And the primary purpose of classification is to categorise media based on a central review of the contents of the media with regards to the "suitability" of the content. This enables parents, at least, parents who are responsible for deciding what their children don't get to see until they're old enough, to make slightly more informed decisions about content.
Without content classification, parents would need to go through reviews and extensive research to make the same decisions.
Certainly, you could suggest that by taking this responsibility, parents are infringing upon the rights of their children, however. Perhaps the problem is not classification at all, but the unwillingness of any group to define the line of responsibility that parents must take.
I'd prefer a society of parental responsibility. I've seen plenty of cases where parent's haven't been responsible, and although some of those cases are in PITA-jail, many aren't. Classifying games won't stop many people from playing them, and even if they do they won't turn into criminals. Neither will reading violent books or watching violent movies. This is not the point. A society where any tools that enable parental responsibility are readily available will be better off than one without them. So what's the problem with classification as a guide to assist parents in making the right choices?
It's more complicated than that. You can't have 8 year old kids going out and buying alcohol, cigarettes, Playboy magazine, whatever. Sure, 90% or better of the underage population wouldn't be interested anyway, but that isn't exactly the point. 8 year old kids shouldn't go out and buy Playboy:The Mansion, either, and not just because it's an awful game.
Alcohol is a serious drug and it can cause serious problems. Likewise, some explicit material just isn't right for people under 18 to get involved in. It really isn't. So how do you ensure that people under 18 can't access this material? What's your solution?
Are you seriously advocating that explicit material should be available to young children?
The solution suggested is one I consider to be the only workable scenario. As an adult, I can get whatever computer games, alcohol, cigarettes, whatever I want to get, I'm entitled to go out and get it. People who are too young for these things just have to wait, like I had to wait before I could legally buy alcohol.
But you seem to think that this is a bad idea. Okay then, I'll throw down the gauntlet. What's your solution? How do you make these products available to people who are emotionally mature enough for them, whilst preventing their availabilty to people who aren't grown up enough for them?
In Duke Nukem there's a cutscene where you rip off some bad alien's head and do the proverbial down his throat. Strange but true. I imagine that was they're referring to.
I wouldn't recommend Duke Nukem for kids, and I'm all for classification instead of outright censorship. If you're over 18 and you can buy any game you want to, where's the bad? If you're a kid and you want to play a game that has sex, graphic violence, nudity, whatever in it, perhaps that should be up to your parents to decide whether they want to buy the game for you.
That's a lot better than saying "Well this Superbowl game has a wardrobe malfunction in it, so we can't let anybody on earth see it. We're just going to burn down the warehouses that it's stored in now."
A lot of modders aren't touching HL2 because they don't want to have to deal with the Steam engine. If I were a modder, I am sure I could find a bunch of different engines more suitable. I know the Unreal guys like it when people mod with their engine... and they don't make you wrestle with Steam to do it.
Half Life 2 doesn't do anything new in a PC game that hasn't been done before to death, from physics engine, graphics, sound, gameplay, even scripted events.
Half Life 2 derives these elements of gameplay and plot from the original Half Life and from other FPS games in the genre.
Therefore, Half Life 2 is a derivative work.
I won't discount Half Life 2 because it's derivative. I'll discount it because of Steam, because Valve deliberately rigged the game engine so it wouldn't work so well on all hardware because they took $5M in payment from ATI, because Valve held back the game because the source code was "stolen" (I guess they couldn't work on it because they no longer had it when it was stolen away from them, huh). I'll discount it because the graphics engine didn't have the same power as the DooM3 engine (some of the lighting effects were awful). I'll discount it because when Valve goes out of business one day, we won't ever be able to play the game again. I'll discount it because the ending to the game felt half-finished.
But to make you feel better, I won't discount it because it's yet-another-scripted-event-shooter.
Funny you should say that. There's a known issue with NForce 3 chipsets and certain versions of the 9600XT card. Once I set myself down to 4x, all the issues went away. Could this be related to the issues you're experiencing? I have a 3000+ at home and had all the same problems until I lowered the multiplier. Now I'm running a 6800 and everything is perfect.
The Catalyst drivers don't have a choice if you set the AGP multiplier to 4 in your BIOS.
I played the original KOTOR with a 9600XT with no problems.
I had problems with KOTOR2 on my LeadTek 6800, but updating the driver fixed all the issues.
Things to do if you experience issues with your ATI card:
1) Check LucasArts website. They have a list of specific video cards that have known issues. 2) Make sure you are running the latest drivers for your mainboard/GPU. 3) Make sure you aren't forcing FSAA/Aniso/etc through the ATI drivers - this can interfere with some games, especially games like KOTOR that like to control those features from within the game. 4) Switch off those features or try running the game with the bare minimum of detail. I have some issues with some games with certain graphics features enabled - for instance, MOHAA:PA doesn't work with Pixel Shader 2.0 enabled on my system. 5) Wait for the patch. LucasArts are releasing a patch for KOTOR2 very soon (europe patch is already out)
The cinematics look awful because they were written for the X-Box, although surely the X-Box could handle higher resolution playback. The wonders of console development, lowering the quality of a computer game near you!
I had serious issues with my 6800, but then I updated ForceWare (aka Detonator) to 66.93 and it is all running smoothly and without any problems.
Also, a patch is forthcoming shortly (already released for the European versions).
The game itself is okay so far but I haven't played through to the end so I can't confirm or deny what the reviewer had to say. It would be a shame because it's a nice enough game, although I enjoyed the original game immensely.
This game uses the same engine however, so should be sold as an expansion or add-on instead of a completely new game. I don't think games deserve a 2.0 unless they're based on a different engine.
Intel has been wanting to do this for years! I remember reading old articles on The Register about it, and how they were pulling back because Microsoft didn't like the idea of Intel taking away things that Microsoft were running with their software, including things like managing networking instead of having the OS do it.
Of course it couldn't last, what with nVidia doing firewalls and NICs and all sorts of other things, Intel is a big company and they know when they need to compete. MS has also lost a bit of their clout when it comes to things like pressuring the bigger companies (intel, HP, Dell)
Under Windows XP or 2K3, by default, Windows File Protection (if enabled) will restore iexplore.exe to its rightful place, so unfortunately deleting iexplore.exe is not exactly that simple.
But otherwise that was a very informative post, it's about time someone looked at the situation a bit more objectively.
Another thing people seem to complain about is that because IE is bundled, it's a bad thing - well in many ways it is a bad thing, but I have come to realise that no OS is particularly useful without a web browser, and almost every Linux distro I have seen bundles a web browser and a media player, but people don't complain about those - in fact it's very important for the end user experience for the OS to do all the basic things you need out of the box (I'm talking desktop here of course).
Windows Server shouldn't have a media player or web browser however. Perhaps as an optional component you can install or enable by flicking a switch. MS uses "internet explorer enhanced security configuration" instead on Win2K3. Too little too late I think.
Game review scores are meaningless, according to the author, because games of different genres cannot be compared in such a numerical way. Of course, what the author doesn't recognise is that the review does indicate a raw level of quality within the genre.
FPS is a particularly good example - games like DooM3 and HL2, both excellent FPS games with their own strengths, reviewed very highly compared with games like Sniper and The Thing (full of bugs). As a result, if I go to gametab or another aggregation site, I can get a good idea of how well any particular game would compare with others in the same genre. Admittedly I sometimes disagree with the exact numbers (in terms of design and artwork, DooM3 was superior to HL2, in terms of gameplay only, HL2 was superior to DooM3, studying the engine makes this quite obvious). Nonetheless I find reviews are reasonable accurate when used for the purpose of comparing games within the same genre. Having said that, you can never trust a single source because many reviewers are essentially bribed or bought into giving certain review scores - Enter the Matrix is a particularly good example of an awful game with an inexplicable high score - at least until the independant review sites savaged it, pushing the aggregate down on the tabulation sites.
Microsoft's traditional embrace and extent methodology in practice.
1) Threaten spammers 2) Buy out or eliminate 3) Pick up the spamming technology and patents 4) Bundle with windows 5) CTRL-ALT-DEL to log on and would you like some V1@gR@ with that?
This is interesting, seems like everyone + dog is jumping onto the "toolbar for IE/Firefox" bandwagon.
What I want to know is, does it have spyware? I seem to remember Yahoo! being in cahoots with some spyware jockeys a year or so ago.
What will this do to Firefox's reputation? I trust firefox and I advocate it heavily to all and sundry. But now, if toolbars like this contain spyware or malware, won't that just turn Firefox into another security hole?
Certainly there is something amiss in the music industry, where a CD sells for $30AUD and the "artist" gets $1. Personally I'm more in favour of the work of musicians and singers than "artists".
Nowadays, we can all listen to music for "Free".
We have been able to do this on commercial radio for some time, however the difference between that old model and this new digital model is that no advertising revenue is gained and piped indirectly back into the music industry.
The difference is, you still paid the rum distiller for the rum, it was this act of buying rum that was illegal. There was no "victim" in this process, morally, prohibition was a very neutral law.
In the case of Kazaa, Kazaa are assisting it's members by providing a conduit that facilitates copyright infringement.
Kazaa themselves committed no direct copyright infringement, however, in the US and some other countries, it is illegal to facilitate copyright infringement (seriously!), which falls along similar lines to modding X-boxes and so on.
So unlike prohibition (the removal of which fostered local business and gave the government a hefty new tax revenue), copyright infringement does have a negative effect on business, or at least it can be argued that it does (CD sales do not seem to be impacted). Having said that, if copyright law was rescinded overnight, I bet iTunes sales would plummet.
Indeedy, the heat generated/dissapated by a CPU is generated by two main factors, simply put.
1) The amount of electricty flowing through it. 2) The size of the CPU
Now, you need a lot of electricity to run a complex CPU and you need more to run it at higher frequencies. The Cell is going to run at speeds higher than 4GHz, and it's die size is greater than that of a P4. So it's going to need whopping great amounts of electricity to make all that magic happen.
CPU's aren't 100% efficient, nothing is, so some of that electricity will bleed off as heat. Since we're dealing with (presumably) more electricty than a P4 (let's not count idle states needing less power because if the magic of the Cell technology happens, we'll use all the processor can handle), the heat is going to be sensational.
To run the latest near-4GHz CPU's from intel, you need to mount a whopping great water cooling system to handle the heat.
Now Sony wants to put 3 or 4 x 4.6GHz CPU's into a single small form factor box?
I seem to remember how loudly the Sony fanboys complained about the noise coming from the XBox... this will be amusing. Will it ship with it's own refrigerator?
Once they get an efficient, free, easy to use DirectX emulator running under Linux, Linux proliferation will make the FireFox explosion look like a whimper.
Most new Windows PC's are now shipping with SP2. SP2 enables the firewall by default, and connects to Windowsupdate during the build process for the latest patches.
Clearly the author 1) Has an old copy of Windows 2) Didn't update during the build process 3) Is not experienced or sensible enough to install any OS, or write columns pretending to be knowledgable in the field of I/T.
You wouldn't build a Linux box without using an up to date distro and kernel. You wouldn't connect it to the internet without firewalling it.
You wouldn't build a Mac without using an up to date revision of MacOS. You wouldn't connect it to the internet without firewalling it.
Why on earth is this guy able to get kudos from the Slashdot community for building an older version of Windows and not firewalling it, then complaining that it got pwn3d?
Although quite often publishers have made some bad decisions with regards to games, in this case the Developer is a very strong one with an excellent record.
Bethesda have made some great, but very under-rated games, from Terminator 2029 through to Elder Scrolls and so on. I have high expectations from these up and coming games.
Slashdot Mirror
And the primary purpose of classification is to categorise media based on a central review of the contents of the media with regards to the "suitability" of the content. This enables parents, at least, parents who are responsible for deciding what their children don't get to see until they're old enough, to make slightly more informed decisions about content.
Without content classification, parents would need to go through reviews and extensive research to make the same decisions.
Certainly, you could suggest that by taking this responsibility, parents are infringing upon the rights of their children, however. Perhaps the problem is not classification at all, but the unwillingness of any group to define the line of responsibility that parents must take.
I'd prefer a society of parental responsibility. I've seen plenty of cases where parent's haven't been responsible, and although some of those cases are in PITA-jail, many aren't. Classifying games won't stop many people from playing them, and even if they do they won't turn into criminals. Neither will reading violent books or watching violent movies. This is not the point. A society where any tools that enable parental responsibility are readily available will be better off than one without them. So what's the problem with classification as a guide to assist parents in making the right choices?
I wouldn't recommend the bible to any child. Just look at what's been done in the world in the name of it.
Likewise, there are some who believe that Star Wars is becoming less appropriate for not only children, but for people in genereal.
There are two ways to look at it.
I won't support censorship "for the children".
I will support classification "for the children".
Censorship removes your right to choice.
Classification doesn't, although you might have to wait a little while if you're underage.
This topic is mostly about classification, not censorship. So what's the problem? RW - you're under 18, aren't ya?
It's more complicated than that. You can't have 8 year old kids going out and buying alcohol, cigarettes, Playboy magazine, whatever. Sure, 90% or better of the underage population wouldn't be interested anyway, but that isn't exactly the point. 8 year old kids shouldn't go out and buy Playboy:The Mansion, either, and not just because it's an awful game.
Alcohol is a serious drug and it can cause serious problems. Likewise, some explicit material just isn't right for people under 18 to get involved in. It really isn't. So how do you ensure that people under 18 can't access this material? What's your solution?
Are you seriously advocating that explicit material should be available to young children?
The solution suggested is one I consider to be the only workable scenario. As an adult, I can get whatever computer games, alcohol, cigarettes, whatever I want to get, I'm entitled to go out and get it. People who are too young for these things just have to wait, like I had to wait before I could legally buy alcohol.
But you seem to think that this is a bad idea. Okay then, I'll throw down the gauntlet. What's your solution? How do you make these products available to people who are emotionally mature enough for them, whilst preventing their availabilty to people who aren't grown up enough for them?
In Duke Nukem there's a cutscene where you rip off some bad alien's head and do the proverbial down his throat. Strange but true. I imagine that was they're referring to.
I wouldn't recommend Duke Nukem for kids, and I'm all for classification instead of outright censorship. If you're over 18 and you can buy any game you want to, where's the bad? If you're a kid and you want to play a game that has sex, graphic violence, nudity, whatever in it, perhaps that should be up to your parents to decide whether they want to buy the game for you.
That's a lot better than saying "Well this Superbowl game has a wardrobe malfunction in it, so we can't let anybody on earth see it. We're just going to burn down the warehouses that it's stored in now."
A lot of modders aren't touching HL2 because they don't want to have to deal with the Steam engine. If I were a modder, I am sure I could find a bunch of different engines more suitable. I know the Unreal guys like it when people mod with their engine... and they don't make you wrestle with Steam to do it.
I agree with your first two paragraphs.
However.
Half Life 2 doesn't do anything new in a PC game that hasn't been done before to death, from physics engine, graphics, sound, gameplay, even scripted events.
Half Life 2 derives these elements of gameplay and plot from the original Half Life and from other FPS games in the genre.
Therefore, Half Life 2 is a derivative work.
I won't discount Half Life 2 because it's derivative. I'll discount it because of Steam, because Valve deliberately rigged the game engine so it wouldn't work so well on all hardware because they took $5M in payment from ATI, because Valve held back the game because the source code was "stolen" (I guess they couldn't work on it because they no longer had it when it was stolen away from them, huh). I'll discount it because the graphics engine didn't have the same power as the DooM3 engine (some of the lighting effects were awful). I'll discount it because when Valve goes out of business one day, we won't ever be able to play the game again. I'll discount it because the ending to the game felt half-finished.
But to make you feel better, I won't discount it because it's yet-another-scripted-event-shooter.
I never read that one. I thought the next book title was going to be "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince".
Or did JK Rowling suddenly become pious?
Funny you should say that. There's a known issue with NForce 3 chipsets and certain versions of the 9600XT card. Once I set myself down to 4x, all the issues went away. Could this be related to the issues you're experiencing? I have a 3000+ at home and had all the same problems until I lowered the multiplier. Now I'm running a 6800 and everything is perfect.
The Catalyst drivers don't have a choice if you set the AGP multiplier to 4 in your BIOS.
I played the original KOTOR with a 9600XT with no problems.
I had problems with KOTOR2 on my LeadTek 6800, but updating the driver fixed all the issues.
Things to do if you experience issues with your ATI card:
1) Check LucasArts website. They have a list of specific video cards that have known issues.
2) Make sure you are running the latest drivers for your mainboard/GPU.
3) Make sure you aren't forcing FSAA/Aniso/etc through the ATI drivers - this can interfere with some games, especially games like KOTOR that like to control those features from within the game.
4) Switch off those features or try running the game with the bare minimum of detail. I have some issues with some games with certain graphics features enabled - for instance, MOHAA:PA doesn't work with Pixel Shader 2.0 enabled on my system.
5) Wait for the patch. LucasArts are releasing a patch for KOTOR2 very soon (europe patch is already out)
The cinematics look awful because they were written for the X-Box, although surely the X-Box could handle higher resolution playback. The wonders of console development, lowering the quality of a computer game near you!
I had serious issues with my 6800, but then I updated ForceWare (aka Detonator) to 66.93 and it is all running smoothly and without any problems.
Also, a patch is forthcoming shortly (already released for the European versions).
The game itself is okay so far but I haven't played through to the end so I can't confirm or deny what the reviewer had to say. It would be a shame because it's a nice enough game, although I enjoyed the original game immensely.
This game uses the same engine however, so should be sold as an expansion or add-on instead of a completely new game. I don't think games deserve a 2.0 unless they're based on a different engine.
Intel has been wanting to do this for years! I remember reading old articles on The Register about it, and how they were pulling back because Microsoft didn't like the idea of Intel taking away things that Microsoft were running with their software, including things like managing networking instead of having the OS do it.
Of course it couldn't last, what with nVidia doing firewalls and NICs and all sorts of other things, Intel is a big company and they know when they need to compete. MS has also lost a bit of their clout when it comes to things like pressuring the bigger companies (intel, HP, Dell)
Shaka, when the walls fell.
Under Windows XP or 2K3, by default, Windows File Protection (if enabled) will restore iexplore.exe to its rightful place, so unfortunately deleting iexplore.exe is not exactly that simple.
But otherwise that was a very informative post, it's about time someone looked at the situation a bit more objectively.
Another thing people seem to complain about is that because IE is bundled, it's a bad thing - well in many ways it is a bad thing, but I have come to realise that no OS is particularly useful without a web browser, and almost every Linux distro I have seen bundles a web browser and a media player, but people don't complain about those - in fact it's very important for the end user experience for the OS to do all the basic things you need out of the box (I'm talking desktop here of course).
Windows Server shouldn't have a media player or web browser however. Perhaps as an optional component you can install or enable by flicking a switch. MS uses "internet explorer enhanced security configuration" instead on Win2K3. Too little too late I think.
Game review scores are meaningless, according to the author, because games of different genres cannot be compared in such a numerical way. Of course, what the author doesn't recognise is that the review does indicate a raw level of quality within the genre.
FPS is a particularly good example - games like DooM3 and HL2, both excellent FPS games with their own strengths, reviewed very highly compared with games like Sniper and The Thing (full of bugs). As a result, if I go to gametab or another aggregation site, I can get a good idea of how well any particular game would compare with others in the same genre. Admittedly I sometimes disagree with the exact numbers (in terms of design and artwork, DooM3 was superior to HL2, in terms of gameplay only, HL2 was superior to DooM3, studying the engine makes this quite obvious). Nonetheless I find reviews are reasonable accurate when used for the purpose of comparing games within the same genre. Having said that, you can never trust a single source because many reviewers are essentially bribed or bought into giving certain review scores - Enter the Matrix is a particularly good example of an awful game with an inexplicable high score - at least until the independant review sites savaged it, pushing the aggregate down on the tabulation sites.
Microsoft's traditional embrace and extent methodology in practice.
1) Threaten spammers
2) Buy out or eliminate
3) Pick up the spamming technology and patents
4) Bundle with windows
5) CTRL-ALT-DEL to log on and would you like some V1@gR@ with that?
This is interesting, seems like everyone + dog is jumping onto the "toolbar for IE/Firefox" bandwagon.
What I want to know is, does it have spyware? I seem to remember Yahoo! being in cahoots with some spyware jockeys a year or so ago.
What will this do to Firefox's reputation? I trust firefox and I advocate it heavily to all and sundry. But now, if toolbars like this contain spyware or malware, won't that just turn Firefox into another security hole?
Certainly there is something amiss in the music industry, where a CD sells for $30AUD and the "artist" gets $1. Personally I'm more in favour of the work of musicians and singers than "artists".
Nowadays, we can all listen to music for "Free".
We have been able to do this on commercial radio for some time, however the difference between that old model and this new digital model is that no advertising revenue is gained and piped indirectly back into the music industry.
The difference is, you still paid the rum distiller for the rum, it was this act of buying rum that was illegal. There was no "victim" in this process, morally, prohibition was a very neutral law.
In the case of Kazaa, Kazaa are assisting it's members by providing a conduit that facilitates copyright infringement.
Kazaa themselves committed no direct copyright infringement, however, in the US and some other countries, it is illegal to facilitate copyright infringement (seriously!), which falls along similar lines to modding X-boxes and so on.
So unlike prohibition (the removal of which fostered local business and gave the government a hefty new tax revenue), copyright infringement does have a negative effect on business, or at least it can be argued that it does (CD sales do not seem to be impacted). Having said that, if copyright law was rescinded overnight, I bet iTunes sales would plummet.
Indeedy, the heat generated/dissapated by a CPU is generated by two main factors, simply put.
1) The amount of electricty flowing through it.
2) The size of the CPU
Now, you need a lot of electricity to run a complex CPU and you need more to run it at higher frequencies. The Cell is going to run at speeds higher than 4GHz, and it's die size is greater than that of a P4. So it's going to need whopping great amounts of electricity to make all that magic happen.
CPU's aren't 100% efficient, nothing is, so some of that electricity will bleed off as heat. Since we're dealing with (presumably) more electricty than a P4 (let's not count idle states needing less power because if the magic of the Cell technology happens, we'll use all the processor can handle), the heat is going to be sensational.
To run the latest near-4GHz CPU's from intel, you need to mount a whopping great water cooling system to handle the heat.
Now Sony wants to put 3 or 4 x 4.6GHz CPU's into a single small form factor box?
I seem to remember how loudly the Sony fanboys complained about the noise coming from the XBox... this will be amusing. Will it ship with it's own refrigerator?
One "word" - DirectX
Once they get an efficient, free, easy to use DirectX emulator running under Linux, Linux proliferation will make the FireFox explosion look like a whimper.
Most new Windows PC's are now shipping with SP2.
SP2 enables the firewall by default, and connects to Windowsupdate during the build process for the latest patches.
Clearly the author
1) Has an old copy of Windows
2) Didn't update during the build process
3) Is not experienced or sensible enough to install any OS, or write columns pretending to be knowledgable in the field of I/T.
You wouldn't build a Linux box without using an up to date distro and kernel. You wouldn't connect it to the internet without firewalling it.
You wouldn't build a Mac without using an up to date revision of MacOS. You wouldn't connect it to the internet without firewalling it.
Why on earth is this guy able to get kudos from the Slashdot community for building an older version of Windows and not firewalling it, then complaining that it got pwn3d?
Although quite often publishers have made some bad decisions with regards to games, in this case the Developer is a very strong one with an excellent record.
Bethesda have made some great, but very under-rated games, from Terminator 2029 through to Elder Scrolls and so on. I have high expectations from these up and coming games.