocks of power pills, rotating energy enhancers to line up properly with your stack of super steroids. All the while, under the threat of your opponent getting an amphetamine bonus booster and burying you under mountains of low protein, carb rich snack bars.
Yeah just have to chime in again here, IE's implementation of CSS is so much significantly worse than Safari, Moz & Opera that I consider it a totally separate stage of developing my sites. First I go through and develop for the browsers that agree on 95% of how to render the CSS.... then IE gets at least twice as much time of bug fixing in order to identify how it's going to screw up this time. The problem with IE that I see being the largest is its ubiquitous nature, and the fat that it was so friendly towards bad html coding. A lot of people got used to testing sites in it, because - hey - most of the time they'd work great. Then when these people started switching over to more standards-based design practices they saw how screwed up everything got. Using IE as the basis for reference it's easy to blame the others. The only problem with that is IE ignores SO many aspects of the CSS standards that it really is apples v. oranges. Zeldman talks about it in his book some - Designing with Web Standards - one of my favorite sections is about the infamous box model problem - it's great, because to most uninitiated, the original IE broken box model actually makes much more sense... but its not the rules :/
My friends and I, really a bunch of game playing nerds all kind of have the same feeling that not only are the first consoles in a generation out the worst, they take JUST as long as the next ones to develop games that are good. I.E. The first batch of games suck (take PS2, the only really killer game of the first round was GT3), even the 2nd round isn't great. By the time the 3rd round comes out the studios are designing for multiple platforms already. My best bud has a hacked XBOX with a 120 gig hard drive and all kinds of emulation and extra stuff. While clearly an awesome machine in terms of performance and this kind of modding options, we still play games on the Gamecube with as much frequency - why? Focus on the GAMEPLAY. Nintendo knows how to make good games, not for kids, but for people who like fun. Microsoft is doing a lot of selling on features, not benefits.
I picked up this book about 2 months ago and it really is one of the best buys on my shelf. Zeldman's book and his sites are wounderful resources that not only contain a good deal of info themselves but point you in the right direction to a really great community of like minded, forward thinking developers.
XHTML & CSS are tough sometimes, and Zeldman's realistic approach to transitioning to a standard web language is refreshing - he's not a zealot.
I hope more web designers will jump on board this movement - if we ever want to get paid really well and escape the image of the teen with frontpage coding his uncle's website we need to embrace these kind of ideas.
If the average inmate is as bad as GTA as I am it should be a massive deterrent to crime. I suck so much its unbelievable - although I can snipe and strafe and murder with the best of them in CS or UT, I cannot hit the broadside of a barn with a shotgun in GTA3 - I dont think i've ever completed an entire mission without a cheat code in any of the games.
Give them this game! Rockstar, make a harder version for criminals, one with alternate paths like community college and construction careers.
Stories like this, and the everquest-baby-death and all others are so old at this point it really is hardly worth anyone even getting upset on either side.
Nobody will ever actually successfully scapegoat a videogame company or rock band, all it serves to do is create more press and probably sales. Any real censorship isn't going to come from cases like this, but rather from PATRIOT-style laws.
Conversely, no amount of sensible talk will convince any loser criminal/flunkie that they control their own lives. If all else fails they will blame satan or their parents.
Fact of the matter is it's a mixture of all things, but most importantly: nobody cares. Random violence and stupidity has always been with man, and it will continue to be! At least as long as it makes for good ratings.
Yeah, its a good thing they didnt take a bunch of hookers out to the park and beat them with baseball bats!
I remember reading a while ago about the comparison between the computer-learns-human style of doing things vs. human-learns-computer.
The examples I believe were the current Palm OS with its logical if somewhat odd "grafitti" system. It was compared to the old Newtons which attempted to learn the user's handwriting, as well as the new tablet pc's.
Basically the long and short of it was that the order of % correctness went newton > tablet > palm. Although the tablet pc's do a pretty good job interpreting, they still "make mistakes" when someone's writing gets really sloppy. On the other hand after a minimum of time the average user can use graffiti with a high level of accuracy and can understand the malformations of a sigil that might produce an error while being made.
All in all though it seems most of these attempts to "learn" what a user may do are misplaced. I try to keep my "websites" directory very well organized, as well as my "print work" directory, but both vary in structure from each other, even before my own mistakes and idiosyncratic files. And my applications directory is a completely different story... and lets not even get started on consumer media. Shouldn't this all be handled by XML soon anyway?
We've still got the world's best massively parellel computers in our noggins. Pattern recognition OWNZ.
I think it works like this:
Husband/Boyfriend: "The Playstation 2 is only $150 at best buy."
Wife/Girlfriend: "You already have a Playstation!"
Husband/Boyfriend: "But this one play's DEE VEE DEEs! We can watch all the seasons of Sex & The City"
Wife/Girlfriend: "Ok."
Husband/Boyfriend: "Mwaha. GTA:Vice City here I come"
It seems people have a lot of slightly varying opinions on this, with a lot saying that yest vietnam was somehow different. It seems to me what we're looking at is the dissonance of the idea of what we believe to be a just nation (The US) fighting a just ware (democracy v. communism) losing. Giving up. Bad guys winning. It's hard to rectify that! There's definitely a 'historical narrative' that our history books and culture in general want to adhere to, a la Hegel & Marx. We believe subconsciously we are all on the right side of history... but really right and wrong have little to do with what happens in war. In reality Vietnam got botched for a huge variety of reasons - and it had very little to do with whether or not the US motives were noble - just as no war is won based on its motives. They're won by the side with the most committment and dedication to winning. Anyway, what I would ask is what do Germans think about WW2 games? The portrayals of Germany ranges from totally morally equivalent with the Allies (in most of the tank/strategy type games) to comically evil in Wolfenstein. Is it difficult for a german to play a game as a regular Wehrmacht general and not envison the Deaths-Head clad SS? Why don't we have FPS civil war games? They are ALL strategy, and morally ambiguous at best (as all top-down strategy games are, its their nature). Why not a FPS with the missions being Sherman's march to the sea? Why not WWII bomber games with Dresden as a mission? The more I think about it the more it seems the whole topic is silly. They are games, they all avoid the really nasty stuff. Civilians don't get killed en masse, combat is either totally abstract or comical. Even MoH ( a great game, I love it) falls into the Duke Nukem cliche of one super tough soldier killing hundreds, thousands even of enemies. Our culture in general has some really complex issues dealing with when war/terrorism/death become acceptable forms of entertainment. It's like the southpark episode where AIDS is old enough to become acceptable joke material. I think people should take a step back and recognize that they are playing games about shooting PEOPLE. If they can't stomach that then they shouldn't play any war game - if they can then they need to recognize that the games aren't real, they aren't even a close approximation of real, and it isn't in the budget to get the facts straight.
His primary motivation seemed to be to achieve a human level of emotion. To actually feel. This seems kind of logical to me : it sure would get boring fast without any desire to do anything because it would impart a sense of satisfaction or happiness. AI machines would probably want to have hobbies and interests just like us - of course - the concept of "wanting" is emotional itself. Hmm.
However, much more work, refinement, and especially regulation and simplification is necessary before the game is managable And 19 years and dozens of rule books later, the quest continues..... :-)
2nd Edition got out of hand, and 3rd ED is a joke. Can't games come up with something better? You bet! -Contributions welcome!
Pinwheels Role Playing System