I think most people will agree on this game. I play a lot of games, most of them once through (I'm not a huge FPS/online player, so a trip through the single player game and I'm usually done). The addictive thing about Diablo is the play mechanic... I was actually done with the game, and didn't have a desire to keep playing it, but for some reason I had to go through and play it again anyways.
MacKay doesn't have an instant solution to the problem, but says that English-speaking WOW players should "Keep a more open mind and trust people a little more.
"This would go a long way to bringing some racial harmony to World of Warcraft and the world in general."
It's ironic to talk about racial harmony in WoW, since the game is completely setup along the lines of race war. You can't even talk to players in the other faction; it's prevented by the server code and if you try to circumvent it you get banned. The result is a high level of distrust between the opposing factions, which I am guessing is completely by design.
It would be interesting if Blizzard opened some servers where Horde and Alliance could communicate; I wonder what would happen (and I'd certainly start a character on one!)
3. Dubbing obligations 3.1 The Licensee hereby warrants, represents and undertakes that it shall: (1) Dub each Track in its entirety provided that the Fade-down Section of any Track may be subject to the use of premature fade and cross-faded or overlapped with the Track following immediately thereafter provided that the period of audible cross fade or overlap does not exceed 2 (two) seconds; (2) not Dub Tracks in such a way as to accelerate the rate of the Fade-up Section at the commencement of any Track; (3) Dub Tracks so that all reproductions of Sound Recordings on a DJ Database or Back-up Database will be of sufficient technical standard so that the quality of the original Sound Recording is reasonably preserved for any person listening to the Service; (4) not mix, remix, Segue, edit, change or otherwise manipulate the sounds of any Sound Recording so that the sounds on the Dubbed copy of the Sound Recording are different from those on the original Sound Recording
This section is a HUGE restriction on DJs. It basically prevents you from doing mash-up style mixing, or even to do an extended transition. It prevents you from dropping samples in from other recordings, from beat juggling, in fact section 4 prevents you from using the EQ to alter the sound of the recording! These techniques are de facto standard with all the DJs I know. It shows a complete lack of understanding or disregard of DJing as an expressive musical form. I can't see DJ Shadow or Richie Hawtin following those guidelines.
You still have the targeted webbing from the first one, but the swinging mechanic has changed so that it's simpler, but I think less engaging than the web mechanic of the first one. Also, Spidey can't power up his jumps like he could in Spiderman II...
I too was hoping for Amazing Spiderman to be Spidey II with more content, since the mechanics of that game were just awesome. The content of AS is great, the Electro fight specifically, but I found little reason to keep playing beyond the story mode. I spent a good ten hours in Spiderman 2 swinging around, jumping from building to building, and generally just playing with the game mechanics outside of the story.
Hopefully the next Spidey will be based off Spiderman II.
'Anachronism eh? SO. Since you feel that in the Future we will all have equal access to all technology, how do you explain the fact that we are chatting to each other via a global information network while many thousands of people still live in subsistance communities?'
My wife spent six weeks in Uganda this summer in a village there. They recently got electricity for the first time ever, their houses have dirt floors, and they have to carry water half a mile from the well whenever they need it, since they don't have plumbing.
They also have cellphones and a few laptops, and they drive into Mbale to send and receive email. There are services in the city that will charge your electronic gear for a fee; you leave your phone or whatever with them and pick it up a few hours later.
It's quite possible to live in (nearly) subsistence communities and also 'chat via a global information network'... I don't think things are so clearly partitioned. The farmers in Mongolia may need global communications in order for them to sell their crops abroad.
I'd like to know who these real world developers are, who were disappointed to find they couldn't write general purpose code for vector units, and for whom multiple threads are too large a hurdle to overcome before PS4.
This article is just silly. Of COURSE if you do a straight port, your performance is going to suck. That's like writing a game for the PS2 and only using the core, while neglecting the 2 vector units on that machine. A static mesh renderer written which fully exploits the VU1 pipeline on the PS2 will be at least 20x faster than one that works only on the core. I am sure the same issues are at play in PS3/XB360. Any developer who has been around for a while has a decent idea of what they are in for given the specs for the new hardware. PS2 developers especially are used to balancing processing work across multiple chips. If the "real world developers" he talked to are coming over from an XBOX only dev environment, then yeah, I bet it's a rude awakening;)
And the idea that developers will just let silicon go to waste is ridiculous too. If they can't use it for the code they traditionally run it on, they will find things to put on it that WILL run well, like inverse kinematics for example. If game programmers have cycles left over to burn, they will find things to burn with them:) The comment is probably valid for the first cycle of games, when people are mostly concerned with time to market, but the 2nd round will be impressive. Actually, from the way Kameo and Ghost Recon looked at E3, the 1st cycle might be impressive too.
psh. it's not that hard. get the right tools for the job, ESPECIALLY the right gauge solder. practice on some old hardware first until you have the technique down, and then take a crack at the drive. i soldered and unsoldered a bunch of capacitors to old ISA boards i had lying around to learn. you probably have some of those lying around i'd imagine.
mind you, i'm only saying this because it sounds like easy soldering (i'm guessing the connector has big obvious pads). if it's a surface mount chip or something like that that has come off, then that's probably beyond beginner level soldering.
You can get super quiet 1K generators, which should be enough to power a projection setup as long as you're doing the low power broadcast thing for sound and not using speakers.
Punish the rich? It isn't about punishing the rich. People who benefit most from a society should give back the most to that society. That has been understood all the way back in recorded history, and it's only recently we've had this "you don't owe anyone anything" mentality.
Society creates the markets that caused these people to be able to build their fortunes. Society at great expense hires police and the military to protect their assets from those who would seek to take them away by force. Society trains and educates the people who become their work force. Society builds the roads that allow them to ship their goods from place to place easily.
I _guarantee_ you that the people who own oil companies benefit more from having a very expensive and mobile military than some minimum wage WalMart worker. The WalMart guy needs a military that's going to keep aggressors out of the US. The oil company needs an advanced military that can project force out into the global arena and secure foreign sources of oil. Why should the WalMart guy pay for that? Maybe he should just buy a hunting rifle to protect his home, and let EXXON buy all the bombs to drop on Baghdad.
Tying taxes to capital makes sense, because more capital = more to defend, more to support with infrastructure, etc. I wouldn't advocate it personally, but it is not an outrageous idea.
The thing that makes me angry is not that people have more than me. It's that those who have more whine all the time about how they're asked to do more, when the simple fact in modern, conservative America is they get more benefit from the tax dollar than the average taxpayer. You'll excuse me if I don't feel sorry for them.
According to the CBO, the top 1% paid 23% of all federal taxes. However, they also made 16% of the nations income, and more interestingly, posessed 39% of the nation's wealth (see here, or just google "us wealth distribution")
Pay 23% of all taxes, and get 39% of the wealth? Sounds like a good deal to me.
I called and apparently I'm the only one who has complained about this, at least according to the person I talked to on the other end of the phone.
They claimed it was justified because the government doesn't want people counterfeiting money, so they added the feature in. But aren't their other anti-counterfeiting measures in currency that do the job just fine, without this step?
I'm assuming that if they do this, then it's only a short step before they prohibit you from scanning things that have, oh, say a DRM watermark in it. The same kinds of argument can be made.
So give them a call and let them know how you feel about tools enforcing policy.
This simply doesn't wash. How about you let me raid your personal bank account, take your money and use it to put you out of business?
Ah, I don't know why I always give in to arguing with laissez-faire extremists. they always make the same boring arguments.
Tell ya what, why don't we move to the libertarian government free utopia you guys always want. I'll go buy the land from all your neighbors in a mile circle around your house, and then charge you $1 million dollars as a toll every time you wish to leave. Hey, it's a free economy, and i'm just trying to make a honest, hardworking buck.
Only the ones who gave away a ludicrous all-you-can-eat buffet for 1/10th their cost. Let's talk about a reality here - not the fiction of unlimited fiber and free capacity the deluded talk of. The Internet is a time-share of an international network. The closer you get to requiring more dedicated use and less shared use (e.g. sustained MP3 file transfers consuming 3 Mbps consistently), the more you need to either pay for a dedicated 3 Mbps of network, or else reduce your consumption.
The metering that I'm talking about (Comcast proposal) was on the order of 5GB/month free, with something like a dime/megabyte over that. If you were to have a "sustained" connection delivering that 5GB evenly over a month, your usage would be 2K/second. You could support about 3000 users on a T3 line at that rate. T3s are $10000 a month. So do you really think they should be charging $90000 a month for a $10000 resource? THAT'S the reality.
You could do a lot to manage that resource by _intelligent_ bandwidth throttling for abusers, scaling them back at peak times, but letting them have the run of the net when nobody is using it. But I don't think anyone puts that much thought into it.
As usual, revisionist history doesn't compute. FedEx and UPS emerged to provide service where the postal service had completely failed. "Letters sent quickly and reliably? Why would we do that? It'd take work!"
What the hell are you talking about? We still have a USPS, and their service IS better than it was pre competition. I guess in your revisionist present, the postal service has already failed and has been out of business by private sector competitors. I fail to see what your point is.
There is nothing the government does that isn't done better by honest, hard-working people.
Sigh. The old myth. Let's see the honest, hardworking people of the private sector defend the US from invasion, clean up after a bank collapse, or bail out a community that has been decimated by a natural disasted. Oh... that's right, they'd have no interest in that because there's no PROFIT in it.
The private sectors main focus is maximum profit for minimum service and expenditure. Doing things well is incidental to that goal. You can achieve success by being the best in your field, or by buying and assimilating your competition until you're the only one left. In which case it doesn't matter how bad your service is, you're the only game in town.
The government is stealing my money regardless of what they spend it on. They could spend it on a municipal internet provider that steps up to do what the commercial providers tremble and make excuses why they can't. Or they could kick it back to Walmart in tax breaks, so that they'll build more stores and drive local businessmen out of business and lower the prevailing wage.
I don't see a problem at all with govt stepping in where a need exists. And right now broadband is stalled because nobody wants to provide a level of service that will kickstart new applications. Instead broadband providers are cutting back on bandwidth, reducing functionality, and even talking about usage metering!
Government exists to serve the public interest. Corporations exist to generate profit for stakeholders, and are suffered to exist for the greater public good of what they can provide. If they can't serve the public effectively, it's reasonable for the government to step in and provide the necessary level of service.
Where the money comes from is not an issue to the competition. If by outspending the ISPs they actually do a better job, then that's fine, people will vote with their feet and sign up with the muni service. If they are as "incompetent" as you say they are, then they won't stand a chance, and the government will shut them down as a failed experiment.
It wouldn't be the first time a government org competed in a free marketplace. Look at the USPS, they are competing with FedEx and UPS. FedEx and UPS aren't exactly being driven out of business, they're thriving. And the USPS has improved vastly due to having to compete with them, to the point where they actually provide *gasp* customer service!
You know, if muni utilities are as inefficient as you say, then the big telecom companies should laugh at their efforts and look forward to crushing them in a competitive marketplace.
But instead they're complaining and getting laws passed to obstruct them.
During the power "crisis" in California, when rolling blackouts were affecting the rest of the state, I was in Los Angeles with rock steady power, low rates, and assurances that the supply of power was fine and that rates would stay the same. My provider? Los Angeles Dept. of Water and Power, a government run utililty company.
If a municipality wants to offer net access in a community and *compete* with the other providers, why should they be denied? It's a free market, and as long as you have a choice, you can choose corporate or utility provided service. In the end, you'll choose whoever provides the service at the best performance for the lowest cost.
There's still plenty of lag on broadband when playing games, and a lot of it has to do with unoptimized code (which normally is fixed later down the road via patches on the PC).
A lot MORE of it has to do with dropped packets on the internet, and ping times. There isn't a whole lot you can do to improve responsiveness at 200+ msec pings, other than change your game design to be less dependent on a real-time feedback loop.
Contrary to popular belief, bandwidth is NOT the issue when it comes to network games. It's latency. I wrote the networking game logic for Interstate '76, probably one of the first games playable on the internet, and it was not a big deal to get it to run with 4 players at 14.4k modem speeds! The bitch was the ping times, every modem link adds 100ms lag, so in those days pretty much every player was 200msec+. Real time games are pretty much unplayable at 400msec or greater, especially ones with vehicle physics and speeds:P There was NO amount of optimization I could do to change that lag, it was all hardware and the speed of light.
Granted that some network code is really bloated, particularly games that use an abstracted object state synchronization model, but the real cause of the problem is the lag time.
Well you can, but not with a lossy encoding scheme such as MP3. There are plenty of people out there, myself included, who simply do not like( or cannot even abide )the warbly sound of lossy compression, and would resist phasing out of high-resolution audio formats.
The funny thing about this, is that was what audiophiles said just before CDs replaced vinyl. "CDs will never replace vinyl, because digital media isn't as warm as an analog record."
I'm looking forward to intelligent machines like coffee makers that know how to make good coffee and record players that can mix tracks and perform scratches without a human DJ.
Artificial Intelligence need not be feared, if we use it wisely and with caution.
How about intelligent machines that can make posts to Slashdot convincing readers that Artificial Intelligence nead not be feared?
Hey, I'm on to you, buddy. You can't fool us humans that easily.
This is just a Bust A Move ripoff! It plays exactly the same!!
The arcade in UCLA's student union had something like 8 Bust A Move machines and they were always busy... back in 1992 when I was there in grad school. I doubt Snood is 11 years old.
There are a variety of factors which determine why a game fails to come to market, or why it comes to market in a fashion that makes people shake their heads and go "why did they even bother to make this piece of crap?". But the main reason is the the development cycle and how well the team making the game adheres to it.
A lot of teams suffer from a lack of ability to scope their project appropriately. They try to make "ubergames"; games with every possible feature imaginable or desirable, and the feature lists for these games often have their fanbase drooling for it's release. These teams tend to take the attitude "we will ship when it's done", and in doing so they lose the focus necessary to actually ship the game, because at no point do they stop making changes, because they can always see ways to "improve" the game. At that point, many things can happen that result in a failed game. The publisher may get sick of hearing their requests for more time, look at how much money they've spent on this unfinished game, and either cancel the project because they can never hope to recoup their investment, or force the team to wrap it and ship nearly as is, which means that the game will be buggy, unpolished, and missing a lot of the features that were promised. A good example of this was Sierra's Outpost; a planetary colonization sim that had a HUGE list of innovative features, which shipped buggy and with a README on the disk explaining that 2/3 of the features in the advertising were not in the game.
Alternately, the publisher may continue to have faith, or they may have a lot of money on their own, and they just keep working on the game ad infinitum (Duke Nukem, anyone?)
It's fine to make a game that is ambitious and takes longer than the 18-24 month standard development cycle; but it's critical to success that you set milestones and some form of schedule; but most importantly that you know when you need to stop adding stuff and bring the game to a finish.
Actually, Germany already has very strict controls on what kind of violence you can have in videogames... the most strict of any of the markets that I've ever shipped a game into. You can't show blood, you can't show anything remotely resembling dismemberment, and you can't have cruel or excessive violence (a la GTA3). Basically if it wouldn't get a Teen rating in the US (due to violence), you can't sell it in Germany.
Slashdot Mirror
"Windows Vista: Now you can let someone else tell you what you can do with your data."
I think most people will agree on this game. I play a lot of games, most of them once through (I'm not a huge FPS/online player, so a trip through the single player game and I'm usually done). The addictive thing about Diablo is the play mechanic... I was actually done with the game, and didn't have a desire to keep playing it, but for some reason I had to go through and play it again anyways.
MacKay doesn't have an instant solution to the problem, but says that English-speaking WOW players should "Keep a more open mind and trust people a little more.
"This would go a long way to bringing some racial harmony to World of Warcraft and the world in general."
It's ironic to talk about racial harmony in WoW, since the game is completely setup along the lines of race war. You can't even talk to players in the other faction; it's prevented by the server code and if you try to circumvent it you get banned. The result is a high level of distrust between the opposing factions, which I am guessing is completely by design.
It would be interesting if Blizzard opened some servers where Horde and Alliance could communicate; I wonder what would happen (and I'd certainly start a character on one!)
Within the current copyright regime, I don't really see it as unreasonable with asking DJ's to pay 200 for a licence. However, when you read the conditions of the licence (taken from PPLs site at http://www.ppluk.com/ppl/ppl_lf.nsf/PDFs/$file/Dig ital_DJ_Licence_Terms_and_Conditions.pdf), this is where you find the real unreasonableness of their demands:
3. Dubbing obligations
3.1 The Licensee hereby warrants, represents and undertakes that it shall:
(1) Dub each Track in its entirety provided that the Fade-down Section of any Track may be subject to the use of premature fade and cross-faded or overlapped with the Track following immediately thereafter provided that the period of audible cross fade or overlap does not exceed 2 (two) seconds;
(2) not Dub Tracks in such a way as to accelerate the rate of the Fade-up Section at the commencement of any Track;
(3) Dub Tracks so that all reproductions of Sound Recordings on a DJ Database or Back-up Database will be of sufficient technical standard so that the quality of the original Sound Recording is reasonably preserved for any person listening to the Service;
(4) not mix, remix, Segue, edit, change or otherwise manipulate the sounds of any Sound Recording so that the sounds on the Dubbed copy of the Sound Recording are different from those on the original Sound Recording
This section is a HUGE restriction on DJs. It basically prevents you from doing mash-up style mixing, or even to do an extended transition. It prevents you from dropping samples in from other recordings, from beat juggling, in fact section 4 prevents you from using the EQ to alter the sound of the recording! These techniques are de facto standard with all the DJs I know. It shows a complete lack of understanding or disregard of DJing as an expressive musical form. I can't see DJ Shadow or Richie Hawtin following those guidelines.
You still have the targeted webbing from the first one, but the swinging mechanic has changed so that it's simpler, but I think less engaging than the web mechanic of the first one. Also, Spidey can't power up his jumps like he could in Spiderman II...
I too was hoping for Amazing Spiderman to be Spidey II with more content, since the mechanics of that game were just awesome. The content of AS is great, the Electro fight specifically, but I found little reason to keep playing beyond the story mode. I spent a good ten hours in Spiderman 2 swinging around, jumping from building to building, and generally just playing with the game mechanics outside of the story.
Hopefully the next Spidey will be based off Spiderman II.
'Anachronism eh? SO. Since you feel that in the Future we will all have equal access to all technology, how do you explain the fact that we are chatting to each other via a global information network while many thousands of people still live in subsistance communities?'
My wife spent six weeks in Uganda this summer in a village there. They recently got electricity for the first time ever, their houses have dirt floors, and they have to carry water half a mile from the well whenever they need it, since they don't have plumbing.
They also have cellphones and a few laptops, and they drive into Mbale to send and receive email. There are services in the city that will charge your electronic gear for a fee; you leave your phone or whatever with them and pick it up a few hours later.
It's quite possible to live in (nearly) subsistence communities and also 'chat via a global information network'... I don't think things are so clearly partitioned. The farmers in Mongolia may need global communications in order for them to sell their crops abroad.
I'd like to know who these real world developers are, who were disappointed to find they couldn't write general purpose code for vector units, and for whom multiple threads are too large a hurdle to overcome before PS4.
;)
:) The comment is probably valid for the first cycle of games, when people are mostly concerned with time to market, but the 2nd round will be impressive. Actually, from the way Kameo and Ghost Recon looked at E3, the 1st cycle might be impressive too.
This article is just silly. Of COURSE if you do a straight port, your performance is going to suck. That's like writing a game for the PS2 and only using the core, while neglecting the 2 vector units on that machine. A static mesh renderer written which fully exploits the VU1 pipeline on the PS2 will be at least 20x faster than one that works only on the core. I am sure the same issues are at play in PS3/XB360. Any developer who has been around for a while has a decent idea of what they are in for given the specs for the new hardware. PS2 developers especially are used to balancing processing work across multiple chips. If the "real world developers" he talked to are coming over from an XBOX only dev environment, then yeah, I bet it's a rude awakening
And the idea that developers will just let silicon go to waste is ridiculous too. If they can't use it for the code they traditionally run it on, they will find things to put on it that WILL run well, like inverse kinematics for example. If game programmers have cycles left over to burn, they will find things to burn with them
-marsh
psh. it's not that hard. get the right tools for the job, ESPECIALLY the right gauge solder. practice on some old hardware first until you have the technique down, and then take a crack at the drive. i soldered and unsoldered a bunch of capacitors to old ISA boards i had lying around to learn. you probably have some of those lying around i'd imagine.
mind you, i'm only saying this because it sounds like easy soldering (i'm guessing the connector has big obvious pads). if it's a surface mount chip or something like that that has come off, then that's probably beyond beginner level soldering.
-marsh
yeah, because you know, he's a uniter not a divider...
You can get super quiet 1K generators, which should be enough to power a projection setup as long as you're doing the low power broadcast thing for sound and not using speakers.
Punish the rich? It isn't about punishing the rich. People who benefit most from a society should give back the most to that society. That has been understood all the way back in recorded history, and it's only recently we've had this "you don't owe anyone anything" mentality.
Society creates the markets that caused these people to be able to build their fortunes. Society at great expense hires police and the military to protect their assets from those who would seek to take them away by force. Society trains and educates the people who become their work force. Society builds the roads that allow them to ship their goods from place to place easily.
I _guarantee_ you that the people who own oil companies benefit more from having a very expensive and mobile military than some minimum wage WalMart worker. The WalMart guy needs a military that's going to keep aggressors out of the US. The oil company needs an advanced military that can project force out into the global arena and secure foreign sources of oil. Why should the WalMart guy pay for that? Maybe he should just buy a hunting rifle to protect his home, and let EXXON buy all the bombs to drop on Baghdad.
Tying taxes to capital makes sense, because more capital = more to defend, more to support with infrastructure, etc. I wouldn't advocate it personally, but it is not an outrageous idea.
The thing that makes me angry is not that people have more than me. It's that those who have more whine all the time about how they're asked to do more, when the simple fact in modern, conservative America is they get more benefit from the tax dollar than the average taxpayer. You'll excuse me if I don't feel sorry for them.
People in the top 2% of wealth pay over 90% of taxes.
uh, no.
taxes vs. income (see "Share of Income vs. Share of Taxes")
According to the CBO, the top 1% paid 23% of all federal taxes. However, they also made 16% of the nations income, and more interestingly, posessed 39% of the nation's wealth (see here, or just google "us wealth distribution")
Pay 23% of all taxes, and get 39% of the wealth? Sounds like a good deal to me.
Their customer service number is 800-833-6687.
I called and apparently I'm the only one who has complained about this, at least according to the person I talked to on the other end of the phone.
They claimed it was justified because the government doesn't want people counterfeiting money, so they added the feature in. But aren't their other anti-counterfeiting measures in currency that do the job just fine, without this step?
I'm assuming that if they do this, then it's only a short step before they prohibit you from scanning things that have, oh, say a DRM watermark in it. The same kinds of argument can be made.
So give them a call and let them know how you feel about tools enforcing policy.
Great, he modded his XBOX to look like an ugly version of an XBox devkit.
This simply doesn't wash. How about you let me raid your personal bank account, take your money and use it to put you out of business?
Ah, I don't know why I always give in to arguing with laissez-faire extremists. they always make the same boring arguments.
Tell ya what, why don't we move to the libertarian government free utopia you guys always want. I'll go buy the land from all your neighbors in a mile circle around your house, and then charge you $1 million dollars as a toll every time you wish to leave. Hey, it's a free economy, and i'm just trying to make a honest, hardworking buck.
Only the ones who gave away a ludicrous all-you-can-eat buffet for 1/10th their cost. Let's talk about a reality here - not the fiction of unlimited fiber and free capacity the deluded talk of. The Internet is a time-share of an international network. The closer you get to requiring more dedicated use and less shared use (e.g. sustained MP3 file transfers consuming 3 Mbps consistently), the more you need to either pay for a dedicated 3 Mbps of network, or else reduce your consumption.
The metering that I'm talking about (Comcast proposal) was on the order of 5GB/month free, with something like a dime/megabyte over that. If you were to have a "sustained" connection delivering that 5GB evenly over a month, your usage would be 2K/second. You could support about 3000 users on a T3 line at that rate. T3s are $10000 a month. So do you really think they should be charging $90000 a month for a $10000 resource? THAT'S the reality.
You could do a lot to manage that resource by _intelligent_ bandwidth throttling for abusers, scaling them back at peak times, but letting them have the run of the net when nobody is using it. But I don't think anyone puts that much thought into it.
As usual, revisionist history doesn't compute. FedEx and UPS emerged to provide service where the postal service had completely failed. "Letters sent quickly and reliably? Why would we do that? It'd take work!"
What the hell are you talking about? We still have a USPS, and their service IS better than it was pre competition. I guess in your revisionist present, the postal service has already failed and has been out of business by private sector competitors. I fail to see what your point is.
There is nothing the government does that isn't done better by honest, hard-working people.
Sigh. The old myth. Let's see the honest, hardworking people of the private sector defend the US from invasion, clean up after a bank collapse, or bail out a community that has been decimated by a natural disasted. Oh... that's right, they'd have no interest in that because there's no PROFIT in it.
The private sectors main focus is maximum profit for minimum service and expenditure. Doing things well is incidental to that goal. You can achieve success by being the best in your field, or by buying and assimilating your competition until you're the only one left. In which case it doesn't matter how bad your service is, you're the only game in town.
The government is stealing my money regardless of what they spend it on. They could spend it on a municipal internet provider that steps up to do what the commercial providers tremble and make excuses why they can't. Or they could kick it back to Walmart in tax breaks, so that they'll build more stores and drive local businessmen out of business and lower the prevailing wage.
I don't see a problem at all with govt stepping in where a need exists. And right now broadband is stalled because nobody wants to provide a level of service that will kickstart new applications. Instead broadband providers are cutting back on bandwidth, reducing functionality, and even talking about usage metering!
Government exists to serve the public interest. Corporations exist to generate profit for stakeholders, and are suffered to exist for the greater public good of what they can provide. If they can't serve the public effectively, it's reasonable for the government to step in and provide the necessary level of service.
Where the money comes from is not an issue to the competition. If by outspending the ISPs they actually do a better job, then that's fine, people will vote with their feet and sign up with the muni service. If they are as "incompetent" as you say they are, then they won't stand a chance, and the government will shut them down as a failed experiment.
It wouldn't be the first time a government org competed in a free marketplace. Look at the USPS, they are competing with FedEx and UPS. FedEx and UPS aren't exactly being driven out of business, they're thriving. And the USPS has improved vastly due to having to compete with them, to the point where they actually provide *gasp* customer service!
You know, if muni utilities are as inefficient as you say, then the big telecom companies should laugh at their efforts and look forward to crushing them in a competitive marketplace.
But instead they're complaining and getting laws passed to obstruct them.
During the power "crisis" in California, when rolling blackouts were affecting the rest of the state, I was in Los Angeles with rock steady power, low rates, and assurances that the supply of power was fine and that rates would stay the same. My provider? Los Angeles Dept. of Water and Power, a government run utililty company.
If a municipality wants to offer net access in a community and *compete* with the other providers, why should they be denied? It's a free market, and as long as you have a choice, you can choose corporate or utility provided service. In the end, you'll choose whoever provides the service at the best performance for the lowest cost.
I have had mine for a month, and it has just suffered catastrophic failure. Blinking unreadable LED display, won't respond to any buttons.
Hopefully Buy.com will replace it with a working model. It was pretty cool while it worked.
There's still plenty of lag on broadband when playing games, and a lot of it has to do with unoptimized code (which normally is fixed later down the road via patches on the PC).
:P There was NO amount of optimization I could do to change that lag, it was all hardware and the speed of light.
A lot MORE of it has to do with dropped packets on the internet, and ping times. There isn't a whole lot you can do to improve responsiveness at 200+ msec pings, other than change your game design to be less dependent on a real-time feedback loop.
Contrary to popular belief, bandwidth is NOT the issue when it comes to network games. It's latency. I wrote the networking game logic for Interstate '76, probably one of the first games playable on the internet, and it was not a big deal to get it to run with 4 players at 14.4k modem speeds! The bitch was the ping times, every modem link adds 100ms lag, so in those days pretty much every player was 200msec+. Real time games are pretty much unplayable at 400msec or greater, especially ones with vehicle physics and speeds
Granted that some network code is really bloated, particularly games that use an abstracted object state synchronization model, but the real cause of the problem is the lag time.
Well you can, but not with a lossy encoding scheme such as MP3. There are plenty of people out there, myself included, who simply do not like( or cannot even abide )the warbly sound of lossy compression, and would resist phasing out of high-resolution audio formats.
The funny thing about this, is that was what audiophiles said just before CDs replaced vinyl. "CDs will never replace vinyl, because digital media isn't as warm as an analog record."
We know how that turned out.
...And it really ties the room together.
I'm looking forward to intelligent machines like coffee makers that know how to make good coffee and record players that can mix tracks and perform scratches without a human DJ.
Artificial Intelligence need not be feared, if we use it wisely and with caution.
How about intelligent machines that can make posts to Slashdot convincing readers that Artificial Intelligence nead not be feared?
Hey, I'm on to you, buddy. You can't fool us humans that easily.
This is just a Bust A Move ripoff! It plays exactly the same!!
The arcade in UCLA's student union had something like 8 Bust A Move machines and they were always busy... back in 1992 when I was there in grad school. I doubt Snood is 11 years old.
-marsh
There are a variety of factors which determine why a game fails to come to market, or why it comes to market in a fashion that makes people shake their heads and go "why did they even bother to make this piece of crap?". But the main reason is the the development cycle and how well the team making the game adheres to it.
A lot of teams suffer from a lack of ability to scope their project appropriately. They try to make "ubergames"; games with every possible feature imaginable or desirable, and the feature lists for these games often have their fanbase drooling for it's release. These teams tend to take the attitude "we will ship when it's done", and in doing so they lose the focus necessary to actually ship the game, because at no point do they stop making changes, because they can always see ways to "improve" the game. At that point, many things can happen that result in a failed game. The publisher may get sick of hearing their requests for more time, look at how much money they've spent on this unfinished game, and either cancel the project because they can never hope to recoup their investment, or force the team to wrap it and ship nearly as is, which means that the game will be buggy, unpolished, and missing a lot of the features that were promised. A good example of this was Sierra's Outpost; a planetary colonization sim that had a HUGE list of innovative features, which shipped buggy and with a README on the disk explaining that 2/3 of the features in the advertising were not in the game.
Alternately, the publisher may continue to have faith, or they may have a lot of money on their own, and they just keep working on the game ad infinitum (Duke Nukem, anyone?)
It's fine to make a game that is ambitious and takes longer than the 18-24 month standard development cycle; but it's critical to success that you set milestones and some form of schedule; but most importantly that you know when you need to stop adding stuff and bring the game to a finish.
-marsh
Actually, Germany already has very strict controls on what kind of violence you can have in videogames... the most strict of any of the markets that I've ever shipped a game into. You can't show blood, you can't show anything remotely resembling dismemberment, and you can't have cruel or excessive violence (a la GTA3). Basically if it wouldn't get a Teen rating in the US (due to violence), you can't sell it in Germany.