This is just more proof that God put those fossils in our 6000 years Young Earth to confuse us. There's no way to preserve anything for millions of years. I mean, it's obvious. This is why Intelligent Design needs to be taught in schools. The truth is staring science in the face, and they refuse to see it!
I dunno about you guys, but Karateka has a warm place in my heart even after all these years. I'd love to play it again.
And as long as I'm dreaming, Lord British will rise from his grave or his hole or his whatever and make a solo RPG with a great story and a lot of ethical decision-making, just like he used to.
Oooooooooh, and I always loved Moon Patrol. I played that until I broke the cartridge.
How are they going to know I want to see hardcore erotica featuring members of all four Star Trek shows in zero-G sex? If they can make this work, I'll order a dozen!
Personally, I would keep the floodgates open. What better metric do you have than if you own employees use your product? If they shut it they'll have a harder time estimating how successful they are at capturing the search market.
Eh, I'd take the exact opposite stance. Programmers are, let's face it, completely nerdy compared to the general population. My dad, for example, writes e-mails in all capital letters. He doesn't know not to, and I figure he's old enough to have the right to e-mail people however the hell he wants. A programmer would never write an e-mail like that. They're not who Microsoft is targetting. They're trying to get all the people juuuuuuuuuust smart enough to listen to their kids/friends/parents/uncles/that neighbor boy with the warez ad in the local newspaper when they say, "switch to Firefox and I wouldn't have to fix this every other week" and "ask.com sucks, use google."
Because that's a gigantic chunk of the market, and that's probably where your boss lives. And your boss has a lot more control over the software purchasing than the programmers.
In any case, since I don't think the metric's particularly good, that's one reason to shut it down. The other is just the ol' "eating our own dog food" thing. This is an ugly piece of PR from MS's perspective. They look like their own employees are saying they have inferior software. Mostly because they do (I think. I'm sure some astroturfer will be willing to explain to me why that's wrong, whether I ask for it or not). But it doesn't matter if the employees use google because google threatened to kill their significant other and/or kids and/or dog or because the microsoft search engine requires you to infect yourself with AIDS before you can use it--the PR potential of the facts is still bad.
Plus, I'd imagine being forced to use the crappy MS search engine would spur those engineers on to new heights of programming just to try to make the damn thing the Google Killer they want it to be. And lest ye all think I'm some kind of mindless anti-Microsoft drone cleverly disguised as an Internet pervert, I assure you, I would use Microsoft's search engine if it were better than google's. That's a big if, I think, but I'll give them a shot at it. I think they're going to fail, but I'll give them their shot. Hell, I used to think I'd never be willing to spend the time it takes to download mp3's. I have been wrong before.
Um, look, I think we all know there's a stereotype out there. Anime nerds that learn Japanese because JAPAN IS SUPERIOR and then go to Japan because OMG Samurai and Ninjas are around every corner and they're going to stalk Megumi Hayashibara or whoever it is that they remember from their favorite anime. And of course they're all obsessed with Asian women, too. "They're just so much more feminine."
(I don't see how anyone can say, "One race's women are superior to another's." There's just so many beautiful women out there of every race. But that's just me. I just don't want anyone to think that I'm part of that Asian chicks-only clique.)
But just because people like that are not emotionally equipped to handle a proper analysis of another culture, it does not necessarily follow that this guy is totally off his rocker. I think it's the height of racist stupidity to go around calling people gaijin (Japanese for "foreigner," with an emphasis on an "outsider" status, to those not in the know) and claiming that they can't even come up with a basic understanding of Japanese culture. Are Japanese people somehow so complex and special that nobody outside their culture could possibly understand them? Flipping that one around, is American culture beyond Japanese understanding? How about Russian culture? Or French culture? Why or why not? Is it because American culture is so simplistic and pathetic that the Japanese mind can easily understand it?
Or is it just your "inscrutable Asians" racist stereotype rearing its ugly head?
The Japanese are not some incredibly special case. They are humans, just like everyone else.* They are not immune to being understood by people not raised inside their own cultural norms. If you have a disagreement with the conclusions of the parent, argue your point with facts and logic.
*except for the ones that are really Saurians and part of the conspiracy to pilot the Spaceship Earth into the sun to make way for a new hyperspace bypass.
To this day, Ultima V is one of those games that I remember fondly, and would play again (if I could get the damn thing to run on modern hardware, that is)*. I have the cloth map filed away in my filing cabinet, and in theory, I still have the coin somewhere, I think (Ultima V came with a free coin; ostensibly because the player, the Avatar, was called to Brittania with it). Richard Garriot really had something with the Ultima series. It had some real class. You don't get cloth maps and crazy "magic" coins these days (Or cheesy, but thoughtful, pieces of obsidian--the transportation device of Ultima VI). Sigh. Now all the boxes are tiny and they just contain a game CD case, a manual, and a lot of promotional material.
Is Garriot gonna do a non-MMO game again someday? Does anyone know if that's in the works? Not to knock the whole 'Net thang, but MMO games just don't suit my fancy.
*Dear nerds: I'm too lazy to do this, not too stupid. And yes, I have a legal copy of the game.
Minus the amazing ending, sadly enough. Apparently, it's giving them problems hacking the good PC version ending onto the 3DO version's codebase. Here's hoping they fix it up and include it soon.
Models as good as, say, the chick in Final Fantasy or the chick in the first animatrix short (Last Flight of the Osiris) are NOT cheap or easy to build, at least not yet. Look at how much they spent just to make Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within--$100 million+. I'd argue that you need a model at least as good as Aki's (the FF chick), if not better, to get the man on the street to want your porn. Most people, despite what you may have seen on the internet (Caution: that's porn), do not want to watch animated sex of any sort. Porn is usually produced on a shoestring budget (or shall I punningly say g-string?). If you spend $25,000 on your porn film, you're spending a lot, believe it or not.
With a CG movie, you'd still need to pay the animators, the modelers, and the voice talent, as well as some time on a render farm to actually make the film. I can't help but think that adds up to rather a lot more than $25,000 right now, and probably will for quite a while.
On the other hand, CG porn probably is coming eventually, and here's why I think it'll happen: reusing old animations and hacking up models to make them look a bit different (rather than building new ones) will result in a big savings over doing things the hard way. If that means some clever camera angles will hide that fact Porn Movie Alpha and Porn Movie Bravo are using the same sex scene, only with marginally different models, well, as long as it was a good sex scene, who cares? Certainly not the pornographer. That's how the cost of making a CG movie will be brought down low enough to make it feasible.
Great, I just wrote about porn on Slashdot. That means an extra 7 years of no sex.
Slashdot Mirror
This is just more proof that God put those fossils in our 6000 years Young Earth to confuse us. There's no way to preserve anything for millions of years. I mean, it's obvious. This is why Intelligent Design needs to be taught in schools. The truth is staring science in the face, and they refuse to see it!
/., I'm kidding.
Relax,
I dunno about you guys, but Karateka has a warm place in my heart even after all these years. I'd love to play it again.
And as long as I'm dreaming, Lord British will rise from his grave or his hole or his whatever and make a solo RPG with a great story and a lot of ethical decision-making, just like he used to.
Oooooooooh, and I always loved Moon Patrol. I played that until I broke the cartridge.
How are they going to know I want to see hardcore erotica featuring members of all four Star Trek shows in zero-G sex? If they can make this work, I'll order a dozen!
Because that's a gigantic chunk of the market, and that's probably where your boss lives. And your boss has a lot more control over the software purchasing than the programmers.
In any case, since I don't think the metric's particularly good, that's one reason to shut it down. The other is just the ol' "eating our own dog food" thing. This is an ugly piece of PR from MS's perspective. They look like their own employees are saying they have inferior software. Mostly because they do (I think. I'm sure some astroturfer will be willing to explain to me why that's wrong, whether I ask for it or not). But it doesn't matter if the employees use google because google threatened to kill their significant other and/or kids and/or dog or because the microsoft search engine requires you to infect yourself with AIDS before you can use it--the PR potential of the facts is still bad.
Plus, I'd imagine being forced to use the crappy MS search engine would spur those engineers on to new heights of programming just to try to make the damn thing the Google Killer they want it to be. And lest ye all think I'm some kind of mindless anti-Microsoft drone cleverly disguised as an Internet pervert, I assure you, I would use Microsoft's search engine if it were better than google's. That's a big if, I think, but I'll give them a shot at it. I think they're going to fail, but I'll give them their shot. Hell, I used to think I'd never be willing to spend the time it takes to download mp3's. I have been wrong before.
Um, look, I think we all know there's a stereotype out there. Anime nerds that learn Japanese because JAPAN IS SUPERIOR and then go to Japan because OMG Samurai and Ninjas are around every corner and they're going to stalk Megumi Hayashibara or whoever it is that they remember from their favorite anime. And of course they're all obsessed with Asian women, too. "They're just so much more feminine."
(I don't see how anyone can say, "One race's women are superior to another's." There's just so many beautiful women out there of every race. But that's just me. I just don't want anyone to think that I'm part of that Asian chicks-only clique.)
But just because people like that are not emotionally equipped to handle a proper analysis of another culture, it does not necessarily follow that this guy is totally off his rocker. I think it's the height of racist stupidity to go around calling people gaijin (Japanese for "foreigner," with an emphasis on an "outsider" status, to those not in the know) and claiming that they can't even come up with a basic understanding of Japanese culture. Are Japanese people somehow so complex and special that nobody outside their culture could possibly understand them? Flipping that one around, is American culture beyond Japanese understanding? How about Russian culture? Or French culture? Why or why not? Is it because American culture is so simplistic and pathetic that the Japanese mind can easily understand it?
Or is it just your "inscrutable Asians" racist stereotype rearing its ugly head?
The Japanese are not some incredibly special case. They are humans, just like everyone else.* They are not immune to being understood by people not raised inside their own cultural norms. If you have a disagreement with the conclusions of the parent, argue your point with facts and logic.
*except for the ones that are really Saurians and part of the conspiracy to pilot the Spaceship Earth into the sun to make way for a new hyperspace bypass.
To this day, Ultima V is one of those games that I remember fondly, and would play again (if I could get the damn thing to run on modern hardware, that is)*. I have the cloth map filed away in my filing cabinet, and in theory, I still have the coin somewhere, I think (Ultima V came with a free coin; ostensibly because the player, the Avatar, was called to Brittania with it). Richard Garriot really had something with the Ultima series. It had some real class. You don't get cloth maps and crazy "magic" coins these days (Or cheesy, but thoughtful, pieces of obsidian--the transportation device of Ultima VI). Sigh. Now all the boxes are tiny and they just contain a game CD case, a manual, and a lot of promotional material.
Is Garriot gonna do a non-MMO game again someday? Does anyone know if that's in the works? Not to knock the whole 'Net thang, but MMO games just don't suit my fancy.
*Dear nerds: I'm too lazy to do this, not too stupid. And yes, I have a legal copy of the game.
Minus the amazing ending, sadly enough. Apparently, it's giving them problems hacking the good PC version ending onto the 3DO version's codebase. Here's hoping they fix it up and include it soon.
It'll be a while. Probably a rather long one.
Models as good as, say, the chick in Final Fantasy or the chick in the first animatrix short (Last Flight of the Osiris) are NOT cheap or easy to build, at least not yet. Look at how much they spent just to make Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within--$100 million+. I'd argue that you need a model at least as good as Aki's (the FF chick), if not better, to get the man on the street to want your porn. Most people, despite what you may have seen on the internet (Caution: that's porn), do not want to watch animated sex of any sort. Porn is usually produced on a shoestring budget (or shall I punningly say g-string?). If you spend $25,000 on your porn film, you're spending a lot, believe it or not.
With a CG movie, you'd still need to pay the animators, the modelers, and the voice talent, as well as some time on a render farm to actually make the film. I can't help but think that adds up to rather a lot more than $25,000 right now, and probably will for quite a while.
On the other hand, CG porn probably is coming eventually, and here's why I think it'll happen: reusing old animations and hacking up models to make them look a bit different (rather than building new ones) will result in a big savings over doing things the hard way. If that means some clever camera angles will hide that fact Porn Movie Alpha and Porn Movie Bravo are using the same sex scene, only with marginally different models, well, as long as it was a good sex scene, who cares? Certainly not the pornographer. That's how the cost of making a CG movie will be brought down low enough to make it feasible.
Great, I just wrote about porn on Slashdot. That means an extra 7 years of no sex.