The problem is that a broken algorithm just makes that piece of social engineering a lot easier.
If I just told you you can download the latest auto-installer of the latest WoW patch from www.i-pwn-ur-puter.ru instead through the slow Blizzard installer, you might think "uh, wtf, I think I'll play it safe anyway and get it directly from Blizzard. I trust them more than I trust a warez and script-kiddie site."
Now picture that I tell you "and here's a link to the MD5 sum on Blizzard's site. You can check for yourself that the the file on our site is the original file and it hasn't been tampered with." In fact, I would even _urge_ you to make a habit to check all your downloads against the original MD5 sums, for your own good.
It already looks a lot safer and more legitimate. Well, maybe not to _you_, but to a lot of people it does.
That's the whole problem. That false sense of security makes the "if we can convince you to run our insecure extractor code" part a helluva lot easier.
Having a free press is good and fine, but it's only worth anything if you have some reason to believe you're getting signal and not noise. Or at least that you're getting a reasonable signal to noise ratio.
If you can just say anything anonymously, don't have to put your reputation on the line, and don't have to check and document your sources either... well, let's put it like this: we've already been there. It doesn't take paranoia or conspiracy theories to imagine a potential outcome, since we have plenty of _real_ cases where it's already happened. The whole 19'th century for example is full of parties and individuals anonymously slandering each other in venomous pamphlets and faked secret protocols used as proof of the most absurd plans.
And if you look further back in time, when counts and dukes went to war against each other, they always had a bunch of heinous accusations about the other side, covering the whole ground between witchcraft, bestiality, vampirism, pacts with Satan to bring forth the Apocalypse (I guess that was the medieval version of "but they have WMDs!!!11";), treason, etc. You'd think that between all those vices, perversions, and running a full time coven of dark mages, some monarchs wouldn't even have any time left to sleep.
The press at least pretending to be impartial and about _reporting_ instead of fabricating news (hey, I did say "at least pretending") is a very recent invention. It's not its natural state. Remove all safeguards and let anyone start any rumour, and they will do that all over again.
"We left Korea. We left Vietnam. We left Kuwait. We left Somalia and Kosovo. We're going to leave Afghanistan and Iraq, too, when the job is done. Do you see a pattern here?"
Yes, I see the pattern that you got there in the first place. Since WW2, no other nation, heck, not even any whole continent, has started as many wars.
Even the USSR was a lot tamer by comparison. Yes, they tried to beat up Afghanistan and set up their own puppet government there, and had a brief tour through Hungary to the same end. The USA did that to two countries during the current president alone.
Defining it as being the good guys just because you just got there, shot a bunch of people, secured a puppet government and some fat concessions to USA-based corporations, and left, is like saying that the school bully is really the good guy there because he just beat people up and took their lunch money. Didn't take them into slavery or anything, right?
Bah, fluxbox is for wimps. Write an article on running Ratpoison on Tiger. I'm sure every Mac user was sick and tired of having all menus, icons, overlapping windows, and indeed a GUI at all. Not to mention all that effort of reaching for the mouse and giving it a quick shove upwards to get to those menus.
With Ratpoison you too can have a free -- as in, "I have no fucking clue what the First Amendment actually says, so I'll pretend that it has anything to do with contracts and licenses" -- interface to your Mac's filesystem.
Plus, nothing says Real Man like using "ls", "cd" and hitting tab 20 times to launch your favourite app or copy a file, instead of clicking or dragging an icon like those GUI-user pussies. Think of it! You'll be the talk of the party. Heck, parties will be thrown in your honour once word gets out how hardcore your keyboard skillz are. Random women on the street will come begging to have your baby.
(And yes, I realize your post was sarcasm too. I just felt like adding my own "*yawn*" while we're in a "look, we're so l33t for running KDE on, umm, unix" thread.)
Well, I don't think the action-reaction is always in that direction: that the voters want some regulation to start with, and the politicians just bow to the will of the masses. It would be nice to live in that kind of an ideal democracy, but, eh, do you really believe that's what's happening?
See, the good part of democracy is that promising to solve a problem, any problem, is a good way to get elected. Doubly so if it's a major problem. And that's a good thing. It's what, at least theoretically, should keep politicians working for the people. (Or at least promising to.)
The bad part of democracy is also just that: inventing a problem to solve, or blowing a minor one out of proportion, is a damn good way to get elected.
"And maybe by constantly building small things YOU'RE really trying to compensate for something?"
Well, in fact, yes. Such as compensating for having a realistic budget. I doubt that those schools could afford to build a bloody huge space shuttle, and the fuel to lift off all those hundreds of tons, just to put something washing-machine sized into orbit. It's basically like packing a half a pound chocolate bar in a few hundred pounds of hi-tech packaging before sending it by UPS: you're paying a lot more than you have to.
"The game industry has all but abandoned the adventure genre where we were just beginning to grow up and see some good storytelling. Now we have crap! Gamers need to watch better movies, read better books, and learn to appreciate themes outside of their adolescent power and sex fantasies."
Actually, not meant as an offense or anything, but you make a major confusion between what the publisher wants and what the gamers want.
E.g., you blame the disappearance of adventure games on gamers, which is just false. You basically rehash the common myth that everyone stopped buying adventures and got hooked on FPS, and that's why adventures nearly went extinct. But that's a myth. The publishers dropping that genre happened at a time when more people bought adventure games than ever before. It was a market that was actually _growing_.
You want to know why that genre was really dropped? Because it was more expensive to produce than a no-brainer Quake clone. At that time scripting a complex adventure game cost a lot of money. Or you could make a FPS instead for a fraction of that money. Remember we're talking about the old FPS, where there was no story and no scripting involved. You could just license a cheap 3D engine, slap a couple of skins and levels together, and that's it: you had a game.
With a FPS you didn't even have to outsell adventure games. If with a FPS you sold _half_ as many copies, but it cost a tenth of the price to produce, you still got way better ROI (Return On Investment.)
_That's_ why FPS exploded back then, not gamers. Again: you blame on the gamers something that was purely the publisher's financial decision.
And that's just one aspect where it's the publisher's own taking the easy route, not really the gamers' choice.
E.g., you mention teenager power and sex fantasies? How about the fact that the best selling PC game of all time was The Sims? You know, a game that has _no_ combat, _no_ PvP power games, and _no_ sex whatsoever? We're talking a game where the most violence you could see was a cartoonish cloud when two people fought, and even then you had to actively try hard to get them to fight. And a game where the most "sex"-related content was a hug and a kiss. (The love bed got added in a later expansion pack.)
(And as a tangent, to illustrate the dichotomy between who the gamers are and what the publisher does, I still remember some ads for The Sims 2. I don't know if it's a country-specific thing, or if that was world-wide, but anyway: You have the sequel to a non-sex game. And it's a game which sold to a helluva lot of women. And generally whose average gamer was _not_ in the horny teenager bracket. So how does EA market it? Well, by hammering on the sex aspect only. There were ads after ads about having sex with the neighbour lady while the wife is away, sex on the sofa, sex in bed with two women, sex in the kitchen, sex, sex, sex. It made it sound like that was all there was to the game. Some idiot marketer at EA decided to aim their ads at the only market they understand: horny teenagers. Even at the expense of potentially alienating their core fans. I'm not a prude or anything, but it made it sound like something really lame and not worth the money. I mean, eh, I don't need to pay $40 just to enact sex fantasies in a sex game. It's not like I can't find better images on the internet for free.)
E.g., although not from your message, another common complaint is that somehow it's gamers who value graphics over substance. And again, if you look at the sales, that's just not true. You may notice that about 10 times more people play WoW, with its cartoonish graphics, than the graphically-superior Everquest 2. You may notice that, again, the mostly-2D low-res The Sims outsold FPS games that had vastly superior graphics. Or you may notice that even in the FPS category, the ancient CounterStrike is still _the_ most played online FPS, even though it looks like ass compared to newer games.
The problem there is that you pass judgment upon a whole medium based on... what? An old arcade game like Robotron, some arcade-ish Mario games, and basically a puzzle game. Now I won't say Mario games aren't good games, but really, they're just easy-to-play arcade-ish games that have almost no story at all. They're not made to be deep or emotional, they're just meant to keep you happily clicking a controller button for a few hours.
So basically you look at a few games that don't even have much story and don't even try to cause an emotional response, and then extrapolate that all games are like that. Well, no, you just told me there what games _you_ play, not what all games are.
Extrapolating your experiences with Mario to an RPG like Planescape Torment (where BTW, the whole goal is to die and go to hell, so I'm not even sure it counts that much as a happy end in the classic sense) is just silly. It's just as silly as if someone came and said that no movie ever had a plot or any character depth, based on their watching only porn movies. (Not saying that Mario is like porn and not trying to insult Mario or its players, but as plot and character depth goes, that's really about the closest movie category. Insert any other movie category with nearly zero story, plot or character depth, if that makes you feel any better.)
There are _plenty_ of games with deep and involved stories and plots. If you don't want to play those, fine by me, that's a valid choice. I know there are people who actually want a shallow entertainment and hate long cut scenes or reading text in a game. It's different from my own tastes, but I can understand that point of view too. But then please don't come and pretend that all games are Mario and Katamari Damacy, because that simply isn't true.
I.e., we're all nerds, we all like to think that the world is about eloquently building an ivory tower and having something _logical_ (if only by virtue of using enough fallacies) to say about anything. We're the kids who got praised (if only by our parents) when we could rant for hours about how the rainbow is like that because of refraction and difraction on water droplets, instead of saying some platitude like "dunno what it is, but it's as beautiful as your eyes". We're the ones who when asked something like "why do you like music?" would actually _expect_ someone to launch into a whole philosophical disertation about the effects on the psyche and the evolutionary advantage of having a brain that detects patterns, e.g., the beat in a song. And would actually look down upon someone who just gives the human answer "uh, I never thought about that". (See the recent "How I Failed the Turing Test" story on Slashdot, and some of the comments to it.) We're the kind who actually _has_ to have something smart (sounding) to say on a topic, and would feel naked and stupid to admit just for once that we have no bloody clue.
(And if someone wants to point out that my own message is an example of that: yes. It is. I'm a nerd too. I'm good at talking out the ass too. I can speak fluently out the ass in three languages and a variety of topics.;)
So we mod up those who are just like us.
It's just one personal bias on top of the others, and we mod up those who fit that bias. And we exert a conformity pressure towards that point.
It's not meant to be a critique or anything. All I'm saying is that in the end we're just another group of humans.
"Because so far, a story in a game has not incited a revolution of philosophy or thought"
99.9999% of novels don't do either. Thousands of them are published each year, but when was the last time a revolution in philosophy actually happened for _any_ reason.
"nor has it created an enviroment where it is real enough to make you feel a connection to it."
Then maybe you've played the wrong games. Sure, if you play most FPS games or the "mindlessly click 20 times on 'build dwarf' and rush" kind of RTS, yes, they're not worlds you can take seriously or connect to. They're shallow, they're artifficial, they give you a one-dimensional character that exists mostly just as a gun support, and generally you'll be too busy circle-strafing to pause and admire the world. On the other hand, there are RPGs I could relate to very well.
E.g., in "Vampire, The Masquerade: Redemption" I could relate to Christoph's struggle to hang onto his noble ideals even in undeath. His choices and humanity loss/gain mechanics actually make sense once you actually relate to him. He's the kind of guy who _has_ to take the noble and altruistic choice, even after God damned him, just because for him it's the _right_ thing to do. He'll lose faith in himself (and thus humanity) not only for doing something bad, but for not doing the _right_ thing, consequences be damned. He just _has_ to pipe up in front of the Ventrue prince of Prague in defense of the mortals, he just _has_ to run off at dawn (huge risk for a vampire) to defend civilians (even of a different faith!) from a golem, etc.
E.g., try "Valkyrie Profile" sometime. They go into a lot of detail to give you the story of the world and of your Einherjar. There are a lot of stories there ranging from noble (e.g., Lawfer giving his life to save an unjustly imprisoned civilian), to just sad (the blind singer), to hopeful (a bandit and cutthroat being forgiven for once saving a little girl from slavery), to outright stupid (the mermaid's death.) Well, they're all sad, since you had to be dead to be chosen by a Valkyrie to start with.
E.g., if you want something to get philosophical about, try "Persona 2: Eternal Punishment". There people's beliefs change and shape the very world itself, including a point where a model zeppelin flies just because enough people thought it's a real zeppelin. Plus the whole "persona" theme, if you think about it.
E.g., "Planescape: Torment" has a pretty deep story, and a rather original one. In fact, a thoroughly unique one in the video game world.
E.g., "KOTOR" may not be as deep as the deepest novels, but it does have very well portrayed characters (each has not only their own story, but each ends in their own quest to wrap it up) and worlds, a good story, and frankly it's a better prequel to Star Wars than all three of Lucas's own prequels put together. (In fact, I'd humbly suggest that if Lucas wants to make more prequels, he should hire Bioware to write the script for a change.)
And so on and so forth.
Lumping all those in the shallow category of just pop-culture icons and Duke-Nukem style catchphrases, is IMHO a very shallow point of view itself. It's like lumping, say, Rubens and Michelangelo into the "softcore porn" category because, eh, they just painted/sculpted naked people, right?
You seem to assume (but maybe I'm just mis-reading it) that being forced into some uninformed unfiltered choices of social groups will result in more diversity. I'd say, on the contrary, it reduces diversity on the whole.
See, if you did go (alone) to Bar X and tried to fit in and have some "shared experience", the result isn't that there'd just be some people (older or not) who could use some more diversity. Chances are there'd be a clique of regulars who already have One True Way (TM) of seeing the world. They already have their favourite football team, their right way to dress, their right(eous) set of prejudices and biases in how they see the world, etc. And are quite content to pat each other on the back and circularly reinforce the view that that's the One True Way (TM) and it's everyone else who's anywhere between wrong and a menace to society.
Will they welcome diversity and a wildly different, sometimes even opposite, point of view? Well, no, groups generally don't. Chances are they go there precisely to hear it from each other about how they're the right and upstanding ones, and feel like in one big like-minded family.
That's not meant as an insult or anything. It's just the way human groups work, and how humans look for social acceptance. Chances are you want to be in a group who thinks you're right, not in a group where you're the odd freak.
If you go in there with spiky green hair, a "Work Sucks" t-shirt and a few piercings won't remind them that the world is more diverse and we all could be more open minded. It will just be a disturbance in the Forc... err... in that comfy illusion that the world isn't diverse, and that a closed mind is the right kind of mind. If anything, it will just result in a round of talks (either right now or, rarely, politely waiting for you to leave first) about how hooligans like you are what's wrong with society today, and how back in our day the grass was greener, the sun brighter, and everyone not only walked 5 miles through snow to school, uphill both ways, but they _liked_ it.
(And to not only pick on older people -- hey, I'm no longer myself either -- the same would happen in reverse if you went in a gentleman outfit, complete with vest, pocket watch and bowtie, to a punk bar. You'd just be their own version of what's wrong with society today, and how nostalgic lemmings like you are what keeps us all in the middle ages.)
If you want to fit in that existing crowd, you have to dress like them, talk like them, cheer for the same football team (even if you don't even like football), have the same prejudices, and generally be on the "us" side of the whole "us vs them" theme. And there'll be a _lot_ of "us vs them".
Such a group exerts a pressure towards conformism and uniformity. Adding one more member won't make it more diverse, it will just add one more guy or gal who ends up assimilated in it, and ultimately becomes yet another clone of any other group member. Maybe an imperfect clone, but nevertheless a clone.
So on the whole of society that kind of homogenizing actually reduces diversity.
Is it that much worse if I go looking for a group that fits me as I am instead? I'd say not at all. Even if it results in largely separated groups, it does a hell of a lot more to preserve diversity on the whole.
No offense, but let's put it like this: medicine says that about 1% of the people are psychopaths. (And according to a recent article, a lot of them are in management too.)
We're talking people who just don't have any empathy. Unlike, say, autists which can't read the signals, these guys typically read them all right but use them at best for their own entertainment. If you think your disarming defenselessness would make one think "oh my god, I couldn't look myself in the mirror if I screwed such a nice guy", you're sadly mistaken. They just aren't wired for that. They're wired to see you as no better than a bug to step on, or fry with a magnifying glass just to see how long it takes for it to die.
And that's just one class of people who'd be more than happy to have some painful entertainment at your expense, if you really were as defenseless as you pretend and if that legal stuff didn't keep them from it.
If you think that you've been safe so far because no ill will already formed all around you, you might as well believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. You live in the same society and among the same people who as late as the 20'th century ordered others to shoot starving factory workers in cold blood. People who between a few dollars profit and a few hundred human lives, chose the dollars.
I'm not even talking about something disguised as patriotism, duty to one's country or to God, or whatever other excuses people use to avoid feeling guilty. I'm talking literally personally ordering that some people be shot and left to bleed to death on the pavement, just because they're in the way of corporate profits. That kinda lack of empathy.
There's a lot more ill will around you than you think, and if you can afford to play the whole shiny-hippy... err... happy charade of being defenseless, is precisely because you aren't. It's because all that legalese and all that legal framework actually work. Because they do a mighty fine job of deterring a lot of people, long after that ill intent has formed in their hearts.
Also, IMHO you see a false dichotomy where one doesn't exist. There is no point at which you must choose between trembling for your very life in every hour of your life, and "la la la, I'm defenseless and happy". There's a huge difference between being affraid and just being informed and prepared. You seem to lump them in the same pot, but actually being informed and prepared may well mean you know _why_ you don't have to be appraid.
I can spend 15 minutes reading a contract before I sign it, and still be quite happy the rest of the time. Among other things _because_ I've read it, know what's in it, know my legal rights, and don't need to worry about it. I'm quite happy not because I choose to stay ignorant, but because I know what can happen, why, and what are my choices if/when that happens.
It's like living in the valey under a dam, in a sense. You can (A) tremble for your life, or (B) you can take your kinda shiny-happy "I'm happy to ignore the risks and don't care if I die" approach, but (C) I'll prefer to know what can happen and why it's improbable to happen. I'll sleep very soundly at night knowing that, say, it would take a direct nuclear strike to breach it (in which case the water would be the last of my concerns anyway), than trying to convince myself that I'm better off not knowing and not caring. Or I can choose to move to another place where I can feel safer, and go back to being happy without being ill informed.
Hate to burst your bubble, but, no offense, "art" isn't defined as "that subset which I approve of". It's also not defined as "snotty philosophical stuff that contemplates really deep stuff and/or makes references to obscure 19'th century authors".
Art never was defined like that. A lot of what we today consider classic art never was more than an expensive low-tech version of pornography. (I'll go on a limb and say that in an age where female clothing was such that seeing an ankle counted as arousing, having an oil painting or three of naked women on the wall might have done something for the hormones too, and wasn't there just as a tribute to the beauty of the human body.) A lot of it was just plain old entertainment, e.g., dance music or theatre plays that were just a low-tech sitcom.
Now not everything is _good_ art, and not everything is an intellectual exercise, but
If I paint a picture, it's art. If I sculpt a statue, it's art. Then why isn't it art if I make it a 3D model and apply a texture on top of it?
If I were to choreograph a ballet or a live concert performance, it would be art. IIRC, in at least one country (I don't remember which now) it was ruled that the strippers dancing in a club counts as art, and is therefore exempt from VAT. Why isn't it then art if I script some NPCs to enact it? (The German version of Gothic for example included an in-game concert by the band In Extremo.)
Etc. So, please. Again, it may be bad art or whatever, but classifying it as not art strikes me as just misguided elitism.
"As it is, for the most part games are simply commodities, designed to sell as many copies as possible."
Should we then start excluding from the definition of "art" all the artists who've ever worked just for the money? I can think of quite a few quotes from people who've had the cojones to admit that they're in it primarily for the money, and not for pure art for art's sake.
If art made just for money gets to be non-art, you've just lost for example Leonardo DaVinci, Michelangelo, and all those renaissance "sellouts" who made a living (and in some cases, like Leonardo DaVinci financed their other interests) out of painting or sculpting whatever the client wanted to buy.
Seems to me that if it's ok for a renaissance painter to paint a duke's portrait only because he was paid to do so, and still be art, the same should apply to an artist paid by a game company. A painting of, say, a dragon doesn't cease being art just because it was paid for by Electronic Arts, just as it wouldn't cease being art if it was paid for by a 9'th century Chinese emperor.
"If developers could fix upon one magic formula that would guarantee sales of 10 million units every time, they would use it every time, regardless of how artistic that formula was, or how artistic re-using that formula over and over was. (Does this sound familiar to anyone? This is the ideal game publishers have been working towards for about the last 10 or 15 years.)"
You mean the same as Hollywood is fixed on a handful of tried-and-tested scripts (e.g., "the hero's journey"), and how RIAA is fixed on a small number of tried-and-tested music and lyrics recipes? (Including, yes, girl bands singing about being a total slut, to appeal to teenager males just discovering their testosterone, and conversely boy bands whose only merit is appealing to the hormones of teenage girls.)
So I fail to see why would anyone single out games there. If we're going to redefine art as some prissy, pure and intellectual exercise that it never was, a _lot_ more will start counting as non-art than just video games. In fact, you're left with a world where extremely little art has been created in the last 5000 years straight.
In addition to what was mentioned, namely that natural language is vague, the problem is that anything that's not clear enough _will_ be abused or mis-construed by someone.
Let me give you an example that borders on absurd theatre: do you know why software is licensed, not sold? You may notice that when you buy a Ford car or book, you just own the car or book, you don't get "a non-tranferrable license to use it". What's different with software?
Because while common sense would say "I bought 1 copy, I own it, I execute that 1 copy I own, same as with a book", technically it's copied to RAM to be executed. So you'd be breaking copyright law if you copied it (even to RAM) without a license to do so. That's the loophole through which the whole "license" thing was wiggled through. And which in turn opened the door to having whatever restrictions imposed upon you that the copyright owner wishes to impose.
"Copying" in the sense that you intentionally produce a duplicate of a book or record, was extended to something which is more of a side-effect of how computers work than wilfully duplicating someone else's work. And also taken from a context where you could actually sell or distribute the copy in direct competition with the copyright holder, to something where... let's just say it's just stupid to think that you'd pull your RAM sticks out and give them to someone as a copy of Doom 3. So it misses the whole spirit and intention of copyright law (whether you aggree or disaggree with it.)
That's the problem with things that aren't clearly defined. If it's possible to get an advantage via a verbal fallacy or mis-construing something, some interested party _will_ do it.
E.g., let's say we signed a brief contract that just says "Moraelin aggrees to sell his old 22" colour monitor to aeoo for one hundred dollars." Simple, clear and to the point, right?
Well, at what date? I didn't say anywhere I'd give it to you right now, or for that matter even this year.
Does it have to work when you receive it, or can I just give you the pieces of one that I dropped while moving? If we put in the contract that it should work, by what definition of "work"? What's your recourse if it doesn't?
Is that US dollars, Canadian dollars, Australian dollars, or board-game dollars? Where should the money be delivered? (I'll probably want them deposited in my bank, and not, say, requiring me to go withdraw them personally from Elbonia's only bank;)
And are you sure what kind of monitor you're getting? Now you may be thinking "bah, even if it's an old CRT, a 22 inch never was too bad". I might however point you at the dictionary and the fact that a monitor was also a kind of military ship. So by that contract I could send you a painted toy ship.
And so on and so forth. And the whole legalese and those 30 page contracts are there just to leave as little room as possible for such creative interpretations.
You may have a lot of clue, heck, you may even be the most intelligent person to ever walk the Earth, the fact still is: you still don't inherently have any rights on EA's private property. (E.g., on their TSO servers.)
As they say, "freedom of press" only applies to those who own the press. And the first amendment mentions very explicitly that it only applies to the government. ("Congress shall make no law..." and "to petition the government for a redress of grievances".) That wasn't in response to anything specific in your message, but just to set the stage very clear: you have no rights whatsoever on EA's servers.
If they want to listen to you ok. If not, not. Tough luck, go talk to someone else then.
The same goes for in-game "journalism." In respect to what happens on their servers, EA isn't censoring the press, EA _is_ the press there. They have the final word over what content they allow in their medium.
Same as you can't go to the New Your Times and demand that they print your blog, or to CNN and demand that they give you air time to hype your blog, you can't demand that EA carries it in-game either.
It doesn't matter why, and they don't even have to explain why. Maybe the editor just didn't think the topic fits, or thought it was a too sensitive topic, or thought you were too verbose, or maybe he had a personal vendetta against you. Or maybe he had a bad day and just dumped it into the trashcan unread. It doesn't matter. It's their right to do so.
If you don't possess the millions to own the press, it doesn't matter how clued or intelligent you are, you have exactly as much or as little rights as the owner wants to give you. Maybe sad, but them's the breaks.
We all like to bitch about developpers playing God and whatnot, but honestly I think running a MMO like a democracy would fail for several reasons:
1. The average player has _no_ clue of game design and the implications a change has.
E.g., more than half the players don't seem to understand that the numbers on a MUD or MMO are meaningless by themselves, and mean anything only as ratios to the other numbers. E.g., that (going by Blizzard's claim that an extra group member gives you roughly +10 levels) if I gave you twice the hit points and damage per second output, but put you against enemies 10 levels higher, you're exactly back to square one.
So everyone just whines for a shortcut, for a bigger number on their weapon or whatever, without even understanding what they're asking for or where that shortcut leads. (Usually towards a "click here to be level 60 and receive all the best equipment" kind of game. And then they'd whine that the game is boring.)
That doesn't apply to only DPS numbers, btw. Other issues, such as PvP or the economy or combat/crafting mechanics are whined about just the same by people who don't even understand what they're asking for and what the effects would be.
Briefly, I'll take a good designer any day instead of a horde of monkeys randomly clicking on voting buttons.
2. Griefers. Virtual governments have the same problem as in-character justice and other such tried-and-failed ideas. Namely: there's _nothing_ you can do in-character to someone who doesn't stay in-character and sees their character as disposable to start with.
Same here: there _will_ be a bunch of people voting just to cause the most disruption and damage, because it doesn't affect them.
3. Some issues aren't even feasible to solve that easily. Those companies have finite (if large) funds after all. If they end up having to check on and babysit every single player, sorry, your $13 a month just isn't enough for that.
E.g., sure, a guy can get a lot of political capital by playing the bogus "waah, I'm a victim! EA supressed my free speech when I ranted and raved against their game, and blew bogus issues like virtual prostitution out of proportion" card. But honestly, even if you voted that EA cracks down on virtual vice, how would they enforce that and at what cost?
I can tell you firsthand that none of the major MMOs have a "/blowjob" command or such. It's the players being inventive with other commands (e.g., a prayer kinda command was used on AO to sorta look like a blowjob, until the devs took it out) or just with typed text, IRC/AOL style. So if anyone voted that EA cracks down on that, EA would literally have to read everyone's chats with everyone else, and go through lists of all emote commands used, etc.
And then someone else would make a fuss about how EA violates their privacy. More voting, more posers playing virtual politician and agitating the masses, lather, rinse, repeat ad-nauseam.
4. For that matter, it would be just too much of an expense and effort just to keep up with the posers trolling for attention that way. Especially if you give them attention: nothing gets a troll going on and on like getting attention. And once you've officially invited them to play politician and have to democratically debate with them every bogus issue they come up with, that's what you gave them: lots and lots of publicity and attention.
I can see that getting out of hand fast. Every single ban (e.g., for outright cheating) would be brought up as some major political issue that needs to be debated and voted on, every single new spell or NPC would be debated to death too, etc. It would take a whole PR department just to keep up with the uphill battles of proving that, no, ffs, that guy isn't a martyr persecuted by the publisher, but someone who used hacks and cheats.
Etc.
Basically, dunno, democracy sounds good and fine, but I don't want to pay 2-3 times the monthly cost just so the devs can afford to implement it. And I can do without the open invitation for every poser and troll to play politician.
The iron fist rule of the publisher isn't perfect, but it works reasonably well. I can live with that.
Ah, no, I'm not basing my buying decisions on that, of course. After all, I run Windows on my gaming machine, and I own an XBox too, even though I've already said that MS _is_ a monopolist.
I'm basing my decision to buy or not buy strictly on what games are available for it, and how many of them I'd like to play.
And as I've said before, the DS really has so few games published here in Europe that you can count them on your fingers. None particularly tempting either. (E.g., since everyone waves around Nintendogs as an example of why did they buy a DS, that one never got released here either.)
So, well, you can probably see how it doesn't matter whether I like or dislike Nintendo there. I'm just not gonna buy a system that (in Europe) gets a game every two months, and none that interests me yet. Between the DS and the PSP, even if I were a Nintendo fanboy, the DS simply isn't a competitor here. It doesn't even try to compete.
Open the properties for your network connection, "Advanced", go to the properties for the TCP/IP protocol, "Advanced" again, and then on the last tab ("Options") you'll see stuff like "IP-Security" and "TCP/IP filtering". (Yes, it's very well hidden. I hadn't found it myself until someone told me it's there.)
The last one, for example, is basically just a traditional old-style firewall: it lets you block everything except speciffic ports, by number. It's really primitive. It doesn't have the functionality of modern software firewalls, like distinguishing between applications, or even between directions of traffic, but then again, it works.
It also exists since NT 4.
IP-Security is more advanced, and you can even define your own rules there. You'll need to use the "Group Policy" editor for that, though. (E.g., by running "GPEDIT.MSC" from the Start/Run... menu.)
Nintendo tried the legal bullying route against N64 emulators before, e.g., against UltraHLE.
Their going the "just that it was theft of their stuff, and breaking the DMCA, both" is still, well, precisely the point. That an emulator containing exactly 0 (ZERO) lines of Nintendo code is somehow theft of Nintendo's property, isn't just laughable, but just the kind of playing nasty that I was talking about. Using the DMCA to that end, doubly so.
"Their old contracts are old for a reason, and let's admit that maybe it was smarter that way, I prefer 1 good game, rather then an ok game and 2 ports (3 if you count the computer)"
You don't get it, kid. I'm not talking that you couldn't port your current game to other systems. I'm talking that you had to sell yourself into serfdom to Nintendo, and never ever be allowed to publish any _other_ game for a non-Nintendo platform. Think non-compete for life.
After that point you'd be basically at Nintendo's mercy. If they didn't want to publish your games any more, you couldn't just say "fuck it, then I'll try making my next game for the PC instead." You'd just go bankrupt. You were officially their bitch from that point, and they knew it. You _had_ to do what Nintendo wanted, and at whatever price Nintendo felt like paying, or go bankrupt.
_That_ nasty. The old Nintendo was a nastier monopolist than MS at it's nastiest hour.
Mind you, those contracts got overruled in courts, but that they even tried that kind of "sign yourself into serfdom for life" stunt, says something.
Also let me say: having one game ported on more systems, doesn't make it be suddenly a worse game, which you seem to imply. Au contraire, it gives it more potential market, hence it can be made with a bigger budget. Between selling 100,000 copies on one platform and selling 200,000 copies across 3 platforms, guess which gives you more funds to hire extra artists or include more levels? Right.
So any way you want to look at it, that stuff didn't benefit either the consumer or the developpers in any form or shape. It was self-serving stuff that benefited exactly one entity: Nintendo itself.
Now I can understand that they're in it to make money, and act primarily in their own interest, and all. Fair enough. But claiming that it benefitted _anyone_ but themselves (e.g., that the consumers too got better games out of it) is pretty funny.
"Gamecube's falling is the same as the PSP's current predicament."
Well, yes, any console lives or dies by the number and mass appeal of the games it has. No arguments there. The difference is that the Gamecube has already failed, while the PSP is just starting. Will it fail too? Maybe. Maybe not. It's far too early to tell.
So far it seems to be doing great at least in Europe. Admittedly, that's also because Nintendo pretty much gave up on the European market. You can count the number of DS games released here on your fingers, and it's not even the best ones. And the DS sales reflect that: they've sold in really pitiful numbers. So at least here the PSP is at the moment very much the _only_ choice.
I can assume that that'll go a long way to make it a valid market. Europe is a games market only slightly smaller than the USA market, and about twice the Japan market. Dominating this market can go a long way to make it worth writing games for it.
But again, I wouldn't know which way it'll really go from here. We shall see. Proclaiming it either a victor or a failure at this point is just silly.
Well, I won't disaggree with you on the whole. It in fact mirrors my own thoughts and observations.
I once got a computer virused intentionally. (That was the only Windows virus I ever got, btw, so if anyone wants to start with the canned "Windows has viruses, use Linux instead" answers, spare your breath.) I was installing Windows 2000, had no firewall handy, and thought I'm too lazy to go buy a firewall or go burn Zone Alarm on a CD on someone else's computer. Also, I didn't know yet that I could just activate the built-in poor-man's firewall (yes, you can tell Windows 2000 to not allow incoming connections) to stay safe until I download the updates and a firewall. So, anyway, I thought I'd let it get virused while I download the firewall, then format and reinstall. It's not like 20 minutes extra are a major catastrophe.
So predictably it does catch an RPC buffer-overflow virus while downloading Sygate Personal Firewall. Then I block it from connecting to the network and play with it a little. It got me curious.
You know what was sad? It actually slowed the computer a lot less than Norton. You know what's sadder? Installing Norton and running a full scan didn't catch it anyway. It just slowed down the computer some more.
But still, Symantec isn't _the_ worst. Try McAffee sometime if you're masochistic. Not only it was even less efficient and slower, but also had such gems as:
- needed IE to download its updates, because it used some ActiveX crap, but it was too stupid to just launch IE, then. It launched the default browser, in this case Opera, and then couldn't get itself updated. That sad.
- it was installed on D: but the updates proceeded to install themselves in the default directory on C:. Worse yet, I wasn't just left with just an extra copy on the hard drive, but had two versions running in RAM at the same time.
- this got even funnier later when I uninstalled it, because one of the two versions remained installed and auto-loaded. I had to edit the registry to stop it. (If you thought only spyware has to be removed that way, McAffee is obviously the counter-example.)
- their "privacy" protection basically did nothing but try to protect me from cookies, including temporary login cookies on web sites. I suddenly couldn't use any sites that required login. Not even in a consistent and predictable way. E.g., Gamespy's Fileplanet got terminally confused and different pages thought that I was logged in and not logged in at the same time.
And so on and so forth. That was a rather non-funny experience.
Honestly, even if you cared about Karma (though beats me why would you), as you've said, it's ridiculously easy to come by anyway.
And it's not like he'd be the first one anyway. There's a whole category of people insecure enough to throw that kind of kindergarten revenge fit. If only now you see 3 day old posts starting to get unexplained attention, eh, you haven't paid attention. If anything I find it funny that someone would be that immature.
But, really, why would you care about it anyway? Does it really matter if your groupthink score... err... I mean "karma", goes up or down? Just say what you think and don't care about such prom-queen scores.
If anything, that "karma" hurts more than it helps. It spawned a whole class of karma-whore prom-queens repeating the same idiocies on topics they don't even understand, just because it's what gets them points. Which is just pollution.
Neither the Gamecube nor the PSP have an inherent problem with games, or at least not in the form of "it can't possibly have more games".
You can step down from that soap box. It's not some conspiracy to be pro-Sony and anti-Nintendo. It's just a pragmatic decision based on what games exist at a given time that interest a potential buyer. No more, no less.
There was nothing that said the Gamecube couldn't possibly get more games. For me, it just somehow didn't. The ports from other systems I could already play on those other systems, and Nintendo's own games just fall squarely outside the genres I'm interested in.
Likewise, there's nothing to say that the PSP will or won't get more games. We'll see. If it gets enough, it will do better. If not, not. So far, I'm pleased with it, but even I won't claim which way it'll go from here.
Any speculation along the lines of "System X will be guaranteed to get all the games, and System Y is guaranteed to get not much more" is just that: wild speculation. It makes for a good fanboy rant, but it's still talking out the ass either way.
The as for the rest of the rant:
"The problem is PSP should stand for PS Ports."
Well, that doesn't bother me. The PS2 happens to have the genres I like in abundance. If that's the kind of games that'll make it to the PSP, well, you've just told me I should be happy about buying it.
"They should have allowed everyone to put their own apps on the system."
Unless the DS does, it seems to me it's a non-sequitur. Can you just put your own app on a cartridge and run it?
But anyway, I bought it for the games, not to run Java on it, so it doesn't bother me. I already have a PC to do my programming on.
"but of course Sony doesn't want freedom (remember they have a huge invested interest in RIAA.)"
You mean unlike Nintendo which tried to stop emulation by patenting something as vague and patently bogus as "emulating a GBA"? Or patented something as blatantly obvious as simulating insanity in a game?
And I'm not even getting again into their old strong-arm contracts that said that you can't _ever_ program for another platform if you want a game published on theirs.
Doesn't strike me like the great defender of Freedom, so far.
"You can't damage a cartridge like you can easily scratch a disk."
Have you even _seen_ an UMD? If you can scratch it through the caddy, I want to know how you're doing it. Attacking it with a chisel and hammer, or what?
So basically that just tells me you don't even know what you're talking about.
"ut when an app makes system calls, it's calling "LPC" Microsoft code. So much of the IO subsystem also winds through the GUI, because the architecture is so spaghetti, that it gets bogged down."
Bullshit. You may notice that Windows is divided into portions like Kernel.exe (core functions like, yes, file IO) and GDI.exe (graphics stuff). Claiming that a file IO operation goes through the GDI at any point, or that there'd be some spaghetti code that spans more than one executable, just shows me that you have no clue what you're talking about.
"Then there are the system services that start up."
As opposed to the services that Linux starts up, eh? I see easily three times as many processes when I do a "top" on this machine than on my Windows gaming machine. So you're doing... what? Getting all self-righteous anti-MS for doing... the exact same things that Linux is doing? I mean, heh.
Here's some free, complimentary clue: just because a process is loaded, it doesn't mean it's actually running all the time.
"And the bloated DLLs that load big chunks in and out of memory for one function call, and which don't flush quickly enough due to lackadaisical garbage collection"
Even skipping over the fact that it's just ignorant FUD pulled out of the ass, it _still_ would be completely off the mark.
Here's some more free complimentary clue: paging in Windows happens in 4k pages, same as in Linux. Because that's the page size supported by the physical hardware. And even _if_ DLLs were bloated and stayed in memory when unused -- heck, even _if_ no unloading even existed at all -- you'd get one of those unused 4k pages swapped out to disk as soon as you need it. Exactly the same as in Linux.
So again, it just tells me you have no clue what you're talking about.
""Premature" optimization is the only kind available for Windows, usually in the form of "use another OS instead"."
Tell you what: I'll take that more seriously when it's based on some actual facts, not on FUD pulled out of the ass like above. There are good reasons to choose Unix instead of Windows or viceversa, but such falsehoods pulled out of a zealot's imagination aren't it.
"Really, don't you think there'd be more than just one Windows HPC entry in the "Top 500", ones that weren't bought onto the list by Microsoft? Why is the same HW running Linux so much "H'er PC"? The industry is extremely competitive, as is the MS attempt to enter it. Why hasn't MS been successful in cracking it yet, if WIndows is so HPC?"
1. Sure as heck not because of the GUI which isn't even _used_ at the time.
2. It's a strawman anyway. If you took the time to read what you're answering to before letting it rip with the canned FUD, you'll notice that I never claimed that Windows was necessarily the best HPC choice. I've even listed two other things which may make or break a HPC implementation, Windows or otherwise.
_All_ I've said was that having a GUI makes 0% difference in Windows and all that "bloat" isn't even costing you any CPU cycles or RAM. The same applies not only to Windows, btw, but also to Linux, Solaris, AIX, MacOS, and generally any OS that has at least half a clue. Having X and the GUI libraries installed on your Solaris server costs you no performance either. Until someone actually logs into it and uses some graphical programs, all that GUI "bloat" has exactly 0% impact on performance.
So either answer to _that_, or spare me the straw-men.
In all fairness, ancient polytheism wasn't as much a clever design from scratch, but a mix-and-match that reflected more who conquered whom, and which faction gained influence at whose expense.
For starters, each time a new city would join the empire, its own protector deity would be added to the pantheon. Or occasionally a close enough existing deity would be used as a good enough substitute.
(With the occasional mis-step, such as Egypt ending up basically ruled by satanists because their invaders assimilated their own deity of war with Egypt's Set.)
And that was just the beginning. From there Gods moved up and down the hierarchy like yoyos, and occasionally got killed off, to reflect the shifts in the balance of power. Each time a city or caste gained enough power and influence (e.g., went to be alliance leader or was the birthplace of the new Pharaoh or whatever), it's deity went up the hierarchy. Then they got pushed downwards and so did their god.
And whole new myths and legends got thought up to give the masses some explanation as to why that balance changed. "Yeah, well, Ra may have been all that cool and great, but our Isis tricked him, so now she and Osiris rule even over him. So get worshipping your new masters." Some time and an invasion later, "Yeah, but our Set killed your Osiris. Pwn3d, suckers." Then two centuries and a revolt later it's "Yeah, but our Isis did a bit o' necrophilia, gave birth to Horus, and between them they pwn3d Set and resurrected Osiris." And so on, and so forth.
So basically IMHO all that separation of responsibilities was more like the side-effect of all this, than cleverly designed that way to avoid uncomfortable questions.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that a broken algorithm just makes that piece of social engineering a lot easier.
If I just told you you can download the latest auto-installer of the latest WoW patch from www.i-pwn-ur-puter.ru instead through the slow Blizzard installer, you might think "uh, wtf, I think I'll play it safe anyway and get it directly from Blizzard. I trust them more than I trust a warez and script-kiddie site."
Now picture that I tell you "and here's a link to the MD5 sum on Blizzard's site. You can check for yourself that the the file on our site is the original file and it hasn't been tampered with." In fact, I would even _urge_ you to make a habit to check all your downloads against the original MD5 sums, for your own good.
It already looks a lot safer and more legitimate. Well, maybe not to _you_, but to a lot of people it does.
That's the whole problem. That false sense of security makes the "if we can convince you to run our insecure extractor code" part a helluva lot easier.
Having a free press is good and fine, but it's only worth anything if you have some reason to believe you're getting signal and not noise. Or at least that you're getting a reasonable signal to noise ratio.
If you can just say anything anonymously, don't have to put your reputation on the line, and don't have to check and document your sources either... well, let's put it like this: we've already been there. It doesn't take paranoia or conspiracy theories to imagine a potential outcome, since we have plenty of _real_ cases where it's already happened. The whole 19'th century for example is full of parties and individuals anonymously slandering each other in venomous pamphlets and faked secret protocols used as proof of the most absurd plans.
And if you look further back in time, when counts and dukes went to war against each other, they always had a bunch of heinous accusations about the other side, covering the whole ground between witchcraft, bestiality, vampirism, pacts with Satan to bring forth the Apocalypse (I guess that was the medieval version of "but they have WMDs!!!11";), treason, etc. You'd think that between all those vices, perversions, and running a full time coven of dark mages, some monarchs wouldn't even have any time left to sleep.
The press at least pretending to be impartial and about _reporting_ instead of fabricating news (hey, I did say "at least pretending") is a very recent invention. It's not its natural state. Remove all safeguards and let anyone start any rumour, and they will do that all over again.
"We left Korea. We left Vietnam. We left Kuwait. We left Somalia and Kosovo. We're going to leave Afghanistan and Iraq, too, when the job is done. Do you see a pattern here?"
Yes, I see the pattern that you got there in the first place. Since WW2, no other nation, heck, not even any whole continent, has started as many wars.
Even the USSR was a lot tamer by comparison. Yes, they tried to beat up Afghanistan and set up their own puppet government there, and had a brief tour through Hungary to the same end. The USA did that to two countries during the current president alone.
Defining it as being the good guys just because you just got there, shot a bunch of people, secured a puppet government and some fat concessions to USA-based corporations, and left, is like saying that the school bully is really the good guy there because he just beat people up and took their lunch money. Didn't take them into slavery or anything, right?
Bah, fluxbox is for wimps. Write an article on running Ratpoison on Tiger. I'm sure every Mac user was sick and tired of having all menus, icons, overlapping windows, and indeed a GUI at all. Not to mention all that effort of reaching for the mouse and giving it a quick shove upwards to get to those menus.
With Ratpoison you too can have a free -- as in, "I have no fucking clue what the First Amendment actually says, so I'll pretend that it has anything to do with contracts and licenses" -- interface to your Mac's filesystem.
Plus, nothing says Real Man like using "ls", "cd" and hitting tab 20 times to launch your favourite app or copy a file, instead of clicking or dragging an icon like those GUI-user pussies. Think of it! You'll be the talk of the party. Heck, parties will be thrown in your honour once word gets out how hardcore your keyboard skillz are. Random women on the street will come begging to have your baby.
(And yes, I realize your post was sarcasm too. I just felt like adding my own "*yawn*" while we're in a "look, we're so l33t for running KDE on, umm, unix" thread.)
Well, I don't think the action-reaction is always in that direction: that the voters want some regulation to start with, and the politicians just bow to the will of the masses. It would be nice to live in that kind of an ideal democracy, but, eh, do you really believe that's what's happening?
See, the good part of democracy is that promising to solve a problem, any problem, is a good way to get elected. Doubly so if it's a major problem. And that's a good thing. It's what, at least theoretically, should keep politicians working for the people. (Or at least promising to.)
The bad part of democracy is also just that: inventing a problem to solve, or blowing a minor one out of proportion, is a damn good way to get elected.
"And maybe by constantly building small things YOU'RE really trying to compensate for something?"
Well, in fact, yes. Such as compensating for having a realistic budget. I doubt that those schools could afford to build a bloody huge space shuttle, and the fuel to lift off all those hundreds of tons, just to put something washing-machine sized into orbit. It's basically like packing a half a pound chocolate bar in a few hundred pounds of hi-tech packaging before sending it by UPS: you're paying a lot more than you have to.
"The game industry has all but abandoned the adventure genre where we were just beginning to grow up and see some good storytelling. Now we have crap! Gamers need to watch better movies, read better books, and learn to appreciate themes outside of their adolescent power and sex fantasies."
Actually, not meant as an offense or anything, but you make a major confusion between what the publisher wants and what the gamers want.
E.g., you blame the disappearance of adventure games on gamers, which is just false. You basically rehash the common myth that everyone stopped buying adventures and got hooked on FPS, and that's why adventures nearly went extinct. But that's a myth. The publishers dropping that genre happened at a time when more people bought adventure games than ever before. It was a market that was actually _growing_.
You want to know why that genre was really dropped? Because it was more expensive to produce than a no-brainer Quake clone. At that time scripting a complex adventure game cost a lot of money. Or you could make a FPS instead for a fraction of that money. Remember we're talking about the old FPS, where there was no story and no scripting involved. You could just license a cheap 3D engine, slap a couple of skins and levels together, and that's it: you had a game.
With a FPS you didn't even have to outsell adventure games. If with a FPS you sold _half_ as many copies, but it cost a tenth of the price to produce, you still got way better ROI (Return On Investment.)
_That's_ why FPS exploded back then, not gamers. Again: you blame on the gamers something that was purely the publisher's financial decision.
And that's just one aspect where it's the publisher's own taking the easy route, not really the gamers' choice.
E.g., you mention teenager power and sex fantasies? How about the fact that the best selling PC game of all time was The Sims? You know, a game that has _no_ combat, _no_ PvP power games, and _no_ sex whatsoever? We're talking a game where the most violence you could see was a cartoonish cloud when two people fought, and even then you had to actively try hard to get them to fight. And a game where the most "sex"-related content was a hug and a kiss. (The love bed got added in a later expansion pack.)
(And as a tangent, to illustrate the dichotomy between who the gamers are and what the publisher does, I still remember some ads for The Sims 2. I don't know if it's a country-specific thing, or if that was world-wide, but anyway: You have the sequel to a non-sex game. And it's a game which sold to a helluva lot of women. And generally whose average gamer was _not_ in the horny teenager bracket. So how does EA market it? Well, by hammering on the sex aspect only. There were ads after ads about having sex with the neighbour lady while the wife is away, sex on the sofa, sex in bed with two women, sex in the kitchen, sex, sex, sex. It made it sound like that was all there was to the game. Some idiot marketer at EA decided to aim their ads at the only market they understand: horny teenagers. Even at the expense of potentially alienating their core fans. I'm not a prude or anything, but it made it sound like something really lame and not worth the money. I mean, eh, I don't need to pay $40 just to enact sex fantasies in a sex game. It's not like I can't find better images on the internet for free.)
E.g., although not from your message, another common complaint is that somehow it's gamers who value graphics over substance. And again, if you look at the sales, that's just not true. You may notice that about 10 times more people play WoW, with its cartoonish graphics, than the graphically-superior Everquest 2. You may notice that, again, the mostly-2D low-res The Sims outsold FPS games that had vastly superior graphics. Or you may notice that even in the FPS category, the ancient CounterStrike is still _the_ most played online FPS, even though it looks like ass compared to newer games.
So basically, please. While I can relate to yo
The problem there is that you pass judgment upon a whole medium based on... what? An old arcade game like Robotron, some arcade-ish Mario games, and basically a puzzle game. Now I won't say Mario games aren't good games, but really, they're just easy-to-play arcade-ish games that have almost no story at all. They're not made to be deep or emotional, they're just meant to keep you happily clicking a controller button for a few hours.
So basically you look at a few games that don't even have much story and don't even try to cause an emotional response, and then extrapolate that all games are like that. Well, no, you just told me there what games _you_ play, not what all games are.
Extrapolating your experiences with Mario to an RPG like Planescape Torment (where BTW, the whole goal is to die and go to hell, so I'm not even sure it counts that much as a happy end in the classic sense) is just silly. It's just as silly as if someone came and said that no movie ever had a plot or any character depth, based on their watching only porn movies. (Not saying that Mario is like porn and not trying to insult Mario or its players, but as plot and character depth goes, that's really about the closest movie category. Insert any other movie category with nearly zero story, plot or character depth, if that makes you feel any better.)
There are _plenty_ of games with deep and involved stories and plots. If you don't want to play those, fine by me, that's a valid choice. I know there are people who actually want a shallow entertainment and hate long cut scenes or reading text in a game. It's different from my own tastes, but I can understand that point of view too. But then please don't come and pretend that all games are Mario and Katamari Damacy, because that simply isn't true.
I.e., we're all nerds, we all like to think that the world is about eloquently building an ivory tower and having something _logical_ (if only by virtue of using enough fallacies) to say about anything. We're the kids who got praised (if only by our parents) when we could rant for hours about how the rainbow is like that because of refraction and difraction on water droplets, instead of saying some platitude like "dunno what it is, but it's as beautiful as your eyes". We're the ones who when asked something like "why do you like music?" would actually _expect_ someone to launch into a whole philosophical disertation about the effects on the psyche and the evolutionary advantage of having a brain that detects patterns, e.g., the beat in a song. And would actually look down upon someone who just gives the human answer "uh, I never thought about that". (See the recent "How I Failed the Turing Test" story on Slashdot, and some of the comments to it.) We're the kind who actually _has_ to have something smart (sounding) to say on a topic, and would feel naked and stupid to admit just for once that we have no bloody clue.
(And if someone wants to point out that my own message is an example of that: yes. It is. I'm a nerd too. I'm good at talking out the ass too. I can speak fluently out the ass in three languages and a variety of topics.;)
So we mod up those who are just like us.
It's just one personal bias on top of the others, and we mod up those who fit that bias. And we exert a conformity pressure towards that point.
It's not meant to be a critique or anything. All I'm saying is that in the end we're just another group of humans.
"Because so far, a story in a game has not incited a revolution of philosophy or thought"
99.9999% of novels don't do either. Thousands of them are published each year, but when was the last time a revolution in philosophy actually happened for _any_ reason.
"nor has it created an enviroment where it is real enough to make you feel a connection to it."
Then maybe you've played the wrong games. Sure, if you play most FPS games or the "mindlessly click 20 times on 'build dwarf' and rush" kind of RTS, yes, they're not worlds you can take seriously or connect to. They're shallow, they're artifficial, they give you a one-dimensional character that exists mostly just as a gun support, and generally you'll be too busy circle-strafing to pause and admire the world. On the other hand, there are RPGs I could relate to very well.
E.g., in "Vampire, The Masquerade: Redemption" I could relate to Christoph's struggle to hang onto his noble ideals even in undeath. His choices and humanity loss/gain mechanics actually make sense once you actually relate to him. He's the kind of guy who _has_ to take the noble and altruistic choice, even after God damned him, just because for him it's the _right_ thing to do. He'll lose faith in himself (and thus humanity) not only for doing something bad, but for not doing the _right_ thing, consequences be damned. He just _has_ to pipe up in front of the Ventrue prince of Prague in defense of the mortals, he just _has_ to run off at dawn (huge risk for a vampire) to defend civilians (even of a different faith!) from a golem, etc.
E.g., try "Valkyrie Profile" sometime. They go into a lot of detail to give you the story of the world and of your Einherjar. There are a lot of stories there ranging from noble (e.g., Lawfer giving his life to save an unjustly imprisoned civilian), to just sad (the blind singer), to hopeful (a bandit and cutthroat being forgiven for once saving a little girl from slavery), to outright stupid (the mermaid's death.) Well, they're all sad, since you had to be dead to be chosen by a Valkyrie to start with.
E.g., if you want something to get philosophical about, try "Persona 2: Eternal Punishment". There people's beliefs change and shape the very world itself, including a point where a model zeppelin flies just because enough people thought it's a real zeppelin. Plus the whole "persona" theme, if you think about it.
E.g., "Planescape: Torment" has a pretty deep story, and a rather original one. In fact, a thoroughly unique one in the video game world.
E.g., "KOTOR" may not be as deep as the deepest novels, but it does have very well portrayed characters (each has not only their own story, but each ends in their own quest to wrap it up) and worlds, a good story, and frankly it's a better prequel to Star Wars than all three of Lucas's own prequels put together. (In fact, I'd humbly suggest that if Lucas wants to make more prequels, he should hire Bioware to write the script for a change.)
And so on and so forth.
Lumping all those in the shallow category of just pop-culture icons and Duke-Nukem style catchphrases, is IMHO a very shallow point of view itself. It's like lumping, say, Rubens and Michelangelo into the "softcore porn" category because, eh, they just painted/sculpted naked people, right?
You seem to assume (but maybe I'm just mis-reading it) that being forced into some uninformed unfiltered choices of social groups will result in more diversity. I'd say, on the contrary, it reduces diversity on the whole.
See, if you did go (alone) to Bar X and tried to fit in and have some "shared experience", the result isn't that there'd just be some people (older or not) who could use some more diversity. Chances are there'd be a clique of regulars who already have One True Way (TM) of seeing the world. They already have their favourite football team, their right way to dress, their right(eous) set of prejudices and biases in how they see the world, etc. And are quite content to pat each other on the back and circularly reinforce the view that that's the One True Way (TM) and it's everyone else who's anywhere between wrong and a menace to society.
Will they welcome diversity and a wildly different, sometimes even opposite, point of view? Well, no, groups generally don't. Chances are they go there precisely to hear it from each other about how they're the right and upstanding ones, and feel like in one big like-minded family.
That's not meant as an insult or anything. It's just the way human groups work, and how humans look for social acceptance. Chances are you want to be in a group who thinks you're right, not in a group where you're the odd freak.
If you go in there with spiky green hair, a "Work Sucks" t-shirt and a few piercings won't remind them that the world is more diverse and we all could be more open minded. It will just be a disturbance in the Forc... err... in that comfy illusion that the world isn't diverse, and that a closed mind is the right kind of mind. If anything, it will just result in a round of talks (either right now or, rarely, politely waiting for you to leave first) about how hooligans like you are what's wrong with society today, and how back in our day the grass was greener, the sun brighter, and everyone not only walked 5 miles through snow to school, uphill both ways, but they _liked_ it.
(And to not only pick on older people -- hey, I'm no longer myself either -- the same would happen in reverse if you went in a gentleman outfit, complete with vest, pocket watch and bowtie, to a punk bar. You'd just be their own version of what's wrong with society today, and how nostalgic lemmings like you are what keeps us all in the middle ages.)
If you want to fit in that existing crowd, you have to dress like them, talk like them, cheer for the same football team (even if you don't even like football), have the same prejudices, and generally be on the "us" side of the whole "us vs them" theme. And there'll be a _lot_ of "us vs them".
Such a group exerts a pressure towards conformism and uniformity. Adding one more member won't make it more diverse, it will just add one more guy or gal who ends up assimilated in it, and ultimately becomes yet another clone of any other group member. Maybe an imperfect clone, but nevertheless a clone.
So on the whole of society that kind of homogenizing actually reduces diversity.
Is it that much worse if I go looking for a group that fits me as I am instead? I'd say not at all. Even if it results in largely separated groups, it does a hell of a lot more to preserve diversity on the whole.
No offense, but let's put it like this: medicine says that about 1% of the people are psychopaths. (And according to a recent article, a lot of them are in management too.)
We're talking people who just don't have any empathy. Unlike, say, autists which can't read the signals, these guys typically read them all right but use them at best for their own entertainment. If you think your disarming defenselessness would make one think "oh my god, I couldn't look myself in the mirror if I screwed such a nice guy", you're sadly mistaken. They just aren't wired for that. They're wired to see you as no better than a bug to step on, or fry with a magnifying glass just to see how long it takes for it to die.
And that's just one class of people who'd be more than happy to have some painful entertainment at your expense, if you really were as defenseless as you pretend and if that legal stuff didn't keep them from it.
If you think that you've been safe so far because no ill will already formed all around you, you might as well believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. You live in the same society and among the same people who as late as the 20'th century ordered others to shoot starving factory workers in cold blood. People who between a few dollars profit and a few hundred human lives, chose the dollars.
I'm not even talking about something disguised as patriotism, duty to one's country or to God, or whatever other excuses people use to avoid feeling guilty. I'm talking literally personally ordering that some people be shot and left to bleed to death on the pavement, just because they're in the way of corporate profits. That kinda lack of empathy.
There's a lot more ill will around you than you think, and if you can afford to play the whole shiny-hippy... err... happy charade of being defenseless, is precisely because you aren't. It's because all that legalese and all that legal framework actually work. Because they do a mighty fine job of deterring a lot of people, long after that ill intent has formed in their hearts.
Also, IMHO you see a false dichotomy where one doesn't exist. There is no point at which you must choose between trembling for your very life in every hour of your life, and "la la la, I'm defenseless and happy". There's a huge difference between being affraid and just being informed and prepared. You seem to lump them in the same pot, but actually being informed and prepared may well mean you know _why_ you don't have to be appraid.
I can spend 15 minutes reading a contract before I sign it, and still be quite happy the rest of the time. Among other things _because_ I've read it, know what's in it, know my legal rights, and don't need to worry about it. I'm quite happy not because I choose to stay ignorant, but because I know what can happen, why, and what are my choices if/when that happens.
It's like living in the valey under a dam, in a sense. You can (A) tremble for your life, or (B) you can take your kinda shiny-happy "I'm happy to ignore the risks and don't care if I die" approach, but (C) I'll prefer to know what can happen and why it's improbable to happen. I'll sleep very soundly at night knowing that, say, it would take a direct nuclear strike to breach it (in which case the water would be the last of my concerns anyway), than trying to convince myself that I'm better off not knowing and not caring. Or I can choose to move to another place where I can feel safer, and go back to being happy without being ill informed.
Hate to burst your bubble, but, no offense, "art" isn't defined as "that subset which I approve of". It's also not defined as "snotty philosophical stuff that contemplates really deep stuff and/or makes references to obscure 19'th century authors".
Art never was defined like that. A lot of what we today consider classic art never was more than an expensive low-tech version of pornography. (I'll go on a limb and say that in an age where female clothing was such that seeing an ankle counted as arousing, having an oil painting or three of naked women on the wall might have done something for the hormones too, and wasn't there just as a tribute to the beauty of the human body.) A lot of it was just plain old entertainment, e.g., dance music or theatre plays that were just a low-tech sitcom.
Now not everything is _good_ art, and not everything is an intellectual exercise, but
If I paint a picture, it's art. If I sculpt a statue, it's art. Then why isn't it art if I make it a 3D model and apply a texture on top of it?
If I were to choreograph a ballet or a live concert performance, it would be art. IIRC, in at least one country (I don't remember which now) it was ruled that the strippers dancing in a club counts as art, and is therefore exempt from VAT. Why isn't it then art if I script some NPCs to enact it? (The German version of Gothic for example included an in-game concert by the band In Extremo.)
Etc. So, please. Again, it may be bad art or whatever, but classifying it as not art strikes me as just misguided elitism.
"As it is, for the most part games are simply commodities, designed to sell as many copies as possible."
Should we then start excluding from the definition of "art" all the artists who've ever worked just for the money? I can think of quite a few quotes from people who've had the cojones to admit that they're in it primarily for the money, and not for pure art for art's sake.
If art made just for money gets to be non-art, you've just lost for example Leonardo DaVinci, Michelangelo, and all those renaissance "sellouts" who made a living (and in some cases, like Leonardo DaVinci financed their other interests) out of painting or sculpting whatever the client wanted to buy.
Seems to me that if it's ok for a renaissance painter to paint a duke's portrait only because he was paid to do so, and still be art, the same should apply to an artist paid by a game company. A painting of, say, a dragon doesn't cease being art just because it was paid for by Electronic Arts, just as it wouldn't cease being art if it was paid for by a 9'th century Chinese emperor.
"If developers could fix upon one magic formula that would guarantee sales of 10 million units every time, they would use it every time, regardless of how artistic that formula was, or how artistic re-using that formula over and over was. (Does this sound familiar to anyone? This is the ideal game publishers have been working towards for about the last 10 or 15 years.)"
You mean the same as Hollywood is fixed on a handful of tried-and-tested scripts (e.g., "the hero's journey"), and how RIAA is fixed on a small number of tried-and-tested music and lyrics recipes? (Including, yes, girl bands singing about being a total slut, to appeal to teenager males just discovering their testosterone, and conversely boy bands whose only merit is appealing to the hormones of teenage girls.)
So I fail to see why would anyone single out games there. If we're going to redefine art as some prissy, pure and intellectual exercise that it never was, a _lot_ more will start counting as non-art than just video games. In fact, you're left with a world where extremely little art has been created in the last 5000 years straight.
In addition to what was mentioned, namely that natural language is vague, the problem is that anything that's not clear enough _will_ be abused or mis-construed by someone.
Let me give you an example that borders on absurd theatre: do you know why software is licensed, not sold? You may notice that when you buy a Ford car or book, you just own the car or book, you don't get "a non-tranferrable license to use it". What's different with software?
Because while common sense would say "I bought 1 copy, I own it, I execute that 1 copy I own, same as with a book", technically it's copied to RAM to be executed. So you'd be breaking copyright law if you copied it (even to RAM) without a license to do so. That's the loophole through which the whole "license" thing was wiggled through. And which in turn opened the door to having whatever restrictions imposed upon you that the copyright owner wishes to impose.
"Copying" in the sense that you intentionally produce a duplicate of a book or record, was extended to something which is more of a side-effect of how computers work than wilfully duplicating someone else's work. And also taken from a context where you could actually sell or distribute the copy in direct competition with the copyright holder, to something where... let's just say it's just stupid to think that you'd pull your RAM sticks out and give them to someone as a copy of Doom 3. So it misses the whole spirit and intention of copyright law (whether you aggree or disaggree with it.)
That's the problem with things that aren't clearly defined. If it's possible to get an advantage via a verbal fallacy or mis-construing something, some interested party _will_ do it.
E.g., let's say we signed a brief contract that just says "Moraelin aggrees to sell his old 22" colour monitor to aeoo for one hundred dollars." Simple, clear and to the point, right?
Well, at what date? I didn't say anywhere I'd give it to you right now, or for that matter even this year.
Does it have to work when you receive it, or can I just give you the pieces of one that I dropped while moving? If we put in the contract that it should work, by what definition of "work"? What's your recourse if it doesn't?
Is that US dollars, Canadian dollars, Australian dollars, or board-game dollars? Where should the money be delivered? (I'll probably want them deposited in my bank, and not, say, requiring me to go withdraw them personally from Elbonia's only bank;)
And are you sure what kind of monitor you're getting? Now you may be thinking "bah, even if it's an old CRT, a 22 inch never was too bad". I might however point you at the dictionary and the fact that a monitor was also a kind of military ship. So by that contract I could send you a painted toy ship.
And so on and so forth. And the whole legalese and those 30 page contracts are there just to leave as little room as possible for such creative interpretations.
You may have a lot of clue, heck, you may even be the most intelligent person to ever walk the Earth, the fact still is: you still don't inherently have any rights on EA's private property. (E.g., on their TSO servers.)
As they say, "freedom of press" only applies to those who own the press. And the first amendment mentions very explicitly that it only applies to the government. ("Congress shall make no law..." and "to petition the government for a redress of grievances".) That wasn't in response to anything specific in your message, but just to set the stage very clear: you have no rights whatsoever on EA's servers.
If they want to listen to you ok. If not, not. Tough luck, go talk to someone else then.
The same goes for in-game "journalism." In respect to what happens on their servers, EA isn't censoring the press, EA _is_ the press there. They have the final word over what content they allow in their medium.
Same as you can't go to the New Your Times and demand that they print your blog, or to CNN and demand that they give you air time to hype your blog, you can't demand that EA carries it in-game either.
It doesn't matter why, and they don't even have to explain why. Maybe the editor just didn't think the topic fits, or thought it was a too sensitive topic, or thought you were too verbose, or maybe he had a personal vendetta against you. Or maybe he had a bad day and just dumped it into the trashcan unread. It doesn't matter. It's their right to do so.
If you don't possess the millions to own the press, it doesn't matter how clued or intelligent you are, you have exactly as much or as little rights as the owner wants to give you. Maybe sad, but them's the breaks.
We all like to bitch about developpers playing God and whatnot, but honestly I think running a MMO like a democracy would fail for several reasons:
1. The average player has _no_ clue of game design and the implications a change has.
E.g., more than half the players don't seem to understand that the numbers on a MUD or MMO are meaningless by themselves, and mean anything only as ratios to the other numbers. E.g., that (going by Blizzard's claim that an extra group member gives you roughly +10 levels) if I gave you twice the hit points and damage per second output, but put you against enemies 10 levels higher, you're exactly back to square one.
So everyone just whines for a shortcut, for a bigger number on their weapon or whatever, without even understanding what they're asking for or where that shortcut leads. (Usually towards a "click here to be level 60 and receive all the best equipment" kind of game. And then they'd whine that the game is boring.)
That doesn't apply to only DPS numbers, btw. Other issues, such as PvP or the economy or combat/crafting mechanics are whined about just the same by people who don't even understand what they're asking for and what the effects would be.
Briefly, I'll take a good designer any day instead of a horde of monkeys randomly clicking on voting buttons.
2. Griefers. Virtual governments have the same problem as in-character justice and other such tried-and-failed ideas. Namely: there's _nothing_ you can do in-character to someone who doesn't stay in-character and sees their character as disposable to start with.
Same here: there _will_ be a bunch of people voting just to cause the most disruption and damage, because it doesn't affect them.
3. Some issues aren't even feasible to solve that easily. Those companies have finite (if large) funds after all. If they end up having to check on and babysit every single player, sorry, your $13 a month just isn't enough for that.
E.g., sure, a guy can get a lot of political capital by playing the bogus "waah, I'm a victim! EA supressed my free speech when I ranted and raved against their game, and blew bogus issues like virtual prostitution out of proportion" card. But honestly, even if you voted that EA cracks down on virtual vice, how would they enforce that and at what cost?
I can tell you firsthand that none of the major MMOs have a "/blowjob" command or such. It's the players being inventive with other commands (e.g., a prayer kinda command was used on AO to sorta look like a blowjob, until the devs took it out) or just with typed text, IRC/AOL style. So if anyone voted that EA cracks down on that, EA would literally have to read everyone's chats with everyone else, and go through lists of all emote commands used, etc.
And then someone else would make a fuss about how EA violates their privacy. More voting, more posers playing virtual politician and agitating the masses, lather, rinse, repeat ad-nauseam.
4. For that matter, it would be just too much of an expense and effort just to keep up with the posers trolling for attention that way. Especially if you give them attention: nothing gets a troll going on and on like getting attention. And once you've officially invited them to play politician and have to democratically debate with them every bogus issue they come up with, that's what you gave them: lots and lots of publicity and attention.
I can see that getting out of hand fast. Every single ban (e.g., for outright cheating) would be brought up as some major political issue that needs to be debated and voted on, every single new spell or NPC would be debated to death too, etc. It would take a whole PR department just to keep up with the uphill battles of proving that, no, ffs, that guy isn't a martyr persecuted by the publisher, but someone who used hacks and cheats.
Etc.
Basically, dunno, democracy sounds good and fine, but I don't want to pay 2-3 times the monthly cost just so the devs can afford to implement it. And I can do without the open invitation for every poser and troll to play politician.
The iron fist rule of the publisher isn't perfect, but it works reasonably well. I can live with that.
Ah, no, I'm not basing my buying decisions on that, of course. After all, I run Windows on my gaming machine, and I own an XBox too, even though I've already said that MS _is_ a monopolist.
I'm basing my decision to buy or not buy strictly on what games are available for it, and how many of them I'd like to play.
And as I've said before, the DS really has so few games published here in Europe that you can count them on your fingers. None particularly tempting either. (E.g., since everyone waves around Nintendogs as an example of why did they buy a DS, that one never got released here either.)
So, well, you can probably see how it doesn't matter whether I like or dislike Nintendo there. I'm just not gonna buy a system that (in Europe) gets a game every two months, and none that interests me yet. Between the DS and the PSP, even if I were a Nintendo fanboy, the DS simply isn't a competitor here. It doesn't even try to compete.
Open the properties for your network connection, "Advanced", go to the properties for the TCP/IP protocol, "Advanced" again, and then on the last tab ("Options") you'll see stuff like "IP-Security" and "TCP/IP filtering". (Yes, it's very well hidden. I hadn't found it myself until someone told me it's there.)
The last one, for example, is basically just a traditional old-style firewall: it lets you block everything except speciffic ports, by number. It's really primitive. It doesn't have the functionality of modern software firewalls, like distinguishing between applications, or even between directions of traffic, but then again, it works.
It also exists since NT 4.
IP-Security is more advanced, and you can even define your own rules there. You'll need to use the "Group Policy" editor for that, though. (E.g., by running "GPEDIT.MSC" from the Start/Run... menu.)
Nintendo tried the legal bullying route against N64 emulators before, e.g., against UltraHLE.
Their going the "just that it was theft of their stuff, and breaking the DMCA, both" is still, well, precisely the point. That an emulator containing exactly 0 (ZERO) lines of Nintendo code is somehow theft of Nintendo's property, isn't just laughable, but just the kind of playing nasty that I was talking about. Using the DMCA to that end, doubly so.
"Their old contracts are old for a reason, and let's admit that maybe it was smarter that way, I prefer 1 good game, rather then an ok game and 2 ports (3 if you count the computer)"
You don't get it, kid. I'm not talking that you couldn't port your current game to other systems. I'm talking that you had to sell yourself into serfdom to Nintendo, and never ever be allowed to publish any _other_ game for a non-Nintendo platform. Think non-compete for life.
After that point you'd be basically at Nintendo's mercy. If they didn't want to publish your games any more, you couldn't just say "fuck it, then I'll try making my next game for the PC instead." You'd just go bankrupt. You were officially their bitch from that point, and they knew it. You _had_ to do what Nintendo wanted, and at whatever price Nintendo felt like paying, or go bankrupt.
_That_ nasty. The old Nintendo was a nastier monopolist than MS at it's nastiest hour.
Mind you, those contracts got overruled in courts, but that they even tried that kind of "sign yourself into serfdom for life" stunt, says something.
Also let me say: having one game ported on more systems, doesn't make it be suddenly a worse game, which you seem to imply. Au contraire, it gives it more potential market, hence it can be made with a bigger budget. Between selling 100,000 copies on one platform and selling 200,000 copies across 3 platforms, guess which gives you more funds to hire extra artists or include more levels? Right.
So any way you want to look at it, that stuff didn't benefit either the consumer or the developpers in any form or shape. It was self-serving stuff that benefited exactly one entity: Nintendo itself.
Now I can understand that they're in it to make money, and act primarily in their own interest, and all. Fair enough. But claiming that it benefitted _anyone_ but themselves (e.g., that the consumers too got better games out of it) is pretty funny.
"Gamecube's falling is the same as the PSP's current predicament."
Well, yes, any console lives or dies by the number and mass appeal of the games it has. No arguments there. The difference is that the Gamecube has already failed, while the PSP is just starting. Will it fail too? Maybe. Maybe not. It's far too early to tell.
So far it seems to be doing great at least in Europe. Admittedly, that's also because Nintendo pretty much gave up on the European market. You can count the number of DS games released here on your fingers, and it's not even the best ones. And the DS sales reflect that: they've sold in really pitiful numbers. So at least here the PSP is at the moment very much the _only_ choice.
I can assume that that'll go a long way to make it a valid market. Europe is a games market only slightly smaller than the USA market, and about twice the Japan market. Dominating this market can go a long way to make it worth writing games for it.
But again, I wouldn't know which way it'll really go from here. We shall see. Proclaiming it either a victor or a failure at this point is just silly.
Well, I won't disaggree with you on the whole. It in fact mirrors my own thoughts and observations.
I once got a computer virused intentionally. (That was the only Windows virus I ever got, btw, so if anyone wants to start with the canned "Windows has viruses, use Linux instead" answers, spare your breath.) I was installing Windows 2000, had no firewall handy, and thought I'm too lazy to go buy a firewall or go burn Zone Alarm on a CD on someone else's computer. Also, I didn't know yet that I could just activate the built-in poor-man's firewall (yes, you can tell Windows 2000 to not allow incoming connections) to stay safe until I download the updates and a firewall. So, anyway, I thought I'd let it get virused while I download the firewall, then format and reinstall. It's not like 20 minutes extra are a major catastrophe.
So predictably it does catch an RPC buffer-overflow virus while downloading Sygate Personal Firewall. Then I block it from connecting to the network and play with it a little. It got me curious.
You know what was sad? It actually slowed the computer a lot less than Norton. You know what's sadder? Installing Norton and running a full scan didn't catch it anyway. It just slowed down the computer some more.
But still, Symantec isn't _the_ worst. Try McAffee sometime if you're masochistic. Not only it was even less efficient and slower, but also had such gems as:
- needed IE to download its updates, because it used some ActiveX crap, but it was too stupid to just launch IE, then. It launched the default browser, in this case Opera, and then couldn't get itself updated. That sad.
- it was installed on D: but the updates proceeded to install themselves in the default directory on C:. Worse yet, I wasn't just left with just an extra copy on the hard drive, but had two versions running in RAM at the same time.
- this got even funnier later when I uninstalled it, because one of the two versions remained installed and auto-loaded. I had to edit the registry to stop it. (If you thought only spyware has to be removed that way, McAffee is obviously the counter-example.)
- their "privacy" protection basically did nothing but try to protect me from cookies, including temporary login cookies on web sites. I suddenly couldn't use any sites that required login. Not even in a consistent and predictable way. E.g., Gamespy's Fileplanet got terminally confused and different pages thought that I was logged in and not logged in at the same time.
And so on and so forth. That was a rather non-funny experience.
Honestly, even if you cared about Karma (though beats me why would you), as you've said, it's ridiculously easy to come by anyway.
And it's not like he'd be the first one anyway. There's a whole category of people insecure enough to throw that kind of kindergarten revenge fit. If only now you see 3 day old posts starting to get unexplained attention, eh, you haven't paid attention. If anything I find it funny that someone would be that immature.
But, really, why would you care about it anyway? Does it really matter if your groupthink score... err... I mean "karma", goes up or down? Just say what you think and don't care about such prom-queen scores.
If anything, that "karma" hurts more than it helps. It spawned a whole class of karma-whore prom-queens repeating the same idiocies on topics they don't even understand, just because it's what gets them points. Which is just pollution.
Neither the Gamecube nor the PSP have an inherent problem with games, or at least not in the form of "it can't possibly have more games".
You can step down from that soap box. It's not some conspiracy to be pro-Sony and anti-Nintendo. It's just a pragmatic decision based on what games exist at a given time that interest a potential buyer. No more, no less.
There was nothing that said the Gamecube couldn't possibly get more games. For me, it just somehow didn't. The ports from other systems I could already play on those other systems, and Nintendo's own games just fall squarely outside the genres I'm interested in.
Likewise, there's nothing to say that the PSP will or won't get more games. We'll see. If it gets enough, it will do better. If not, not. So far, I'm pleased with it, but even I won't claim which way it'll go from here.
Any speculation along the lines of "System X will be guaranteed to get all the games, and System Y is guaranteed to get not much more" is just that: wild speculation. It makes for a good fanboy rant, but it's still talking out the ass either way.
The as for the rest of the rant:
"The problem is PSP should stand for PS Ports."
Well, that doesn't bother me. The PS2 happens to have the genres I like in abundance. If that's the kind of games that'll make it to the PSP, well, you've just told me I should be happy about buying it.
"They should have allowed everyone to put their own apps on the system."
Unless the DS does, it seems to me it's a non-sequitur. Can you just put your own app on a cartridge and run it?
But anyway, I bought it for the games, not to run Java on it, so it doesn't bother me. I already have a PC to do my programming on.
"but of course Sony doesn't want freedom (remember they have a huge invested interest in RIAA.)"
You mean unlike Nintendo which tried to stop emulation by patenting something as vague and patently bogus as "emulating a GBA"? Or patented something as blatantly obvious as simulating insanity in a game?
And I'm not even getting again into their old strong-arm contracts that said that you can't _ever_ program for another platform if you want a game published on theirs.
Doesn't strike me like the great defender of Freedom, so far.
"You can't damage a cartridge like you can easily scratch a disk."
Have you even _seen_ an UMD? If you can scratch it through the caddy, I want to know how you're doing it. Attacking it with a chisel and hammer, or what?
So basically that just tells me you don't even know what you're talking about.
Actually, I thought it was Aten not Ra that was enforced as a single deity by Akhenaten.
"ut when an app makes system calls, it's calling "LPC" Microsoft code. So much of the IO subsystem also winds through the GUI, because the architecture is so spaghetti, that it gets bogged down."
Bullshit. You may notice that Windows is divided into portions like Kernel.exe (core functions like, yes, file IO) and GDI.exe (graphics stuff). Claiming that a file IO operation goes through the GDI at any point, or that there'd be some spaghetti code that spans more than one executable, just shows me that you have no clue what you're talking about.
"Then there are the system services that start up."
As opposed to the services that Linux starts up, eh? I see easily three times as many processes when I do a "top" on this machine than on my Windows gaming machine. So you're doing... what? Getting all self-righteous anti-MS for doing... the exact same things that Linux is doing? I mean, heh.
Here's some free, complimentary clue: just because a process is loaded, it doesn't mean it's actually running all the time.
"And the bloated DLLs that load big chunks in and out of memory for one function call, and which don't flush quickly enough due to lackadaisical garbage collection"
Even skipping over the fact that it's just ignorant FUD pulled out of the ass, it _still_ would be completely off the mark.
Here's some more free complimentary clue: paging in Windows happens in 4k pages, same as in Linux. Because that's the page size supported by the physical hardware. And even _if_ DLLs were bloated and stayed in memory when unused -- heck, even _if_ no unloading even existed at all -- you'd get one of those unused 4k pages swapped out to disk as soon as you need it. Exactly the same as in Linux.
So again, it just tells me you have no clue what you're talking about.
""Premature" optimization is the only kind available for Windows, usually in the form of "use another OS instead"."
Tell you what: I'll take that more seriously when it's based on some actual facts, not on FUD pulled out of the ass like above. There are good reasons to choose Unix instead of Windows or viceversa, but such falsehoods pulled out of a zealot's imagination aren't it.
"Really, don't you think there'd be more than just one Windows HPC entry in the "Top 500", ones that weren't bought onto the list by Microsoft? Why is the same HW running Linux so much "H'er PC"? The industry is extremely competitive, as is the MS attempt to enter it. Why hasn't MS been successful in cracking it yet, if WIndows is so HPC?"
1. Sure as heck not because of the GUI which isn't even _used_ at the time.
2. It's a strawman anyway. If you took the time to read what you're answering to before letting it rip with the canned FUD, you'll notice that I never claimed that Windows was necessarily the best HPC choice. I've even listed two other things which may make or break a HPC implementation, Windows or otherwise.
_All_ I've said was that having a GUI makes 0% difference in Windows and all that "bloat" isn't even costing you any CPU cycles or RAM. The same applies not only to Windows, btw, but also to Linux, Solaris, AIX, MacOS, and generally any OS that has at least half a clue. Having X and the GUI libraries installed on your Solaris server costs you no performance either. Until someone actually logs into it and uses some graphical programs, all that GUI "bloat" has exactly 0% impact on performance.
So either answer to _that_, or spare me the straw-men.
In all fairness, ancient polytheism wasn't as much a clever design from scratch, but a mix-and-match that reflected more who conquered whom, and which faction gained influence at whose expense.
For starters, each time a new city would join the empire, its own protector deity would be added to the pantheon. Or occasionally a close enough existing deity would be used as a good enough substitute.
(With the occasional mis-step, such as Egypt ending up basically ruled by satanists because their invaders assimilated their own deity of war with Egypt's Set.)
And that was just the beginning. From there Gods moved up and down the hierarchy like yoyos, and occasionally got killed off, to reflect the shifts in the balance of power. Each time a city or caste gained enough power and influence (e.g., went to be alliance leader or was the birthplace of the new Pharaoh or whatever), it's deity went up the hierarchy. Then they got pushed downwards and so did their god.
And whole new myths and legends got thought up to give the masses some explanation as to why that balance changed. "Yeah, well, Ra may have been all that cool and great, but our Isis tricked him, so now she and Osiris rule even over him. So get worshipping your new masters." Some time and an invasion later, "Yeah, but our Set killed your Osiris. Pwn3d, suckers." Then two centuries and a revolt later it's "Yeah, but our Isis did a bit o' necrophilia, gave birth to Horus, and between them they pwn3d Set and resurrected Osiris." And so on, and so forth.
So basically IMHO all that separation of responsibilities was more like the side-effect of all this, than cleverly designed that way to avoid uncomfortable questions.