"How many other countries you know, for example, that developed a supersonic passenger jet (the correct answer is that there was no other such country)."
You mean there was no such thing as the Concorde? Heh. Dude, I'll tell you what I tell the Americans too: please don't get your "facts" about other countries purely from propaganda.
"The army was large, indeed, but military spendings as a percentage of GDP were not extremely high. Furthermore, there were no other options for the Soviet Union, given that the United States was busy waging the Cold War against it. Parity with the NATO was the only option."
There's a fine line between parity and having 2-3 times the army of the whole NATO combined. We're talking countries combined which had more than twice your population, and an order of magnitude more powerful economies.
"Well, we were an industrial power. What was it that we didn't have? May be an extremely reliable and efficient Unified Energy System, unlike anywhere else in the world? May be advanced nuclear energy industry? Or a powerful aerospace industry? Or a huge machine-building industry, making every possible machine? Or a chemical industry? Petrochemical industry? What was that industry that the Soviet Union didn't have?"
Not enough of either of them per capita, that's what you didn't have. Your industry divided by the population lagged behind more and more. And it was more and more lagging behind technologically, as in: more and more of what you produced was lower tech. Which is really why it lagged. All while military spending per capita was growing higher and higher.
Yeah, technically you had a bit of every industry, but in some cases after you subtract the part that was producing or researching exclusively to support the army, you're left with... well, let's put it like this: _technically_ you had some, in the same way as I _technically_ have an agriculture, because I have a couple of potted plants on the balcony.
At some point, Gorbachev found the country in a position where it just didn't have enough industrial capacity (after subtracting all the expenses) to keep up with the NATO any more. That's why he, and most of the supreme soviet for that matter, rushed to suddenly play nice and democratic. Because there just wasn't enough industrial capacity left to keep up the old "we can bury you all" game and facade.
So if you don't believe me about the state of the industry, hell, I guess you can argue that with them too, then. Because it didn't look more viable to your own supreme soviet either.
"Not to mention that all that was done without exploiting Third World countries"
So I guess you didn't plunder the resources of the whole Eastern Europe after WW2, right? I happen to know first hand that whole countries were not just drained of some mineral resources to support the URSS economy, but in a couple of cases were left literally depleted of some resources. So, please. Spare me the propaganda.
"and that what wealth was created by the system was distributed equitably among the whole population and not just a small group of people (millionaires plus the upper middle class)."
I guess you're trying to tell me there wasn't a huge disparity between how the party officials lived, and how an unskilled-labour worker in the non-russian areas lived. I don't know, dude. Those guys lived and acted as if they owned the place. Just because purely on paper it was "state property" they used and spent, is IMHO more of a technicality, than really making any difference.
And if I were to really be nasty, I'd talk about what "equality" meant to the millions of Ukrainian peasants who literally starved to death to meet Stalin's quotas. But that's ancient history anyway, so I won't go into that.
Still, we're already getting sidetracked. That equality is good and fine and reason for pride, yeah. (If it actually were true, anyway.) But regardless, the power of the USSR still rose and fell as its industry, compared to the rest of the world, rose and fell. Equitably divided or not, after a point, compared to the western world, it just fell. Everyone else grew faster. That's all.
"Too bad you Yanks had to destroy my country.:( That it wasn't the only country you destroyed is not a consolation."
Actually, you know what? I'm not a "Yank", and I've been even known to piss off the "Yanks" occasionally, but it's sorta heart-warming to see that they don't have a monopoly on ignorance.
Get this: it wasn't the Americans that destroyed your country. The Americans didn't do anything to you, and even sold you pretty much anything you wanted to buy. E.g., grain. Yes, most of the bread you ate in the Soviet days was made from American grain.
Your country was destroyed by your own Communist Party officials. While other countries invested most of their funds in industrial research and modernizing the industry, the CCCP invested almost everything in the army. That's why you fell behind.
See, you had more army than the whole NATO put together. Very modern army too. You had so much army that western Europe shit its pants when Reagan announced the SDI (a.k.a. "Star Wars") programme: with the USA no longer needing Europe to keep the URSS in check, there was a distinct possibility that the USA would just let Europe deal with the URSS on its own. And the estimation was that the military disparity was so insane, that western europe as a whole would lose within a couple of weeks.
But that army came at the expense of your industry. The USA evolved by investing in more/better industry, and having the military expenses as a very small percentage of their GDP. The USSR invested everything they could in more army, and your industry stagnated. By the 1980's your industry wasn't in that much better shape than in the 50's.
You could have been an industrial power equal to the USA. But your supreme soviet decided you'd rather be a military behemoth, even at the expense of stagnating as an economic power.
That, in a nutshell is what "destroyed" your country. It wasn't the Yanks, it wasn't even communism, it was just idiotic mis-management of the economy by your own leaders.
"The Rivington Playground on Manhattan's East Side has a small sign at the entrance that says adults are prohibited unless they are accompanied by a child"
I took the liberty to highlight a key word there: it's a playground, not just any park. So far from being a case of "waah, absurd regulations forbid adults from sitting in parks", it's more of a case of "WTH was an adult doing on a children's playground, if they have no kids, anyway?" No, seriously.
It's not like anyone forbade her from entering parks generally. I'm sure if she just wanted to sit down on a bench, there were other parks in the area.
So what we really have there is just a case of sensational journalism making it sound like something it wasn't. "Stranger Ticketed For Being On Kids' Playground Without Kids" wouldn't have sounded outrageous enough. But phrase it like someone was ticketed for just being in a park, and voila, you have a story that sells.
Do you actually want a bunch of adult strangers hanging around your kids at the playground anyway? I'm sure every parent has told their children to not talk to strangers. It's not stuff that's new. Stories like the Grimm Brothers' "Hansel and Gretel" are about just that: a way to tell kids "stay away from strangers, they might want to kill you." It's a story from 1812 AD, i.e., almost two hundred years old, long before the Internet, Republican-vs-Democrat political games, or pedophiles in chat rooms hype. And people still didn't want their kids to play with strangers or take gifts from strangers. Go figure.
Yeah, yeah, presumption and innocence and all that, and maybe that stranger is just a kind old lady or gentleman that just loves children... but chances are that if you have a kid, you didn't tell him or her "if a stranger offers you candy, and wants you to get into his car... go for it." And if your kid is at the playground, whether with you or not, chances are that you're under the assumption that he/she will play with other kids his/her age, not with adults.
So basically we have a rule that says, in a nutshell, "this playground is for children. If you're not a child or accompanying your own child, stay out." What is unreasonable about it? Seems to me like just what I'd expect from a playground.
" but a parks spokesman told the Daily News that the department hoped police would use some common sense when enforcing the rule"
And here it's where it starts to sound suspiciously like a crap case of discrimination to me. Exactly what do they mean by common sense? Women are ok, men are automatically pedophiles?
How about just keeping all adults off the children's playground anyway? I'm pretty sure that not many parents are much more thrilled about their little Dick and Jane playing with a stranger woman than with a stranger man.
I'm sure there have been plenty of abductions where a woman was involved. And let's also note that the witch in the "Hansel and Gretel" story is a woman. Yes, it's a fictional character, but for a story whose main purpose is teaching young ones to not take candy for strangersm nor come in when a stranger invites them, it does say that they didn't think "ah, but if it's a woman, it's ok. Then take the candy and go into her house. Only men are dangerous."
The idea in both cases is whether you're responsible enough to be entrusted with taking that decision. That's all.
So it's not that there's any similarity between being a soldier and being drunk, and noone was making that kind of a connection. The thing that _is_ common is that you're taking a decision for yourself. In one case you take the decision that it's OK to go get shot, in the other case you take the decision that it's ok to drink a beer.
And the government basically says that at a given age, simultaneously (A) you're mature and informed enough to decide to sign away many months of your life, and to risk death and injury, i.e., a _major_ decision, but (B) you're not mature and informed enough to deal with a minor choice that'll affect you for maybe 2-3 hours at most.
Additionally, you're considered mature enough so under high stress and pressure, and while having a gun and ammo, you'll take intelligent life and death decisions. Because that's what war is all about: split-second life and death decisions, at a time when you're soaked in adrenalin. But at the same time you're considered too immature and too dumb to deal with having a slight alcohol-induced buzz.
And if someone's really too dumb to control their actions after a beer as an unarmed civilian, what happens when they find some alcohol to drink during a war? Aren't they just as irresponsible now, only now they also have a loaded weapon and some grenades?
"How about using the polished insides of bronze shields? Presumably the greeks would have had plenty of those at hand, considering the situation."
The idea is ingenious, but unfortunately it's not realistic either.
The greek round shields, also (incorrectly) known as Hoplon were made of _wood_. (As a side-note, most shields ever used were wood. Roman shields, for example, were literally made plywood.)
So, well, you're telling me they'd focus light with a polished _wooden_ shield? That seems... a little improbable.
Additionally, we're talking about shields that were too deeply curved anyway. Even if you covered a shield's inside with silver and polished it (and that too would take time and a lot of silver), you'd be left with something that's maybe good for sorta almost focusing the light at maybe 1 to 2 meter distance, not "at bow and arrow range".
So, yeah, they had plenty of... something completely useless.
You seem to assume that a greek city had a large factory, capable of cranking up 500 parabolic mirrors just like that.
In practice, they'd have one smith with maybe a couple of apprentices, and I very much doubt that they'd even have the ore supply ready in the warehouses for that kind of a task. We're not talking about going to your local factory and asking them to run some sheet metal through the big press 500 times, we're talking about someone hammering and polishing all those by hand. It would have taken many months there.
Add to that the question if a smith was even qualified enough to make a parabolic mirror with the right focal distance. Then produce 500 with the same focal distance. Yeah, a smart guy like Archimedes could have done it, with lots of tuning and experimentation. The local weaponsmith and a couple of almost untrained apprentices? Yeah, right. So you're proposing, what? That Archimedes himself, and maybe a couple of other smart guys, polishes and tunes 500 bronze mirrors by hand? That would take _years_.
Basically _that_ is the whole problem. We're not talking if it could be done with a modern factory, and a warehouse full of materials at that. We're talking about an ancient town. Those weren't even too large.
"So why not get excited about a possibility? Maybe you're a cynic. Maybe you're some MS/Sony fanboy. Maybe you just don't think it will work."
I just don't think it will work.
"Why didn't you say anything about what I said, rather than just putting words in my mouth?"
You mean I should have also answered to stuff like "For all your learning you are really stupid."? I was sorta tempted to comment about it being the standard fanboy tantrum, but then again, why bother? You'd rather that I did?;)
As for putting words in your mouth, eh, go re-read the fourth paragraph in the message I was answering to. In fact, I'll save you the trouble: "But to say this isn't exciting (this is important) simply because you can't think of any cool games is stupid, and a logical fallacy as well." My emphasis there. I'd say the implication is pretty clear that I should view it as exciting even if I can't think of any use for it. Hence, I've answered to just that.
"What about those actors and the pre-rendered stuff?"
I was referring precisely to the videos there. Have you actually downloaded them? Try it. I've yet to see anyone actually using those in action. All they do show is a bunch of paid actors waving them around in a choreographed video clip. For an article that pretty much _starts_ with "then watch the video of it in action that's available on our download page", it showed a clip containing anything _but_ some actual gamer actually using it in action. No, sorry, some advertising clip does _not_ count as seeing it in action.
Other than that, yeah, whop-de-flippin-do... so in some crude over-simplified demos, coached by a Nintendo employee, and at a very precise position in regards to the TV, a journalist found it to be sorta working. Wake me up when it works in an actual game, facing more complex issues like having to circle-strafe in a FPS without twisting your arm. In a rigged demo, all that can be easily avoided. Or when it's as accurate as a lightgun not in a rigged demo, _and_ from a fixed position, but when you've calibrated it sitting at one end of the sofa and then give it to player 2 sitting at the other end. _Then_ I'll be convinced it works.
"That really hurts your credibility"
If I were concerned about "credibility" in Slashdot's Nintendo fanboy community, I'd just join in the mutual-backpatting chorus of singing praise to Nintendo and accusing everyone else of being (A) bought by MS/Sony, (B) trying to stiffle innovation, (C) intentionally torturing themselves by playing boring stuff, just so they won't admit that only Nintendo's games are great, or (D) all the above. Look around you. That's the way the big karma is gained in this forum.
In practice, I couldn't care less. I'll say what I think. If anyone doesn't like it, or finds it less credible because it doesn't match his/her pet dogma, tough shit. If I'll ever I start altering my opinions to win a popularity contest, instead of saying what I think, that's the day I'll lose all self-respect.
"makes me wonder if you know anything about it other than that it looks like a remote and you wave it in the air."
I couldn't care less what you wonder about me. We're talking Nintendo's controller, not trying to be prom queen or win a popularity contest. But it's a free country, so go ahead and wonder anyway:)
"You also must have ignored the part where I said "Firstly, neither he nor I, said anything about trying something new for the sake of it being new.""
Actually, I didn't. The answer was to your saying that I should be excited. Nothing more. Notice how nowhere did I say you want me to try it. So, yes, that phrase has been acknowledged.
A. Well, then basically you are one sane person about it. You, sir, have my respect.
See, hope is ok in my book. Nothing wrong with that.
All that does get my goat is the recent all-out offensive of the "if you're for innovation, then you must be excited about this controller" battlecry or the equivalent "if you're not excited about it, you're not really for innovation" (or even "you're a horrible person, part of some Sony/MS conspiracy, trying to stop innovation as a whole"). I say they're equivalent because one is "A => B" and the other is "not B => not A".
And what gets me about that, is best explained if we turn to the dictionary:
in-no-va-tion n.
1. The act of introducing something new.
2. Something newly introduced.
That's the whole problem. That word has two very distinct meanings. Noone has anything against innovation as (1) the act, even though someof us don't like (2) one particular product, newly introduced. I.e., the whole "if you don't like Nintendo's controller, you're against innovation" I'm bombarded with, is just a textbook case of a Verbal Fallacy.
That's not in response to anything in your message, which, again, is finally a sane and rational one. Just, well, explaining why I'm already flipping out when I see yet another variant of the exact same fallacy. I.e., how this whole sub-thread came to be.
B. About the Sidewinder joysticks, it's not that simple. Sidewinder isn't a separate company, it's a brand owned by Microsoft itself. You know, the same mammoth company who owns Microsoft Games, the publisher, and who didn't think twice about blowing a few hundred millions to jump-start the XBox as a gaming platform.
Microsoft is all about integration like that: if one division needs the backing of others, they _will_ get it. And if they want a market segment, they can throw a lot of weight at it.
I.e., if all that stood between those Sidewinder gamepads and adoption was lack of games, I do believe that MS wouldn't be deterred by that.
And the Saitek ones were MS-compatible anyway, so they basically rose or fell (actually just fell) together with the Sidewinder ones.
Ok, so let's get the topic straight this time, because this beating around the bush and tantrums are getting tiresome. Your point is basically: "But you should be excited about it because it's _new_!!" That _is_ what you're saying, or are you going to do a verbose dodge again?
This might come as new and unexpected, but at some point you just have to use your own brains and decide for yourself what looks exciting and important to _you_, and what doesn't. To me, this doesn't. Claiming that everyone should get excited about a gimmick just because it's new, is just plain old silly.
Yeah, theoretically it _could_ open new possibilities. Or then again, maybe not. It may not be as original as you think. A whole line of Sidewinder gamepads existed, and I seem to recall some Saitek models too, that had just that: a motion sensor. Remind me... what genres did those make possible? For that matter, in which genres did they rule as a controller? As far as I know, everyone already silently discontinued such models.
But at any rate, it's just a possibility. No more.
And we're talking a _gaming_ console. There's one single reason to own one or to get excited about one: the games. If I can't think of any games that would benefit it, there's no reason for me to get excited about it. It's that simple.
"Someone else already discussed your rant about the virtual boy"
No, he did a totally off-topic rant that had nothing to do with what I had written there.
"To me, that also could have changed the way we game. A neat idea, not exactly implemented the best way."
Which actually is the whole crux of the problem. There are lots of neat-sounding ideas that nevertheless never got implemented right, or some which arguably can't even be implemented "right", as in, better than the conventional ways. VR, touch-screens, power-gloves, you name it. "For every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, neat, and wrong." The VB was just one such wrong solution.
The question that still remains to be answered is if the Revolution controller is also one. The problems that Nintendo waves around, like the need to draw more people to gaming, are real. (And not very original either, since that's what MS says too, and what Sony addressed with their original Playstation.) Is this controller the right answer? Or is it such a solution that's simple, neat and completely wrong? So far it looks like the latter to me.
Whoa. Simmer down, Captain Nintendo;) To recap what all that message was about:
1. Noone was saying "all new ideas suck", and noone is generally against new ideas. Lay down the persecution complex. All that was written there is that _some_ new ideas can still suck. Keyword: some. You can't just say "original ==> good". The two qualities are pretty much orthogonal, that's all I'm saying.
_Some_ original stuff is good, and _some_ stuff can be bad even though it's new and original. There are plenty of examples in both categories. That's all.
(E.g., the black plague in Europe or flu among the Indians in the 16'th century were damn new and original, but still they weren't fun. Not much gameplay and balance there, you know. You just cough and sneeze until you die.)
2. About the VirtualBoy: I've only said that the VirtualBoy _itself_, in spite of being new and original, (A) didn't change anything, and (B) was _the_ console that died a horrible death. Hence the whole "OMG!!11 All other consoles will fail and only this one will survive because it's soo original!!11" thing is false. Something can be highly original, and still crap, and it can still die. That's all. That's all there is to that VirtualBoy reference.
So unless you're trying to say that you got wireless or rumble because of the VirtualBoy, I can't even see what your point is. (And I'm pretty sure you didn't, because rumble would have damaged the oscilating mirrors in a VirtualBoy.) Do we have any technology today that's because of the _VirtualBoy_? If yes, please do enlighten me. But generic canned rants about how OMG Nintendo soo innovates, just have nothing to do with what I was saying there.
"Because, like anyone else, I have an imagination, and I've thought of every single game I've loved in the past 20 years and very few wouldn't be better with this controller, and genres I hate (RTS, FPS, sports) are the ones that'll benefit most, assuming the right companies get involved with this thing (and that's a big assumption)."
Yes, bingo, same thing here. I've tried to imagine exactly how I'd control every single genre with it, and so far I'm not even seeing even one which would be better with this PR-stunt gimmick than (depending on genre) with a mouse or joystick. Yes, if you don't think more than 1-2 seconds about it, and superficially at that, it's "omg, it would so rule to wave it around as a sword" time. Once I actually put my thinking cap on, and start thinking about gameplay, usability and how would the controls even work if I coded a game for that thing... it starts looking pretty bad to me. Heck, even skipping the other aspects, the fact alone that it only has two buttons has me scratching my head about some genres.
So to me, this looks like a crap PR stunt. It's stuff that looks good in a press release, and then allows them to sell you a different attachment for every game. (And to quote VG Cats again: since we're talking Nintendo, chances are they'll be _required_.) But a better way to control games? Sure doesn't look that way to me.
Which of us is right? Hell if I know. I'll just wait and see the actual games.
But again, just to have one thing clear: noone is against innovation as a whole. It's strictly about this one gadget. No more, no less.
"Maybe you don't like this controller, but you have to admit it opens a lot more doors than the other two consoles, which are pretty much the exact same as their old consoles. Honestly, any new doors opening for game developers with the PS3 or 360? "Yeah we can make trees look real nice now". Really looking forward to it."
AFAIK, noone said the PS3 or 360 are original or anything. Yeah, we can aggree there very very quickly. Yeah, the Nintendo Revolution controller is far more original. Kudos to Nintendo for even trying. But is it also better? Doesn't look better to me. But we'll all wait and see anyway.
And here's the even more important part: will it have the games that interest me? Because
Actually, while the GP post _is_ offensive and does have all the tact and style of a 12 year old, I can sorta see how she got that idea too.
It's not just about women. Since you do ask "what about fathers?", I can say I've seen the exact same thing happen to fathers.
I have a male co-worker who couldn't even stop from talking about Counter-Strike. Heck, I'm a hardcore gamer myself, but even by my standards that guy was just obsessed. He _lived_ for that one game, and had no other topic than his work and that. Ever since he's got a son last year, I don't think he's totalled more than a couple of hours of gaming in the whole year. He never even mentions the game any more.
(And thank goodness for that, let me say. I'm a hardcore gamer myself, but it was so unbelievably boring to hear someone talking about the same game and the same 2-3 maps for 3 years straight. Enough is enough, you know. But I digress.)
What I'm saying is that there _is_ a big change in people, or at least some people, when they become parents. I'm sure that might change back later, maybe when the kid is at the age where they can play together, but the initial change can be very very abrupt. I can see how it would give someone ideas like "wtf, is that even the same person? I swear it's the hormones or something." I'm sure the "clan"-mates of the guy I've mentioned must have asked themselves the exact same thing.
The way some of these giants are described by those who supposedly fought them, it would more probably be like:
"3rd March, 1327.
Dear Diary,
By the prophet's beard! I was walking into town to sell my wares, and as I took one corner next thing I know I'm staring into someone's belt buckle. I looked upwards startled and in front of me was this giant man, with arms thicker than my legs and a giant crossbow the size of a ballista in one hand. It scared the life out of me. He must have seen how I was trembling in my boots as I he smiled at me and moved on. I must tell everyone in my village about it! In fact, I'll write a letter immediately to my cousin Harun Al Azhred in Alexandria to tell him about it."
I mean, seriously, life was fucking boring back then. If you think what's on TV nowadays is boring, picture riding a camel for days or ploughing a few acres of land, with nothing ever happening. Something this unusual would provide something talk about for years. Doubly so if one of the giants had the monstrous or demonic features that some are credited with. If you bumped into, say, a Tauren (from WoW) IRL, you _would_ tell everyone about it.
Casual gamers can be into very different kinds of games than us hardcore folk. Hardcore gamers want a challenge, danger, and spectacular ways to fail or to defeat someone. E.g., when I won a race in a game by pushing my opponent to crash directly into a bridge pillar, it made my day. It was _the_ ultimate victory. When I tried getting mom to play the same game, she wasn't even interested.
Additionally, yes, you've noticed a very real phenomenon, non-gamers and casual gamers tend to show more empathy towards the NPCs. You and I have been desensitized. We _know_ they're just NPCs, they're not real, they don't have feelings, they're just there to be abused. But non-gamers haven't been brought to this "it's not real" state of mind yet. (Incidentally, that's also what causes the media hysteria over games. To a non-gamer, the things you do in a game are the actions of a deranged psychopath.)
But try telling a non-gamer that, for example, you gave your Cow in Black and White a savage beating. Mom was appaled by the idea that I beat up an animal. Or I was telling her about my playing Tropico (a sorta city-building sim, themed around a stereotypical central-american dictatorship), and how I made everyone live in the cheapest flats, made all TV stations broadcast my propaganda, and so on. Yep, you guessed, she was appaled.
But knowing that, you can also get an idea that you need different kinds of games to get a non-gamer hooked. (I.e., also that MS would need to start actually produce games for moms, if they want moms playing their games.)
E.g., I had no problems whatsoever getting mom addicted to Lumines or various other abstract puzzle games. Or for that matter to cutesy jump puzzles like Mario 64.
E.g., after I got her past her horror to what I'm doing to those poor people, mom actually got addicted to Tropico. She actually enjoyed taking good care of those little simulated people. She tried keeping everyone employed, sheltered, and generally happy.
For that matter, I also got grandma, a totally computer-illiterate old woman, who's never touched a keyboard or mouse before, addicted to Sierra's "Emperor: Rise of The Middle Kingdom". And speaking of empathy towards NPCs, after she went back home, she called me a few times to ask how are those people doing. Apparently she thought that village she's built keeps functioning when she's not there. Go figure.
Etc.
Again, it's actually very possible to make a game that non-gamers can get started on, once you realize what their perceptions and priorities are, and how much they differ from those of a die-hard hardcore gamer. Whether MS is actually going to do that, though, I wouldn't know. Seeing how much a modern publisher misunderstands that market, I'd rather bet they're just gonna dump a bunch of non-gamers in the middle of a FPS frag fest, put them in a tiny bikini and give them moaning sounds if they're female, and have a bunch of 12 year olds call them nasty names. And then the publisher's staff goes back to scratching their heads and wondering why did those non-gamers go back to not playing games. I mean, it was all good fun, right? RIGHT? Why would anyone not buy our console after they've experienced all that fun?
I'll aggree wholeheartedly with you, but I think the big picture is even more baffling than that.
See, the full "story" is that in the beginning, a.k.a., in the days of Pong and PacMan, the industry had a pretty good 50-50 gender distribution and they knew it. Then somewhere along the road they somehow decided that "chicks don't play games", making games only for horny 16 year old males is all that's needed, and using women as sex objects to sell to games to those males is perfectly ok.
What's fascinating is that it's the exact opposite road than what, say, the car industry took. The car industry started by promoting its cars as things for Real Men (and we're still stuck with a generation or two who still think that their penis size _depends_ on their car and on driving like a homicidal psycho) and presenting women as the prize you'll get for having that car. Then it finally dawned upon them that "hey, you know what? we could have twice the market if we dropped that silly notion that cars are only for men." So nowadays you have not only cars marketted to women, or named to sound like the women's version (e.g., Fiat "Bravo", masculine, and Fiat "Brava", feminine), but recently we even have cars _designed_ for women.
The gaming industry did the exact same road in reverse. They started by selling games to both, then decided they'd rather alienate half the market. It fascinates me. How and why does a whole industry get that kind of an idiotic idea?
And I can't even pin the blame on immature male programmers. Most of these decisions go through a publisher anyway. We're taling business people there, not immature nerds. I can see how a horny male nerd would go "but I really wanna see tits and ass" when making a game, but how do you get a bunch of businessmen to cheerfully give up half the market?
In fact, here's a very recent such screw-up that happened at the publisher, or at least with the publisher's blessing.
You've mentioned The Sims yourself, and yes, it was _the_ game that appealed to more women than any others, as well as to a lot of adult casual gamers. It was a game that, as released, didn't even have any sex or violence. And it appealed to a lot of people _because_ of that. (I'm sure you know that already, but bear with me.)
So then EA publishes The Sims 2. How do they market it? Well, I can tell you that at least here, I ran into pages after pages of ads in magazines, all hammering on the same aspect: sex. Sex in bed, sex on the sofa, sex in the kitchen, sex with the neighbour lady while the wife is away, threesome sex with the neighbour lady _and_ the wife, sex, sex, sex. Add to that the trailer clip with the woman ripping off her clothes and jumping on the guy... I think about half a dozen times in a fairly a short clip.
It's fascinating, really. Some idiot marketroid at EA basically ran an ad campaign that just didn't match the target demographic for it. In fact, one which was outright offensive to a large part of the target demographic. Someone at EA just couldn't get his head out of his ass, and out of the mentality that games are made for, and marketted to, horny 16 year old males.
And then come such stories in which everyone wonders how they can bring women back to gaming, and how much they'd like to get their money too. And it _still_ doesn't occur to them what the problem is? It makes me wonder WTF are these people smoking, really.
See, even without going into what's morally wrong with that attitude (it's been said already anyway), it's a piss-poor use of my time anyway.
1. It's not the job I wanted to do. If I wanted to clean up crap, I'd be a janitor. I'm a programmer. There's a difference. I'd rather spend my time coding or playing a game, than searching through someone's registry for crap
(The same goes, btw, for crap like "I bought an ancient scanner at a flea market. Can you please make it work?" Then it turns out it's an ancient SCSI model from back in the DOS times, that nowadays the manufacturer doesn't even admit ever having sold.)
2. How much _do_ you get paid for it anyway? If I were to charge someone, say, my consultant fee for that time (as an arbitrary measure of my time's worth: that's how much I'd get paid at work for that time), chances are they could just buy a new computer, including OS, for that money.
In practice most people I know get paid some token price, if at all. Even on/. pretty much _the_ standard post about it is along the lines of "yay, I got a pizza for fixing their computer". Or a beer, or a homecooked meal, or whatever. I'm sorry, unless you're a teenager without an allowance or living on a 1-2$ per hour wage in East Elbonia, that doesn't even start to be adequate compensation. Taking a part time job at McDonalds would likely pay more money per hour than that.
And let's go back to the "if at all" part. What most people seem to want isn't to pay a professional to have their computer serviced, but to mooch some free repairs off a nerd who (in their opinion) had nothing better to do with his time anyway. Asking for money, more often than not won't get you paid, it will just get them offended. (Though on the bright side, sometimes they're offended enough to stop asking for free tech support.)
"The pedantic response here is that if you really were up to something new as much as the next guy, you would be up to the revolution's controller."
I'll call bullshit on that. Wanting something new doesn't mean you have to stop thinking for yourself, nor that you'll take _any_ idiocy just because it's new.
Want to disaggree there? Well then I propose you go hit yourself in the groin with a hammer. It's something new, which you've never experienced before. What are you waiting for? If you were all for something new, you'd have done it already, right?
Lemme guess... you didn't actually go do it, right? Well, assuming that you didn't, you illustrate _exactly_ what I'm talking about: even if something's new, it can still not be fun, and you can still think for yourself and decide "nope, I don't want that."
Same here for some of us and the Revolution controller. I'll wait and see what games it's actually good for, thank you very much, because so far all Nintendo showed us were some _actors_ waving it around in front of a pre-rendered _movie_. They weren't actually playing a game with it. But in the meantime, I can still think for myself and it looks to me like it would be uncomfortable and ineffective, other than as a PR stunt. But again, we'll see. I'll wait for the games first.
Additionally, I sorta find the use of the Argumentum ad numerum fallacyhere funny. "if you really were up to something new as much as the next guy"... which next guy would that be? The guy drawing the VG Cats comic strip, maybe, which basically called it a sex toy? It's yet unproven if the majority on which to base that kind of Argumentum ad numerum even exists.
"Nintendo has a long history of changing the way games are played, and I have no doubts that if this next generation of consoles fails that Nintendo won't. What are my reasons? They are the only company doing something different."
"Almost all civilizations have oral or written records of giants and dwarves (trust me, LOTR is not a new idea). These, as most other legends, must have some sort of factual origin"
And almost all civilizations have some undead in their mythology. E.g., vampires. What's your theory about the factual origin of those? Are you telling me that the dead actually rose from their graves and preyed upon the living?
Now seriously, at least the giants are actually _very_ easily explained by exaggeration. It's like the hunters' or fishermen's tales of catching one "I swear it was this big" and increasing every year. Well, the same happened in wars. Defeating a particularly fearsome or important opponent is gradually inflated to having bested someone Goliath sized and with various demonic features or super-powers.
You don't even have to look too far back to see exactly that. During at least one of the crusades, one of the archers on the walls is described as pretty much a giant with a siege weapon in his hand. (A saracen version of Terry Pratchett's Detritus, if you will.)
You'd think that if one of the soldiers in the garrison actually had those proportions, it would get mentioned in more places than just that battle. It's something deviating that far from the norm that you'd just have heard about it. Merchants and travellers passing through the city would have mentioned something.
So, anyway, I wouldn't take mythology as a source of factual data for anthropology or human evolution.
Well, it's a good question. I don't know why they need a patent there, especially since it covers a very specific process, and not the XML Schema files themselves.
But the better question is: ok, so exactly what _can_ big bad MS prevent me from doing? Again, I'm genuinely curious. I want to know. Any lawyers in the house?
Can they prevent me from running an XML file through Xerces/libxml and Xalan/libxslt? I like to think they can't have patented that. At any rate, that would also affect anyone who's ever used XML and XSLT.
Even if they could somehow get a patent as broad as "reading XML data into a word processor" (they didn't, or not yet, but let's take the worst case scenario) can that stop me from just running the file through Xalan and getting a different file, with no word processor involved at that point?
Can they stop me from using Cocoon to automatically transform/convert the files, on demand? Because that's just the kind of thing I'd do, if the company I work for needed to access old files. Dump all those documents on a big fileserver, or into a database so I can also store metadatam including whose file is it. Then just set up a simple intranet web site, that you point at the document you want, and you get the transformed result as a download. It's not even a complicated Cocoon pipeline: a generator that just reads a document and parses it, a transformator that just applies a XSLT to it, and a serializer that just spits another XML (e.g., in DocBook or OpenDocument) or a HTML or a PDF.
Can that MS patent stop that? Because it's something so generic that it would mean forbidding Cocoon completely.
Bear in mind that at no point does it need to even access MS's XML Schemas. It just applies an XSLT to a generic XML. How's MS going to use patents against that?
"OK, first things first; let's have a little lesson on what XML is. XML is not really that big a deal. All it means really is that the less-than and more-than signs are reserved symbols; one writes constructs such as..... to indicate a bounded block of type foo, or to indicate a single instance of type bar. The meanings of different foo and bar are what constitute a schema. The HTML used for web pages is actually just a bastardised dialect of XML. End of lesson."
At a _very_ superficial level, yes. But it's actually a massive over-simplification, missing such aspects as having a standard parser or a standard way to transform it via XSLT and about a dozen other key points. Or that unlike the binary formats it can be read by a human. (Not comfortably, but it can be done.) Or that there are a thousand and one tools that can generate a schema for me from the XML documents, without requiring me to pay a dime to Microsoft. (It won't have all the possible nuances, but it will have all that appear in my documents. That's good enough for me.) Etc.
And that's exactly why I ask. As long as I know I'll expect <foo>..</foo> constructs, exactly how is my data in peril there. I keep getting being told about some scary bullshit scenarios in which MS owns all my data, and I can't possibly get it ever again from their evil clutches. Well, that's the whole question: exactly how _are_ they going to do that, then? I can just run the whole thing through Xerces and get my data out of there myself.
"You can expect the problem with Microsoft's format that only Microsoft -- and a chosen few appointed by Microsoft -- are allowed to write programs that can retrieve your data once it has been saved in Microsoft's proprietary format. OpenOffice.org's format is better because any competent programmer can help you to retrieve that data, without being beholden to anyone."
You mean they can legally prevent Xerces or libxml from parsing that file? Or they can prevent Xalan or libxslt from transforming it? How?
"Any data that belongs to you rather than to Microsoft."
It will still belong to me just as much after it's stored in XML. Regardless of whether it's with MS's schema, or Sun's, or my own.
"That is not the problem. The problem is if, five or ten years down the line, you decide for some reason to move away from Microsoft."
Yep, I'm listening. That's in fact why I'm asking.
"Now someone else's document converter may well not be able to handle Microsoft's proprietary format correctly. Your data might become inaccessible!"
And this is the very thing I'm not convinced of. As long as that data is in XML anyway, _how_ are they going to prevent me from getting at least my text out of it?
"In five, fifty or a hundred years, any competent programmer will still be able to obtain the schema which will enable them to make sense of an OpenOffice.org document, because no one person or organisation controls that schema. No such guarantee can be made in respect of Microsoft's schema."
In 5, 50 or 100 years, any competent programmer can still feed the document into XMLSpy and get a good enough schema for it. Heck, even without automated tools for that, if anyone so completely retarded as to look at a plaintext file and not possibly be able to get the data out (even if by copy-and-paste in Notepad, if that's all their IQ allows), they have no business getting paid as a programmer. I know that competence went out of style somewhere during the dot-com boom, but ffs, we're talking elementary logic and/or the ability to google for something that can generate a schema for them. Not even necessarily both. If anyone can tell me with a straight face that the company's data is lost and forever captured by MS when staring at an XML file, I'll say he/she needs to go back to flipping burgers or whatever job they were qualified for before they faked a resume.
"With OpenDocument, this isn't an issue. No matter what product you buy in the future, it can work with OpenDocument. Doesn't matter what product a client or customer uses -- if it's OD-compatible, you can exchange data."
So basically it's a case of "with OpenDocument you don't have a problem, as long as you buy only applications which are OpenDocument compatible". However, replace "OpenDocument" with "MS Word Format" or "WordPerfect Doc" or "Moraelin's Own Format" (.mof;) or whatever in there and the same still holds true. "You won't ever have a problem with X, as long as you only ever use programs which support X." So basically it's just another document format to get locked in. Except it's Sun's instead of MS's. From a pragmatic and "no love for either camp" point of view, that alone is far from counting as either advantage or disadvantage.
"But, you're stuck. You have 10 years of data that's locked into Microsoft products, what do you do? Convert everything -- and hope everything comes through unscathed?"
Well, that's exactly what I'm asking. If the XML Schema for it is published, why can't I write a simple XSLT to convert it to some other format? (E.g., to DocBook, or OpenDocument, or simply to HTML.) Or can't I run it through Xerces/Saxon/libxml/whatever and extract the data the old fashioned way? What concrete problems would I be looking at in that scenario?
"Also, there's interoperability with external organizations. Right now, to do business with the federal or most state governments, your business must use Office to be able to exchange data. No ifs ands or buts about it."
So wouldn't that count as a reason to stay with MS Office, then? Because then it wouldn't matter how much I think MS's schema sucks or not, it's a given. You must start and end with that format. In your words, "what do you do? Convert everything -- and hope everything comes through unscathed? Buy Office and the new product for everything? Create a "legacy application gateway" with a few copies of Office accessable via Citrix or VNC?"
I've actually RTFA, and I'm still at a loss about exactly _what_ is better about OOo's XML Schema, or wrong about MS's.
In TFA the guy just goes on about how his own XML Schema is, you know, lovingly handcrafted and how he _cares_ about your data. Which is just a content-free judgment call. Yeah, so he likes his own XML Schema better. Whop-de-do, that's such a total surprise.
It's not like if I went around the office and asked 10 guys I wouldn't get 10 different schemas, and each loves his own more and is convinced that everyone else's sucks. Just the proper way to use attributes alone has everyone polarized in three camps, with everyone in one camp arguing that the other two are awfully wrong and against the very idea of OOP or of XML itself. Handling validation and showing which fields are wrong to the user who filled the form? Yep, another clean three-way split, and I've actually had to implement three different ways to handle it, to please all three camps. And so on.
So that he loves his own more and thinks it's a better way to store my data, is very much expected there. I was already sure he thinks that. In fact, I'd be worried if he said he didn't.
What really interests me is exactly which concrete problems should I expect with MS's, that supposedly aren't there if I use OOo's format. If I try to retrieve that data in 5, 10 or 100 years, as in his answer, exactly in which way is OOo's format better? Exactly _what_ kind of data gets more benefits from his schema than from MS's in that context? In which way, and for what concrete reasons does he foresee that MS's own converters (which so far still import Word 6 documents with no problems) will break down and cry like little girls if fed a Word 12 document some 10 years from now?
No, really, it's not a flame. I want to know. If I'm to go there and pester my boss to switch from MS Office to OOo, I damn better have some very concrete arguments and use-cases. If my whole argument is "but some guy from Sun likes Sun's format more" and "but Sun's format is lovingly handcrafted with love and care for your data", chances are I'll get laughed out of his office.
"I think it fits the conventional definition of poor usability rather well actually. The customer has money that they're willing to part with, and they have to fill in extra forms, then wait days, or longer if they don't have online banking, for a Paypal code to appear on their bank statement. It's not exactly user-friendly."
What I meant was that when (or rather "if") most people think of usability, they only think of their own site. Their site is user-friendly, has a cool shopping cart and all, and you surely already have a PayPal account so you only need to click here, right? Even the usability books I've read tended to deal only with what's on your site, and not with such issues as needing paypal accounts, or having signed up with a piss-poor ad provider whose ads take 2 minutes each to load. Or maybe I've just read the wrong books, I guess.
But yeah, once you look at the whole user experience, you're right, it fits the conventional definition of bad usability like a glove.
"I've been developing small business ecommerce sites for the past 10 years, and on every single development I've been part of we've tried to avoid Paypal integration simply because it puts users off."
Let's even skip over the bad perception of PayPal, and trusting my money to someone who's ostensibly not a bank, makes no guarantees, isn't backed by the government, and generally is just some dot-com.
But let's put it like this: if an e-commerce site can't afford to just make a contract with a bank to deal with credit-/debit-cards, why should I feel confident in them. We're not talking some starving web-cartoonist taking micro-payments for a living, we're talking a business and trusting them with, say, a few hundred quid for a new PC or a new 20" TFT monitor. Then I'd expect them to, you know, act like a business and inspire some confidence.
If they can't even afford to get some credit-card processing capability, can they even afford a warehouse, or will I get to wait for a month while they order the stuff directly from the manufacturer? Can they even afford employees, then? (E.g., will I have to wait for a month if it's a one man business and the guy is on vacation?) Will they be around next month, if I need support or to file a RMA?
Plus, I suspect for a lot of people it's also a matter of "usability". Yes, I know it doesn't really fit the real definition of "usability", but please bear with me. It's the same idea: making people jump through extra hoops and go through extra web pages just to buy your product is bad. If someone doesn't have a PayPal account, having to go through all those hoops to register a PayPal account, get confirmed, etc, then finally return to get the product they wanted... some may lose interest and go shop somewhere else.
"I've never seen the uncanny valley discussed in such apocalyptic terms"
Well, the part that makes me worry in that graph is the dip below zero. I don't know if that theory is true or not, but _if_ it is, there ought to be a point ahead where more "realism" would actually be repulsive, as in worse than not playing a game at all. That's how I read that graph and that less than zero situation. (E.g., see the examples there: you could play with a toy robot or doll, but a zombie or a corpse is something you'd want to be as far away from as you can.)
That's basically why the apocaliptic terms.
Additionally, it is interesting grounds for speculation what happens on the other side of the valley anyway. According to that theory, on our not-yet-real side you still don't have too much empathy for the characters, but on the other side you do. Thing is, you can do a lot of stuff to the NPCs precisely because of that: you can sorta relate to them for storytelling reasons, but are still detached enough because you still know it's an NPC. If needed, you can do stuff that would require you to be literally a psychopath IRL. (Which is one thing that scares the non-gamers and causes the anti-gaming hysteria: for someone who hasn't been trained to instinctively know "it's just NPCs, they don't matter", in half the games you _are_ acting like a psychopath. It scares people.)
_If_ there is a point at which you can actually mistake them for a human, could you still do those things and look yourself in the mirror in the morning? Some grown men have been known to cry at Aeris's death in FF7. What would happen if that scene happened in a Star Trek holodeck setting that's indistinguishable from reality? Could you bear being mind-controlled, gutting her like sardine and watching her bleed on the floor in that realistic a setting? I suspect a lot of people would get permanent psychological damage there.
Basically, could it be that we're better off staying on the current side of the valley? That theory does say that the best stories intentionally stay around the peak on the left side.
"but I think the market will take care of it"
It _probably_ will, but then there has been one gaming market crash already. Ok, for very different reasons, but it's already happened. So we already know it's possible (even if admittedly improbable to happen again) to drive the market as a whole off gaming.
"I thought the physics of The Spirits Within were a big reason why it was so off-putting- characters rarely ever interact with each other or the scenery in ways that require much physical simulation. [...] Also, the facial animations of the characters were very rigid, because facial animations are hard (but very important for the sake of empathy)."
I.e., you describe the exact same phenomenon I was talking about, and which then turned out that the uncanny valley theory already was about: you notice some details that aren't there. That's just the thing. You could live with wooden facial expressions in a 1000 polygons per character game or cut scene, or with games where the whole interaction is magic, or you could live with that in a comic or cartoon, but start noticing it when it gets realistic enough to be mistakable for humans.
It's not just because it's a movie, IMHO. I've noticed the same thing in EQ2 vs WoW, and they're both games in the same genre. It's just business as usual when my cartoonish characterin WoW just rubs his hands to produce a piece of armour, but I found myself noticing stuff like "wtf, he's hammering that blade in the air instead of on the anvil" in EQ2. Same about combat, since you mentioned edge combat in relation to the FF movie: in EQ2 I do notice stuff like that my realistic looking character swings the weapon at the wrong tempo or in somewhat the wrong direction.
Slashdot Mirror
"How many other countries you know, for example, that developed a supersonic passenger jet (the correct answer is that there was no other such country)."
You mean there was no such thing as the Concorde? Heh. Dude, I'll tell you what I tell the Americans too: please don't get your "facts" about other countries purely from propaganda.
"The army was large, indeed, but military spendings as a percentage of GDP were not extremely high. Furthermore, there were no other options for the Soviet Union, given that the United States was busy waging the Cold War against it. Parity with the NATO was the only option."
There's a fine line between parity and having 2-3 times the army of the whole NATO combined. We're talking countries combined which had more than twice your population, and an order of magnitude more powerful economies.
"Well, we were an industrial power. What was it that we didn't have? May be an extremely reliable and efficient Unified Energy System, unlike anywhere else in the world? May be advanced nuclear energy industry? Or a powerful aerospace industry? Or a huge machine-building industry, making every possible machine? Or a chemical industry? Petrochemical industry? What was that industry that the Soviet Union didn't have?"
Not enough of either of them per capita, that's what you didn't have. Your industry divided by the population lagged behind more and more. And it was more and more lagging behind technologically, as in: more and more of what you produced was lower tech. Which is really why it lagged. All while military spending per capita was growing higher and higher.
Yeah, technically you had a bit of every industry, but in some cases after you subtract the part that was producing or researching exclusively to support the army, you're left with... well, let's put it like this: _technically_ you had some, in the same way as I _technically_ have an agriculture, because I have a couple of potted plants on the balcony.
At some point, Gorbachev found the country in a position where it just didn't have enough industrial capacity (after subtracting all the expenses) to keep up with the NATO any more. That's why he, and most of the supreme soviet for that matter, rushed to suddenly play nice and democratic. Because there just wasn't enough industrial capacity left to keep up the old "we can bury you all" game and facade.
So if you don't believe me about the state of the industry, hell, I guess you can argue that with them too, then. Because it didn't look more viable to your own supreme soviet either.
"Not to mention that all that was done without exploiting Third World countries"
So I guess you didn't plunder the resources of the whole Eastern Europe after WW2, right? I happen to know first hand that whole countries were not just drained of some mineral resources to support the URSS economy, but in a couple of cases were left literally depleted of some resources. So, please. Spare me the propaganda.
"and that what wealth was created by the system was distributed equitably among the whole population and not just a small group of people (millionaires plus the upper middle class)."
I guess you're trying to tell me there wasn't a huge disparity between how the party officials lived, and how an unskilled-labour worker in the non-russian areas lived. I don't know, dude. Those guys lived and acted as if they owned the place. Just because purely on paper it was "state property" they used and spent, is IMHO more of a technicality, than really making any difference.
And if I were to really be nasty, I'd talk about what "equality" meant to the millions of Ukrainian peasants who literally starved to death to meet Stalin's quotas. But that's ancient history anyway, so I won't go into that.
Still, we're already getting sidetracked. That equality is good and fine and reason for pride, yeah. (If it actually were true, anyway.) But regardless, the power of the USSR still rose and fell as its industry, compared to the rest of the world, rose and fell. Equitably divided or not, after a point, compared to the western world, it just fell. Everyone else grew faster. That's all.
"Too bad you Yanks had to destroy my country. :( That it wasn't the only country you destroyed is not a consolation."
Actually, you know what? I'm not a "Yank", and I've been even known to piss off the "Yanks" occasionally, but it's sorta heart-warming to see that they don't have a monopoly on ignorance.
Get this: it wasn't the Americans that destroyed your country. The Americans didn't do anything to you, and even sold you pretty much anything you wanted to buy. E.g., grain. Yes, most of the bread you ate in the Soviet days was made from American grain.
Your country was destroyed by your own Communist Party officials. While other countries invested most of their funds in industrial research and modernizing the industry, the CCCP invested almost everything in the army. That's why you fell behind.
See, you had more army than the whole NATO put together. Very modern army too. You had so much army that western Europe shit its pants when Reagan announced the SDI (a.k.a. "Star Wars") programme: with the USA no longer needing Europe to keep the URSS in check, there was a distinct possibility that the USA would just let Europe deal with the URSS on its own. And the estimation was that the military disparity was so insane, that western europe as a whole would lose within a couple of weeks.
But that army came at the expense of your industry. The USA evolved by investing in more/better industry, and having the military expenses as a very small percentage of their GDP. The USSR invested everything they could in more army, and your industry stagnated. By the 1980's your industry wasn't in that much better shape than in the 50's.
You could have been an industrial power equal to the USA. But your supreme soviet decided you'd rather be a military behemoth, even at the expense of stagnating as an economic power.
That, in a nutshell is what "destroyed" your country. It wasn't the Yanks, it wasn't even communism, it was just idiotic mis-management of the economy by your own leaders.
"The Rivington Playground on Manhattan's East Side has a small sign at the entrance that says adults are prohibited unless they are accompanied by a child"
I took the liberty to highlight a key word there: it's a playground, not just any park. So far from being a case of "waah, absurd regulations forbid adults from sitting in parks", it's more of a case of "WTH was an adult doing on a children's playground, if they have no kids, anyway?" No, seriously.
It's not like anyone forbade her from entering parks generally. I'm sure if she just wanted to sit down on a bench, there were other parks in the area.
So what we really have there is just a case of sensational journalism making it sound like something it wasn't. "Stranger Ticketed For Being On Kids' Playground Without Kids" wouldn't have sounded outrageous enough. But phrase it like someone was ticketed for just being in a park, and voila, you have a story that sells.
Do you actually want a bunch of adult strangers hanging around your kids at the playground anyway? I'm sure every parent has told their children to not talk to strangers. It's not stuff that's new. Stories like the Grimm Brothers' "Hansel and Gretel" are about just that: a way to tell kids "stay away from strangers, they might want to kill you." It's a story from 1812 AD, i.e., almost two hundred years old, long before the Internet, Republican-vs-Democrat political games, or pedophiles in chat rooms hype. And people still didn't want their kids to play with strangers or take gifts from strangers. Go figure.
Yeah, yeah, presumption and innocence and all that, and maybe that stranger is just a kind old lady or gentleman that just loves children... but chances are that if you have a kid, you didn't tell him or her "if a stranger offers you candy, and wants you to get into his car... go for it." And if your kid is at the playground, whether with you or not, chances are that you're under the assumption that he/she will play with other kids his/her age, not with adults.
So basically we have a rule that says, in a nutshell, "this playground is for children. If you're not a child or accompanying your own child, stay out." What is unreasonable about it? Seems to me like just what I'd expect from a playground.
" but a parks spokesman told the Daily News that the department hoped police would use some common sense when enforcing the rule"
And here it's where it starts to sound suspiciously like a crap case of discrimination to me. Exactly what do they mean by common sense? Women are ok, men are automatically pedophiles?
How about just keeping all adults off the children's playground anyway? I'm pretty sure that not many parents are much more thrilled about their little Dick and Jane playing with a stranger woman than with a stranger man.
I'm sure there have been plenty of abductions where a woman was involved. And let's also note that the witch in the "Hansel and Gretel" story is a woman. Yes, it's a fictional character, but for a story whose main purpose is teaching young ones to not take candy for strangersm nor come in when a stranger invites them, it does say that they didn't think "ah, but if it's a woman, it's ok. Then take the candy and go into her house. Only men are dangerous."
The idea in both cases is whether you're responsible enough to be entrusted with taking that decision. That's all.
So it's not that there's any similarity between being a soldier and being drunk, and noone was making that kind of a connection. The thing that _is_ common is that you're taking a decision for yourself. In one case you take the decision that it's OK to go get shot, in the other case you take the decision that it's ok to drink a beer.
And the government basically says that at a given age, simultaneously (A) you're mature and informed enough to decide to sign away many months of your life, and to risk death and injury, i.e., a _major_ decision, but (B) you're not mature and informed enough to deal with a minor choice that'll affect you for maybe 2-3 hours at most.
Additionally, you're considered mature enough so under high stress and pressure, and while having a gun and ammo, you'll take intelligent life and death decisions. Because that's what war is all about: split-second life and death decisions, at a time when you're soaked in adrenalin. But at the same time you're considered too immature and too dumb to deal with having a slight alcohol-induced buzz.
And if someone's really too dumb to control their actions after a beer as an unarmed civilian, what happens when they find some alcohol to drink during a war? Aren't they just as irresponsible now, only now they also have a loaded weapon and some grenades?
"How about using the polished insides of bronze shields? Presumably the greeks would have had plenty of those at hand, considering the situation."
The idea is ingenious, but unfortunately it's not realistic either.
The greek round shields, also (incorrectly) known as Hoplon were made of _wood_. (As a side-note, most shields ever used were wood. Roman shields, for example, were literally made plywood.)
So, well, you're telling me they'd focus light with a polished _wooden_ shield? That seems... a little improbable.
Additionally, we're talking about shields that were too deeply curved anyway. Even if you covered a shield's inside with silver and polished it (and that too would take time and a lot of silver), you'd be left with something that's maybe good for sorta almost focusing the light at maybe 1 to 2 meter distance, not "at bow and arrow range".
So, yeah, they had plenty of... something completely useless.
You seem to assume that a greek city had a large factory, capable of cranking up 500 parabolic mirrors just like that.
In practice, they'd have one smith with maybe a couple of apprentices, and I very much doubt that they'd even have the ore supply ready in the warehouses for that kind of a task. We're not talking about going to your local factory and asking them to run some sheet metal through the big press 500 times, we're talking about someone hammering and polishing all those by hand. It would have taken many months there.
Add to that the question if a smith was even qualified enough to make a parabolic mirror with the right focal distance. Then produce 500 with the same focal distance. Yeah, a smart guy like Archimedes could have done it, with lots of tuning and experimentation. The local weaponsmith and a couple of almost untrained apprentices? Yeah, right. So you're proposing, what? That Archimedes himself, and maybe a couple of other smart guys, polishes and tunes 500 bronze mirrors by hand? That would take _years_.
Basically _that_ is the whole problem. We're not talking if it could be done with a modern factory, and a warehouse full of materials at that. We're talking about an ancient town. Those weren't even too large.
"So why not get excited about a possibility? Maybe you're a cynic. Maybe you're some MS/Sony fanboy. Maybe you just don't think it will work."
;)
:)
I just don't think it will work.
"Why didn't you say anything about what I said, rather than just putting words in my mouth?"
You mean I should have also answered to stuff like "For all your learning you are really stupid."? I was sorta tempted to comment about it being the standard fanboy tantrum, but then again, why bother? You'd rather that I did?
As for putting words in your mouth, eh, go re-read the fourth paragraph in the message I was answering to. In fact, I'll save you the trouble: "But to say this isn't exciting (this is important) simply because you can't think of any cool games is stupid, and a logical fallacy as well." My emphasis there. I'd say the implication is pretty clear that I should view it as exciting even if I can't think of any use for it. Hence, I've answered to just that.
"What about those actors and the pre-rendered stuff?"
I was referring precisely to the videos there. Have you actually downloaded them? Try it. I've yet to see anyone actually using those in action. All they do show is a bunch of paid actors waving them around in a choreographed video clip. For an article that pretty much _starts_ with "then watch the video of it in action that's available on our download page", it showed a clip containing anything _but_ some actual gamer actually using it in action. No, sorry, some advertising clip does _not_ count as seeing it in action.
Other than that, yeah, whop-de-flippin-do... so in some crude over-simplified demos, coached by a Nintendo employee, and at a very precise position in regards to the TV, a journalist found it to be sorta working. Wake me up when it works in an actual game, facing more complex issues like having to circle-strafe in a FPS without twisting your arm. In a rigged demo, all that can be easily avoided. Or when it's as accurate as a lightgun not in a rigged demo, _and_ from a fixed position, but when you've calibrated it sitting at one end of the sofa and then give it to player 2 sitting at the other end. _Then_ I'll be convinced it works.
"That really hurts your credibility"
If I were concerned about "credibility" in Slashdot's Nintendo fanboy community, I'd just join in the mutual-backpatting chorus of singing praise to Nintendo and accusing everyone else of being (A) bought by MS/Sony, (B) trying to stiffle innovation, (C) intentionally torturing themselves by playing boring stuff, just so they won't admit that only Nintendo's games are great, or (D) all the above. Look around you. That's the way the big karma is gained in this forum.
In practice, I couldn't care less. I'll say what I think. If anyone doesn't like it, or finds it less credible because it doesn't match his/her pet dogma, tough shit. If I'll ever I start altering my opinions to win a popularity contest, instead of saying what I think, that's the day I'll lose all self-respect.
"makes me wonder if you know anything about it other than that it looks like a remote and you wave it in the air."
I couldn't care less what you wonder about me. We're talking Nintendo's controller, not trying to be prom queen or win a popularity contest. But it's a free country, so go ahead and wonder anyway
"You also must have ignored the part where I said "Firstly, neither he nor I, said anything about trying something new for the sake of it being new.""
Actually, I didn't. The answer was to your saying that I should be excited. Nothing more. Notice how nowhere did I say you want me to try it. So, yes, that phrase has been acknowledged.
See, hope is ok in my book. Nothing wrong with that.
All that does get my goat is the recent all-out offensive of the "if you're for innovation, then you must be excited about this controller" battlecry or the equivalent "if you're not excited about it, you're not really for innovation" (or even "you're a horrible person, part of some Sony/MS conspiracy, trying to stop innovation as a whole"). I say they're equivalent because one is "A => B" and the other is "not B => not A".
And what gets me about that, is best explained if we turn to the dictionary:That's the whole problem. That word has two very distinct meanings. Noone has anything against innovation as (1) the act, even though someof us don't like (2) one particular product, newly introduced. I.e., the whole "if you don't like Nintendo's controller, you're against innovation" I'm bombarded with, is just a textbook case of a Verbal Fallacy.
That's not in response to anything in your message, which, again, is finally a sane and rational one. Just, well, explaining why I'm already flipping out when I see yet another variant of the exact same fallacy. I.e., how this whole sub-thread came to be.
B. About the Sidewinder joysticks, it's not that simple. Sidewinder isn't a separate company, it's a brand owned by Microsoft itself. You know, the same mammoth company who owns Microsoft Games, the publisher, and who didn't think twice about blowing a few hundred millions to jump-start the XBox as a gaming platform.
Microsoft is all about integration like that: if one division needs the backing of others, they _will_ get it. And if they want a market segment, they can throw a lot of weight at it.
I.e., if all that stood between those Sidewinder gamepads and adoption was lack of games, I do believe that MS wouldn't be deterred by that.
And the Saitek ones were MS-compatible anyway, so they basically rose or fell (actually just fell) together with the Sidewinder ones.
Ok, so let's get the topic straight this time, because this beating around the bush and tantrums are getting tiresome. Your point is basically: "But you should be excited about it because it's _new_!!" That _is_ what you're saying, or are you going to do a verbose dodge again?
This might come as new and unexpected, but at some point you just have to use your own brains and decide for yourself what looks exciting and important to _you_, and what doesn't. To me, this doesn't. Claiming that everyone should get excited about a gimmick just because it's new, is just plain old silly.
Yeah, theoretically it _could_ open new possibilities. Or then again, maybe not. It may not be as original as you think. A whole line of Sidewinder gamepads existed, and I seem to recall some Saitek models too, that had just that: a motion sensor. Remind me... what genres did those make possible? For that matter, in which genres did they rule as a controller? As far as I know, everyone already silently discontinued such models.
But at any rate, it's just a possibility. No more.
And we're talking a _gaming_ console. There's one single reason to own one or to get excited about one: the games. If I can't think of any games that would benefit it, there's no reason for me to get excited about it. It's that simple.
"Someone else already discussed your rant about the virtual boy"
No, he did a totally off-topic rant that had nothing to do with what I had written there.
"To me, that also could have changed the way we game. A neat idea, not exactly implemented the best way."
Which actually is the whole crux of the problem. There are lots of neat-sounding ideas that nevertheless never got implemented right, or some which arguably can't even be implemented "right", as in, better than the conventional ways. VR, touch-screens, power-gloves, you name it. "For every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, neat, and wrong." The VB was just one such wrong solution.
The question that still remains to be answered is if the Revolution controller is also one. The problems that Nintendo waves around, like the need to draw more people to gaming, are real. (And not very original either, since that's what MS says too, and what Sony addressed with their original Playstation.) Is this controller the right answer? Or is it such a solution that's simple, neat and completely wrong? So far it looks like the latter to me.
Whoa. Simmer down, Captain Nintendo ;) To recap what all that message was about:
1. Noone was saying "all new ideas suck", and noone is generally against new ideas. Lay down the persecution complex. All that was written there is that _some_ new ideas can still suck. Keyword: some. You can't just say "original ==> good". The two qualities are pretty much orthogonal, that's all I'm saying.
_Some_ original stuff is good, and _some_ stuff can be bad even though it's new and original. There are plenty of examples in both categories. That's all.
(E.g., the black plague in Europe or flu among the Indians in the 16'th century were damn new and original, but still they weren't fun. Not much gameplay and balance there, you know. You just cough and sneeze until you die.)
2. About the VirtualBoy: I've only said that the VirtualBoy _itself_, in spite of being new and original, (A) didn't change anything, and (B) was _the_ console that died a horrible death. Hence the whole "OMG!!11 All other consoles will fail and only this one will survive because it's soo original!!11" thing is false. Something can be highly original, and still crap, and it can still die. That's all. That's all there is to that VirtualBoy reference.
So unless you're trying to say that you got wireless or rumble because of the VirtualBoy, I can't even see what your point is. (And I'm pretty sure you didn't, because rumble would have damaged the oscilating mirrors in a VirtualBoy.) Do we have any technology today that's because of the _VirtualBoy_? If yes, please do enlighten me. But generic canned rants about how OMG Nintendo soo innovates, just have nothing to do with what I was saying there.
"Because, like anyone else, I have an imagination, and I've thought of every single game I've loved in the past 20 years and very few wouldn't be better with this controller, and genres I hate (RTS, FPS, sports) are the ones that'll benefit most, assuming the right companies get involved with this thing (and that's a big assumption)."
Yes, bingo, same thing here. I've tried to imagine exactly how I'd control every single genre with it, and so far I'm not even seeing even one which would be better with this PR-stunt gimmick than (depending on genre) with a mouse or joystick. Yes, if you don't think more than 1-2 seconds about it, and superficially at that, it's "omg, it would so rule to wave it around as a sword" time. Once I actually put my thinking cap on, and start thinking about gameplay, usability and how would the controls even work if I coded a game for that thing... it starts looking pretty bad to me. Heck, even skipping the other aspects, the fact alone that it only has two buttons has me scratching my head about some genres.
So to me, this looks like a crap PR stunt. It's stuff that looks good in a press release, and then allows them to sell you a different attachment for every game. (And to quote VG Cats again: since we're talking Nintendo, chances are they'll be _required_.) But a better way to control games? Sure doesn't look that way to me.
Which of us is right? Hell if I know. I'll just wait and see the actual games.
But again, just to have one thing clear: noone is against innovation as a whole. It's strictly about this one gadget. No more, no less.
"Maybe you don't like this controller, but you have to admit it opens a lot more doors than the other two consoles, which are pretty much the exact same as their old consoles. Honestly, any new doors opening for game developers with the PS3 or 360? "Yeah we can make trees look real nice now". Really looking forward to it."
AFAIK, noone said the PS3 or 360 are original or anything. Yeah, we can aggree there very very quickly. Yeah, the Nintendo Revolution controller is far more original. Kudos to Nintendo for even trying. But is it also better? Doesn't look better to me. But we'll all wait and see anyway.
And here's the even more important part: will it have the games that interest me? Because
Actually, while the GP post _is_ offensive and does have all the tact and style of a 12 year old, I can sorta see how she got that idea too.
It's not just about women. Since you do ask "what about fathers?", I can say I've seen the exact same thing happen to fathers.
I have a male co-worker who couldn't even stop from talking about Counter-Strike. Heck, I'm a hardcore gamer myself, but even by my standards that guy was just obsessed. He _lived_ for that one game, and had no other topic than his work and that. Ever since he's got a son last year, I don't think he's totalled more than a couple of hours of gaming in the whole year. He never even mentions the game any more.
(And thank goodness for that, let me say. I'm a hardcore gamer myself, but it was so unbelievably boring to hear someone talking about the same game and the same 2-3 maps for 3 years straight. Enough is enough, you know. But I digress.)
What I'm saying is that there _is_ a big change in people, or at least some people, when they become parents. I'm sure that might change back later, maybe when the kid is at the age where they can play together, but the initial change can be very very abrupt. I can see how it would give someone ideas like "wtf, is that even the same person? I swear it's the hormones or something." I'm sure the "clan"-mates of the guy I've mentioned must have asked themselves the exact same thing.
The way some of these giants are described by those who supposedly fought them, it would more probably be like:
"3rd March, 1327.
Dear Diary,
By the prophet's beard! I was walking into town to sell my wares, and as I took one corner next thing I know I'm staring into someone's belt buckle. I looked upwards startled and in front of me was this giant man, with arms thicker than my legs and a giant crossbow the size of a ballista in one hand. It scared the life out of me. He must have seen how I was trembling in my boots as I he smiled at me and moved on. I must tell everyone in my village about it! In fact, I'll write a letter immediately to my cousin Harun Al Azhred in Alexandria to tell him about it."
I mean, seriously, life was fucking boring back then. If you think what's on TV nowadays is boring, picture riding a camel for days or ploughing a few acres of land, with nothing ever happening. Something this unusual would provide something talk about for years. Doubly so if one of the giants had the monstrous or demonic features that some are credited with. If you bumped into, say, a Tauren (from WoW) IRL, you _would_ tell everyone about it.
Casual gamers can be into very different kinds of games than us hardcore folk. Hardcore gamers want a challenge, danger, and spectacular ways to fail or to defeat someone. E.g., when I won a race in a game by pushing my opponent to crash directly into a bridge pillar, it made my day. It was _the_ ultimate victory. When I tried getting mom to play the same game, she wasn't even interested.
Additionally, yes, you've noticed a very real phenomenon, non-gamers and casual gamers tend to show more empathy towards the NPCs. You and I have been desensitized. We _know_ they're just NPCs, they're not real, they don't have feelings, they're just there to be abused. But non-gamers haven't been brought to this "it's not real" state of mind yet. (Incidentally, that's also what causes the media hysteria over games. To a non-gamer, the things you do in a game are the actions of a deranged psychopath.)
But try telling a non-gamer that, for example, you gave your Cow in Black and White a savage beating. Mom was appaled by the idea that I beat up an animal. Or I was telling her about my playing Tropico (a sorta city-building sim, themed around a stereotypical central-american dictatorship), and how I made everyone live in the cheapest flats, made all TV stations broadcast my propaganda, and so on. Yep, you guessed, she was appaled.
But knowing that, you can also get an idea that you need different kinds of games to get a non-gamer hooked. (I.e., also that MS would need to start actually produce games for moms, if they want moms playing their games.)
E.g., I had no problems whatsoever getting mom addicted to Lumines or various other abstract puzzle games. Or for that matter to cutesy jump puzzles like Mario 64.
E.g., after I got her past her horror to what I'm doing to those poor people, mom actually got addicted to Tropico. She actually enjoyed taking good care of those little simulated people. She tried keeping everyone employed, sheltered, and generally happy.
For that matter, I also got grandma, a totally computer-illiterate old woman, who's never touched a keyboard or mouse before, addicted to Sierra's "Emperor: Rise of The Middle Kingdom". And speaking of empathy towards NPCs, after she went back home, she called me a few times to ask how are those people doing. Apparently she thought that village she's built keeps functioning when she's not there. Go figure.
Etc.
Again, it's actually very possible to make a game that non-gamers can get started on, once you realize what their perceptions and priorities are, and how much they differ from those of a die-hard hardcore gamer. Whether MS is actually going to do that, though, I wouldn't know. Seeing how much a modern publisher misunderstands that market, I'd rather bet they're just gonna dump a bunch of non-gamers in the middle of a FPS frag fest, put them in a tiny bikini and give them moaning sounds if they're female, and have a bunch of 12 year olds call them nasty names. And then the publisher's staff goes back to scratching their heads and wondering why did those non-gamers go back to not playing games. I mean, it was all good fun, right? RIGHT? Why would anyone not buy our console after they've experienced all that fun?
I'll aggree wholeheartedly with you, but I think the big picture is even more baffling than that.
See, the full "story" is that in the beginning, a.k.a., in the days of Pong and PacMan, the industry had a pretty good 50-50 gender distribution and they knew it. Then somewhere along the road they somehow decided that "chicks don't play games", making games only for horny 16 year old males is all that's needed, and using women as sex objects to sell to games to those males is perfectly ok.
What's fascinating is that it's the exact opposite road than what, say, the car industry took. The car industry started by promoting its cars as things for Real Men (and we're still stuck with a generation or two who still think that their penis size _depends_ on their car and on driving like a homicidal psycho) and presenting women as the prize you'll get for having that car. Then it finally dawned upon them that "hey, you know what? we could have twice the market if we dropped that silly notion that cars are only for men." So nowadays you have not only cars marketted to women, or named to sound like the women's version (e.g., Fiat "Bravo", masculine, and Fiat "Brava", feminine), but recently we even have cars _designed_ for women.
The gaming industry did the exact same road in reverse. They started by selling games to both, then decided they'd rather alienate half the market. It fascinates me. How and why does a whole industry get that kind of an idiotic idea?
And I can't even pin the blame on immature male programmers. Most of these decisions go through a publisher anyway. We're taling business people there, not immature nerds. I can see how a horny male nerd would go "but I really wanna see tits and ass" when making a game, but how do you get a bunch of businessmen to cheerfully give up half the market?
In fact, here's a very recent such screw-up that happened at the publisher, or at least with the publisher's blessing.
You've mentioned The Sims yourself, and yes, it was _the_ game that appealed to more women than any others, as well as to a lot of adult casual gamers. It was a game that, as released, didn't even have any sex or violence. And it appealed to a lot of people _because_ of that. (I'm sure you know that already, but bear with me.)
So then EA publishes The Sims 2. How do they market it? Well, I can tell you that at least here, I ran into pages after pages of ads in magazines, all hammering on the same aspect: sex. Sex in bed, sex on the sofa, sex in the kitchen, sex with the neighbour lady while the wife is away, threesome sex with the neighbour lady _and_ the wife, sex, sex, sex. Add to that the trailer clip with the woman ripping off her clothes and jumping on the guy... I think about half a dozen times in a fairly a short clip.
It's fascinating, really. Some idiot marketroid at EA basically ran an ad campaign that just didn't match the target demographic for it. In fact, one which was outright offensive to a large part of the target demographic. Someone at EA just couldn't get his head out of his ass, and out of the mentality that games are made for, and marketted to, horny 16 year old males.
And then come such stories in which everyone wonders how they can bring women back to gaming, and how much they'd like to get their money too. And it _still_ doesn't occur to them what the problem is? It makes me wonder WTF are these people smoking, really.
See, even without going into what's morally wrong with that attitude (it's been said already anyway), it's a piss-poor use of my time anyway.
/. pretty much _the_ standard post about it is along the lines of "yay, I got a pizza for fixing their computer". Or a beer, or a homecooked meal, or whatever. I'm sorry, unless you're a teenager without an allowance or living on a 1-2$ per hour wage in East Elbonia, that doesn't even start to be adequate compensation. Taking a part time job at McDonalds would likely pay more money per hour than that.
1. It's not the job I wanted to do. If I wanted to clean up crap, I'd be a janitor. I'm a programmer. There's a difference. I'd rather spend my time coding or playing a game, than searching through someone's registry for crap
(The same goes, btw, for crap like "I bought an ancient scanner at a flea market. Can you please make it work?" Then it turns out it's an ancient SCSI model from back in the DOS times, that nowadays the manufacturer doesn't even admit ever having sold.)
2. How much _do_ you get paid for it anyway? If I were to charge someone, say, my consultant fee for that time (as an arbitrary measure of my time's worth: that's how much I'd get paid at work for that time), chances are they could just buy a new computer, including OS, for that money.
In practice most people I know get paid some token price, if at all. Even on
And let's go back to the "if at all" part. What most people seem to want isn't to pay a professional to have their computer serviced, but to mooch some free repairs off a nerd who (in their opinion) had nothing better to do with his time anyway. Asking for money, more often than not won't get you paid, it will just get them offended. (Though on the bright side, sometimes they're offended enough to stop asking for free tech support.)
"The pedantic response here is that if you really were up to something new as much as the next guy, you would be up to the revolution's controller."
I'll call bullshit on that. Wanting something new doesn't mean you have to stop thinking for yourself, nor that you'll take _any_ idiocy just because it's new.
Want to disaggree there? Well then I propose you go hit yourself in the groin with a hammer. It's something new, which you've never experienced before. What are you waiting for? If you were all for something new, you'd have done it already, right?
Lemme guess... you didn't actually go do it, right? Well, assuming that you didn't, you illustrate _exactly_ what I'm talking about: even if something's new, it can still not be fun, and you can still think for yourself and decide "nope, I don't want that."
Same here for some of us and the Revolution controller. I'll wait and see what games it's actually good for, thank you very much, because so far all Nintendo showed us were some _actors_ waving it around in front of a pre-rendered _movie_. They weren't actually playing a game with it. But in the meantime, I can still think for myself and it looks to me like it would be uncomfortable and ineffective, other than as a PR stunt. But again, we'll see. I'll wait for the games first.
Additionally, I sorta find the use of the Argumentum ad numerum fallacyhere funny. "if you really were up to something new as much as the next guy"... which next guy would that be? The guy drawing the VG Cats comic strip, maybe, which basically called it a sex toy? It's yet unproven if the majority on which to base that kind of Argumentum ad numerum even exists.
"Nintendo has a long history of changing the way games are played, and I have no doubts that if this next generation of consoles fails that Nintendo won't. What are my reasons? They are the only company doing something different."
You mean the same as the VirtualBoy was the one that changed the way games were played and the one that didn't fail, because it was different? Oh, wait, it did fail, and it didn't change anything. Shucks, there goes that theory.
"Almost all civilizations have oral or written records of giants and dwarves (trust me, LOTR is not a new idea). These, as most other legends, must have some sort of factual origin"
And almost all civilizations have some undead in their mythology. E.g., vampires. What's your theory about the factual origin of those? Are you telling me that the dead actually rose from their graves and preyed upon the living?
Now seriously, at least the giants are actually _very_ easily explained by exaggeration. It's like the hunters' or fishermen's tales of catching one "I swear it was this big" and increasing every year. Well, the same happened in wars. Defeating a particularly fearsome or important opponent is gradually inflated to having bested someone Goliath sized and with various demonic features or super-powers.
You don't even have to look too far back to see exactly that. During at least one of the crusades, one of the archers on the walls is described as pretty much a giant with a siege weapon in his hand. (A saracen version of Terry Pratchett's Detritus, if you will.)
You'd think that if one of the soldiers in the garrison actually had those proportions, it would get mentioned in more places than just that battle. It's something deviating that far from the norm that you'd just have heard about it. Merchants and travellers passing through the city would have mentioned something.
So, anyway, I wouldn't take mythology as a source of factual data for anthropology or human evolution.
Well, it's a good question. I don't know why they need a patent there, especially since it covers a very specific process, and not the XML Schema files themselves.
But the better question is: ok, so exactly what _can_ big bad MS prevent me from doing? Again, I'm genuinely curious. I want to know. Any lawyers in the house?
Can they prevent me from running an XML file through Xerces/libxml and Xalan/libxslt? I like to think they can't have patented that. At any rate, that would also affect anyone who's ever used XML and XSLT.
Even if they could somehow get a patent as broad as "reading XML data into a word processor" (they didn't, or not yet, but let's take the worst case scenario) can that stop me from just running the file through Xalan and getting a different file, with no word processor involved at that point?
Can they stop me from using Cocoon to automatically transform/convert the files, on demand? Because that's just the kind of thing I'd do, if the company I work for needed to access old files. Dump all those documents on a big fileserver, or into a database so I can also store metadatam including whose file is it. Then just set up a simple intranet web site, that you point at the document you want, and you get the transformed result as a download. It's not even a complicated Cocoon pipeline: a generator that just reads a document and parses it, a transformator that just applies a XSLT to it, and a serializer that just spits another XML (e.g., in DocBook or OpenDocument) or a HTML or a PDF.
Can that MS patent stop that? Because it's something so generic that it would mean forbidding Cocoon completely.
Bear in mind that at no point does it need to even access MS's XML Schemas. It just applies an XSLT to a generic XML. How's MS going to use patents against that?
"OK, first things first; let's have a little lesson on what XML is. XML is not really that big a deal. All it means really is that the less-than and more-than signs are reserved symbols; one writes constructs such as ..... to indicate a bounded block of type foo, or to indicate a single instance of type bar. The meanings of different foo and bar are what constitute a schema. The HTML used for web pages is actually just a bastardised dialect of XML. End of lesson."
At a _very_ superficial level, yes. But it's actually a massive over-simplification, missing such aspects as having a standard parser or a standard way to transform it via XSLT and about a dozen other key points. Or that unlike the binary formats it can be read by a human. (Not comfortably, but it can be done.) Or that there are a thousand and one tools that can generate a schema for me from the XML documents, without requiring me to pay a dime to Microsoft. (It won't have all the possible nuances, but it will have all that appear in my documents. That's good enough for me.) Etc.
And that's exactly why I ask. As long as I know I'll expect <foo>..</foo> constructs, exactly how is my data in peril there. I keep getting being told about some scary bullshit scenarios in which MS owns all my data, and I can't possibly get it ever again from their evil clutches. Well, that's the whole question: exactly how _are_ they going to do that, then? I can just run the whole thing through Xerces and get my data out of there myself.
"You can expect the problem with Microsoft's format that only Microsoft -- and a chosen few appointed by Microsoft -- are allowed to write programs that can retrieve your data once it has been saved in Microsoft's proprietary format. OpenOffice.org's format is better because any competent programmer can help you to retrieve that data, without being beholden to anyone."
You mean they can legally prevent Xerces or libxml from parsing that file? Or they can prevent Xalan or libxslt from transforming it? How?
"Any data that belongs to you rather than to Microsoft."
It will still belong to me just as much after it's stored in XML. Regardless of whether it's with MS's schema, or Sun's, or my own.
"That is not the problem. The problem is if, five or ten years down the line, you decide for some reason to move away from Microsoft."
Yep, I'm listening. That's in fact why I'm asking.
"Now someone else's document converter may well not be able to handle Microsoft's proprietary format correctly. Your data might become inaccessible!"
And this is the very thing I'm not convinced of. As long as that data is in XML anyway, _how_ are they going to prevent me from getting at least my text out of it?
"In five, fifty or a hundred years, any competent programmer will still be able to obtain the schema which will enable them to make sense of an OpenOffice.org document, because no one person or organisation controls that schema. No such guarantee can be made in respect of Microsoft's schema."
In 5, 50 or 100 years, any competent programmer can still feed the document into XMLSpy and get a good enough schema for it. Heck, even without automated tools for that, if anyone so completely retarded as to look at a plaintext file and not possibly be able to get the data out (even if by copy-and-paste in Notepad, if that's all their IQ allows), they have no business getting paid as a programmer. I know that competence went out of style somewhere during the dot-com boom, but ffs, we're talking elementary logic and/or the ability to google for something that can generate a schema for them. Not even necessarily both. If anyone can tell me with a straight face that the company's data is lost and forever captured by MS when staring at an XML file, I'll say he/she needs to go back to flipping burgers or whatever job they were qualified for before they faked a resume.
Thanks. That's just the kind of thing that I was interested in.
"With OpenDocument, this isn't an issue. No matter what product you buy in the future, it can work with OpenDocument. Doesn't matter what product a client or customer uses -- if it's OD-compatible, you can exchange data."
So basically it's a case of "with OpenDocument you don't have a problem, as long as you buy only applications which are OpenDocument compatible". However, replace "OpenDocument" with "MS Word Format" or "WordPerfect Doc" or "Moraelin's Own Format" (.mof;) or whatever in there and the same still holds true. "You won't ever have a problem with X, as long as you only ever use programs which support X." So basically it's just another document format to get locked in. Except it's Sun's instead of MS's. From a pragmatic and "no love for either camp" point of view, that alone is far from counting as either advantage or disadvantage.
"But, you're stuck. You have 10 years of data that's locked into Microsoft products, what do you do? Convert everything -- and hope everything comes through unscathed?"
Well, that's exactly what I'm asking. If the XML Schema for it is published, why can't I write a simple XSLT to convert it to some other format? (E.g., to DocBook, or OpenDocument, or simply to HTML.) Or can't I run it through Xerces/Saxon/libxml/whatever and extract the data the old fashioned way? What concrete problems would I be looking at in that scenario?
"Also, there's interoperability with external organizations. Right now, to do business with the federal or most state governments, your business must use Office to be able to exchange data. No ifs ands or buts about it."
So wouldn't that count as a reason to stay with MS Office, then? Because then it wouldn't matter how much I think MS's schema sucks or not, it's a given. You must start and end with that format. In your words, "what do you do? Convert everything -- and hope everything comes through unscathed? Buy Office and the new product for everything? Create a "legacy application gateway" with a few copies of Office accessable via Citrix or VNC?"
I've actually RTFA, and I'm still at a loss about exactly _what_ is better about OOo's XML Schema, or wrong about MS's.
In TFA the guy just goes on about how his own XML Schema is, you know, lovingly handcrafted and how he _cares_ about your data. Which is just a content-free judgment call. Yeah, so he likes his own XML Schema better. Whop-de-do, that's such a total surprise.
It's not like if I went around the office and asked 10 guys I wouldn't get 10 different schemas, and each loves his own more and is convinced that everyone else's sucks. Just the proper way to use attributes alone has everyone polarized in three camps, with everyone in one camp arguing that the other two are awfully wrong and against the very idea of OOP or of XML itself. Handling validation and showing which fields are wrong to the user who filled the form? Yep, another clean three-way split, and I've actually had to implement three different ways to handle it, to please all three camps. And so on.
So that he loves his own more and thinks it's a better way to store my data, is very much expected there. I was already sure he thinks that. In fact, I'd be worried if he said he didn't.
What really interests me is exactly which concrete problems should I expect with MS's, that supposedly aren't there if I use OOo's format. If I try to retrieve that data in 5, 10 or 100 years, as in his answer, exactly in which way is OOo's format better? Exactly _what_ kind of data gets more benefits from his schema than from MS's in that context? In which way, and for what concrete reasons does he foresee that MS's own converters (which so far still import Word 6 documents with no problems) will break down and cry like little girls if fed a Word 12 document some 10 years from now?
No, really, it's not a flame. I want to know. If I'm to go there and pester my boss to switch from MS Office to OOo, I damn better have some very concrete arguments and use-cases. If my whole argument is "but some guy from Sun likes Sun's format more" and "but Sun's format is lovingly handcrafted with love and care for your data", chances are I'll get laughed out of his office.
So can anyone shed some more light on that issue?
"I think it fits the conventional definition of poor usability rather well actually. The customer has money that they're willing to part with, and they have to fill in extra forms, then wait days, or longer if they don't have online banking, for a Paypal code to appear on their bank statement. It's not exactly user-friendly."
What I meant was that when (or rather "if") most people think of usability, they only think of their own site. Their site is user-friendly, has a cool shopping cart and all, and you surely already have a PayPal account so you only need to click here, right? Even the usability books I've read tended to deal only with what's on your site, and not with such issues as needing paypal accounts, or having signed up with a piss-poor ad provider whose ads take 2 minutes each to load. Or maybe I've just read the wrong books, I guess.
But yeah, once you look at the whole user experience, you're right, it fits the conventional definition of bad usability like a glove.
"I've been developing small business ecommerce sites for the past 10 years, and on every single development I've been part of we've tried to avoid Paypal integration simply because it puts users off."
Let's even skip over the bad perception of PayPal, and trusting my money to someone who's ostensibly not a bank, makes no guarantees, isn't backed by the government, and generally is just some dot-com.
But let's put it like this: if an e-commerce site can't afford to just make a contract with a bank to deal with credit-/debit-cards, why should I feel confident in them. We're not talking some starving web-cartoonist taking micro-payments for a living, we're talking a business and trusting them with, say, a few hundred quid for a new PC or a new 20" TFT monitor. Then I'd expect them to, you know, act like a business and inspire some confidence.
If they can't even afford to get some credit-card processing capability, can they even afford a warehouse, or will I get to wait for a month while they order the stuff directly from the manufacturer? Can they even afford employees, then? (E.g., will I have to wait for a month if it's a one man business and the guy is on vacation?) Will they be around next month, if I need support or to file a RMA?
Plus, I suspect for a lot of people it's also a matter of "usability". Yes, I know it doesn't really fit the real definition of "usability", but please bear with me. It's the same idea: making people jump through extra hoops and go through extra web pages just to buy your product is bad. If someone doesn't have a PayPal account, having to go through all those hoops to register a PayPal account, get confirmed, etc, then finally return to get the product they wanted... some may lose interest and go shop somewhere else.
"I've never seen the uncanny valley discussed in such apocalyptic terms"
Well, the part that makes me worry in that graph is the dip below zero. I don't know if that theory is true or not, but _if_ it is, there ought to be a point ahead where more "realism" would actually be repulsive, as in worse than not playing a game at all. That's how I read that graph and that less than zero situation. (E.g., see the examples there: you could play with a toy robot or doll, but a zombie or a corpse is something you'd want to be as far away from as you can.)
That's basically why the apocaliptic terms.
Additionally, it is interesting grounds for speculation what happens on the other side of the valley anyway. According to that theory, on our not-yet-real side you still don't have too much empathy for the characters, but on the other side you do. Thing is, you can do a lot of stuff to the NPCs precisely because of that: you can sorta relate to them for storytelling reasons, but are still detached enough because you still know it's an NPC. If needed, you can do stuff that would require you to be literally a psychopath IRL. (Which is one thing that scares the non-gamers and causes the anti-gaming hysteria: for someone who hasn't been trained to instinctively know "it's just NPCs, they don't matter", in half the games you _are_ acting like a psychopath. It scares people.)
_If_ there is a point at which you can actually mistake them for a human, could you still do those things and look yourself in the mirror in the morning? Some grown men have been known to cry at Aeris's death in FF7. What would happen if that scene happened in a Star Trek holodeck setting that's indistinguishable from reality? Could you bear being mind-controlled, gutting her like sardine and watching her bleed on the floor in that realistic a setting? I suspect a lot of people would get permanent psychological damage there.
Basically, could it be that we're better off staying on the current side of the valley? That theory does say that the best stories intentionally stay around the peak on the left side.
"but I think the market will take care of it"
It _probably_ will, but then there has been one gaming market crash already. Ok, for very different reasons, but it's already happened. So we already know it's possible (even if admittedly improbable to happen again) to drive the market as a whole off gaming.
"I thought the physics of The Spirits Within were a big reason why it was so off-putting- characters rarely ever interact with each other or the scenery in ways that require much physical simulation. [...] Also, the facial animations of the characters were very rigid, because facial animations are hard (but very important for the sake of empathy)."
I.e., you describe the exact same phenomenon I was talking about, and which then turned out that the uncanny valley theory already was about: you notice some details that aren't there. That's just the thing. You could live with wooden facial expressions in a 1000 polygons per character game or cut scene, or with games where the whole interaction is magic, or you could live with that in a comic or cartoon, but start noticing it when it gets realistic enough to be mistakable for humans.
It's not just because it's a movie, IMHO. I've noticed the same thing in EQ2 vs WoW, and they're both games in the same genre. It's just business as usual when my cartoonish characterin WoW just rubs his hands to produce a piece of armour, but I found myself noticing stuff like "wtf, he's hammering that blade in the air instead of on the anvil" in EQ2. Same about combat, since you mentioned edge combat in relation to the FF movie: in EQ2 I do notice stuff like that my realistic looking character swings the weapon at the wrong tempo or in somewhat the wrong direction.