Actually, Ogg support is showing up in more and more interesting places these days (although admittedly not the one place that matters, the iPod). But lots of Korean manufacturers - who make the tons of non-iPod devices out there - support Ogg. It's free to implement, and easy, so why not? Ogg files are pretty popular in Asia.
I said something like this in a previous discussion, but it bears repeating: the difference between the two attitudes is not one of religion. Christians can be intolerant of "heresy" also; just look at the dark ages. A few hundred years ago, a comic making fun of Jesus would have guaranteed a death sentence in many countries.
So what's the difference? It's the social liberalism of the society. In the west, we've embraced free speech and had our beliefs and views challenged to various degrees in a long process. We've been working towards true freedom of speech in the west for a long time. The middle east hasn't gotten to this point yet, but that's a characteristic of the society, not the religion. Christians were very violent without much of a sense of humor hundreds of years ago (look at the Puritans, or the crusades, or the Spanish Inquisition - the current riots pale in comparison).
The solution is to help the societies learn to value freedom as much as we do. I'm not sure that's something that can be imposed by outside forces, though. In fact, I'm not sure how it can be achieved at all.
I don't think it's insightful to say that what was once next-generation isn't anymore. That's like saying "Man, in 1910, 1950 was considered the future!" It might blow your mind if you're high, but it quickly stops being deep when you come down.
Six years ago, the PS2 was the next generation of gaming consoles. That's not marketing hype, that's just a tautology. Once the PS3 has come out, it will be the current generation, the PS2 will be last-generation, and the PS4 will be next-generation. That's just the way linear time works.
A good SCM that no one has mentioned so far is Perforce - it's what seemingly everyone uses in the game industry. It's really overkill for individual people, but they'll give you a free two-user license. It's a pleasure to use, and much more friendly than SVN or CVS. The client also runs on Linux, Windows, and OSX if you do multi-platform development.
Google Desktop Search is awful for finding code. I actually sent them comments along these lines, too. The problem is that Google's search algorithm ignores a lot of punctuation and other characters that don't add a lot of meaning in regular English text. However, when you start dealing with code, they become incredibly important. It's hard to search for particular functions when parentheses are ignored, for example. I actually find the Windows "Search" tool to be superior for searching code files, which says a lot.
What I'd like to see is an extension that uses Google's brains to make searching code even easier - being able to find the declaration of a function, for example, or every time where you add to a variable rather than subtract from it, or things like that.
Out of curiousity, how does this differ from supermarkets and similar where they occasionally have a notice saying "Dear customer, in our weekly advertising circular the price of X was misprinted as $5.99/lb. The actual price is $15.99/lb. We are sorry for any inconvenience."? Is that entirely illegal?
I'm sure what happened in more detail is a boss walked by a few times in a week at varying times (11, 2p, 3p, etc) and saw half the time that this person was playing games instead of working. The employer has every right to kick them out. They're on someone elses dollar, so they damn-well be worth it
If you read the article, you'll see that this was a special visit by the Mayor, not a habitual thing at all. The mayor noticed Solitare on his screen, and had a word with the guy's boss. So not only are we talking about losing your job over one infraction, but it's not left up to your manager's discretion - a VIP is putting his foot down!
Of course, it was pretty stupid for the guy to be playing games when the VIP came to visit, but that's another issue.
That doesn't make me a happy customer, however, and eventually, some company WILL come along and offer the same thing without lying about what "unlimited" means. And when that happens, Netflix will learn how the local crack dealer feels when the Mexican mob moves in.
Depending on where you live, you might want to check out Greencine. It's based in San Francisco, so it takes a while for discs to get to the east coast, but they don't do any sort of throttling that I'm aware of. They also have a much more community-focused approach than Netflix, and concentrate on indie and foreign films (although they have everything). They also offer video-on-demand for some of their catalog, although you have to pay a per-movie fee. Slashdotters might also be intrigued to hear that their Bluecine service offers adult movies for rental.
Perhaps our helpfull Government could do something to protect us from this thing called "truth" and the nefarious rise of factual information dissemination
Your comment seems to take the view that Christianity and Islam are entirely different because of the reactions to these cartoons (the real ones and the proposed cartoons). However, I think it's worthwhile to note that a few hundred years ago, you probably would have been killed for even talking about such a cartoon. The difference is not the religion involved, it's the social liberalism of your society. The west has been moving towards openness and acceptance for hundreds of years, and THAT's the difference.
On a side note, the scariest thing I've seen in this whole brouhaha has been a picture of a protester in Syria holding up a sign saying "Freedom Go To Hell". That's an attitude that has more to do with this issue than the religions of the people involved.
One thing I think you're missing is that controls haven't really been taken away, thanks to the motion-sensing. That is, on a dualshock-type controller your left hand deals with movement through the analog stick and d-pad, and has two shoulder buttons. There aren't any "action" buttons over there (other than the shoulder buttons). So they take away the left side of the controller and the right analog stick, but put the analog-stick/d-pad functionality into the controller itself. They also added some control in the form of rotation, which allows an extra degree of movement.
Now, that still leaves one analog stick and two shoulder buttons missing, in case there's a game that would use the entire controller. And guess what the "nunchuck" attachment has? One analog stick and two shoulder buttons.
It's certainly a change, but I don't think you're actually *missing* anything. And remember, Metroid Prime and the other games that work so well with the GCN controller were adapted to work that way - they wouldn't play the same with a mouse or even a dualshock. The control scheme may have to change for the new controller, but it's not like the current control scheme is the One True Way or anything.
The video game industry was given awards for their rating system by concerned parent groups and the government. The real problem is that there's a disconnect with parents. To them, "videogames" are like "comics" and "cartoons" - they're for kids. So anything that's a videogame MUST be suitable for little Johnny and there's no need to check any sort of ratings system. So even though a game called "Grand Theft Auto" has a big M - MATURE: VIOLENCE, SEX, REALISTIC BLOOD AND GORE on the cover, it still must be OK for their kid.
The other problem is that the retailers don't take the ratings as seriously as the movie theater operators do, and frequently sell kids games that aren't meant for them. However, this isn't as big a problem as the other one; it turns out that 84% of games that kids get are bought for them by parents.
Melville does have an entire chapter where he talks about whales as giant fish instead of mammals, you know. So he certainly can be wrong when discussing whales. However, I agree that it's unlikely he'd be wrong about the harvesting aspects, since those were well understood at the time.
For the rest of his article, I'll give you a secret about E3: the real industry insiders don't care anymore. E3 is a consumer show now, no matter how much they try to say it isn't. The industry wants schmucks to go there, gawk at the hot scantily-clad babes, and crow about the next big game. E3 years ago was a blast when it was real insider scoops and communications with industry heavyweights.
E3 has always been the "consumer" show. It's always been about marketing your hot new property to the press, to the retailers, and indirectly to Joe Consumer. It's always been about marketing... Business deals get closed there, but it's still about strutting your stuff as a company in order to help close those deals. It's never been anything else. The "inside info" you think you're getting is intentionally released by the companies who have something to sell there.
The real place where the "industry heavyweights" meet and talk is GDC, and that's not for the press or consumers (although it's tending a little more in that direction lately...)
Obviously this is a joke, but Sony sends actual employees down to man the E3 booths. So the person explaining the game might be a tester, or in marketing, or even a programmer. It's good because it means they can send lots of employees to the show, they don't have to vet contractors, and they just pay their employees their normal salary.
Nintendo also uses employees, but I'm not sure about MS or EA.
Unfortunately, in the actual scheme of things individual store employees are not very important. I work my company's booth at E3 every year, and I can tell you who the real VIPs are... It's the representatives from Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and so forth. They don't tell 7-year-olds which Pokemon title is the best, true, but they make the decisions of which launches to throw their support behind, which platforms to carry, and the promotions and things. They are the ones the show is being thrown for, and they're the ones who get escorted around by VPs, put in the front of the line, and wined and dined. Wal-mart sells more games than EB or anyone else does, and Wal-mart not carrying your game is a virtual death sentence.
The real purpose of E3 is the game companies selling their products to distributors. So the EBGames clerk is not important, but the head of EB is. There's also buzz to generate, and that's where the journalists come in - they get the information out to consumers, but they're not as important as the retailers.
In any case, most of the game store employees are influenced by the gaming press, so by giving the press access they get the word out to the EBGames clerks without having to invite hundreds of thousands of register jockeys to the expo. And by rushing the boss of EBGames through the VIP line, they make sure the store is going to stock their titles/hardware, promote it, and enforce policies on the lowly clerks. It's much more effective to target your CEO than each individual employee.
Yes... I think it's interesting that the more graphically advanced games get, the fewer actual gameplay features they seem to have. No 3D MMORPG has equalled the gameplay complexity of a good MUD yet.
There's of course a lot of discussion in epistemology whether the Turing test is meaningful at all - Searle's Chinese Box paper discussed the idea of whether or not correctly interpreting input can be said to be intelligence.
But basically it comes down to a deeper philosophical divide. Turing took the pragmatic approach of assuming that anything that was indistinguishable from a thinking being was, for all intents and purposes, a thinking being. Other philosophers might feel that the pragmatism isn't necessarily the road to truth, and that there might be further undectectable differences between thinking beings and machines.
Or of course there's also the fact that the test itself might be poorly designed, and that it would take a trained psychologist or other specialist to tell the difference between a "real" thinker and a "fake" one. Currently most people can't tell the difference between a psychopath and a normal human; perhaps a thinking computer would be more like a psychopath. Then it just becomes a matter of proposing a new test that would catch the difference between the two.
I think, from the way you said it, that you fall more into Searle's camp... That's a hard place to be, though, because you have to explain what sort of transcendental difference is "missing" between perfectly human-like symbol manipulation and "real" intelligence. The problem of defining intelligence isn't a simple one, and it's very hard to point out why the pragmatic approach might not work. What would be a suitable alternate definition for intelligence?
Actually, I bet it's not that great for Blizzard. They make less money when more people spend more time online (assuming they didn't gain new accounts, of course).
I imagine they depend on only a subset of their total subscribers being online at any one time for load balancing and bandwidth costs and so forth.
The only benefit they'd gain from it is bragging rights.
You're absolutely right - Apple gives you something for your money. However, it's the same way Mercedes or Rolls-Royce gives you something for your money. You get a lot, but you have to spend a lot.
Regardless of what a good deal a Mercedes might be, most people are in the market for a Honda or Toyota.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you mean that it's easier to fund a crime syndicate in Russia than one in the US.
Actually, Ogg support is showing up in more and more interesting places these days (although admittedly not the one place that matters, the iPod). But lots of Korean manufacturers - who make the tons of non-iPod devices out there - support Ogg. It's free to implement, and easy, so why not? Ogg files are pretty popular in Asia.
I said something like this in a previous discussion, but it bears repeating: the difference between the two attitudes is not one of religion. Christians can be intolerant of "heresy" also; just look at the dark ages. A few hundred years ago, a comic making fun of Jesus would have guaranteed a death sentence in many countries.
So what's the difference? It's the social liberalism of the society. In the west, we've embraced free speech and had our beliefs and views challenged to various degrees in a long process. We've been working towards true freedom of speech in the west for a long time. The middle east hasn't gotten to this point yet, but that's a characteristic of the society, not the religion. Christians were very violent without much of a sense of humor hundreds of years ago (look at the Puritans, or the crusades, or the Spanish Inquisition - the current riots pale in comparison).
The solution is to help the societies learn to value freedom as much as we do. I'm not sure that's something that can be imposed by outside forces, though. In fact, I'm not sure how it can be achieved at all.
I don't think it's insightful to say that what was once next-generation isn't anymore. That's like saying "Man, in 1910, 1950 was considered the future!" It might blow your mind if you're high, but it quickly stops being deep when you come down.
Six years ago, the PS2 was the next generation of gaming consoles. That's not marketing hype, that's just a tautology. Once the PS3 has come out, it will be the current generation, the PS2 will be last-generation, and the PS4 will be next-generation. That's just the way linear time works.
A good SCM that no one has mentioned so far is Perforce - it's what seemingly everyone uses in the game industry. It's really overkill for individual people, but they'll give you a free two-user license. It's a pleasure to use, and much more friendly than SVN or CVS. The client also runs on Linux, Windows, and OSX if you do multi-platform development.
Google Desktop Search is awful for finding code. I actually sent them comments along these lines, too. The problem is that Google's search algorithm ignores a lot of punctuation and other characters that don't add a lot of meaning in regular English text. However, when you start dealing with code, they become incredibly important. It's hard to search for particular functions when parentheses are ignored, for example. I actually find the Windows "Search" tool to be superior for searching code files, which says a lot.
What I'd like to see is an extension that uses Google's brains to make searching code even easier - being able to find the declaration of a function, for example, or every time where you add to a variable rather than subtract from it, or things like that.
Out of curiousity, how does this differ from supermarkets and similar where they occasionally have a notice saying "Dear customer, in our weekly advertising circular the price of X was misprinted as $5.99/lb. The actual price is $15.99/lb. We are sorry for any inconvenience."? Is that entirely illegal?
I'm sure what happened in more detail is a boss walked by a few times in a week at varying times (11, 2p, 3p, etc) and saw half the time that this person was playing games instead of working. The employer has every right to kick them out. They're on someone elses dollar, so they damn-well be worth it
If you read the article, you'll see that this was a special visit by the Mayor, not a habitual thing at all. The mayor noticed Solitare on his screen, and had a word with the guy's boss. So not only are we talking about losing your job over one infraction, but it's not left up to your manager's discretion - a VIP is putting his foot down!
Of course, it was pretty stupid for the guy to be playing games when the VIP came to visit, but that's another issue.
That doesn't make me a happy customer, however, and eventually, some company WILL come along and offer the same thing without lying about what "unlimited" means. And when that happens, Netflix will learn how the local crack dealer feels when the Mexican mob moves in.
Depending on where you live, you might want to check out Greencine. It's based in San Francisco, so it takes a while for discs to get to the east coast, but they don't do any sort of throttling that I'm aware of. They also have a much more community-focused approach than Netflix, and concentrate on indie and foreign films (although they have everything). They also offer video-on-demand for some of their catalog, although you have to pay a per-movie fee. Slashdotters might also be intrigued to hear that their Bluecine service offers adult movies for rental.
Hey Jacques! BTW, thou art avenged.
Perhaps our helpfull Government could do something to protect us from this thing called "truth" and the nefarious rise of factual information dissemination
They're doing their best!
Your comment seems to take the view that Christianity and Islam are entirely different because of the reactions to these cartoons (the real ones and the proposed cartoons). However, I think it's worthwhile to note that a few hundred years ago, you probably would have been killed for even talking about such a cartoon. The difference is not the religion involved, it's the social liberalism of your society. The west has been moving towards openness and acceptance for hundreds of years, and THAT's the difference.
On a side note, the scariest thing I've seen in this whole brouhaha has been a picture of a protester in Syria holding up a sign saying "Freedom Go To Hell". That's an attitude that has more to do with this issue than the religions of the people involved.
One thing I think you're missing is that controls haven't really been taken away, thanks to the motion-sensing. That is, on a dualshock-type controller your left hand deals with movement through the analog stick and d-pad, and has two shoulder buttons. There aren't any "action" buttons over there (other than the shoulder buttons). So they take away the left side of the controller and the right analog stick, but put the analog-stick/d-pad functionality into the controller itself. They also added some control in the form of rotation, which allows an extra degree of movement.
Now, that still leaves one analog stick and two shoulder buttons missing, in case there's a game that would use the entire controller. And guess what the "nunchuck" attachment has? One analog stick and two shoulder buttons.
It's certainly a change, but I don't think you're actually *missing* anything. And remember, Metroid Prime and the other games that work so well with the GCN controller were adapted to work that way - they wouldn't play the same with a mouse or even a dualshock. The control scheme may have to change for the new controller, but it's not like the current control scheme is the One True Way or anything.
There's also the island nation of Tuvalu, which is currently slowly evacuating its citizens... They don't expect their country to exist in 20 years.
They can't do much about the problem, but at least they're doing it, while we're sitting around arguing whether it's our fault or not.
The video game industry was given awards for their rating system by concerned parent groups and the government. The real problem is that there's a disconnect with parents. To them, "videogames" are like "comics" and "cartoons" - they're for kids. So anything that's a videogame MUST be suitable for little Johnny and there's no need to check any sort of ratings system. So even though a game called "Grand Theft Auto" has a big M - MATURE: VIOLENCE, SEX, REALISTIC BLOOD AND GORE on the cover, it still must be OK for their kid.
The other problem is that the retailers don't take the ratings as seriously as the movie theater operators do, and frequently sell kids games that aren't meant for them. However, this isn't as big a problem as the other one; it turns out that 84% of games that kids get are bought for them by parents.
Melville does have an entire chapter where he talks about whales as giant fish instead of mammals, you know. So he certainly can be wrong when discussing whales. However, I agree that it's unlikely he'd be wrong about the harvesting aspects, since those were well understood at the time.
Yeah, selling your soul for 3.5 million just means you're a piker. Doing it for 3.5 BILLION means you're a visionary.
For the rest of his article, I'll give you a secret about E3: the real industry insiders don't care anymore. E3 is a consumer show now, no matter how much they try to say it isn't. The industry wants schmucks to go there, gawk at the hot scantily-clad babes, and crow about the next big game. E3 years ago was a blast when it was real insider scoops and communications with industry heavyweights.
E3 has always been the "consumer" show. It's always been about marketing your hot new property to the press, to the retailers, and indirectly to Joe Consumer. It's always been about marketing... Business deals get closed there, but it's still about strutting your stuff as a company in order to help close those deals. It's never been anything else. The "inside info" you think you're getting is intentionally released by the companies who have something to sell there.
The real place where the "industry heavyweights" meet and talk is GDC, and that's not for the press or consumers (although it's tending a little more in that direction lately...)
Obviously this is a joke, but Sony sends actual employees down to man the E3 booths. So the person explaining the game might be a tester, or in marketing, or even a programmer. It's good because it means they can send lots of employees to the show, they don't have to vet contractors, and they just pay their employees their normal salary.
Nintendo also uses employees, but I'm not sure about MS or EA.
Unfortunately, in the actual scheme of things individual store employees are not very important. I work my company's booth at E3 every year, and I can tell you who the real VIPs are... It's the representatives from Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and so forth. They don't tell 7-year-olds which Pokemon title is the best, true, but they make the decisions of which launches to throw their support behind, which platforms to carry, and the promotions and things. They are the ones the show is being thrown for, and they're the ones who get escorted around by VPs, put in the front of the line, and wined and dined. Wal-mart sells more games than EB or anyone else does, and Wal-mart not carrying your game is a virtual death sentence.
The real purpose of E3 is the game companies selling their products to distributors. So the EBGames clerk is not important, but the head of EB is. There's also buzz to generate, and that's where the journalists come in - they get the information out to consumers, but they're not as important as the retailers.
In any case, most of the game store employees are influenced by the gaming press, so by giving the press access they get the word out to the EBGames clerks without having to invite hundreds of thousands of register jockeys to the expo. And by rushing the boss of EBGames through the VIP line, they make sure the store is going to stock their titles/hardware, promote it, and enforce policies on the lowly clerks. It's much more effective to target your CEO than each individual employee.
Yes... I think it's interesting that the more graphically advanced games get, the fewer actual gameplay features they seem to have. No 3D MMORPG has equalled the gameplay complexity of a good MUD yet.
There's of course a lot of discussion in epistemology whether the Turing test is meaningful at all - Searle's Chinese Box paper discussed the idea of whether or not correctly interpreting input can be said to be intelligence.
But basically it comes down to a deeper philosophical divide. Turing took the pragmatic approach of assuming that anything that was indistinguishable from a thinking being was, for all intents and purposes, a thinking being. Other philosophers might feel that the pragmatism isn't necessarily the road to truth, and that there might be further undectectable differences between thinking beings and machines.
Or of course there's also the fact that the test itself might be poorly designed, and that it would take a trained psychologist or other specialist to tell the difference between a "real" thinker and a "fake" one. Currently most people can't tell the difference between a psychopath and a normal human; perhaps a thinking computer would be more like a psychopath. Then it just becomes a matter of proposing a new test that would catch the difference between the two.
I think, from the way you said it, that you fall more into Searle's camp... That's a hard place to be, though, because you have to explain what sort of transcendental difference is "missing" between perfectly human-like symbol manipulation and "real" intelligence. The problem of defining intelligence isn't a simple one, and it's very hard to point out why the pragmatic approach might not work. What would be a suitable alternate definition for intelligence?
Actually, I bet it's not that great for Blizzard. They make less money when more people spend more time online (assuming they didn't gain new accounts, of course).
I imagine they depend on only a subset of their total subscribers being online at any one time for load balancing and bandwidth costs and so forth.
The only benefit they'd gain from it is bragging rights.
To Norway, every other country is politically unstable ;-)
You're absolutely right - Apple gives you something for your money. However, it's the same way Mercedes or Rolls-Royce gives you something for your money. You get a lot, but you have to spend a lot.
Regardless of what a good deal a Mercedes might be, most people are in the market for a Honda or Toyota.