"most of the gaming genres we're familiar with today were still indistinct, half-formed concepts waiting for that one game necessary to define them."
This is a bunch of nonsense. Genre's were well defined very quickly, if anything the more mainstream games became the more watered dowm the genre's have become. Just one look at Mass effect is overwhelming proof of this. You can't look at any modern FPS and pickup old 90's FPS games and say modern fps are 'more well formed'. The reality is modern games are movies with a small bit of gameplay. The game parts of videogames have been stripped out to expand to the mainstream audience because the mainstream audience doesn't get or like gameplay.
Canada is right next to the US and is subject to the same think tanks, all the right wing parties on the North american continent talk to each other all the time because they are all capitalists. You should read about harper.
"You're not supposed to play alone. Didn't you get the memo?"
I don't care about your fucking corporate propaganda. DRM is DRM this whole "this game was meant to be an MMO" is bullshit. Diablo 2 had online and didn't have single player lag so go please fuck yourself. I don't appreciate them purposely breaking the single player game. The fact that you would defend it, is fucking sick that you'd tolerate such criminality.
But the single player online requirement wont. So it really doesn't matter. It's still DRM and they've still taken the game code hostage. The whole idea of single-player lag is bullshit. It's got to be the most awful thing especially for hardcore SP mode players.
"It's been that way for years. Why are people acting surprised?"
Because people are irrational and stupid. Just look at all the morons that bought Diablo 3 giving the green light to 'online only games' f2p, auction house, and SINGLE PLAYER LAG.
We just have too many brainless gaming addicts on planet earth.
Yo captain dumbass, you were just robbed blind by the banking system. Any intelligent population would be voting D&R out of office, but no you're so addicted to fascism/capitalist ideology and brainwashed by anti-communist ideology and so historically fucking illiterate you vote the dumb fucks right back in.
If a former National security advisor says you people are ignorant, you better fucking believe someone much more educated and in the know than you will ever be knows his shit.
Brzezinski: I am very worried that most Americans are close to total ignorance about the world. They are ignorant. That is an unhealthy condition in a country in which foreign policy has to be endorsed by the people if it is to be pursued. And it makes it much more difficult for any president to pursue an intelligent policy that does justice to the complexity of the world.
SPIEGEL: Yet the American right is still convinced of American exceptionalism.
Brzezinski: That is a reaction to the inability of people to understand global complexity or important issues like American energy dependency. Therefore, they search for simplistic sources of comfort and clarity. And the people that they are now selecting to be, so to speak, the spokespersons of their anxieties are, in most cases, stunningly ignorant.
You have to consider performance against the current flagship, the ATI card is as fast as a TITAN in most cases and significantly less costly. So if the highest performing part (titan) is 200-400 more than the ATI card, then the ATI card (for that performance level) is in fact the lowest cost option.
You always pay premium for the bleeding edge. When the 8800 GTX/GTS came out it was the same since it was the top performer so they could charge premium prices. At the time the 8800 was so good they could charge it. I've still got an 8800 GTS in my core 2 machine that's 6 years old. The absolute 'need' to upgrade stopped a long time ago. My machine can run 99% of most games just fine even with a card thats 6 years old. I paid around 500 at the time. So that's a good value considering you don't upgrade the videocard now for at least 5+ years now, because developers simply can't afford to bling out games that max hardware. Look at all the complaints about 'next gen' development costs for AAA and how it's going to cause more of a shake-out and studio closings.
So while the hardware may be expensive, game dev costs make that hardware last a long time now since we've reached 'good enough'.
Americans are the most ignorant and easily led population on the planet. You need to look at the science. See here what science has discovered about the brain:
He also missed the problem that CPU's have to do a lot and programs running on them are written by humans. Programs and power are about trade offs. Everyone forgets that. The problem was never computers but the more power you want and less static the system (i.e. more open and changing and dynamic) the more potential problems because of limits on resources and time given the modern complexity of software and trying to solve difficult not easily defined problems.
Travel is a known quantity, programming in the universe of infinite problem sets are much harder to tackle especially when you have programs written by different people interacting on the same system.
"Even if you only ever use proprietary software, you benefit tremendously from the existence of free software and its moral crusaders."
There's nothing wrong with being a moral crusader. But if you want you values to proliferate, you have to offer something better then the alternatives. Let's be honest, Free software movement hasn't been a success for the average gamer. Steam is totally closed platform and so are all the big console players.
I have no problem with free software advocates principles. The problem they are not seeing is that projects people want are hugely non-trivial. To create something like steam requires resources no person like stallman and company has. While they give good speeches, without funds and some self-sustaining income base those values are being driven out by the corporate world because the naive moralists refuse to see the writing on the wall. There is nothing wrong with being a moralist, but there is something wrong with being naive about what it takes to get people to use your software.
"This doesn't help GNU/Linux on the desktop. It will only lure people into using non-free programs distributed through Steam."
The problem with stallman is that he doesn't grasp that anything requiring years of education and basically amounts to a time commitment of a full time job needs to get paid for. The reason many free programs suck is because no sane programmer in their right mind can produce and maintain a project of non-trivial size that doesn't have a sizable community of tinkerers and paid experts from which to draw from like linux has.
GNU/Linux would be helped if they would allow some commercialization IMHO without any ability to make revenue, who can afford to maintain/update applications which more often then not require a serious amount of time and hard work?
The problem becomes as problems become non-trivial (aka beyond the realm of part-timers both amateur and pro) you simply can't maintain a project of any reasonable size and complexity for any given length of time because people have lives, get old, get sick, die, etc. That is why there needs to be some kind of income coming in to maintain any project beyond the trivial.
While I agree with many of stallman's principles, his allergies to commercialization show how naive he is. If he was serious he'd be rallying the open source community to invest in GOG.COM and get them to make an app that competes with steam that allows users to own their own games for instance. People like stallman don't get that the world doesn't work on hardcore morality, it works on time, energy, effort and what is required to maintain it.
A better idea would be instead of going against the grain of the world, intelligently build cultures that promote at least some of your ideals. The whole gaming world is going F2P/MMO/Walled garden. I'm sure Nintendo, Sony and MS are chomping at the bit to make every game 'online only' eventually after the smashing success of diablo 3 in terms of sales (the march of gaming morons continues).
A better idea would be to fund and protect those people who are at least selling products to have a compelling reason to use software you own. Steam won because it added a huge tonne of features sits like GOG.COM lack (Friends list, etc). It has all you gaming in one place, you can see when you friends are online, what game they are playing, can message them, etc.
The moral crusaders never got the message that they need to act more rationally and intelligently if they want any of their values to survive the onslaught of greed.
"start ranking editors by quality the entire site will gain credibility"
Problem is quality costs time and energy few people are willing to spend, even among experts. Hence Wikipedia has reached the point where it actually needs people who are paid to do quality checking.
... Notch was in the right place at the right time. The success of fortress craft (clone) shows that there was an audience untapped for basically what amounts to a basic 3d modelling tool with some minor game elements.
"I never thought that desire for fiscal responsibility, constitutional rule, and limited concentration of power would be masked over with such a contrived caricature."
Except that's not what it's about, the tea party are willing dupes to D&R. If they were serious they would be voting third party. Not republican. The oligarchy just steers these people into the system and keeps them confused by taking advantage of their hopes.
Not only that, 'limited government' just means even more power for corporations (aka dictatorship and more corporate control of the law, less environmental regulations, more pollution, etc).
There's no good answer because people are immature and desperately uninformed. Nobody should be FOR polluting the fucking planet, but tea partiers definitely are because they don't understand historically GOVERNMENT has been the only force with the kind of power to go after serious polluters. The reason government is so bad is because it has been captured by corporate interests. Tea partiers if they had any intelligence at all would call off the stupid bs between left and right, form a coalition with others and vote both D&R out of office.
"Such organisation would still have to keep happy the politicians who decide to allocate the money."
It wouldn't be run by elected officials, it would be run based on genetic and other scientific assessments of the persons thought and worldview. Tests for sanity. hence I said 'sanity' being #1. There are people who are nearly bias free and have penetrating insights into mankind and society at large. Bias has little to do with survival. We know enough about the world to know when we are threatening our own long term survival. The problem is the people who's minds are easily co-opted by the system.
.. always bends to business or advertisers. At this point I'd like (I know it's unrealistic) to have a news organization that's totally funded by the public via central bank and they have a bottomless well of money to spend in case of political emergency (aka build it into the system) that's run by the sanest citizens. They are picked for their sanity and respect for the truth. People who accept science, aren't easily fooled by left/right ideology, understand that societies have to change in accordance with what is true about the universe, even if that up-ends the status quo. We have people trying to cling to 19th century ideologies in a world where technology is fast making human elements unprofitable over the long term.
News sucks so bad because most people are just too scared or too sheepish to actually call out the corporate system on its bullshit because they depend on that very system for survival, too many people are easily manipulated by the threats of loss of income, relationships and status.
.... are brainwashed. They are politically unaware of history, and hence most americans are some flavor of capitalist. Which means they're screwing themselves. The reason things got as good as they were, was because of revolutionaries (socialists, communists). If not for them FDR would not have had to do the new deal.
"Personally, I can't wait until the GPU goes the way of the math coprocessor."
Not going to happen, memory bandwidth is the big bottneck on GPU's. When's the last time you've seen a CPU with bandwidth greater then a GPU in its L2 cache?
... the real probem is that as problem size increases, the human brain just can't deal with all the stress and energy one must expend to fact check everything. This is why we need automation in checking papers for errors and contradictions, i.e. the number of facts you need to know grows exponentially as things get more complex. What we're really seeing is that the human brain is the biggest bottleneck since human beings have limited time and energy. So no one should be surprised it's easy to 'dupe' or game a system because the resources you need to stop untrustworthy people is unrealistically expensive. Any area of human endeavor is only as good as the people themselves.
... it became possible for the audience of mouthbreathers to post their drivel online and make their views seem relevant/popular/legitimate. If online comments prove anything, it's that the masses are morons. Internet is the new TV and that's why internet comments have been going downhill as more of the masses came online over the last 10 years. The internet became too easy to use for the low brow population.
I frequently see anti-science posts on slashdot get modded up. America is just one big cesspit if ignorance and internet comments show that in spades.
"Valve is not entering the console market in the traditional sense."
That's spin, they made a controller, an operating system and will be selling 'steam machines'. Not only that they have "gaming in your living room" in BIG GIANT LETTERS. Aka that's a console. That is what the 'living room' bit is all about.
Slashdot Mirror
"most of the gaming genres we're familiar with today were still indistinct, half-formed concepts waiting for that one game necessary to define them."
This is a bunch of nonsense. Genre's were well defined very quickly, if anything the more mainstream games became the more watered dowm the genre's have become. Just one look at Mass effect is overwhelming proof of this. You can't look at any modern FPS and pickup old 90's FPS games and say modern fps are 'more well formed'. The reality is modern games are movies with a small bit of gameplay. The game parts of videogames have been stripped out to expand to the mainstream audience because the mainstream audience doesn't get or like gameplay.
Canada is right next to the US and is subject to the same think tanks, all the right wing parties on the North american continent talk to each other all the time because they are all capitalists. You should read about harper.
http://harpercrusade.blogspot.ca/
I was half asleep when I posted that.
"You're not supposed to play alone. Didn't you get the memo?"
I don't care about your fucking corporate propaganda. DRM is DRM this whole "this game was meant to be an MMO" is bullshit. Diablo 2 had online and didn't have single player lag so go please fuck yourself. I don't appreciate them purposely breaking the single player game. The fact that you would defend it, is fucking sick that you'd tolerate such criminality.
But the single player online requirement wont. So it really doesn't matter. It's still DRM and they've still taken the game code hostage. The whole idea of single-player lag is bullshit. It's got to be the most awful thing especially for hardcore SP mode players.
"It's been that way for years. Why are people acting surprised?"
Because people are irrational and stupid. Just look at all the morons that bought Diablo 3 giving the green light to 'online only games' f2p, auction house, and SINGLE PLAYER LAG.
We just have too many brainless gaming addicts on planet earth.
Yo captain dumbass, you were just robbed blind by the banking system. Any intelligent population would be voting D&R out of office, but no you're so addicted to fascism/capitalist ideology and brainwashed by anti-communist ideology and so historically fucking illiterate you vote the dumb fucks right back in.
If a former National security advisor says you people are ignorant, you better fucking believe someone much more educated and in the know than you will ever be knows his shit.
(reprinted from german spiegel)
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27030.htm
Brzezinski: I am very worried that most Americans are close to total ignorance about the world. They are ignorant. That is an unhealthy condition in a country in which foreign policy has to be endorsed by the people if it is to be pursued. And it makes it much more difficult for any president to pursue an intelligent policy that does justice to the complexity of the world.
SPIEGEL: Yet the American right is still convinced of American exceptionalism.
Brzezinski: That is a reaction to the inability of people to understand global complexity or important issues like American energy dependency. Therefore, they search for simplistic sources of comfort and clarity. And the people that they are now selecting to be, so to speak, the spokespersons of their anxieties are, in most cases, stunningly ignorant.
The Korea's are amongst the most educated ironically enough.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_Index
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/dec/07/world-education-rankings-maths-science-reading
You have to consider performance against the current flagship, the ATI card is as fast as a TITAN in most cases and significantly less costly. So if the highest performing part (titan) is 200-400 more than the ATI card, then the ATI card (for that performance level) is in fact the lowest cost option.
You always pay premium for the bleeding edge. When the 8800 GTX/GTS came out it was the same since it was the top performer so they could charge premium prices. At the time the 8800 was so good they could charge it. I've still got an 8800 GTS in my core 2 machine that's 6 years old. The absolute 'need' to upgrade stopped a long time ago. My machine can run 99% of most games just fine even with a card thats 6 years old. I paid around 500 at the time. So that's a good value considering you don't upgrade the videocard now for at least 5+ years now, because developers simply can't afford to bling out games that max hardware. Look at all the complaints about 'next gen' development costs for AAA and how it's going to cause more of a shake-out and studio closings.
So while the hardware may be expensive, game dev costs make that hardware last a long time now since we've reached 'good enough'.
"What makes you so sure?"
The same way secret wars, drone strikes, and secret assassinations make us sure the U.S. government is hiding a fuck-tonne.
"Do the Americans just not care?"
Americans are the most ignorant and easily led population on the planet. You need to look at the science. See here what science has discovered about the brain:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ
He also missed the problem that CPU's have to do a lot and programs running on them are written by humans. Programs and power are about trade offs. Everyone forgets that. The problem was never computers but the more power you want and less static the system (i.e. more open and changing and dynamic) the more potential problems because of limits on resources and time given the modern complexity of software and trying to solve difficult not easily defined problems.
Travel is a known quantity, programming in the universe of infinite problem sets are much harder to tackle especially when you have programs written by different people interacting on the same system.
"Even if you only ever use proprietary software, you benefit tremendously from the existence of free software and its moral crusaders."
There's nothing wrong with being a moral crusader. But if you want you values to proliferate, you have to offer something better then the alternatives. Let's be honest, Free software movement hasn't been a success for the average gamer. Steam is totally closed platform and so are all the big console players.
I have no problem with free software advocates principles. The problem they are not seeing is that projects people want are hugely non-trivial. To create something like steam requires resources no person like stallman and company has. While they give good speeches, without funds and some self-sustaining income base those values are being driven out by the corporate world because the naive moralists refuse to see the writing on the wall. There is nothing wrong with being a moralist, but there is something wrong with being naive about what it takes to get people to use your software.
"This doesn't help GNU/Linux on the desktop. It will only lure people into using non-free programs distributed through Steam."
The problem with stallman is that he doesn't grasp that anything requiring years of education and basically amounts to a time commitment of a full time job needs to get paid for. The reason many free programs suck is because no sane programmer in their right mind can produce and maintain a project of non-trivial size that doesn't have a sizable community of tinkerers and paid experts from which to draw from like linux has.
GNU/Linux would be helped if they would allow some commercialization IMHO without any ability to make revenue, who can afford to maintain/update applications which more often then not require a serious amount of time and hard work?
The problem becomes as problems become non-trivial (aka beyond the realm of part-timers both amateur and pro) you simply can't maintain a project of any reasonable size and complexity for any given length of time because people have lives, get old, get sick, die, etc. That is why there needs to be some kind of income coming in to maintain any project beyond the trivial.
While I agree with many of stallman's principles, his allergies to commercialization show how naive he is. If he was serious he'd be rallying the open source community to invest in GOG.COM and get them to make an app that competes with steam that allows users to own their own games for instance. People like stallman don't get that the world doesn't work on hardcore morality, it works on time, energy, effort and what is required to maintain it.
A better idea would be instead of going against the grain of the world, intelligently build cultures that promote at least some of your ideals. The whole gaming world is going F2P/MMO/Walled garden. I'm sure Nintendo, Sony and MS are chomping at the bit to make every game 'online only' eventually after the smashing success of diablo 3 in terms of sales (the march of gaming morons continues).
A better idea would be to fund and protect those people who are at least selling products to have a compelling reason to use software you own. Steam won because it added a huge tonne of features sits like GOG.COM lack (Friends list, etc). It has all you gaming in one place, you can see when you friends are online, what game they are playing, can message them, etc.
The moral crusaders never got the message that they need to act more rationally and intelligently if they want any of their values to survive the onslaught of greed.
"start ranking editors by quality the entire site will gain credibility"
Problem is quality costs time and energy few people are willing to spend, even among experts. Hence Wikipedia has reached the point where it actually needs people who are paid to do quality checking.
... Notch was in the right place at the right time. The success of fortress craft (clone) shows that there was an audience untapped for basically what amounts to a basic 3d modelling tool with some minor game elements.
... is sucking because the industry is obsessed with creating movies, not games.
"I never thought that desire for fiscal responsibility, constitutional rule, and limited concentration of power would be masked over with such a contrived caricature."
Except that's not what it's about, the tea party are willing dupes to D&R. If they were serious they would be voting third party. Not republican. The oligarchy just steers these people into the system and keeps them confused by taking advantage of their hopes.
Not only that, 'limited government' just means even more power for corporations (aka dictatorship and more corporate control of the law, less environmental regulations, more pollution, etc).
There's no good answer because people are immature and desperately uninformed. Nobody should be FOR polluting the fucking planet, but tea partiers definitely are because they don't understand historically GOVERNMENT has been the only force with the kind of power to go after serious polluters. The reason government is so bad is because it has been captured by corporate interests. Tea partiers if they had any intelligence at all would call off the stupid bs between left and right, form a coalition with others and vote both D&R out of office.
"Such organisation would still have to keep happy the politicians who decide to allocate the money."
It wouldn't be run by elected officials, it would be run based on genetic and other scientific assessments of the persons thought and worldview. Tests for sanity. hence I said 'sanity' being #1. There are people who are nearly bias free and have penetrating insights into mankind and society at large. Bias has little to do with survival. We know enough about the world to know when we are threatening our own long term survival. The problem is the people who's minds are easily co-opted by the system.
.. always bends to business or advertisers. At this point I'd like (I know it's unrealistic) to have a news organization that's totally funded by the public via central bank and they have a bottomless well of money to spend in case of political emergency (aka build it into the system) that's run by the sanest citizens. They are picked for their sanity and respect for the truth. People who accept science, aren't easily fooled by left/right ideology, understand that societies have to change in accordance with what is true about the universe, even if that up-ends the status quo. We have people trying to cling to 19th century ideologies in a world where technology is fast making human elements unprofitable over the long term.
News sucks so bad because most people are just too scared or too sheepish to actually call out the corporate system on its bullshit because they depend on that very system for survival, too many people are easily manipulated by the threats of loss of income, relationships and status.
.... are brainwashed. They are politically unaware of history, and hence most americans are some flavor of capitalist. Which means they're screwing themselves. The reason things got as good as they were, was because of revolutionaries (socialists, communists). If not for them FDR would not have had to do the new deal.
"Personally, I can't wait until the GPU goes the way of the math coprocessor."
Not going to happen, memory bandwidth is the big bottneck on GPU's. When's the last time you've seen a CPU with bandwidth greater then a GPU in its L2 cache?
... the real probem is that as problem size increases, the human brain just can't deal with all the stress and energy one must expend to fact check everything. This is why we need automation in checking papers for errors and contradictions, i.e. the number of facts you need to know grows exponentially as things get more complex. What we're really seeing is that the human brain is the biggest bottleneck since human beings have limited time and energy. So no one should be surprised it's easy to 'dupe' or game a system because the resources you need to stop untrustworthy people is unrealistically expensive. Any area of human endeavor is only as good as the people themselves.
... it became possible for the audience of mouthbreathers to post their drivel online and make their views seem relevant/popular/legitimate. If online comments prove anything, it's that the masses are morons. Internet is the new TV and that's why internet comments have been going downhill as more of the masses came online over the last 10 years. The internet became too easy to use for the low brow population.
I frequently see anti-science posts on slashdot get modded up. America is just one big cesspit if ignorance and internet comments show that in spades.
"Valve is not entering the console market in the traditional sense."
That's spin, they made a controller, an operating system and will be selling 'steam machines'. Not only that they have "gaming in your living room" in BIG GIANT LETTERS. Aka that's a console. That is what the 'living room' bit is all about.