Btw what are some of those philosophical problems with Solipsism? And why exactly is it impossible to psychologically believe? Why should you believe anything exists outside of reality? Well, for one thing, you're arguing with people on an internet forum. If you actually really believed that people, the internet, and reality didn't exist, why would you take the time?
The fact is that solipsists, while they profess to believe one thing, *act* as though they really believed in the outside world and the existence of others.
Some people are addicted to their RIAA label branded music, can't live without their occasional fix, and are too narrow minded to learn of alternatives from independent artists. Yeah, I love independent artists, too. But claiming that there are "alternatives" to every RIAA-branded act is ignoring the problem. It's treating music like laundry detergent, or soft drinks, or something, where there are minor differences at best. Is there really an "alternative" to Bob Dylan or Led Zeppelin or The Beatles? There are other things to listen to, but there aren't any true substitute goods for music from a particular artist. That's why it's so hard to boycott music labels - they've got an essential monopoly on a particular artist, or at least a particular song by a particular artist.
This one was pretty lame. But there was a great one at GDC 2007. I think there used to be video up, somewhere, but I can't find it - the arguments were much more believable, though, and the moderation was better. Plus, the crowd judging them was larger and made up of game developers.
RPS has already posted an update to the original article. The announcement was just for an About page on Psychonauts. Sad, but true!
Update - as has been snootily pointed out in comments, it's since been revealed that the pic's just a teaser for an eventual About page on Psychonauts. The image on the site has been fully-colourised to reflect this. Boo. I would say that Double Fine probably shouldn't have stuck a mysteriously darkened image on a page previously only containing a link to a press release about an upcoming game, however.
They may taste different, but describing one wine as "robust" while another has "overtones of tobacco" is just bullshit. As much so as saying the sound "dances" more on one cable. A French researcher did a blind taste test where he served a white wine, and the same wine dyed red. The white was given "traditional" white descriptors such as crisp, while the "red" was given totally different adjectives.
So basically, wine aficionados are fooling themselves in much the same way as audiophiles.
I'm not religious, but not all of your reasons cited for hating religion are very valid. For example, the "In God We Trust" printed on our money. It's just a slogan, dude, why is it so important? Seriously, my money could say "I have a small penis!" and I wouldn't care, it's just something printed on my money, ultimately entirely inconsequential to anyone's life. Perhaps that's true for you. But what about the majority of people in this country - do you think they would be happy with money that said "The United States of America - Hail Satan!" Or "All Praise L. Ron Hubbard". Perhaps you would be comfortable with that - I wouldn't, because it makes me implicitly agree to values that I don't hold.
The same with the pledge of allegiance. If the official version of the Pledge had a line, "One nation, under the Goddess", wouldn't that say something about our country? It's as non-specific as "under God", but yet it would strike at the heart of many people's beliefs.
How many 16 year olds can be trusted to vote for politicians that promise decent care for the elderly, and reasonable pension provisioning ?
And how many elderly can be trusted to vote for things that are good for young people, and not just good for the elderly? Damn few, it seems like.
One of the great things about democracy is that if everyone who has a stake gets to vote, no one will be screwed over too badly. (Unless there aren't enough of them - but that's another issue.)
"They" didn't split it. They shrunk it. The official E3 is the "real" E3, where the journalists, publishers, and most importantly, retailers meet and see new products.
"E for All" is the result of an events company seeing a hole in their lucrative conference schedule and coming up with something to fill it. Many other conferences are trying to do the same thing - they're hoping that their conference will be the next Must Attend event for the industry.
I think it was terrible and tragic for the real E3 to be canceled. Aside from the fact that I got to go on the company's dime, it was also the one time of year when all the people who don't know games would notice them, because of the regular network news covering the event. It was amazing PR for the industry as a whole. Now it's going to be covered only by the enthusiast press, because it's not a spectacle any more.
Originally written in Hebrew, except for three or four small sections written in Aramaic. The main Hebrew manuscripts we have now is called the Masoretic text, compiled by the Masoretes in the 9th & 10th centuries.
Wait, what? So it's the original text, no translations or transcriptions, but it was only compiled in the 9th and 10th centuries, depicting events that occur up to 6000 years prior?
How can you make the assertion that such a lately-compiled work has not suffered any translational errors or transcription problems?
Granted, the GP's post does seem to be over the top, but I don't think your argument counters claims of "telephone" being played with the texts.
I got into development through QA. But there's a caveat: I didn't directly work my way up. In fact, there's oftentimes no direct path from QA to anything else. I wouldn't expect to be promoted from Tester to anything other than Lead Tester.
The reason a QA job is helpful is that it introduces you to lots of people. Other testers, project managers, producers, programmers, artists, designers - if you make enough friends, eventually you'll be able to leverage that for your career. A tester will get hired as an entry-level producer at some other company and pass along your resume to the engineering lead. You'll impress a programmer with your testing skills and get hired as a project manager.
It comes down to the adage that getting a job is about who you know. Being in a game company, even in a tester role, is a great way to get to know lots of people.
You're overlooking a big problem with multi-disc games, and that's diminishing returns. For multi-disc games, the shared assets need to be on every disc - that means the main character models, weapon models, explosion textures, common level textures, and so forth. So by adding a second DVD-9, you don't actually gain 9GB of space. As your game grows larger, the amount of common material will approach the size of a single disc, and adding more discs will not get you anything.
Not to mention that gamers these days complain about a few seconds of level loading time - they won't stand for having to switch DVDs every level.
And another problem is that disc-switching doesn't work with a more free-form, open-world style game, as is common these days.
I'm a Star Trek fan (although not so much of the original series, I have to admit), but I'm totally confused by this constant recent desire to tie every space mission to popular sci-fi. In a mainstream news article, I can understand it. But here on Slashdot? Do we really need Vulcans to be involved before we get excited about a *mission to explore another solar system*? That's incredibly cool on its own. By hyping it up as somehow Star Trek-related, you really minimize the plain awesomeness there is in space exploration.
I think that has more to do with a failure to utilize the processor well than a "weak" graphics card. It's easy (well, relatively speaking) to use the Cell to supplement the RSX (it's really, really good at doing pre-rendering tasks), and that way you have more flexibility when algorithms change or when you want to shift power over to AI or physics instead of graphics (like Katamari or Loco Roco or something for PS3).
Actually, E3 was only partially for the press. It was mostly for the distributors - I heard people say that the most important person there was the VP from Walmart. The spectacle and the demos and so forth are for selling the game to consumers through the press, sure, but they're also for selling the game to the distributors (and less so these days, selling the game to the publishers).
Personally, I'll miss E3 trips, expense accounts, and parties...
I have a Sony Reader with the e-ink screen, and it's more readable the brighter it gets. They have a roadmap towards color (and some working prototypes) although I'm not sure when it's scheduled to arrive. The upsides are low power usage, sunlight readability, and crisp, paper-like images. The downsides are probably expense (I don't know how much the components cost, but my Reader was $350 retail, which suggests the screens are expensive), low refresh rate (on the order of.5 seconds per refresh at best - no video applications, obviously), and a "gray" look to your screens.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact is that solipsists, while they profess to believe one thing, *act* as though they really believed in the outside world and the existence of others.
This one was pretty lame. But there was a great one at GDC 2007. I think there used to be video up, somewhere, but I can't find it - the arguments were much more believable, though, and the moderation was better. Plus, the crowd judging them was larger and made up of game developers.
So... The Metagame is cool, MTV sucks.
Try GreenCine. If you're on the west coast, it's as fast as Netflix, with a lot better selection of obscure/indie films (and porn).
And they're not evil.
RPS has already posted an update to the original article. The announcement was just for an About page on Psychonauts. Sad, but true!
Update - as has been snootily pointed out in comments, it's since been revealed that the pic's just a teaser for an eventual About page on Psychonauts. The image on the site has been fully-colourised to reflect this. Boo. I would say that Double Fine probably shouldn't have stuck a mysteriously darkened image on a page previously only containing a link to a press release about an upcoming game, however.
They may taste different, but describing one wine as "robust" while another has "overtones of tobacco" is just bullshit. As much so as saying the sound "dances" more on one cable. A French researcher did a blind taste test where he served a white wine, and the same wine dyed red. The white was given "traditional" white descriptors such as crisp, while the "red" was given totally different adjectives.
So basically, wine aficionados are fooling themselves in much the same way as audiophiles.
The same with the pledge of allegiance. If the official version of the Pledge had a line, "One nation, under the Goddess", wouldn't that say something about our country? It's as non-specific as "under God", but yet it would strike at the heart of many people's beliefs.
And Star Trek: Deep Space Nine "proposed" the same thing a while ago ;-)
They had replicators, so it was easier...
By the way, the word you want is immoral not amoral. They mean totally different things.
How many 16 year olds can be trusted to vote for politicians that promise decent care for the elderly, and reasonable pension provisioning ?
And how many elderly can be trusted to vote for things that are good for young people, and not just good for the elderly? Damn few, it seems like.
One of the great things about democracy is that if everyone who has a stake gets to vote, no one will be screwed over too badly. (Unless there aren't enough of them - but that's another issue.)
For some reason, I believe you.
"They" didn't split it. They shrunk it. The official E3 is the "real" E3, where the journalists, publishers, and most importantly, retailers meet and see new products.
"E for All" is the result of an events company seeing a hole in their lucrative conference schedule and coming up with something to fill it. Many other conferences are trying to do the same thing - they're hoping that their conference will be the next Must Attend event for the industry.
I think it was terrible and tragic for the real E3 to be canceled. Aside from the fact that I got to go on the company's dime, it was also the one time of year when all the people who don't know games would notice them, because of the regular network news covering the event. It was amazing PR for the industry as a whole. Now it's going to be covered only by the enthusiast press, because it's not a spectacle any more.
Sure. And if golf is too expensive, just buy a soccer ball, right? They're both sports, so they're the same thing...
Four. The basic shape is triangular, but that is not its only shape.
So it's More Than Meets The Eye, then?
Originally written in Hebrew, except for three or four small sections written in Aramaic. The main Hebrew manuscripts we have now is called the Masoretic text, compiled by the Masoretes in the 9th & 10th centuries.
Wait, what? So it's the original text, no translations or transcriptions, but it was only compiled in the 9th and 10th centuries, depicting events that occur up to 6000 years prior?
How can you make the assertion that such a lately-compiled work has not suffered any translational errors or transcription problems?
Granted, the GP's post does seem to be over the top, but I don't think your argument counters claims of "telephone" being played with the texts.
Exactly. The way discrimination against blacks went away after the Civil War. The free market took care of that one, all right.
I got into development through QA. But there's a caveat: I didn't directly work my way up. In fact, there's oftentimes no direct path from QA to anything else. I wouldn't expect to be promoted from Tester to anything other than Lead Tester.
The reason a QA job is helpful is that it introduces you to lots of people. Other testers, project managers, producers, programmers, artists, designers - if you make enough friends, eventually you'll be able to leverage that for your career. A tester will get hired as an entry-level producer at some other company and pass along your resume to the engineering lead. You'll impress a programmer with your testing skills and get hired as a project manager.
It comes down to the adage that getting a job is about who you know. Being in a game company, even in a tester role, is a great way to get to know lots of people.
You're overlooking a big problem with multi-disc games, and that's diminishing returns. For multi-disc games, the shared assets need to be on every disc - that means the main character models, weapon models, explosion textures, common level textures, and so forth. So by adding a second DVD-9, you don't actually gain 9GB of space. As your game grows larger, the amount of common material will approach the size of a single disc, and adding more discs will not get you anything.
Not to mention that gamers these days complain about a few seconds of level loading time - they won't stand for having to switch DVDs every level.
And another problem is that disc-switching doesn't work with a more free-form, open-world style game, as is common these days.
I'm a Star Trek fan (although not so much of the original series, I have to admit), but I'm totally confused by this constant recent desire to tie every space mission to popular sci-fi. In a mainstream news article, I can understand it. But here on Slashdot? Do we really need Vulcans to be involved before we get excited about a *mission to explore another solar system*? That's incredibly cool on its own. By hyping it up as somehow Star Trek-related, you really minimize the plain awesomeness there is in space exploration.
My wife and I are working on having a spawn of minions right now...
And posting on Slashdot at the same time! What talent!
I think that has more to do with a failure to utilize the processor well than a "weak" graphics card. It's easy (well, relatively speaking) to use the Cell to supplement the RSX (it's really, really good at doing pre-rendering tasks), and that way you have more flexibility when algorithms change or when you want to shift power over to AI or physics instead of graphics (like Katamari or Loco Roco or something for PS3).
Actually, E3 was only partially for the press. It was mostly for the distributors - I heard people say that the most important person there was the VP from Walmart. The spectacle and the demos and so forth are for selling the game to consumers through the press, sure, but they're also for selling the game to the distributors (and less so these days, selling the game to the publishers).
Personally, I'll miss E3 trips, expense accounts, and parties...
I have a Sony Reader with the e-ink screen, and it's more readable the brighter it gets. They have a roadmap towards color (and some working prototypes) although I'm not sure when it's scheduled to arrive. The upsides are low power usage, sunlight readability, and crisp, paper-like images. The downsides are probably expense (I don't know how much the components cost, but my Reader was $350 retail, which suggests the screens are expensive), low refresh rate (on the order of .5 seconds per refresh at best - no video applications, obviously), and a "gray" look to your screens.
I think you're right. The cost of the dev kit hardware, while considerable, pales in comparison to the basic platform licensing costs.