I think about all of the hosting out there that are still running 4.x.
Hah. I recently discovered that my workplace was actually running MySQL 3.x, which is such an old release that it doesn't even support structured queries. "MyQL", I call it.
It's why Blizzard is one of the only group out there that makes a good product - Damn the release date! A better game is better for everyone in the long run.
Quoth Shigeru Miyamoto: "A late game is only late for a while. A bad game is bad forever."
That would make for superb irony when we reach the future of Fahrenheit 451. All the houses are fireproof, on account of being made of the very paper Montag is paid to burn...
As an aside, why do we still have to do all of this in terms of car analogies? We are all Slashdot nerds, I think we can understand computers on their own terms by now.
I think it shows that people are ever more shallow in their music tastes and now only want those one or two big hits, ignoring the rest of the material. How many times have you listened to an album, or an artist's entire catalogue, and come to love one of the b-sides or album tracks more than the one or two big hits? For me it's a lot.
I think it's something else entirely.
The way in which we think about music is completely changing. The notions of albums, singles, B-sides and EPs are disappearing because music is no longer subject to any kind of time restriction or packaging system. An LP was what, 25 minutes a side? A cassette, 45 mins per side. A CD, 70 mins total. But that's over. An audio file can be any length. A musical composition can be any number of audio files in any order. It can be any length. And people can purchase any combination of them at a whim. Making a double or a triple album doesn't incur any kind of extra production cost.
The singles charts have been obsolete for a very long time and I think the album charts are going to go the same way. People need to start thinking sideways about all of this. Artists, labels and retailers all need to start taking advantage of the new creative possibilities.
I'm desperately waiting for somebody to create some web application or blog extension which lets you sell your own music online. Buy some hosting, set a per-track price, open a PayPal account, upload the music, start selling. I don't have the know-how or I'd be on this myself.
Comics aren't so much for prepubescent boys anymore. The target demographic has grown up considerably in the last few decades. It's twenty-somethings upwards now. Demands are more than just "shallow fantasies" now.
The problem is that applying ordinary mathematical concepts like "infinite" to theological concepts like "God" doesn't work. If he's infinite, is he infinite in volume? In surface area? In mass? Is he an infinitely long cylinder or a blob or what? Mathematically, an object can be infinite but not include everything; is this the case with God? Does he have a boundary? How many dimensions does he have? Three? Four? Does he fill all of the observable universe? How can God be infinite if the universe is not? Is the majority of his structure in other dimensions? What is this extra space he fills? Can he travel through time? Can he travel back in time to see his past self? If so, what happens to the timeline? If not, why not? I thought he was omnipotent? If God is an infinite presence, in what sense is he present in the real world? Does he give off heat, does he interact with ordinary matter in a manner which can be tested for? Does he have an electric charge, or is he electrically neutral? If he is literally present everywhere in the world, then no test can fail, so how, indeed, can there even exist a test for that? Why'd he create the universe in the first place? Did he create other intelligent life forms on other planets? Why did he start out with one legal system and then replace it with another one, instead of starting out with the working one from minute one? Why create humans at all? At what point in their evolution did humans acquire souls, and why do humans have them but not animals? Are we even sure about that? Why are humans created in need of redemption when they could have just been happy forever? Why let the Fall happen? Why does God need praising? Why is prayer necessary if God already knows what you want and what you need better than you do? If he is good and omnipotent, why is there evil? Is he partially evil or limited in his powers? If the answer is "free will", why is freedom to do evil better than eternal happiness? And why were humans built without free will? Doesn't that mean they were built imperfect? And so on, and so on...
This is my real problem with intelligent design and creationism. "God did it" isn't simply a cop-out answer, it opens up literally hundreds of new questions to which neither science nor religious dogma has the answers.
Also, I don't know whether it's supposed to be ironic, but the site itself is an excellent example of a web page that sucks. I mean, look at the sidebar which descends a full screen further than the main content column, for example.
Quiet, quiet! If we play this right, we can make it so the grand masters of the future of humanity are its technological elite! Which was the plan all along!
Well, then you get to the question of how you define a bad game. If you mean horrible graphics/sound, pointless gameplay and lack of direction or sense, then the HSR games do qualify as bad, even though they're still fun to play. Likewise, there are many B-movies which are cheap/stupid/incomprehensible but still enjoyable.
But you seem to be taking a more philosophical viewpoint that a game is bad if it turns out to be different from what the makers intended. There aren't many movies which are like this and I certainly can't think of ANY movies which are so bad - so different from the creators' intentions - that they become good.
"So bad it's good" generally implies that a game/movie has significant badness/awfulness in some respect and that this makes it more enjoyable. The HSR games have this - deliberately. Many B-movies have this, by pure luck or incompetence. I don't think the creators' intentions weigh in here, because all you have to go on is the game/movie - you'll never know what they were truly aiming for.
Just because an argument's ancient doesn't mean it's not still valid. Plus, after all, the number of distributions has been rising for a long time. Maybe the argument carries more weight now than it used to.
Hah! I get it! Denying people access to their BDSM pornography is just another form of chastity discipline, being applied to the WHOLE BDSM community at once. That's extreme, UK government! I didn't know you were into that stuff.
We actually do this is in a very tiny way when space probes use planet fly-bys to get speed boosts. The space probe zooms around the back of the planet and a small amount of momentum is exchanged - the probe leaves at a higher absolute speed while the planet's orbit is slowed down very very slightly.
Not all anime is excrutiatingly slow-paced, but I would definitely be interested to see what they come up with regarding Dragonball Z. Underneath the tedious "Hyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!"s and filler there are some good concepts and the occasional decent fight scene. Paring the whole thing down to ~2 hours per saga could only be a good thing.
I'd go so far as to say that the original Star Wars series (4-6) will stand up better than the newer series
Way ahead of you. The effects in Episode I already look antiquated, likewise the modifications (extra CGI backdrops) that were made for the Special Editions.
Ridley Scott has stated repeatedly that Deckard was a replicant. A replicant who thought he was human.
But Harrison Ford was told by Scott that Deckard was a human, so he played Deckard as a human.
So Deckard was a replicant who thought he was human. And Ford played a replicant, but thought he was playing a human. Ford was just as misled as Deckard was. That was exactly the point.
Deckard didn't really know who he was. False memories. Ford didn't really know who he was. Misdirection. Do you know who you are? Are you sure?
This theme of uncertainty about the true nature of reality underlies a lot of Philip K. Dick's work. I'm really pleased with how it worked out in the movie.
(The fact that Harrison Ford is, in reality, a replicant, is just the icing on the cake.)
Slashdot Mirror
Hah. I recently discovered that my workplace was actually running MySQL 3.x, which is such an old release that it doesn't even support structured queries. "MyQL", I call it.
Quoth Shigeru Miyamoto: "A late game is only late for a while. A bad game is bad forever."
That would make for superb irony when we reach the future of Fahrenheit 451. All the houses are fireproof, on account of being made of the very paper Montag is paid to burn...
As an aside, why do we still have to do all of this in terms of car analogies? We are all Slashdot nerds, I think we can understand computers on their own terms by now.
They were a lot worse than Star Trek, despite coming a decade later. I'd say they were pretty bad even for their time.
On a related topic, you just lost the Game. Which I invented, so you owe me a buck ninety.
Great, so there'd be almost no cybercrime!
I think it's something else entirely.
The way in which we think about music is completely changing. The notions of albums, singles, B-sides and EPs are disappearing because music is no longer subject to any kind of time restriction or packaging system. An LP was what, 25 minutes a side? A cassette, 45 mins per side. A CD, 70 mins total. But that's over. An audio file can be any length. A musical composition can be any number of audio files in any order. It can be any length. And people can purchase any combination of them at a whim. Making a double or a triple album doesn't incur any kind of extra production cost.
The singles charts have been obsolete for a very long time and I think the album charts are going to go the same way. People need to start thinking sideways about all of this. Artists, labels and retailers all need to start taking advantage of the new creative possibilities.
I'm desperately waiting for somebody to create some web application or blog extension which lets you sell your own music online. Buy some hosting, set a per-track price, open a PayPal account, upload the music, start selling. I don't have the know-how or I'd be on this myself.
Comics aren't so much for prepubescent boys anymore. The target demographic has grown up considerably in the last few decades. It's twenty-somethings upwards now. Demands are more than just "shallow fantasies" now.
The problem is that applying ordinary mathematical concepts like "infinite" to theological concepts like "God" doesn't work. If he's infinite, is he infinite in volume? In surface area? In mass? Is he an infinitely long cylinder or a blob or what? Mathematically, an object can be infinite but not include everything; is this the case with God? Does he have a boundary? How many dimensions does he have? Three? Four? Does he fill all of the observable universe? How can God be infinite if the universe is not? Is the majority of his structure in other dimensions? What is this extra space he fills? Can he travel through time? Can he travel back in time to see his past self? If so, what happens to the timeline? If not, why not? I thought he was omnipotent? If God is an infinite presence, in what sense is he present in the real world? Does he give off heat, does he interact with ordinary matter in a manner which can be tested for? Does he have an electric charge, or is he electrically neutral? If he is literally present everywhere in the world, then no test can fail, so how, indeed, can there even exist a test for that? Why'd he create the universe in the first place? Did he create other intelligent life forms on other planets? Why did he start out with one legal system and then replace it with another one, instead of starting out with the working one from minute one? Why create humans at all? At what point in their evolution did humans acquire souls, and why do humans have them but not animals? Are we even sure about that? Why are humans created in need of redemption when they could have just been happy forever? Why let the Fall happen? Why does God need praising? Why is prayer necessary if God already knows what you want and what you need better than you do? If he is good and omnipotent, why is there evil? Is he partially evil or limited in his powers? If the answer is "free will", why is freedom to do evil better than eternal happiness? And why were humans built without free will? Doesn't that mean they were built imperfect? And so on, and so on...
This is my real problem with intelligent design and creationism. "God did it" isn't simply a cop-out answer, it opens up literally hundreds of new questions to which neither science nor religious dogma has the answers.
I'm interested to see whether anybody voluntarily pays e.g. $1000 for the album.
You lost me. How fast is searching usually?
Also, I don't know whether it's supposed to be ironic, but the site itself is an excellent example of a web page that sucks. I mean, look at the sidebar which descends a full screen further than the main content column, for example.
Quiet, quiet! If we play this right, we can make it so the grand masters of the future of humanity are its technological elite! Which was the plan all along!
Google PageRank?
It's only a 0 to 10 scale, but it's better than nothing.
That depends very much on whether you are an advertiser, a typical digg user, or a typical Slashdot user.
But I enjoy thinking :(
Well, then you get to the question of how you define a bad game. If you mean horrible graphics/sound, pointless gameplay and lack of direction or sense, then the HSR games do qualify as bad, even though they're still fun to play. Likewise, there are many B-movies which are cheap/stupid/incomprehensible but still enjoyable.
But you seem to be taking a more philosophical viewpoint that a game is bad if it turns out to be different from what the makers intended. There aren't many movies which are like this and I certainly can't think of ANY movies which are so bad - so different from the creators' intentions - that they become good.
"So bad it's good" generally implies that a game/movie has significant badness/awfulness in some respect and that this makes it more enjoyable. The HSR games have this - deliberately. Many B-movies have this, by pure luck or incompetence. I don't think the creators' intentions weigh in here, because all you have to go on is the game/movie - you'll never know what they were truly aiming for.
Just because an argument's ancient doesn't mean it's not still valid. Plus, after all, the number of distributions has been rising for a long time. Maybe the argument carries more weight now than it used to.
Hah! I get it! Denying people access to their BDSM pornography is just another form of chastity discipline, being applied to the WHOLE BDSM community at once. That's extreme, UK government! I didn't know you were into that stuff.
We actually do this is in a very tiny way when space probes use planet fly-bys to get speed boosts. The space probe zooms around the back of the planet and a small amount of momentum is exchanged - the probe leaves at a higher absolute speed while the planet's orbit is slowed down very very slightly.
Not all anime is excrutiatingly slow-paced, but I would definitely be interested to see what they come up with regarding Dragonball Z. Underneath the tedious "Hyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!"s and filler there are some good concepts and the occasional decent fight scene. Paring the whole thing down to ~2 hours per saga could only be a good thing.
Way ahead of you. The effects in Episode I already look antiquated, likewise the modifications (extra CGI backdrops) that were made for the Special Editions.
Ridley Scott has stated repeatedly that Deckard was a replicant. A replicant who thought he was human.
But Harrison Ford was told by Scott that Deckard was a human, so he played Deckard as a human.
So Deckard was a replicant who thought he was human. And Ford played a replicant, but thought he was playing a human. Ford was just as misled as Deckard was. That was exactly the point.
Deckard didn't really know who he was. False memories. Ford didn't really know who he was. Misdirection. Do you know who you are? Are you sure?
This theme of uncertainty about the true nature of reality underlies a lot of Philip K. Dick's work. I'm really pleased with how it worked out in the movie.
(The fact that Harrison Ford is, in reality, a replicant, is just the icing on the cake.)