"And people ask what the point of having the monarchy around is."
Considering the state of the world, I don't think some people would mind trying having temporarily having a king to kick the asshats out of government. Some days I think we should just give absolute power to one man temporarily so he can get fire and get rid of people who are not doing their jobs.
"I am all for the gaming experience being opened up to people without having to keep a bleeding edge gaming rig going."
I'm all against it if companies don't have stand alone releases for PC anymore because it gives coporations way too much control over content, I can imagine Nvidia and AMD are not too pleased wiht online (i.e. no reason for a high end 3D card anymore) not to mention the insane lack of privacy. IMHO onlive is just customer lockin and hardcore DRM, I really hope it stays minority.
The technology is cool, but they need to allow you to download the games from online and run them offline (i.e. kind of like how steam allows digital downloads and backup of your games).
Having the option to play unconnected from the mothership is paramount IMHO. I can say is that online is for coporations to get back their monopoly, under the guise of "solving a problem" (i.e. expensive hardware)
Most hardware on the PC isn't that expensive anymore, you can get an entire PC for under $500 there's videocards that will run anything for 100 or less now. Almost all games today on the PC don't need anything more then an 8800 GT.
I'm sorry to tell you but the structure of corporate capitalism means corporations want the least expensive, most abusable human beings. The ain't coming back to america because wage expectations will never come down there and the cost of living is through the roof, you can't compete with slave labor and the way currencies are manipulated in the world market.
The truth is we have an OVERSUPPLY of people, people shouldn't HAVE to work like they do today with all our manufacturing cacpity, the problem is the culture and ideology of corporate capitalism in the west, if people got a national income it would go a long way to solving many problems but corparate types hate that because then human beings are not as easily exploitable because their expectations have been raised.
"Reality isn't fun. If it was we wouldn't play games."
I'll second this and say that those people who want realistic games are a stupid minority who don't understand game design. I also think the person in the article is taking random internet comments about "wanting more realism" in games way too seriously, I think most people want good art and immersion and they call that art and animation "realism". i.e. when a character animates badly we associate it with a "lack of realism" rather then a lack of good art direction, since I'd venture to say MOST video game characters animate in very unrealistic ways anyway (in terms of physics) but "LOOK REAL" in that they seem natural.
We only want to borrow the best parts from the real world. More realistic violence/damage models would be insanely boring, in fact the more photo realistic games get the less I am enthralled by them. The great thing about games is that the developers can take artistic license and don't have audience expectations of "being realistic". Games should not try to copy the movie industry so heavily, I'm can't be the only one worried about games that are getting too close to hollywood in terms of trying to make characters photorealistic (mass effect I'm looking at you) and more hollywoody.
Dont get me wrong I liked mass effect, it's just they don't need to keep upping the realism there's a point you cross where everything becomes the same and boring. I like it when artist can do different styles for games. I liked the art style in Need for speed nitro for instance, and thought it was great and it was a shame the core of the game itself wasn't better.
I'll take my God of War and Bayonetta before "more realsitic" graphics.
"The FTC needs to consider whether the consumer would really benefit by forcing chipmakers to keep various pieces seperate for the sake of competition. The continued decline in average selling price, combined with the increasing capability of each new generation of microprocessor indicates that consumers are not negatively impacted by such design integration."
The problem is not integration as it is the liscensing issues, where Intel tweaked Nehalem chips to deny Nvidia a liscense to make motherboard chipsets for it's processors.
It's not integration it's using your Intellectual property as a result of "integration" (i.e. tweaking chips = old license invalid) as a legal weapon
"I bought Mass Effect only to find out that the game simply does not run. My computer is as close to flawless as it could possibly get, it's been running for years and has successfully played many games with many different engines, I have done workarounds for crashes and bugs and all sorts of things, it's a tried and true PC."
I've had the same sort sof issues but this is when it's time to reinstall a fresh copy of windows. I always have a spare hard drive with a fresh copy of XP on it to test games with, when you install software over long periods of time on ANY microsoft OS, you can expect garbage entries to pile up that will prevent certain software from working. I know I still have a drive that won't run certain games because other software is conflicting with it that I have yet to pull the rest of the files off of.
The nature of windows drivers, DLL's and the registry in windows IMHO is what causes MOST of peoples problems with software.
Back in ye old DOS days, you could clear everything out of your config.sys or autoexec.bat and run "clean" and shit would just work.
Windows perversely causes thee things by not trying to simplify the OS, IMHO games should run in their own virtual environment like if they are on a fresh install of the OS.
"After all, no one should invent anything until it's been discussed in committee for a minimum of 10 years, until the technology it is attempting to standardize has already been superseded by something better !"
The irony is that routers and wifi network cards are a CASE IN POINT against your argument, many router and wifi network card manufacturers were allowed to release hardware based on unfinished specs, they worked intermittently and made a mess of the home router market. Almost all early home routers and wifi cards were pure junk!
"While it is true that the pay of most people working on a game is not tied to it's performance, their job security is very strongly tied to it. What if nobody bought the game and everybody pirated it?"
That means your game as not good enough to buy, blame your managers for underfunding your game or not finding a team with enough talent.
You act as if games developers have been putting out are not filled with bugs or incomplete features, or not downright crap compared to games that have raised the bar. PC games have been particularly burned by really nasty developers who release buggy shit on release. I remember empire total war debacle. Quite frankly the people funding/developing the games do not spend anywhere near enough time making sure their product is QA'd correctly, and release games with broken o unfinished features.
Why do these people deserve job security?
I'll give you a case in point, Supreme commander 1 was completely unfinished on release and the game balance was non-existent, the single player campaign was amateurish and it's like they had not learned anything from Starcraft or Company of Heroes on how to make a great single player RTS. Quite frankly if you are going to make an RTS, you should have learned the lessons of all the other RTS games that your audience has been playing over the last 10 years.
I bought Supreme commander and it's addon Fallen alliance as charity because I know how devs get screwed by their publishers in not getting enough time to finish their game, but lets face it... a lot of dev's just don't care and give into the "pump and dump" model of game development.
Get a game into a state just enough so that it will sell, then drop support and do any bug fixes and release it in an add on.
"As someone who makes his living selling content through the Internet, I want people to think several times before building a tool like AdBlock"
Adblock exists because most ads today are fucking obnoxious, pop ups flash, volume tweaking, lots of jerky motion or using girls in sexy positions to catch you gaze ANY cheap neurological trick they know to get you to look at the ad space.
I have really sensitive eyes and I really hate it when there are lots of flashing and moving ads of any type, flash ads tend to be the absolute worst.
Until ad companies and website operators stop being so obnoxious they can stuff it. You have no right to profit, if I don't like your site because you allow obnoxious advertising you don't deserve to exist.
The GP poster would do well to learn some neuroscience, the way the mind misretrieve's or misuses information is in a predictable manner.
They're and their and there, you can have someone meaning to say "there" and they type "their" and this is done *unconsciously and automatically* and beyond the persons awareness. These are common neurological errors in a persons brain due to the way they are wired. I constantly make the same mistakes over and over again and you just have to live with the fact that some peoples neural network are particularly noisy.
I've often left out, switched or mistyped similar words or had bad grammar in my posts and still got rated insightful because many of those mods understand this fact.
Many neurological errors are UNCONSCIOUS the user is not even aware he has mistyped because the user internally is sending the message to "type their" (what they actually mean) and their motor system is sent "there".
The way memory exists in human minds is via networks of association therefore anything near those activated networks when something is looked up may be drawn instead without the user knowing it.
Quite frankly data is so duplicated today bit-rot is not really an issue if you know what tools to use, especially if you use tools like quickpar on important data that can handle bad blocks.
Much data is easily duplicated, the data you want to save if it is important should be backed up with care.
Even though much of the data I download is easily downloaded again, the stuff I want to keep I quickpar the archives and burn to disc, and really important data that is irreplacable I make multiple copies.
... I'm kind of wondering why nobody in the game industry has thought of taking User interfaces in games and fully develop them for other software apps as spinoffs for alternate sources of revenue?
I was pretty impressed by Deadspace's in-game UI, now if they could take some great UI concepts and apply them to other applications outside of games the expertise gained in the industry could probably take userinterfaces to the next level.
"Overpriced to begin with? Rubbish. They cost loads less than on any competing platform"
That's not the issue, games themselves are now WAY WAY over produced so their value to people is nil. Most iPhone games are rehashes of old games and are absolute junk, I'm not surprised no one wants to pay money for a phone game. Most people have systems dedicated to gaming for just this purpose.
iPhone games = flash games, this is why many flash games are run on portals for the ad revenue. IMHO that's the model iPhone games are under and quite frankly we already have tonnes of casual flash games and casual games portals.
There is just way too much oversupply in games and I think most developers need their heads read, you're competing against ALL OTHER possible games, why would someone waste their finite money on a dinky little iPhone game and not Modern warfare 2, or left for dead 2?
... about internet connections, everytime you visist a website you hit a bunch of ad and tracking servers, and most people do not have proper anti-information leaking programs on their systems.
You can gain the same information in a multitude of ways, privacy simply cannot survive onslaught of advancing technology where we want to use that technology to scientifically monitor everything possible to increase our understanding of complex systems.
"If you can't get your drivers right, people won't buy your cards more than once and the folks that do and experience problems will turn folks away from your business. I know I recount this story on the forums I frequent."
Except often times it's not drivers but power/power issues, especially if you've overstuffed your wall sockets and powerbars. I had a machine that would keep freezing with one of my fans turned on plugged into one of the power bars, I unplugged the fan from the bar and all was fine.
A lot of problems come from using "dirty" or highly erratic/badly wired/overloaded power sources.
"I'm sure I can tell 128 MP3 is not so good. it's sounds a bit hot to my ears. "
You need decent speakers/ good headphones with isolation and no noise to really aprpeciate the difference between raw and MP3 encoded, but beyond 128 encoding, like 192 or variable encoding it gets tough unless the songs themselves hit notes in such a way as to make the differences audible.
I've found that over 192 or using variable encoding I've not had as many problems with hiss/snaps and pops.
"This is where the collaborative and accumulative nature of hard science really excels. "
Except our scienec is embryonic at present, so I would assert that even today's science will look clownlike a few generations down the line. i.e. we tend to overestimate what we know and understimate what we don't.
This statement is meaningless. Your statement appears wise but notice how you are saying this long AFTER THE FACT. "They were not your ordinary crackpot" is comment made with 100% hindsight. Note the comments from his PEERS AT THE TIME, everyone in the community all educated people at the time thought he was wrong and many still thought he was wrong for the rest of their lives despite their vaunted education.
Slashdot Mirror
"Exactly me immediate reaction. How intelligent do these guys expect an elephant to be?"
Actually the elephants have calculated the fate of the universe and realize it's all pointless, they are secretly laugh at us all!
"And people ask what the point of having the monarchy around is."
Considering the state of the world, I don't think some people would mind trying having temporarily having a king to kick the asshats out of government. Some days I think we should just give absolute power to one man temporarily so he can get fire and get rid of people who are not doing their jobs.
Good points, if only I had the mod points!
"I am all for the gaming experience being opened up to people without having to keep a bleeding edge gaming rig going."
I'm all against it if companies don't have stand alone releases for PC anymore because it gives coporations way too much control over content, I can imagine Nvidia and AMD are not too pleased wiht online (i.e. no reason for a high end 3D card anymore) not to mention the insane lack of privacy. IMHO onlive is just customer lockin and hardcore DRM, I really hope it stays minority.
The technology is cool, but they need to allow you to download the games from online and run them offline (i.e. kind of like how steam allows digital downloads and backup of your games).
Having the option to play unconnected from the mothership is paramount IMHO. I can say is that online is for coporations to get back their monopoly, under the guise of "solving a problem" (i.e. expensive hardware)
Most hardware on the PC isn't that expensive anymore, you can get an entire PC for under $500 there's videocards that will run anything for 100 or less now. Almost all games today on the PC don't need anything more then an 8800 GT.
I'm sorry to tell you but the structure of corporate capitalism means corporations want the least expensive, most abusable human beings. The ain't coming back to america because wage expectations will never come down there and the cost of living is through the roof, you can't compete with slave labor and the way currencies are manipulated in the world market.
The truth is we have an OVERSUPPLY of people, people shouldn't HAVE to work like they do today with all our manufacturing cacpity, the problem is the culture and ideology of corporate capitalism in the west, if people got a national income it would go a long way to solving many problems but corparate types hate that because then human beings are not as easily exploitable because their expectations have been raised.
They want obedience with your head down.
"Reality isn't fun. If it was we wouldn't play games."
I'll second this and say that those people who want realistic games are a stupid minority who don't understand game design. I also think the person in the article is taking random internet comments about "wanting more realism" in games way too seriously, I think most people want good art and immersion and they call that art and animation "realism". i.e. when a character animates badly we associate it with a "lack of realism" rather then a lack of good art direction, since I'd venture to say MOST video game characters animate in very unrealistic ways anyway (in terms of physics) but "LOOK REAL" in that they seem natural.
We only want to borrow the best parts from the real world. More realistic violence/damage models would be insanely boring, in fact the more photo realistic games get the less I am enthralled by them. The great thing about games is that the developers can take artistic license and don't have audience expectations of "being realistic". Games should not try to copy the movie industry so heavily, I'm can't be the only one worried about games that are getting too close to hollywood in terms of trying to make characters photorealistic (mass effect I'm looking at you) and more hollywoody.
Dont get me wrong I liked mass effect, it's just they don't need to keep upping the realism there's a point you cross where everything becomes the same and boring. I like it when artist can do different styles for games. I liked the art style in Need for speed nitro for instance, and thought it was great and it was a shame the core of the game itself wasn't better.
I'll take my God of War and Bayonetta before "more realsitic" graphics.
"Kids don't realize that their chances of playing in the NFL are equivalent to winning the lottery"
Kids realize this but for most kids hardwork is painful and boring, you forget that math requires effort and most people do not want to expend effort.
"Government operates by forcibly taking money from one person and giving it to another person or organization."
You are taxed by consent, if you don't like it, then do what the earlier Americans did and revolt (no taxation without representation).
"The FTC needs to consider whether the consumer would really benefit by forcing chipmakers to keep various pieces seperate for the sake of competition. The continued decline in average selling price, combined with the increasing capability of each new generation of microprocessor indicates that consumers are not negatively impacted by such design integration."
The problem is not integration as it is the liscensing issues, where Intel tweaked Nehalem chips to deny Nvidia a liscense to make motherboard chipsets for it's processors.
It's not integration it's using your Intellectual property as a result of "integration" (i.e. tweaking chips = old license invalid) as a legal weapon
"I bought Mass Effect only to find out that the game simply does not run. My computer is as close to flawless as it could possibly get, it's been running for years and has successfully played many games with many different engines, I have done workarounds for crashes and bugs and all sorts of things, it's a tried and true PC."
I've had the same sort sof issues but this is when it's time to reinstall a fresh copy of windows. I always have a spare hard drive with a fresh copy of XP on it to test games with, when you install software over long periods of time on ANY microsoft OS, you can expect garbage entries to pile up that will prevent certain software from working. I know I still have a drive that won't run certain games because other software is conflicting with it that I have yet to pull the rest of the files off of.
The nature of windows drivers, DLL's and the registry in windows IMHO is what causes MOST of peoples problems with software.
Back in ye old DOS days, you could clear everything out of your config.sys or autoexec.bat and run "clean" and shit would just work.
Windows perversely causes thee things by not trying to simplify the OS, IMHO games should run in their own virtual environment like if they are on a fresh install of the OS.
"That's the negative aspect of the /. moderation system, it encourages groupthink and censorship. "
I agree quite a lot. Try posting anyting critical of free markets or austrian economics, see what happens.
Left wing criticism of anything gets heavily modded into oblivion all too often.
"After all, no one should invent anything until it's been discussed in committee for a minimum of 10 years, until the technology it is attempting to standardize has already been superseded by something better !"
The irony is that routers and wifi network cards are a CASE IN POINT against your argument, many router and wifi network card manufacturers were allowed to release hardware based on unfinished specs, they worked intermittently and made a mess of the home router market. Almost all early home routers and wifi cards were pure junk!
"While it is true that the pay of most people working on a game is not tied to it's performance, their job security is very strongly tied to it. What if nobody bought the game and everybody pirated it?"
That means your game as not good enough to buy, blame your managers for underfunding your game or not finding a team with enough talent.
You act as if games developers have been putting out are not filled with bugs or incomplete features, or not downright crap compared to games that have raised the bar. PC games have been particularly burned by really nasty developers who release buggy shit on release. I remember empire total war debacle. Quite frankly the people funding/developing the games do not spend anywhere near enough time making sure their product is QA'd correctly, and release games with broken o unfinished features.
Why do these people deserve job security?
I'll give you a case in point, Supreme commander 1 was completely unfinished on release and the game balance was non-existent, the single player campaign was amateurish and it's like they had not learned anything from Starcraft or Company of Heroes on how to make a great single player RTS. Quite frankly if you are going to make an RTS, you should have learned the lessons of all the other RTS games that your audience has been playing over the last 10 years.
I bought Supreme commander and it's addon Fallen alliance as charity because I know how devs get screwed by their publishers in not getting enough time to finish their game, but lets face it... a lot of dev's just don't care and give into the "pump and dump" model of game development.
Get a game into a state just enough so that it will sell, then drop support and do any bug fixes and release it in an add on.
"As someone who makes his living selling content through the Internet, I want people to think several times before building a tool like AdBlock"
Adblock exists because most ads today are fucking obnoxious, pop ups flash, volume tweaking, lots of jerky motion or using girls in sexy positions to catch you gaze ANY cheap neurological trick they know to get you to look at the ad space.
I have really sensitive eyes and I really hate it when there are lots of flashing and moving ads of any type, flash ads tend to be the absolute worst.
Until ad companies and website operators stop being so obnoxious they can stuff it. You have no right to profit, if I don't like your site because you allow obnoxious advertising you don't deserve to exist.
The GP poster would do well to learn some neuroscience, the way the mind misretrieve's or misuses information is in a predictable manner.
They're and their and there, you can have someone meaning to say "there" and they type "their" and this is done *unconsciously and automatically* and beyond the persons awareness. These are common neurological errors in a persons brain due to the way they are wired. I constantly make the same mistakes over and over again and you just have to live with the fact that some peoples neural network are particularly noisy.
I've often left out, switched or mistyped similar words or had bad grammar in my posts and still got rated insightful because many of those mods understand this fact.
Many neurological errors are UNCONSCIOUS the user is not even aware he has mistyped because the user internally is sending the message to "type their" (what they actually mean) and their motor system is sent "there".
The way memory exists in human minds is via networks of association therefore anything near those activated networks when something is looked up may be drawn instead without the user knowing it.
Quite frankly data is so duplicated today bit-rot is not really an issue if you know what tools to use, especially if you use tools like quickpar on important data that can handle bad blocks.
Much data is easily duplicated, the data you want to save if it is important should be backed up with care.
Even though much of the data I download is easily downloaded again, the stuff I want to keep I quickpar the archives and burn to disc, and really important data that is irreplacable I make multiple copies.
http://www.quickpar.co.uk/
"Tell me about it.. a self-selecting group of people grade themselves? How on earth is that scientific?"
Happens all the time, it's called peer review.
... I'm kind of wondering why nobody in the game industry has thought of taking User interfaces in games and fully develop them for other software apps as spinoffs for alternate sources of revenue?
I was pretty impressed by Deadspace's in-game UI, now if they could take some great UI concepts and apply them to other applications outside of games the expertise gained in the industry could probably take userinterfaces to the next level.
I've seen things like:
http://www.taggalaxy.com/ ... and always wondered what some guys in the game industry couldn't do if given the time to develop some kick ass UI.
http://cooliris.com/
"Overpriced to begin with? Rubbish. They cost loads less than on any competing platform"
That's not the issue, games themselves are now WAY WAY over produced so their value to people is nil. Most iPhone games are rehashes of old games and are absolute junk, I'm not surprised no one wants to pay money for a phone game. Most people have systems dedicated to gaming for just this purpose.
iPhone games = flash games, this is why many flash games are run on portals for the ad revenue. IMHO that's the model iPhone games are under and quite frankly we already have tonnes of casual flash games and casual games portals.
There is just way too much oversupply in games and I think most developers need their heads read, you're competing against ALL OTHER possible games, why would someone waste their finite money on a dinky little iPhone game and not Modern warfare 2, or left for dead 2?
... about internet connections, everytime you visist a website you hit a bunch of ad and tracking servers, and most people do not have proper anti-information leaking programs on their systems.
You can gain the same information in a multitude of ways, privacy simply cannot survive onslaught of advancing technology where we want to use that technology to scientifically monitor everything possible to increase our understanding of complex systems.
"If you can't get your drivers right, people won't buy your cards more than once and the folks that do and experience problems will turn folks away from your business. I know I recount this story on the forums I frequent."
Except often times it's not drivers but power/power issues, especially if you've overstuffed your wall sockets and powerbars. I had a machine that would keep freezing with one of my fans turned on plugged into one of the power bars, I unplugged the fan from the bar and all was fine.
A lot of problems come from using "dirty" or highly erratic/badly wired/overloaded power sources.
"I'm sure I can tell 128 MP3 is not so good. it's sounds a bit hot to my ears. "
You need decent speakers/ good headphones with isolation and no noise to really aprpeciate the difference between raw and MP3 encoded, but beyond 128 encoding, like 192 or variable encoding it gets tough unless the songs themselves hit notes in such a way as to make the differences audible.
I've found that over 192 or using variable encoding I've not had as many problems with hiss/snaps and pops.
"This is where the collaborative and accumulative nature of hard science really excels. "
Except our scienec is embryonic at present, so I would assert that even today's science will look clownlike a few generations down the line. i.e. we tend to overestimate what we know and understimate what we don't.
"My point is this: for every Wegener/Cantor/Galileo there are thousands of Bozo the clowns"
My point is that everyone is a clown, and do aren't capable of knowing who is a clown and who is not since they are all clowns.
"They were not your ordinary crackpot."
This statement is meaningless. Your statement appears wise but notice how you are saying this long AFTER THE FACT. "They were not your ordinary crackpot" is comment made with 100% hindsight. Note the comments from his PEERS AT THE TIME, everyone in the community all educated people at the time thought he was wrong and many still thought he was wrong for the rest of their lives despite their vaunted education.