That from a government I'm convinced wants it to be Chechens so they can continue cleansing the ethnics from an oilpatch.
Maybe, but as the article states, the Russian government also wants the incident to look like Chechnya wasn't a factor. I think it is still a little too early to tell what really happened and who was really involved.
Wikipedia has an excellent explanation, especially in detailing the targets. The article here is now subscription only, but you can get the jist of it from what is given. Obviously you could google for "Steven Hatfill", who at least was suspected as being part of the leak (I have no idea if he is still under suspicion, but obviously the government figured it was from one of their labs if they were looking at him). A good (early) article about why it looks like military anthrax samples were used is here.
But honestly, you probably should have just briefly looked into this yourself. Obviously most of this is common knowledge to quite a few people, and has been for some time (I learned that it was almost definitely US military in origin probably well more than six months ago).
It's mind-bogglingly fast. I put it on my slower machines (128 MB of RAM). It doesn't cost much to get rid of the adbar, and there are worse things to spend $40 on than software.
I certainly agree with you, especially about multiple choices being better. But wouldn't something better to spend $40 on be more RAM for that computer?:D
The problem then probably wasn't the videocard. I play Doom3 on a Radeon 9600 at medium quality and 800x600 and it is very playable. Hovers between 30-60 frame a second almost the entire time, with only some rare exceptions (like a certain boss, or one or two of the non-action scenes that id intentionally made lower framerate for visual quality purposes). I can't imagine why a 9800 would have problems...
Hollywood doesn't actually get any money for the ads, AFAIK. It all goes to the cinema, which actually needs it. The problem is that current films just don't stay in the theaters for very long, and with the type of profit sharing that is used nowadays by the studios and the theaters, the theaters just aren't doing very well financially.
Let me explain: usually the first week or so of a film release will have the theater earning something like 10% of the ticket sales. Every week thereafter they will make another 10% or so, cumulative. This wasn't a big deal when good films would stay in theaters for half a year or so, and when far less films were released, but that simply isn't how it is done nowadays (why exactly this is is an exercize left to the reader). And the studios generally only heavily advertise a film for its first week (there are exceptions, but the advertising is still only heavy right before release), which just makes films maximize more and more their first week sales at the expense of long-term sales. The studios then rush the film out to DVD fairly quickly now (sometimes far less than six months after theatrical release!), which doesn't help the theater at all, of course.
Don't get me wrong, I despise advertising in all its forms (I rarely watch any television for just that reason, and never the major networks, who advertise more frequently. I block 99% of all ads on the web, etc.). But the theaters don't really have any other options other than bankruptsy, as the film studios have nearly all of the control in this situation. I just ignore the ads in the theater myself, taking the opportunity to continue conversation with my friends. Just pretend the film was delayed 10 minutes or so (anything longer would be pretty ridiculous on the part of the theater, but it just hasn't happened in my recent experience), maybe the projector isn't ready...
(And I am pretty sure pre-film ads go way back, just usually it would be something like a short film or news clip that mentioned the sponser at the end. There were definitely some ads in theaters back in the 80s, but usually only for stuff like Coca Cola or the candy the theater sells. They aren't new, though they are more aggressive.)
But Dvorak here is stating that Word sucks and should be replaced, which is in the realm of facts, not prediction.
(And he has certainly been wrong lots of times before, but that is sort of in the job description. If he only made predictions that were definite, sure things, they would be boring and no one would read his articles. Most people would just look at the headline, say "Duh", and move on.)
You seem knowledgeable about this, so I was wondering if you know of any good wiki server software for Windows? Eventually I will be running linux, but until then I would like to do something like you are mentioning...it sounds ridiculously useful. Thanks!
You may already be aware of this, but David Lynch was actually going to originally direct Return of the Jedi. I believe he turned it down to work on Dune (though I am probably wrong). Would have been very interesting...
Whew. I was worried there too. Amped 2 is just an awesome game - nothing else like it out there. A shame more people don't play it online.
Amped2's heavy use of analog controls and the need to be stylish in your tricks really push it above and beyond the Tony Hawk series and its clones - it really is the next evolutionary stage in 'extreme' (ugh) sports games. Maybe Amped 3 will finally open more people's eyes...
Your numbers say that there are literally millions of gamers who want online play. While you are certainly correct that not every gamer wants it, any company that would intentionally ignore that large of an audience, with no real benefit by doing so, is just stupid and/or stubborn. The two companies that are at least attempting to satisfy every segment of the gaming market are the two most successful console-makers right now - that isn't a coincidence.
(And that is ignoring the whole network effects that internet gaming causes, which are very beneficial for console sales. Xbox Live users buy more Xbox games than your average person. They see and hear that their friends are really enjoying a game they don't have. That is the best advertising you can get!)
Price-fixing. Lots of cases of this, including convictions in multiple countries. Consoles, games, etc.
Attempts to impose government censorship on games (to hurt rival Sega). Just being so censorship crazy in general is bad enough in my eyes.
Threatening retailers not to advertise the coming Xbox, or they wouldn't get enough GBA stock.
All that shit they did to third parties during the SNES and NES days. (Apparently more recently, too, but it was especially prominent back then.)
That shit they pulled on Sony with the SNES CD-ROM. Karma killed them on that one of course.
Most of their voice-acting (Slippy, Toad in MarioKart, etc.):D
Etc.
(And though it can't be confirmed obviously, the death of good old Gunpei was pretty freaking suspicious. It has "yakuza hit" written all over it, IMHO.)
Even worse, Nintendo actually started the whole regulation thing by going to Lieberman before the controversy had even began. He wasn't even looking into it prior to that.
What Nintendo console fits the definition of a "home video game system with hard disk drive and Internet access capability", since that is what the patent pertains to?
You originally talked about "half-decent" dev houses - innovative games weren't even mentioned. What is your complaint exactly?
(And why would Renderware be advertising all the niche games that their engine is used for? They are trying to sell their engine to developers as a product that can be used to make successful games in a variety of genres. The existing list does that perfectly. Sports games, action games, adventure games, strategy games, platforming games... They don't mention racing games, but hopefully any serious dev would already know about GTA3 and the awesome Burnout 2. Besides, it is obvious that most development houses using Renderware don't seem to allow their games being used for this PR, or games like GTA3 would be at the top of the list.)
Regardless, most innovative games leverage either some kind of existing technology (a modified previous game engine perhaps) or a design with the ability for lots of higher level game editing (various Brian Reynolds games like Alpha Centauri do this well). Those are really the only reasonable ways to do iterative (and hence innovative) development nowadays.
And I would love to know what your standards are for an inspired, original game. If something like The Movies doesn't fit them, I can't imagine a game that could.
Which is why we are saying Apple has limited users' choice in legal music. No DRMed music other than Apple's own is allowed. And if Apple can't/won't sell non-DRM music, you can hardly pretend that every other company should, and that it is their fault for not doing so...
Do keep in mind several of those 'achievements' are straight BS, or at best misleading (and some of them are admittedly understating certain positives!). For example, girls have been going to school in Iraq since the 1970s (it was a constitutional right). Some Americans and their 'knowledge' of the Middle East can be pretty funny sometimes ("the Taliban in Afghanistan were against girls going to school, so Iraq must have been the same thing!" seems to be the thought process here).
The grandparent post was talking about how bad the games are that Azure makes, not necessarily how weird Japanese arcade games are. And a relationship sim isn't that bizarre of a game design, really.
You're confusing originality with... I'm not even sure there's a word for it, but something along the lines of "lack of franchises."
No, the complaint that there is a lack of originality was a correct one. It is just that the grandparent poster was talking about setting/character originality, while you are talking about gameplay originality. Both are very important, though the former is definitely underrated by too many gamers. (And developers! Nintendo basically ignores it nowadays - very sad.)
A film's quality and originality aren't solely based on its acting (or direction, or whatever you think it most important). Having an original script or characters is crucial, too. Same thing with games and gameplay.
The new camera isn't a bugfix. It doesn't solve any of the 'problems' that bad players complained about in the first game (largely their inability to use the block button, though they blame it on the camera). It is essentially unusuable in combat, as everyone expected. Not a bugfix.
I don't think you really understand (or read!) the article. The point wasn't that game music nowadays is boring or poor, the point was that it really isn't game music. Nearly all of it is an attempt to be Hollywood (ex: sounding like John Williams, with a real or convincingly faked orchestra) or radio (ex: licensed pop music, or perhaps some popular electronica stuff).
Games are capable of having their own style of music, just like most films have a very 'film' soundtrack (even in films that consist mainly of 'real' songs, like Kill Bill - it uses the music in a very film way), or how an opera has a music style unique to it.
We don't really know what that game soundtrack should sound like yet. As the author pointed out, it took something like half a century to figure out how to make music for the piano properly, and that instrument saw considerably less evolution in that period compared to videogame hardware. For a while there, popular games were pushing new boundaries with sound, exploring just what a videogame could and should sound like.
But with few exceptions, we just aren't seeing that kind of uniqueness in game audio nowadays, and the author was complaining about that. Not that the music isn't entertaining or accomplished...
People who work for government bureaucracies are at least ostensibly working for the good of the country - something not remotely true of a publicly-owned corporation. Governments also have to follow stricter laws that serve to at least slightly protect citizens (obviously the prison system is not the best example of this working, but there are laws lurking somewhere in there at least). And most government agencies routinely face budget cuts, which has forced at least some prison systems to let some of the more minor criminals go.
Slashdot Mirror
A few years ago the teachers had a strike in my town (near Chicago). So needless to say, I disagree...
That from a government I'm convinced wants it to be Chechens so they can continue cleansing the ethnics from an oilpatch.
Maybe, but as the article states, the Russian government also wants the incident to look like Chechnya wasn't a factor. I think it is still a little too early to tell what really happened and who was really involved.
Wikipedia has an excellent explanation, especially in detailing the targets. The article here is now subscription only, but you can get the jist of it from what is given. Obviously you could google for "Steven Hatfill", who at least was suspected as being part of the leak (I have no idea if he is still under suspicion, but obviously the government figured it was from one of their labs if they were looking at him). A good (early) article about why it looks like military anthrax samples were used is here.
But honestly, you probably should have just briefly looked into this yourself. Obviously most of this is common knowledge to quite a few people, and has been for some time (I learned that it was almost definitely US military in origin probably well more than six months ago).
It's mind-bogglingly fast. I put it on my slower machines (128 MB of RAM). It doesn't cost much to get rid of the adbar, and there are worse things to spend $40 on than software.
:D
I certainly agree with you, especially about multiple choices being better. But wouldn't something better to spend $40 on be more RAM for that computer?
The problem then probably wasn't the videocard. I play Doom3 on a Radeon 9600 at medium quality and 800x600 and it is very playable. Hovers between 30-60 frame a second almost the entire time, with only some rare exceptions (like a certain boss, or one or two of the non-action scenes that id intentionally made lower framerate for visual quality purposes). I can't imagine why a 9800 would have problems...
(i.e. millions of dollars jettisoned on the whims of an undertalented first-film-was-a-hit director)
Critical opinions aside, Kill Bill made quite a tidy profit for Miramax. So the money was hardly "jettisoned"...
(I enjoyed Kill Bill, but I can definitely admit it is a love-hate kind of film.)
Hollywood doesn't actually get any money for the ads, AFAIK. It all goes to the cinema, which actually needs it. The problem is that current films just don't stay in the theaters for very long, and with the type of profit sharing that is used nowadays by the studios and the theaters, the theaters just aren't doing very well financially.
Let me explain: usually the first week or so of a film release will have the theater earning something like 10% of the ticket sales. Every week thereafter they will make another 10% or so, cumulative. This wasn't a big deal when good films would stay in theaters for half a year or so, and when far less films were released, but that simply isn't how it is done nowadays (why exactly this is is an exercize left to the reader). And the studios generally only heavily advertise a film for its first week (there are exceptions, but the advertising is still only heavy right before release), which just makes films maximize more and more their first week sales at the expense of long-term sales. The studios then rush the film out to DVD fairly quickly now (sometimes far less than six months after theatrical release!), which doesn't help the theater at all, of course.
Don't get me wrong, I despise advertising in all its forms (I rarely watch any television for just that reason, and never the major networks, who advertise more frequently. I block 99% of all ads on the web, etc.). But the theaters don't really have any other options other than bankruptsy, as the film studios have nearly all of the control in this situation. I just ignore the ads in the theater myself, taking the opportunity to continue conversation with my friends. Just pretend the film was delayed 10 minutes or so (anything longer would be pretty ridiculous on the part of the theater, but it just hasn't happened in my recent experience), maybe the projector isn't ready...
(And I am pretty sure pre-film ads go way back, just usually it would be something like a short film or news clip that mentioned the sponser at the end. There were definitely some ads in theaters back in the 80s, but usually only for stuff like Coca Cola or the candy the theater sells. They aren't new, though they are more aggressive.)
But Dvorak here is stating that Word sucks and should be replaced, which is in the realm of facts, not prediction.
(And he has certainly been wrong lots of times before, but that is sort of in the job description. If he only made predictions that were definite, sure things, they would be boring and no one would read his articles. Most people would just look at the headline, say "Duh", and move on.)
You seem knowledgeable about this, so I was wondering if you know of any good wiki server software for Windows? Eventually I will be running linux, but until then I would like to do something like you are mentioning...it sounds ridiculously useful. Thanks!
Did you see A.I.? Did you see how Speilberg massacred the ending with and extra 30min of flimsy pseudo aliens?
:D
No, some of saw what really happened.
(I admit the ending threw me for a loop when I first saw it. But after I rewatched the film and understood it, it is one of my favorite endings ever.)
You may already be aware of this, but David Lynch was actually going to originally direct Return of the Jedi. I believe he turned it down to work on Dune (though I am probably wrong). Would have been very interesting...
Whew. I was worried there too. Amped 2 is just an awesome game - nothing else like it out there. A shame more people don't play it online.
Amped2's heavy use of analog controls and the need to be stylish in your tricks really push it above and beyond the Tony Hawk series and its clones - it really is the next evolutionary stage in 'extreme' (ugh) sports games. Maybe Amped 3 will finally open more people's eyes...
Your numbers say that there are literally millions of gamers who want online play. While you are certainly correct that not every gamer wants it, any company that would intentionally ignore that large of an audience, with no real benefit by doing so, is just stupid and/or stubborn. The two companies that are at least attempting to satisfy every segment of the gaming market are the two most successful console-makers right now - that isn't a coincidence.
(And that is ignoring the whole network effects that internet gaming causes, which are very beneficial for console sales. Xbox Live users buy more Xbox games than your average person. They see and hear that their friends are really enjoying a game they don't have. That is the best advertising you can get!)
Some Evil Nintendo Stuff:
:D
Price-fixing. Lots of cases of this, including convictions in multiple countries. Consoles, games, etc.
Attempts to impose government censorship on games (to hurt rival Sega). Just being so censorship crazy in general is bad enough in my eyes.
Threatening retailers not to advertise the coming Xbox, or they wouldn't get enough GBA stock.
All that shit they did to third parties during the SNES and NES days. (Apparently more recently, too, but it was especially prominent back then.)
That shit they pulled on Sony with the SNES CD-ROM. Karma killed them on that one of course.
Most of their voice-acting (Slippy, Toad in MarioKart, etc.)
Etc.
(And though it can't be confirmed obviously, the death of good old Gunpei was pretty freaking suspicious. It has "yakuza hit" written all over it, IMHO.)
Even worse, Nintendo actually started the whole regulation thing by going to Lieberman before the controversy had even began. He wasn't even looking into it prior to that.
What Nintendo console fits the definition of a "home video game system with hard disk drive and Internet access capability", since that is what the patent pertains to?
You originally talked about "half-decent" dev houses - innovative games weren't even mentioned. What is your complaint exactly?
(And why would Renderware be advertising all the niche games that their engine is used for? They are trying to sell their engine to developers as a product that can be used to make successful games in a variety of genres. The existing list does that perfectly. Sports games, action games, adventure games, strategy games, platforming games... They don't mention racing games, but hopefully any serious dev would already know about GTA3 and the awesome Burnout 2. Besides, it is obvious that most development houses using Renderware don't seem to allow their games being used for this PR, or games like GTA3 would be at the top of the list.)
Regardless, most innovative games leverage either some kind of existing technology (a modified previous game engine perhaps) or a design with the ability for lots of higher level game editing (various Brian Reynolds games like Alpha Centauri do this well). Those are really the only reasonable ways to do iterative (and hence innovative) development nowadays.
And I would love to know what your standards are for an inspired, original game. If something like The Movies doesn't fit them, I can't imagine a game that could.
If they have to reencode a lossy AAC file to a lossy MP3 player to get it portable, they aren't getting good quality regardless.
Which is why we are saying Apple has limited users' choice in legal music. No DRMed music other than Apple's own is allowed. And if Apple can't/won't sell non-DRM music, you can hardly pretend that every other company should, and that it is their fault for not doing so...
Do keep in mind several of those 'achievements' are straight BS, or at best misleading (and some of them are admittedly understating certain positives!). For example, girls have been going to school in Iraq since the 1970s (it was a constitutional right). Some Americans and their 'knowledge' of the Middle East can be pretty funny sometimes ("the Taliban in Afghanistan were against girls going to school, so Iraq must have been the same thing!" seems to be the thought process here).
A fairly sound breakdown can be found here.
The grandparent post was talking about how bad the games are that Azure makes, not necessarily how weird Japanese arcade games are. And a relationship sim isn't that bizarre of a game design, really.
You're confusing originality with... I'm not even sure there's a word for it, but something along the lines of "lack of franchises."
No, the complaint that there is a lack of originality was a correct one. It is just that the grandparent poster was talking about setting/character originality, while you are talking about gameplay originality. Both are very important, though the former is definitely underrated by too many gamers. (And developers! Nintendo basically ignores it nowadays - very sad.)
A film's quality and originality aren't solely based on its acting (or direction, or whatever you think it most important). Having an original script or characters is crucial, too. Same thing with games and gameplay.
The new camera isn't a bugfix. It doesn't solve any of the 'problems' that bad players complained about in the first game (largely their inability to use the block button, though they blame it on the camera). It is essentially unusuable in combat, as everyone expected. Not a bugfix.
I don't think you really understand (or read!) the article. The point wasn't that game music nowadays is boring or poor, the point was that it really isn't game music. Nearly all of it is an attempt to be Hollywood (ex: sounding like John Williams, with a real or convincingly faked orchestra) or radio (ex: licensed pop music, or perhaps some popular electronica stuff).
Games are capable of having their own style of music, just like most films have a very 'film' soundtrack (even in films that consist mainly of 'real' songs, like Kill Bill - it uses the music in a very film way), or how an opera has a music style unique to it.
We don't really know what that game soundtrack should sound like yet. As the author pointed out, it took something like half a century to figure out how to make music for the piano properly, and that instrument saw considerably less evolution in that period compared to videogame hardware. For a while there, popular games were pushing new boundaries with sound, exploring just what a videogame could and should sound like.
But with few exceptions, we just aren't seeing that kind of uniqueness in game audio nowadays, and the author was complaining about that. Not that the music isn't entertaining or accomplished...
People who work for government bureaucracies are at least ostensibly working for the good of the country - something not remotely true of a publicly-owned corporation. Governments also have to follow stricter laws that serve to at least slightly protect citizens (obviously the prison system is not the best example of this working, but there are laws lurking somewhere in there at least). And most government agencies routinely face budget cuts, which has forced at least some prison systems to let some of the more minor criminals go.