What's this? Decrying a new technology based on its potential applications? Am I reading the same Slashdot that I used to?
Everything has the potential for abuse. Does this mean we should stop developing new uses for networks?
This service appears to be 100% opt-in. Therefore, those who choose not to use it (like me and, I assume, you) will never be affected by it.
Because loading screens are a thing of the past (thank goodness), especially on consoles. Instead of a thermometer bar taking over the screen for a level transition, you see (e.g.) an animation of your character taking a few seconds to open a door or even a full-blown cinematic cutscene that plays out of RAM while the loading takes place. Some games don't even take control away from the player- just force him to run through a time-consuming and simple (low RAM consumption) area that's set up so that it takes him long enough to reach the other end that his destination has loaded by the time he gets there. Virtually no recent console game takes more than a handful of seconds to load new areas even if it does show a load screen; those that do tend to be PC ports anyway (Doom 3, DX:IW).
This will be an interesting puzzle for level designers - advertisements are best placed in high-traffic areas to maximize exposure, but the players will then tend to avoid those areas to minimize exposure (read: annoyance and distraction). And the advertisements will be competing with game elements that are also trying to draw the player's attention- powerups, other players, stationary objects like teleporters. Advertisements will also have interesting effects on perception and types of engagement- sniping right now is just a matter of looking for moving targets, but what if they're running around in front of a giant flashing movie trailer?
A good bit of the wrongheadedness of this idea comes from the fact that in professional sports, the ads are not aimed at the players; they're supposed to be seen by the audience who is watching them. Video games have no equivalent to this, except in the "pro gaming" world, which is still too small to be an influential market
The thing is that fun hasn't been (and arguably can't and shouldn't be) formalized and made predictable. Given a game design, it's very difficult to determine how fun it is until you build the game and try playing it- and if it's a modern 3D game that's going to take an awful lot of coding and artwork. Once you've done that, if you end up with a mediocre game, you have two options- either admit that the design is fundamentally flawed and start over (easy for a shareware author or hobbyist, not so easy for a large staff trying to make a living) or kick it out the door anyway and hopefully sell enough copies to be able to afford the next development cycle.
So, in short, I agree with everything you said, but it's not like there's an easy solution to this issue. Even if there was somehow a formula for determining and optimizing fun much earlier in the process, Sturgeon's Law would still hold and the market would be in the same situation as today.
There is a very strong objection to cold-calling cell phones that doesn't apply to landlines: It costs money to receive a call on a cell phone. This is why unsolicited faxes are illegal.
That's a custom feature in the Finder (and possibly other first-party apps); the dragging API doesn't do it automatically. However, that's where Expose comes in:P
To be really effective, you'd also have to have a method of suppressing or discrediting information that is clearly wrong, and the web simply doesn't work that way. How do you guarantee that the ill person encounters your information first and decides to accept it and stop researching when he does? How do you stop him from doing just that at the first quack blog that pops out of Google?
They did use to do this, with a hidden disk partition. Techies complained about not being able to restore to a configuration of their choosing (the partition contained an OEM bundle) and not having access to xx% of the hard disk, and retailers dropped it.
People who lose the cap before entering it into the store.
People who throw away the cap because they don't want the prize (for whatever reason).
People who didn't read the label and didn't know it was a winning cap.
People who read the label and didn't think it was worth installing iTunes to take advantage of it.
People who read the label and don't have enough related knowledge to see what the contest is offering and how to claim it (it's really not that easy if you start from first principles).
People who want the prize but never remember to go to the store and redeem it (this is also a large factor in mail-in rebates).
Doing that would bring back the problem the ESRB was formed to address- attacks on video gaming as a whole. By appearing to make an effort to segregate childrens' and adults' games, the industry was able to make itself more resistant to lawsuits and censorship. Without ratings, something like GTA would never have been published in the first place (or would have been kept in a seedy back room behind a curtain next to the pornography).
And when the "necessary evil" is more than half the email traffic on the net and starting to drown out the things we are supposed to be gaining by putting up with this necessary evil? The moral of the tragedy of the commons is that nobody wins.
One of the secrets of keeping promotions like that profitable is that few of the winning entries ever get redeemed. People lose them or forget about finding them or don't care about them all the time. I'm sure the number of free songs downloaded from the music store is much lower than the number of free music codes distributed by Apple's promotional partners.
Why do people insist on spelling it "Damashii"? "Damacy" is the official transliteration of the name used by the original creators of the game; who can overrule that?
Yeah, because every single movie ever made after sound, color, and CGI were invented has totally sucked. Whatever. Technology and creativity evolve hand-in-hand, and Sturgeon's Law holds now as it has held in the past and will hold in the future.
Forgot to add this- also it is NOT true that most PC users could tell you what brand of CPU they have. Most Slashdot posters, perhaps, but if you asked the aforementioned Joe Sixpacks you'd get everything from "Windows" to "What's a CPU?"
No, it just means IBM only has to cater to a handful of major manufacturers instead of millions of Joe Sixpacks. And those manufacturers have basically the same criteria as single consumers (does it do what it's supposed to with reasonable performance? how much does it cost? can I trust promises made in answer to those questions based on previous experience with the supplier?), only on a much larger scale.
Because they ARE inside these new systems. The Revolution will use an IBM CPU (PowerPC variant). The PS3 will use an IBM CPU (Cell). The Xbox 360 uses an IBM CPU (Microsoft even dropped Intel to switch to IBM). The war will go on for years but IBM has secured quite a beachhead in the opening salvo.
Nintendo is trying to become the Apple of the game industry. Fit into a niche the big boys don't care about or have trouble attacking. Cultivate a "hardcore" fanbase that's guaranteed to buy your product and provide a steady stream of income. Make first-party products so good that it doesn't matter if you have third-party support. This strategy could keep Nintendo going indefinitely if they keep their game standards up and if they don't care about being the undisputed king of the hill any more.
The purpose of this device is to allow the Revolution to go on the Internet without the customer having to fuck with the cables going into their router or the technical details of wifi. You plug the dongle into the computer, you go through a quick wizard and click OK a few times, you turn on the Revolution, and it's online. There's no step 4!
If there's really demand for Java support of new OS X features, someone else can write a bridge for it- how to do this is well understood. There are already third party Cocoa bridges for Python, Ruby, and Perl.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it would be a nightmare for Apple. It would turn OS X into another OS/2, and we just saw how that story ended a few days ago.
What's this? Decrying a new technology based on its potential applications? Am I reading the same Slashdot that I used to? Everything has the potential for abuse. Does this mean we should stop developing new uses for networks?
This service appears to be 100% opt-in. Therefore, those who choose not to use it (like me and, I assume, you) will never be affected by it.
Because loading screens are a thing of the past (thank goodness), especially on consoles. Instead of a thermometer bar taking over the screen for a level transition, you see (e.g.) an animation of your character taking a few seconds to open a door or even a full-blown cinematic cutscene that plays out of RAM while the loading takes place. Some games don't even take control away from the player- just force him to run through a time-consuming and simple (low RAM consumption) area that's set up so that it takes him long enough to reach the other end that his destination has loaded by the time he gets there. Virtually no recent console game takes more than a handful of seconds to load new areas even if it does show a load screen; those that do tend to be PC ports anyway (Doom 3, DX:IW).
This will be an interesting puzzle for level designers - advertisements are best placed in high-traffic areas to maximize exposure, but the players will then tend to avoid those areas to minimize exposure (read: annoyance and distraction). And the advertisements will be competing with game elements that are also trying to draw the player's attention- powerups, other players, stationary objects like teleporters. Advertisements will also have interesting effects on perception and types of engagement- sniping right now is just a matter of looking for moving targets, but what if they're running around in front of a giant flashing movie trailer?
A good bit of the wrongheadedness of this idea comes from the fact that in professional sports, the ads are not aimed at the players; they're supposed to be seen by the audience who is watching them. Video games have no equivalent to this, except in the "pro gaming" world, which is still too small to be an influential market
Apple never dropped 68K support in MacOS (they did in OS X). OS 9.2.2 still has the mixed mode manager, and 68K apps run fine under Classic.
The thing is that fun hasn't been (and arguably can't and shouldn't be) formalized and made predictable. Given a game design, it's very difficult to determine how fun it is until you build the game and try playing it- and if it's a modern 3D game that's going to take an awful lot of coding and artwork. Once you've done that, if you end up with a mediocre game, you have two options- either admit that the design is fundamentally flawed and start over (easy for a shareware author or hobbyist, not so easy for a large staff trying to make a living) or kick it out the door anyway and hopefully sell enough copies to be able to afford the next development cycle.
So, in short, I agree with everything you said, but it's not like there's an easy solution to this issue. Even if there was somehow a formula for determining and optimizing fun much earlier in the process, Sturgeon's Law would still hold and the market would be in the same situation as today.
There is a very strong objection to cold-calling cell phones that doesn't apply to landlines: It costs money to receive a call on a cell phone. This is why unsolicited faxes are illegal.
That's a custom feature in the Finder (and possibly other first-party apps); the dragging API doesn't do it automatically. However, that's where Expose comes in :P
To be really effective, you'd also have to have a method of suppressing or discrediting information that is clearly wrong, and the web simply doesn't work that way. How do you guarantee that the ill person encounters your information first and decides to accept it and stop researching when he does? How do you stop him from doing just that at the first quack blog that pops out of Google?
They did use to do this, with a hidden disk partition. Techies complained about not being able to restore to a configuration of their choosing (the partition contained an OEM bundle) and not having access to xx% of the hard disk, and retailers dropped it.
Doing that would bring back the problem the ESRB was formed to address- attacks on video gaming as a whole. By appearing to make an effort to segregate childrens' and adults' games, the industry was able to make itself more resistant to lawsuits and censorship. Without ratings, something like GTA would never have been published in the first place (or would have been kept in a seedy back room behind a curtain next to the pornography).
And when the "necessary evil" is more than half the email traffic on the net and starting to drown out the things we are supposed to be gaining by putting up with this necessary evil? The moral of the tragedy of the commons is that nobody wins.
One of the secrets of keeping promotions like that profitable is that few of the winning entries ever get redeemed. People lose them or forget about finding them or don't care about them all the time. I'm sure the number of free songs downloaded from the music store is much lower than the number of free music codes distributed by Apple's promotional partners.
Why do people insist on spelling it "Damashii"? "Damacy" is the official transliteration of the name used by the original creators of the game; who can overrule that?
Oh. That makes sense, I guess. And here I was thinking that the Windows logo was to hardcore Linux geeks like garlic to vampires.
What makes you think the same thing can't be done on the 360? Game developers have been gathering and using libraries for years.
Yeah, because every single movie ever made after sound, color, and CGI were invented has totally sucked. Whatever. Technology and creativity evolve hand-in-hand, and Sturgeon's Law holds now as it has held in the past and will hold in the future.
Forgot to add this- also it is NOT true that most PC users could tell you what brand of CPU they have. Most Slashdot posters, perhaps, but if you asked the aforementioned Joe Sixpacks you'd get everything from "Windows" to "What's a CPU?"
No, it just means IBM only has to cater to a handful of major manufacturers instead of millions of Joe Sixpacks. And those manufacturers have basically the same criteria as single consumers (does it do what it's supposed to with reasonable performance? how much does it cost? can I trust promises made in answer to those questions based on previous experience with the supplier?), only on a much larger scale.
Because they ARE inside these new systems. The Revolution will use an IBM CPU (PowerPC variant). The PS3 will use an IBM CPU (Cell). The Xbox 360 uses an IBM CPU (Microsoft even dropped Intel to switch to IBM). The war will go on for years but IBM has secured quite a beachhead in the opening salvo.
The PC world just hasn't caught up with those in the know yet. I haven't even *seen* a floppy for years.
Nintendo is trying to become the Apple of the game industry. Fit into a niche the big boys don't care about or have trouble attacking. Cultivate a "hardcore" fanbase that's guaranteed to buy your product and provide a steady stream of income. Make first-party products so good that it doesn't matter if you have third-party support. This strategy could keep Nintendo going indefinitely if they keep their game standards up and if they don't care about being the undisputed king of the hill any more.
The purpose of this device is to allow the Revolution to go on the Internet without the customer having to fuck with the cables going into their router or the technical details of wifi. You plug the dongle into the computer, you go through a quick wizard and click OK a few times, you turn on the Revolution, and it's online. There's no step 4!
If there's really demand for Java support of new OS X features, someone else can write a bridge for it- how to do this is well understood. There are already third party Cocoa bridges for Python, Ruby, and Perl.