I think this would be a very bad thing for the US, though. If we lost our fear at sending our own people to die, we wouldn't hesitate to invade all sorts of places. The biggest factor preventing politicians from declaring war left and right is the public outcry at the death of the soldiers.
I think if this comes to pass it will mean a lot more unjust war.
Yeah. It's like how we can't watch Casablanca at home any more, because we don't have 1940s projectors at home. Or how I can't play Pacman because the technology has advanced so far that video game cabinets are obsolete.
Pretty much the first thing ported to any hardware platform is game emulators. You can get them for your iPod! I think that as we go forward, content will continually be adapted for new media. In fact, the cynic in me says that's one of the driving forces behind new media - the ability to resell the same old content in a new form.
In 400 years, assuming civilization is still around, we'll still have NES emulators and ROMs.
...isn't the computer, it's the display. Or maybe the power source. Anyway, we have a lot of computers that are small enough to be wearable pretty easily. What we don't have is a good available head-mounted display that you can use while walking around, for the full gargoyle effect. And also we're missing a good power supply that will last through a full day (well, depending on how many batteries you're willing to carry around, I guess...)
This looks cool anyway, but I know from looking into getting a wearable that the machine itself is the easy part.
Thanks for the explanation and the reference. It does seem to be more related to the intolerance and violence rather than strict facism. I'm not sure whether defining everything intolerant and violent to be "facist" is a good idea, though. It seems like blurring a precise definition simply to include anything we don't like. Terrorism and facism seem to be almost completely opposite concepts, really.
However, I fully agree with your original point that the US should not have backed down on the cartoon issue. It seems obvious to me, having seen the cartoons, that they were all meant to make the exact point that free speech was inconsistent with the social values of most Islamic countries (and religious extremism in general). So the firestorm simply proved the cartoonists' point.
That's a bit naive. Most of our employees are devious little buggers. As soon as no-one is looking they're sending amusing flash/avi/mpeg between themselves, forwarding jokes someone outside sent to their gmail account (and they've cut-n-pasted them into work mail), etc.
Umm. I don't really see the problem? I mean, it's not the most productive behavior, but it's hardly destructive. I wouldn't even call it "devious". I think you're taking a far too controlling attitude towards your employees' behavior.
I expect in a while people will start complaining about our unfounded notions of temporal superiority, and we will have to stop believing we are superior to past civilisations.
Actually, I've been thinking about this a bit recently. It's interesting that only very recently has Western civilization been upbeat about the future. During the Dark Ages and Middle Ages (with good reason) and through the Renaissance, Greek and Roman civilization was looked on as the height of human accomplishment. Our best was behind us, and all we could do was aspire to equal those forgotten heights. As time marched on, we were headed downhill. Sometime after the industrial revolution, perhaps only sometime in the 20th century, we realized that we had equalled and surpassed the accomplishments of the great empires. At about this time, Latin and Greek stopped being required for well-educated people, and we started imagining "the future" as the best place to be. Now we were headed uphill!
A side effect has been that we envision quality as tending upwards over time. So things will be better in the future, and were worse in the past (despite the fact that this isn't true - there are peaks and valleys, of course).
So actually, it's only very recently that we think of ourselves as being superior to past civilizations.
Maybe you can help me with this - it isn't directly related to your point, but I'm curious about the origin of the term "Islamofacists". I've seen it used a little bit here and there, but it seems strange... Inaccurate, really, since I wouldn't describe Islam as being particularly "facist". Theocratic dictatorship springs to mind, but not facism. Is it just used to indicate the dictatorial aspect?
It also seems to be used often by more conservative commentators. Perhaps using "theocracy" in a negative way doesn't sit well with them?
Anyway, I'm curious what exactly you're saying with that term. Honestly curious, BTW, not trying to provoke argument or anything.
Why? Well, what would you think if I said "I don't see why I have to deal with black people in games. In my ideal world, there wouldn't be any black people!"
The slippery slope *is* fallacious, but that doesn't indicate anything about the truth value of the resulting argument. All the fallacy part means is that it doesn't logically follow, in a rigorous sense. It may still be true, and sometimes slippery slopes are real.
There's a big difference between logically sound and truthful.
If only it was still being made!:-( The Karma is the best player I have ever encountered, and the only reason I stopped bringing mine everywhere is that the battery life is down to only a couple hours now. It breaks my heart, because now I have to buy something inferior. Hopefully the Rockbox team will finish with their port to iPod soon.... That should make it fairly Karma-like.
I think the comment above points out one of Slashdot's enduring biases and explains one of the reasons Slashdot as a whole has such a terrible track record in predicting success of failure of things like the iPod.
Personally, I'm not interested in predicting the wider success or failure of tech products. I judge something on one criterion: whether I, personally, want one. I'm not going to pretend everyone else wants the same thing I do. But that doesn't mean I can't say something like "The iPod offers fewer important features than other competing MP3 players". It does, indeed, because I'm not a person who cares about design, or marketing, or having the hot gadget. I want something that plays music well, and plays the formats my music is stored in. And the iPod doesn't.
Your argument seems to boil down to, "It's popular, so it must be better." Looking at past records of popular items vs. good ones, I don't feel too ashamed. Look at Apple's other market, for instance. Most people on Slashdot would agree that MacOS is generally "better" from a features standpoint than Windows. Yet people haven't flocked to it in droves. Is it then wrong to criticize Windows' flaws? Is that another example of Slashdot being out-of-touch with reality?
I can't wait to jump on the ebook bandwagon. I'm raring to go. I've got my credit card out, ready to throw money at the first person to offer me the right platform. They almost exist, but not yet... I need a long-battery-life, light, high-contrast, open-format reader. No one sells those yet. They're all LCD-based or proprietary, if they even exist.
Luckily, sometime this spring three readers will be released that meet these criteria in varying degrees:
The Sony eReader will be long-lasting, light, and high contrast. Being Sony, it will not be open-format.
The iRex Iliad will be long-lasting, light, and high-contrast. It will be slightly more open than the Sony, and also have a touchscreen, a larger screen and higher resolution, and wifi. Unfortunately, it costs an arm and a leg and will intially retail only in Europe.
The Hanlin v2 will be long-lasting, light, high contrast, and run Linux, supporting all sorts of exciting formats. Not all the features of the Iliad, but cheaper than either of the others.
So... I won't be held back any more, once these manufacturers finally get around to releasing their hardware.
In fact, I saw a picture a while ago from the cartoon protests. It was a man holding up a sign that said "Freedom Go To Hell".
Scary. The idea that freedom is something that you actively dislike, rather than just being apathetic towards. Some people have realized that freedom means freedom to do things that don't fit in with their religion, and so they don't want any, thanks. (This applies in the US, too, of course - free speech is fine until it conflicts with your religion, and then there's too much of it).
Hmm. I've seen a number of different departments and companies, and there's certainly crunch, and some places are really bad. But my personal experience is that it's not all the time, everywhere. Personally I've only crunched for about two weeks in the past year, and prior to that only about two months a year (and not tough crunching, either, just 9am-9pm weekdays, less on weekends).
Given that the official title of the Phil Harrison keynote is "PlayStation3: Beyond The Box", I'd have to assume that we will learn *something* new about the PS3. It may not be much, but you can't schedule a major keynote at GDC and expect to get away with no new info. That's really the only purpose of these keynotes - if they had nothing to say, they wouldn't give a keynote.
...70 hours is basically mandatory all the time in all companies and at all stages of a project.
You've been misinformed. This is not the case for all companies, and certainly not in all stages of the project. It may very well be for EA, but they are the evil empire of the gaming industry. There are many companies who hold up "no crunch" as a badge of pride. I was even reading about one in Game Developer Magazine that has mandatory 40-hour weeks - you're not even *allowed* to stay late. (It sounded like a pretty horrible company in other respects, though).
Crunch does happen in the gaming industry more than other software development, that's true. But saying it happens all the time in all companies is false.
And my problem with Animal Crossing is that there's no "community" place where you can randomly visit someone else's town... you have to manually put someone else's code in.
This is entirely intentional, from what I understand. Nintendo feels that Animal Crossing is a game that you should play with people you know somewhat well in real life, since you're letting them into your town where they can perform potentially damaging actions. It also fits more with their idea of the game - a neighborly, small-village-community sort of thing, not a vast faceless crowd.
Whether that was a good decision or not is up for debate, but it wasn't due to lack of planning as you're implying.
I voted for this bill, even though I was very troubled by the fact that it seemed to be a big handout for corporate interests, with little to no oversight. I, and many others, were very unhappy with the exact terms of the bill. However, I held my nose and voted for it, after much deliberation, because the prospect of stem cell research being defeated in California was worse. Even if it was voted down because of the no open meetings provisions, or the biotech corporate connections, it would be seen as a victory for religious conservatives and a blow to stem cell research in general, and I'm not sure we'd ever see the stem cell bill I'd like.
I'm still not sure whether or not I did the right thing, but I thought I'd explain my reasoning. It wasn't due to ignorance (or, at least not the ignorance you're talking about).
There are certainly more games being released for other platforms, but honestly, how many good games get released? Nintendo generally releases good games, but they don't do so very often. On the other platforms, you have tons of crappy sports titles, Barbie Horse Adventures, Generic Shooter #57, and Collection of Old Arcade Games released every month, sure, but how often do you get a GTA or a Halo? Is it really less often than you get a Zelda, Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, or Killer 7?
There are several features that the iPod is still missing. They're the reason I haven't gotten one. One is Ogg playback, just because I have a lot of music in Ogg. That's forgivable, and I can transcode if need be. However, the other one is simply unacceptable, and that's the lack of gapless playback. Workarounds like encoding all my music as one file are also unacceptable. I need true gapless playback for files that support it.
That will solve the gapless issue and hopefully the Ogg issue, too. It'll also add a whole lot of cool features... When they finish that project, I might finally buy an iPod.
There are at least two other e-ink based products due out this spring: the Hanlin V2 Reader, that runs Linux and will sell for $325, and the iRex Iliad, made by a Philips spin-off, that has a larger screen size, wifi, and a touch-screen interface, but will not be able to be developed for by non-licensed developers. It will probably cost around $400 (although it will be a Europe-only thing at first).
The Sony one gets all the press, though, so I imagine it will be the popular option at least until Apple releases one;-)
They don't have quite the same power problem, since they only use power on refreshes. So you can read something like 8000 pages on a single charge - probably good enough for a transatlantic flight. The price is still an issue, however.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this would be a very bad thing for the US, though. If we lost our fear at sending our own people to die, we wouldn't hesitate to invade all sorts of places. The biggest factor preventing politicians from declaring war left and right is the public outcry at the death of the soldiers.
I think if this comes to pass it will mean a lot more unjust war.
Yeah. It's like how we can't watch Casablanca at home any more, because we don't have 1940s projectors at home. Or how I can't play Pacman because the technology has advanced so far that video game cabinets are obsolete.
Pretty much the first thing ported to any hardware platform is game emulators. You can get them for your iPod! I think that as we go forward, content will continually be adapted for new media. In fact, the cynic in me says that's one of the driving forces behind new media - the ability to resell the same old content in a new form.
In 400 years, assuming civilization is still around, we'll still have NES emulators and ROMs.
...isn't the computer, it's the display. Or maybe the power source. Anyway, we have a lot of computers that are small enough to be wearable pretty easily. What we don't have is a good available head-mounted display that you can use while walking around, for the full gargoyle effect. And also we're missing a good power supply that will last through a full day (well, depending on how many batteries you're willing to carry around, I guess...)
This looks cool anyway, but I know from looking into getting a wearable that the machine itself is the easy part.
- proper gapless playback
Really? I didn't think anything had real gapless except for the Karma. What player do you have?
Thanks for the explanation and the reference. It does seem to be more related to the intolerance and violence rather than strict facism. I'm not sure whether defining everything intolerant and violent to be "facist" is a good idea, though. It seems like blurring a precise definition simply to include anything we don't like. Terrorism and facism seem to be almost completely opposite concepts, really.
However, I fully agree with your original point that the US should not have backed down on the cartoon issue. It seems obvious to me, having seen the cartoons, that they were all meant to make the exact point that free speech was inconsistent with the social values of most Islamic countries (and religious extremism in general). So the firestorm simply proved the cartoonists' point.
That's a bit naive. Most of our employees are devious little buggers. As soon as no-one is looking they're sending amusing flash/avi/mpeg between themselves, forwarding jokes someone outside sent to their gmail account (and they've cut-n-pasted them into work mail), etc.
Umm. I don't really see the problem? I mean, it's not the most productive behavior, but it's hardly destructive. I wouldn't even call it "devious". I think you're taking a far too controlling attitude towards your employees' behavior.
I expect in a while people will start complaining about our unfounded notions of temporal superiority, and we will have to stop believing we are superior to past civilisations.
Actually, I've been thinking about this a bit recently. It's interesting that only very recently has Western civilization been upbeat about the future. During the Dark Ages and Middle Ages (with good reason) and through the Renaissance, Greek and Roman civilization was looked on as the height of human accomplishment. Our best was behind us, and all we could do was aspire to equal those forgotten heights. As time marched on, we were headed downhill. Sometime after the industrial revolution, perhaps only sometime in the 20th century, we realized that we had equalled and surpassed the accomplishments of the great empires. At about this time, Latin and Greek stopped being required for well-educated people, and we started imagining "the future" as the best place to be. Now we were headed uphill!
A side effect has been that we envision quality as tending upwards over time. So things will be better in the future, and were worse in the past (despite the fact that this isn't true - there are peaks and valleys, of course).
So actually, it's only very recently that we think of ourselves as being superior to past civilizations.
Hi,
Maybe you can help me with this - it isn't directly related to your point, but I'm curious about the origin of the term "Islamofacists". I've seen it used a little bit here and there, but it seems strange... Inaccurate, really, since I wouldn't describe Islam as being particularly "facist". Theocratic dictatorship springs to mind, but not facism. Is it just used to indicate the dictatorial aspect?
It also seems to be used often by more conservative commentators. Perhaps using "theocracy" in a negative way doesn't sit well with them?
Anyway, I'm curious what exactly you're saying with that term. Honestly curious, BTW, not trying to provoke argument or anything.
Thanks.
Why? Well, what would you think if I said "I don't see why I have to deal with black people in games. In my ideal world, there wouldn't be any black people!"
That sort of thinking leads down a terrible road.
The slippery slope *is* fallacious, but that doesn't indicate anything about the truth value of the resulting argument. All the fallacy part means is that it doesn't logically follow, in a rigorous sense. It may still be true, and sometimes slippery slopes are real.
There's a big difference between logically sound and truthful.
If only it was still being made! :-( The Karma is the best player I have ever encountered, and the only reason I stopped bringing mine everywhere is that the battery life is down to only a couple hours now. It breaks my heart, because now I have to buy something inferior. Hopefully the Rockbox team will finish with their port to iPod soon.... That should make it fairly Karma-like.
I think the comment above points out one of Slashdot's enduring biases and explains one of the reasons Slashdot as a whole has such a terrible track record in predicting success of failure of things like the iPod.
Personally, I'm not interested in predicting the wider success or failure of tech products. I judge something on one criterion: whether I, personally, want one. I'm not going to pretend everyone else wants the same thing I do. But that doesn't mean I can't say something like "The iPod offers fewer important features than other competing MP3 players". It does, indeed, because I'm not a person who cares about design, or marketing, or having the hot gadget. I want something that plays music well, and plays the formats my music is stored in. And the iPod doesn't.
Your argument seems to boil down to, "It's popular, so it must be better." Looking at past records of popular items vs. good ones, I don't feel too ashamed. Look at Apple's other market, for instance. Most people on Slashdot would agree that MacOS is generally "better" from a features standpoint than Windows. Yet people haven't flocked to it in droves. Is it then wrong to criticize Windows' flaws? Is that another example of Slashdot being out-of-touch with reality?
I think it's a little disturbing that your fantasy world apparently means a place without any homosexuals.
I can't wait to jump on the ebook bandwagon. I'm raring to go. I've got my credit card out, ready to throw money at the first person to offer me the right platform. They almost exist, but not yet... I need a long-battery-life, light, high-contrast, open-format reader. No one sells those yet. They're all LCD-based or proprietary, if they even exist.
Luckily, sometime this spring three readers will be released that meet these criteria in varying degrees:
The Sony eReader will be long-lasting, light, and high contrast. Being Sony, it will not be open-format.
The iRex Iliad will be long-lasting, light, and high-contrast. It will be slightly more open than the Sony, and also have a touchscreen, a larger screen and higher resolution, and wifi. Unfortunately, it costs an arm and a leg and will intially retail only in Europe.
The Hanlin v2 will be long-lasting, light, high contrast, and run Linux, supporting all sorts of exciting formats. Not all the features of the Iliad, but cheaper than either of the others.
So... I won't be held back any more, once these manufacturers finally get around to releasing their hardware.
In fact, I saw a picture a while ago from the cartoon protests. It was a man holding up a sign that said "Freedom Go To Hell".
Scary. The idea that freedom is something that you actively dislike, rather than just being apathetic towards. Some people have realized that freedom means freedom to do things that don't fit in with their religion, and so they don't want any, thanks. (This applies in the US, too, of course - free speech is fine until it conflicts with your religion, and then there's too much of it).
Hmm. I've seen a number of different departments and companies, and there's certainly crunch, and some places are really bad. But my personal experience is that it's not all the time, everywhere. Personally I've only crunched for about two weeks in the past year, and prior to that only about two months a year (and not tough crunching, either, just 9am-9pm weekdays, less on weekends).
Given that the official title of the Phil Harrison keynote is "PlayStation3: Beyond The Box", I'd have to assume that we will learn *something* new about the PS3. It may not be much, but you can't schedule a major keynote at GDC and expect to get away with no new info. That's really the only purpose of these keynotes - if they had nothing to say, they wouldn't give a keynote.
...70 hours is basically mandatory all the time in all companies and at all stages of a project.
You've been misinformed. This is not the case for all companies, and certainly not in all stages of the project. It may very well be for EA, but they are the evil empire of the gaming industry. There are many companies who hold up "no crunch" as a badge of pride. I was even reading about one in Game Developer Magazine that has mandatory 40-hour weeks - you're not even *allowed* to stay late. (It sounded like a pretty horrible company in other respects, though).
Crunch does happen in the gaming industry more than other software development, that's true. But saying it happens all the time in all companies is false.
And my problem with Animal Crossing is that there's no "community" place where you can randomly visit someone else's town... you have to manually put someone else's code in.
This is entirely intentional, from what I understand. Nintendo feels that Animal Crossing is a game that you should play with people you know somewhat well in real life, since you're letting them into your town where they can perform potentially damaging actions. It also fits more with their idea of the game - a neighborly, small-village-community sort of thing, not a vast faceless crowd.
Whether that was a good decision or not is up for debate, but it wasn't due to lack of planning as you're implying.
Hi,
I voted for this bill, even though I was very troubled by the fact that it seemed to be a big handout for corporate interests, with little to no oversight. I, and many others, were very unhappy with the exact terms of the bill. However, I held my nose and voted for it, after much deliberation, because the prospect of stem cell research being defeated in California was worse. Even if it was voted down because of the no open meetings provisions, or the biotech corporate connections, it would be seen as a victory for religious conservatives and a blow to stem cell research in general, and I'm not sure we'd ever see the stem cell bill I'd like.
I'm still not sure whether or not I did the right thing, but I thought I'd explain my reasoning. It wasn't due to ignorance (or, at least not the ignorance you're talking about).
There are certainly more games being released for other platforms, but honestly, how many good games get released? Nintendo generally releases good games, but they don't do so very often. On the other platforms, you have tons of crappy sports titles, Barbie Horse Adventures, Generic Shooter #57, and Collection of Old Arcade Games released every month, sure, but how often do you get a GTA or a Halo? Is it really less often than you get a Zelda, Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, or Killer 7?
On the other hand, Acclaim was a big enough name to justify a Slashdot story. So their money got them some benefit, at least.
There are several features that the iPod is still missing. They're the reason I haven't gotten one. One is Ogg playback, just because I have a lot of music in Ogg. That's forgivable, and I can transcode if need be. However, the other one is simply unacceptable, and that's the lack of gapless playback. Workarounds like encoding all my music as one file are also unacceptable. I need true gapless playback for files that support it.
r t
However, I might soon be buying an iPod, since the fine folks over at RockBox are busy porting their firmware over: http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/IpodPo
That will solve the gapless issue and hopefully the Ogg issue, too. It'll also add a whole lot of cool features... When they finish that project, I might finally buy an iPod.
There are at least two other e-ink based products due out this spring: the Hanlin V2 Reader, that runs Linux and will sell for $325, and the iRex Iliad, made by a Philips spin-off, that has a larger screen size, wifi, and a touch-screen interface, but will not be able to be developed for by non-licensed developers. It will probably cost around $400 (although it will be a Europe-only thing at first).
;-)
The Sony one gets all the press, though, so I imagine it will be the popular option at least until Apple releases one
They don't have quite the same power problem, since they only use power on refreshes. So you can read something like 8000 pages on a single charge - probably good enough for a transatlantic flight. The price is still an issue, however.