I agree. Most video games are a large investment in both time and money. They aren't like movies where you can spend two hours watching something and then go on with your life. If you like the movie that's cool, if not, well you only spent $5 for the rental anyway so it's not a big loss. However, if you put down $50 on a game, you want to know that your time will be well spent playing it.
This is an area where I think a system like Xbox Live could really start to shine. Why not offer limited, playable demos through the Live service? Since you know that people will have a broadband connection hooked up anyway and it has this large harddrive that goes mostly unused, why not put some demos on it? If I had a nice menu of various Xbox titles that I could browse and select, I would probably go out and buy more games, particularly maybe those games I would usually overlook. It would take a while to download a playable demo, but people download movies and games all the time so this wouldn't be that much different. Heck, why not have it download in the background while playing another game? I know they have demo CDs and things, but having all the demos in one location would really be cool. It's like going to Apple's Quicktime trailer site where you can preview tons of movies in one stop.
Illegal, yes... worthy of jail time? No. Let's have the punishment fit the crime. Afterall, I can go about speeding in my car and potentially kill someone and I will only get fined $100. You can get completely wasted one night and only spend an evening in jail for being drunk and disorderly in public. But, if you log onto a P2P network and download a song, you get your entire life ruined because you are now a convicted fellon? And imagine the strain on the legal system if this started happening on a large scale. Heck, I would be pissed if I were a judge and had to sit through another case of "The City of Los Angeles vs. Molly Parker for Copyright Infringement in the 2nd degree".
I worked for a brief period of time at a game company. While there I realized that developers prefer to write games for consols because they have pretty standard libraries and specifications. They don't like hacking all their code to get it to work with various graphics cards and other computer configurations. Intead, they would rather want to use that time to tweak their code to get maximum performance on a specific set of hardware. I used to be a PC gamer, but now most of my games are played on the Xbox. It creates a good separation between game time and work time.
Must we *always* have 2.9 billion forms of electronic media at our fingertips in the ever rare chance that our natural surroundings ever become boring?
Rare chance? I don't know about you, but the same commute to the same job gets pretty boring after a while. In my day-to-day life, my natural surroundings aren't that exciting unless you consider reading the new ads on the sides of busses and buildings fun.
And how many times has a Hans Zimmer soundtrack been used in trailers? It seems like every new action or suspense movie trailer has "Crimson Tide" or "Gladiator" going through it. I actually get a kick out of identifying the score... it's a little geek trait of mine. But I will only use this power for good, never for evil.
Does this mean I have to stop using the top of my computer as a food tray? It was so convinient to be able to place a plate and glass on top of the case while I'm working.
When I just got out of college, I got a sweet job at a large software company. At least, it seemed sweet at first. They gave me a great salary, generous benefits, and reasonable hours. However, it was boring as hell. My life was basically the reality version of the movie "Office Space". I had too many managers, went through too much red tape, and basically only had to do 15 minutes of actual work a week. I figured I was too young to hate my job so much so I changed. I now have a job that pays less, has no benefits, and has me working long hours. But at least I spend my time working a job I like and not spending my free time wishing I had a better one.
So what's the lesson learned? When you're young, work the job you like. You have your entire life to work jobs you hate and once you get that house, new car, wife, and children it will be tougher to leave a bad job if it pays well. When you're young and basically all you have in your life it work, make that work as enjoyable as possible. Plan for the future, but don't let that possible future ruin your present.
After careful evaluation of current market place realities and underlying economic considerations, we've decided that this was not the appropriate time to launch a graphic adventure on the PC.
I agree. LucasArts has been one of the few companies that has still invested in creating adventure games. They are one of the best in that category. However, all their critically-acclaimed adventure games have not done very well in the market place. Grim Fandango was a great game, but it wasn't exactly flying off the shelves. The Monkey Island games were also fun, but didn't set any records. There are those faithful that will always play adventure games, but their numbers are going down. It's simple supply and demand and there just isn't demand for it. Unfortunately, any slapped-together Star Wars game will almost always outsell a finely crafted LucasArts adventure game.
I agree that assembly language is an important staple of any computer programmer. However, I don't think it should be taught first for a psychological reason. Teaching assembly first could be very confusing and might turn off people who could make great programmers. One of the things that attracted me to computer science was that I could create cool things right off the bat. My friends in other engineering diciplines had to go through about two years of coursework before they could even start doing anything remotely cool. I was having a great time writing programs in C and Java from day one. Then, when I did learn assembly, I had a much better background and understanding on how my printf statement was really fed into the computer. I don't think I would have had the respect for assembly that I have now if I would have tried to learn it first. It would be like trying to teach someone to drive by first having them put together the engine. Then again, if that were a requirement we would have less bad drivers. But I digress.
Basically, I liked my education where I was taught concepts in the context of a language. You want to learn about memory allocation? Teach pointers and things in C. You want to learn about object oriented models... use Java or C++. You want to learn about how a computer functions at a base level, learn assembly. The language itself should never be the end goal, it should be a means to learn the concepts. The best programmers I've encountered are ones who have ideas, not ones who can't think outside a particular language.
The only reason that film was good was Johnny Depp.
Yeah, I know I hate it when a movie is good because an actor plays his role really well. Movies should be good because they have a lot of explosions, and crashes, and people saying naughty words. But at least we both agree that the movie was good.
Does this mean you would need to provide a valid credit card number to set up an email account? That's done already if you go through an ISP, but what about all those free, web-based email servers? Or what about people who have set up their own email server on a PC? How would you go about tracking down these people and billing them?
There is one thing we have all learned from the spammers and that is that they are smart. They have just as many smart programmers working for them as we have fighting against them. They know how to avoid detection. Spam and identity theft go hand and hand. So if they were financially responsible, whose to say they wouldn't just fork over a stolen credit card number and have Joe Sixpack pick up the tab?
we'll all be talking about this old network called "The Internet". We'll talk about how cool it was before the UN and an bunch of delegates came in and screwed it up. Historians will look back and trace why exactly the Internet fell. It will look something like this:
2005: Having survived the bad press, the RIAA and the MPAA split off into their own countries, gained admission to the UN, and outlawed the use of any digital music or video across a network.
2007: The world, angry at the U.S.A. for their 3rd war with Iraq, put sanctions on the U.S.'s use of the world wide web.
2008: After a year of web sanctions, the U.S. launches a military campaign on Malaysia since they had the most votes for the U.S. sanctions. This brings the number of current U.S. military campaigns to 10.
2010: The countries of RIA and MPA (remember, they dropped that last "A" back in 2005) successfully defeat the U.S. whose military was spread really thin due to their most recent war with England.
2012: The RIA, now the most powerful member of the U.N., indefinitely bans all world-wide Internet use since they are still complaining that artists are not getting paid for their work.
2014: The Open Source community, fresh off a victory against SCO, start building their own network called "Linet". It goes live with 30 million users connecting to it within the first 24 hours.
2015: "Linet" achieves self-awareness and launches an attack against the humans... the end.
Go to Merriam-Webster Online and lookup "slave" in the dictionary. You will see that one of the technical definitions of "slave" is "a device (as the printer of a computer) that is directly responsive to another". This is one of the official meanings people! Do we now need to change it and append "except in L.A. where someone who didn't know anything about computers was offended for no reason".
And besides, what is wrong with the words "slave" and "master"? Yes, slavery itself is wrong, but the word itself is not. It does not refer to a specific race, creed, religion, etc. There are plenty of words that are used in our language that could have a bad connotation if taken in the wrong context. If "slave" is wrong in a computer context, then her are some other things that are not correct:
Mouse: vermin that spreads disease so that has to be renamed to "x/y coordinate changer"
Joystick: sexual connotations so that has to be renamed to "gamer's handle"
Motherboard: too much bias toward a certain gender so that has to be renamed to "parentboard"
Hard Drive: again, sexual connotations so that has to be renamed to "magnetic storage device".
Any use of these old words will result in immediate imprisonment and fines.
-prozac79 "Making email fun again, one letter at a time"
That's because public education doesn't have a strong lobby group like the MPAA. Last time I checked, teachers couldn't march into a senator's office with a briefcase of cash.
The final desperation that leaves you gasping for air - the story was over, the ending happy, and all of a sudden the greatest trajedy of all (for the hobbits) is revealed.
Really? I found it to all be rather long-winded. You have close to 1000 pages of the story of the ring and the war, then 50 about the Scouring of the Shire. It all seemed a little tacked on at the end and really only serves to show that final fate of Saruman and not much else. Sure, you could go on about how it shows that not even the Shire was untouched by war, that you can never really go home again, etc., but I grew rather restless reading it. It doesn't seem like a great tragedy because the hobbits eventually win everything back and restore the Shire. I just don't see how it's the most important part of the trilogy and is something more than a story inside a story.
I have a feeling that the makers of these cameras will start to spin how the computer community is to blame for hacking every consumer product and making it do things that the manufacturer never intended. They can say stuff like "We can't make any good products because when we do, someone finds a way to hack and ruin it!" They then run behind the DMCA so that they can make money on a plan that is shown to be flawed. Do they make a better product? Nope. They just get behind their lawyers and try to cram bad products down the public's throat. I say we need need to spend less money fighting for flawed methodologies and products (do you hear me RIAA/MPAA?) and more time on R&D.
This poses an interesting question... Do you think they will release the super-DVD collection with all 6 movies + extras after Ep. III is released? Will everyone go out and buy the OT and then go out and buy some sort of collector's edition when and if it's available? How many copies of Star Wars can you have: Official DVD, bootleg DVD, collector's edition DVD, VHS, LaserDisc? I'm tired of buying the same movie over and over again out of fear that I will be missing a window of oportunity to ever own it at all.
Wow! I think this is the first time I've ever seen all posters agree with each other... Gator is crap. On most articles, there will always be that minority which might say "Microsoft isn't that bad." Or, "Linux does have a downside." Or, "The RIAA does have a point." However, from the cross-section of posts I've read, 100% of/. posters hate Gator. Now that we have found a common ground, let us rejoice and mend our other differences. Let the healing begin...
I grabbed the little shit by his shirt. "So...you're going to copy this to your friends over The Internet, punk?" I asked him in my best Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry voice.
"Uh y-yeh." He mumbled, shocked.
"That's it. What's your name? You're blacklisted. Now take yourself and your little bitch friend out of my store - and don't come back." I barked.
Yeah, that sounds like a great place to take a family. You can't get buy songs with offensive lyrics, but you can get roughed-up by the store owner.
But seriously, I don't see how a blacklist could possibly work. You threw out someone who was going to buy a CD from you store. If that person is blacklisted, your store and any other music store will never see a penny from him again. Now how is that going to help your business? And guess what? That CD will still find its way onto the internet. So, when all is said and done, the CD is out there for download and you're out the $15 the kid was going to pay you before being tossed out. Good plan.
I wouldn't poke fingers at game developers. They are some of the brightest programmers out there. They know how to tweak code to get every last drop of performance they can. A lot of them know every trick in the book when it comes to getting code to perform in an optimal way.
The issue with games requiring the latest and greatest hardware is that the consumer is never satisfied with the results of real-time rendering. A game can always look better with more polygons or another render pass. Of course, more polygons and more render passes require more memory and speed. So a game will not let available resources remain unused if those resources could be used to make the game experience look better (of course, no hardware or coding can cover up a game that just isn't fun to play). Perhaps in the future the hardware will be available were game developers can create games that are "real-looking enough" and can throttle back on the amount of resources they need to consume. But until that day comes, a game will always benefit from better hardware.
While there are a plethora of 3D apps out there, knowing how to use Maya is a huge plus in a lot of markets. For a lot of companies in the entertainment industry, knowing how to use Maya is a must. If you walk into an interview for a movie company and say that you know Maya then you get a big plus. However, the interviewer might not have a clue what Blender is. If you want to develop stuff on your own, then sure, Blender is a good choice. But if you want to learn Maya, then use the Personal Learning Edition.
We still have a good 'ole 386 with a huge 16 MHz processor! I think the RAM is embedded on the motherboard (I don't recall if it was 2 or 4 megs) along with the video card (top of the line, ran things in VGA so it had to be good). It is running some flavor of DOS on it. Nothing special, except I have fond memories of trying to get the original "Wing Commander" to work. I got the game for Christmas one year before my parents knew anything about system requirements for software. They couldn't comprehend that just because the software says it's for the PC, doesn't mean that it will run on our PC.
Now, the one thing that rocks about those old computers is that they taught me the ins and outs of how computers work. I like the days when you had to manually move jumpers and fumble around with configuration files and memory managers to get the most basic things to work. Kids these days have it too easy...
I'm beginning to wonder if the industry will be in a far different place than Microsoft envisions 3 years down the line."
Unfortunately, it's the industy that revolves around MS, not the other way around. So the marketplace will be whatever MS says it will be in 3 years. MS is very good at directing people down a very tightly-controlled channel where they must upgrade to the latest and greatest at some time or another. It's like "The Matrix"... people are part of a system and aren't ready to be unplugged. As time goes on and they get more used to the system, the harder it is for them to get out. So, by 2006 the MS users will be exactly where Microsoft wants them to be, that is, ready to upgrade to Longhorn.
Personally, I blame it all on CGI. What is has made films too easy to produce. Star Wars: A New Hope was brilliant, because Lucas had to tell a story
Actually, it was A New Hope that was one of the first real "Blockbuster" movies as we know them today. Think about the 70's... it was an era of the quiet movie. You know, The Godfather, Rocky (yes, the first Rocky was a great movie), and so forth. Then, in 1977 Star Wars came along and blew everyone away with its awesome special effects. Believe me, people weren't seeing the movie over and over again because of the great actors and dialog, but because it was wildly imaginative and fun to watch. No one had seen special effects of that kind since it took us from the "Flash Gordon" era to modern special effects. It was then followed by a huge marketing campaign that had everything from SW T-shirts to pencils. It was the first of its kind where people would wait in lines around the block to get into the theater.
If you read a lot about the history of Star Wars, a lot of people say that it was the first real blockbuster where marketing and grand effects took center stage.
Slashdot Mirror
This is an area where I think a system like Xbox Live could really start to shine. Why not offer limited, playable demos through the Live service? Since you know that people will have a broadband connection hooked up anyway and it has this large harddrive that goes mostly unused, why not put some demos on it? If I had a nice menu of various Xbox titles that I could browse and select, I would probably go out and buy more games, particularly maybe those games I would usually overlook. It would take a while to download a playable demo, but people download movies and games all the time so this wouldn't be that much different. Heck, why not have it download in the background while playing another game? I know they have demo CDs and things, but having all the demos in one location would really be cool. It's like going to Apple's Quicktime trailer site where you can preview tons of movies in one stop.
Illegal, yes... worthy of jail time? No. Let's have the punishment fit the crime. Afterall, I can go about speeding in my car and potentially kill someone and I will only get fined $100. You can get completely wasted one night and only spend an evening in jail for being drunk and disorderly in public. But, if you log onto a P2P network and download a song, you get your entire life ruined because you are now a convicted fellon? And imagine the strain on the legal system if this started happening on a large scale. Heck, I would be pissed if I were a judge and had to sit through another case of "The City of Los Angeles vs. Molly Parker for Copyright Infringement in the 2nd degree".
I worked for a brief period of time at a game company. While there I realized that developers prefer to write games for consols because they have pretty standard libraries and specifications. They don't like hacking all their code to get it to work with various graphics cards and other computer configurations. Intead, they would rather want to use that time to tweak their code to get maximum performance on a specific set of hardware. I used to be a PC gamer, but now most of my games are played on the Xbox. It creates a good separation between game time and work time.
Rare chance? I don't know about you, but the same commute to the same job gets pretty boring after a while. In my day-to-day life, my natural surroundings aren't that exciting unless you consider reading the new ads on the sides of busses and buildings fun.
And how many times has a Hans Zimmer soundtrack been used in trailers? It seems like every new action or suspense movie trailer has "Crimson Tide" or "Gladiator" going through it. I actually get a kick out of identifying the score... it's a little geek trait of mine. But I will only use this power for good, never for evil.
Does this mean I have to stop using the top of my computer as a food tray? It was so convinient to be able to place a plate and glass on top of the case while I'm working.
So what's the lesson learned? When you're young, work the job you like. You have your entire life to work jobs you hate and once you get that house, new car, wife, and children it will be tougher to leave a bad job if it pays well. When you're young and basically all you have in your life it work, make that work as enjoyable as possible. Plan for the future, but don't let that possible future ruin your present.
I agree. LucasArts has been one of the few companies that has still invested in creating adventure games. They are one of the best in that category. However, all their critically-acclaimed adventure games have not done very well in the market place. Grim Fandango was a great game, but it wasn't exactly flying off the shelves. The Monkey Island games were also fun, but didn't set any records. There are those faithful that will always play adventure games, but their numbers are going down. It's simple supply and demand and there just isn't demand for it. Unfortunately, any slapped-together Star Wars game will almost always outsell a finely crafted LucasArts adventure game.
Basically, I liked my education where I was taught concepts in the context of a language. You want to learn about memory allocation? Teach pointers and things in C. You want to learn about object oriented models... use Java or C++. You want to learn about how a computer functions at a base level, learn assembly. The language itself should never be the end goal, it should be a means to learn the concepts. The best programmers I've encountered are ones who have ideas, not ones who can't think outside a particular language.
Yeah, I know I hate it when a movie is good because an actor plays his role really well. Movies should be good because they have a lot of explosions, and crashes, and people saying naughty words. But at least we both agree that the movie was good.
Does this mean you would need to provide a valid credit card number to set up an email account? That's done already if you go through an ISP, but what about all those free, web-based email servers? Or what about people who have set up their own email server on a PC? How would you go about tracking down these people and billing them?
There is one thing we have all learned from the spammers and that is that they are smart. They have just as many smart programmers working for them as we have fighting against them. They know how to avoid detection. Spam and identity theft go hand and hand. So if they were financially responsible, whose to say they wouldn't just fork over a stolen credit card number and have Joe Sixpack pick up the tab?
we'll all be talking about this old network called "The Internet". We'll talk about how cool it was before the UN and an bunch of delegates came in and screwed it up. Historians will look back and trace why exactly the Internet fell. It will look something like this:
2005: Having survived the bad press, the RIAA and the MPAA split off into their own countries, gained admission to the UN, and outlawed the use of any digital music or video across a network.
2007: The world, angry at the U.S.A. for their 3rd war with Iraq, put sanctions on the U.S.'s use of the world wide web.
2008: After a year of web sanctions, the U.S. launches a military campaign on Malaysia since they had the most votes for the U.S. sanctions. This brings the number of current U.S. military campaigns to 10.
2010: The countries of RIA and MPA (remember, they dropped that last "A" back in 2005) successfully defeat the U.S. whose military was spread really thin due to their most recent war with England.
2012: The RIA, now the most powerful member of the U.N., indefinitely bans all world-wide Internet use since they are still complaining that artists are not getting paid for their work.
2014: The Open Source community, fresh off a victory against SCO, start building their own network called "Linet". It goes live with 30 million users connecting to it within the first 24 hours.
2015: "Linet" achieves self-awareness and launches an attack against the humans... the end.
And besides, what is wrong with the words "slave" and "master"? Yes, slavery itself is wrong, but the word itself is not. It does not refer to a specific race, creed, religion, etc. There are plenty of words that are used in our language that could have a bad connotation if taken in the wrong context. If "slave" is wrong in a computer context, then her are some other things that are not correct:
- Mouse: vermin that spreads disease so that has to be renamed to "x/y coordinate changer"
- Joystick: sexual connotations so that has to be renamed to "gamer's handle"
- Motherboard: too much bias toward a certain gender so that has to be renamed to "parentboard"
- Hard Drive: again, sexual connotations so that has to be renamed to "magnetic storage device".
Any use of these old words will result in immediate imprisonment and fines.-prozac79
"Making email fun again, one letter at a time"
Making email fun, one letter at a time
Really? I found it to all be rather long-winded. You have close to 1000 pages of the story of the ring and the war, then 50 about the Scouring of the Shire. It all seemed a little tacked on at the end and really only serves to show that final fate of Saruman and not much else. Sure, you could go on about how it shows that not even the Shire was untouched by war, that you can never really go home again, etc., but I grew rather restless reading it. It doesn't seem like a great tragedy because the hobbits eventually win everything back and restore the Shire. I just don't see how it's the most important part of the trilogy and is something more than a story inside a story.
I have a feeling that the makers of these cameras will start to spin how the computer community is to blame for hacking every consumer product and making it do things that the manufacturer never intended. They can say stuff like "We can't make any good products because when we do, someone finds a way to hack and ruin it!" They then run behind the DMCA so that they can make money on a plan that is shown to be flawed. Do they make a better product? Nope. They just get behind their lawyers and try to cram bad products down the public's throat. I say we need need to spend less money fighting for flawed methodologies and products (do you hear me RIAA/MPAA?) and more time on R&D.
This poses an interesting question... Do you think they will release the super-DVD collection with all 6 movies + extras after Ep. III is released? Will everyone go out and buy the OT and then go out and buy some sort of collector's edition when and if it's available? How many copies of Star Wars can you have: Official DVD, bootleg DVD, collector's edition DVD, VHS, LaserDisc? I'm tired of buying the same movie over and over again out of fear that I will be missing a window of oportunity to ever own it at all.
Thanks for the buck Bill... I'll be sure to pass it along.
Wow! I think this is the first time I've ever seen all posters agree with each other... Gator is crap. On most articles, there will always be that minority which might say "Microsoft isn't that bad." Or, "Linux does have a downside." Or, "The RIAA does have a point." However, from the cross-section of posts I've read, 100% of /. posters hate Gator. Now that we have found a common ground, let us rejoice and mend our other differences. Let the healing begin...
"Uh y-yeh." He mumbled, shocked.
"That's it. What's your name? You're blacklisted. Now take yourself and your little bitch friend out of my store - and don't come back." I barked.
Yeah, that sounds like a great place to take a family. You can't get buy songs with offensive lyrics, but you can get roughed-up by the store owner.
But seriously, I don't see how a blacklist could possibly work. You threw out someone who was going to buy a CD from you store. If that person is blacklisted, your store and any other music store will never see a penny from him again. Now how is that going to help your business? And guess what? That CD will still find its way onto the internet. So, when all is said and done, the CD is out there for download and you're out the $15 the kid was going to pay you before being tossed out. Good plan.
The issue with games requiring the latest and greatest hardware is that the consumer is never satisfied with the results of real-time rendering. A game can always look better with more polygons or another render pass. Of course, more polygons and more render passes require more memory and speed. So a game will not let available resources remain unused if those resources could be used to make the game experience look better (of course, no hardware or coding can cover up a game that just isn't fun to play). Perhaps in the future the hardware will be available were game developers can create games that are "real-looking enough" and can throttle back on the amount of resources they need to consume. But until that day comes, a game will always benefit from better hardware.
While there are a plethora of 3D apps out there, knowing how to use Maya is a huge plus in a lot of markets. For a lot of companies in the entertainment industry, knowing how to use Maya is a must. If you walk into an interview for a movie company and say that you know Maya then you get a big plus. However, the interviewer might not have a clue what Blender is. If you want to develop stuff on your own, then sure, Blender is a good choice. But if you want to learn Maya, then use the Personal Learning Edition.
Now, the one thing that rocks about those old computers is that they taught me the ins and outs of how computers work. I like the days when you had to manually move jumpers and fumble around with configuration files and memory managers to get the most basic things to work. Kids these days have it too easy...
Unfortunately, it's the industy that revolves around MS, not the other way around. So the marketplace will be whatever MS says it will be in 3 years. MS is very good at directing people down a very tightly-controlled channel where they must upgrade to the latest and greatest at some time or another. It's like "The Matrix"... people are part of a system and aren't ready to be unplugged. As time goes on and they get more used to the system, the harder it is for them to get out. So, by 2006 the MS users will be exactly where Microsoft wants them to be, that is, ready to upgrade to Longhorn.
Actually, it was A New Hope that was one of the first real "Blockbuster" movies as we know them today. Think about the 70's... it was an era of the quiet movie. You know, The Godfather, Rocky (yes, the first Rocky was a great movie), and so forth. Then, in 1977 Star Wars came along and blew everyone away with its awesome special effects. Believe me, people weren't seeing the movie over and over again because of the great actors and dialog, but because it was wildly imaginative and fun to watch. No one had seen special effects of that kind since it took us from the "Flash Gordon" era to modern special effects. It was then followed by a huge marketing campaign that had everything from SW T-shirts to pencils. It was the first of its kind where people would wait in lines around the block to get into the theater.
If you read a lot about the history of Star Wars, a lot of people say that it was the first real blockbuster where marketing and grand effects took center stage.