basically, each game can award a certain amount (I want to say 1000) points to the gamer. The game developers can divvy this up however they want. Basically, they could theoretically give you all the points just for buying the game, or they could make them all nearly impossible to get.
In practice, the way that it usually works is that each game gives you a few points for every "milestone" in the game, a few points for relatively common things, most of the points on various difficult but not impossible things, and then there are a few points that are reserved for the absolutely insane.
Each achivement gives not only points, but the name of the achievment as well, so you can tell if someone got points just for the easy stuff, or for the hard stuff as well.
Personally, I've not bothered chasing after achivements. I know that unlocking everything gives some people a sense of statisfaction, and there isn't anything wrong with that, but I have too little time to play games anymore to spend that time exploring every last corner of a game trying to unlock everything- I have a hard enough time just making it through the main game before another one comes out.
The biggest bottleneck for people getting files off bittorrent isn't their download speed, but the overall upload speed. Even with fairly large swarms, the overall speed can be pretty bad, since most people get crap for upload, so it kinda makes sense for the person who is uploading at the highest rate to get the file first, so they can then upload at their higher rate to everyone in the swarm.
Now what would be interesting would be if they client would give priority to those with more upload up to a certain point, then cut them off, so as to keep them waiting around (and uploading) to get the last few percent of the file longer.
Many HD makers will send you a replacement drive without requiring the platters from the bad drive. Most of the time they just want the case to the hard drive.
I know that most of us on slashdot realize how absurd the RIAA and MPAA's claims are about the losses caused by piracy, but if this is publicized I think that it could go a long way toward aptly demonstrating the absurdity of their claims.
I mean, I don't think anyone, except apparently the RIAA lawers, could possibly believe that in a few months- or even in a year or two, one single (not all that well known) russian website caused the RIAA to lose over a trillion dollars in revenue.
The Good/Bad Programers who know/think they are Good normally may give a couple of corrections in the code just to make it work a little better of efficiently, or just admit that that isn't quite the same approach they would use, in there style they may accomplish the same task differently and make it more easier for them to read threw.
The ones who think they are bad programmers will try to learn about the code hoping it will make them better programmers or just ignore it as a programming thing.
Actually, I would argue that it is the good programmers who will see the code, and try to learn about it, to see how it could make them better programmers. Only the poor programmer will assume that their way is the only/best way, and in so doing, blind themselves to learning new and useful things.
In general, I think that is pretty good advice. I use VMWare regularly to try out new distros, and it's a great way to toy around with something before making a full commitment to installing it on the computer.
The biggest downside for the poster however, is going to be that virtualization is going to have a lot of overhead. Mathematical and Scientific applications are among the most resource intensive things that are done with computers now days, so the overhead of running Linux in a virtual environment may be unacceptable in this case.
I'm not sure that you can completely pin this problem with the game designers though. As I understand it, most car companies will only license out the rights to use their cars in games under the condition that the car is basically shown only in pristine, un-wrecked condition.
I've never been a fan of the GT games, but I think that for a lot of people one of the biggest appeals is the wide variety of cars to choose from, so it's not like the designers can really just say "well screw you car companies" and go with fewer cars, or made up cars, since having the wide selection of real cars is what gets a lot of people to buy the game in the first place.
I own a 360 and I have to agree that this is largely true. The 360 does have some decent games, but it mostly feels like they are all just PC games on a console.
I run XGL and the latest SVN build of Beryl and I have had very few stability problems with it over all. There are certainly a few bugs that seem to be related to video, but on the whole I would say that Ubuntu with XGL and Beryl is much more stable and responsive than Tiger (although, to be fair, it's also on a faster machine, which could have a lot to do with the responsiveness).
The problem is, you are thinking of the universe as expanding from a center point out, when as I understand it, every point is expanding away uniformly from every other point.
At least, that's the way my non-physicist brain understands it.
It took me a minute to get the reference. If anyone else thinks this sounds familiar, and can't place it, it's from a TNG episode where Captain Picard, Data, Troi, LaForge, and I think Dr. Crusher, were returning to the enterprise from a conference, and run into a number of "temporal eddies" that cause pockets of time to act weird.
They are discussion the various talks that they went on, and picard says, regarding the lecture that he attended that "he just kept talking in one long sentence moving from topic to topic so that no one could interrupt it was really quite hypnotic".
Actually, I'm prefectly aware of the keyboard shortcut and the option in the menu. My problem is really that I really think that I should have the option of having it right there. It makes it much easier to type paths in, as well as to immediately see where you are in the file system.
I didn't start using OS X because I wanted something easy, I really don't care much about easy, but I do want something that is efficient. There are a lot of things about OS X that seem inefficient. I picked the directory thing off the top of my head, but there are other examples as well. Off the top of my head- why can't I highlight something then middle-click to copy/past; why can't I shade windows? why is it taking until leapord to get virtual desktops?
don't get me wrong, there are some things I like about OS X, but on the whole the system feels more like it's trying to hide stuff from the user so they don't get scared and run away, instead of working toward letting a user work smarter/faster. And, it's also a preference thing too. Some people like OS X, some people like Windows, I have a friend who still loves Amiga, personally, I like Gnome.
A few years ago, I got an iBook which was my first mac. I don't really regret getting it, as it certainly did what I need, but now that I'm in the market for a new notebook I'm not really considering apple at all, largely because there are a lot of things in the OS X- especially Aqua- that just really annoy me.
The biggest problem that I see with OS X is that it offers very little in customizability. Aqua feels like it was designed for someone who has never used a computer before. For a lot of people, I'm sure that this simplicity is a good thing, and I won't fault Apple for making something easy to learn. Unfortunately, Apple never seemed to consider that what is easy for a newbie is also woefully inefficient and infuriating for a power user. The best example that I can think of is not having the option to type in a path in the Finder. Certainly it can be done with 3rd party applications, but it seems extremely asinine to not support it by default.
I think that teaching kids to program in C is a great idea. I started out by taking C++ in highschool, and I'm now working as a professional developer.
I've seen a lot of comments saying that you should focus less on the language, and more on things like datastructures, algorithms, analysis, and design. I agree that it's important to give some instruction on the basic concepts behind coding, but I think that you're going to have to remember that these are Highschool kids, and it is highly unlikely that they will have the mathematical background to really dig into algorithms.
I also disagree with people who are encouraging you to teach them languages such as Python. While it's true that there are languages that are much better than C at allowing you to get something impressive from a small amount of code, I think that it's detremental to students in the long run. After all, you aren't trying to specifically get these kids interested in programming, rather they are students who were interested enough to come to you.
The biggest thing that I think you can probably do to give the kids a leg up is to focus on the lower level aspects of C. Do a good bit on memory allocation and debugging, and spent a lot of time on pointers. If these kids are interested in going on to become programmers, then making sure they have a solid grasp on pointers is probably one of the best things you can do.
One of the most amazing things about kids is that, when they are cooperative, their minds are incredibly malleable. Take some of the hardest parts of programming, and start getting them to adjust their thinking toward it at an early stage, and you will find that they will become incredibly skilled programmers if they stick with it. Remember that given their mathematical background, there probably isn't a lot of point in trying to get too deep into analysing algorithms, and keep in mind that there is a lot of benefit to learning close-to-the-metal programming and they might not get it in a university (which seem to be focusing on Java more and more). Be sure to keep the assignments fun and challenging, and taylored to the things that they are interested in.
The last bit of advice is that you should focus on more than just teaching them to code. Get them into the culture as well. In my programming class, for example, we used to have a weekly assignment to read and post to two stories on slashdot. We watched Revolution OS and Pirates of Silicon Valley. Get the kids into the hacker subculture and they will go much further as developers as well.
it's true that if I had 75% of the movie, that would definitely be copyrite violation. What I was wondering though is, if I have say, 50% of the bits in a file, but due to where those bits are, they are useless for playing back the file, is that still infringment?
Now what if I have the whole file, but I never share out enough to anyone that they would watch the file just with what I've shared?
I'm certainly not qualified to answer any of these questions, it's just sort of my brain wandering off into a tangent.
As I understand it, the way bittorrent works means that even if I'm seeding a movie it's fairly unliikely that any one person will get the entire file from me, if there are a decent number of peers as well as plenty of other seeders.
Assuming that you need at least, say, 75% of the file for it to be even semi-watchable, I would suspect that with the distributed nature of bittorrent, very few peers or seeders actually distribute enough of the file to any given person for it to really be that "person A got the movie from person B".
Granted, people can download code and offer it up, claiming that they wrote it- but I still think there can be an advantage in asking someone to provide some sample code. While I wouldn't want to go through a bunch of sample code for every single person that I interviewed, if it came down to a couple of people I can see the advantage in looking at some sample code and then quizzing the person on how it works, why they chose to do things a certain way, etc. That way, even if they didn't write the code, you can know that, at the very least, they can look at code someone else has written and tell you what it does (which can, at times, be a more difficult and important skill than being able to write the code in the first place).
The other thing to remember is that, when it comes to code you want to have someone write on a whiteboard, there are really only a few common things that people are asked to write anyway. Every interview I've had, most of the time that I've been asked to write code on a whiteboard, it's basically come down to "write some algorithm from an Algorithms 101 course in your favorite language" anyway. 99% of the time it's been some combination of searching, sorting, replacing, and reversting strings, and people can easily memorize someone else's implementation of those things anyway.
The solution to that problem, as some other posters have mentioned, are games like New Super Mario Bro's. which use 3D graphics to create a 2D game.
I think New SMB showed that there is a lot that can be done with 2D gameplay using the power of the new systems (of course, NSMB is for the DS, but the DS is quite a bit more powerful than the SNES was) and it also enable companies to take advantage of the ease of working with 3D.
I agree that well animated 2D games can be absolutely beautiful (along with the afore mentioned SF3 look at Legend of Mana, which was a PSone game, and had some of the most wonderful looking animated graphics I've ever seen) and the success of a number of cell shaded games (Windwaker looked nice for the parts of it you saw something other than a blue screen, and Dragon Quest VIII was amazing) goes to show that the style won't mean that a game will necessarily fail.
I hope that Nintendo's promise of new games written for the virtual console happens, it might allow us to see some new great 2D games.
I primarily use Gnome, and in my experience it's UI is quite a bit better than Apples.
For one, I think that in many cases the eye candy is done much better. For example, both OS X and Beryl can do transparent windows, but only Beryl lets me make ANY window transparent. Further more, on Beryl I can simply hold alt and scroll the mouse to adjust the transparency- OS X requires several menus and several clicks each time I want to change it. Beryl also lets me zoom in on my desktop (I run in high resolution, so this is handy when I want to zoom in on small flash videos on the web) and to record videos (relatively) strait to xvid. Not to mention virtual desktops, being able to roll up windows, having the option to set windows to be "always on top" or "always on bottom", and actually being able to type in the path to the directory I want to get to.
The biggest problem with OS X is that it's too click-heavy. The shortcut keys are non-intuitive and often require holding down approximately the entire left side of the keyboard.
I realize that for the majority of the market, apple is competing with Vista and Aeroglass, but I think that Aqua also needs to start competing with XGL and Compiz/Beryl.
The primary desktop in my house runs Linux, but I also have an iBook running Tiger. For a long time OS X was a lot prettier than either KDE or Gnome, and people were forever trying to emulate the Aqua look and feel on Linux. A lot of stuff like web browsing and stuff I used to do on my iBook, simply because the GUI was nicer to look at.
Lately though, I'd say for the last year or 18 months, I've been running XGL and Beryl (and compiz before Beryl forked off) and I would say that my desktop now running XGL and Beryl looks much nicer than my iBook running Aqua.
I don't encounter many tailgaters, but when I do I employ a similar strategy. On my way to work today, I had someone who was following me closer than I've ever had ANYONE following me (I would be surprised if there was more than an inch or two between his bumper and mine). So, I sped up until I got next to a school bus that was doing 35 (on a 65mph highway) and slowed down - kept him stuck behind me and unable to get over for probably 20 minutes- I think the busdriver noticed what was going on because she could have sped up but seemed content to drive right along side me until she apparently had to turn off the highway.
Of course, I really want to piss those people off, maybe they'll have a heart attack and die before they have a chance to pollute the gene pool too much.
I think that the time from the release of the NES through the death of the SNES was really a golden age in gaming. There were a lot of simply amazing games that came out in that period.
The thing of it is, I think that it's not fair to write off modern games simply because they aren't keeping pace with the games back then. Doing so would be akin to writing off modern art because we aren't producing masterpieces like they did in the renaissance.
Part of what I think happened is that, during the NES and SNES period, gaming got really big- big enough for a lot of money to be made. At the same time though, the market was still small enough- and populated almost exclusively by "hardcore" gamers- so that it was difficult to get away with producing too much dreck- or at least there was money to be made in going through the effort of making really good titles.
Now days, the market is a lot bigger, and the hardcore gamers are outnumbered by the casual gamers. Casual gamers will play a lot of dreck, because they don't know any better- that means that those titles can make money. There is still a market for great games that appeal to hard core gamers, but making games like that aren't the only way to make money in the game industry anymore (as a side note, as much as they talk about going after different markets, I think nintendo is really going after the hardcore market with the wii more than the casual market).
In short, what it comes down to, is that there are a lot of games that aren't targeted at you. There are still good games to be found and played, it just takes a bit more effort to find them.
Slashdot Mirror
basically, each game can award a certain amount (I want to say 1000) points to the gamer. The game developers can divvy this up however they want. Basically, they could theoretically give you all the points just for buying the game, or they could make them all nearly impossible to get.
In practice, the way that it usually works is that each game gives you a few points for every "milestone" in the game, a few points for relatively common things, most of the points on various difficult but not impossible things, and then there are a few points that are reserved for the absolutely insane.
Each achivement gives not only points, but the name of the achievment as well, so you can tell if someone got points just for the easy stuff, or for the hard stuff as well.
Personally, I've not bothered chasing after achivements. I know that unlocking everything gives some people a sense of statisfaction, and there isn't anything wrong with that, but I have too little time to play games anymore to spend that time exploring every last corner of a game trying to unlock everything- I have a hard enough time just making it through the main game before another one comes out.
The biggest bottleneck for people getting files off bittorrent isn't their download speed, but the overall upload speed. Even with fairly large swarms, the overall speed can be pretty bad, since most people get crap for upload, so it kinda makes sense for the person who is uploading at the highest rate to get the file first, so they can then upload at their higher rate to everyone in the swarm.
Now what would be interesting would be if they client would give priority to those with more upload up to a certain point, then cut them off, so as to keep them waiting around (and uploading) to get the last few percent of the file longer.
Many HD makers will send you a replacement drive without requiring the platters from the bad drive. Most of the time they just want the case to the hard drive.
I know that most of us on slashdot realize how absurd the RIAA and MPAA's claims are about the losses caused by piracy, but if this is publicized I think that it could go a long way toward aptly demonstrating the absurdity of their claims.
I mean, I don't think anyone, except apparently the RIAA lawers, could possibly believe that in a few months- or even in a year or two, one single (not all that well known) russian website caused the RIAA to lose over a trillion dollars in revenue.
The Good/Bad Programers who know/think they are Good normally may give a couple of corrections in the code just to make it work a little better of efficiently, or just admit that that isn't quite the same approach they would use, in there style they may accomplish the same task differently and make it more easier for them to read threw.
The ones who think they are bad programmers will try to learn about the code hoping it will make them better programmers or just ignore it as a programming thing.
Actually, I would argue that it is the good programmers who will see the code, and try to learn about it, to see how it could make them better programmers. Only the poor programmer will assume that their way is the only/best way, and in so doing, blind themselves to learning new and useful things.
Hey! I may have Alzheimer's, but at least I don't have Alzheimer's.
In general, I think that is pretty good advice. I use VMWare regularly to try out new distros, and it's a great way to toy around with something before making a full commitment to installing it on the computer.
The biggest downside for the poster however, is going to be that virtualization is going to have a lot of overhead. Mathematical and Scientific applications are among the most resource intensive things that are done with computers now days, so the overhead of running Linux in a virtual environment may be unacceptable in this case.
I'm not sure that you can completely pin this problem with the game designers though. As I understand it, most car companies will only license out the rights to use their cars in games under the condition that the car is basically shown only in pristine, un-wrecked condition.
I've never been a fan of the GT games, but I think that for a lot of people one of the biggest appeals is the wide variety of cars to choose from, so it's not like the designers can really just say "well screw you car companies" and go with fewer cars, or made up cars, since having the wide selection of real cars is what gets a lot of people to buy the game in the first place.
I own a 360 and I have to agree that this is largely true. The 360 does have some decent games, but it mostly feels like they are all just PC games on a console.
I run XGL and the latest SVN build of Beryl and I have had very few stability problems with it over all. There are certainly a few bugs that seem to be related to video, but on the whole I would say that Ubuntu with XGL and Beryl is much more stable and responsive than Tiger (although, to be fair, it's also on a faster machine, which could have a lot to do with the responsiveness).
I can't wait until ISPs here start offering this connection, so I'll finally be able to get a 100 Gb ps connection*
*with 1kbps upload
The problem is, you are thinking of the universe as expanding from a center point out, when as I understand it, every point is expanding away uniformly from every other point.
At least, that's the way my non-physicist brain understands it.
It took me a minute to get the reference. If anyone else thinks this sounds familiar, and can't place it, it's from a TNG episode where Captain Picard, Data, Troi, LaForge, and I think Dr. Crusher, were returning to the enterprise from a conference, and run into a number of "temporal eddies" that cause pockets of time to act weird.
They are discussion the various talks that they went on, and picard says, regarding the lecture that he attended that "he just kept talking in one long sentence moving from topic to topic so that no one could interrupt it was really quite hypnotic".
And what if they can't afford to have a cool home network?
Actually, I'm prefectly aware of the keyboard shortcut and the option in the menu. My problem is really that I really think that I should have the option of having it right there. It makes it much easier to type paths in, as well as to immediately see where you are in the file system.
I didn't start using OS X because I wanted something easy, I really don't care much about easy, but I do want something that is efficient. There are a lot of things about OS X that seem inefficient. I picked the directory thing off the top of my head, but there are other examples as well. Off the top of my head- why can't I highlight something then middle-click to copy/past; why can't I shade windows? why is it taking until leapord to get virtual desktops?
don't get me wrong, there are some things I like about OS X, but on the whole the system feels more like it's trying to hide stuff from the user so they don't get scared and run away, instead of working toward letting a user work smarter/faster. And, it's also a preference thing too. Some people like OS X, some people like Windows, I have a friend who still loves Amiga, personally, I like Gnome.
A few years ago, I got an iBook which was my first mac. I don't really regret getting it, as it certainly did what I need, but now that I'm in the market for a new notebook I'm not really considering apple at all, largely because there are a lot of things in the OS X- especially Aqua- that just really annoy me.
The biggest problem that I see with OS X is that it offers very little in customizability. Aqua feels like it was designed for someone who has never used a computer before. For a lot of people, I'm sure that this simplicity is a good thing, and I won't fault Apple for making something easy to learn. Unfortunately, Apple never seemed to consider that what is easy for a newbie is also woefully inefficient and infuriating for a power user. The best example that I can think of is not having the option to type in a path in the Finder. Certainly it can be done with 3rd party applications, but it seems extremely asinine to not support it by default.
I think that teaching kids to program in C is a great idea. I started out by taking C++ in highschool, and I'm now working as a professional developer.
I've seen a lot of comments saying that you should focus less on the language, and more on things like datastructures, algorithms, analysis, and design. I agree that it's important to give some instruction on the basic concepts behind coding, but I think that you're going to have to remember that these are Highschool kids, and it is highly unlikely that they will have the mathematical background to really dig into algorithms.
I also disagree with people who are encouraging you to teach them languages such as Python. While it's true that there are languages that are much better than C at allowing you to get something impressive from a small amount of code, I think that it's detremental to students in the long run. After all, you aren't trying to specifically get these kids interested in programming, rather they are students who were interested enough to come to you.
The biggest thing that I think you can probably do to give the kids a leg up is to focus on the lower level aspects of C. Do a good bit on memory allocation and debugging, and spent a lot of time on pointers. If these kids are interested in going on to become programmers, then making sure they have a solid grasp on pointers is probably one of the best things you can do.
One of the most amazing things about kids is that, when they are cooperative, their minds are incredibly malleable. Take some of the hardest parts of programming, and start getting them to adjust their thinking toward it at an early stage, and you will find that they will become incredibly skilled programmers if they stick with it. Remember that given their mathematical background, there probably isn't a lot of point in trying to get too deep into analysing algorithms, and keep in mind that there is a lot of benefit to learning close-to-the-metal programming and they might not get it in a university (which seem to be focusing on Java more and more). Be sure to keep the assignments fun and challenging, and taylored to the things that they are interested in.
The last bit of advice is that you should focus on more than just teaching them to code. Get them into the culture as well. In my programming class, for example, we used to have a weekly assignment to read and post to two stories on slashdot. We watched Revolution OS and Pirates of Silicon Valley. Get the kids into the hacker subculture and they will go much further as developers as well.
it's true that if I had 75% of the movie, that would definitely be copyrite violation. What I was wondering though is, if I have say, 50% of the bits in a file, but due to where those bits are, they are useless for playing back the file, is that still infringment?
Now what if I have the whole file, but I never share out enough to anyone that they would watch the file just with what I've shared?
I'm certainly not qualified to answer any of these questions, it's just sort of my brain wandering off into a tangent.
As I understand it, the way bittorrent works means that even if I'm seeding a movie it's fairly unliikely that any one person will get the entire file from me, if there are a decent number of peers as well as plenty of other seeders.
Assuming that you need at least, say, 75% of the file for it to be even semi-watchable, I would suspect that with the distributed nature of bittorrent, very few peers or seeders actually distribute enough of the file to any given person for it to really be that "person A got the movie from person B".
Granted, people can download code and offer it up, claiming that they wrote it- but I still think there can be an advantage in asking someone to provide some sample code. While I wouldn't want to go through a bunch of sample code for every single person that I interviewed, if it came down to a couple of people I can see the advantage in looking at some sample code and then quizzing the person on how it works, why they chose to do things a certain way, etc. That way, even if they didn't write the code, you can know that, at the very least, they can look at code someone else has written and tell you what it does (which can, at times, be a more difficult and important skill than being able to write the code in the first place).
The other thing to remember is that, when it comes to code you want to have someone write on a whiteboard, there are really only a few common things that people are asked to write anyway. Every interview I've had, most of the time that I've been asked to write code on a whiteboard, it's basically come down to "write some algorithm from an Algorithms 101 course in your favorite language" anyway. 99% of the time it's been some combination of searching, sorting, replacing, and reversting strings, and people can easily memorize someone else's implementation of those things anyway.
The solution to that problem, as some other posters have mentioned, are games like New Super Mario Bro's. which use 3D graphics to create a 2D game.
I think New SMB showed that there is a lot that can be done with 2D gameplay using the power of the new systems (of course, NSMB is for the DS, but the DS is quite a bit more powerful than the SNES was) and it also enable companies to take advantage of the ease of working with 3D.
I agree that well animated 2D games can be absolutely beautiful (along with the afore mentioned SF3 look at Legend of Mana, which was a PSone game, and had some of the most wonderful looking animated graphics I've ever seen) and the success of a number of cell shaded games (Windwaker looked nice for the parts of it you saw something other than a blue screen, and Dragon Quest VIII was amazing) goes to show that the style won't mean that a game will necessarily fail.
I hope that Nintendo's promise of new games written for the virtual console happens, it might allow us to see some new great 2D games.
I primarily use Gnome, and in my experience it's UI is quite a bit better than Apples.
For one, I think that in many cases the eye candy is done much better. For example, both OS X and Beryl can do transparent windows, but only Beryl lets me make ANY window transparent. Further more, on Beryl I can simply hold alt and scroll the mouse to adjust the transparency- OS X requires several menus and several clicks each time I want to change it. Beryl also lets me zoom in on my desktop (I run in high resolution, so this is handy when I want to zoom in on small flash videos on the web) and to record videos (relatively) strait to xvid. Not to mention virtual desktops, being able to roll up windows, having the option to set windows to be "always on top" or "always on bottom", and actually being able to type in the path to the directory I want to get to.
The biggest problem with OS X is that it's too click-heavy. The shortcut keys are non-intuitive and often require holding down approximately the entire left side of the keyboard.
I realize that for the majority of the market, apple is competing with Vista and Aeroglass, but I think that Aqua also needs to start competing with XGL and Compiz/Beryl.
The primary desktop in my house runs Linux, but I also have an iBook running Tiger. For a long time OS X was a lot prettier than either KDE or Gnome, and people were forever trying to emulate the Aqua look and feel on Linux. A lot of stuff like web browsing and stuff I used to do on my iBook, simply because the GUI was nicer to look at.
Lately though, I'd say for the last year or 18 months, I've been running XGL and Beryl (and compiz before Beryl forked off) and I would say that my desktop now running XGL and Beryl looks much nicer than my iBook running Aqua.
I don't encounter many tailgaters, but when I do I employ a similar strategy. On my way to work today, I had someone who was following me closer than I've ever had ANYONE following me (I would be surprised if there was more than an inch or two between his bumper and mine). So, I sped up until I got next to a school bus that was doing 35 (on a 65mph highway) and slowed down - kept him stuck behind me and unable to get over for probably 20 minutes- I think the busdriver noticed what was going on because she could have sped up but seemed content to drive right along side me until she apparently had to turn off the highway.
Of course, I really want to piss those people off, maybe they'll have a heart attack and die before they have a chance to pollute the gene pool too much.
I think that the time from the release of the NES through the death of the SNES was really a golden age in gaming. There were a lot of simply amazing games that came out in that period.
The thing of it is, I think that it's not fair to write off modern games simply because they aren't keeping pace with the games back then. Doing so would be akin to writing off modern art because we aren't producing masterpieces like they did in the renaissance.
Part of what I think happened is that, during the NES and SNES period, gaming got really big- big enough for a lot of money to be made. At the same time though, the market was still small enough- and populated almost exclusively by "hardcore" gamers- so that it was difficult to get away with producing too much dreck- or at least there was money to be made in going through the effort of making really good titles.
Now days, the market is a lot bigger, and the hardcore gamers are outnumbered by the casual gamers. Casual gamers will play a lot of dreck, because they don't know any better- that means that those titles can make money. There is still a market for great games that appeal to hard core gamers, but making games like that aren't the only way to make money in the game industry anymore (as a side note, as much as they talk about going after different markets, I think nintendo is really going after the hardcore market with the wii more than the casual market).
In short, what it comes down to, is that there are a lot of games that aren't targeted at you. There are still good games to be found and played, it just takes a bit more effort to find them.