Many people would rather take the sure thing (the big, one-off payday) than a long gamble (hoping you continue to get money from the business years into the future.)
The utter refusal of the Occupy protesters to become politically engaged--as in, organizing, canvassing, petitioning, fundraising, and eventually voting--is what dooms them far beyond anything else.
The Tea Party would've been a footnote if not for the fact that they became highly politically organized and actually went after elections. I'm not going to hold my breath that Occupy protesters will try something novel like, say, primarying Congressmen next spring.
But they don't want to change the system from within, they want to destroy it and rebuild from scratch. Whether one agrees with that as a goal or not, it's simply not something that is going to happen by staging street rallies and sit-ins and camping in parks.
I'm inclined to agree. The limitations of his style of software development are quite apparent. I think Minecraft is a great game with a concept behind it that hasn't been fully exploited yet, and I would agree that there are mods doing things the core game should be doing. Minecraft itself is a catalog of half-baked ideas. The core of the game--exploring, mining, crafting, and building--is very strong. Many of the other elements, however, feel half-finished. Take wolves as an example. You can tame wolves, take them with you, and they protect you, but they're also monumentally stupid, have some pathfinding bugs, and there's no real point to them. You can't train them or enhance them in any way. I'd love the ability to issue more complex orders to your wolves--say, establishing a patrol route to protect your house, or siccing a pack of wolves on another player or group of enemies, or even ordering one to draw off a pack of creepers and sacrifice itself to save your structures. Instead, you can't really order wolves to do anything but "stay" or "follow me." Wasted potential.
The Nether was also a pretty half-assed concept, getting better with the addition of more mobs and Nether strongholds. But come on, it took almost a year to get the Nether enhanced.
I have a hard time seeing why it takes so long to add new features and enhance existing ones, and then the released product is riddled with bugs. I could understand if the long release cycle for each update was due to extensive regression testing and QA, but it obviously isn't. Remember when new features were coming out every week? What the hell happened to that?
Strictly speaking, you are right, Minecraft is not in any way a voxel-based game. It uses conventional 3D graphics techniques to do what it does, which means polygons, texture mapping, vertex shaders, etc.
Making it a true voxel-based game would mean writing a graphics engine from scratch, most likely, and I can see why Notch wouldn't have wanted to do that.:)
I believe Minecraft requires you login once on any given computer, in order to download all its assets. Then, it will allow you to play online.
If you download the full game from somewhere else, you can also play it offline.
I think it's silly to pirate Minecraft, though. It's a fun enough game that you should pay for it. Try before you buy, if you must, but please buy it if you like it.
I feel your pain. My players complain about how long it takes for me to get a Bukkit update, whining about how they are losing interest in the game, the longer it takes. Not that they absolutely must update the second a new version comes out--I specifically tell them not to! But when I offer to switch us (temporarily) to the vanilla server, they freak--they like having warps and such. There's no pleasing some of them. I also refuse to upgrade right away because the.0 version of any Minecraft release is always riddled with bugs. You usually have to wait for.4 or.5 to have something stable. Mildly annoying bugs are fine and can be worked around, but sometimes you get outright world corruption. No thanks, no thanks.
Netflix can't do that unless and until there is DRM in HTML5 video. The main reason they stream with Silverlight now is because Silverlight allows encrypted streaming.
You seem to be ignoring the fact that we're already drilling the vast majority of the cheap oil available to us. Other extraction methods, like tar sands and liquefying coal, will still result in higher prices. Long-term, the prices are going up, period. By definition, that's going to price a lot of people out of driving anywhere, and anyone who isn't fabulously wealthy is going to feel the pinch. No one is trying to take anything away from you, it's simply reality catching up with us. You can't exponentially increase your consumption of a finite resource without eventually hitting a brick wall.
The rest of your post is really beside the point as it has nothing to do with the economic viability of a system that depends so heavily on cheap fossil fuels.
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
on
The F-35 Story
·
· Score: 1
There's also the notion that you can't put a price tag on national security--we should spend whatever it costs to meet our defense objectives, no matter how expensive and regardless of the actual return we get. Somehow, that got warped into meaning we can spend an unlimited amount of money on the military and its contractors, and to criticize that at all is unpatriotic.
I'm not convinced that we need to spend anywhere near what we're spending to have an effective military. But the problem isn't what we pay the soldiers or what we spend on their essential field equipment, it's these huge, pie-in-the-sky defense contracts where no one is held accountable and the flow of money is virtually guaranteed.
Every analysis I've seen in the past shows that we get an incredible bang for the buck from NASA, in terms of the research they accomplish vs. their funding. But it's not worth anything because it is, by and large, pure research--which has no value to profit-obsessed corporate America.
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
on
The F-35 Story
·
· Score: 1
Exactly right. These programs encourage pigs to line up at the trough and suck the money down as quickly as possible so they can get more. Is there something wrong with starting with a realistic set of requirements (with milestones), a firm budget, and a deadline?
If one private company did this to another, it would be a disaster--I've seen that happen. But when you bilk the government (read: taxpayers) you get another round of cash. It's unreal.
You do realize that smartphone CPUs don't run at their maximum clock all the time, right? There are plenty of ways to save power even as phones get faster and more functional.
I was making a joke. The idea of emulating one current mobile OS inside another current mobile OS is laughably impractical, even if it was technically possible. Thanks for the explanation, though. I didn't know about that limitation on WP7 apps, as I don't work on mobile apps.
I've met one or two like that, although the majority have been sincere, fun, interesting people. My current girlfriend is probably more of a geek than I am (okay, she definitely is) and she's never seemed aloof or egotistical. I have nothing but nice things to say about our sex life, too.:-p
Slashdot Mirror
Many people would rather take the sure thing (the big, one-off payday) than a long gamble (hoping you continue to get money from the business years into the future.)
"National security."
There you go, that's why it will never happen. Two words that can justify any and all measures to separate the governors from the governed.
The US' primary exports are various ways of killing people.
The utter refusal of the Occupy protesters to become politically engaged--as in, organizing, canvassing, petitioning, fundraising, and eventually voting--is what dooms them far beyond anything else.
The Tea Party would've been a footnote if not for the fact that they became highly politically organized and actually went after elections. I'm not going to hold my breath that Occupy protesters will try something novel like, say, primarying Congressmen next spring.
But they don't want to change the system from within, they want to destroy it and rebuild from scratch. Whether one agrees with that as a goal or not, it's simply not something that is going to happen by staging street rallies and sit-ins and camping in parks.
Just be thankful you won't be getting Apple-themed "truck nuts."
GP must think "Carmack's Reverse" is the algorithm used to play music backwards. Truly an innovation.
Poor show, AC.
I'll write code for Mojang the day they start paying me to do so.
I'm inclined to agree. The limitations of his style of software development are quite apparent. I think Minecraft is a great game with a concept behind it that hasn't been fully exploited yet, and I would agree that there are mods doing things the core game should be doing. Minecraft itself is a catalog of half-baked ideas. The core of the game--exploring, mining, crafting, and building--is very strong. Many of the other elements, however, feel half-finished. Take wolves as an example. You can tame wolves, take them with you, and they protect you, but they're also monumentally stupid, have some pathfinding bugs, and there's no real point to them. You can't train them or enhance them in any way. I'd love the ability to issue more complex orders to your wolves--say, establishing a patrol route to protect your house, or siccing a pack of wolves on another player or group of enemies, or even ordering one to draw off a pack of creepers and sacrifice itself to save your structures. Instead, you can't really order wolves to do anything but "stay" or "follow me." Wasted potential.
The Nether was also a pretty half-assed concept, getting better with the addition of more mobs and Nether strongholds. But come on, it took almost a year to get the Nether enhanced.
I have a hard time seeing why it takes so long to add new features and enhance existing ones, and then the released product is riddled with bugs. I could understand if the long release cycle for each update was due to extensive regression testing and QA, but it obviously isn't. Remember when new features were coming out every week? What the hell happened to that?
Strictly speaking, you are right, Minecraft is not in any way a voxel-based game. It uses conventional 3D graphics techniques to do what it does, which means polygons, texture mapping, vertex shaders, etc.
Making it a true voxel-based game would mean writing a graphics engine from scratch, most likely, and I can see why Notch wouldn't have wanted to do that. :)
I believe Minecraft requires you login once on any given computer, in order to download all its assets. Then, it will allow you to play online.
If you download the full game from somewhere else, you can also play it offline.
I think it's silly to pirate Minecraft, though. It's a fun enough game that you should pay for it. Try before you buy, if you must, but please buy it if you like it.
Only to people who bought during beta! Suckers!
* Bought Minecraft during Alpha.
I feel your pain. My players complain about how long it takes for me to get a Bukkit update, whining about how they are losing interest in the game, the longer it takes. Not that they absolutely must update the second a new version comes out--I specifically tell them not to! But when I offer to switch us (temporarily) to the vanilla server, they freak--they like having warps and such. There's no pleasing some of them. I also refuse to upgrade right away because the .0 version of any Minecraft release is always riddled with bugs. You usually have to wait for .4 or .5 to have something stable. Mildly annoying bugs are fine and can be worked around, but sometimes you get outright world corruption. No thanks, no thanks.
Netflix can't do that unless and until there is DRM in HTML5 video. The main reason they stream with Silverlight now is because Silverlight allows encrypted streaming.
Let's not forget that Japanese manufacturers like Toyota have factories in the US, too, so those "foreign" cars are often assembled right here.
The industrial capacity to build these parts in the amounts and time required doesn't even exist in the US anymore.
You seem to be ignoring the fact that we're already drilling the vast majority of the cheap oil available to us. Other extraction methods, like tar sands and liquefying coal, will still result in higher prices. Long-term, the prices are going up, period. By definition, that's going to price a lot of people out of driving anywhere, and anyone who isn't fabulously wealthy is going to feel the pinch. No one is trying to take anything away from you, it's simply reality catching up with us. You can't exponentially increase your consumption of a finite resource without eventually hitting a brick wall.
The rest of your post is really beside the point as it has nothing to do with the economic viability of a system that depends so heavily on cheap fossil fuels.
There's also the notion that you can't put a price tag on national security--we should spend whatever it costs to meet our defense objectives, no matter how expensive and regardless of the actual return we get. Somehow, that got warped into meaning we can spend an unlimited amount of money on the military and its contractors, and to criticize that at all is unpatriotic.
I'm not convinced that we need to spend anywhere near what we're spending to have an effective military. But the problem isn't what we pay the soldiers or what we spend on their essential field equipment, it's these huge, pie-in-the-sky defense contracts where no one is held accountable and the flow of money is virtually guaranteed.
Every analysis I've seen in the past shows that we get an incredible bang for the buck from NASA, in terms of the research they accomplish vs. their funding. But it's not worth anything because it is, by and large, pure research--which has no value to profit-obsessed corporate America.
Exactly right. These programs encourage pigs to line up at the trough and suck the money down as quickly as possible so they can get more. Is there something wrong with starting with a realistic set of requirements (with milestones), a firm budget, and a deadline?
If one private company did this to another, it would be a disaster--I've seen that happen. But when you bilk the government (read: taxpayers) you get another round of cash. It's unreal.
You do realize that smartphone CPUs don't run at their maximum clock all the time, right? There are plenty of ways to save power even as phones get faster and more functional.
Followed by a rash of unexplained cancers.
Not true. Malware apps have been found and removed from the Android Market.
I was making a joke. The idea of emulating one current mobile OS inside another current mobile OS is laughably impractical, even if it was technically possible. Thanks for the explanation, though. I didn't know about that limitation on WP7 apps, as I don't work on mobile apps.
An iOS emulator?
I've met one or two like that, although the majority have been sincere, fun, interesting people. My current girlfriend is probably more of a geek than I am (okay, she definitely is) and she's never seemed aloof or egotistical. I have nothing but nice things to say about our sex life, too. :-p
Sorry you've had bad experiences, though.