Imagine if a software system required 75 different sentences, each one naming a different author or group of authors. To advertise that, you would need a full-page ad.
Christ. And I was worried about Iraq, gun control and third-world starvation for a moment there.
Oh, I'm not denying that it's probably the most convenient way of storing most western music. I've played several instruments in my time, and I fully appreciate the seven-note scale system. I only meant that it would seem nonsensical to any mathematically-minded person who'd never read music before.
The system my friend proposed was modelled around a keyboard where every white key was a tone apart, and black keys separated each one. It'd make playing anything remotely western a complete bitch, but transposing would be a walk in the park...
This reminds me of something I discussed with my friend recently. She's played a bit of music in the past, and being the scientific type, was baffled as to why we refer to musical notes in the way we do. Twelve semitones, but we use seven letters to refer to them, with all those odd sharps and flats? And all the ridiculous bandwidth we waste by having two or three ways of describing each one (double sharps and flats, anyone)? All sorts of nonsensical stuff.
Of course, it all originates from the design of the harpsichord (I think. Don't quote me on that), but surely in this modern age of open standards and such, some visionary must have come up with a more elegant* alternative. Does anyone know of one?
*though clearly, not necessarily more functional. This is standards we're talking about here.
I still feel like I'm missing something here: Just what does the OSS community have to lose?
SCO is a company. A company is like a single organism; it struggles to stay alive. It can die at a moment's notice. All it can do is put off its death, and the only way to do that is by being big, strong, selfish and violent. But it's an uphill battle, and the slightest mistake can bring it all crashing down.
The OSS community, analogously, is like an entire species. There's only one way to make ferns extinct: kill all of them. If Linux was destroyed tomorrow, there'd be replacements within the week (especially as, if I'm not mistaken, it's only a fraction of code that's supposedly stolen. And then there's GNU/Hurd). OSS exists because it needs to. Crushing it would be an exercise on a par with all the plans the evil, camp villains in cheesy musicals have to rid the world of music.
So Joe Average is spoonfed some over-zealous rubbish about Free Software being a plague on the planet created by EVIL HACKERS WHO WANT YOUR CREDIT CARD DETAILS. Anyone with an ounce of sense will see the real picture.
I can understand why you don't like it - the creators made some laughably bad decisions at times - but I think it's a bit extreme to call it a joke. It's got plenty of plot, sentiment, whateveryouwanttocallit, but hides it behind meaningful looks and teen drama so obsessively it almost disappears.
My general impression of Eva is a beautiful series that got too full of itself and went rather horribly wrong at the end (it's not that I don't like all the pseudo-philosophical stuff that features throughout the series - in fact, Eva's strongest moments for me were when Shinji and co weren't busy fighting off Angel Du Jour and were concentrating on being human beings). I think it could have been vastly improved if it had been half the length, and if Anno had gone full steam ahead and done an "End of Eva"-style climax.
That said, one of the best things about End was the feature-film budget and production values - but then, they'd have had twice the money to spend per episode if they'd cut it down.
To an extent. From what I've been able to garner (with more than a little help from these people), it's a very tenuous connection (343 = 7*7*7, Marathon fans!).
Halo 2 is supposedly going to expand on the story in a big way, and will probably reinforce that connection (as well as - Bungie tell us - making us realise just how many Secret Clues were left around Halo. Oh well, any excuse to play the game again...)
I'm an absolute Marathon freak, but while its story may well be the best story (and the best-told story - Bungie communicated an amazing amount of information purely through those terminals) in any game ever, it's not the magnum opus of design and balance that Halo is.
It's the little things. The huge variations created simply by approaching a fight from the other side, or using different weapons. The complete disregard for the Doom mentality that's plagued PC shooters since forever (weapon x is better than weapon x-1! your health starts at 100 and is chipped away tediously bullet by bullet!) in favour of a far more revolutionary and interesting system (each weapon is equally good, and the tremendous differences between them create wonderful interplay between you and the enemies, depending on what you're equipped with. Your shield recharges, so you're forced to make use of every scrap of cover that's around, and the level designers clearly realised this from the outset). The stunning, unpredictable AI. It's genuinely one of the most important games ever made, but no-one can stop shouting "console-selling mediocrity" and look at the big picture, save a few (hence the vitriolic reaction from most corners when Edge magazine rated it 10/10).
Halo outshines pretty much every other game Bungie ever made. The fact that it was made for and under the supervision of Microsoft changes nothing - if anything, it means the game's far more polished than their earlier work. Bungie are well and truly alive and kicking. It's just that now they have a marketing team and an unlimited supply of blank cheques. Why is that a bad thing again?
Branching of plot is overrated, and really not worth the exponential increase in development time. You can have a lot more fun by subtly altering the story according the player's actions, around a core set of static events, as the first game did to an extent.
The real leap forward in DX2 should be the increased emphasis on systemic design. Areas having social context in ways more interesting than "weapons allowed" or "weapons not allowed". NPCs which actually exchange information when they talk to each other. That kind of thing.
There is no justice until Rez is respected for the work of synaesthesic brilliance it is.
(How many other games are dedicated to Bauhaus artists, for God's sake.) ((Except all those trippy German games from the 80s.)) (((All three of them.)))
What worries me is, Anti-Leech have already put together a rather sneaky anti-anti-popup system that takes some serious acrobatics to get around, so pop-up blocking is likely to become uber-moot quicker than ever.
Slashdot Mirror
Come on, there's no need for that; I was just having a laugh. For the record, if I could mark it as Overrated, I would.
Imagine if a software system required 75 different sentences, each one naming a different author or group of authors. To advertise that, you would need a full-page ad.
Christ. And I was worried about Iraq, gun control and third-world starvation for a moment there.
Oh, I'm not denying that it's probably the most convenient way of storing most western music. I've played several instruments in my time, and I fully appreciate the seven-note scale system. I only meant that it would seem nonsensical to any mathematically-minded person who'd never read music before.
The system my friend proposed was modelled around a keyboard where every white key was a tone apart, and black keys separated each one. It'd make playing anything remotely western a complete bitch, but transposing would be a walk in the park...
This reminds me of something I discussed with my friend recently. She's played a bit of music in the past, and being the scientific type, was baffled as to why we refer to musical notes in the way we do. Twelve semitones, but we use seven letters to refer to them, with all those odd sharps and flats? And all the ridiculous bandwidth we waste by having two or three ways of describing each one (double sharps and flats, anyone)? All sorts of nonsensical stuff.
Of course, it all originates from the design of the harpsichord (I think. Don't quote me on that), but surely in this modern age of open standards and such, some visionary must have come up with a more elegant* alternative. Does anyone know of one?
*though clearly, not necessarily more functional. This is standards we're talking about here.
I still feel like I'm missing something here: Just what does the OSS community have to lose?
SCO is a company. A company is like a single organism; it struggles to stay alive. It can die at a moment's notice. All it can do is put off its death, and the only way to do that is by being big, strong, selfish and violent. But it's an uphill battle, and the slightest mistake can bring it all crashing down.
The OSS community, analogously, is like an entire species. There's only one way to make ferns extinct: kill all of them. If Linux was destroyed tomorrow, there'd be replacements within the week (especially as, if I'm not mistaken, it's only a fraction of code that's supposedly stolen. And then there's GNU/Hurd). OSS exists because it needs to. Crushing it would be an exercise on a par with all the plans the evil, camp villains in cheesy musicals have to rid the world of music.
So Joe Average is spoonfed some over-zealous rubbish about Free Software being a plague on the planet created by EVIL HACKERS WHO WANT YOUR CREDIT CARD DETAILS. Anyone with an ounce of sense will see the real picture.
I can understand why you don't like it - the creators made some laughably bad decisions at times - but I think it's a bit extreme to call it a joke. It's got plenty of plot, sentiment, whateveryouwanttocallit, but hides it behind meaningful looks and teen drama so obsessively it almost disappears.
My general impression of Eva is a beautiful series that got too full of itself and went rather horribly wrong at the end (it's not that I don't like all the pseudo-philosophical stuff that features throughout the series - in fact, Eva's strongest moments for me were when Shinji and co weren't busy fighting off Angel Du Jour and were concentrating on being human beings). I think it could have been vastly improved if it had been half the length, and if Anno had gone full steam ahead and done an "End of Eva"-style climax.
That said, one of the best things about End was the feature-film budget and production values - but then, they'd have had twice the money to spend per episode if they'd cut it down.
I, for one, would love a movie of nothing but Shinji's psychedelic dreams as in episodes 25 and 26 of the series.
I think I would actually rather go and watch the first Pokemon movie than see those again.
These movies are like days long. There just isn't the bandwidth. It's the end of P2P!
Nothing that a nice copy of CDex can't fix.
"we all love and work and sing and die"
Yeah, but where are the Windows users going afterwards?
...is it Fair Trade?
Me, I'm getting Deus Ex flashbacks.
"The upload is complete. Your systems were very coopera... is that a copy of KaZaA?!"
To an extent. From what I've been able to garner (with more than a little help from these people), it's a very tenuous connection (343 = 7*7*7, Marathon fans!).
Halo 2 is supposedly going to expand on the story in a big way, and will probably reinforce that connection (as well as - Bungie tell us - making us realise just how many Secret Clues were left around Halo. Oh well, any excuse to play the game again...)
I'm an absolute Marathon freak, but while its story may well be the best story (and the best-told story - Bungie communicated an amazing amount of information purely through those terminals) in any game ever, it's not the magnum opus of design and balance that Halo is.
It's the little things. The huge variations created simply by approaching a fight from the other side, or using different weapons. The complete disregard for the Doom mentality that's plagued PC shooters since forever (weapon x is better than weapon x-1! your health starts at 100 and is chipped away tediously bullet by bullet!) in favour of a far more revolutionary and interesting system (each weapon is equally good, and the tremendous differences between them create wonderful interplay between you and the enemies, depending on what you're equipped with. Your shield recharges, so you're forced to make use of every scrap of cover that's around, and the level designers clearly realised this from the outset). The stunning, unpredictable AI. It's genuinely one of the most important games ever made, but no-one can stop shouting "console-selling mediocrity" and look at the big picture, save a few (hence the vitriolic reaction from most corners when Edge magazine rated it 10/10).
When the hell did Sega start making good marketing decisions?
Halo outshines pretty much every other game Bungie ever made. The fact that it was made for and under the supervision of Microsoft changes nothing - if anything, it means the game's far more polished than their earlier work. Bungie are well and truly alive and kicking. It's just that now they have a marketing team and an unlimited supply of blank cheques. Why is that a bad thing again?
(and dude, writing "M$" is so 1999.)
Branching of plot is overrated, and really not worth the exponential increase in development time. You can have a lot more fun by subtly altering the story according the player's actions, around a core set of static events, as the first game did to an extent. The real leap forward in DX2 should be the increased emphasis on systemic design. Areas having social context in ways more interesting than "weapons allowed" or "weapons not allowed". NPCs which actually exchange information when they talk to each other. That kind of thing.
I bet you can't wait for your users to submit 862 new types of Desert Eagle.
There is no justice until Rez is respected for the work of synaesthesic brilliance it is.
(How many other games are dedicated to Bauhaus artists, for God's sake.)
((Except all those trippy German games from the 80s.))
(((All three of them.)))
What worries me is, Anti-Leech have already put together a rather sneaky anti-anti-popup system that takes some serious acrobatics to get around, so pop-up blocking is likely to become uber-moot quicker than ever.