"There is a certain logic to this. How many times have "experts" told us screwy nonsense, and had lousy track records [dvorak.org], and yet the public at large retained them as experts? Sometimes, the untrained may be able to see things that the supposedly well-trained can't."
The problem is people have a carnal desire to feel superior to others, hence why people poke fun at others. And why kids get picked on in school and later in adult life in more subtle (and not so subtle) ways.
The fact is people rightly fear that classifying people according to their intelligence creates and exacerbates prejudice and justification for "exterminating" or not breeding with the "lesser intelligent" people.
No matter how bright someone is, it doesn't mean they have humanitarian values or ethics. In fact you could say, all the intelligence in the world matters little if you don't have any compassion for those who are not as gifted as you.
No one chose to be born, and you'd hope that truly intelligent people would see much of what a person is, is not chosen, but inborn. Is someone autistic less worthy of life when compared to a genius http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Sidis who didn't according to society "do much" with his gifts?
"I agree that game addiction is a real issue, but the focus should be the person, not the game, since that is where the problem lies."
Any kind of distraction that allows people to check out from their mundane and stress filled and unhappy lives is going to get people addicted. Let's face it, modern life is not a box of chocolates for a lot of people and entertainment, be it gaming or something else, or going out every night to get drunk, is just one way for people to attempt to check out or try to rejuvinate their tired/broken spirits.
"Eventually, what will happen is the wages and employment standards of the entire world will meet somewhere in the middle. Then, they will only go up, as competition for skilled labour drives them that way.
You have to think long term - like on the 50-100 year scale."
That still doesn't make the transition period for those who lost their jobs, or just wasted years in college into a (now) lower wage field with massive 1st world debt any easier.
And I doubt the world will really meet in the middle, corporations have it in their interest to move on as soon as the next batch of cheap workers in another country become available, and then most likely your future children (or childrens children) will be on the other side of the coin.
"Animation from an animator gives it style, and feeling just as much as an actor does. Just watch any old Disney cartoon if you want to see the flow of such animation."
Another issue is that much animation we see is not very realistic to begin with, it does not obey the laws of physics. Most animation is exagerated to look good and for visual, visceral and emotional impact, in fact most animation is not real. If you look at the real world many real world animated things are in fact... boring. Some of the most entertaining and hilarious animations are those that are in fact not real to begin with.
The the things that give superheroes in cartoons or animated series their "mmmph" is the fact that you get unreal exagerated actions and reactions that make them interesting to begin with.
I have a feeling this is memory bandwidth related, modern GPU's have insane amounts of memory bandwidth compared to the wide range of desktops. Not to mention the parallelism.
I disagree. In modern economic circumstances, the environment, familial attachments, where you are located usually dictate what kinds of compromises you can make and can't make. So yes CAREERS CAN cause marriages to fail. It's always a cost vs. benefit analysis.
If you want a reason why marriages fail a big part of the reason is simply economic pressure. Especially by businesses on the working class, people are scared of financial insecurity, losing their jobs, etc.
I bet there is a fairly good correlation between economic pressure and divorce rates.
"Also, the work ethic and education standard in other countries is much higher. I've worked with Indian outsourcing firms, and they make up for their lack of understanding of the problem with 14 hour work days and no complaints about how low their pay is."
You must be a manager. Do you honestly want to work 14 hours a day for most of you waking life? I don't. Any sane person who want's some kind of life outside work doesn't either.
"Compare that to workers in the US, who waste their whole day grumbling about their pay and are completely lazy."
No, workers in the US just want a higher standard of living where they work to live, not live to work. The crazy ass-tastic practices the desperate people or crazy workaholic cultures around the globe that business people love fail to see the consequences of working too much.
This pro-workaholic attitude is part and parcel of the reason of why so many peoples lives are go down the shitter in depression, suicide and worse. More homework, more time in school, more time at work, etc, etc.
"With ever increasing network capacity data storage on the PC will become redundant."
I don't agree, with the advent of new technologies like solid-state flash 'hard disks', there will ALWAYS be a need for storage both centrally and independently of a centralized souce. Think in concept akin to P2P networks, or bit-torrent. Lots of people want their own personal copies of things and do not want to be monitored 24/7 this will not change.
"But I believe that books or the written word in general is not the right tool for collective intelligence and in fact right now stopping us from making some advances e.g. in education."
I don't agree that text is useless, sure it's not the best for every situation, but it is a companion to other styles of rendering and communicating information. This is where I believe FORUMS actually enhance "group think" there are LOTS of gold nuggets particular section of some topic in many peoples minds that would take a single person months and many aspects towards a lifetime to come up with by themselves or not at all.
IMHO I've advanced my learning by leaps and bounds by absorbing other peoples understanding or realizations of the mechanics of how something works and/or reading about their own strategies in active forums. Wikipedia is not perfect, but go to any dedicated website for many professional topics or even just hardcore amateurs gathered around their favorite past-time or subject, like say video games, you will see how quick one persons learning filters down into other peoples own strategies. It's essentially network learning.
.. also work. I play my gameboy advance while using an quality exercise bike, the big thing about exercise is that you need something to keep your mind busy or else you will be bored out of your mind.
"The basic needs 10% of the US apparently don't meet, would be considered luxury in the majority of the world."
You got to be kidding me, poverty in the US does not mean "one console, one tv, one car, and skipping one warm meal", if you're poor you can't even afford that most likely. Also POVERTY scale is relative to the countries over-all wealth. The truly poor and destitute (disabled, homeless, mentally ill, etc), lastly when you live in a "rich" nation your awareness of the quality of life effects your psychology in the same way as living "dirt poor" in a poorer nation.
Real poverty in the US and developed nations is a serious issue (not just the "paper defined" poverty), and it's a more complex issue then simply comparing apples and oranges (a developed nation, to an underdeveloped one).
Poverty in a rich nation is just as bad (and stressful) as poverty in a poor nation. Just ask any one of the millions of poor people, or immigrants getting paid wages lower then what can sustain them.
When you've had to deal with the truly poor in your nation on a regular basis, you know it's equally bad all around.
"or should 'forward thinking' and an still playing an ancient (though exellent) game not go together?"
Really great games are timeless, I can enjoy lots of older games still far more then a lot of newer ones. Well designed games never really go out of style unless you're a graphics whore.
"A good game is good primarily because the gameplay is good,"
Correct, but good game not always equal what sells, See: Planescape torment, Freespace 2, and many other excellent games that flopped.
"better gameplay isn't that expensive to improve."
This is where we'll have to part ways, in my humble opinion gameplay *is* expensive to improve, especially when you're dealing with adding layers of complexity.
And graphics *is* a part of gameplay, because it directly influences how a game *feels*, how the world is rendered, how it looks, God of War for instance would be a totally different experience if the art sucked, or if they went with one of the Kratos models in the "extra's" section on the game disc.
If it wasn't no one would complain about graphics detracting from their experience.
The problem is with disappointing the hardcore fanbase, it leads you to instant death, IMHO... PS2 _IS_ the hardcore gamers system, it has all the games you want to play. The system with the most games win's, period. Sony has got you covered on all the games you might want to play (and rent). That's something both Xbox and Gamecube failed to deliver on: The numerous titles one could rent at blockbuster.
You have to have enough games to sell your system and then you need the library of "renters" of games that your installed base will RENT and never buy. The fact is N64 was the end of Nintendo's dominance because ALL of the good franchises moved to Sony's PS1... and you can bet many developers were glad to be rid of Nintendo.
You can thank Nintendo for shooting itself in the foot by "pulling a sega" (i.e. with the sega CD, 32X, etc), and treating developers more like crap in earlier NES/SNES era. But with using the hardware example, this is EXACTLY how sega killed themselves, by disappointing and screwing their customers over and over with lack of support. Everyone who bought a sega cd surely remembered the painful sting of the lack of software support. When sega the released the 32X every SCD owner could smell it's failure a mile away, it's no small wonder the Saturn and Dreamcast were going to fail, most people that owned any sega system after Genesis could tell you that easily. Once you gain a reputation for fucking with people that paid money for your system and you dishonor your promises it's hard to build a business on the stigma of bad reputation.
You can list huge list of excellent 3rd party games that were "no longer on nintendo" in an a pretty exclusive way.
The best megaman games The best Japanese RPG's (in fact most ALL japanese RPG's during the N64 era) The best fighting games (all went to PS1) Castlevania (one of the best series) Contra (admitedly they fucked it up) Best driving games
Not to mention - Final (god damn) Fantasy series in it's entirety, if you remember correctly FF1(US) through FF3(US) were exclusively developed for the NES and SNES. Next you have streetfighter, another hot title that went to PS1 only, add on megaman, final fantasy, chrono trigger sequel, it's starting to look pretty bad for the little N64!
The only games I owned for the snes: Castlevania Megaman X Chronotrigger FF 4 (FF2 US) FF 6 (FF3 US) Act Raiser Mario Kart Street Fighter 2
And some others...
Many of today's hottest games, game sequels or game worlds have their roots fimrly planted in the past.
Would world of warcraft have sold so many copies if it was not for the fond memories that millions of people had for warcraft 1 & 2 (and a little bit of 3)?
"Descent 1 and 2, IMO, the improvements were fantastic despite some wierd bugs that were patched quickly. The weapons, the AI, the game play were all improved. D3 rolled around and the Grfx were fantastic, and the play was excellent still."
And this is where we'll have to part ways! Descent 3 bombed financially, whereas D1 and D2 did not. So to say D3 was better then Descent 2 is obviously at least partly incorrect. In fact I loved descent 2 to death, I played the think religiously over Kali even when friends had moved onto quake, the frenzied multiplayer fights in those small ugly cubish levels were fun as hell and always got your blood pumping... all I can say is it wasn't the same with D3, being that D3 was made from scratch with an entirely new engine.
Music... D1 + D2 had better music then descent 3... even D1's midi music (the compositions) were better then what was found in D3, in D3 I frequently wanted to shut off the "noise" where the tracks in D2 totally suited blowing stuff (and friends) up.
Gameplay... the fact is Descent being a 3D space combat game has a certain "feel" and sense of motion that the ships and D1 and D2 had that was lost in Descent 3, not to mention the introduction of 2 other ships with different performance characteristics.
Next weapons didn't feel right if you've had played the prior 2 descent games. i.e. Plasma bullets were much smaller then the original, also many sound effects were subdued making identifying and hearing weapons fire at a distance more difficult, D3 was an especially quiet game in terms of hearing weapons fire, etc in larger levels.
Descent 2's multiplayer was greater then D3's, D3 had shinier graphics but it upset the multiplayer magic of Descent 2.
The way missiles worked in D3 and the levels being rather large, the ships all controlling differently, etc, the way some weapons characteristics were modified and the lack of carry over of Favorite weapons from other games... really killed the descent 3 experience.
I don't necessarily agree, IMHO all three want to eventually get the largest installed base possible. Either way it's the games stupid (tm) that ultimately drive console purchases. Nintendo might think they are "targetting" the non-hardcore audience but the fact remains, in order to sell consoles you need people that ARE interested in gaming and most importantly *have the games they want to play*.
I also think anyone who thinks they are targeting "different markets" is selling something. Consoles are about gaming and gaming by itself has a hardcore and "casual" segment but MOST people buy a console based on the games they want to play, not just "because". It all comes down to the wide selection across all genres, the Gamecube and Xbox were starved for JRPG's like final fantasy, and the PS2 basically had everything the cube and xbox didn't... the PS2 was THE GAMERS platform, it had excellent titles across all genres and also had new system selling IP to drive system sales (Grand theft auto, god of war, and others).
Again the fact that the are "going after different markets" is an illusion they ideally want the games that will sell the most systems. Software is greater then hardware.
"... the two major causes of obesity together at last."
As funny as that is, it is in fact TRUE. I speak from experience, especially if you are into marathon session gaming. The fact is if you are spending a lot of time gaming that could otherwise be used to exercise.
And it's not just being "lazy" it's how you've used your time, with some video games (like Civilization series in particular) long segments of time whip by without you really picking up on it, the same goes for other games but when you are engrossed and stimulated you percieve in a distorted way "the length of time" or how much time you have spent.
Re:What is the "killer app" for IPv6?
on
IPv6 Essentials
·
· Score: 1
"I for one REALLY want IPv6 to get here, but the people who make my software and pay for my equipment won't change until they need to."
Exactly, I also think that IPV4 is like the "X86" backwards compatabile requirements of modern CPU's. People are just going to continue evolving and hacking away at coming up with solutions for IPV4, it's unlikely IPV6 will be used for en-masse unless something forces it's widespread adoption and there has to be a real positive (read: economic, or some other important reason) for doing so.
I don't get how anyone could think going with slower hardware is a GOOD thing, also excusing the Wii's slower hardware using "game development costs" is ridiculous, the cost to develop games will always be changing as game companies look to find cheaper ways to make the latest and greatest games. The fact is if you provide the developers hardware *they will find ways to use it for something* even if that is not graphics!! Exta processing power does not always have to be about graphics... I'm getting a litle tired of the "so the graphicss aren't as good, who cares?" well what about things we don't see "visually" that the game developers use the extra processing power for?
The fact is if the PS2 and Xbox 360 are with $50 of the Wii at Wii's launch you definitely know an extra $50 is not much of a stretch.
"Any college that lets students walk during graduation after cheating isn't a very good college indeed. Students don't deserve to graduate, but maybe that's a bit too harsh."
If peoples financial future was not on the line, less cheating would probably occur. No one wants to accept much lower wages and standard of living, hence when the stakes are high, so will be the cheating for the students who do not want to live in squalor.
Let's be frank, students cheat not only because they are lazy, but because the alternative, i.e. the students financial future.... any professional adult can understand.
"I think the generation that missed out on programming in severely constrained environments (I came in the tail end of it myself) are never forced to code with any discipline. If there's a problem, just throw more giga[bytes/hertz/whatever] at it."
I disagree. Ask the engine developers in the game industry how important efficiency is. I'd bet there are other mission critical industries as well who's sole speciality is efficiency.
There are two parts of the problem: Coding as efficient as possible. Computing as fast as possible.
Both need to be worked on, there is a limit to how small you can make a function and how much time or space it uses.
IMHO this whole quizzing can be used negatively, getting potential candidates to do free work for them in hopes of landing a job when the companies have no such intent.
Slashdot Mirror
"There is a certain logic to this. How many times have "experts" told us screwy nonsense, and had lousy track records [dvorak.org], and yet the public at large retained them as experts? Sometimes, the untrained may be able to see things that the supposedly well-trained can't."
The problem is people have a carnal desire to feel superior to others, hence why people poke fun at others. And why kids get picked on in school and later in adult life in more subtle (and not so subtle) ways.
The fact is people rightly fear that classifying people according to their intelligence creates and exacerbates prejudice and justification for "exterminating" or not breeding with the "lesser intelligent" people.
No matter how bright someone is, it doesn't mean they have humanitarian values or ethics. In fact you could say, all the intelligence in the world matters little if you don't have any compassion for those who are not as gifted as you.
No one chose to be born, and you'd hope that truly intelligent people would see much of what a person is, is not chosen, but inborn. Is someone autistic less worthy of life when compared to a genius http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Sidis who didn't according to society "do much" with his gifts?"I agree that game addiction is a real issue, but the focus should be the person, not the game, since that is where the problem lies."
Any kind of distraction that allows people to check out from their mundane and stress filled and unhappy lives is going to get people addicted. Let's face it, modern life is not a box of chocolates for a lot of people and entertainment, be it gaming or something else, or going out every night to get drunk, is just one way for people to attempt to check out or try to rejuvinate their tired/broken spirits.
"Eventually, what will happen is the wages and employment standards of the entire world will meet somewhere in the middle. Then, they will only go up, as competition for skilled labour drives them that way.
You have to think long term - like on the 50-100 year scale."
That still doesn't make the transition period for those who lost their jobs, or just wasted years in college into a (now) lower wage field with massive 1st world debt any easier.
And I doubt the world will really meet in the middle, corporations have it in their interest to move on as soon as the next batch of cheap workers in another country become available, and then most likely your future children (or childrens children) will be on the other side of the coin.
"Animation from an animator gives it style, and feeling just as much as an actor does. Just watch any old Disney cartoon if you want to see the flow of such animation."
Another issue is that much animation we see is not very realistic to begin with, it does not obey the laws of physics. Most animation is exagerated to look good and for visual, visceral and emotional impact, in fact most animation is not real. If you look at the real world many real world animated things are in fact... boring. Some of the most entertaining and hilarious animations are those that are in fact not real to begin with.
The the things that give superheroes in cartoons or animated series their "mmmph" is the fact that you get unreal exagerated actions and reactions that make them interesting to begin with.
"Was my dad smart or dumb? "
He was smart if he lived how he wanted to. i.e. knew the risks and lived that way anyway.
"OR, is it that idiots are more likely to not realise that there's 200-300 calories in a can of soda."
Most 355ml cans of soda are 150 calories.
I thought that would be apparent to anyone that owns a GPU is specialized, silly me.
I have a feeling this is memory bandwidth related, modern GPU's have insane amounts of memory bandwidth compared to the wide range of desktops. Not to mention the parallelism.
"Careers do not cause marriages to fail."
I disagree. In modern economic circumstances, the environment, familial attachments, where you are located usually dictate what kinds of compromises you can make and can't make. So yes CAREERS CAN cause marriages to fail. It's always a cost vs. benefit analysis.
If you want a reason why marriages fail a big part of the reason is simply economic pressure. Especially by businesses on the working class, people are scared of financial insecurity, losing their jobs, etc.
I bet there is a fairly good correlation between economic pressure and divorce rates.
"Also, the work ethic and education standard in other countries is much higher. I've worked with Indian outsourcing firms, and they make up for their lack of understanding of the problem with 14 hour work days and no complaints about how low their pay is."
You must be a manager. Do you honestly want to work 14 hours a day for most of you waking life? I don't. Any sane person who want's some kind of life outside work doesn't either.
"Compare that to workers in the US, who waste their whole day grumbling about their pay and are completely lazy."
No, workers in the US just want a higher standard of living where they work to live, not live to work. The crazy ass-tastic practices the desperate people or crazy workaholic cultures around the globe that business people love fail to see the consequences of working too much.
This pro-workaholic attitude is part and parcel of the reason of why so many peoples lives are go down the shitter in depression, suicide and worse. More homework, more time in school, more time at work, etc, etc.
"With ever increasing network capacity data storage on the PC will become redundant."
I don't agree, with the advent of new technologies like solid-state flash 'hard disks', there will ALWAYS be a need for storage both centrally and independently of a centralized souce. Think in concept akin to P2P networks, or bit-torrent. Lots of people want their own personal copies of things and do not want to be monitored 24/7 this will not change.
"But I believe that books or the written word in general is not the right tool for collective intelligence and in fact right now stopping us from making some advances e.g. in education."
I don't agree that text is useless, sure it's not the best for every situation, but it is a companion to other styles of rendering and communicating information. This is where I believe FORUMS actually enhance "group think" there are LOTS of gold nuggets particular section of some topic in many peoples minds that would take a single person months and many aspects towards a lifetime to come up with by themselves or not at all.
IMHO I've advanced my learning by leaps and bounds by absorbing other peoples understanding or realizations of the mechanics of how something works and/or reading about their own strategies in active forums. Wikipedia is not perfect, but go to any dedicated website for many professional topics or even just hardcore amateurs gathered around their favorite past-time or subject, like say video games, you will see how quick one persons learning filters down into other peoples own strategies. It's essentially network learning.
.. also work. I play my gameboy advance while using an quality exercise bike, the big thing about exercise is that you need something to keep your mind busy or else you will be bored out of your mind.
"The basic needs 10% of the US apparently don't meet, would be considered luxury in the majority of the world."
You got to be kidding me, poverty in the US does not mean "one console, one tv, one car, and skipping one warm meal", if you're poor you can't even afford that most likely. Also POVERTY scale is relative to the countries over-all wealth. The truly poor and destitute (disabled, homeless, mentally ill, etc), lastly when you live in a "rich" nation your awareness of the quality of life effects your psychology in the same way as living "dirt poor" in a poorer nation.
Real poverty in the US and developed nations is a serious issue (not just the "paper defined" poverty), and it's a more complex issue then simply comparing apples and oranges (a developed nation, to an underdeveloped one).
Poverty in a rich nation is just as bad (and stressful) as poverty in a poor nation. Just ask any one of the millions of poor people, or immigrants getting paid wages lower then what can sustain them.
When you've had to deal with the truly poor in your nation on a regular basis, you know it's equally bad all around.
"or should 'forward thinking' and an still playing an ancient (though exellent) game not go together?"
Really great games are timeless, I can enjoy lots of older games still far more then a lot of newer ones. Well designed games never really go out of style unless you're a graphics whore.
"A good game is good primarily because the gameplay is good,"
Correct, but good game not always equal what sells, See: Planescape torment, Freespace 2, and many other excellent games that flopped.
"better gameplay isn't that expensive to improve."
This is where we'll have to part ways, in my humble opinion gameplay *is* expensive to improve, especially when you're dealing with adding layers of complexity.
And graphics *is* a part of gameplay, because it directly influences how a game *feels*, how the world is rendered, how it looks, God of War for instance would be a totally different experience if the art sucked, or if they went with one of the Kratos models in the "extra's" section on the game disc.
If it wasn't no one would complain about graphics detracting from their experience.
The problem is with disappointing the hardcore fanbase, it leads you to instant death, IMHO... PS2 _IS_ the hardcore gamers system, it has all the games you want to play. The system with the most games win's, period. Sony has got you covered on all the games you might want to play (and rent). That's something both Xbox and Gamecube failed to deliver on: The numerous titles one could rent at blockbuster.
You have to have enough games to sell your system and then you need the library of "renters" of games that your installed base will RENT and never buy. The fact is N64 was the end of Nintendo's dominance because ALL of the good franchises moved to Sony's PS1... and you can bet many developers were glad to be rid of Nintendo.
You can thank Nintendo for shooting itself in the foot by "pulling a sega" (i.e. with the sega CD, 32X, etc), and treating developers more like crap in earlier NES/SNES era. But with using the hardware example, this is EXACTLY how sega killed themselves, by disappointing and screwing their customers over and over with lack of support. Everyone who bought a sega cd surely remembered the painful sting of the lack of software support. When sega the released the 32X every SCD owner could smell it's failure a mile away, it's no small wonder the Saturn and Dreamcast were going to fail, most people that owned any sega system after Genesis could tell you that easily. Once you gain a reputation for fucking with people that paid money for your system and you dishonor your promises it's hard to build a business on the stigma of bad reputation.
You can list huge list of excellent 3rd party games that were "no longer on nintendo" in an a pretty exclusive way.
The best megaman games
The best Japanese RPG's (in fact most ALL japanese RPG's during the N64 era)
The best fighting games (all went to PS1)
Castlevania (one of the best series)
Contra (admitedly they fucked it up)
Best driving games
Not to mention - Final (god damn) Fantasy series in it's entirety, if you remember correctly FF1(US) through FF3(US) were exclusively developed for the NES and SNES.
Next you have streetfighter, another hot title that went to PS1 only, add on megaman, final fantasy, chrono trigger sequel, it's starting to look pretty bad for the little N64!
The only games I owned for the snes:
Castlevania
Megaman X
Chronotrigger
FF 4 (FF2 US)
FF 6 (FF3 US)
Act Raiser
Mario Kart
Street Fighter 2
And some others...
Many of today's hottest games, game sequels or game worlds have their roots fimrly planted in the past.
Would world of warcraft have sold so many copies if it was not for the fond memories that millions of people had for warcraft 1 & 2 (and a little bit of 3)?
"Descent 1 and 2, IMO, the improvements were fantastic despite some wierd bugs that
were patched quickly. The weapons, the AI, the game play were all improved.
D3 rolled around and the Grfx were fantastic, and the play was excellent still."
And this is where we'll have to part ways! Descent 3 bombed financially, whereas D1 and D2 did not. So to say D3 was better then Descent 2 is obviously at least partly incorrect. In fact I loved descent 2 to death, I played the think religiously over Kali even when friends had moved onto quake, the frenzied multiplayer fights in those small ugly cubish levels were fun as hell and always got your blood pumping... all I can say is it wasn't the same with D3, being that D3 was made from scratch with an entirely new engine.
Music... D1 + D2 had better music then descent 3... even D1's midi music (the compositions) were better then what was found in D3, in D3 I frequently wanted to shut off the "noise" where the tracks in D2 totally suited blowing stuff (and friends) up.
Gameplay... the fact is Descent being a 3D space combat game has a certain "feel" and sense of motion that the ships and D1 and D2 had that was lost in Descent 3, not to mention the introduction of 2 other ships with different performance characteristics.
Next weapons didn't feel right if you've had played the prior 2 descent games. i.e. Plasma bullets were much smaller then the original, also many sound effects were subdued making identifying and hearing weapons fire at a distance more difficult, D3 was an especially quiet game in terms of hearing weapons fire, etc in larger levels.
Descent 2's multiplayer was greater then D3's, D3 had shinier graphics but it upset the multiplayer magic of Descent 2.
The way missiles worked in D3 and the levels being rather large, the ships all controlling differently, etc, the way some weapons characteristics were modified and the lack of carry over of Favorite weapons from other games... really killed the descent 3 experience.
I don't necessarily agree, IMHO all three want to eventually get the largest installed base possible. Either way it's the games stupid (tm) that ultimately drive console purchases. Nintendo might think they are "targetting" the non-hardcore audience but the fact remains, in order to sell consoles you need people that ARE interested in gaming and most importantly *have the games they want to play*.
I also think anyone who thinks they are targeting "different markets" is selling something. Consoles are about gaming and gaming by itself has a hardcore and "casual" segment but MOST people buy a console based on the games they want to play, not just "because". It all comes down to the wide selection across all genres, the Gamecube and Xbox were starved for JRPG's like final fantasy, and the PS2 basically had everything the cube and xbox didn't... the PS2 was THE GAMERS platform, it had excellent titles across all genres and also had new system selling IP to drive system sales (Grand theft auto, god of war, and others).
Again the fact that the are "going after different markets" is an illusion they ideally want the games that will sell the most systems. Software is greater then hardware.
"... the two major causes of obesity together at last."
As funny as that is, it is in fact TRUE. I speak from experience, especially if you are into marathon session gaming. The fact is if you are spending a lot of time gaming that could otherwise be used to exercise.
And it's not just being "lazy" it's how you've used your time, with some video games (like Civilization series in particular) long segments of time whip by without you really picking up on it, the same goes for other games but when you are engrossed and stimulated you percieve in a distorted way "the length of time" or how much time you have spent.
"I for one REALLY want IPv6 to get here, but the people who make my software and pay for my equipment won't change until they need to."
Exactly, I also think that IPV4 is like the "X86" backwards compatabile requirements of modern CPU's. People are just going to continue evolving and hacking away at coming up with solutions for IPV4, it's unlikely IPV6 will be used for en-masse unless something forces it's widespread adoption and there has to be a real positive (read: economic, or some other important reason) for doing so.
I don't get how anyone could think going with slower hardware is a GOOD thing, also excusing the Wii's slower hardware using "game development costs" is ridiculous, the cost to develop games will always be changing as game companies look to find cheaper ways to make the latest and greatest games. The fact is if you provide the developers hardware *they will find ways to use it for something* even if that is not graphics!! Exta processing power does not always have to be about graphics... I'm getting a litle tired of the "so the graphicss aren't as good, who cares?" well what about things we don't see "visually" that the game developers use the extra processing power for?
The fact is if the PS2 and Xbox 360 are with $50 of the Wii at Wii's launch you definitely know an extra $50 is not much of a stretch.
"Any college that lets students walk during graduation after cheating isn't a very good college indeed. Students don't deserve to graduate, but maybe that's a bit too harsh."
If peoples financial future was not on the line, less cheating would probably occur. No one wants to accept much lower wages and standard of living, hence when the stakes are high, so will be the cheating for the students who do not want to live in squalor.
Let's be frank, students cheat not only because they are lazy, but because the alternative, i.e. the students financial future.... any professional adult can understand.
"I think the generation that missed out on programming in severely constrained environments (I came in the tail end of it myself) are never forced to code with any discipline. If there's a problem, just throw more giga[bytes/hertz/whatever] at it."
I disagree. Ask the engine developers in the game industry how important efficiency is. I'd bet there are other mission critical industries as well who's sole speciality is efficiency.
There are two parts of the problem: Coding as efficient as possible. Computing as fast as possible.
Both need to be worked on, there is a limit to how small you can make a function and how much time or space it uses.
IMHO this whole quizzing can be used negatively, getting potential candidates to do free work for them in hopes of landing a job when the companies have no such intent.