Indeed. That's just the kind of thing I was talking about. Cringely's rants usually make exactly that much sense. Once you actually start thinking about it from a _real_ business perspective, none whatsoever.
You're right, "what would Intel gain?" is indeed one of the right questions.
Does Intel want to spend some 30 billion to go head-to-head with Microsoft? Starting from some 2-3% of the market point? Why? What would they gain there? Even IBM couldn't find a good answer to that question, when they had OS/2 and didn't have to buy anyone for that: they could make more money selling their hardware with Windows pre-installed, than trying to convert the market.
Intel is making a load of money selling their CPUs and chipsets with whatever OS you want. They don't actually care whether you want Windows or Linux or MacOS or BeOS with your Centrino laptop, as long as you buy one.
Yes, Intel had its frictions with MS, such as getting support for the Itanic dropped, but frankly, I don't see _Apple_ becoming the Itanic desktop. Not with the prices Intel charges for one Itanic CPU. Apple will just move a few more P4 CPUs... which Dell and the gang were already moving 20 times as well.
Yes, I can see Intel hedging all bets (including their support for Linux) and flexing its muscles a little at MS (i.e., the power games between corporations I've mentioned.) But getting into a losing pissing contest with MS, and buying Apple for that privilege, I too just can't see what's in it for Intel.
Plus, from a bang-per-buck perspective, what's the point? Yes, Apple can make software, but it's also a 30 billion USD corporation. If Intel wanted to really break free from MS and push software of its own that doesn't need Windows, there are cheaper ways to do that. They can, for example, start with Linux (which, arguably, has more mind-share than MacOS has to start with) and buy just enough application development to make it a more viable option. Thirty billion can get them a _lot_ of software written, if that's what they wanted.
I'd also add, "what would Steve Jobs gain?" As was mentioned, the guy is a control freak. I don't see him handing over control of Apple to Intel. Because as you've said, it would be an acquisition of Apple by Intel, not a merger.
So basically, yeah, you're right, that kinda "merger" makes no sense any way one wants to slice it. It's just another troll article by Cringely.
It was a piece of virtual property, yes, but it was worth (and actually sold for) nearly $1000. By Chinese standards that's more than a family can save in a year.
The fact that it's just bits on a hard drive is irrelevant. Let's say that you wrote a novel on your laptop. Then let's say I copy it off your laptop (e.g., while you're in a meeting at work), put my name on it, and sell the rights to it for some $50,000. (So the monetary value is sorta in the same proportion to what you earn, as that virtual sword was for the Chinese guy.)
Wouldn't you think: "WTF? It was _mine_, not his! Who the fuck gives him the right to take and sell _my_ stuff?"
Now say you came to talk to me about it, and I basically told you "fuck off, sucks to be you, the money is mine now." Because that's what happened between those two people.
Now maybe you'd just gnash your teeth, decide to just hate me now and avoid the christmas rush, and control yourself enough to not commit manslaughter. But then realize that a lot of people don't have _that_ kind of self-control. People get into a homicidal rage for a lot less money every day.
And anyway, the fact remains, virtual or not, Person A took something owned by Person B, sold it, and pocketed the money. A lot of money. Very _real_ money. It wasn't over virtual property, it was over _real_ _money_. Period.
Now I can see how two-bit hack journalists would love to hammer on the "man killed over virtual sword in a game" idiocy. That's the kind of a crap sensationalist headline that sells subscriptions. Whereas "man killed over a shitload of real money" doesn't quite have the same edge.
But seeing the number of responses that treat it like some continuation of an in-game feud, completely ignoring the amount of _real_ _money_ involved, gets depressing at times.
They're within the same realm of reason as when retired cabbies at the pub discuss "obvious" political solutions that would fix the economy, bring the rest of the world in line ("just park an aircraft carrier off the coast of France, that'll scare them"... yeah, right), cure cancer, and generally make it all a wonderland. Or to put it otherwise, they're what you get when you think from a business/marketshare perspective... without having half a clue about either business or market share.
You get stuff that sounds all smart and believable... as long as you don't let reality get in the way. (See his ranting about "unspecified" CPUs.) In Cringely's case, the sad thing is that he sounds all smart precisely _because_ he misses all the points, strings together some truisms and mis-representations, and appeals to an equally uninformed and slightly paranoid readership.
Not meant as an insult to the readership. The fact is, yes, the business world doesn't make sense to most normal people. As someone else put it on slashdot a long time ago, if individuals acted the way corporations do (e.g., someone in the same day saying that you're his best friend, and that you're the incarnation of evil and must be killed), they'd be put in a loony bin.
The business world is made of power games, veiled threats, PR press releases that intentionally mis-lead or mis-represent, and alliances that are formed, broken, and hinted at just to put pressure on a third party. E.g., see Dell's yearly announcing that they consider AMD chips -- and at one point they even let you order a replacement Athlon for your Athlon-based Dell... which didn't exist "yet" -- when they have to re-negotiate their discount from Intel. E.g., see Sony's big PR fuss about a HDD and Linux on the PS2... which turned out to be just a maneuver to get it clasified as a computer instead of a console in the EU, and thus not pay import taxes.
For most normal people the real power games and motivations behind them are just ranging between "nuts" and "petty", or at the very least would if an individual did them instead of a corporation.
So a whole class of pundits, Cringely included, exist just to rant some utterly false, but understandable by normal people, explanation about such events. They tell you not what is, but what you want to hear. Again, it sounds good and believable precisely _because_ it misses the real points. They're what _you_ would do if you were looking for market share and had no clue how that works (and fail miserably), not what a corporation would do.
And of course, all complete with a shotgun approach to making predictions that are vague enough to look sorta fulfilled by such power games.
It has nothing to do with "a religious vast-chasm viewpoint". I'm not even an Apple fan. By most Mac fans' standards, I'm a "wintel fanboy" and have been known to be modded as a troll for questioning Mac issues before.
Because it's research. Those other professions are paid basically for the labour of duplicating or slightly adapting an existing design. Software _is_ a design: that's what you're paid/paying for, not to type a copy of an existing program.
Making software isn't like "see, here's a finished plan of a house, you just have to lay the bricks mechanically". That's what the _compiler_ and _libraries_ do.
What you do in software is more like designing a new car from scratch. Mistakes happen. And yes, even after more than a century of designing cars, you still need to test it extensively and fix the "bugs".
Think "bugs" and "debugging" and screw-ups happen in software? Tell that to the UK government in WW2, who ended up with a "buggy" tank. The engine cooling didn't work at all. Or to the Germans, otherwise noted for good tank doctrines and engineering, who still ended up with monstrosities like the Ferdinand without MGs: an easy prey for infantry. The desperate crews ended up firing a SMG or squad MG through the barrel to have _any_ protection.
And not even only tanks.
Aircraft? Yeah, the BF-109 had massive drag because of the paint used. It also needed massively different force between turning left and turning right. The Me-163 Komet? That was the aircraft that was more dangerous to the pilot than to the enemy. It tended to explode violently when landing.
Or (to also illustrate a management/client screw-up) the French engineers had designed some awesome aircraft for that age... but the client (government) demanded the engine power cut to almost half to save money. Bet they felt stupid when the BF-109 wiped them from the skies.
Infantry weaponry? Take the Japanese 6.5mm squad machinegun from WW2... which jammed unless you manually oiled each round.
Etc.
Ah, but maybe that only happened because they had to stay on the bleeding edge and design completely new things in a limited time? Well, that's the whole point of taking WW2 as an example, because that's the whole problem in software too. Noone pays you to re-type an exact copy of your last program. They'd use that one, if that's what they wanted.
If it was any other engineering profession, one time you have to design a car, one time it's a tree-rotor helicopter, and one time management wants a submarine on robot legs so it can go on land too.
Very good points, and well taken. And before I go any further, I must say I'm an ex-AAA guy, so definitely less qualified in infantry tactics. (We did train to shoot an assault rifle too, but, well, not as much as the real infantry, and of course not up to USMC standards.) Still, just to clarify what I had in mind:
1. About the heavy weaponry, I wasn't really thinking of a.50 machinegun. (Well, ok, the thought did cross my mind, but so did the thought about recoil.)
There is, however, IMHO other stuff that could be fired pretty accurately when you're weighing 500 pounds together with the exo-skeleton and have more than your own muscles strength to hold it pointed that-a-way. E.g., an M-60. Of course, you're just as dead when hit by a 5.56mm round, but higher calibres tend to cause more suppression for some reason.
Another use that comes to mind is AT or AA missiles. They're heavy, and recoil isn't a problem.
2. The point about the 3 round burst is well taken, but AFAIK it was originated in the M-14.
The problem with the M-14 is that the NATO 7.62mm cartridge is too powerful. It's a lot larger and contains more powder than the Soviet 7.62mm round. It's practically the same size as what the Soviets used in the SVD (Dragunov sniper rifle) or in belt-fed medium machineguns. Using that in an assault rifle, yeah, will make it shake like hell on full auto without a bipod. I.e., that needed that 3 round burst limit badly.
The M-16 or the SAW IMHO aren't _that_ horribly in in need of it, though.
And either way, when you have them fixed on a heavy exo-skeleton, IMHO they should shake a lot less.
3. About information overload, well, that's why I've said one soldier per squad. And if anyone actually went to the extreme of having all squad members on the screen, they'd probably be just points on a map anyway.
Basically I'm not proposing that someone micro-manages every soldier, because, yeah, I do realize that it's not even possible. I do trust they will find a way to filter just as much information as they need.
4. About the EM radiation, you do make a valid point. Still, uni-directional broadcasts are also possible. When anyone wants their infantry to keep radio silence, I can imagine that the suits will have that option. In the meantime, they can still transmit maps, orders, whatever, _to_ that infantry.
"Actually no, Poland lost because they sent horsemen with swords against the German tanks and assault rifled soldiers.:-D"
Actually, no, that stupidity was mentioned only once, by the Italians, in a propaganda piece. Even the Germans (i.e., the ones who actually fought there) did _not_ claim that.
And even in the Italian propaganda piece it was cavalry charges vs tanks yes, but _not_ swords vs tanks.
The actual accounts of that war showed the Polish army doing actually pretty well, considering that Germany had one helluva lot more tanks.
E.g., the new 37mm Polish AT-gun was _feared_ by the Germans. It caused tank crews to smear mud over the white cross on their turrets, because to the Polish AT guns it meant "shoot here."
E.g., the Polish tanks were actually pretty modern. A lot more modern than what the French had later. They just had way too few of them. But where they were used, they caused higher casualties to the Germans than they took.
And, oh, "assault rifled soldiers"? While the Germans did invent the assault rifle (against Hitler's explicit orders to drop that "useless" research), in '39 it was still _years_ before that. And contrary to Hollywood movies where every German soldier had a SMG, in reality very few did. Most German soldiers had bolt action rifles, and for close combat they were liberally issuing as many pistols as they could get even to soldiers.
The reason is one of doctrine. The Germans saw the machinegun (in Poland, the MG-34) as the centre piece of the squad, and the rest of the platoon was there more or less to support it.
Basically: no offense, but learn thy history before shooting thy mouth.
"How? The only things I can think of that help against such guerilla tactics are good armor and staying alert. Anyhow, who needs super strength when you have good ol' firepower?"
Which is exactly why and what for: to enable soldiers to carry more armour and dish out more firepower.
Don't think for a moment that military applications of super-strength will mean Superman-style punching villains in the face. It won't. Ever.
However a major topic throughough the last century has been the weight of ammo and equipment a soldier has to carry. It's a real issue. That's one of the reasons (among other factors) why we've moved to smaller calibres.
Put some powered armour on those soldiers and suddenly they can carry a lot more heavy weaponry and ammo.
Individual armour has also been discarded precisely because of weight considerations: you _could_ make a breastplate that could stop a rifle round, but it was impractically heavy.
Now think the other way around: if you have an armoured exo-skeleton, you can carry enough armour at least over the vital organs to stop even a 7.62mm round or shrapnel from hand grenades and pipe bombs. _And_ this time it's without a mobility penalty.
You've just made life harder for the enemy soldiers, because now they need to lug around bigger weaponry to take you out, which limits _their_ mobility.
But perhaps more importantly, and this is really what makes it a wet dream for the military is: enabling soldiers to carry more electronics and a sattellite connection. Giving at least one soldier per squad enough electronics to know exactly where the enemy is, what's happening, where is the squad needed, what should they avoid, etc, is something that can give a _huge_ advantage.
Nations have been defeated before because basically their chain of command didn't react fast enough. E.g., that's why large armies like those of France or Poland crumbled in the face of Blitzkrieg in WW2. They just weren't prepared to react at that speed.
Or the USSR in WW2 was massively handicapped by their lack of radios on their tanks.
Now picture giving each squad a direct link to their officers _all_ the time. Bidirectional. You can know _exactly_ what's happening at each point, in real time, and the soldiers can know exactly what's expected of them. You can instantly see when your troops are being pinned and flanked, and how, and you can tell them exactly how to counter it. Better yet they too can see a bigger picture and react in a more intelligent manner.
It's something that can really make or break a battle.
You are of course right about maths being a valuable life skill, but if I'm allowed to nitpick, I'd say the same applies to all blackboxes: before one can use them right, one needs at least _some_ understanding of how it works inside. The same applies IMHO to programming.
The line of thinking "oh, we'll give programmers a bunch blackboxes and they don't have to know the algorithms behind them" is what got us saddled with co-workers who can't code worth crap. Yes, it's not needed to know the exact MPEG4 algorithm, but without knowledge of at least the basics, well, that's how we got at the point where 3 out of 4 "programmers" can't program.
I see _consultants_ advocating using two arrays for large data sets instead of a hash table. Presumably because they never learned that one is O(1) and one is O(n).
I've seen _two_ co-workers end up debugging into a HashMap (because they were utterly lost when finding their own bugs) and go "Java is broken! It replaced my item in the array with another! My data is lost!" Turns out that they had no fucking clue what a linked list is, and that merely a new node was added to the front of one.
And then there's the one I fondly call Wally, who was attempting basically this:
public void nuller(int x) {
x = 0; }
public void testNuller() {
int x = 1;
nuller(x);
assertTrue("x should be 0", x == 0); }
Then did it again later. The concept of "call by value" was utterly lost on him.
Or pointers? Java's syntax hides pointers, making them basically a blackbox. Something that just happens behind the scenes for you. Unfortunately I see people bitten in the ass everyday by utter lack of knowledge of what a pointer is and how it works.
Or then there's security. I've seen consultants from a big corporation implementing a system so full of security holes it wasn't even funny. They honestly thought that just slapping together some blackboxes with lots of buzzwords made them safe. It didn't.
They failed to grasp even basic concepts as "what if the user edits the '?user_id=1234' to '?user_id=0' in the URL and makes themselves super-user?" Yes, that sad. They failed to understand basic concepts like non-repudiation: when someone deleted their own user from that system, the program would helpfully cascade through all tables and erase all tracks that the user ever existed or ever done anything. They failed to even notice they need to quote the user input, both when displaying it in HTML _and_ when using it in an SQL querry. Etc.
Basically anything that wasn't already built in their blackboxes, they were utterly obvlivious to.
So basically, no, I wouldn't expect a random person off the street to implement MPEG4 either, but I'd expect anyone paid as a programmer to know at least the basics (the equivalent of arithmetic in maths) before they're even given a MPEG4 library and told to add that to a program.
Which brings me back to maths: the same is true for maths and a lot of jobs. Even if one decided that 10x10 isn't needed for Burger King jobs, we're not preparing _all_ kids for that kind of jobs. Expecting someone to understand the more advanced maths used in most engineering or science fields when their knowledge of the basics is just "oh, I push these two buttons on a calculator", is IMHO like building a house without the ground floor.
It's called sarcasm, in case that went over your head. The "lecture" on insulting morons was just a sarcastic way of saying "no, I'm not impressed, and not backing off just because you throw around big words and insults."
And you still don't impress me, even with the new load of insults. No, you still haven't made any actual point.
Actually, let me retract that: you did make one point. You did prove, just as I expected, that other than throwing pretentious sounding words and insults, you don't actually know what you're talking about. You don't actually know much about "cultural evolution" or "primate neuroscience", do you? You didn't disappoint me there.
"You're just another big mouth on/. without a single point of your own to make."
Which is just the point. Actual science, yes, it's usually based on someone else's point. (Even if you were a recognized authority in the field, your work wouldn't exist in a vaccuum.)
Or briefly: science is that-a-away, personal wet fantasies are in the opposite direction.
If the "women want to be treated like sex objects" thing is _your_ idea, come out and say so. Don't wrap it in lame pretenses that it's some scientiffic fact backed up by anthropology _and_ neuroscience.
" Yes there is. Humans, mostly. Chinese feet, westerner breasts, aftican vaginal mutilation..."
Point well taken. I was meaning a species other than humans.
"Spiral out of control? Nile carp in aftica outcompeting every other fish. Cats in NZ. Cane Toads in Australia."
Yes, but for themselves there is no such thing as "we need to evolve a handicap to avoid this". Yes, they out-competed _other_ fish. This isn't a problem for them.
They reached the equilibrium point where their numbers are just the number that the food sources can support. That's all.
There is _no_ point for a species at this point to basically evolve in a direction that puts it at a handicap. Evolution favours mutations which make it _better_ fit for the environment, and _less_ likely to die before it has offspring.
"People find attractive what they find attractive and you just have to deal with it."
No arguments there. We can aggree there very quickly.
But that wasn't the point. The point is merely that there is no such thing as "see, there's this darwinistic hard-wired built-in ideal of beauty, which is the perfect body shape to bear healthy children." The current mutant idea of beauty, yes, it's what it is, and we all just have to deal with it. But built-in or having _any_ darwinistic advantage (considering that it's opposite to what humans and human physiology evolved to) it isn't.
My point, isn't whether I enjoy or don't enjoy comics.
My point is that he didn't prove anything. He just threw some insults and pretentious words to "prove" a dubious point. No, sorry, I don't consider that to "prove" anything.
I'm open to other points of view, yes. If he's got an opinion or some data to contribute to a discussion, yes, go ahead. But calling everyone names if they dare think otherwise, sorry, doesn't really make a point.
There is no species which deliberately handicaps itself, and their is no case where that's necessary to curb a species' spiralling out of control.
For starters, all species have a built in balance between available food and number of members. In most cases it involves some predator-prey relationships too.
E.g., if too many rabbits are born, more foxes have food, which naturally curbs the rabbits' expansion. If there are less rabbits, some foxes starve.
There is no way for a species to spiral out of control. Eventually the species will either become the main course for others, or hit the limits of its food supply.
What most such pseudo-science theories seem to mis-represent as such are other factors which the species needed, and which are _not_ there as handicaps.
E.g., human breasts, since you mention them are there _not_ either as handicap, nor as the "sex signal of having a butt on the chest" idiocy. They're there because that's convenient for a primate to hold its baby, and they're that size in humans because a human baby needs a _lot_ of food. The brains alone needs ridiculous quantities of proteins to even keep working. (See why the evoloution of human brain size kept step with the availability of food sources: e.g., fire allowing us to eat plants.)
E.g., other signals (such as colours) in various species are _not_ there as a handicap, but to solve problems like finding each other. See, being well hidden from predators doesn't help that much if you also don't find a partner to mate with. Or like the kid being able to follow the mother.
A subset of those evolved in situations where the species had no signifficant natural enemies. No, not as a way to attract more enemies, but because lack of those changed the priorities. The advantage of easier finding a mate or being easier to follow by your kids, trumped the disadvantage of being more visible to an enemy which didn't even exist.
But noticing that would require some real science, including some healthy applying of Occam's Razor. While most such pseudo-science bullshit is just working towards a pre-set agenda: trying to rationalize why thinking with your dick instead of with your head is good. And then "facts" are twisted or outright made up to fit that pre-set conclusion.
Let me tell you a secret: There's a reason the thin models get silicone implants to have big breasts. The reason is human biology.
There is a fundamental problem with the current brain-fucked ideal of beauty (as represented in comics too), namely anorexic with huge breasts. The problem is that it tends not to happen in normal, healthy humans. By the time the body has been forced to eat its fat reserves, or didn't have enough food to build them up in the first place, guess what? It doesn't have enough fat for big breasts either. Those reserves went too.
The current ideal of beauty is something that deviates far enough from the biological average, or from a normal human metaboloism, to count as a _mutant_.
So you're telling me... what? That you're expecting normal healthy kids from a _mutant_? Now I would understand a fascination with mutants in comics as a source of super-powers (after all, most super-heroes are mutants). But as a means of propagating normal human genes to healthy human offspring, it's outright idiotic.
And as was already mentioned, this ideal is very new. In some parts of the world, as new as late 20'th century. (See recent stories about Asian girls ending up with metabolism problem and other illnesses, by starving themselves or making themselves puke, to fit the beauty ideal Hollywood raped their coutries with. Countries where until recently the idea of beauty was a slightly fat woman.)
See, for most of human history, the beauty ideal was actually someone who by modern standards would be considered overweight. And you know the fertility figurines the cavemen made? Now those were seriously overweight.
_That_ was the kind of shape that guaranteed survival the next time there's a famine or you catch a disease. An anorexic wife would most likely have died long before passing those genes along. Someone with fat reserves would have survived.
And then there are other bleeps on the history radar, such as the Greeks and Romans. You may notice that those did have statues of thin women, for a change. They also had tiny breasts. In fact, the Romans are noted as having invented the bra... for the purpose of _hiding_ breasts. In effect, a strip of cloth tied over the breasts to make a woman look like she had none.
Oops, that ideal of beauty was different from ours too.
Or then, yes, were the Chinese, whose idea of beauty was more centred around crippled feet. A woman was apparently dead sexy for them if, before anything else, her feet were crippled to the point of barely being able to walk.
Oops, that differs from our beauty ideal too.
So give me a break. There is no correlation between our current _mutant_ ideal of beauty and survival in anything even vaguely resembling natural condition. And there is _no_ constant ideal through human history to suggest that somehow chasing that idea is built into the species.
So lemme see, you're obviously right and obviously _every_ woman's secret dream is to be represented as a cheap slut, because:
1. you call names any dissenting opinion ("anti-male feminist bullshit")
2. you call names everyone who dares have a different opionion ("total loss", "male mysoginist")
3. You briefly drop some pretentious sounding pseudo-science babble ("comprehension of human and cultural evolution", or "primate neuroscience"). Of course, without any further details as to _which_ recognized works in those fields actually paint the women in that light.
Blimey, just because you knew a complicated word like "neuroscience" (wrong field, but eh) everything you say _must_ be the absolute truth.
Bah. That's the most weak-ass attempt at a self-serving fallacy and proof-by-intimidation I've seen in ages. You're on slashdot, boy, not on some Power Puff Girls board for preschoolers. You'll have to do _much_ better than that.
If you're gonna verbally bully someone on slashdot, you know, _the_ place where "you're all idiots" is the _baseline_, just calling us weak stuff like "male mysoginists" or "total loss" doesn't even start to cut it. Stop being that diplomatic. Anything short of a numbered list of 10 ways in which the dissenter sucks hairy ass doesn't even start to intimidate anyone into submission.
And pretentious references at "neuroscience"? Boy, you can do better than that. Name-drop! Try "I was talking to my friend Dr Kurt von Muenchausen, a respected researcher in primate neuroscience, and he said <insert made up theory as to why female primates are hard-wired to enjoy a humiliating role>"
Better yet, make up a book name and page number too. Now that's more like it. Before anyone figured that there's no such researcher or book, you've already hand-waved a logical hole you could drive a bus through.
Or, of course, you could actually _prove_ your point, instead of lame hand-waving and name-calling. Do you know something about neuroscience or anthropology (since that's what studies cultural evolution) that we don't? Exactly _which_ respected researcher proved that women are hard-wired to dream of being represented and treated like a disposable sex object? In which article or book? Name, ISBN and page number.
Not that I actually expect that to happen, but eh, I'm prepared to be surprised.
Well, if you want to go into that, IMHO the "super-hero" genre is the exaggerated form (spandex costumes included) of, well, the super-heroes we have in legends, ballads, books and recently movies. And not as much "owes to those", but is basically the same genre that always existed.
Humans seem to need to read/watch/hear/stories about, well, (demi)god-like super-humans doing stuff way above what normal humans could possibly do.
There's a reason why even in religion you have people like for example Samson in the Old Testament, or Hercules, or Odin and the gang. Because it's the kind of stuff which people want to hear about. (It's been a while since I've last read the Bible, but I seem to remember that the whole Samson and his mane story didn't really have much of a divine moral, commandment or prophecy to it. It was there apparently just because it was a nice story about a super-powered guy.)
Or recently even when people aren't dressed in spandex, you still have basically super-heroes. You have people like Rambo which can be shot at by a whole bloody division, and missed. (Guess in City Of Heroes terms, that's one hell of a well slotted Super Reflexes power. Probably took the Weave power too.) You have ninja movies where they can jump 20m upwards, disappear into smoke on flat ground, and catch arrows with their hands. Etc.
Or in books which aren't even super-hero books you have, basically, super-heroes. E.g., Pug from the Riftwar saga is _the_ most powerful mage ever, _the_ one who can create a focus in his imagination and use it to cast real spells. E.g., half of Terry Prattchett's characters are basically super-heroes: e.g., Cohen the Barbarian can dodge anything, including an artillery shot at point blank range. (See "Interesting Times".)
So what's the point of this big rant? That humans always needed and had their super-heroes. That genre seems to have appeared all over the globe, from the natives of America to ancient China to the (at the time physically isolated from the rest of the world) ancient Egypt. And to this day comprises at least half the novels and movies produced. And which proper super-heroes like Marvel's or DC's aren't IMHO as much ripping off, as just being a sub-genre in the grand scheme of things.
You confuse "Real Use" with "Real Work". You can "use" a lot of stuff, without it counting as "work".
E.g., you get some real use out of your bed at home, but I wouldn't say sleeping there counts as "work". (Or if it does, where can I sign up to get paid for it?) And screwing doesn't really count as work for most people either.
E.g., you get some real use out of your TV, but most people don't get paid to watch TV, nor consider it "work".
Same here. Playing a game _is_ "real use" of a computer. It might not be "work", but "use" it is.
Ah, good, and I suppose only you know which is the right religion and are of course qualified to tell other people that theirs is "nothing but hollow rituals". Did you speak personally with God and got told personally which religion He considers true and which isn't? No, really. Or is it the usual "my religion is right because it's mine, but yours is damend to hell for "? (Basically "mine is right and yours is wrong, because we're already established that mine is right and it says yours is wrong.")
Well, _my_ religion is that it's all a MMO game, and God is a game designer. Probably started it all as a college assignment, since, hey, noone but a student gets everything done in the last 7 days.
Had two players and one map (Eden) in the beginning, and even those two abused bugs to get an unfair advantage. Players, huh? You tell them "leave that tree alone, 'cause it does funny things to your stats", and what do they do? Right. Any MUD or MMO admin could have told you what they'll do. Should have just banned their sorry ass, if you ask me.
Skip forward, past some player-wipe (the flood), Jesus aggroing two groups (the Jews _and_ the Romans) and getting nailed for it (noob;), and such, getting a big expansion pack (America), and here we are.
So of course, since it's my religion it's right, and yours is of course wrong because mine says so. You've twisted and perverted the words of the Game Designer, and made hollow rituals out of it. You won't be saved (to tape, weekly.)
See how stupid the whole "my religion is right and yours is hollow rituals" pissing contest is yet?
Well, you do bring some very valid points, though I'd use them rather as examples of bad design. In fact as examples where someone's put all their budget into graphics, and couldn't care less about gameplay.
E.g., easily recognizable characters in 3D isn't that huge a problem if someone actually put some thought into it. E.g., Tomb Raider solved it gracefully ages ago by making Lara be the only one who wears that colour. I'm not saying I like the game or anything, but talking of gameplay and design, that's a very good visual cue. You don't need to think at all, you can just instinctively know which is your character.
The problem is that everyone who then copied Tomb Raider, didn't put any effort even in understanding WTF they're trying to copy. They didn't even stop to think _what_ worked in those games, and just skiped to "oh, I know, let's make ours with a bimbo with bigger tits and give her even less to wear." (Or better yet "let's make the whole point of the game to get her in more and more revealing outfits", a la Heavy Metal: FAKK2.)
That's another major gripe of mine with all these clones flooding the market: they're almost invariably made by people who don't even make the effort of trying to understand WTF they're cloning, and _why_ was it a hit last year. They just see it as "woo, Game X sold well, let's copy it." But because of not understanding _what_ the people liked in that (yes, because they can't afford even that on the whole 0$ budget they have for actual design), they make something which is just a superficial copy and misses everything that made that game good.
Or, conversely you can still screw up even in 2D.
E.g., Fallout 2, although I _am_ a fanboy of that game, did fail miserably at making characters easily recognizable. Sulik looked like any other tribesman, and your own character in any armour looked no different than any other NPC in the same armour.
E.g., speaking of easy-to-read distances of relations in 2D makes me _cringe_, because I remember Ultima 8. If you thought jump puzzles were bad in 3D, try in isometric view. I could never tell if the tile I want to jump to is level with me, or slightly higher but to the left, or slightly lower but to the right. I've jumped into water (which meant instant death) more times than I care to remember because of that.
So basically you can IMHO screw up just as well in 2D as in 3D, if you don't actually put enough thought into gameplay. (Or, as was the case with Black And White, if you let some celebrity make it all an ego-masturbation exercise and insist on bad ideas, even when internal testing shows those ideas to be bad gameplay. Or even non-functional.)
Either way, personally I'm not saying that graphics should stay 2D and 320x240 or text-mode or anything. I'm not _that_ nostalgic.
What I have been saying all along, though, is that a more reasonable balance between graphics and gameplay would have been possible. For a while some 9 games out of 10 had chosen _only_ graphics, over anything else.
"I can't imagine home sales of ECS boards are that high (though they are favored by bargain basement whitebox builders)."
Actually I can. My A64 box, which is to say my main computer, is on an ECS motherboard and a SIS chipset at that. Rock stable, good drivers, the traditional SIS good IDE performance.
I actually had a MSI motherboard before, and it died on me. Now many people do complain about MSI, but in my case I think I'm the one to blame for ruining it. Long story, involves a bloody huge copper heatsink. Anyway, I did have a MSI for half a year.
Then I got the ECS/SIS for less than half the price. Guess what? It's just as fast (if nothing else, the memory controller is on the CPU anyway), just as stable, has all the features _I_ need (no, I didn't really need _two_ gigabyte Ethernet chips on-board, nor two different IDE-RAID chips) and generally Just Works (TM).
From my experience with lots of mobos (I _am_ a compulsive upgrader), most of the difference between buying the most expensive board from a big name like Asus or an el-cheapo brand like ECS or Asroc is:
1. Overclocking features. Cheap mobos don't give you much control over timings and voltages. (Yay for the privilege of paying an extra 100$ to overclock a CPU by 5%. No, seriously;)
2. Unneeded bells, whistles and gongs to call it a "premium" or "deluxe" version and charge twice the price. (And for me it's invariably stuff I didn't need anyway.)
I did explicitly include moral ones in there, because essentially they're the same thing. Just for the sake of quoting from my own messages, catch:
"Ditto for moral or ethics situations. If you don't have a choice like "do I help these guys, shrug and walk away, or kill them and take their money?", then essentially you can't showcase what _you_ would do there. You can't actually showcase an altruistic character or conversely a bad no-nonsense mofo. You're really playing the game designer's ethics, not _yours_."
It's the same thing: unless you can do choices, ethical or tactical or otherwise, you can't really showcase or define _your_ character. Those decisions are what flesh out your character and define it.
E.g., take Grandia 2, an otherwise good game, but does the usual Japanese RPG thing of defining my main character for me. There is no way for example to play a compassionate Ryudo, or conversely to play an even bigger asshole. You're stuck with a Ryudo that bullies and makes fun of... someone with a terminal condition (sort of like having cancer and demonic possession rolled in one), and in fear for her very life.
Yeah, bullying dying people, that's gotta be the apex of fun... for some people. But that's the crux of the issue: it doesn't let me actually showcase whether I too want to be that kind of a person or not.
To showcase _my_ character there, I'd need to be allowed some moral choices. Like, dunno, saying something nice for a change to someone who's (according to the story so far), most likely carrying a death sentence with a countdown ticking downwards. But I'm not allowed that. And without that, I'm basically playing someone else's character instead of mine.
Now as I also said in that message, I do not want the game to _preach_ about how one decision is good and another makes me an evil heartless monster. But do let me make those decisions for myself, and live with the consequences or rewards.
Why do people treat it like it's a "Gameplay or Graphics" choice? Because that's the budget choice that publishers make every day, that's why.
Every extra polygon in models costs man-hours, which means dollars. Every new quest scripted into the game, or every fork in the plot if you want non-linear games, or every alternate way to solve a quest, that's dollars too. Every week spent tweaking the gameplay or balance, now that's _big_ bucks.
And it all ads up. You can't have everything.
Yes, it would be nice to live in a fantasy wonderland where developpers are given enough time and budget to make everything just right and perfect: the best possible graphics (including someone modelling all the chunks and the interiors of the buildings you want to blow holes in), _and_ the perfectly tuned gameplay, _and_ plenty of interesting and unique quests. Quite a nice fantasy, I'll admit. But in the Real World it won't happen.
In the Real World, whatever you do will be a compromise. To put extra money in X, you have to give less budget to Y. To hire an extra scripter for the quests, you give up one artist for the graphics. Or more often viceversa.
Even inside one such category it's a compromise. You could make your game as vast and full of quests like Morrowind, but on the flip side they'll be all generic fed-ex quests and all NPCs will say the same deliberately generic one-size-fits-all lines. Or you could make every quest unique and each area unique like the Tribunal expansion pack to Morrowind, but then it will be a _lot_ smaller. Or have something in between like Bloodmoon. As I've said, it's all a compromise.
But back to the "Graphics vs Gameplay" choice, that _is_ the story of the last decade straight.
What do you think was _really_ the reason why FPS exploded, while a _growing_ market like adventure games was dropped by Sierra and the rest? Yes, more people were buying adventure games than ever, yet that genre skirted with extinction. You know why? Because of that budget choice. Licensing a 3D engine, slapping together a bunch of graphics for it, and calling it a game was cheap. Scripting a complex adventure game was more expensive _and_ didn't leave you enough budget for flashy graphics to flood the screenshot sites with.
Gameplay is even more so. Coming up with something even vaguely original _and_ tweaking the gameplay and controls to be just right, is something that takes lots of testing, lots of tweaking, which all means lots of money. Licensing a 3D engine, and just putting new skins on the monsters and weapons of whatever game sold well last year, meant you had to invest exactly 0$ in gameplay. So everyone and their grandma took that route.
So there you go: _that_ is what and why some of us are ranting about. Because the "gameplay or graphics" is a choice that's very very real, and which is in fact why for a while the market was flooded with pure crap and clones.
Yes, it's gradually getting better, and in the meantime more publishers increased the budgets to sorta cover all bases, at least half-arsedly. But it's still a compromise, and still a choice they have to make: how much goes to gameplay, and how much goes to graphics.
If you never make any choices, good or bad, _how_ are you going to showcase your and your character's talents?
E.g., let's take a situation from an old game, Fallout 2, which I liked precisely because in any situation there were at least 2-3 fundamentally different ways to solve it. So you're at the Navarro base, and you can go in with the guns blazing and hope you can take out the heavy plasma turrets before they kill you. Or you can get yourself recruited there, do everything on the sly, noone's any wiser, and get a power armour and weapon too. Or sneak in through the back door, and use stealth. Or various other ways and combinations thereof. (E.g., sneak through the back door, but then kill everyone anyway, using the elevators for hit and run tactics against the turrets.)
I.e., that's a choice you have to make, and it's precisely that kind of choice that lets you play a _role_. Do you want to be a minigun-wielding power-armour-wearing killer, or a diplomat, or a spy, or whatever else? Who do you want to side with? Who or what do you fight, and who or what do you support? Etc.
Once you take those choices out, it all becomes... the shallow FPS we've been flooded with.
E.g., if the _only_ choice there were "go in, kill everyone", then that role has already been determined for you. You're not playing _your_ role any more, you're playing what the game designer already decided for you: a fighter. You're not showcasing _your_ character's skills (e.g., smooth-talking someone instead of killing them), you're trying to match the skill/equipment combo that the designers had in mind. ("And for this mission you absolutely need the crossbow and silenced pistol.")
Ditto for moral or ethics situations. If you don't have a choice like "do I help these guys, shrug and walk away, or kill them and take their money?", then essentially you can't showcase what _you_ would do there. You can't actually showcase an altruistic character or conversely a bad no-nonsense mofo. You're really playing the game designer's ethics, not _yours_.
I'm thinking what you really meant there was more like "don't f***ng preach" rather than "don't make me choose." Or at least that's _my_ gripe with some games, anyway. Having multiple options is good. Having someone else's morals and/or beliefs shoved down my throat, isn't.
If the dumbest questions you get are "Isn't this a Pentium 4? I heard Pentium 4 is the best?", you probably have some very tech-savvy customers there.
I don't even work in a shop, but I have this knee-jerk reaction to go buy some computer stuff for Easter or Christmas (and about 10 times in between) like everyone else. And around Easter and Christmas I get to stand in line for _hours_, watching the shop staff being bogged by people needing hours to decide what to buy. Stuff like (I swear to god, not made up, both were happening at the same time right before christmas):
1. One lady apparently had some good idea what kind of a computer she wants. Presumably given to her by someone else, because while I'll be the first to point out that women can be great at computer stuff, this one wasn't. Anyway, see, she didn't have money for that config, and... she took an hour of debating with the clerk whether she wants it without a PSU or without a CD drive. How was she planning to run a computer without a PSU, is for me still one of life's greater mysteries.
2. The other clerk in the shop was having a discussion like this with a customer, going in a loop, about some video capture card:
Customer: "But Shop X has the same card cheaper!" Clerk: "The same one? I doubt it, but ok, so buy it from them then." Customer: "Yeah, well, it's actually a Brand Y card, but it does the same things, right?" Clerk: "No, not really. This one also has <insert list of features>." Customer: "But mostly it does the same thing, right?" Clerk: "Yeah, well, if you only need the basic features, yes, you're probably better off with that one. It's indeed a cheaper model." Customer: "So can't I get this one for the same price? It does the same thing." Clerk: "No, I'm affraid not. This one is more expensive." Customer: "But in that shop it was a lot cheaper!" Clerk: "No, again, not the same card. This one costs more." Customer: "But I don't have that much money." Clerk: "Yes, well, so buy the cheaper one then." Customer: "But I really want this one. Can't I get it for the same price as the other one?" Clerk: "Nope, sorry."
And so on, and so forth, in an endless loop, reminding me of a little kid's "but I really want that lollypop" persistence. Only, of course, when a 40 year old does it, it's just not the same thing.
I actually left the line after something like 30 minutes, went and bought some other stuff, and came back some 30-40 minutes later. The exact same two were still blocking the clerks, going in a loop over the exact same stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. That's just the kind of thing I was talking about. Cringely's rants usually make exactly that much sense. Once you actually start thinking about it from a _real_ business perspective, none whatsoever.
You're right, "what would Intel gain?" is indeed one of the right questions.
Does Intel want to spend some 30 billion to go head-to-head with Microsoft? Starting from some 2-3% of the market point? Why? What would they gain there? Even IBM couldn't find a good answer to that question, when they had OS/2 and didn't have to buy anyone for that: they could make more money selling their hardware with Windows pre-installed, than trying to convert the market.
Intel is making a load of money selling their CPUs and chipsets with whatever OS you want. They don't actually care whether you want Windows or Linux or MacOS or BeOS with your Centrino laptop, as long as you buy one.
Yes, Intel had its frictions with MS, such as getting support for the Itanic dropped, but frankly, I don't see _Apple_ becoming the Itanic desktop. Not with the prices Intel charges for one Itanic CPU. Apple will just move a few more P4 CPUs... which Dell and the gang were already moving 20 times as well.
Yes, I can see Intel hedging all bets (including their support for Linux) and flexing its muscles a little at MS (i.e., the power games between corporations I've mentioned.) But getting into a losing pissing contest with MS, and buying Apple for that privilege, I too just can't see what's in it for Intel.
Plus, from a bang-per-buck perspective, what's the point? Yes, Apple can make software, but it's also a 30 billion USD corporation. If Intel wanted to really break free from MS and push software of its own that doesn't need Windows, there are cheaper ways to do that. They can, for example, start with Linux (which, arguably, has more mind-share than MacOS has to start with) and buy just enough application development to make it a more viable option. Thirty billion can get them a _lot_ of software written, if that's what they wanted.
I'd also add, "what would Steve Jobs gain?" As was mentioned, the guy is a control freak. I don't see him handing over control of Apple to Intel. Because as you've said, it would be an acquisition of Apple by Intel, not a merger.
So basically, yeah, you're right, that kinda "merger" makes no sense any way one wants to slice it. It's just another troll article by Cringely.
It was a piece of virtual property, yes, but it was worth (and actually sold for) nearly $1000. By Chinese standards that's more than a family can save in a year.
The fact that it's just bits on a hard drive is irrelevant. Let's say that you wrote a novel on your laptop. Then let's say I copy it off your laptop (e.g., while you're in a meeting at work), put my name on it, and sell the rights to it for some $50,000. (So the monetary value is sorta in the same proportion to what you earn, as that virtual sword was for the Chinese guy.)
Wouldn't you think: "WTF? It was _mine_, not his! Who the fuck gives him the right to take and sell _my_ stuff?"
Now say you came to talk to me about it, and I basically told you "fuck off, sucks to be you, the money is mine now." Because that's what happened between those two people.
Now maybe you'd just gnash your teeth, decide to just hate me now and avoid the christmas rush, and control yourself enough to not commit manslaughter. But then realize that a lot of people don't have _that_ kind of self-control. People get into a homicidal rage for a lot less money every day.
And anyway, the fact remains, virtual or not, Person A took something owned by Person B, sold it, and pocketed the money. A lot of money. Very _real_ money. It wasn't over virtual property, it was over _real_ _money_. Period.
Now I can see how two-bit hack journalists would love to hammer on the "man killed over virtual sword in a game" idiocy. That's the kind of a crap sensationalist headline that sells subscriptions. Whereas "man killed over a shitload of real money" doesn't quite have the same edge.
But seeing the number of responses that treat it like some continuation of an in-game feud, completely ignoring the amount of _real_ _money_ involved, gets depressing at times.
They're within the same realm of reason as when retired cabbies at the pub discuss "obvious" political solutions that would fix the economy, bring the rest of the world in line ("just park an aircraft carrier off the coast of France, that'll scare them"... yeah, right), cure cancer, and generally make it all a wonderland. Or to put it otherwise, they're what you get when you think from a business/marketshare perspective... without having half a clue about either business or market share.
You get stuff that sounds all smart and believable... as long as you don't let reality get in the way. (See his ranting about "unspecified" CPUs.) In Cringely's case, the sad thing is that he sounds all smart precisely _because_ he misses all the points, strings together some truisms and mis-representations, and appeals to an equally uninformed and slightly paranoid readership.
Not meant as an insult to the readership. The fact is, yes, the business world doesn't make sense to most normal people. As someone else put it on slashdot a long time ago, if individuals acted the way corporations do (e.g., someone in the same day saying that you're his best friend, and that you're the incarnation of evil and must be killed), they'd be put in a loony bin.
The business world is made of power games, veiled threats, PR press releases that intentionally mis-lead or mis-represent, and alliances that are formed, broken, and hinted at just to put pressure on a third party. E.g., see Dell's yearly announcing that they consider AMD chips -- and at one point they even let you order a replacement Athlon for your Athlon-based Dell... which didn't exist "yet" -- when they have to re-negotiate their discount from Intel. E.g., see Sony's big PR fuss about a HDD and Linux on the PS2... which turned out to be just a maneuver to get it clasified as a computer instead of a console in the EU, and thus not pay import taxes.
For most normal people the real power games and motivations behind them are just ranging between "nuts" and "petty", or at the very least would if an individual did them instead of a corporation.
So a whole class of pundits, Cringely included, exist just to rant some utterly false, but understandable by normal people, explanation about such events. They tell you not what is, but what you want to hear. Again, it sounds good and believable precisely _because_ it misses the real points. They're what _you_ would do if you were looking for market share and had no clue how that works (and fail miserably), not what a corporation would do.
And of course, all complete with a shotgun approach to making predictions that are vague enough to look sorta fulfilled by such power games.
It has nothing to do with "a religious vast-chasm viewpoint". I'm not even an Apple fan. By most Mac fans' standards, I'm a "wintel fanboy" and have been known to be modded as a troll for questioning Mac issues before.
Because it's research. Those other professions are paid basically for the labour of duplicating or slightly adapting an existing design. Software _is_ a design: that's what you're paid/paying for, not to type a copy of an existing program.
Making software isn't like "see, here's a finished plan of a house, you just have to lay the bricks mechanically". That's what the _compiler_ and _libraries_ do.
What you do in software is more like designing a new car from scratch. Mistakes happen. And yes, even after more than a century of designing cars, you still need to test it extensively and fix the "bugs".
Think "bugs" and "debugging" and screw-ups happen in software? Tell that to the UK government in WW2, who ended up with a "buggy" tank. The engine cooling didn't work at all. Or to the Germans, otherwise noted for good tank doctrines and engineering, who still ended up with monstrosities like the Ferdinand without MGs: an easy prey for infantry. The desperate crews ended up firing a SMG or squad MG through the barrel to have _any_ protection.
And not even only tanks.
Aircraft? Yeah, the BF-109 had massive drag because of the paint used. It also needed massively different force between turning left and turning right. The Me-163 Komet? That was the aircraft that was more dangerous to the pilot than to the enemy. It tended to explode violently when landing.
Or (to also illustrate a management/client screw-up) the French engineers had designed some awesome aircraft for that age... but the client (government) demanded the engine power cut to almost half to save money. Bet they felt stupid when the BF-109 wiped them from the skies.
Infantry weaponry? Take the Japanese 6.5mm squad machinegun from WW2... which jammed unless you manually oiled each round.
Etc.
Ah, but maybe that only happened because they had to stay on the bleeding edge and design completely new things in a limited time? Well, that's the whole point of taking WW2 as an example, because that's the whole problem in software too. Noone pays you to re-type an exact copy of your last program. They'd use that one, if that's what they wanted.
If it was any other engineering profession, one time you have to design a car, one time it's a tree-rotor helicopter, and one time management wants a submarine on robot legs so it can go on land too.
Very good points, and well taken. And before I go any further, I must say I'm an ex-AAA guy, so definitely less qualified in infantry tactics. (We did train to shoot an assault rifle too, but, well, not as much as the real infantry, and of course not up to USMC standards.) Still, just to clarify what I had in mind:
.50 machinegun. (Well, ok, the thought did cross my mind, but so did the thought about recoil.)
1. About the heavy weaponry, I wasn't really thinking of a
There is, however, IMHO other stuff that could be fired pretty accurately when you're weighing 500 pounds together with the exo-skeleton and have more than your own muscles strength to hold it pointed that-a-way. E.g., an M-60. Of course, you're just as dead when hit by a 5.56mm round, but higher calibres tend to cause more suppression for some reason.
Another use that comes to mind is AT or AA missiles. They're heavy, and recoil isn't a problem.
2. The point about the 3 round burst is well taken, but AFAIK it was originated in the M-14.
The problem with the M-14 is that the NATO 7.62mm cartridge is too powerful. It's a lot larger and contains more powder than the Soviet 7.62mm round. It's practically the same size as what the Soviets used in the SVD (Dragunov sniper rifle) or in belt-fed medium machineguns. Using that in an assault rifle, yeah, will make it shake like hell on full auto without a bipod. I.e., that needed that 3 round burst limit badly.
The M-16 or the SAW IMHO aren't _that_ horribly in in need of it, though.
And either way, when you have them fixed on a heavy exo-skeleton, IMHO they should shake a lot less.
3. About information overload, well, that's why I've said one soldier per squad. And if anyone actually went to the extreme of having all squad members on the screen, they'd probably be just points on a map anyway.
Basically I'm not proposing that someone micro-manages every soldier, because, yeah, I do realize that it's not even possible. I do trust they will find a way to filter just as much information as they need.
4. About the EM radiation, you do make a valid point. Still, uni-directional broadcasts are also possible. When anyone wants their infantry to keep radio silence, I can imagine that the suits will have that option. In the meantime, they can still transmit maps, orders, whatever, _to_ that infantry.
"Actually no, Poland lost because they sent :-D"
horsemen with swords against the German tanks
and assault rifled soldiers.
Actually, no, that stupidity was mentioned only once, by the Italians, in a propaganda piece. Even the Germans (i.e., the ones who actually fought there) did _not_ claim that.
And even in the Italian propaganda piece it was cavalry charges vs tanks yes, but _not_ swords vs tanks.
The actual accounts of that war showed the Polish army doing actually pretty well, considering that Germany had one helluva lot more tanks.
E.g., the new 37mm Polish AT-gun was _feared_ by the Germans. It caused tank crews to smear mud over the white cross on their turrets, because to the Polish AT guns it meant "shoot here."
E.g., the Polish tanks were actually pretty modern. A lot more modern than what the French had later. They just had way too few of them. But where they were used, they caused higher casualties to the Germans than they took.
And, oh, "assault rifled soldiers"? While the Germans did invent the assault rifle (against Hitler's explicit orders to drop that "useless" research), in '39 it was still _years_ before that. And contrary to Hollywood movies where every German soldier had a SMG, in reality very few did. Most German soldiers had bolt action rifles, and for close combat they were liberally issuing as many pistols as they could get even to soldiers.
The reason is one of doctrine. The Germans saw the machinegun (in Poland, the MG-34) as the centre piece of the squad, and the rest of the platoon was there more or less to support it.
Basically: no offense, but learn thy history before shooting thy mouth.
"How? The only things I can think of that help against such guerilla tactics are good armor and staying alert. Anyhow, who needs super strength when you have good ol' firepower?"
Which is exactly why and what for: to enable soldiers to carry more armour and dish out more firepower.
Don't think for a moment that military applications of super-strength will mean Superman-style punching villains in the face. It won't. Ever.
However a major topic throughough the last century has been the weight of ammo and equipment a soldier has to carry. It's a real issue. That's one of the reasons (among other factors) why we've moved to smaller calibres.
Put some powered armour on those soldiers and suddenly they can carry a lot more heavy weaponry and ammo.
Individual armour has also been discarded precisely because of weight considerations: you _could_ make a breastplate that could stop a rifle round, but it was impractically heavy.
Now think the other way around: if you have an armoured exo-skeleton, you can carry enough armour at least over the vital organs to stop even a 7.62mm round or shrapnel from hand grenades and pipe bombs. _And_ this time it's without a mobility penalty.
You've just made life harder for the enemy soldiers, because now they need to lug around bigger weaponry to take you out, which limits _their_ mobility.
But perhaps more importantly, and this is really what makes it a wet dream for the military is: enabling soldiers to carry more electronics and a sattellite connection. Giving at least one soldier per squad enough electronics to know exactly where the enemy is, what's happening, where is the squad needed, what should they avoid, etc, is something that can give a _huge_ advantage.
Nations have been defeated before because basically their chain of command didn't react fast enough. E.g., that's why large armies like those of France or Poland crumbled in the face of Blitzkrieg in WW2. They just weren't prepared to react at that speed.
Or the USSR in WW2 was massively handicapped by their lack of radios on their tanks.
Now picture giving each squad a direct link to their officers _all_ the time. Bidirectional. You can know _exactly_ what's happening at each point, in real time, and the soldiers can know exactly what's expected of them. You can instantly see when your troops are being pinned and flanked, and how, and you can tell them exactly how to counter it. Better yet they too can see a bigger picture and react in a more intelligent manner.
It's something that can really make or break a battle.
You are of course right about maths being a valuable life skill, but if I'm allowed to nitpick, I'd say the same applies to all blackboxes: before one can use them right, one needs at least _some_ understanding of how it works inside. The same applies IMHO to programming.
The line of thinking "oh, we'll give programmers a bunch blackboxes and they don't have to know the algorithms behind them" is what got us saddled with co-workers who can't code worth crap. Yes, it's not needed to know the exact MPEG4 algorithm, but without knowledge of at least the basics, well, that's how we got at the point where 3 out of 4 "programmers" can't program.
I see _consultants_ advocating using two arrays for large data sets instead of a hash table. Presumably because they never learned that one is O(1) and one is O(n).
I've seen _two_ co-workers end up debugging into a HashMap (because they were utterly lost when finding their own bugs) and go "Java is broken! It replaced my item in the array with another! My data is lost!" Turns out that they had no fucking clue what a linked list is, and that merely a new node was added to the front of one.
And then there's the one I fondly call Wally, who was attempting basically this:
public void nuller(int x) {
x = 0;
}
public void testNuller() {
int x = 1;
nuller(x);
assertTrue("x should be 0", x == 0);
}
Then did it again later. The concept of "call by value" was utterly lost on him.
Or pointers? Java's syntax hides pointers, making them basically a blackbox. Something that just happens behind the scenes for you. Unfortunately I see people bitten in the ass everyday by utter lack of knowledge of what a pointer is and how it works.
Or then there's security. I've seen consultants from a big corporation implementing a system so full of security holes it wasn't even funny. They honestly thought that just slapping together some blackboxes with lots of buzzwords made them safe. It didn't.
They failed to grasp even basic concepts as "what if the user edits the '?user_id=1234' to '?user_id=0' in the URL and makes themselves super-user?" Yes, that sad. They failed to understand basic concepts like non-repudiation: when someone deleted their own user from that system, the program would helpfully cascade through all tables and erase all tracks that the user ever existed or ever done anything. They failed to even notice they need to quote the user input, both when displaying it in HTML _and_ when using it in an SQL querry. Etc.
Basically anything that wasn't already built in their blackboxes, they were utterly obvlivious to.
So basically, no, I wouldn't expect a random person off the street to implement MPEG4 either, but I'd expect anyone paid as a programmer to know at least the basics (the equivalent of arithmetic in maths) before they're even given a MPEG4 library and told to add that to a program.
Which brings me back to maths: the same is true for maths and a lot of jobs. Even if one decided that 10x10 isn't needed for Burger King jobs, we're not preparing _all_ kids for that kind of jobs. Expecting someone to understand the more advanced maths used in most engineering or science fields when their knowledge of the basics is just "oh, I push these two buttons on a calculator", is IMHO like building a house without the ground floor.
It's called sarcasm, in case that went over your head. The "lecture" on insulting morons was just a sarcastic way of saying "no, I'm not impressed, and not backing off just because you throw around big words and insults."
/. without a single point of your own to make."
And you still don't impress me, even with the new load of insults. No, you still haven't made any actual point.
Actually, let me retract that: you did make one point. You did prove, just as I expected, that other than throwing pretentious sounding words and insults, you don't actually know what you're talking about. You don't actually know much about "cultural evolution" or "primate neuroscience", do you? You didn't disappoint me there.
"You're just another big mouth on
Which is just the point. Actual science, yes, it's usually based on someone else's point. (Even if you were a recognized authority in the field, your work wouldn't exist in a vaccuum.)
Or briefly: science is that-a-away, personal wet fantasies are in the opposite direction.
If the "women want to be treated like sex objects" thing is _your_ idea, come out and say so. Don't wrap it in lame pretenses that it's some scientiffic fact backed up by anthropology _and_ neuroscience.
" Yes there is. Humans, mostly. Chinese feet, westerner breasts, aftican vaginal mutilation..."
Point well taken. I was meaning a species other than humans.
"Spiral out of control? Nile carp in aftica outcompeting every other fish. Cats in NZ. Cane Toads in Australia."
Yes, but for themselves there is no such thing as "we need to evolve a handicap to avoid this". Yes, they out-competed _other_ fish. This isn't a problem for them.
They reached the equilibrium point where their numbers are just the number that the food sources can support. That's all.
There is _no_ point for a species at this point to basically evolve in a direction that puts it at a handicap. Evolution favours mutations which make it _better_ fit for the environment, and _less_ likely to die before it has offspring.
I'm sure I've read a dozen comics and seen a dozen movies where that was the plot. Just shows that Samson should have read the Evil Overlord's List ;)
"People find attractive what they find attractive and you just have to deal with it."
:)
No arguments there. We can aggree there very quickly.
But that wasn't the point. The point is merely that there is no such thing as "see, there's this darwinistic hard-wired built-in ideal of beauty, which is the perfect body shape to bear healthy children." The current mutant idea of beauty, yes, it's what it is, and we all just have to deal with it. But built-in or having _any_ darwinistic advantage (considering that it's opposite to what humans and human physiology evolved to) it isn't.
That's all I'm saying
My point, isn't whether I enjoy or don't enjoy comics.
My point is that he didn't prove anything. He just threw some insults and pretentious words to "prove" a dubious point. No, sorry, I don't consider that to "prove" anything.
I'm open to other points of view, yes. If he's got an opinion or some data to contribute to a discussion, yes, go ahead. But calling everyone names if they dare think otherwise, sorry, doesn't really make a point.
There is no species which deliberately handicaps itself, and their is no case where that's necessary to curb a species' spiralling out of control.
For starters, all species have a built in balance between available food and number of members. In most cases it involves some predator-prey relationships too.
E.g., if too many rabbits are born, more foxes have food, which naturally curbs the rabbits' expansion. If there are less rabbits, some foxes starve.
There is no way for a species to spiral out of control. Eventually the species will either become the main course for others, or hit the limits of its food supply.
What most such pseudo-science theories seem to mis-represent as such are other factors which the species needed, and which are _not_ there as handicaps.
E.g., human breasts, since you mention them are there _not_ either as handicap, nor as the "sex signal of having a butt on the chest" idiocy. They're there because that's convenient for a primate to hold its baby, and they're that size in humans because a human baby needs a _lot_ of food. The brains alone needs ridiculous quantities of proteins to even keep working. (See why the evoloution of human brain size kept step with the availability of food sources: e.g., fire allowing us to eat plants.)
E.g., other signals (such as colours) in various species are _not_ there as a handicap, but to solve problems like finding each other. See, being well hidden from predators doesn't help that much if you also don't find a partner to mate with. Or like the kid being able to follow the mother.
A subset of those evolved in situations where the species had no signifficant natural enemies. No, not as a way to attract more enemies, but because lack of those changed the priorities. The advantage of easier finding a mate or being easier to follow by your kids, trumped the disadvantage of being more visible to an enemy which didn't even exist.
But noticing that would require some real science, including some healthy applying of Occam's Razor. While most such pseudo-science bullshit is just working towards a pre-set agenda: trying to rationalize why thinking with your dick instead of with your head is good. And then "facts" are twisted or outright made up to fit that pre-set conclusion.
Let me tell you a secret: There's a reason the thin models get silicone implants to have big breasts. The reason is human biology.
There is a fundamental problem with the current brain-fucked ideal of beauty (as represented in comics too), namely anorexic with huge breasts. The problem is that it tends not to happen in normal, healthy humans. By the time the body has been forced to eat its fat reserves, or didn't have enough food to build them up in the first place, guess what? It doesn't have enough fat for big breasts either. Those reserves went too.
The current ideal of beauty is something that deviates far enough from the biological average, or from a normal human metaboloism, to count as a _mutant_.
So you're telling me... what? That you're expecting normal healthy kids from a _mutant_? Now I would understand a fascination with mutants in comics as a source of super-powers (after all, most super-heroes are mutants). But as a means of propagating normal human genes to healthy human offspring, it's outright idiotic.
And as was already mentioned, this ideal is very new. In some parts of the world, as new as late 20'th century. (See recent stories about Asian girls ending up with metabolism problem and other illnesses, by starving themselves or making themselves puke, to fit the beauty ideal Hollywood raped their coutries with. Countries where until recently the idea of beauty was a slightly fat woman.)
See, for most of human history, the beauty ideal was actually someone who by modern standards would be considered overweight. And you know the fertility figurines the cavemen made? Now those were seriously overweight.
_That_ was the kind of shape that guaranteed survival the next time there's a famine or you catch a disease. An anorexic wife would most likely have died long before passing those genes along. Someone with fat reserves would have survived.
And then there are other bleeps on the history radar, such as the Greeks and Romans. You may notice that those did have statues of thin women, for a change. They also had tiny breasts. In fact, the Romans are noted as having invented the bra... for the purpose of _hiding_ breasts. In effect, a strip of cloth tied over the breasts to make a woman look like she had none.
Oops, that ideal of beauty was different from ours too.
Or then, yes, were the Chinese, whose idea of beauty was more centred around crippled feet. A woman was apparently dead sexy for them if, before anything else, her feet were crippled to the point of barely being able to walk.
Oops, that differs from our beauty ideal too.
So give me a break. There is no correlation between our current _mutant_ ideal of beauty and survival in anything even vaguely resembling natural condition. And there is _no_ constant ideal through human history to suggest that somehow chasing that idea is built into the species.
So lemme see, you're obviously right and obviously _every_ woman's secret dream is to be represented as a cheap slut, because:
1. you call names any dissenting opinion ("anti-male feminist bullshit")
2. you call names everyone who dares have a different opionion ("total loss", "male mysoginist")
3. You briefly drop some pretentious sounding pseudo-science babble ("comprehension of human and cultural evolution", or "primate neuroscience"). Of course, without any further details as to _which_ recognized works in those fields actually paint the women in that light.
Blimey, just because you knew a complicated word like "neuroscience" (wrong field, but eh) everything you say _must_ be the absolute truth.
Bah. That's the most weak-ass attempt at a self-serving fallacy and proof-by-intimidation I've seen in ages. You're on slashdot, boy, not on some Power Puff Girls board for preschoolers. You'll have to do _much_ better than that.
If you're gonna verbally bully someone on slashdot, you know, _the_ place where "you're all idiots" is the _baseline_, just calling us weak stuff like "male mysoginists" or "total loss" doesn't even start to cut it. Stop being that diplomatic. Anything short of a numbered list of 10 ways in which the dissenter sucks hairy ass doesn't even start to intimidate anyone into submission.
And pretentious references at "neuroscience"? Boy, you can do better than that. Name-drop! Try "I was talking to my friend Dr Kurt von Muenchausen, a respected researcher in primate neuroscience, and he said <insert made up theory as to why female primates are hard-wired to enjoy a humiliating role>"
Better yet, make up a book name and page number too. Now that's more like it. Before anyone figured that there's no such researcher or book, you've already hand-waved a logical hole you could drive a bus through.
Or, of course, you could actually _prove_ your point, instead of lame hand-waving and name-calling. Do you know something about neuroscience or anthropology (since that's what studies cultural evolution) that we don't? Exactly _which_ respected researcher proved that women are hard-wired to dream of being represented and treated like a disposable sex object? In which article or book? Name, ISBN and page number.
Not that I actually expect that to happen, but eh, I'm prepared to be surprised.
Well, if you want to go into that, IMHO the "super-hero" genre is the exaggerated form (spandex costumes included) of, well, the super-heroes we have in legends, ballads, books and recently movies. And not as much "owes to those", but is basically the same genre that always existed.
Humans seem to need to read/watch/hear/stories about, well, (demi)god-like super-humans doing stuff way above what normal humans could possibly do.
There's a reason why even in religion you have people like for example Samson in the Old Testament, or Hercules, or Odin and the gang. Because it's the kind of stuff which people want to hear about. (It's been a while since I've last read the Bible, but I seem to remember that the whole Samson and his mane story didn't really have much of a divine moral, commandment or prophecy to it. It was there apparently just because it was a nice story about a super-powered guy.)
Or recently even when people aren't dressed in spandex, you still have basically super-heroes. You have people like Rambo which can be shot at by a whole bloody division, and missed. (Guess in City Of Heroes terms, that's one hell of a well slotted Super Reflexes power. Probably took the Weave power too.) You have ninja movies where they can jump 20m upwards, disappear into smoke on flat ground, and catch arrows with their hands. Etc.
Or in books which aren't even super-hero books you have, basically, super-heroes. E.g., Pug from the Riftwar saga is _the_ most powerful mage ever, _the_ one who can create a focus in his imagination and use it to cast real spells. E.g., half of Terry Prattchett's characters are basically super-heroes: e.g., Cohen the Barbarian can dodge anything, including an artillery shot at point blank range. (See "Interesting Times".)
So what's the point of this big rant? That humans always needed and had their super-heroes. That genre seems to have appeared all over the globe, from the natives of America to ancient China to the (at the time physically isolated from the rest of the world) ancient Egypt. And to this day comprises at least half the novels and movies produced. And which proper super-heroes like Marvel's or DC's aren't IMHO as much ripping off, as just being a sub-genre in the grand scheme of things.
You confuse "Real Use" with "Real Work". You can "use" a lot of stuff, without it counting as "work".
E.g., you get some real use out of your bed at home, but I wouldn't say sleeping there counts as "work". (Or if it does, where can I sign up to get paid for it?) And screwing doesn't really count as work for most people either.
E.g., you get some real use out of your TV, but most people don't get paid to watch TV, nor consider it "work".
Same here. Playing a game _is_ "real use" of a computer. It might not be "work", but "use" it is.
Ah, good, and I suppose only you know which is the right religion and are of course qualified to tell other people that theirs is "nothing but hollow rituals". Did you speak personally with God and got told personally which religion He considers true and which isn't? No, really. Or is it the usual "my religion is right because it's mine, but yours is damend to hell for "? (Basically "mine is right and yours is wrong, because we're already established that mine is right and it says yours is wrong.")
Well, _my_ religion is that it's all a MMO game, and God is a game designer. Probably started it all as a college assignment, since, hey, noone but a student gets everything done in the last 7 days.
Had two players and one map (Eden) in the beginning, and even those two abused bugs to get an unfair advantage. Players, huh? You tell them "leave that tree alone, 'cause it does funny things to your stats", and what do they do? Right. Any MUD or MMO admin could have told you what they'll do. Should have just banned their sorry ass, if you ask me.
Skip forward, past some player-wipe (the flood), Jesus aggroing two groups (the Jews _and_ the Romans) and getting nailed for it (noob;), and such, getting a big expansion pack (America), and here we are.
So of course, since it's my religion it's right, and yours is of course wrong because mine says so. You've twisted and perverted the words of the Game Designer, and made hollow rituals out of it. You won't be saved (to tape, weekly.)
See how stupid the whole "my religion is right and yours is hollow rituals" pissing contest is yet?
Well, you do bring some very valid points, though I'd use them rather as examples of bad design. In fact as examples where someone's put all their budget into graphics, and couldn't care less about gameplay.
E.g., easily recognizable characters in 3D isn't that huge a problem if someone actually put some thought into it. E.g., Tomb Raider solved it gracefully ages ago by making Lara be the only one who wears that colour. I'm not saying I like the game or anything, but talking of gameplay and design, that's a very good visual cue. You don't need to think at all, you can just instinctively know which is your character.
The problem is that everyone who then copied Tomb Raider, didn't put any effort even in understanding WTF they're trying to copy. They didn't even stop to think _what_ worked in those games, and just skiped to "oh, I know, let's make ours with a bimbo with bigger tits and give her even less to wear." (Or better yet "let's make the whole point of the game to get her in more and more revealing outfits", a la Heavy Metal: FAKK2.)
That's another major gripe of mine with all these clones flooding the market: they're almost invariably made by people who don't even make the effort of trying to understand WTF they're cloning, and _why_ was it a hit last year. They just see it as "woo, Game X sold well, let's copy it." But because of not understanding _what_ the people liked in that (yes, because they can't afford even that on the whole 0$ budget they have for actual design), they make something which is just a superficial copy and misses everything that made that game good.
Or, conversely you can still screw up even in 2D.
E.g., Fallout 2, although I _am_ a fanboy of that game, did fail miserably at making characters easily recognizable. Sulik looked like any other tribesman, and your own character in any armour looked no different than any other NPC in the same armour.
E.g., speaking of easy-to-read distances of relations in 2D makes me _cringe_, because I remember Ultima 8. If you thought jump puzzles were bad in 3D, try in isometric view. I could never tell if the tile I want to jump to is level with me, or slightly higher but to the left, or slightly lower but to the right. I've jumped into water (which meant instant death) more times than I care to remember because of that.
So basically you can IMHO screw up just as well in 2D as in 3D, if you don't actually put enough thought into gameplay. (Or, as was the case with Black And White, if you let some celebrity make it all an ego-masturbation exercise and insist on bad ideas, even when internal testing shows those ideas to be bad gameplay. Or even non-functional.)
Either way, personally I'm not saying that graphics should stay 2D and 320x240 or text-mode or anything. I'm not _that_ nostalgic.
What I have been saying all along, though, is that a more reasonable balance between graphics and gameplay would have been possible. For a while some 9 games out of 10 had chosen _only_ graphics, over anything else.
"I can't imagine home sales of ECS boards are that high (though they are favored by bargain basement whitebox builders)."
Actually I can. My A64 box, which is to say my main computer, is on an ECS motherboard and a SIS chipset at that. Rock stable, good drivers, the traditional SIS good IDE performance.
I actually had a MSI motherboard before, and it died on me. Now many people do complain about MSI, but in my case I think I'm the one to blame for ruining it. Long story, involves a bloody huge copper heatsink. Anyway, I did have a MSI for half a year.
Then I got the ECS/SIS for less than half the price. Guess what? It's just as fast (if nothing else, the memory controller is on the CPU anyway), just as stable, has all the features _I_ need (no, I didn't really need _two_ gigabyte Ethernet chips on-board, nor two different IDE-RAID chips) and generally Just Works (TM).
From my experience with lots of mobos (I _am_ a compulsive upgrader), most of the difference between buying the most expensive board from a big name like Asus or an el-cheapo brand like ECS or Asroc is:
1. Overclocking features. Cheap mobos don't give you much control over timings and voltages. (Yay for the privilege of paying an extra 100$ to overclock a CPU by 5%. No, seriously;)
2. Unneeded bells, whistles and gongs to call it a "premium" or "deluxe" version and charge twice the price. (And for me it's invariably stuff I didn't need anyway.)
I did explicitly include moral ones in there, because essentially they're the same thing. Just for the sake of quoting from my own messages, catch: "Ditto for moral or ethics situations. If you don't have a choice like "do I help these guys, shrug and walk away, or kill them and take their money?", then essentially you can't showcase what _you_ would do there. You can't actually showcase an altruistic character or conversely a bad no-nonsense mofo. You're really playing the game designer's ethics, not _yours_." It's the same thing: unless you can do choices, ethical or tactical or otherwise, you can't really showcase or define _your_ character. Those decisions are what flesh out your character and define it. E.g., take Grandia 2, an otherwise good game, but does the usual Japanese RPG thing of defining my main character for me. There is no way for example to play a compassionate Ryudo, or conversely to play an even bigger asshole. You're stuck with a Ryudo that bullies and makes fun of... someone with a terminal condition (sort of like having cancer and demonic possession rolled in one), and in fear for her very life. Yeah, bullying dying people, that's gotta be the apex of fun... for some people. But that's the crux of the issue: it doesn't let me actually showcase whether I too want to be that kind of a person or not. To showcase _my_ character there, I'd need to be allowed some moral choices. Like, dunno, saying something nice for a change to someone who's (according to the story so far), most likely carrying a death sentence with a countdown ticking downwards. But I'm not allowed that. And without that, I'm basically playing someone else's character instead of mine. Now as I also said in that message, I do not want the game to _preach_ about how one decision is good and another makes me an evil heartless monster. But do let me make those decisions for myself, and live with the consequences or rewards.
Why do people treat it like it's a "Gameplay or Graphics" choice? Because that's the budget choice that publishers make every day, that's why.
Every extra polygon in models costs man-hours, which means dollars. Every new quest scripted into the game, or every fork in the plot if you want non-linear games, or every alternate way to solve a quest, that's dollars too. Every week spent tweaking the gameplay or balance, now that's _big_ bucks.
And it all ads up. You can't have everything.
Yes, it would be nice to live in a fantasy wonderland where developpers are given enough time and budget to make everything just right and perfect: the best possible graphics (including someone modelling all the chunks and the interiors of the buildings you want to blow holes in), _and_ the perfectly tuned gameplay, _and_ plenty of interesting and unique quests. Quite a nice fantasy, I'll admit. But in the Real World it won't happen.
In the Real World, whatever you do will be a compromise. To put extra money in X, you have to give less budget to Y. To hire an extra scripter for the quests, you give up one artist for the graphics. Or more often viceversa.
Even inside one such category it's a compromise. You could make your game as vast and full of quests like Morrowind, but on the flip side they'll be all generic fed-ex quests and all NPCs will say the same deliberately generic one-size-fits-all lines. Or you could make every quest unique and each area unique like the Tribunal expansion pack to Morrowind, but then it will be a _lot_ smaller. Or have something in between like Bloodmoon. As I've said, it's all a compromise.
But back to the "Graphics vs Gameplay" choice, that _is_ the story of the last decade straight.
What do you think was _really_ the reason why FPS exploded, while a _growing_ market like adventure games was dropped by Sierra and the rest? Yes, more people were buying adventure games than ever, yet that genre skirted with extinction. You know why? Because of that budget choice. Licensing a 3D engine, slapping together a bunch of graphics for it, and calling it a game was cheap. Scripting a complex adventure game was more expensive _and_ didn't leave you enough budget for flashy graphics to flood the screenshot sites with.
Gameplay is even more so. Coming up with something even vaguely original _and_ tweaking the gameplay and controls to be just right, is something that takes lots of testing, lots of tweaking, which all means lots of money. Licensing a 3D engine, and just putting new skins on the monsters and weapons of whatever game sold well last year, meant you had to invest exactly 0$ in gameplay. So everyone and their grandma took that route.
So there you go: _that_ is what and why some of us are ranting about. Because the "gameplay or graphics" is a choice that's very very real, and which is in fact why for a while the market was flooded with pure crap and clones.
Yes, it's gradually getting better, and in the meantime more publishers increased the budgets to sorta cover all bases, at least half-arsedly. But it's still a compromise, and still a choice they have to make: how much goes to gameplay, and how much goes to graphics.
If you never make any choices, good or bad, _how_ are you going to showcase your and your character's talents?
E.g., let's take a situation from an old game, Fallout 2, which I liked precisely because in any situation there were at least 2-3 fundamentally different ways to solve it. So you're at the Navarro base, and you can go in with the guns blazing and hope you can take out the heavy plasma turrets before they kill you. Or you can get yourself recruited there, do everything on the sly, noone's any wiser, and get a power armour and weapon too. Or sneak in through the back door, and use stealth. Or various other ways and combinations thereof. (E.g., sneak through the back door, but then kill everyone anyway, using the elevators for hit and run tactics against the turrets.)
I.e., that's a choice you have to make, and it's precisely that kind of choice that lets you play a _role_. Do you want to be a minigun-wielding power-armour-wearing killer, or a diplomat, or a spy, or whatever else? Who do you want to side with? Who or what do you fight, and who or what do you support? Etc.
Once you take those choices out, it all becomes... the shallow FPS we've been flooded with.
E.g., if the _only_ choice there were "go in, kill everyone", then that role has already been determined for you. You're not playing _your_ role any more, you're playing what the game designer already decided for you: a fighter. You're not showcasing _your_ character's skills (e.g., smooth-talking someone instead of killing them), you're trying to match the skill/equipment combo that the designers had in mind. ("And for this mission you absolutely need the crossbow and silenced pistol.")
Ditto for moral or ethics situations. If you don't have a choice like "do I help these guys, shrug and walk away, or kill them and take their money?", then essentially you can't showcase what _you_ would do there. You can't actually showcase an altruistic character or conversely a bad no-nonsense mofo. You're really playing the game designer's ethics, not _yours_.
I'm thinking what you really meant there was more like "don't f***ng preach" rather than "don't make me choose." Or at least that's _my_ gripe with some games, anyway. Having multiple options is good. Having someone else's morals and/or beliefs shoved down my throat, isn't.
If the dumbest questions you get are "Isn't this a Pentium 4? I heard Pentium 4 is the best?", you probably have some very tech-savvy customers there.
I don't even work in a shop, but I have this knee-jerk reaction to go buy some computer stuff for Easter or Christmas (and about 10 times in between) like everyone else. And around Easter and Christmas I get to stand in line for _hours_, watching the shop staff being bogged by people needing hours to decide what to buy. Stuff like (I swear to god, not made up, both were happening at the same time right before christmas):
1. One lady apparently had some good idea what kind of a computer she wants. Presumably given to her by someone else, because while I'll be the first to point out that women can be great at computer stuff, this one wasn't. Anyway, see, she didn't have money for that config, and... she took an hour of debating with the clerk whether she wants it without a PSU or without a CD drive. How was she planning to run a computer without a PSU, is for me still one of life's greater mysteries.
2. The other clerk in the shop was having a discussion like this with a customer, going in a loop, about some video capture card:
Customer: "But Shop X has the same card cheaper!"
Clerk: "The same one? I doubt it, but ok, so buy it from them then."
Customer: "Yeah, well, it's actually a Brand Y card, but it does the same things, right?"
Clerk: "No, not really. This one also has <insert list of features>."
Customer: "But mostly it does the same thing, right?"
Clerk: "Yeah, well, if you only need the basic features, yes, you're probably better off with that one. It's indeed a cheaper model."
Customer: "So can't I get this one for the same price? It does the same thing."
Clerk: "No, I'm affraid not. This one is more expensive."
Customer: "But in that shop it was a lot cheaper!"
Clerk: "No, again, not the same card. This one costs more."
Customer: "But I don't have that much money."
Clerk: "Yes, well, so buy the cheaper one then."
Customer: "But I really want this one. Can't I get it for the same price as the other one?"
Clerk: "Nope, sorry."
And so on, and so forth, in an endless loop, reminding me of a little kid's "but I really want that lollypop" persistence. Only, of course, when a 40 year old does it, it's just not the same thing.
I actually left the line after something like 30 minutes, went and bought some other stuff, and came back some 30-40 minutes later. The exact same two were still blocking the clerks, going in a loop over the exact same stuff.