The Grimwell review had a great quote from Say Anything:
I dont want to sell anything, buy anything or process anything as a career.
I dont want to sell anything bought or processed or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought or processed. Or repair anything sold, bought or processed. You know, as a career I dont want to do that.
the tendency for open source game developers to spend massive amounts of time simply copying something we already have disappoints me
The tendency for other people to do things in their spare time to entertain themselves and others like them but not you is truly a great human failing- If only someone would write an epic novel to memorialize this for future generations: I've tried posting on slashdot but I'm yet to convince any accomplished writers to write stuff to my specification for free...
In my experience, inventing your own gameplay mechanics is far easier and more fun than implementing them.
Presumably why there's no code to download from your game site, right?
Why re-make Zelda when you could be creating something completely original?... I would be far more interested if someone had created an entirely original gameplay engine and an entirely original game
If you only care about certain aspects of game creation, you're not going to waste a lot of time being original in every other department you don't care about. The fact is, there's plenty of people making their own contributions to experimental gaming if you go look for them (Kenta Cho comes to mind in the graphics departmnet). But moost of those projects aren't worth a slashdot article, and very few have the nostalgia factor of 8-bit Legend of Zelda.
now that Bungie is famous (/ with MS) the "nerds" (game players) who were their "friends" from the beginning get dumped for the "cool kids"
Why is Bungie not letting dedicated fans play Halo2 before launch? (rhetorical question)
I'm guessing they "want" some "free" advertising on Entertainment Tonight (tv show with viewership largely unaware of Halo or the sequel). The "friends/nerds" (paying customers) of Bungie have already pre-ordered the game. The game is so huge that there is no one who pays attention to games that doesn't know about it- they have to put previews in movie theaters, stage strange stuff like ilovebees, and get some people who are recognizable and good-looking to get their picture taken playing the game in order to reach out to a bigger market.
Something tells me i'll have it tuned to Radio X for most of the game.
It seems kind of odd- probably more people will be listening to some of these fake radio stations than listen to any single real station. If they could online enable it, they could download new songs and even have real paying advertisers, but not like they'd need that extra revenue, and better stick to funny parody ads...
So now that I can play HD in my car, I need to rearranged the dash- get rid of the not-so-content-rich odometer and gas gauge and so on to be able to fit the plasma screen in.
The only think I can think of is that perhaps they're still losing money on each Xbox they sell, so the pressure is on to get something with lower manufacturing costs out the door...
Last I heard the Xbox 2 would have no hard drive, which would take a sizable chunk out of the manufacturing costs compare to the current Xbox.
As long as I'm not directly hurt by X, X is an innovation and A Good Thing(tm). When X becomes harmful it quickly becomes a problem.
1. Substitute X = filesharing 2. Substitute X = outsourcing
So the importance of all industries, or of anything that can stand in for 'X', is entirely subjective: portions of the music industry are of equal strategic and economic value as a large highly educated technological working class?
3. Substitute X = oversimplification 4. Substitute X = modding trolls down
Everybody take pause- what Vicsun is implying is that even though our system runs on the principle of individuals working to promote their own interests, realize now that you're just being selfish. If the central planners tell you to sacrifice now for the good of the many and that great reward is in store for you if you have patience, do so without question.
How bad was Fire Warrior? I keep seeing it in EB for $10 and am always considering buying it.
Why sell a videogame version that would dilute the market for the original, and more sustainably profitable game?
It seems to me that the core competency of GDW is the content- the 40K universe, characters, vehicles, weapons, aliens, etc- and their sustainable profitability comes from regular additions to that universe. Gameplay on the tabletop seems secondary (though still important), and perhaps model fabrication comes in to play- the point is any and all forms of electronic games should be able to exist and not detract from the original.
The fact one is electronic and the other is tabletop is where the complementarity comes from- when you can't find a tournament or buddies or whatever to play a full game of tabletop with, you can play with the same rules and style against the AI or someone online. I think there's undeniable appeal of pushing models around a detailed landscape, painting them, acquiring a large collection, and so on, the videogame version can never take that away.
Dilution of the IP itself (not the ruleset or playing experience as in your example) can also arise from releasing too many spin offs of a low quality- though games have a limited potential for damage because they have such short shelf lives.
what I've observed is people sitting around complaining about "rights" and "entitlement" rather than doing anything.
This is so true. The only people who succeed in gaining more rights and better entitlements are those who get out and do something about it, at least let their representatives know and vote accordingly.
If all the camera feeds go straight to Police HQ where they disappear into vaults forever, they will be, at best, totally worthless and more likely to be abused
It's simple. Have everyone fill out a Freedom of Information Act request for every recorded video feed for a given month, and repeat every month. The act allows you to sue the government if they don't deliver in a timely fashion.
How exactly do you rack up $68M in debt developing a PC anyway?
Before this article, I always thought they were a fraud in the 'ha-ha april fools' sense, but I guess if they pissed away $68 million with very little chance of recouping it, maybe they're more of an investor lawsuit SEC investigation etc. style fraud?
The art assets are very labor intensive, and and very strongly coupled to the game they're in- which is why the industry, especially the smaller outfits, need more open-source libraries, engines, and so forth to take care of the non-art aspects. And they need more and better open-source tools in which to create the art with. That way they can concentrate on the art that really differentiates their product and not re-invent the wheel with everything else.
>> I'd vote for McCain in a heartbeat, but never for anyone in the Bush family.
> what if someone in the bush family... [snip fantastic speculation]...would you vote for her then because of her ideas, or would you still hate her because of her family?
> I'm sorry if you think it's a foolish example, but i judge people by the content of their ideas and their character, not their lineage. that's what the Civil Rights movement in the 1960's was all about.
This is the most ridiculous +5 insightful I have ever seen. What if Bush-14 in the year 2329 fed all the poor, caused world peace, and was capable of speaking in complete sentences without a teleprompter? What if a Bush was running against a dark elder god whose campaign promise would be to eat the brains of the entire human race- MLK would be spinning in his grave then, wouldn't he? All because some slashdot poster swore never to vote for a Bush. For shame.
The parent makes a statement use the word 'never' is a slightly non-literal sense. Anyone could go on all day thinking of bizarre situations that would cause the parent poster to consider voting for someone from the Bush family. They are judging on the content of character, and every Bush they've thus far seen has not faired well by that judgement. I don't think it's wrong to say you'd never do something based on all currently available information and fail to account for every possiblity that may occur in the future that might cause you to change your stance (flip-flopping, they call it).
...and we will bitch and moan and accuse Lucas of destroying our childhoods.
Couple of observations here-
Lots of movies are shit. If you go to movies, you're going to see some shit.
If I was to go to a shit movie, out of a selection of shit movies:
I'd rather see a shit movie with aliens, spaceship battles, light sabre duels, big explosions and high production values that a shit independent/romantic-comedy/foreign/period-piece/e tc. movie.
I'd rather see a shit movie that everyone else I know is also seeing, than something bad nobody has ever heard of. Bitching and moaning is fun, especially if it's done with some insight, and lots of other people appreciate that insight and agree.
In the end it's also good to know that huge amounts of fame and money and great past work don't equate to the ability to make a good movie today. Because that loosely suggests that someone without much money, fame, or past experience to speak of can make a good movie- we'll need that fresh talent when people coasting off successes from decades ago finally die off.
"cutting the military budget would put all those defense R&D contractors out of work" : there are plenty of jobs for EE/CPE/MAE types that need doing that aren't military.
I partially agree, but with different justification:
Let's say a truck for the army cost as much as truck bought by a business, and employed equal numbers of engineers and factory workers to create: the investment into the army truck is never returned because it simply transport soldiers and supplies around, while the business may make money off its truck because it can transport saleable goods. So it would be better for the economy if the government subsidized commercial businesses rather than subsidized military contractors.
A soldier is someone who is not working at a regular job producing something or providing a service, and of course in the case of drafting or heavy recruiting people who may have been productive in their current jobs may be taken out of the workforce, damaging the economy.
The same goes for R&D- a lot of interesting civilian technologies have come about because the original technology was for military use, but it would be more efficient to simply do R&D for civilian use and skip the wasteful military part.
In the case of an actual invasion/threat to the nation that the military can address, the money invested may be justified because the cost of repairing bombed buildings, overcoming civilian deaths, etc. is greater or comparable (certainly the value of human life is hard to quantify) than the cost of a standing defense.
Although we do do some direct subsidization and research for purely non-military things, the fact is that congress is more likely to allot money out of fear (we need these tanks or bombers or we'll lose the next/current war) than of greed (this tech will probably have a huge payoff in 5-10 years).
There's nothing sadder than engineers who've been chomping at the bit for years wanting to do some *real* space work hearing about Bush's Mars plan, maybe even getting to work on preliminaries, and knowing that it's all a political game and nothing will ever actually get off the ground
I'd guess those engineers who've been the business for more than a couple years are used to it by now. If I had nickel for every broken dream in the space industry I could pay back the taxpayers and investors for all the money wasted there.
Every single one of those things is easier to produce as plain text on a blog/slashdot/whatever post and easier to be consumed. It's much easier to write effectively than to acquire or be naturally gifted with the looks and clear enunciation that you would want for the video format, and reading poor writing is not nearly as bad as watching someone ugly and mumbling.
Just ask yourself: how long would that post have taken to put together if you had to turn it into a ten minute video, and how many people would watch it compared to the number of slashdot readers who might have scanned over your +3 comment?
I would like to see more home-brew video on the net myself, but I think the format will most likely continue to be "here's a 5-minute dramatic video we put together over the last month/year", or "here is some footage taken at today's parade/riot/natural disaster", rather than weekly productions that emulate crappy cable tv.
McCaw's WIreless ISP Begins Trial Run This Summer Wireless Networking | Posted by timothy on Saturday June 05, @08:23PM
Ask Slashdot: Is Caps Lock Dead? Hardware | Posted by timothy on Saturday June 05, @07:21PM
Caps lock is dead...no- wait, someone accidently left it stuck on when writing their headline! No, that was just the shift key, damn...
(If this makes no sense at all the editors have probably fixed the extra capital letter there)
(If this makes sense but I should have RFTA because it's actually called McCaw's WIreless ISP, then that's a stupid name and should be derided accordingly)
It's only a matter of time before someone in the government claims that the rationale for maintaining a stockpile of nuclear weapons is to provide us with a deterrent against terrorists who might steal weapons from that stockpile and use them against us.
It would probably be bad for soldiers and VIPs alike if instead of a small hole appearing in a normal vest, and perhaps a little blood if there's penetratio- there's this huge splatter of possibly colored liquid (mixed with blood maybe) that lets the assailant know very graphically that they've scored a direct hit? Remember from your FPS experience that it's much more satisfying as well as easier to zero in on targets when there's a bunch of blood that sprays out, as opposed to pre-rag-doll-physics kid-friendly bloodless games where you have to shoot a whole lot more and wildly too until you know the target is really down.
Maybe they could make the liquid gooey so it would congeal and limit blood loss for bullet holes left by bullets that do go through.
2...(not in my 20's anymore)... 4. The number of artists creating music that I enjoy has decreased significantly.
These two may be causally linked.
I think when a person is in school or other situations where they're surrounded by similar people there's more pressure to be tapped into cool music, or any kind of music, but once you're in real life around a huge diversity of people all with different tastes in pretty much everything, the pressure just dissolves.
There's plenty of great new music out there, but I think I myself will never buy a music album (I tried out a couple music clubs years back, but came out of it with way too much crap). Music recordings are nice, but not really worth money to me. Other than the twenty minute commute I don't really have places and time to consume it. I'm not going to sit around in my spare time listening to music, it just doesn't engage enough senses. I'd rather be watching a movie or playing video games or reading or working on creative projects of my own and not be distracted by music (if it's good, it's distracting, if it's bad, why the hell listen to it, and why do anything for fun that needs distracting from). That's just me though...
Has anyone else wondered what will happen when it becomes truly simple for EVERYONE to make movies, games, music etc. ?
Sure, frequently. What would happen is that movies, games, and music would become fundamental units of expression, on par with sentences made of words. Written words make up novels, which are analogous to movies or albums, but think of what would be analogous to email and handwritten notes and memos or whatever.
But that probably would be a long ways off, because the fundamental building blocks of visual imagery or music are exponentially more dense than writing. Think of the number of letters, the number of words, and combinatorial permutations of sentences and so on. Then think of an image, where each element is a pixel, or a tiny polygon, or a sound with all the frequency and phase components. There's infinitely more combinations of those that produce meaningfuly output (and a greater infinity more of unmeaningful output) for visuals and sound than exist for words. All that artistic freedom requires a huge amount of artistic input to fill out. Words get to evoke images and sounds in your head, while movies have to actually do the work during production.
It's easy to point to tools that allow us to produce what appears to be very high quality music and visuals without much work, the fact is that discerning viewers frequently can immediately identify the tools and favor work that required much more work and looks much more unique. Some one can produce a scene in Poser with stock models very quickly, but after seeing a hundred of those they'll all blend together, and viewers will want to go watch a movie that required hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of artistic hours because all that work is represented on the screen.
On the other hand, click on my sig and see how good or bad amateurs can get...
Slashdot Mirror
the tendency for open source game developers to spend massive amounts of time simply copying something we already have disappoints me
The tendency for other people to do things in their spare time to entertain themselves and others like them but not you is truly a great human failing- If only someone would write an epic novel to memorialize this for future generations: I've tried posting on slashdot but I'm yet to convince any accomplished writers to write stuff to my specification for free...
In my experience, inventing your own gameplay mechanics is far easier and more fun than implementing them.
Presumably why there's no code to download from your game site, right?
Why re-make Zelda when you could be creating something completely original?... I would be far more interested if someone had created an entirely original gameplay engine and an entirely original game
If you only care about certain aspects of game creation, you're not going to waste a lot of time being original in every other department you don't care about. The fact is, there's plenty of people making their own contributions to experimental gaming if you go look for them (Kenta Cho comes to mind in the graphics departmnet). But moost of those projects aren't worth a slashdot article, and very few have the nostalgia factor of 8-bit Legend of Zelda.
now that Bungie is famous (/ with MS) the "nerds" (game players) who were their "friends" from the beginning get dumped for the "cool kids"
Why is Bungie not letting dedicated fans play Halo2 before launch? (rhetorical question)
I'm guessing they "want" some "free" advertising on Entertainment Tonight (tv show with viewership largely unaware of Halo or the sequel). The "friends/nerds" (paying customers) of Bungie have already pre-ordered the game. The game is so huge that there is no one who pays attention to games that doesn't know about it- they have to put previews in movie theaters, stage strange stuff like ilovebees, and get some people who are recognizable and good-looking to get their picture taken playing the game in order to reach out to a bigger market.
Something tells me i'll have it tuned to Radio X for most of the game.
It seems kind of odd- probably more people will be listening to some of these fake radio stations than listen to any single real station. If they could online enable it, they could download new songs and even have real paying advertisers, but not like they'd need that extra revenue, and better stick to funny parody ads...
So now that I can play HD in my car, I need to rearranged the dash- get rid of the not-so-content-rich odometer and gas gauge and so on to be able to fit the plasma screen in.
The only think I can think of is that perhaps they're still losing money on each Xbox they sell, so the pressure is on to get something with lower manufacturing costs out the door...
Last I heard the Xbox 2 would have no hard drive, which would take a sizable chunk out of the manufacturing costs compare to the current Xbox.
As long as I'm not directly hurt by X, X is an innovation and A Good Thing(tm). When X becomes harmful it quickly becomes a problem.
1. Substitute X = filesharing
2. Substitute X = outsourcing
So the importance of all industries, or of anything that can stand in for 'X', is entirely subjective: portions of the music industry are of equal strategic and economic value as a large highly educated technological working class?
3. Substitute X = oversimplification
4. Substitute X = modding trolls down
Everybody take pause- what Vicsun is implying is that even though our system runs on the principle of individuals working to promote their own interests, realize now that you're just being selfish. If the central planners tell you to sacrifice now for the good of the many and that great reward is in store for you if you have patience, do so without question.
How bad was Fire Warrior? I keep seeing it in EB for $10 and am always considering buying it.
Why sell a videogame version that would dilute the market for the original, and more sustainably profitable game?
It seems to me that the core competency of GDW is the content- the 40K universe, characters, vehicles, weapons, aliens, etc- and their sustainable profitability comes from regular additions to that universe. Gameplay on the tabletop seems secondary (though still important), and perhaps model fabrication comes in to play- the point is any and all forms of electronic games should be able to exist and not detract from the original.
The fact one is electronic and the other is tabletop is where the complementarity comes from- when you can't find a tournament or buddies or whatever to play a full game of tabletop with, you can play with the same rules and style against the AI or someone online. I think there's undeniable appeal of pushing models around a detailed landscape, painting them, acquiring a large collection, and so on, the videogame version can never take that away.
Dilution of the IP itself (not the ruleset or playing experience as in your example) can also arise from releasing too many spin offs of a low quality- though games have a limited potential for damage because they have such short shelf lives.
what I've observed is people sitting around complaining about "rights" and "entitlement" rather than doing anything.
This is so true. The only people who succeed in gaining more rights and better entitlements are those who get out and do something about it, at least let their representatives know and vote accordingly.
If all the camera feeds go straight to Police HQ where they disappear into vaults forever, they will be, at best, totally worthless and more likely to be abused
It's simple. Have everyone fill out a Freedom of Information Act request for every recorded video feed for a given month, and repeat every month. The act allows you to sue the government if they don't deliver in a timely fashion.
How exactly do you rack up $68M in debt developing a PC anyway?
Before this article, I always thought they were a fraud in the 'ha-ha april fools' sense, but I guess if they pissed away $68 million with very little chance of recouping it, maybe they're more of an investor lawsuit SEC investigation etc. style fraud?
The art assets are very labor intensive, and and very strongly coupled to the game they're in- which is why the industry, especially the smaller outfits, need more open-source libraries, engines, and so forth to take care of the non-art aspects. And they need more and better open-source tools in which to create the art with. That way they can concentrate on the art that really differentiates their product and not re-invent the wheel with everything else.
The trouble with open sourcing the engines is that you can no longer charge those licensing fees
Quake is available as open or closed: "For teams that dont want to operate under the GPL, were now offering a "non-GPL" QUAKE engine license for a flat fee of $10,000 per title". As long as you own all the source, you can license your stuff under as many licenses as you want, for pay or not.
>> I'd vote for McCain in a heartbeat, but never for anyone in the Bush family.
> what if someone in the bush family... [snip fantastic speculation]...would you vote for her then because of her ideas, or would you still hate her because of her family?
> I'm sorry if you think it's a foolish example, but i judge people by the content of their ideas and their character, not their lineage. that's what the Civil Rights movement in the 1960's was all about.
This is the most ridiculous +5 insightful I have ever seen. What if Bush-14 in the year 2329 fed all the poor, caused world peace, and was capable of speaking in complete sentences without a teleprompter? What if a Bush was running against a dark elder god whose campaign promise would be to eat the brains of the entire human race- MLK would be spinning in his grave then, wouldn't he? All because some slashdot poster swore never to vote for a Bush. For shame.
The parent makes a statement use the word 'never' is a slightly non-literal sense. Anyone could go on all day thinking of bizarre situations that would cause the parent poster to consider voting for someone from the Bush family. They are judging on the content of character, and every Bush they've thus far seen has not faired well by that judgement. I don't think it's wrong to say you'd never do something based on all currently available information and fail to account for every possiblity that may occur in the future that might cause you to change your stance (flip-flopping, they call it).
Just a hunch, but I'm pretty sure that's why old Ted Kennedy decided not to run for presidency.
He did run against Carter in 1980 for the nomination..., unless you're referring to him not running this year.
...and we will bitch and moan and accuse Lucas of destroying our childhoods.
e tc. movie.
Couple of observations here-
Lots of movies are shit. If you go to movies, you're going to see some shit.
If I was to go to a shit movie, out of a selection of shit movies:
I'd rather see a shit movie with aliens, spaceship battles, light sabre duels, big explosions and high production values that a shit independent/romantic-comedy/foreign/period-piece/
I'd rather see a shit movie that everyone else I know is also seeing, than something bad nobody has ever heard of. Bitching and moaning is fun, especially if it's done with some insight, and lots of other people appreciate that insight and agree.
In the end it's also good to know that huge amounts of fame and money and great past work don't equate to the ability to make a good movie today. Because that loosely suggests that someone without much money, fame, or past experience to speak of can make a good movie- we'll need that fresh talent when people coasting off successes from decades ago finally die off.
"cutting the military budget would put all those defense R&D contractors out of work" : there are plenty of jobs for EE/CPE/MAE types that need doing that aren't military.
I partially agree, but with different justification:
Let's say a truck for the army cost as much as truck bought by a business, and employed equal numbers of engineers and factory workers to create: the investment into the army truck is never returned because it simply transport soldiers and supplies around, while the business may make money off its truck because it can transport saleable goods. So it would be better for the economy if the government subsidized commercial businesses rather than subsidized military contractors.
A soldier is someone who is not working at a regular job producing something or providing a service, and of course in the case of drafting or heavy recruiting people who may have been productive in their current jobs may be taken out of the workforce, damaging the economy.
The same goes for R&D- a lot of interesting civilian technologies have come about because the original technology was for military use, but it would be more efficient to simply do R&D for civilian use and skip the wasteful military part.
In the case of an actual invasion/threat to the nation that the military can address, the money invested may be justified because the cost of repairing bombed buildings, overcoming civilian deaths, etc. is greater or comparable (certainly the value of human life is hard to quantify) than the cost of a standing defense.
Although we do do some direct subsidization and research for purely non-military things, the fact is that congress is more likely to allot money out of fear (we need these tanks or bombers or we'll lose the next/current war) than of greed (this tech will probably have a huge payoff in 5-10 years).
There's nothing sadder than engineers who've been chomping at the bit for years wanting to do some *real* space work hearing about Bush's Mars plan, maybe even getting to work on preliminaries, and knowing that it's all a political game and nothing will ever actually get off the ground
I'd guess those engineers who've been the business for more than a couple years are used to it by now. If I had nickel for every broken dream in the space industry I could pay back the taxpayers and investors for all the money wasted there.
Every single one of those things is easier to produce as plain text on a blog/slashdot/whatever post and easier to be consumed. It's much easier to write effectively than to acquire or be naturally gifted with the looks and clear enunciation that you would want for the video format, and reading poor writing is not nearly as bad as watching someone ugly and mumbling.
Just ask yourself: how long would that post have taken to put together if you had to turn it into a ten minute video, and how many people would watch it compared to the number of slashdot readers who might have scanned over your +3 comment?
I would like to see more home-brew video on the net myself, but I think the format will most likely continue to be "here's a 5-minute dramatic video we put together over the last month/year", or "here is some footage taken at today's parade/riot/natural disaster", rather than weekly productions that emulate crappy cable tv.
McCaw's WIreless ISP Begins Trial Run This Summer
Wireless Networking | Posted by timothy on Saturday June 05, @08:23PM
Ask Slashdot: Is Caps Lock Dead?
Hardware | Posted by timothy on Saturday June 05, @07:21PM
Caps lock is dead...no- wait, someone accidently left it stuck on when writing their headline! No, that was just the shift key, damn...
(If this makes no sense at all the editors have probably fixed the extra capital letter there)
(If this makes sense but I should have RFTA because it's actually called McCaw's WIreless ISP, then that's a stupid name and should be derided accordingly)
It's only a matter of time before someone in the government claims that the rationale for maintaining a stockpile of nuclear weapons is to provide us with a deterrent against terrorists who might steal weapons from that stockpile and use them against us.
It would probably be bad for soldiers and VIPs alike if instead of a small hole appearing in a normal vest, and perhaps a little blood if there's penetratio- there's this huge splatter of possibly colored liquid (mixed with blood maybe) that lets the assailant know very graphically that they've scored a direct hit? Remember from your FPS experience that it's much more satisfying as well as easier to zero in on targets when there's a bunch of blood that sprays out, as opposed to pre-rag-doll-physics kid-friendly bloodless games where you have to shoot a whole lot more and wildly too until you know the target is really down.
Maybe they could make the liquid gooey so it would congeal and limit blood loss for bullet holes left by bullets that do go through.
2. ..(not in my 20's anymore) ...
4. The number of artists creating music that I enjoy has decreased significantly.
These two may be causally linked.
I think when a person is in school or other situations where they're surrounded by similar people there's more pressure to be tapped into cool music, or any kind of music, but once you're in real life around a huge diversity of people all with different tastes in pretty much everything, the pressure just dissolves.
There's plenty of great new music out there, but I think I myself will never buy a music album (I tried out a couple music clubs years back, but came out of it with way too much crap). Music recordings are nice, but not really worth money to me. Other than the twenty minute commute I don't really have places and time to consume it. I'm not going to sit around in my spare time listening to music, it just doesn't engage enough senses. I'd rather be watching a movie or playing video games or reading or working on creative projects of my own and not be distracted by music (if it's good, it's distracting, if it's bad, why the hell listen to it, and why do anything for fun that needs distracting from). That's just me though...
Has anyone else wondered what will happen when it becomes truly simple for EVERYONE to make movies, games, music etc. ?
Sure, frequently. What would happen is that movies, games, and music would become fundamental units of expression, on par with sentences made of words. Written words make up novels, which are analogous to movies or albums, but think of what would be analogous to email and handwritten notes and memos or whatever.
But that probably would be a long ways off, because the fundamental building blocks of visual imagery or music are exponentially more dense than writing. Think of the number of letters, the number of words, and combinatorial permutations of sentences and so on. Then think of an image, where each element is a pixel, or a tiny polygon, or a sound with all the frequency and phase components. There's infinitely more combinations of those that produce meaningfuly output (and a greater infinity more of unmeaningful output) for visuals and sound than exist for words. All that artistic freedom requires a huge amount of artistic input to fill out. Words get to evoke images and sounds in your head, while movies have to actually do the work during production.
It's easy to point to tools that allow us to produce what appears to be very high quality music and visuals without much work, the fact is that discerning viewers frequently can immediately identify the tools and favor work that required much more work and looks much more unique. Some one can produce a scene in Poser with stock models very quickly, but after seeing a hundred of those they'll all blend together, and viewers will want to go watch a movie that required hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of artistic hours because all that work is represented on the screen.
On the other hand, click on my sig and see how good or bad amateurs can get...
The group is a bunch of dorks who get together to drink soda and talk about computers on Friday nights instead of getting laid
You're right, they should be posting on slashdot, with its vast reserves of available women and where computers never get mentioned at all.