... is not rockstar developers it's that making and understanding how software will perform and it's impacts is a hard problem. It's not like engineering where the laws of nature are relatively fixed and known and is a matter of trade offs (time vs cost), ANY change to a program has potential impacts and ripple effects on all other subsystems effectively changing program behavior to some extent. The real issue is the tools for software development and making these things understandable in complex systems is a hard problem. It's a matter of framing problems and solutions in ways that you can actually understand their impacts. Too much software development is undefined and uncharted because of the nature of coding itself. There is a lot of research going on in visualization trying to make these ethereal systems of code easy to grasp and understand in ways that are much easier and more natural for our senses as human beings.
It's a matter of being able to grasp what is that you are trying to do and it's impact. Most developers (even rockstars) have issues with not even knowing where they are headed and what will be needed down the line as projects grow and outstrip human ability to understand them. Software has long since passed the complexity where the human mind has the ability to full grasp all the complex interactions. The real problem now is getting the research and data to make demystify this complexity (i.e. complexity partially being a synonym for not being able to see/understand what a problem and solutions are and it's impacts).
"Your arguments would probably be more listened to if you didn't use Marxist terminology"
It's not "marxist terminology" capitalism is enforced and came into being by men with guns, only in america would someone say something so ignorant of history. More proof america is under the spell of mass political propaganda.
... have long taken advantage of public disinterest, ignorance and general stupidity. The trend will continue. One only has to look at the clusterfuck that is copyright and patents. It's too bad we can't go back and time and kill it. It's become a monster. We alright have outright criminal laws that limit the rights of the public at large to own software. The game industry has become more and more corrupt and criminal as time has gone on and its going to get worse.
The worst thing about it is the millions of mouthbreathing morons who just eat it right up. Diablo 3 had 6Million+ morons buy it. There are days I just want to chuck an asteroid at earth and be dumb with the millions of dumb shits who feed this in the first place.
They did it with Metroid. Also there was the big transition to 3D mario starting with the 64. It's most likely do-able if you can figure how to design it correct.
"People who rail against day 1 DLC have no idea how releasing a game works. "
No this is all because of modern development costs and team sizes, in the late 90's early 2000's game team sizes were orders of magnitude smaller as well as costs to develop said game. DLC is a way to try to exploit gamers for extra cash by cutting up and parcelling out pieces of the game that you already had planned from the get go during the design phase. When content was less costly and lower resolution you could produce more content per unit of time per dollar, Modern games have expensive assets so you get a lot less for the same money because each asset takes so much longer and is more expensive but adds less to the actual game (so you ARE actually GETTING LESS). But gamers are just consumers that grew up with games so they see these new tactics as exploitation (and they are) because they are stop gap measures to deal with rising team sizes and development costs that have to be solved over the long term. Twisting the facts because of your ignorance of gaming history isn't a good idea.
"Can we turn any slashdot topic into an anti-rich diatribe"?
The idea that rich people historically came into existence by merit and not by legal exploitation and a cubic fuck-tonne of wars and violence is a myth. The legal foundations of a society are backed by guns and violence and anyone who thinks the current system is not exploitive and rigged in some sense is a moron, the whole legal framework is setup to deny economic rights to the majority through historical enclosure movements which to enable the new legal framework requires massive violence and unrest. So to talk negatively of the rich is the historically LITERATE thing to do.
"Clearly this guy hasn't seen enough dystopian movies about two-class societies emerging from genetics."
We ALREADY have a two class society, whether capitalists admit it or not the 'pay you what you're worth' element of capitalism NATURALLY sorts people eugenically to some extent whether any of us want it to or not.
Can't say I've never switched, what you can do is install the new version into a new directory and/or backup the old database go check their forums/go ask around.
"This is forever. It's genetically inherited and it can NEVER be cured. There is no way to know how bad the effects will be (i.e. disease, immunity response, deformities, life span, etc) in the offspring for all generations."
... were always over-rated. I hate having to repeat the same actions on touch interface devices because it doesn't register your motion. Buttons are nice, simple and consistent. I mourn the unpopularity of button based devices, I never understood why anyone would take a touch based MP3 player over one with well designed and placed buttons. I always hate accidentally causing music to skip or change songs on touch based devices.
"And if they don't, they're not interested, so please fuck off."
What you call "assault" is nothing of the sort, what women call 'assault' is that men are confused about how to engage women. They are incapable of seeing what you see. They are people who are just ignorant of social etiquette. It's hard for geeks to get that experience when they are constantly bullied and rejected. It's a self fulfilling prophecy - can't get social experience if no one wants to socialize with you to begin with, catch 22.
Actually they've demonized themselves, they hate anything to do with helping other people. They are demonized correctly. You Americans live in a bizzaro world of misinformation and propaganda, in short, you don't know which end is up. Anyone out-side your country knows your right wing politicians are fucking mad. The fact that you can't see what the world does is why the world is so weary of you people.
"No surprise here, the mind controls the body. Why wouldn't the placebo effect work both ways?"
This actually goes a long way to prove that psychological abuse is actually physically damaging to the body, that bullshit about 'what doesn't kill you makes you stronger' or 'sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me' is bullshit.
After all if you are a social outcast you are deprived of things your body needs (like say companionship or sex) compared to other people.
"I said no to star craft two and diablo 3 as well."
Not a loss, the original developers are long gone. D3 and SC2 are bland and the magic is long gone. They survive through sheer inertia and new bodies without a long history of gaming.
And I'll be playing God of war 1 and games like Gradius V in high resolution. PC emulation only makes old classics better in the long run unless their is incompatibility or some game company does something incredibly stupid like how the original FF7 had really poorly encoded FMV which made the PS1 version superior. Although FF7 PC now has mods that take it beyond what the original could have ever dreamed.
"Rather then going for broke and getting as much FPS as possible, why don't game developers focus on optimizing the experience for a SOLID 60 FPS, that is"
You just missed the point, the high FPS is just an average, you want a minimum FPS the game never falls under given heavy load (lots of objects, effects onscreen).
IF you ever played Quake 3 back in the day it was all about having many things going on onscreen at the same time.
"It drives me nuts when I run into doors I can not open, "walls" I can not jump over, holes I can not duck through, items I cannot pickup and all that stuff."
I understand but that has always been there because having absolute open levels DOES NOT MAKE SENSE. Now for items I can understand. One of the things GTA and other open world games got wrong is that you screw up the pacing of the game when you give the player too much freedom and players end up getting seriously bored because the space between activities is long and usually tedious. Even Saints row the third despite it being a fun game has serious issues with travel time. There is enormous amounts of 'dead time' in modern games that shouldn't be there and ways to avoid that is to constrain the player to get a move on.
"you have obviously never heard of TOR, Chaumian mixes, Dining Cryptographers, etc.."
Facebook and how MOST people use the net and don't understand how technology works makes that effectively impossible (like I stated). Just because a small % of the population knows how to anonymize itself doesn't mean it's still not effectively impossible for large amounts of data related to you.
Think of this for a second, you have friends or know people, have parents, they sign up for facebook and start posting pictures of someone you know or their family member and you happen to be included in it. Zip into the database you go! Same with email and everything else. People always give away other peoples information unintentionally unknowingly everyday. You can't escape the fact that all information exists in a network and anyone in your network that leaks info about you means its effectively impossible for you to control much of the information about you floating around. Just interacting with any system (financial, banks, etc) means you're giving away data to OTHER institutions which are also CLUELESS or if not clueless you still have businesses selling data to other businesses for profit behind your back which is also from a pragmatic perspective largely unenforceable.
... in the modern era. What about GEO IP location, or identifying people by their IP address + browsing history (everytime you visit a website, multiple websites are tracking you).
Buzzwords like: Ad Serving, Traffic Analytics, Content Customization, are just euphamisms for identifying end users, their interests, spending habits, etc.
The below company has blizzard entertainment and others as a clients, you can bet they are using it to identify where their users live, what their income levels are, etc. It's trivial to identify people once you have enough information. Especially isnce IP addresses often give away a persons physical location.
No one has the resources to deal with it, it's like piracy you can't stop it even if you'd want to and big business has an interest in furthering its criminality and criminalizing anything that gets in its way.
"We have to make a case that they will be happier without DRM"
"In history it is not idealism, goodness or morality that reign -- their kingdom is not of this world -- but rather resolve, energy, presence of mind, and practical ability. One cannot erase this fact with laments and moral judgments. That is the way man is; that is the way life is; that is way history is."--Oswald spengler
What I'm saying is simply the vast majority of people don't know how computers work and new generations of gamers either don't care or never grew up in PC golden age of no drm. I've seen peolpe defending diablo 3's 'always online' by calling it an 'mmo' or 'it was made an mmo so it's all ok'. Those kids don't give a rats ass. I've been downright sickened by how gamers go out of their way to bend over and take it from game companies like valve, EA, and blizzard. I'm not hopeful for the future, gamers on the whole seem to be indifferent morons who don't have sufficient intelligence to understand right from wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
... is not rockstar developers it's that making and understanding how software will perform and it's impacts is a hard problem. It's not like engineering where the laws of nature are relatively fixed and known and is a matter of trade offs (time vs cost), ANY change to a program has potential impacts and ripple effects on all other subsystems effectively changing program behavior to some extent. The real issue is the tools for software development and making these things understandable in complex systems is a hard problem. It's a matter of framing problems and solutions in ways that you can actually understand their impacts. Too much software development is undefined and uncharted because of the nature of coding itself. There is a lot of research going on in visualization trying to make these ethereal systems of code easy to grasp and understand in ways that are much easier and more natural for our senses as human beings.
http://www.allosphere.ucsb.edu/
It's a matter of being able to grasp what is that you are trying to do and it's impact. Most developers (even rockstars) have issues with not even knowing where they are headed and what will be needed down the line as projects grow and outstrip human ability to understand them. Software has long since passed the complexity where the human mind has the ability to full grasp all the complex interactions. The real problem now is getting the research and data to make demystify this complexity (i.e. complexity partially being a synonym for not being able to see/understand what a problem and solutions are and it's impacts).
"Your arguments would probably be more listened to if you didn't use Marxist terminology"
It's not "marxist terminology" capitalism is enforced and came into being by men with guns, only in america would someone say something so ignorant of history. More proof america is under the spell of mass political propaganda.
... have long taken advantage of public disinterest, ignorance and general stupidity. The trend will continue. One only has to look at the clusterfuck that is copyright and patents. It's too bad we can't go back and time and kill it. It's become a monster. We alright have outright criminal laws that limit the rights of the public at large to own software. The game industry has become more and more corrupt and criminal as time has gone on and its going to get worse.
The worst thing about it is the millions of mouthbreathing morons who just eat it right up. Diablo 3 had 6Million+ morons buy it. There are days I just want to chuck an asteroid at earth and be dumb with the millions of dumb shits who feed this in the first place.
"Its not like they can take Mario and make a FPS"
They did it with Metroid. Also there was the big transition to 3D mario starting with the 64. It's most likely do-able if you can figure how to design it correct.
"People who rail against day 1 DLC have no idea how releasing a game works. "
No this is all because of modern development costs and team sizes, in the late 90's early 2000's game team sizes were orders of magnitude smaller as well as costs to develop said game. DLC is a way to try to exploit gamers for extra cash by cutting up and parcelling out pieces of the game that you already had planned from the get go during the design phase. When content was less costly and lower resolution you could produce more content per unit of time per dollar, Modern games have expensive assets so you get a lot less for the same money because each asset takes so much longer and is more expensive but adds less to the actual game (so you ARE actually GETTING LESS). But gamers are just consumers that grew up with games so they see these new tactics as exploitation (and they are) because they are stop gap measures to deal with rising team sizes and development costs that have to be solved over the long term. Twisting the facts because of your ignorance of gaming history isn't a good idea.
"Can we turn any slashdot topic into an anti-rich diatribe"?
The idea that rich people historically came into existence by merit and not by legal exploitation and a cubic fuck-tonne of wars and violence is a myth. The legal foundations of a society are backed by guns and violence and anyone who thinks the current system is not exploitive and rigged in some sense is a moron, the whole legal framework is setup to deny economic rights to the majority through historical enclosure movements which to enable the new legal framework requires massive violence and unrest. So to talk negatively of the rich is the historically LITERATE thing to do.
Enclosure:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure
Bail outs (priviledges of the elite) see here:
http://dailybail.com/home/there-are-no-words-to-describe-the-following-part-ii.html
and here:
http://dailybail.com/
"Clearly this guy hasn't seen enough dystopian movies about two-class societies emerging from genetics."
We ALREADY have a two class society, whether capitalists admit it or not the 'pay you what you're worth' element of capitalism NATURALLY sorts people eugenically to some extent whether any of us want it to or not.
Can't say I've never switched, what you can do is install the new version into a new directory and/or backup the old database go check their forums/go ask around.
Just for those who don't know you can find old versions of programs at...
http://www.oldversion.com/
"This is forever. It's genetically inherited and it can NEVER be cured. There is no way to know how bad the effects will be (i.e. disease, immunity response, deformities, life span, etc) in the offspring for all generations."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eScDfYzMEEw
... were always over-rated. I hate having to repeat the same actions on touch interface devices because it doesn't register your motion. Buttons are nice, simple and consistent. I mourn the unpopularity of button based devices, I never understood why anyone would take a touch based MP3 player over one with well designed and placed buttons. I always hate accidentally causing music to skip or change songs on touch based devices.
"And if they don't, they're not interested, so please fuck off."
What you call "assault" is nothing of the sort, what women call 'assault' is that men are confused about how to engage women. They are incapable of seeing what you see. They are people who are just ignorant of social etiquette. It's hard for geeks to get that experience when they are constantly bullied and rejected. It's a self fulfilling prophecy - can't get social experience if no one wants to socialize with you to begin with, catch 22.
" Don't demonize your political adversareis."
Actually they've demonized themselves, they hate anything to do with helping other people. They are demonized correctly. You Americans live in a bizzaro world of misinformation and propaganda, in short, you don't know which end is up. Anyone out-side your country knows your right wing politicians are fucking mad. The fact that you can't see what the world does is why the world is so weary of you people.
"No surprise here, the mind controls the body. Why wouldn't the placebo effect work both ways?"
This actually goes a long way to prove that psychological abuse is actually physically damaging to the body, that bullshit about 'what doesn't kill you makes you stronger' or 'sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me' is bullshit.
After all if you are a social outcast you are deprived of things your body needs (like say companionship or sex) compared to other people.
"I said no to star craft two and diablo 3 as well."
Not a loss, the original developers are long gone. D3 and SC2 are bland and the magic is long gone. They survive through sheer inertia and new bodies without a long history of gaming.
"Really, buy software for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and there's no end to grief. Buy Angry Birds for a dollar, and it works like a charm."
Angry birds is orders of magnitude less complicated then many other software projects, you cannot compare apples to oranges.
"i prefer my *real* PS2."
And I'll be playing God of war 1 and games like Gradius V in high resolution. PC emulation only makes old classics better in the long run unless their is incompatibility or some game company does something incredibly stupid like how the original FF7 had really poorly encoded FMV which made the PS1 version superior. Although FF7 PC now has mods that take it beyond what the original could have ever dreamed.
There is a whole host of mods here
http://fem1.uniag.sk/Miroslav.Jezik/ff7ncopam.html
Also screenshots of enhanced models/textures and graphics can be found around the web, stuff IMPOSSIBLE to do on a console.
"Rather then going for broke and getting as much FPS as possible, why don't game developers focus on optimizing the experience for a SOLID 60 FPS, that is"
You just missed the point, the high FPS is just an average, you want a minimum FPS the game never falls under given heavy load (lots of objects, effects onscreen).
IF you ever played Quake 3 back in the day it was all about having many things going on onscreen at the same time.
"Surveys have shown that the distribution of political, ethical and religious opinions tends to be the same whatever the IQ group."
The human brain does not work on enlightenment view of human rationality, see here:
http://bit.ly/dYaWUc
"Really? Are you serious? There's an economic downturn."
For the little people. Perhaps you weren't paying attention to the secret trillions handed out.
See the following:
http://dailybail.com/home/there-are-no-words-to-describe-the-following-part-ii.html
More here
http://dailybail.com/
"It drives me nuts when I run into doors I can not open, "walls" I can not jump over, holes I can not duck through, items I cannot pickup and all that stuff."
I understand but that has always been there because having absolute open levels DOES NOT MAKE SENSE. Now for items I can understand. One of the things GTA and other open world games got wrong is that you screw up the pacing of the game when you give the player too much freedom and players end up getting seriously bored because the space between activities is long and usually tedious. Even Saints row the third despite it being a fun game has serious issues with travel time. There is enormous amounts of 'dead time' in modern games that shouldn't be there and ways to avoid that is to constrain the player to get a move on.
"you have obviously never heard of TOR, Chaumian mixes, Dining Cryptographers, etc.."
Facebook and how MOST people use the net and don't understand how technology works makes that effectively impossible (like I stated). Just because a small % of the population knows how to anonymize itself doesn't mean it's still not effectively impossible for large amounts of data related to you.
Think of this for a second, you have friends or know people, have parents, they sign up for facebook and start posting pictures of someone you know or their family member and you happen to be included in it. Zip into the database you go! Same with email and everything else. People always give away other peoples information unintentionally unknowingly everyday. You can't escape the fact that all information exists in a network and anyone in your network that leaks info about you means its effectively impossible for you to control much of the information about you floating around. Just interacting with any system (financial, banks, etc) means you're giving away data to OTHER institutions which are also CLUELESS or if not clueless you still have businesses selling data to other businesses for profit behind your back which is also from a pragmatic perspective largely unenforceable.
... in the modern era. What about GEO IP location, or identifying people by their IP address + browsing history (everytime you visit a website, multiple websites are tracking you).
Buzzwords like: Ad Serving, Traffic Analytics, Content Customization, are just euphamisms for identifying end users, their interests, spending habits, etc.
The below company has blizzard entertainment and others as a clients, you can bet they are using it to identify where their users live, what their income levels are, etc. It's trivial to identify people once you have enough information. Especially isnce IP addresses often give away a persons physical location.
http://www.maxmind.com/app/ip-location
No one has the resources to deal with it, it's like piracy you can't stop it even if you'd want to and big business has an interest in furthering its criminality and criminalizing anything that gets in its way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Spengler
"We have to make a case that they will be happier without DRM"
"In history it is not idealism, goodness or morality that reign -- their kingdom is not of this world -- but rather resolve, energy, presence of mind, and practical ability. One cannot erase this fact with laments and moral judgments. That is the way man is; that is the way life is; that is way history is."--Oswald spengler
What I'm saying is simply the vast majority of people don't know how computers work and new generations of gamers either don't care or never grew up in PC golden age of no drm. I've seen peolpe defending diablo 3's 'always online' by calling it an 'mmo' or 'it was made an mmo so it's all ok'. Those kids don't give a rats ass. I've been downright sickened by how gamers go out of their way to bend over and take it from game companies like valve, EA, and blizzard. I'm not hopeful for the future, gamers on the whole seem to be indifferent morons who don't have sufficient intelligence to understand right from wrong.