See, if your favourite genre happens to fall squarely into the Mario/Zelda/whatever-cheap-hack-on-the-same-engine category, then I can see how you'd be happy. But please don't assume that _everyone_ has the exact same tastes you do.
My favourite genre however are CRPGs and I fucking _hate_ 3D jump-and-runs. (And no, the Zeldas are _not_ RPGs.) So Mario and Zelda never did anything for me.
I liked the SNES, because that's where the RPGs were at. The N64 on the other hand was the start of my contempt for Nintendo. Over its awfully long life span it had exactly _one_ (debatably) RPG, and even that one was not published in Europe. The Gamecube falls in the same category too: looking at its lineup of games really doesn't do anything for me.
And Nintendo's arrogant "we have all the games we need, it's Sony who'll go bankrupt for publishing lots of games" attitude also didn't help. Here I had an N64 catching dust, with one game published every 2-3 months and even that one some jump-and-run I didn't want. And Nintendo is telling me that that's all the games they need.
I started just hating Nintendo at that point.
"I think people take cheap shots at them because they don't want to admit that "kiddy games" such as Zelda: Wind Waker and Mario Sunshine are a lot more fun to play than those hack and slash "grownup" games."
Ah, a conspiracy theory. Some world-wide conspiracy made everyone say they dislike Nintendo's games, even though they really like it. Think about it for a little, and I think you'll realize how silly that theory is.
No, some of us just honestly have other tastes in games, and don't find Nintendo's games to be any fun. At all. It's not about being "kiddy games", it's simply about everyone liking a different kind of a game:
Nintendo catters to a niche, at the expense of ignoring everyone else. By the sound of it, you are in that niche market. Good for you. I can see how you'd be happy with Nintendo's games then. Most people however fall outside that niche, which is why it's a niche.
"My buddies tease me about it, but who isn't having fun playing Mario Kart or Mario Party?"
I don't. I very much prefer a real racing _simulation_, like Gran Turismo.
It's not about it being Mario or Nintendo or "kiddie". The whole pseudo-racing-while-throwing-crap-at-each-other genre just doesn't do anything for me. That includes the PSX/PS2/whatever games in that category. And includes the SF/cartoon-license/whatever games, not just the "kiddie" ones.
"Who doesn't like to drop a bomb bug on their enemies pikmin and blow 'em to bits?"
I don't. Honestly. If I want to blow things to bits, I load a proper strategy game. E.g., "Rome: Total War".
"Who doesn't think the storyline to Windwaker is interesting?"
Even if I didn't mind the story as such, the implementation does nothing for me. I mean, Daikatana's story wasn't the bad part about it either. Stil, that didn't make it game of the year or anything.
Even then, I doubt that the big bang is what the bible referred to.
See, the Big Bang was more like, first there was liquid, then there was GAS (a step utterly missing in the bible), then there was liquid again as gravity collapsed clouds of hydrogen, then there was plasma as the star ignited, then it went bang and it was gas again... and only after a few more such cycles you had enough of the heavier elements to have land as we know it.
Besides, the last time I've read the bible it was more about Earth than about the universe as a whole.
Don't get me wrong, you can fit the Genesys is a lot of funny ways into the history of Earth. (My own pet theory is that God was a student, seein' as he did it all in the last 7 days.) But fitting the Big Bang in it is just not supported by _anything_ in the bible.
Every boxed distro I've ever used since Linux started supporting modules, installs those as modules. They're only loaded if you actually have that hardware.
So if your friend's machine doesn't have Bluetooth or PCMCIA, rest assured that the drivers for it won't be loaded.
So the problem is...? That he/she/it has maybe 1 MB taken by those modules, in an age where the smallest HDD you can buy in a shop is something like 37 GB? (And even that if you get an old WD Raptor or a SCSI drive. For ATA/SATA the starting point is higher.)
"What if I CAN open your document, maybe I even have a copy of MS Office running in CrossOver, but what if I don't have your particular CAD software or proprietary mapping software or stupid fucking MS DRM CODEC for that video clip? Now I have a document with a bunch of stupid broken data in it!"
What if you're not even supposed to read that particular document? If that document is intended for internal use, at a workplace where I _know_ that everyone got that CAD package pre-installed, I'd very much like to embed it.
Or how about embedding other Office formats? E.g., if I have Office on that computer, I already have both Word _and_ Power Point installed. And embedding means I can use them as such, not as lame "see the powerpoint foil in the other file" notes, nor as some read-only export/renderer. I can not only just have a state diagram generated in PowerPoint inside a Word document, I can also double click it and edit it there and then. Then I can drop a bloody Excel table _and_ a chart in it, and again, they stay editable.
You propose... what? That I separately open Excel, edit the data, export the chart as GIF and then import it in word? Yeah, that's productive. Not.
And how about if I need to edit it later? Yeah, let's remember which separate Excel file was used to create and export that chart, so I can do it again with the changed data. No, thanks. I'll take embedding instead.
"To get back on topic, we should do the stone-age thing and convert ALL media meant for final distribution (or public consumption) into a standard, open format for interchange."
See above. Some things were never meant for public distribution to start with.
"Back when people carved their data in stone or baked-clay tables, it lasted damn near forever. Then they moved to papyrus and it rotted easier, but still could be rolled and stored for thousands of years."
Yes, and technical progress also hapened roughly once per thousand years. I'm not sure how that's better.
Yes, formats change. We now can do better, and can do it with more data.
E.g., at one point, RLE was the best we could do to compress an image. Nowadays your mom can run around with a cheap digital camera and a cheap flash card because we moved to a better format.
Better yet she can (and at least mine does) shoot whole bursts of photos, and pick the one that looks the best. Try doing that with raw uncompressed bitmaps, and you'd need a 1-2GB flash card as a bare minimum.
E.g., concatenating a bunch of bitmaps was the best movie compression available. But then also the longest movie you'd hope to see on a desktop was measured in seconds. Or it was a slide show. And even that at such resolutions as 320x200.
If we stuck to that, you _still_ wouldn't be able to get a movie on a DVD. Because it takes a lot more compression to get a movie to fit in 5 GB. We'd probably still be waiting for those new holographic discs to be able to store a movie on them.
And now we have better codecs than even that. E.g., if I put up some home video or a short video capture from a game, I'll encode it as DivX. Because, you know, I'd rather that those people get it as a 100 MB download than a 1 GB download. Not everyone is on broadband yet, even in the USA.
Etc.
So, yes, formats change. Thank god for that.
Were mom's photos or my short video capture of my GT2 mad skillz some historical document, that will plunge the Earth back into the dark ages if lost? Well, no.
Basically most pro-thin-client posts I see in this whole thread are self-centred admins thinking that the whole company, nay verily the whole world, revolves against them. The whole purpose of hardware, software, and infrastructure is to make _their_ life easier, even if it means dragging everyone's productivity in the basement.
100 users served by a quad-opteron, and displayed over a network? With a whole 160 meg RAM per user? Ooer. Now that must make it painful to even recalculate a spreadsheet or scroll through a complex Word document. And I've actually had to support Java programs over VNC or terminal server. Man, now that was a pain.
Have you even _tried_ using a complex spreadsheet over a thin client in that setup? I'm guessing you didn't. Hint: we're not talking about using a file server for 100 users. We're talking actually running 200..300 Windows programs on that server at the same time.
We're also talking at the very least _millions_ of GDI/X/whatever operations pushed through the network per second, just to display all those programs. Yay, way to stuff the infrastructure.
So luxury for whom? For _you_ maybe? Yay, your life was simplified, at the expense of making everyone else's job hard. That must be such a big win for the company. Not.
Here's an idea: your job, lame as it may be, is a support job, not an end by itself. IT in a corporation is one thing that doesn't generate _any_ money by itself. Its _only_ job is to support those who actually bring the R in ROI.
So making the admin's job easy at the expense of crippling everyone else has got to be the dumbest business proposition ever.
If that job is too lame for you, hey, find something else to do. God knows I'll be one who doesn't miss all the useless admins who don't want to do their job.
Just FYI, _all_ "Made By ATI" video cards are actually made by Sapphire. So you're saying... what? That ATI's own preferred manufacturer is not high end enough for you?:)
Have you actually checked that Sapphire uses worse RAM than ASUS? No offense, but somehow I doubt that.
Basically there's a helluva lot of difference between actually having a clue, and just being a slave to brand names.
Sometimes big brand names are actually _worse_ than some of the lower end competitors. (E.g., for the longest time Sony had a tradition of picking the cheapest TFT panels made by others, claiming it has _half_ the latency value that the panel's manufacturer claimed, and selling that shit for twice the price of better products.) In a lot of the big name cases you don't pay extra for quality, you just pay for having the brand name slapped on a piece of shit.
Sometimes the big name stuff is the exact same stuff that the smaller manufacturers sell. E.g., ATI cards are made by Sapphire. E.g., IBM monitors (or at least a lot of them) are made by BenQ. Yes, the el-cheapo monitor company. Etc.
So, you know, just buying the most expensive version isn't always the solution. In fact, it's usually a very bad solution.
1. A decent computer costs nowadays, what? A few hundred dollars? How much can you save on CPU and RAM anyway? A decent CPU is under 200$. (You don't need a 3.6 GHz P4EE on everyone's desk.) So you're gonna save... what? Maybe 100$ for the whole machine?
With costs in the range of several tens of thousands per person per year, that kind of saving is a spit in the bucket. It's just not worth the loss of productivity and the learning curve.
Even assuming that all programs ran exactly as fast over a network (and they don't), and the server had enough computing power to not get stuffed when 100 people do some CPU-intensive batch processing at the same time (e.g., before the big meeting on Friday), etc, it's still a losing proposition. You only need 1-2 server crashes, or hard drive getting full, or whatnot, to turn that "profit" into a loss.
2. Precisely because salaries are high and operating costs are high, the way to go is to increase productivity, not to handicap everyone with piss-poor cheap tools. It's not even something IT speciffic.
E.g. if you have a construction company, the way to go is to buy a bulldozer and a crane, not to give everyone shovels and buckets. Yes, shovels and buckets are cheap, redundant (you can have everyone have one), reliable (no moving parts for a start), bug free (the design was tested for millenia), etc. It's still a bloody stupid business plan.
3. Is it even a win anyway? Let's say you ran 100 terminals off a mainframe. You saved maybe, what, 10,000$ by buying thin clients instead of computers?
Now let's say you connect them all to a small-ish 8 CPU Sun server, say, the Sun Fire V890. Let's take the 8-way 32 GB RAM option: $123,995.00
Net _loss_ there: over $100,000. You also want to make it _redundant_? Shall we take two of those? Net loss: almost $250,000.
And that's already a piss-poor solution, since 100 users actually running CPU and graphics intensive software on that, will make the machine crawl. I.e., you invested $250,000 into... lowering productivity. How bloody stupid is that?
I.e., please... I can see how snake oil vendors like Sun would love to convince you to pay them $250,000 for a piss-poor big-iron solution, instead of paying $100,000 to Dell for some good PCs. But is it actually in your company's interest to pay more for less? Definitely not.
It's not about embedding music and videos, it's about embedding _anything_ whatsoever. Some of which _are_ valid things to have in a document.
E.g., surprise, I might want to embed a CAD drawing as an illustration in a document. E.g., I might have a map generated out of sattellite data, by a specialized program. E.g., I might have a scientiffic/simulation program which can present its data or results in its own format, and I might want to embed that in a document. Etc.
"Text document" no longer means 80 column, 7 bit ASCII, you know. If an illustration or diagram actually belongs in that text, I'd very much like it to be actually included there, and not just referenced as "oh, and you also need to look at asdfgh666.jpg in the attached pics.zip file." Stopping to do that not only is a waste of my time, it also pointlessly disrupts the reading process.
Yes, one could do the stone-age thing and do a piss-poor export to some graphics format first, and then embed that. And pray to the dark gods that you don't end with some piss-poor conversion and/or scaling artefacts when printing. Just like in the bad old days.
Or you could have a modern design which can spare you that waste of money, brains and time. Microsoft obviously took this route. Kudos to them.
So, no offense, the "why would you need to embed a video in a text document?" is just a straw man, and not even a good one.
Again: The point is to have an architecture which can embed anything whatsoever, from any program. Incidentally something that generic is also usable to embed videos. But it's also able to embed stuff that _is_ perfectly normal and logical to have in a text document. Which is the real point.
Just for the sake of repeating myself, don't assume that every computer in the world is a server, and/or that everyone must be running a l33t multi-user system with 500 different accounts define.
A normal user's home computer is a very different beast. Normal users don't measure their e-penis in number of uptime hours or number of l33t server processes on their system. Most of that l33t stuff that your average/. nerd is proud of, is just a waste of any normal user's time.
The average normal user doesn't have a server or thousands of user accounts on his/her server. And has no intention of going that route. Now in that context:
"Running as root is like pointing a loaded gun at everyone just in case they're a criminal."
Yes, except there is noone else on that computer. So it's more like pointing around a gun in your own concrete basement, with noone else around. Whop-de-do, that must be sooo good a reason to not run as root. Not.
"Running as root is like driving down the highway with your hood open and your oil cap off."
Except it's on your own private strip of road, and noone else has any business to be on that road to start with. So the problem is?
" Running as root is like posting to slashdot without reading TFA.:)"
Except it's a post in your own private diary. So the problem is?
The/. crowd seems to assume that everything is a server. Even if it's their home computer, it's got to run Apache, MySQL, Squid, a mail server, etc.
That is _not_ what Joe Average needs, however. For that matter, not what _I_ need.
I explicitly do _not_ want a web server, database server, or any other goddamn server on my desktop machine. I explicitly don't need one, and I explicitly don't want one using up my RAM and CPU cycles. I'm pretty sure mom and dad don't either.
So the whole "but what if someone uses a vulnerability in Apache?" is a moot point: they won't find Apache on my machine to start with.
Also the whole idea why it's called a _Personal_ Computer (PC) is that I don't need, nor want, a multi-user bonanza on it. It's not some server where every Tom, Dick and Harry has their own separate account and their own separate data.
The same, incidentally, applies to most family computers. Joe and Jill Average, and their 2.2 children, most of the time don't keep their files secret from each other. It's not like Jill's digital photos of trees and squirrels are some top secret.
So all that someone could exploit is some program _I_ am currently running, as _my_ user. Period. And then it can erase my data.
And that assessment is right: that's what's important on that system. The programs are the easy part: reinstalling the whole system and all the programs is a few hours exercise. Getting your own data back might not even be possible, short of having a time machine.
I.e., for Joe and Jill Average, with a _desktop_ machine (not a server), it really makes zero difference whether they run as root or as some other user.
Well, you can play it again now and then, yes. Basically there's major difference between (A) watching it again once in a blue moon, and (B) watching it again and again, 6 hours a day, 7 days a week, for two years straight. _No_ story is that good. If anyone really watched a movie like that, I'd more likely suspect they're obsessed and need to see a good doctor.
Eh, I'm not talking about how the politicians are using that army;)
I just mean, seriously, if people in _any_ army acted as irresponsibly as people in college, you'd have firefights between squads every day. I do believe that you'd hear about it in the press if that was the case.
Let's get back to the part where you say: "I would argue that there hasn't been a decent PC game put out in years."
Now I supposed you were going for hyperbole to make a point. But I would have answered much the same that he did, if I had thought you literally mean that. Now on the average there _are_ a lot more of "me too" clones released and some focus being shifted from gameplay to graphics. But averages are averages, and claiming that no game in the last years was even decent is just false.
For a start your world seems to be just divided into "repetitive PacMan-style gameplay = good, anything story driven = bad." But even then:
1. The recent deluge of MMOs already catter to the same market. Expect no story there, just doing the same thing over and over again.
2. It's some major self-centeredness in claiming that only that's good gaming, and anything else is bad and sold only on graphics. A lot of us actually _like_ a story in a game, same as we like to be told a story in a movie or book.
Yes, that cuts down on replay value, but I'll live with that. Sometimes it's better to eat a steak for 20 minutes than to chew the same gum for 16 hours straight. Or in the case of games I'll take for example some 40 hours of good story in KOTOR, over 400 hours of mindless repetitive clicking in some other games.
3. The "Black And White" example really doesn't say much. It was just a crap game, sold by massive shameless hype, no more. It's not representative of every single new game in any form or shape.
I'm technically supposed to be a reserve sergeant. I.e., in case of a war I'd actually get a squad or maybe a platoon of people, and I'd be supposed to lead them to their deaths. Now it doesn't mean I'm an expert in military matters or anything, but I like to think it does at least give me _some_ idea about it. You know, means at least I've seen some of it up close.
And there's a helluva lot of difference between _maybe_ 1 in 10,000 soldiers doing something stupid in the army, and 9 in 10 students doing stupid stuff in college. You know, as in: several orders of magnitude of a difference.
The vast majority of people _are_ responsible in the army. The vast majority of people are dangerously irresponsible in college. And here's the fun part: it's the same people in any country with conscription.
You say, "In fact, I would argue that there hasn't been a decent PC game put out in years." I suspect you were going for hyperbole to illustrate a point, but still... that's wrong.
Now we could aggree that on the average the chance to pick a good game has went down, and doubly so for the chance to pick an _original_ game. But claiming that no game in years even came to the level of "decent", no, sorry, that's just not true.
I'll also argue that judging a game _only_ on replay value is a piss-poor criterion. That excludes from the start any story-based game, and a lot of us actually like those. Pick your own favourite movie or book: could you see that movie or read that book, again and again each day, for years? Probably not. Does it make it automatically a bad book or movie? I'd say definitely not. Well, then I'd say the same ought to apply to games.
Anyway, if we're talking about no good games being released in years, just off the top of my head (and bearing in mind that my favourite genres may not match yours), I can think of games like:
- Tropico (and more recently Children Of The Nile, as a clone of it set in ancient Egypt). Very nice game, and very nice job of simulating your subjects as living beings instead of building statistics.
- Knights Of The Old Republic. Not only a very nice RPG with a very good story, but also a better prequel to Star Wars than what George Lucas ever made. I'm not even a SW fan at all, and I found the game to be worth every cent on its own merits as an RPG.
- Fable (ok, so it's not yet released on the PC.) I was _very_ weary of buying a PM game again, after the shameless fiasco that was Black & White, but I can honestly say that Fable was one of the most entertaining things I've ever done with my pants on.
- The whole Europa Universalis/Victoria/Hearts Of Iron/Crusader Kings series. "Real Time Strategy" doesn't only mean "Dune 2 clones", you know. Paradox's games are actually about _strategy_ and at a strategy level. Very welcome change, if you ask me. (And BTW, they still have 2D graphics.)
- Vampire Bloodlines. You know, this is one game which I really didn't play because of the graphics. See, I had the resolution set to 1600x1200, 8x FSAA and 16x aniso, so the game engine compensating by a piss-poor texture resolution and polygon-count level-of-detail, to keep the frame rate playable. So I had graphics that looked debatably worse than in some Playstation games, if the PSX character had stuck his/her face in a clogged toilet. Even in that context, I found the game most entertaining to play.
- Die Gilde ("Europa 1400 - The Guild"). Very nice take on the business strategy sim genre, and probably taking third place as number of hours played among the games I've played. (Right after The Sims and Fallout 2.)
- "Rome: Total War". If you ignore the RT combat (i.e., skip them and let the AI play for you), it _is_ a turn-based Civilization-type game. A very nice one, too.
Etc.
I realize by now I could go on for hours. (That's what not having a life and buying almost every game released will do to one.) So let's just say, a lot of us _do_ find good games to play, among all the crap being released.
Maybe instead of being so focused on what the kid should be forbidden to do, maybe explain to him/her _why_ that stuff is bad, and what the consequences are?
Someone else already did mention college and kids going off-guidance. And while I do mostly blame it on the wrong incentive and peer-pressure there, it should also be noted that it also coincides with the moment they get out of their parents' reach. Mommy and daddy are no longer around to say "you're not allowed to drink." So, whoppee, it must be allowed now. Let's end up in an alcoholic comma.
Maybe explaining what's wrong with it would have been more productive?
Or I see you mention sex and violence references in games. You probably also know already _why_ those are taboo nowadays: the fear that they'll teach the kid to be a serial killer. Maybe, you know, teaching the kid the difference between right and wrong (and that murder is squarely in the second category) would be a safer way to solve that problem, than hoping that your kid will never ever see a violent game?
So your protection lies in hoping that your kid is physically prevented by AOL from ever hearing any sex talk? Are you _that_ sure that he/she is equally protected IRL? There is no filter in Real Life, as far as I know. What if they get seduced by a RL paedophile?
Or what will happen when, see above, they go to college and are suddenly without AOL's protection? Are you sure you won't see that kid starring in some amateur porn flick? (Gay porn flick for bonus points.)
Basically what some of us swiftly blame parents for isn't that you weren't there 24/7 to look over the kid's shoulder. Au contraire. What we blame parents for, is not taking the time to teach those kids _why_ some stuff is wrong, even at those times when mommy and daddy aren't around to protect them.
I must confess that I was eagerly awaiting that question even before I hit "Submit" on that message. The answer being: You mean just like adults do?
E.g., I'm comfortably older than the 29 year old limit that that post proposed, and I can see that a lot (most?) of my decisions are about short term gratification than about long term planning.
E.g., smoking. It's just that: better risk death later, than take the discomfort of quitting now. The short-term gratification of lighting one up trumps the prospect of cancer later. (Yes, I'm a smoker myself. I _know_ I'm being stupid about it.)
E.g., consumerism is just that: short term gratification. And you see even retired seniors doing that.
Especially the kind that's about "keeping up with the Jonesses" (or one-upping the Jonesses if possible.) Ludicrious quantities of effort and money go into just getting the peer recognition that one's car (or TV, house, etc) is bigger than the Jonesses car. I.e., the same course of action and for the same reward, as doing those stupid things in college.
And often with the same trade-off as in college: people get stuck in a crap job because they took the instant gratification of consumerism, instead of investing into learning some markettable skill and finding a better job. That kind of long time investment is trumped by showing off to the Jonesses _now_.
E.g., (mostly male) driving. Everyone knows that cars can kill or maim, but everyone thinks it can't happen to him. (Yes, of course _you_ are the greatest driver on Earth, and accidents can only possibly happen to other people. Riiight.) But IMHO it's another symptom of the same effect: the short term gratification of hopefully getting home 2 minutes earlier, is perceived as more important than maybe ending up crippled later.
See, aiming a gun that-a-way and shooting is the easy part. Technically you could even get a monkey to kill people, or just release a bunch of rabid pitbulls and hope they gore someone.
The thing, however, is about responsibility and making the right judgment call.
E.g., when you stand guard for _hours_ with an assault rifle and live ammo, you're trusted to be responsible enough to _not_ start shooting at cars on the nearby highway because you're bored. E.g., when you're taught how to lob a grenade, and yes at some point you'll get to use live ones, you're trusted to be responsible enough to not lob it at your platoon mates or shove it down your own pants. Etc.
But you know why that works, while college is an exercise in proving you're more stupid than the others? Consequences.
Sorry, 18-19 year olds are _not_ brain-dead. They _are_ perfectly capable of cause-effect judgment.
However, like all humans at all ages, they choose the course of action that offers the best (short time) effect.
In the army you _know_ that you'll be up shit creek without a paddle if you do something stupid.
In college it's exactly the other way around: the way to gain prestige and peer recognition is to do all those sorts of stupid things. Think of it as the RL equivalent of karma whoring on/. You don't get to be fashionable and popular in college by being the guy/gal who actually learns stuff. You get to be fashionable and popular by fitting in with the rebel-without-a-clue gang. You get to be _really_ popular if you up the ante: whatever idiocy someone else did, by jove, show everyone that you can do it twice as idiotic.
So it's not that you're more stupid at 19 than you are at 29. In both cases you just pick the course of action that promises the most rewards, and the least perceived short-term risks. It's just that at 19 and in college the whole rewards and negative consequences scale is turned on its head. So the perfectly logical course of action to take in that situation, seems bloody stupid when viewed from another context.
Well, I don't even have a problem with that kind of a wording. Say that you prefer faith to science, or that you think the universe is too perverse for science, and that's ok by me. Or call it philosophy for all I care. Just as long as long as it doesn't end up actively insisting that some pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo is science.
Plus, it seems to me more like a mis-understanding there, anyway. Science doesn't claim that it has all the answers, or even that there is some final answer. Science is a process, a method, not a dogma.
In a way, science and religion are really orthogonal. You can still believe in some supreme divinity, and apply a scientiffic approach in understanding His/Her/Its work. Again, science really is just a method.
Does that method have merits? I'd say that's plenty obvious. The computer you type on, the car you drive to work, the house you live in, etc, are made possible by science. (Both theoretical and applied, i.e., engineering.) The clothes you wear are made by machines, you guessed, made by some scientists and engineers. Etc.
Thing is, science makes some very precise predictions, which one can build upon. E.g., it says that if you have X litres of Y% gasoline in air at Z atmospheres pressure, and you ignite it, it does something. That if you make an X nanometre transistor, it does something else. That's what made your car or your computer possible.
So for better or worse, that method works so far and is useful enough to hang on to it. Regardless of whether you believe there's some divine limit to it or not, it's worked well enough for us so far. Before I'll have it replaced with something else, I'll want to see that something else show some comparable results.
Can you replace that with religious/pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo? Well, no. I've yet to see someone quantify "god's will" in any way that allows one to actually build anything practical. Has anyone designed a transistor that works on divine power? How much blessing does it need to work? Does it need less blessing if you make it smaller?
So religion isn't anywhere near being a replacement for science.
And conversely science isn't anywhere near being a replacement for religion, if you need religion.
Which is why it irks me to see all that bullshit propaganda aimed at blurring the lines. It's like proclaiming that North is the same as East.
Noone has a problem with your faith. Sure, you can believe in the Great Game Designer in the sky, flying giraffes, or whatever floats your boat. Go ahead.
The problem is that creationism and ID actively attack science. Not just via the anti-science lobbies. What irks me even more is the more perverse propaganda of trying to distort what "science" even means. The whole shameless propaganda assault that science is just another faith, or that any pseudo-scientific-sounding bullshit is just another science.
No, it's not. Science is that-a-way, faith is in that other direction. Saying that ID is anywhere near science, is like saying that deer is a mushroom, or that fish is a herb.
So here's the deal: the moment you guys stop the anti-science propaganda, including the actively trying to pervert and distort what "science" means, you'll find that most of us science meanies will be more than happy to leave you alone.
There is no "scientific/faith union" as long as the "science" part is missing in that mix.
See, science is _not_ about just having a set of truths, so you can't just take any set of truths dressed in pseudo-science babble and call it science. In fact science has _no_ truths. It's all about doubting everything, or trying to improve it.
Every scientific theory has to have not just a list of experiments that prove it, but also some very clear conditions that would _disprove_ it, or at least show its limitations.
Science makes clear predictions. If they don't happen, you've just found a limit of that theory. Any law of physics that comes with a formula, also contains the way to test its validity: you just need to find find a situation where that formula doesn't hold true.
E.g., we have quantum mechanics or relativity precisely because the newtonian mechanics were possible to disprove. So someone did find ranges where they're no longer a good approximation. That's how scientiffic progress happens.
"Intelligent Design" is not science, no matter what pseudo-scientific babble it's dressed in, because it lacks that. It's based on something that can't possibly be tested, disproved or improved. Unlike science, it has its set of immutable "truths", and that's that.
There is no clear prediction that can be made based on some supernatural creator's will. Much less a prediction that can be _tested_.
So, no, sorry, "scientific/faith union" it ain't. It's just faith dressed in pseudo-science nonsense babble. But at the end of the day, it remains just that: "faith". No more. There is _no_ science in it.
What makes it even more hillarious is that science the sworn enemy of that "mix", and constantly attacked. So it's like saying that Operation Barbarosa (WW2 invasion of USSR by Germany) was a "welcome union between Germany and the USSR". It's so much bullshit it could fertilize a few acres.
Any law or ammendment is a _means_, not an end. The goal is fulfilling the people's needs and wants, and the law is merely an end to that.
If an existing law, or interpretation of it, does not actually serve the public good, it's not worth defending. Plain and simple. It has nothing to do with being sheeple, it has to do with having a brain. Namely, with being able to understand the distinction between "means" and "end".
Is the government attempting to stiffle your speech about how liberals are a better government than conservatives, or viceversa? That's worth fighting against. The government has no business suppressing a mature political speech, even if it doesn't like the ideas in it.
Is someone stiffling your libel or cyber-bullying campaign against your ex-gf/ex-bf/boss/etc? Well, actually that's something worth supporting. The libel kind of "free speech" does _not_ actually serve society in any form or shape. (No, allowing some whiner to verbally masturbate on the web is not really some greater social good.)
For a people so proud of their "freedom of speech", I find it appalling the way the average american doesn't even understand it. Your average idiot whining about how, in the name of "freedom of speech", he should be allowed to cheat in an online game or troll a bulletin board, doesn't even know wtf that ammendment says.
For starters that it only applies to your relationship to the government. E.g., that the government can't stop you from saying that Kerry would have been better than Bush, or viceversa.
It does _not_ however apply to your relationship to anyone else. It does _not_ mean that any particular site has to carry your bullshit. It does _not_ mean that any game has to tolerate your anti-social behaviour on their server. It does not mean you're free to rape someone else's rights, such as in this case their privacy. And it does _not_ mean that your ex has to just bend over and let you libel him/her/it in your whiny blog.
Since when was being an ex-gf/ex-bf/neighbour/whatever an excuse for libel? Is there some paragraph in the laws that says that? Was there some precedent established in the courts that went "ah, ok, they used to go out together, so it's perfectly normal and acceptable for them to print lies about each other"? No, seriously.
I do believe that if said ex-girlfriend managed to publish those lies in a book or in a newspaper, she'd be looking at a nasty lawsuit. Methinks it's only fair that the exact same applies to blogs.
So noone's asking that the government explicitly goes and silences women, or some other emotionally-charged bullshit, but just that the same rules apply on blogs as in any other segment of the media. If you publish lies about someone, you damn better be sure you can prove that stuff in a court of law.
And just for the sake of going on a tangent, my advice to that ex-gf (or ex-bf that does the same, no need to single out a gender there) would be: grow up, get over it, see a good surgeon about having your head removed from your ass. Life moves one. Whining in a blog never solved anything.
Yes, maybe you've had a bad relationship, maybe he/she/it didn't deserve you, bla, bla, bla. You have my compassion. But it's over, so get over it already. From that point on what matters is what _you_ do with _your_ life. Learning from past experiences is ok. But living in the past and begging for sympathy because of what happened last century, that's just another way to be a loser.
No, sorry, I think people are perfectly qualified to understand that they don't want their private data on the web. They don't have to even know what a blog is. They don't want you publishing _their_ data. Period.
Seems to me that they're perfectly competent to decide that.
Incidentally, though, you do also illustrate another problem with blogs, and why it _isn't_ some Earth-changing revolution. Why it's still just a bunch of whiny nerds, too busy patting each other on the back, to actually cause any social or political change.
See, it's just this kind of self-centered ivory-tower attitutde. Re-read what you just wrote. Basically it's "bah, I'm the important one. You don't matter. If you dare disaggree with me, then your opinion is worthless and you're a bunch of incompetent morons. Heck, you don't even really _have_ an opinion."
That kind of self-centeredness doesn't win many supporters, much less move the masses or challenge the establishment.
Additionally, most of the time it's not just that bloggers can't carry the message across, it's that they don't even _have_ a message anyone else gives a damn about. It's the self-centering again. Their world revolves so much around themselves, that their only issues are their _own_ problems.
See the whole thread here, or again, what you wrote yourself. The whole focus is "how dare those sheep want to censor _us_?" Ever stopped to wonder _why_ those people answered that way? What is the problem _they_ see? What public benefit could cyber-bullying someone in a blog possibly have? I.e. _why_ on Earth would someone in their right mind answer "nah, I really want every socially-inept whiner to publish my address and telephone number on the web"?
And I mean really trying to see the others' point of view, not hand waving and piss poor excuses like "waah, someone made them answer that way". Might be a new experience.
There's a lesson in there: the way politics works is "vote for me, and I'll do something for _you_." _Noone_ won or swayed an election yet with a message like "I'm the important one, and you're a bunch of sheep I don't care about."
The way it works is "I care about _your_ problems". It's not "I'm the important one here. You should come solve _my_ problems."
Sorry, I don't believe that any whiny moron with a web page is automatically God, and can do whatever he damn pleases to other people. Privacy _is_ an issue even if you're a "blogger".
And sometimes it's just that: privacy. I don't care about "slippery slope" theories, you just have no business giving away someone else's data. I'll worry about "freedom of speech" issues when it's about actually censoring political opinions, which is really all that that ammendment was supposed to protect. Bullying your boss or your ex-girlfriend via publishing their life on the web, is one "freedom of speech" I'll be quite happy to do without.
And it's not even just about bloggers.
Companies too _are_ bound by some privacy laws, and doubly so in Europe. If anyone published my details, even in a newspaper or company brochure or as "customer of the month" on their games e-commerce site, they could get their pants sued off. That data is, simply put, mine not theirs in the first place. If they published children's addresses and schedule to go to school, I _think_ they may even run into some criminal laws.
But even in the USA, there are already laws covering that kind of thing. E.g., a newspaper can't publish your medical record.
So I see nothing wrong with asking that "bloggers" are bound by the same rules. Again, no, just being able to type a whine in a text box does _not_ make you god, does _not_ put you above privacy or common courtesy rules, and sure as hell does _not_ give you carte blance to bully other people ("here's my boss's home address and phone number. He's a fucking moron. Do something to inconvenience him.")
You're just a guy with a web page, nothing more. You're not above the law. And if something annoys enough people, the law gets changed to reflect that. Even if it involves bringing you down from the imaginary pedestal of blogger godhood. That's all.
Slashdot Mirror
See, if your favourite genre happens to fall squarely into the Mario/Zelda/whatever-cheap-hack-on-the-same-engine category, then I can see how you'd be happy. But please don't assume that _everyone_ has the exact same tastes you do.
My favourite genre however are CRPGs and I fucking _hate_ 3D jump-and-runs. (And no, the Zeldas are _not_ RPGs.) So Mario and Zelda never did anything for me.
I liked the SNES, because that's where the RPGs were at. The N64 on the other hand was the start of my contempt for Nintendo. Over its awfully long life span it had exactly _one_ (debatably) RPG, and even that one was not published in Europe. The Gamecube falls in the same category too: looking at its lineup of games really doesn't do anything for me.
And Nintendo's arrogant "we have all the games we need, it's Sony who'll go bankrupt for publishing lots of games" attitude also didn't help. Here I had an N64 catching dust, with one game published every 2-3 months and even that one some jump-and-run I didn't want. And Nintendo is telling me that that's all the games they need.
I started just hating Nintendo at that point.
"I think people take cheap shots at them because they don't want to admit that "kiddy games" such as Zelda: Wind Waker and Mario Sunshine are a lot more fun to play than those hack and slash "grownup" games."
Ah, a conspiracy theory. Some world-wide conspiracy made everyone say they dislike Nintendo's games, even though they really like it. Think about it for a little, and I think you'll realize how silly that theory is.
No, some of us just honestly have other tastes in games, and don't find Nintendo's games to be any fun. At all. It's not about being "kiddy games", it's simply about everyone liking a different kind of a game:
Nintendo catters to a niche, at the expense of ignoring everyone else. By the sound of it, you are in that niche market. Good for you. I can see how you'd be happy with Nintendo's games then. Most people however fall outside that niche, which is why it's a niche.
"My buddies tease me about it, but who isn't having fun playing Mario Kart or Mario Party?"
I don't. I very much prefer a real racing _simulation_, like Gran Turismo.
It's not about it being Mario or Nintendo or "kiddie". The whole pseudo-racing-while-throwing-crap-at-each-other genre just doesn't do anything for me. That includes the PSX/PS2/whatever games in that category. And includes the SF/cartoon-license/whatever games, not just the "kiddie" ones.
"Who doesn't like to drop a bomb bug on their enemies pikmin and blow 'em to bits?"
I don't. Honestly. If I want to blow things to bits, I load a proper strategy game. E.g., "Rome: Total War".
"Who doesn't think the storyline to Windwaker is interesting?"
Even if I didn't mind the story as such, the implementation does nothing for me. I mean, Daikatana's story wasn't the bad part about it either. Stil, that didn't make it game of the year or anything.
Even then, I doubt that the big bang is what the bible referred to.
See, the Big Bang was more like, first there was liquid, then there was GAS (a step utterly missing in the bible), then there was liquid again as gravity collapsed clouds of hydrogen, then there was plasma as the star ignited, then it went bang and it was gas again... and only after a few more such cycles you had enough of the heavier elements to have land as we know it.
Besides, the last time I've read the bible it was more about Earth than about the universe as a whole.
Don't get me wrong, you can fit the Genesys is a lot of funny ways into the history of Earth. (My own pet theory is that God was a student, seein' as he did it all in the last 7 days.) But fitting the Big Bang in it is just not supported by _anything_ in the bible.
Every boxed distro I've ever used since Linux started supporting modules, installs those as modules. They're only loaded if you actually have that hardware.
So if your friend's machine doesn't have Bluetooth or PCMCIA, rest assured that the drivers for it won't be loaded.
So the problem is...? That he/she/it has maybe 1 MB taken by those modules, in an age where the smallest HDD you can buy in a shop is something like 37 GB? (And even that if you get an old WD Raptor or a SCSI drive. For ATA/SATA the starting point is higher.)
"What if I CAN open your document, maybe I even have a copy of MS Office running in CrossOver, but what if I don't have your particular CAD software or proprietary mapping software or stupid fucking MS DRM CODEC for that video clip? Now I have a document with a bunch of stupid broken data in it!"
What if you're not even supposed to read that particular document? If that document is intended for internal use, at a workplace where I _know_ that everyone got that CAD package pre-installed, I'd very much like to embed it.
Or how about embedding other Office formats? E.g., if I have Office on that computer, I already have both Word _and_ Power Point installed. And embedding means I can use them as such, not as lame "see the powerpoint foil in the other file" notes, nor as some read-only export/renderer. I can not only just have a state diagram generated in PowerPoint inside a Word document, I can also double click it and edit it there and then. Then I can drop a bloody Excel table _and_ a chart in it, and again, they stay editable.
You propose... what? That I separately open Excel, edit the data, export the chart as GIF and then import it in word? Yeah, that's productive. Not.
And how about if I need to edit it later? Yeah, let's remember which separate Excel file was used to create and export that chart, so I can do it again with the changed data. No, thanks. I'll take embedding instead.
"To get back on topic, we should do the stone-age thing and convert ALL media meant for final distribution (or public consumption) into a standard, open format for interchange."
See above. Some things were never meant for public distribution to start with.
"Back when people carved their data in stone or baked-clay tables, it lasted damn near forever. Then they moved to papyrus and it rotted easier, but still could be rolled and stored for thousands of years."
Yes, and technical progress also hapened roughly once per thousand years. I'm not sure how that's better.
Yes, formats change. We now can do better, and can do it with more data.
E.g., at one point, RLE was the best we could do to compress an image. Nowadays your mom can run around with a cheap digital camera and a cheap flash card because we moved to a better format.
Better yet she can (and at least mine does) shoot whole bursts of photos, and pick the one that looks the best. Try doing that with raw uncompressed bitmaps, and you'd need a 1-2GB flash card as a bare minimum.
E.g., concatenating a bunch of bitmaps was the best movie compression available. But then also the longest movie you'd hope to see on a desktop was measured in seconds. Or it was a slide show. And even that at such resolutions as 320x200.
If we stuck to that, you _still_ wouldn't be able to get a movie on a DVD. Because it takes a lot more compression to get a movie to fit in 5 GB. We'd probably still be waiting for those new holographic discs to be able to store a movie on them.
And now we have better codecs than even that. E.g., if I put up some home video or a short video capture from a game, I'll encode it as DivX. Because, you know, I'd rather that those people get it as a 100 MB download than a 1 GB download. Not everyone is on broadband yet, even in the USA.
Etc.
So, yes, formats change. Thank god for that.
Were mom's photos or my short video capture of my GT2 mad skillz some historical document, that will plunge the Earth back into the dark ages if lost? Well, no.
Basically most pro-thin-client posts I see in this whole thread are self-centred admins thinking that the whole company, nay verily the whole world, revolves against them. The whole purpose of hardware, software, and infrastructure is to make _their_ life easier, even if it means dragging everyone's productivity in the basement.
100 users served by a quad-opteron, and displayed over a network? With a whole 160 meg RAM per user? Ooer. Now that must make it painful to even recalculate a spreadsheet or scroll through a complex Word document. And I've actually had to support Java programs over VNC or terminal server. Man, now that was a pain.
Have you even _tried_ using a complex spreadsheet over a thin client in that setup? I'm guessing you didn't. Hint: we're not talking about using a file server for 100 users. We're talking actually running 200..300 Windows programs on that server at the same time.
We're also talking at the very least _millions_ of GDI/X/whatever operations pushed through the network per second, just to display all those programs. Yay, way to stuff the infrastructure.
So luxury for whom? For _you_ maybe? Yay, your life was simplified, at the expense of making everyone else's job hard. That must be such a big win for the company. Not.
Here's an idea: your job, lame as it may be, is a support job, not an end by itself. IT in a corporation is one thing that doesn't generate _any_ money by itself. Its _only_ job is to support those who actually bring the R in ROI.
So making the admin's job easy at the expense of crippling everyone else has got to be the dumbest business proposition ever.
If that job is too lame for you, hey, find something else to do. God knows I'll be one who doesn't miss all the useless admins who don't want to do their job.
Just FYI, _all_ "Made By ATI" video cards are actually made by Sapphire. So you're saying... what? That ATI's own preferred manufacturer is not high end enough for you? :)
Have you actually checked that Sapphire uses worse RAM than ASUS? No offense, but somehow I doubt that.
Basically there's a helluva lot of difference between actually having a clue, and just being a slave to brand names.
Sometimes big brand names are actually _worse_ than some of the lower end competitors. (E.g., for the longest time Sony had a tradition of picking the cheapest TFT panels made by others, claiming it has _half_ the latency value that the panel's manufacturer claimed, and selling that shit for twice the price of better products.) In a lot of the big name cases you don't pay extra for quality, you just pay for having the brand name slapped on a piece of shit.
Sometimes the big name stuff is the exact same stuff that the smaller manufacturers sell. E.g., ATI cards are made by Sapphire. E.g., IBM monitors (or at least a lot of them) are made by BenQ. Yes, the el-cheapo monitor company. Etc.
So, you know, just buying the most expensive version isn't always the solution. In fact, it's usually a very bad solution.
1. A decent computer costs nowadays, what? A few hundred dollars? How much can you save on CPU and RAM anyway? A decent CPU is under 200$. (You don't need a 3.6 GHz P4EE on everyone's desk.) So you're gonna save... what? Maybe 100$ for the whole machine?
With costs in the range of several tens of thousands per person per year, that kind of saving is a spit in the bucket. It's just not worth the loss of productivity and the learning curve.
Even assuming that all programs ran exactly as fast over a network (and they don't), and the server had enough computing power to not get stuffed when 100 people do some CPU-intensive batch processing at the same time (e.g., before the big meeting on Friday), etc, it's still a losing proposition. You only need 1-2 server crashes, or hard drive getting full, or whatnot, to turn that "profit" into a loss.
2. Precisely because salaries are high and operating costs are high, the way to go is to increase productivity, not to handicap everyone with piss-poor cheap tools. It's not even something IT speciffic.
E.g. if you have a construction company, the way to go is to buy a bulldozer and a crane, not to give everyone shovels and buckets. Yes, shovels and buckets are cheap, redundant (you can have everyone have one), reliable (no moving parts for a start), bug free (the design was tested for millenia), etc. It's still a bloody stupid business plan.
3. Is it even a win anyway? Let's say you ran 100 terminals off a mainframe. You saved maybe, what, 10,000$ by buying thin clients instead of computers?
Now let's say you connect them all to a small-ish 8 CPU Sun server, say, the Sun Fire V890. Let's take the 8-way 32 GB RAM option: $123,995.00
Net _loss_ there: over $100,000. You also want to make it _redundant_? Shall we take two of those? Net loss: almost $250,000.
And that's already a piss-poor solution, since 100 users actually running CPU and graphics intensive software on that, will make the machine crawl. I.e., you invested $250,000 into... lowering productivity. How bloody stupid is that?
I.e., please... I can see how snake oil vendors like Sun would love to convince you to pay them $250,000 for a piss-poor big-iron solution, instead of paying $100,000 to Dell for some good PCs. But is it actually in your company's interest to pay more for less? Definitely not.
It's not about embedding music and videos, it's about embedding _anything_ whatsoever. Some of which _are_ valid things to have in a document.
E.g., surprise, I might want to embed a CAD drawing as an illustration in a document. E.g., I might have a map generated out of sattellite data, by a specialized program. E.g., I might have a scientiffic/simulation program which can present its data or results in its own format, and I might want to embed that in a document. Etc.
"Text document" no longer means 80 column, 7 bit ASCII, you know. If an illustration or diagram actually belongs in that text, I'd very much like it to be actually included there, and not just referenced as "oh, and you also need to look at asdfgh666.jpg in the attached pics.zip file." Stopping to do that not only is a waste of my time, it also pointlessly disrupts the reading process.
Yes, one could do the stone-age thing and do a piss-poor export to some graphics format first, and then embed that. And pray to the dark gods that you don't end with some piss-poor conversion and/or scaling artefacts when printing. Just like in the bad old days.
Or you could have a modern design which can spare you that waste of money, brains and time. Microsoft obviously took this route. Kudos to them.
So, no offense, the "why would you need to embed a video in a text document?" is just a straw man, and not even a good one.
Again: The point is to have an architecture which can embed anything whatsoever, from any program. Incidentally something that generic is also usable to embed videos. But it's also able to embed stuff that _is_ perfectly normal and logical to have in a text document. Which is the real point.
Just for the sake of repeating myself, don't assume that every computer in the world is a server, and/or that everyone must be running a l33t multi-user system with 500 different accounts define.
/. nerd is proud of, is just a waste of any normal user's time.
:)"
A normal user's home computer is a very different beast. Normal users don't measure their e-penis in number of uptime hours or number of l33t server processes on their system. Most of that l33t stuff that your average
The average normal user doesn't have a server or thousands of user accounts on his/her server. And has no intention of going that route. Now in that context:
"Running as root is like pointing a loaded gun at everyone just in case they're a criminal."
Yes, except there is noone else on that computer. So it's more like pointing around a gun in your own concrete basement, with noone else around. Whop-de-do, that must be sooo good a reason to not run as root. Not.
"Running as root is like driving down the highway with your hood open and your oil cap off."
Except it's on your own private strip of road, and noone else has any business to be on that road to start with. So the problem is?
" Running as root is like posting to slashdot without reading TFA.
Except it's a post in your own private diary. So the problem is?
The /. crowd seems to assume that everything is a server. Even if it's their home computer, it's got to run Apache, MySQL, Squid, a mail server, etc.
That is _not_ what Joe Average needs, however. For that matter, not what _I_ need.
I explicitly do _not_ want a web server, database server, or any other goddamn server on my desktop machine. I explicitly don't need one, and I explicitly don't want one using up my RAM and CPU cycles. I'm pretty sure mom and dad don't either.
So the whole "but what if someone uses a vulnerability in Apache?" is a moot point: they won't find Apache on my machine to start with.
Also the whole idea why it's called a _Personal_ Computer (PC) is that I don't need, nor want, a multi-user bonanza on it. It's not some server where every Tom, Dick and Harry has their own separate account and their own separate data.
The same, incidentally, applies to most family computers. Joe and Jill Average, and their 2.2 children, most of the time don't keep their files secret from each other. It's not like Jill's digital photos of trees and squirrels are some top secret.
So all that someone could exploit is some program _I_ am currently running, as _my_ user. Period. And then it can erase my data.
And that assessment is right: that's what's important on that system. The programs are the easy part: reinstalling the whole system and all the programs is a few hours exercise. Getting your own data back might not even be possible, short of having a time machine.
I.e., for Joe and Jill Average, with a _desktop_ machine (not a server), it really makes zero difference whether they run as root or as some other user.
Well, you can play it again now and then, yes. Basically there's major difference between (A) watching it again once in a blue moon, and (B) watching it again and again, 6 hours a day, 7 days a week, for two years straight. _No_ story is that good. If anyone really watched a movie like that, I'd more likely suspect they're obsessed and need to see a good doctor.
Eh, I'm not talking about how the politicians are using that army ;)
I just mean, seriously, if people in _any_ army acted as irresponsibly as people in college, you'd have firefights between squads every day. I do believe that you'd hear about it in the press if that was the case.
Let's get back to the part where you say: "I would argue that there hasn't been a decent PC game put out in years."
Now I supposed you were going for hyperbole to make a point. But I would have answered much the same that he did, if I had thought you literally mean that. Now on the average there _are_ a lot more of "me too" clones released and some focus being shifted from gameplay to graphics. But averages are averages, and claiming that no game in the last years was even decent is just false.
For a start your world seems to be just divided into "repetitive PacMan-style gameplay = good, anything story driven = bad." But even then:
1. The recent deluge of MMOs already catter to the same market. Expect no story there, just doing the same thing over and over again.
2. It's some major self-centeredness in claiming that only that's good gaming, and anything else is bad and sold only on graphics. A lot of us actually _like_ a story in a game, same as we like to be told a story in a movie or book.
Yes, that cuts down on replay value, but I'll live with that. Sometimes it's better to eat a steak for 20 minutes than to chew the same gum for 16 hours straight. Or in the case of games I'll take for example some 40 hours of good story in KOTOR, over 400 hours of mindless repetitive clicking in some other games.
3. The "Black And White" example really doesn't say much. It was just a crap game, sold by massive shameless hype, no more. It's not representative of every single new game in any form or shape.
I'm technically supposed to be a reserve sergeant. I.e., in case of a war I'd actually get a squad or maybe a platoon of people, and I'd be supposed to lead them to their deaths. Now it doesn't mean I'm an expert in military matters or anything, but I like to think it does at least give me _some_ idea about it. You know, means at least I've seen some of it up close.
And there's a helluva lot of difference between _maybe_ 1 in 10,000 soldiers doing something stupid in the army, and 9 in 10 students doing stupid stuff in college. You know, as in: several orders of magnitude of a difference.
The vast majority of people _are_ responsible in the army. The vast majority of people are dangerously irresponsible in college. And here's the fun part: it's the same people in any country with conscription.
You say, "In fact, I would argue that there hasn't been a decent PC game put out in years." I suspect you were going for hyperbole to illustrate a point, but still... that's wrong.
Now we could aggree that on the average the chance to pick a good game has went down, and doubly so for the chance to pick an _original_ game. But claiming that no game in years even came to the level of "decent", no, sorry, that's just not true.
I'll also argue that judging a game _only_ on replay value is a piss-poor criterion. That excludes from the start any story-based game, and a lot of us actually like those. Pick your own favourite movie or book: could you see that movie or read that book, again and again each day, for years? Probably not. Does it make it automatically a bad book or movie? I'd say definitely not. Well, then I'd say the same ought to apply to games.
Anyway, if we're talking about no good games being released in years, just off the top of my head (and bearing in mind that my favourite genres may not match yours), I can think of games like:
- Tropico (and more recently Children Of The Nile, as a clone of it set in ancient Egypt). Very nice game, and very nice job of simulating your subjects as living beings instead of building statistics.
- Knights Of The Old Republic. Not only a very nice RPG with a very good story, but also a better prequel to Star Wars than what George Lucas ever made. I'm not even a SW fan at all, and I found the game to be worth every cent on its own merits as an RPG.
- Fable (ok, so it's not yet released on the PC.) I was _very_ weary of buying a PM game again, after the shameless fiasco that was Black & White, but I can honestly say that Fable was one of the most entertaining things I've ever done with my pants on.
- The whole Europa Universalis/Victoria/Hearts Of Iron/Crusader Kings series. "Real Time Strategy" doesn't only mean "Dune 2 clones", you know. Paradox's games are actually about _strategy_ and at a strategy level. Very welcome change, if you ask me. (And BTW, they still have 2D graphics.)
- Vampire Bloodlines. You know, this is one game which I really didn't play because of the graphics. See, I had the resolution set to 1600x1200, 8x FSAA and 16x aniso, so the game engine compensating by a piss-poor texture resolution and polygon-count level-of-detail, to keep the frame rate playable. So I had graphics that looked debatably worse than in some Playstation games, if the PSX character had stuck his/her face in a clogged toilet. Even in that context, I found the game most entertaining to play.
- Die Gilde ("Europa 1400 - The Guild"). Very nice take on the business strategy sim genre, and probably taking third place as number of hours played among the games I've played. (Right after The Sims and Fallout 2.)
- "Rome: Total War". If you ignore the RT combat (i.e., skip them and let the AI play for you), it _is_ a turn-based Civilization-type game. A very nice one, too.
Etc.
I realize by now I could go on for hours. (That's what not having a life and buying almost every game released will do to one.) So let's just say, a lot of us _do_ find good games to play, among all the crap being released.
Maybe instead of being so focused on what the kid should be forbidden to do, maybe explain to him/her _why_ that stuff is bad, and what the consequences are?
Someone else already did mention college and kids going off-guidance. And while I do mostly blame it on the wrong incentive and peer-pressure there, it should also be noted that it also coincides with the moment they get out of their parents' reach. Mommy and daddy are no longer around to say "you're not allowed to drink." So, whoppee, it must be allowed now. Let's end up in an alcoholic comma.
Maybe explaining what's wrong with it would have been more productive?
Or I see you mention sex and violence references in games. You probably also know already _why_ those are taboo nowadays: the fear that they'll teach the kid to be a serial killer. Maybe, you know, teaching the kid the difference between right and wrong (and that murder is squarely in the second category) would be a safer way to solve that problem, than hoping that your kid will never ever see a violent game?
So your protection lies in hoping that your kid is physically prevented by AOL from ever hearing any sex talk? Are you _that_ sure that he/she is equally protected IRL? There is no filter in Real Life, as far as I know. What if they get seduced by a RL paedophile?
Or what will happen when, see above, they go to college and are suddenly without AOL's protection? Are you sure you won't see that kid starring in some amateur porn flick? (Gay porn flick for bonus points.)
Basically what some of us swiftly blame parents for isn't that you weren't there 24/7 to look over the kid's shoulder. Au contraire. What we blame parents for, is not taking the time to teach those kids _why_ some stuff is wrong, even at those times when mommy and daddy aren't around to protect them.
I must confess that I was eagerly awaiting that question even before I hit "Submit" on that message. The answer being: You mean just like adults do?
E.g., I'm comfortably older than the 29 year old limit that that post proposed, and I can see that a lot (most?) of my decisions are about short term gratification than about long term planning.
E.g., smoking. It's just that: better risk death later, than take the discomfort of quitting now. The short-term gratification of lighting one up trumps the prospect of cancer later. (Yes, I'm a smoker myself. I _know_ I'm being stupid about it.)
E.g., consumerism is just that: short term gratification. And you see even retired seniors doing that.
Especially the kind that's about "keeping up with the Jonesses" (or one-upping the Jonesses if possible.) Ludicrious quantities of effort and money go into just getting the peer recognition that one's car (or TV, house, etc) is bigger than the Jonesses car. I.e., the same course of action and for the same reward, as doing those stupid things in college.
And often with the same trade-off as in college: people get stuck in a crap job because they took the instant gratification of consumerism, instead of investing into learning some markettable skill and finding a better job. That kind of long time investment is trumped by showing off to the Jonesses _now_.
E.g., (mostly male) driving. Everyone knows that cars can kill or maim, but everyone thinks it can't happen to him. (Yes, of course _you_ are the greatest driver on Earth, and accidents can only possibly happen to other people. Riiight.) But IMHO it's another symptom of the same effect: the short term gratification of hopefully getting home 2 minutes earlier, is perceived as more important than maybe ending up crippled later.
See, aiming a gun that-a-way and shooting is the easy part. Technically you could even get a monkey to kill people, or just release a bunch of rabid pitbulls and hope they gore someone.
/. You don't get to be fashionable and popular in college by being the guy/gal who actually learns stuff. You get to be fashionable and popular by fitting in with the rebel-without-a-clue gang. You get to be _really_ popular if you up the ante: whatever idiocy someone else did, by jove, show everyone that you can do it twice as idiotic.
The thing, however, is about responsibility and making the right judgment call.
E.g., when you stand guard for _hours_ with an assault rifle and live ammo, you're trusted to be responsible enough to _not_ start shooting at cars on the nearby highway because you're bored. E.g., when you're taught how to lob a grenade, and yes at some point you'll get to use live ones, you're trusted to be responsible enough to not lob it at your platoon mates or shove it down your own pants. Etc.
But you know why that works, while college is an exercise in proving you're more stupid than the others? Consequences.
Sorry, 18-19 year olds are _not_ brain-dead. They _are_ perfectly capable of cause-effect judgment.
However, like all humans at all ages, they choose the course of action that offers the best (short time) effect.
In the army you _know_ that you'll be up shit creek without a paddle if you do something stupid.
In college it's exactly the other way around: the way to gain prestige and peer recognition is to do all those sorts of stupid things. Think of it as the RL equivalent of karma whoring on
So it's not that you're more stupid at 19 than you are at 29. In both cases you just pick the course of action that promises the most rewards, and the least perceived short-term risks. It's just that at 19 and in college the whole rewards and negative consequences scale is turned on its head. So the perfectly logical course of action to take in that situation, seems bloody stupid when viewed from another context.
Well, I don't even have a problem with that kind of a wording. Say that you prefer faith to science, or that you think the universe is too perverse for science, and that's ok by me. Or call it philosophy for all I care. Just as long as long as it doesn't end up actively insisting that some pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo is science.
Plus, it seems to me more like a mis-understanding there, anyway. Science doesn't claim that it has all the answers, or even that there is some final answer. Science is a process, a method, not a dogma.
In a way, science and religion are really orthogonal. You can still believe in some supreme divinity, and apply a scientiffic approach in understanding His/Her/Its work. Again, science really is just a method.
Does that method have merits? I'd say that's plenty obvious. The computer you type on, the car you drive to work, the house you live in, etc, are made possible by science. (Both theoretical and applied, i.e., engineering.) The clothes you wear are made by machines, you guessed, made by some scientists and engineers. Etc.
Thing is, science makes some very precise predictions, which one can build upon. E.g., it says that if you have X litres of Y% gasoline in air at Z atmospheres pressure, and you ignite it, it does something. That if you make an X nanometre transistor, it does something else. That's what made your car or your computer possible.
So for better or worse, that method works so far and is useful enough to hang on to it. Regardless of whether you believe there's some divine limit to it or not, it's worked well enough for us so far. Before I'll have it replaced with something else, I'll want to see that something else show some comparable results.
Can you replace that with religious/pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo? Well, no. I've yet to see someone quantify "god's will" in any way that allows one to actually build anything practical. Has anyone designed a transistor that works on divine power? How much blessing does it need to work? Does it need less blessing if you make it smaller?
So religion isn't anywhere near being a replacement for science.
And conversely science isn't anywhere near being a replacement for religion, if you need religion.
Which is why it irks me to see all that bullshit propaganda aimed at blurring the lines. It's like proclaiming that North is the same as East.
Noone has a problem with your faith. Sure, you can believe in the Great Game Designer in the sky, flying giraffes, or whatever floats your boat. Go ahead.
The problem is that creationism and ID actively attack science. Not just via the anti-science lobbies. What irks me even more is the more perverse propaganda of trying to distort what "science" even means. The whole shameless propaganda assault that science is just another faith, or that any pseudo-scientific-sounding bullshit is just another science.
No, it's not. Science is that-a-way, faith is in that other direction. Saying that ID is anywhere near science, is like saying that deer is a mushroom, or that fish is a herb.
So here's the deal: the moment you guys stop the anti-science propaganda, including the actively trying to pervert and distort what "science" means, you'll find that most of us science meanies will be more than happy to leave you alone.
There is no "scientific/faith union" as long as the "science" part is missing in that mix.
See, science is _not_ about just having a set of truths, so you can't just take any set of truths dressed in pseudo-science babble and call it science. In fact science has _no_ truths. It's all about doubting everything, or trying to improve it.
Every scientific theory has to have not just a list of experiments that prove it, but also some very clear conditions that would _disprove_ it, or at least show its limitations.
Science makes clear predictions. If they don't happen, you've just found a limit of that theory. Any law of physics that comes with a formula, also contains the way to test its validity: you just need to find find a situation where that formula doesn't hold true.
E.g., we have quantum mechanics or relativity precisely because the newtonian mechanics were possible to disprove. So someone did find ranges where they're no longer a good approximation. That's how scientiffic progress happens.
"Intelligent Design" is not science, no matter what pseudo-scientific babble it's dressed in, because it lacks that. It's based on something that can't possibly be tested, disproved or improved. Unlike science, it has its set of immutable "truths", and that's that.
There is no clear prediction that can be made based on some supernatural creator's will. Much less a prediction that can be _tested_.
So, no, sorry, "scientific/faith union" it ain't. It's just faith dressed in pseudo-science nonsense babble. But at the end of the day, it remains just that: "faith". No more. There is _no_ science in it.
What makes it even more hillarious is that science the sworn enemy of that "mix", and constantly attacked. So it's like saying that Operation Barbarosa (WW2 invasion of USSR by Germany) was a "welcome union between Germany and the USSR". It's so much bullshit it could fertilize a few acres.
Any law or ammendment is a _means_, not an end. The goal is fulfilling the people's needs and wants, and the law is merely an end to that.
If an existing law, or interpretation of it, does not actually serve the public good, it's not worth defending. Plain and simple. It has nothing to do with being sheeple, it has to do with having a brain. Namely, with being able to understand the distinction between "means" and "end".
Is the government attempting to stiffle your speech about how liberals are a better government than conservatives, or viceversa? That's worth fighting against. The government has no business suppressing a mature political speech, even if it doesn't like the ideas in it.
Is someone stiffling your libel or cyber-bullying campaign against your ex-gf/ex-bf/boss/etc? Well, actually that's something worth supporting. The libel kind of "free speech" does _not_ actually serve society in any form or shape. (No, allowing some whiner to verbally masturbate on the web is not really some greater social good.)
For a people so proud of their "freedom of speech", I find it appalling the way the average american doesn't even understand it. Your average idiot whining about how, in the name of "freedom of speech", he should be allowed to cheat in an online game or troll a bulletin board, doesn't even know wtf that ammendment says.
For starters that it only applies to your relationship to the government. E.g., that the government can't stop you from saying that Kerry would have been better than Bush, or viceversa.
It does _not_ however apply to your relationship to anyone else. It does _not_ mean that any particular site has to carry your bullshit. It does _not_ mean that any game has to tolerate your anti-social behaviour on their server. It does not mean you're free to rape someone else's rights, such as in this case their privacy. And it does _not_ mean that your ex has to just bend over and let you libel him/her/it in your whiny blog.
It's that simple.
Since when was being an ex-gf/ex-bf/neighbour/whatever an excuse for libel? Is there some paragraph in the laws that says that? Was there some precedent established in the courts that went "ah, ok, they used to go out together, so it's perfectly normal and acceptable for them to print lies about each other"? No, seriously.
I do believe that if said ex-girlfriend managed to publish those lies in a book or in a newspaper, she'd be looking at a nasty lawsuit. Methinks it's only fair that the exact same applies to blogs.
So noone's asking that the government explicitly goes and silences women, or some other emotionally-charged bullshit, but just that the same rules apply on blogs as in any other segment of the media. If you publish lies about someone, you damn better be sure you can prove that stuff in a court of law.
And just for the sake of going on a tangent, my advice to that ex-gf (or ex-bf that does the same, no need to single out a gender there) would be: grow up, get over it, see a good surgeon about having your head removed from your ass. Life moves one. Whining in a blog never solved anything.
Yes, maybe you've had a bad relationship, maybe he/she/it didn't deserve you, bla, bla, bla. You have my compassion. But it's over, so get over it already. From that point on what matters is what _you_ do with _your_ life. Learning from past experiences is ok. But living in the past and begging for sympathy because of what happened last century, that's just another way to be a loser.
No, sorry, I think people are perfectly qualified to understand that they don't want their private data on the web. They don't have to even know what a blog is. They don't want you publishing _their_ data. Period.
Seems to me that they're perfectly competent to decide that.
Incidentally, though, you do also illustrate another problem with blogs, and why it _isn't_ some Earth-changing revolution. Why it's still just a bunch of whiny nerds, too busy patting each other on the back, to actually cause any social or political change.
See, it's just this kind of self-centered ivory-tower attitutde. Re-read what you just wrote. Basically it's "bah, I'm the important one. You don't matter. If you dare disaggree with me, then your opinion is worthless and you're a bunch of incompetent morons. Heck, you don't even really _have_ an opinion."
That kind of self-centeredness doesn't win many supporters, much less move the masses or challenge the establishment.
Additionally, most of the time it's not just that bloggers can't carry the message across, it's that they don't even _have_ a message anyone else gives a damn about. It's the self-centering again. Their world revolves so much around themselves, that their only issues are their _own_ problems.
See the whole thread here, or again, what you wrote yourself. The whole focus is "how dare those sheep want to censor _us_?" Ever stopped to wonder _why_ those people answered that way? What is the problem _they_ see? What public benefit could cyber-bullying someone in a blog possibly have? I.e. _why_ on Earth would someone in their right mind answer "nah, I really want every socially-inept whiner to publish my address and telephone number on the web"?
And I mean really trying to see the others' point of view, not hand waving and piss poor excuses like "waah, someone made them answer that way". Might be a new experience.
There's a lesson in there: the way politics works is "vote for me, and I'll do something for _you_." _Noone_ won or swayed an election yet with a message like "I'm the important one, and you're a bunch of sheep I don't care about."
The way it works is "I care about _your_ problems". It's not "I'm the important one here.
You should come solve _my_ problems."
Sorry, I don't believe that any whiny moron with a web page is automatically God, and can do whatever he damn pleases to other people. Privacy _is_ an issue even if you're a "blogger".
And sometimes it's just that: privacy. I don't care about "slippery slope" theories, you just have no business giving away someone else's data. I'll worry about "freedom of speech" issues when it's about actually censoring political opinions, which is really all that that ammendment was supposed to protect. Bullying your boss or your ex-girlfriend via publishing their life on the web, is one "freedom of speech" I'll be quite happy to do without.
And it's not even just about bloggers.
Companies too _are_ bound by some privacy laws, and doubly so in Europe. If anyone published my details, even in a newspaper or company brochure or as "customer of the month" on their games e-commerce site, they could get their pants sued off. That data is, simply put, mine not theirs in the first place. If they published children's addresses and schedule to go to school, I _think_ they may even run into some criminal laws.
But even in the USA, there are already laws covering that kind of thing. E.g., a newspaper can't publish your medical record.
So I see nothing wrong with asking that "bloggers" are bound by the same rules. Again, no, just being able to type a whine in a text box does _not_ make you god, does _not_ put you above privacy or common courtesy rules, and sure as hell does _not_ give you carte blance to bully other people ("here's my boss's home address and phone number. He's a fucking moron. Do something to inconvenience him.")
You're just a guy with a web page, nothing more. You're not above the law. And if something annoys enough people, the law gets changed to reflect that. Even if it involves bringing you down from the imaginary pedestal of blogger godhood. That's all.