Intelligent design was the term coined by creationists when teaching creationism (meaning a rejection of evolution) in schools was determined to be unconstitutional. Your understanding that they are two different concepts is testament to their success.
Having Played Mass Effect, and worked in game Dev, I would agree that you are absolutely the source of the problem, in that you can't even figure out what the problem was to begin with! You just take something the dev director said out of context, misinterpret it, then argue it.
Storing item data? Yeah, that's just a few bits of data in a database, or whatever, but making a functional UI to handle 100's of items across multiple characters in dozens of configurations? Adding, subtracting, comparing items quickly and powerfully between characters, characters and inventory, inventory and stores, stores and characters, etc. etc. That's the actual 'work' of making a game playable. Your obtuseness knows no ends.
There are accounting reasons that Apple has to charge for the iPod Touch updates to be in compliance with stuff like Sarbanes Oxley (sp?). Now, it should have been a $5 pack like the Wi-Fi update. People would have still complained, but bought it and moved on. At $20, you just feel gouged. Plus, who's going to want to buy an iPod Touch when this could just happen again in 6 months?
Yeah, the real answer is that Apple will have released a newer iPod touch, and you'll get left behind anyways. That's the one thing Zune is doing right, which is supporting v.1 customers with everything that the v.2 customers get feature wise.
The guy was paying for a service, which was to diagnose the problem and return the computer to a functioning state. The cost of service was includes of parts used, which are swapped for bad parts. There was no point in which he purchased a hard drive.
In fact, since I happen to know Apple's repair pricing, I can even tell you that they comped him the installation cost (since the install is trivial, but try getting that service from any other service provider).
So basically, the SERVICE was performed as specified, but the guy felt entitled to something that did not fall within the description of what he paid for. Then he whinged about it on his blog.
My anecdotal tally is that they have over 100% failure rate over the course of a year. This is from a poll of about 35 people who have collectively gone through more than 50 x360s, with some individuals going through 3-4.
The X360 has awesome games, but it also has the life expectancy of a Ferrari Enzo in the hands of a coke snorting CEO.
I entered first grade not knowing how to read, but I picked it up plenty fast.
In highschool, I had extremely high standardized test scores, placed out of college english requirements with 5's on the AP english exam, excellent scores on SAT and SAT II for english and german, had a pile of german awards (highest score on the standardized german exam for the state), and a smattering of journalism awards.
In college, I studied german, french, and japanese simultaneously while doing a double major in physics and math, chem minor.
I think what really made the difference for me was growing up in a bilingual environment (english and korean), and studying music before I could read. Growing up, I also watched lots of TV and played video games constantly, which I think had a large influence on the problem solving skills that I have today.
I'm not sure modern games would be as good for this. I played hundreds of games as a kid, each requiring adapting to a new set of rules, objectives, and strategies to complete. Modern software is much larger, and more repetitive, so it may not have the same effect.
you are very wrong. If it requires soldering to fix, itnwas a connectivity/hardware problem, and it was bricked. After some REPAIR work, the xbox was made functional again, but it was physically broken prior to that.
Bricked means no amount of non-firmware/hardware modification will get the unit working again. Firmware counts because most consumers would not have the specialized hardware necessary to reflash their bricked device.
Bricking has nothing to do with software and data. You have to back that shit up or accept losing it. Data loss is catastrophic, but it can happen as a result of many different software problems that have no bearing on hardware problems.
I don't get this article at all. With its resolution independence, the iPhone makes a pretty good reader - for a mobile device. Its probably best in class compared to windows mobile devices and palms. But comparing it to a full blown ebook reader? That's crossing product categories in a weird and uncomfortable way.
I think of my iPhone as a Swiss army knife. It would make a passable ereader, but not an incredible one.
if you have a digital tuner, its all technically hd, although some of it is just 480p streams. They seem t be indicating that you don't even have the option of shrinking it down, which makes no sense to me since I can do whatever I want with the digital tuner in my mac. I can take 1080i and shrink it to postage stamp iPod sizes, if I'm so inclined. I mainly encode to 480x320 for my iPhone.
I purchased two of these for my girlfriend, X-Men, and Fantastic Four. The only problem (which I'm sure you're aware of), is that some series like X-Men did a lot of story line branching into mini series and spin-offs, which are not contained within these anthologies.
Plus, once you have 500 comics in PDF format, they just scream to be put onto a mobile device, or eBook reader, but I haven't figured this part out yet. Maybe I can load a few issues at a time onto a flash card and read them from my OLPC =D
Right. Only 80 hours. Apparently your management isn't familiar with the principle of diminishing returns. Startups aren't even run that way any more, at least not in silicon valley where I work. Smart startups and VCs these days are much more interested in sustainable, stable companies than the boom/bust nonsense of the.bomb era.
Working crunch at EA may "only" take 80 hours of your week, but trust me, there's nothing left after that because the work is challenging. If you're pushing much over 80, your job is time-consuming but easy, or you're just planning on a quickly approaching burnout sometime soon.
Spore, Dead Space, Army of Two, Crysis, Boogie etc. etc. EA is as innovative as any of the next top 5 major publishers (which is not very). It's not like you're singling out EA in any way with your comment. You're just describing the current state of the gaming industry.
Look at Activision, 2K, Ubisoft, THQ and how many sequels and franchise spin offs they publish. THQ spits out endless terrible movie franchise titles, which are uniformly bad.
EA cranks out a million sports titles, but that's just their exclusive licenses. Every company has their franchises, and any company that could get their hands on EA's sports franchises would do exactly what EA is doing with them.
India has reversed their stance, and has purchased a small batch of OLPC laptops to evaluate. They've scrapped their "$10 laptop" project as unfeasible. Apparently, developing a low-cost, robust, durable hardware platform was more challenging than they originally anticipated.
I'm already in for one. The OLPC is really the first project of its kind to reach some level of success, and it looks like it could take off if it can achieve critical mass.
My opinion is that even if OLPC eventually fails, they will have laid a lot of the groundwork for successor projects to come. Right now, they are the people that I can donate funds to to bring this sort of project to fruition.
well this doesn't work in the case of some games, like settlers of catan, where the resource distribution can be so skewed that it matters more to the outcome than the sum of all my decision making, at which point you,re no longer playing a game, just watchng events unfold.
After a few games that progressed this way, I just decided to stop playing because it was basically candyland (also not a game).
small cases ftw! My two main desktops are a mac mini (a little buddy for my tv), and a 20" iMac, who's effective case size is very small as well. obviously if you need 4 expansion cards, or multiple internal drives, the big case is great, but im loving my small compys.
What I can't get is that they complain about only making $15 million off of the iTMS store, while the per-episode price of their content remains ~30% higher than buying the series on DVD. When they sell a DVD, there are a lot more people taking cuts, such as the DVD content creators, mastering studio, replication, shipping, and retail.
Yet, you don't hear them complaining about DVD box sets!
No, there have been some tentative release dates, but it's only been "about six months away" in two distinct points in history, this being one of them.
as a gaming genre, the fighter seems to have benefitted very little from advances in 3d. Most mechanics are still based on a series of 1D vectors, rather than exhibiting any true 3 dimensionality. Im curious to see how the capcom team updates their perenial favorite in an industry that uses 3d graphics as some sort of crutch. the sf franchise still sees a lot of play at high level gaming tournaments.
Their PR campaign before the games release was that GH2 for the 360 would have "more online content than anyone has ever seen in a game..." Well Harmonix is talking about having new DLC for Rock Band every week, along with full albums available as well. They probably picked up their GHII DLC plans and transplanted them into RB. It was pretty impressive how quickly Harmonix switched gears once the GH franchise was transferred to Neversoft. Their swan song release of "Rock the '80s" was also particularly tepid. Coincidence?
I find it fascinating that someone who's Slashdot ID is around a million is telling someone with just under 23k "how we like it here." Just some food for thought.
I could really go either way with the "geek card" meme, but I wouldnt go out of my way to try and tell someone that they are or aren't a geek for any particular reason.
Bahamut Zero nuthin', can you say "Knights of the Round"? It was 13 mini summons all back to back. The first time, you feel light-headed from phenomenal ass whuppin you just unleashed. Later on, when you fight bosses that require 12-15 castings of "KotR" to defeat, and all party members equipped with Mime, it unleashes this unending summoning sequence that just goes on and on...
Of course, my party all had Final Attack -> Phoenix, the master materia with their respective W's... the game aspect was already over.
Even if the Wii gets downloadable content, the experience will still be inferior without a better mass storage solution. Either you cough up for several gigs of flash media (hassle), or they have an external USB mass storage drive (expensive), or they do a hardware revision (splinters users into 'haves' and 'have-nots').
I don't think downloadable RockBand/GHIII content on the Wii will ever be comparable to the experience you'd have on the PS3, or X360.
And this is coming from a guy who's ONLY new-gen console is a Wii.
When backward compatibility was much better on the PS3 (for older playstation games), than on the X360 (for xbox games), and before teh PS3 had yet launched (and noone could evaluate the back compat performance) Sony went on and on about the importance of back compatibility, how it was a major focus, and how it was integral to building a brand that transcends any single piece of hardware. They went on and on about how the PS3 would have 100% back compatibility at launch so that your older PS titles would not lose value.
After several hundred PS2 and PS1 titles had incompatibilities with the PS3, and after the recent PS2 upgrades caused PS2 games not to work on the new PS2s, Sony spokesperson Reiko Sakamoto said: "It's hard to say the PlayStation 3 will be 100 percent backwards compatible, but as we said earlier this year, we aim to make it so as much as possible," Sakamoto said, according to IDG.
So basically Sony is a company that will straight out lie to you to get you to buy their products. They will say "You will get X", then later on say "X is not important. We will not be delivering X".
From a consumer's standpoint, it is not enough to say that this helps Sony recoup their losses. People have to be accountable for the things that they say they will do, professionally, ethically, whatever.
M$ always said "we will have some back compat for the best sellers/important titles", and they do what they can/want to do. They have like 200/700 titles, but they never promised 100%, or touted it as a core benefit of their platform.
Nintendo never claimed they would deliver any N64 back compat in the GC, although they're demonstrating that they can bring some N64 titles to the Wii. They claimed they'd have games from a bunch of platforms, but they never promised all of them.
Sony claimed 100%. They said it was important and a major focus. When they couldn't give 100% (they still delivered an amazing 97%), they said they would work on it to make it right. Then they turn around and dump the whole thing and expect consumers to keep scooping this shit up and scarfing it down.
Slashdot Mirror
Intelligent design was the term coined by creationists when teaching creationism (meaning a rejection of evolution) in schools was determined to be unconstitutional. Your understanding that they are two different concepts is testament to their success.
That's because Religion is protected. The Truth? not so much...
Having Played Mass Effect, and worked in game Dev, I would agree that you are absolutely the source of the problem, in that you can't even figure out what the problem was to begin with! You just take something the dev director said out of context, misinterpret it, then argue it.
Storing item data? Yeah, that's just a few bits of data in a database, or whatever, but making a functional UI to handle 100's of items across multiple characters in dozens of configurations? Adding, subtracting, comparing items quickly and powerfully between characters, characters and inventory, inventory and stores, stores and characters, etc. etc. That's the actual 'work' of making a game playable. Your obtuseness knows no ends.
There are accounting reasons that Apple has to charge for the iPod Touch updates to be in compliance with stuff like Sarbanes Oxley (sp?). Now, it should have been a $5 pack like the Wi-Fi update. People would have still complained, but bought it and moved on. At $20, you just feel gouged. Plus, who's going to want to buy an iPod Touch when this could just happen again in 6 months?
Yeah, the real answer is that Apple will have released a newer iPod touch, and you'll get left behind anyways. That's the one thing Zune is doing right, which is supporting v.1 customers with everything that the v.2 customers get feature wise.
The guy was paying for a service, which was to diagnose the problem and return the computer to a functioning state. The cost of service was includes of parts used, which are swapped for bad parts. There was no point in which he purchased a hard drive.
In fact, since I happen to know Apple's repair pricing, I can even tell you that they comped him the installation cost (since the install is trivial, but try getting that service from any other service provider).
So basically, the SERVICE was performed as specified, but the guy felt entitled to something that did not fall within the description of what he paid for. Then he whinged about it on his blog.
My anecdotal tally is that they have over 100% failure rate over the course of a year. This is from a poll of about 35 people who have collectively gone through more than 50 x360s, with some individuals going through 3-4.
The X360 has awesome games, but it also has the life expectancy of a Ferrari Enzo in the hands of a coke snorting CEO.
I entered first grade not knowing how to read, but I picked it up plenty fast.
In highschool, I had extremely high standardized test scores, placed out of college english requirements with 5's on the AP english exam, excellent scores on SAT and SAT II for english and german, had a pile of german awards (highest score on the standardized german exam for the state), and a smattering of journalism awards.
In college, I studied german, french, and japanese simultaneously while doing a double major in physics and math, chem minor.
I think what really made the difference for me was growing up in a bilingual environment (english and korean), and studying music before I could read. Growing up, I also watched lots of TV and played video games constantly, which I think had a large influence on the problem solving skills that I have today.
I'm not sure modern games would be as good for this. I played hundreds of games as a kid, each requiring adapting to a new set of rules, objectives, and strategies to complete. Modern software is much larger, and more repetitive, so it may not have the same effect.
you are very wrong. If it requires soldering to fix, itnwas a connectivity/hardware problem, and it was bricked. After some REPAIR work, the xbox was made functional again, but it was physically broken prior to that.
Bricked means no amount of non-firmware/hardware modification will get the unit working again. Firmware counts because most consumers would not have the specialized hardware necessary to reflash their bricked device.
Bricking has nothing to do with software and data. You have to back that shit up or accept losing it. Data loss is catastrophic, but it can happen as a result of many different software problems that have no bearing on hardware problems.
I don't get this article at all. With its resolution independence, the iPhone makes a pretty good reader - for a mobile device. Its probably best in class compared to windows mobile devices and palms. But comparing it to a full blown ebook reader? That's crossing product categories in a weird and uncomfortable way.
I think of my iPhone as a Swiss army knife. It would make a passable ereader, but not an incredible one.
if you have a digital tuner, its all technically hd, although some of it is just 480p streams. They seem t be indicating that you don't even have the option of shrinking it down, which makes no sense to me since I can do whatever I want with the digital tuner in my mac. I can take 1080i and shrink it to postage stamp iPod sizes, if I'm so inclined. I mainly encode to 480x320 for my iPhone.
I purchased two of these for my girlfriend, X-Men, and Fantastic Four. The only problem (which I'm sure you're aware of), is that some series like X-Men did a lot of story line branching into mini series and spin-offs, which are not contained within these anthologies.
Plus, once you have 500 comics in PDF format, they just scream to be put onto a mobile device, or eBook reader, but I haven't figured this part out yet. Maybe I can load a few issues at a time onto a flash card and read them from my OLPC =D
Right. Only 80 hours. Apparently your management isn't familiar with the principle of diminishing returns. Startups aren't even run that way any more, at least not in silicon valley where I work. Smart startups and VCs these days are much more interested in sustainable, stable companies than the boom/bust nonsense of the .bomb era.
Working crunch at EA may "only" take 80 hours of your week, but trust me, there's nothing left after that because the work is challenging. If you're pushing much over 80, your job is time-consuming but easy, or you're just planning on a quickly approaching burnout sometime soon.
Spore, Dead Space, Army of Two, Crysis, Boogie etc. etc. EA is as innovative as any of the next top 5 major publishers (which is not very). It's not like you're singling out EA in any way with your comment. You're just describing the current state of the gaming industry.
Look at Activision, 2K, Ubisoft, THQ and how many sequels and franchise spin offs they publish. THQ spits out endless terrible movie franchise titles, which are uniformly bad.
EA cranks out a million sports titles, but that's just their exclusive licenses. Every company has their franchises, and any company that could get their hands on EA's sports franchises would do exactly what EA is doing with them.
India has reversed their stance, and has purchased a small batch of OLPC laptops to evaluate. They've scrapped their "$10 laptop" project as unfeasible. Apparently, developing a low-cost, robust, durable hardware platform was more challenging than they originally anticipated.
I'm already in for one. The OLPC is really the first project of its kind to reach some level of success, and it looks like it could take off if it can achieve critical mass.
My opinion is that even if OLPC eventually fails, they will have laid a lot of the groundwork for successor projects to come. Right now, they are the people that I can donate funds to to bring this sort of project to fruition.
well this doesn't work in the case of some games, like settlers of catan, where the resource distribution can be so skewed that it matters more to the outcome than the sum of all my decision making, at which point you,re no longer playing a game, just watchng events unfold.
After a few games that progressed this way, I just decided to stop playing because it was basically candyland (also not a game).
small cases ftw! My two main desktops are a mac mini (a little buddy for my tv), and a 20" iMac, who's effective case size is very small as well. obviously if you need 4 expansion cards, or multiple internal drives, the big case is great, but im loving my small compys.
What I can't get is that they complain about only making $15 million off of the iTMS store, while the per-episode price of their content remains ~30% higher than buying the series on DVD. When they sell a DVD, there are a lot more people taking cuts, such as the DVD content creators, mastering studio, replication, shipping, and retail.
Yet, you don't hear them complaining about DVD box sets!
No, there have been some tentative release dates, but it's only been "about six months away" in two distinct points in history, this being one of them.
as a gaming genre, the fighter seems to have benefitted very little from advances in 3d. Most mechanics are still based on a series of 1D vectors, rather than exhibiting any true 3 dimensionality. Im curious to see how the capcom team updates their perenial favorite in an industry that uses 3d graphics as some sort of crutch. the sf franchise still sees a lot of play at high level gaming tournaments.
I find it fascinating that someone who's Slashdot ID is around a million is telling someone with just under 23k "how we like it here." Just some food for thought.
I could really go either way with the "geek card" meme, but I wouldnt go out of my way to try and tell someone that they are or aren't a geek for any particular reason.
Bahamut Zero nuthin', can you say "Knights of the Round"? It was 13 mini summons all back to back. The first time, you feel light-headed from phenomenal ass whuppin you just unleashed. Later on, when you fight bosses that require 12-15 castings of "KotR" to defeat, and all party members equipped with Mime, it unleashes this unending summoning sequence that just goes on and on...
Of course, my party all had Final Attack -> Phoenix, the master materia with their respective W's... the game aspect was already over.
Even if the Wii gets downloadable content, the experience will still be inferior without a better mass storage solution. Either you cough up for several gigs of flash media (hassle), or they have an external USB mass storage drive (expensive), or they do a hardware revision (splinters users into 'haves' and 'have-nots').
I don't think downloadable RockBand/GHIII content on the Wii will ever be comparable to the experience you'd have on the PS3, or X360.
And this is coming from a guy who's ONLY new-gen console is a Wii.
When backward compatibility was much better on the PS3 (for older playstation games), than on the X360 (for xbox games), and before teh PS3 had yet launched (and noone could evaluate the back compat performance) Sony went on and on about the importance of back compatibility, how it was a major focus, and how it was integral to building a brand that transcends any single piece of hardware. They went on and on about how the PS3 would have 100% back compatibility at launch so that your older PS titles would not lose value.
After several hundred PS2 and PS1 titles had incompatibilities with the PS3, and after the recent PS2 upgrades caused PS2 games not to work on the new PS2s, Sony spokesperson Reiko Sakamoto said: "It's hard to say the PlayStation 3 will be 100 percent backwards compatible, but as we said earlier this year, we aim to make it so as much as possible," Sakamoto said, according to IDG.
So basically Sony is a company that will straight out lie to you to get you to buy their products. They will say "You will get X", then later on say "X is not important. We will not be delivering X".
From a consumer's standpoint, it is not enough to say that this helps Sony recoup their losses. People have to be accountable for the things that they say they will do, professionally, ethically, whatever.
M$ always said "we will have some back compat for the best sellers/important titles", and they do what they can/want to do. They have like 200/700 titles, but they never promised 100%, or touted it as a core benefit of their platform.
Nintendo never claimed they would deliver any N64 back compat in the GC, although they're demonstrating that they can bring some N64 titles to the Wii. They claimed they'd have games from a bunch of platforms, but they never promised all of them.
Sony claimed 100%. They said it was important and a major focus. When they couldn't give 100% (they still delivered an amazing 97%), they said they would work on it to make it right. Then they turn around and dump the whole thing and expect consumers to keep scooping this shit up and scarfing it down.
Not only is there less risk, but 1) Most retail outlets don't press charges, and 2) the RIAA has already made its cut, so they're already sated.