Point taken. I was wrong to imply that 1984 was only about communism.
I still think, though, that the book is overused as a metaphor. It gets tiring to hear invoked the specter of a totalitarian state whenever a discussion of rights encroachment comes up. It's a slippery slope argument gone wild.
This is basically what the Axis did in WWII. It's also cropped up in fictional works like 1984, Aeon Flux, Equilibrium, etc.
Um, no. Hilter took power in Germany by leveraging nationalist and racist fervor, and working popular anger about unfair WW1 reparations treaties. The Japanese empire was a result of popular imperialist ideals dating from the 19th century, and a desire to prove themselves as a major world power. In the Soviet Union (which 1984 was meant to represent), the totalitarian state was a direct outgrowth of the popular communist revolution. In none of these cases was fear of terrorism at all a factor. (I haven't heard those science fiction books you mention, though.)
The importance of terrorism in world politics is actually a rather new thing dating from the 90s. In the past, terrorists had neither WMD nor suicide bombing techniques, so they were much less dangerous. The Star Trek writers probably were more inspired by current events than history.
Side note: what is it with people conflating fascism, stalinism and (the comparatively *extremely* tame) current US rights restrictions as if they were all the same? These are all completely different, both qualitatively and quantitatively! It makes me grind my teeth together whenever somebody uses 1984 as an analogy for a contemporary phenomenon. 1984 is about communism, and communism is dead. It's just not very relevant anymore.
I hear the CPU is going to be a different architecture (PowerPC IIRC). That means the only way to be backwards compatible is to have some kind of emulation (software or hardware), and for that the Xbox2 would have to be several orders of magnitude faster than the Xbox. Unfortunately, since the Xbox2 is only one generation ahead, it likely won't cut it. (consider the amount of power required just to emulate a PS1 on modern PCs!).
What? Who cares what they call it? Whatever word you use, a spam folder is a spam folder, and the entire point of its existence is that it's junk you're not supposed to have to read. You can't go around putting legitimate mail in it, causing people to miss it, and then explain it all away by saying, oh, I said it was bulk. What a lame excuse.
You say you're a Linux user; why not plug one of your Linux boxes to the 'net, use it as NAT-routing firewall using iptables, and download the updates from behind the firewall? It's always worked for me. Or if you only have one machine, you can buy a cheap NAT router for 50$ nowadays.
This solution seems so obvious to me that I wonder why you even bothered to ask. With your apparent technical knowledge, surely you must've thought of this. I'm inclined to think this question was just a veiled way to start an article bashing Microsoft about all the worms affecting their system.
But the suggestion that Japanese people generally hate all American games is complete and utter bullshit.
Back when I lived in Japan in 2002, I visited many game stores, and at the small or medium sized ones there usually wasn't a single American game on the shelves. Most of the Japanese people who have an Xbox bought it for the beach volleyball game, not Halo. And since the PC is such a stronghold for American games, you'd expect PC game stores to stock mostly American, right? Wrong. It's 100% hentai.
Maybe "pretty poorly" was a poor way of putting it, but I considered a few hundred thousand copies to be not a good showing for one of the greatest American games of the past decade. Imagine how a bad game would sell.
It sounds like things have changed somewhat since I lived there, but I don't think my claim is "utter bullshit". American games remain wildly unpopular in Japan.
They're both equally awful, as far as I'm concerned. Things like this should always be parodies --- that way, the badness of the acting and the sets becomes part of the joke. Otherwise, it's just painful.
No, it has nothing to do with patriotism or racism, from what I can tell. For various reasons, they just think American games suck. For example, American artwork tends to be gritty and realistic, whereas they prefer cutesy and cartoonish artwork. American games have fast camera movement (especially FPSes, which are a 99% American genre) and --- I'm not sure why exactly this is, but --- it makes many Japanese people motion sick. American games prioritize nonlinear and "free" gameplay, Japanese gamers prefer a streamlined and directed experience (e.g. consider Morrowind vs. Final Fantasy). Many American games focus on online multiplayer, but Japanese people don't seem to think much of it (though maybe this is just a technology penetration thing). Those are the main problems.
For example, what are we supposed to make of this:
"We recognize the right to political secession by political entities, private groups, or individuals."
This is maybe a little unclear, but since it's in the "diplomatic policy" section, I think they're advocating the official recognition of Taiwan. I oppose this on practical grounds, but at any rate it's not a crackpot policy. As for opposing censorship, I don't see what's so bad about that.
I have some serious disagreements with the Libertarian party, but on the whole their policies appear sane to me. What bothers me the most about them is the simplistic and unnuanced nature of their ideas.
The Consitution Party, though, sound like a bunch of fundamentalist nutwings. They advocate the death penalty for drug offenses (!!!). Truly crazy.
That may be your view, but Japanese people generally hate all American games. Halo is obscure, and even GTA3 sold pretty poorly over there. If MS can't get Japanese developers on board, they are doomed in the Japanese market.
But everyone should be using GPG. It's a scandal that we have strong, fast encrytion available today, but nobody is using it because none of the email client makers are bothering to properly integrate it in their clients. The average user doesn't know how easy it is to read his mail, and will often email passwords and such in plaintext. It's up to the developers to make the transition; due to widespread ignorance of the risks, there will never be user demand.
Haha, that's hilariously bad. A high-school kid could've figured out how to disable autorun and bypass that protection.
My pet theory is that the reason all DRM schemes are so hopelessly weak is that whenever the music industry confronts a competent programmer with the request to build a DRM scheme, he immediately throws up his hands and says it's impossible to do properly. The only people who will attempt the assignment are those who are too incompetent to understand that the schemes can't work.
I had the same type of problem with XP, but I finally fixed it thanks to this great forum thread. In a nutshell, here are the common problems:
The "Enable IEEE 802.1x authentication for this network" checkbox. As I recall, this is enabled by default (!?) even though the vast majority of wireless systems don't use this. (This is something completely different from WEP.) This must be off or you'll lose your connection every few minutes, as the driver tries and fails to authenticate using this protocol. This was my problem.
XP sometimes has problems with hidden SSIDs. Make sure to broadcast yours. Yeah, it weakens your security somewhat, but it was only obscurity anyway. Use WEP or, even better, MAC address binding.
Finally, if neither of the above work for you, you can turn off the Wireless Zero service completely and use only your manufacturer's drivers. Go to Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Services and set Wireless Zero to "Disabled". You'll need to install the drivers from your manufacturer's CD, of course. Frankly, considering the problems with MS's drivers, I would recommend this for everybody.
It took me a long time to figure this out. I thought for a long time it was just intrinsic unreliability of 802.11b, but as I should've guessed it was Windows' fault. Having disabled Wireless Zero, my connection is now flawless on XP.
You might be right. But I wonder if the leak might not have caused a lot of chaos at Valve as well. I can imagine angry speeches from bosses, IT staff getting fired etc as a result of the crack. They may have had to realign much of their organization to have a stronger security focus. Certainly plain old delays are common in the gaming industry, but it seems also quite plausible to me that the leak may have played a part.
I'm glad police cyber-crimes units are taking care of real criminals instead of wasting their time going after petty file-sharers. These people (if they are indeed the culprits) are the real problem --- illegally breaking into servers and stealing private information. They directly hurt the community of Half-Life fans by causing disorder at Valve, and they probably had a negative effect on the entire gaming industry as companies were forced to tighten their security policy.
I'm a supporter of open source, but "forced open source" by cracking developers' computers and making their data public is just unethical. These people were real black hats; IIRC, they wrote cracking programs for their private use, specifically to crack Valve --- every sysadmin's worst nightmare. I hope crackdowns like this will get more prominent media attention in the future.
You're right that Office has a quality lead, but it's small enough that OpenOffice would normally overwhelm it with its unbeatable price lead. The real issue here is the closed file formats.
MySQL? It's better than Microsoft's SQL server offerings, last I heard. Are you confusing Microsoft with Oracle (who ships for Unix systems, BTW)?
You have a point with e-mail. Though perhaps if users had more awareness of what's letting all those e-mail viruses through, they wouldn't like Outlook's ease-of-use so much anymore.
The media player thing was likely intentional. v6 is more widely available, and a lot of people (like me) *really hate* media player v9. Anyway, you can easily change it in Tools->Options->Downloads->File Types.
Personally, I've only seen one page in 4 months that had serious rendering problems with Firefox. For those rare cases you can keep a copy of IE lying around.
My view is that the primary function of pre-university education is to get students enthusiastic about learning. What really matters is that a student gets into habit of reading and gathering info, and gets fired up about academic topics. The amount of education that can be accumulated by an enthusiastic lifelong learner far outweighs that that can be forced into students against their will during the few years of primary and secondary school.
It sounds like you're a good example of this. You may not have learned much when you were young, but this was more than made up for by your love of history. So I approve of this game (provided it's actually fun!).
The graphics in The Sims are far from poor, IMHO. There are probably something like 100 megs of 2d art in that game. That's why I tried to qualify my statement with "cheap-looking".
I agree with your second point, though. I was mostly speaking in terms of commercial success.
People in general value good stories much more than good graphics.
That may be so, but they don't show it with their wallets. There are a lot of films with excellent stories --- as good or better than Shrek --- being released every year. They are for the most part relatively low-budget, live-action films shown largely in film festivals. Take, for instance, Koreeda Hirokazu's After Life from a few years ago. IMHO, it's one of the greatest pieces of Japanese cinema of the last decade --- but most people have never even heard of it.
Yet, weak films like Independence Day and Terminator 3 are blockbusters. Are you sure people value good stories? I agree with you that it can only help your film's success to have a good story. But equally clearly, big budget is almost always the key factor, and story is a secondary.
The same can be applied to the gaming industry -- while games with amazing graphics may sell well initially, they will only last until the next eye candy comes out a few weeks later. Games with solid gameplay will continue to be played for years (see Counter Strike for an example).
Gameplay is of course important, but in today's videogame industry, both gameplay and graphics are essential to be a commercial success. Outside of the Gameboy Advance, where standards are lower, can you name a single widely successful game from the past 3 years with cheap-looking 2d graphics? Games with good gameplay but poor graphics can only achieve a cult following in today's market.
Note, I am not approving any of this --- I like good stories and good gameplay as well --- but I'm just trying to be realistic here.
Even more seriously, time is supposed to work around paradoxes in Bradbury's story, but the ending still involves a contradiction. Why are the characters that went back in time able to tell that the writing system had changed? Wouldn't their minds change as well from the timeline change, since they have seen only that writing system since they were born?
I'm not too fond of this story. The prose is extremely purple, the election business feels contrived, and the ending is cute but artificial (what does Travis have to gain by murdering the guy? The new world isn't bad enough already without being put into jail?). I've seen worse time travel stories (*cough* *cough* recent film also involving a butterfly), but I've also seen much better. Like that Simpsons halloween special where Homer accidentally builds a time machine while attempting to repair his toaster:).
At any rate, this story isn't long enough to make a feature-length film, so I expect the film won't have that much to do with it anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Doh. Good call. I should've added a "to my knowledge" after my claims.
I still think, though, that the book is overused as a metaphor. It gets tiring to hear invoked the specter of a totalitarian state whenever a discussion of rights encroachment comes up. It's a slippery slope argument gone wild.
Um, no. Hilter took power in Germany by leveraging nationalist and racist fervor, and working popular anger about unfair WW1 reparations treaties. The Japanese empire was a result of popular imperialist ideals dating from the 19th century, and a desire to prove themselves as a major world power. In the Soviet Union (which 1984 was meant to represent), the totalitarian state was a direct outgrowth of the popular communist revolution. In none of these cases was fear of terrorism at all a factor. (I haven't heard those science fiction books you mention, though.)
The importance of terrorism in world politics is actually a rather new thing dating from the 90s. In the past, terrorists had neither WMD nor suicide bombing techniques, so they were much less dangerous. The Star Trek writers probably were more inspired by current events than history.
Side note: what is it with people conflating fascism, stalinism and (the comparatively *extremely* tame) current US rights restrictions as if they were all the same? These are all completely different, both qualitatively and quantitatively! It makes me grind my teeth together whenever somebody uses 1984 as an analogy for a contemporary phenomenon. 1984 is about communism, and communism is dead. It's just not very relevant anymore.
I hear the CPU is going to be a different architecture (PowerPC IIRC). That means the only way to be backwards compatible is to have some kind of emulation (software or hardware), and for that the Xbox2 would have to be several orders of magnitude faster than the Xbox. Unfortunately, since the Xbox2 is only one generation ahead, it likely won't cut it. (consider the amount of power required just to emulate a PS1 on modern PCs!).
What? Who cares what they call it? Whatever word you use, a spam folder is a spam folder, and the entire point of its existence is that it's junk you're not supposed to have to read. You can't go around putting legitimate mail in it, causing people to miss it, and then explain it all away by saying, oh, I said it was bulk. What a lame excuse.
This solution seems so obvious to me that I wonder why you even bothered to ask. With your apparent technical knowledge, surely you must've thought of this. I'm inclined to think this question was just a veiled way to start an article bashing Microsoft about all the worms affecting their system.
Back when I lived in Japan in 2002, I visited many game stores, and at the small or medium sized ones there usually wasn't a single American game on the shelves. Most of the Japanese people who have an Xbox bought it for the beach volleyball game, not Halo. And since the PC is such a stronghold for American games, you'd expect PC game stores to stock mostly American, right? Wrong. It's 100% hentai.
Maybe "pretty poorly" was a poor way of putting it, but I considered a few hundred thousand copies to be not a good showing for one of the greatest American games of the past decade. Imagine how a bad game would sell.
It sounds like things have changed somewhat since I lived there, but I don't think my claim is "utter bullshit". American games remain wildly unpopular in Japan.
They're both equally awful, as far as I'm concerned. Things like this should always be parodies --- that way, the badness of the acting and the sets becomes part of the joke. Otherwise, it's just painful.
No, it has nothing to do with patriotism or racism, from what I can tell. For various reasons, they just think American games suck. For example, American artwork tends to be gritty and realistic, whereas they prefer cutesy and cartoonish artwork. American games have fast camera movement (especially FPSes, which are a 99% American genre) and --- I'm not sure why exactly this is, but --- it makes many Japanese people motion sick. American games prioritize nonlinear and "free" gameplay, Japanese gamers prefer a streamlined and directed experience (e.g. consider Morrowind vs. Final Fantasy). Many American games focus on online multiplayer, but Japanese people don't seem to think much of it (though maybe this is just a technology penetration thing). Those are the main problems.
This is maybe a little unclear, but since it's in the "diplomatic policy" section, I think they're advocating the official recognition of Taiwan. I oppose this on practical grounds, but at any rate it's not a crackpot policy. As for opposing censorship, I don't see what's so bad about that.
I have some serious disagreements with the Libertarian party, but on the whole their policies appear sane to me. What bothers me the most about them is the simplistic and unnuanced nature of their ideas.
The Consitution Party, though, sound like a bunch of fundamentalist nutwings. They advocate the death penalty for drug offenses (!!!). Truly crazy.
That may be your view, but Japanese people generally hate all American games. Halo is obscure, and even GTA3 sold pretty poorly over there. If MS can't get Japanese developers on board, they are doomed in the Japanese market.
But everyone should be using GPG. It's a scandal that we have strong, fast encrytion available today, but nobody is using it because none of the email client makers are bothering to properly integrate it in their clients. The average user doesn't know how easy it is to read his mail, and will often email passwords and such in plaintext. It's up to the developers to make the transition; due to widespread ignorance of the risks, there will never be user demand.
My guess is that he simply had Autorun disabled, and that's why he didn't notice it. (Yes, the protection is that weak ...).
My pet theory is that the reason all DRM schemes are so hopelessly weak is that whenever the music industry confronts a competent programmer with the request to build a DRM scheme, he immediately throws up his hands and says it's impossible to do properly. The only people who will attempt the assignment are those who are too incompetent to understand that the schemes can't work.
It took me a long time to figure this out. I thought for a long time it was just intrinsic unreliability of 802.11b, but as I should've guessed it was Windows' fault. Having disabled Wireless Zero, my connection is now flawless on XP.
That's easy to say, but it's in the nature of games that they can't be both efficient and perfectly secure. Obscurity is the only option in this case.
You might be right. But I wonder if the leak might not have caused a lot of chaos at Valve as well. I can imagine angry speeches from bosses, IT staff getting fired etc as a result of the crack. They may have had to realign much of their organization to have a stronger security focus. Certainly plain old delays are common in the gaming industry, but it seems also quite plausible to me that the leak may have played a part.
I'm a supporter of open source, but "forced open source" by cracking developers' computers and making their data public is just unethical. These people were real black hats; IIRC, they wrote cracking programs for their private use, specifically to crack Valve --- every sysadmin's worst nightmare. I hope crackdowns like this will get more prominent media attention in the future.
You're right that Office has a quality lead, but it's small enough that OpenOffice would normally overwhelm it with its unbeatable price lead. The real issue here is the closed file formats.
MySQL? It's better than Microsoft's SQL server offerings, last I heard. Are you confusing Microsoft with Oracle (who ships for Unix systems, BTW)?
You have a point with e-mail. Though perhaps if users had more awareness of what's letting all those e-mail viruses through, they wouldn't like Outlook's ease-of-use so much anymore.
Care to explain what you think Spirited Away was really about? I'm genuinely curious.
Personally, I've only seen one page in 4 months that had serious rendering problems with Firefox. For those rare cases you can keep a copy of IE lying around.
It sounds like you're a good example of this. You may not have learned much when you were young, but this was more than made up for by your love of history. So I approve of this game (provided it's actually fun!).
I agree with your second point, though. I was mostly speaking in terms of commercial success.
That may be so, but they don't show it with their wallets. There are a lot of films with excellent stories --- as good or better than Shrek --- being released every year. They are for the most part relatively low-budget, live-action films shown largely in film festivals. Take, for instance, Koreeda Hirokazu's After Life from a few years ago. IMHO, it's one of the greatest pieces of Japanese cinema of the last decade --- but most people have never even heard of it.
Yet, weak films like Independence Day and Terminator 3 are blockbusters. Are you sure people value good stories? I agree with you that it can only help your film's success to have a good story. But equally clearly, big budget is almost always the key factor, and story is a secondary.
The same can be applied to the gaming industry -- while games with amazing graphics may sell well initially, they will only last until the next eye candy comes out a few weeks later. Games with solid gameplay will continue to be played for years (see Counter Strike for an example).
Gameplay is of course important, but in today's videogame industry, both gameplay and graphics are essential to be a commercial success. Outside of the Gameboy Advance, where standards are lower, can you name a single widely successful game from the past 3 years with cheap-looking 2d graphics? Games with good gameplay but poor graphics can only achieve a cult following in today's market.
Note, I am not approving any of this --- I like good stories and good gameplay as well --- but I'm just trying to be realistic here.
I'm not too fond of this story. The prose is extremely purple, the election business feels contrived, and the ending is cute but artificial (what does Travis have to gain by murdering the guy? The new world isn't bad enough already without being put into jail?). I've seen worse time travel stories (*cough* *cough* recent film also involving a butterfly), but I've also seen much better. Like that Simpsons halloween special where Homer accidentally builds a time machine while attempting to repair his toaster :).
At any rate, this story isn't long enough to make a feature-length film, so I expect the film won't have that much to do with it anyway.