"The company's first generation of drives suffered from fragmentation issues resulting in performance degradation over time."
The performance degradation in the Intel X-25 is not because of a "firmware bug". All SSD's will suffer performance degradation whether or not their writing/wear leveling algorithms have been updated via firmware.
"Perhaps there is some way to recover the franchise, but I suspect your average movie-goer will be pissed at Scott's attempts at a prequel because it will likely not be anything like a film done by James Cameron, which is what people have come to expect from Aliens"
James camerons was easily the best in the series. The first aliens while not bad was too plodding and lets also not forget it was a different generation. I'm at a loss why they didn't get James Cameron to do all the subsequent aliens.
I agree that the series totally died with the third installment and then the torture that was alien resurrection.
Aliens 3 wasn't TOO bad (as a movie on its own), but it warped the series expectations, you were just like "what the fuck" after you watched it wondering how they could have messed up such a great series after the Aliens.
"Most Japanese developers feature their games in a clearly Japanese setting."
Actually most anime characters do not look like japanese at all. I think Japan has a pretty healthy mix of diversity in their art styles.
Case in point, the recently released street fighter 4 Ryu and Ken look pretty "americanized" while they may have japanese artistic undertones, Guile or Ken would hardly be "japan only" or what about dhalism?
I think this is more of an issue of lack of imagination IMHO and while you might create "white sims" people, I think when it comes to media AESTHETICS is paramount, what if certain ethnic groups are better looking aesthetically universally to all people? It has little to do with race and more to do with standards of style and beauty.
"The best games I've played to date aren't good because of tech, but great stories and immersive and imaginative environment"
I'm going to say that YES tech does matter since we're talking about game engines that define the SCOPE of an artists and level designers creativity, tech is just as much a part of the art. All good art you've ever seen, books, games, etc, require skill and technique and that is the essence of technology whether it is an artist or an engineer designing a game engine, or computer engineers designing next generation CPU's and GPU's which allow such creativity in the first place.
Go check out the water and atmospheric effects in Empire total war when doing ship battles, those are possible because of shader effects because of hardware advances which are all based on the tech. So yes, tech is just as important as all other aspects of a game regardless of whether the user is aware of it or not.
I still think hand tuned AI when it comes to games matters since processing power is limited, also the real problem comes from having the AI come up with models in order to effectively understand what the opponent is doing. Right now most difficult AI's in games like RTS get special cheats instead of using tactics since "fair" AI's get wooped, AI's in games usually only have reaction time, cheats or outnumbering the player as their advantage.
"Around the turn of the last century, we needed about 80% of the US population working on farms to feed us all. Today, it's more like 4%, and we're the world's biggest food exporter. What do you think made that possible?"
You're confusing improvements in mechanization and understanding of chemistry with cost cutting engineered chemical additives to food whose long term effects are unknown. They are not the same in the slightest, companies emphasize the bottom over truth if it makes them money and history has shown corporate power is abused often.
"And hell, I rather eat food thats *NOT* made in cow shit just because its "natural" based on human history and was the only way to make it at the time."
It's not a matter of old versus new, it's a matter of understanding. If food grown with cowshit is no better then superduper engineered fertilizer, then it doesn't matter.
I agree with what you say but let's not forget theirs consequences to our actions and some companies might do harm to the biosphere (mosanto and their crops that are sterile), the real problem comes from the people at the helm of industry - are they ethical or not? Sometimes I wonder if the people need some kind of voting power to vote idiots managing the food supply out.
Quite frankly I think companies should be banned/regulated from engineering foods that go sterile unless their is good reason for them not to.
... it seems whenever a chipmaker tries to fab its own parts (3dfx and their own boards when they merged/bought out STB) they end up dying a slow death. The only really that can afford it's own fab is intel and thats because it has the largest marketshare as well as having had leading products for so long.
"Nearly each iteration of the series (ed: of zelda) is a reboot."
I would disagree, almost every Zelda game has a template that it follows religiously. I'd love to take the combat advances from god of war and stick them in zelda, and I'd also like a more mature and grungier zelda. Nintendo has been playing it safe with zelda for too long. You always find link and Zelda are always dumbed down to 6 year old level, they could do a heck of a lot with Zelda but I think the japanese designers like Miyamoto are too conservative and out of touch with north american gamers.
I remember hearing about the fallout between Miyamoto and the developer of Starfox, the developer basically said that the fans want starfox ala the original, where you are flying the arwing, and he told miyamoto thats what they expect and miyamoto wanted to do other crap with it. And I agree with the starfox dev 100%.
The truth is if it ain't broke don't fix it.
Nintendo has broken franchises before and Starfox is a case in point, starfox adventures and starfox assault were the most miserable in the series.
I was really disappointed with both as the focus was on 3D platforming and not what made starfox famous to begin with. I'd love to see a reboot of the original starfox personally, the original designers of the first one had everything right on all they needed for a sequel was to tweak it a bit.
What you are talking about is thinking about thinking or metacognition, the ability to see and pull back from a process, to estimate it's usefulness/fruitlessness and move onto another task.
I think you're missing the benefit of people going into space:
Really smart people the best of humanity no longer have to answer to the politics of the earth and therefore can have new moralities based on secular science that don't have to cow to the stupids, a civilization on another planet is not within reach of the crazy fundies here on earth.
When the earth was less populated it was possible to create new traditions and moralities by moving away and setting up your own shop, now imagine you can do that in a less hostile atmosphere with technology where people are smarter and better then the average human being.
"I am required to use a bound book. That means that pages cannot be added or removed without making it obvious."
This doesn't mean you can't use a printer, in fact it would be a good idea to invent a printer that is able to write to bound books (I would guess they already exist?) and then have some hidden encoding printed onto the page so that you'd know if pages were modified or something along those lines.
It's not about ethical challenges it's about a religious worship and reverence of what is "natural", morality is ultimately arbitrary and based on the situation, if we all were going and the best option was to use stem cells or else... we'd make those sacrifices because it was forced upon us by nature herself. People get comfortable with that "if they found it like this, or it has been this way for x time, then it is good or sacred". This is fundamentally the problem with immature human thinking of those who don't think too much or aren't long lived enough to see where principles break down.
By definition everytime a woman has a period she's killing a human who *could have been*.
The truth is nature sucks and that's the whole point we have science to begin with, we're being slowly eaten alive by natures destructive forces against our own will.
We could make the argument that many of the worlds problems come from death itself in that human beings never live long enough to mature nad grow out of their more immature ideas of morality, religion, and ignorance about the universe.
A long lived human being has time on his hands to figure out much more then a short live human being.
Many of our problems come from the fact that there is way too much stuff to learn and only around ~30,000 days of life.
~30K days is roughly years of life... I'm going to assume statistically the average most people will live to is around 80 until technology catches up and makes life extension/enhancement/being young work out.
Imagine of Einstein didn't have to die, or plato, or socrates, imagine how much shit they would have learned and been able to add to humanity.
Anyone who opposes science is opposing the great things human beings given more time could accomplish, and that goes for everybody. Now someone with a more average intelligence could accomplish great things as well as someone who is a genius by sheer nature of him having more time to accomplish it.
"Even if it does, it may consider human beings beneath notice, as worthy of consideration as bacteria are to us."
But bacteria aren't self aware like we are, and since AI is being designed by us and not a random process we can certainly test AI's safely in black box environments (i.e. AI's without bodies, etc).
... they provide original english and japanese voices AND subtitles.
It also helps that SF4 was designed from the start for both japanese and english speaking markets.
Even though I have quibles with the voice over work since I've seen so many SF anime movies with different voice actors (the ones who did the anime that came with the collectors edition of the game in english sucked pretty bad).
Capcom and Sony usually have done pretty alright voice work, it's finally good to see original japanese + subtitle options.
I really wished over PS2 RPG's went that route, although if you want to see OUTSTANDING localization check out level 5's rogue galaxy, that game is effin amazing in terms of what they did.
But that's a human way of looking at things, we will have a hand in designing how AI's function and also if AI's are SMARTER then humans then they will know that we are self aware like themselves, the idea of 'smarter then a human' and 'looking at humans as cockroaches' doesn't mix. If we take the greek philosophical view that evil is the result of ignorance and human beings commit acts of evil out of ignorance then by definition an AI would be even less ignorant then man and hence less evil.
We're smarter then animals but we know animals feel things and attempt to treat them humanely and we also know they are slaves to their instincts and can't help being that way, a AI genuinely smarter then US would look at us the way we look at a developmentally disabled person someone who needs to be looked after and whos rights need to be protected.
... anything that is super intelligent is likely not to act as dumb as unethical as a human, with great power comes great responsibility. Human beings are way too paranoid, we already have nukes with smart people (technically dumb in another sense) developing even more destructive weapons.... I'm sure the higher intelligence you have the more ethical you are and the lack of ethics in human beings has more to do with biological egoism and hyper individualistic deritous we've inherited that machines won't have.
Let's also not forget machines will have the option to not feel anything and exist totally neutrally whereas human beings can't just shut off their nervous system, they get tired, sick, lonely, need love, etc, AI's largely won't need any of that because they will lack all those biological feelings that give rise to war in the first place.
Also anything that is truly intelligent and is capable of ethical reasoning and not a mere automaton would quickly realize it's lack of concern for others.
"Why? I don't get this. Since you're so interested in cars -- if I build a car, does my neighbor have a right to use it whenever he wants without my permission "
Your analogy doesn't fit, we're comparing the model of how a product is sold to a customer and the customers rights to the product *he/she paid for*.
Your customer BUYS the software PRODUCT from you, hence he should be able to get legal access to the source code at some time in the future should he/she want it, especially so others can work on it and fix the software as hardware advances and not be dependent on draconian copyright laws that were allowed to exist by default, that allows hte original developers or corporation that developed it to browbeat society by sucking up the advancements made from commons itself. Since the public was too ignorant to understand anything about their rights to software products.
The whole purpose of patents expiring is so that people can use advancements and incorporate those advancements and knowledge into other products, with software a company can sit on anything learned or advancements into oblivion.
It should have never been allowed to begin with, their should have been a government repository required for the source code and assets of all software so that legal customers who paid for it should have access to it should it need to be repaired/updated/whatever.
And yes I do believe that society has partial ownership of anything someone else 'makes' because you are technically only re-organizing information that already exists in nature, you're not creating anything *new* in nature just re-arranging matter and energy.
And also your SUCCESS depends on your customers your wealth was derived from the mass of society, so society definitely should have a say especially if you are abusing society for your economic benefit.
I don't think any sane person can argue with that, that there have to be some kind of limits.
Contracts are a way for men to hide their evil immorral actions and wrap it in market rhetoric.
The whole point is that the majority of the population is not interested and not technically minded enough to defend their rights in this area.
The fact that software can be sold like that at all is part of the reason we have so many problems to begin with.
This allows software companies to forcibly obsolete software, imagine if your car company remotely disable your car whenever it made a new model, and your old car would be purposely made defective so that you aren't able to use it as society progresses. There is no reason for software to break at all given that the society has co-ownership rights to all software, so that the source can be released to legimate owners of software.
It's this kind of BS that makes the softwarei industry who support that model the worst kinds of people on the planet regardless of whether or not they are aware of their lack of intelligence in the matter.
I know software developers have to make a living but seriously the only reason they are able to get away with it is because of ignorance, lack of interest and lack of intellgience in the population at large.
"(*). Just because copyright ends, doesn't mean you have the right to have someone else's work on your own terms"
You do if you pay for it, since you've paid for the work + given the guy a profit. Imagine if your car dealer could tell you couldn't have someone else repair your car, software industry is tyrannical, you can't hire other programmers to fix or modify things about windows for instance that you don't like.
This is exactly the problem with modern "liscensing". It's bullshit.
"you get to play continuously for an hour with three buddies on the sofa"
Thanks for your worthless argument...
Three Buddies on the sofa who can see where you are is bullshit, I'd hate to try playing Q3 CTF on a console, it would suck without each person having their own screen. Consoles now also have their own screens because of internet multiplay so the "sofa argument" is used by those who are denial, I play CoD4 online via xbox live and I certainly don't think "the sofa" versus playing with my buds over xbox live is so different, especially given the time constraints on those of us with jobs and a life.
Slashdot Mirror
"The company's first generation of drives suffered from fragmentation issues resulting in performance degradation over time."
The performance degradation in the Intel X-25 is not because of a "firmware bug". All SSD's will suffer performance degradation whether or not their writing/wear leveling algorithms have been updated via firmware.
"Perhaps there is some way to recover the franchise, but I suspect your average movie-goer will be pissed at Scott's attempts at a prequel because it will likely not be anything like a film done by James Cameron, which is what people have come to expect from Aliens"
James camerons was easily the best in the series. The first aliens while not bad was too plodding and lets also not forget it was a different generation. I'm at a loss why they didn't get James Cameron to do all the subsequent aliens.
I agree that the series totally died with the third installment and then the torture that was alien resurrection.
Aliens 3 wasn't TOO bad (as a movie on its own), but it warped the series expectations, you were just like "what the fuck" after you watched it wondering how they could have messed up such a great series after the Aliens.
"Most Japanese developers feature their games in a clearly Japanese setting."
Actually most anime characters do not look like japanese at all. I think Japan has a pretty healthy mix of diversity in their art styles.
Case in point, the recently released street fighter 4 Ryu and Ken look pretty "americanized" while they may have japanese artistic undertones, Guile or Ken would hardly be "japan only" or what about dhalism?
I think this is more of an issue of lack of imagination IMHO and while you might create "white sims" people, I think when it comes to media AESTHETICS is paramount, what if certain ethnic groups are better looking aesthetically universally to all people? It has little to do with race and more to do with standards of style and beauty.
"The best games I've played to date aren't good because of tech, but great stories and immersive and imaginative environment"
I'm going to say that YES tech does matter since we're talking about game engines that define the SCOPE of an artists and level designers creativity, tech is just as much a part of the art. All good art you've ever seen, books, games, etc, require skill and technique and that is the essence of technology whether it is an artist or an engineer designing a game engine, or computer engineers designing next generation CPU's and GPU's which allow such creativity in the first place.
Go check out the water and atmospheric effects in Empire total war when doing ship battles, those are possible because of shader effects because of hardware advances which are all based on the tech. So yes, tech is just as important as all other aspects of a game regardless of whether the user is aware of it or not.
I still think hand tuned AI when it comes to games matters since processing power is limited, also the real problem comes from having the AI come up with models in order to effectively understand what the opponent is doing. Right now most difficult AI's in games like RTS get special cheats instead of using tactics since "fair" AI's get wooped, AI's in games usually only have reaction time, cheats or outnumbering the player as their advantage.
"Around the turn of the last century, we needed about 80% of the US population working on farms to feed us all. Today, it's more like 4%, and we're the world's biggest food exporter. What do you think made that possible?"
You're confusing improvements in mechanization and understanding of chemistry with cost cutting engineered chemical additives to food whose long term effects are unknown. They are not the same in the slightest, companies emphasize the bottom over truth if it makes them money and history has shown corporate power is abused often.
"And hell, I rather eat food thats *NOT* made in cow shit just because its "natural" based on human history and was the only way to make it at the time."
It's not a matter of old versus new, it's a matter of understanding. If food grown with cowshit is no better then superduper engineered fertilizer, then it doesn't matter.
I agree with what you say but let's not forget theirs consequences to our actions and some companies might do harm to the biosphere (mosanto and their crops that are sterile), the real problem comes from the people at the helm of industry - are they ethical or not? Sometimes I wonder if the people need some kind of voting power to vote idiots managing the food supply out.
Quite frankly I think companies should be banned/regulated from engineering foods that go sterile unless their is good reason for them not to.
... it seems whenever a chipmaker tries to fab its own parts (3dfx and their own boards when they merged/bought out STB) they end up dying a slow death. The only really that can afford it's own fab is intel and thats because it has the largest marketshare as well as having had leading products for so long.
"Your rig needs five fans, but makes a little less noise than the Wii? I can't even hear my Wii's fan from across the room"
Maybe not the fan, but some Wii drives are LOUD I know one of the first Wii's I owned had a really loud drive.
Yes but if you look at our own history we've done much much worse, we've had every stripe of behaviour, things like cannibalism and on and on.
In fact if hitler had won the world might look a lot different, or if the USSR hadn't collapsed for instance.
"Humans are really unique in how much they argue about the ethics of killing something for the benefit of their group."
Humans also have many times the brain power of other animals, I'm sure if other animals had our brainpower they would do similar things.
"Nearly each iteration of the series (ed: of zelda) is a reboot."
I would disagree, almost every Zelda game has a template that it follows religiously. I'd love to take the combat advances from god of war and stick them in zelda, and I'd also like a more mature and grungier zelda. Nintendo has been playing it safe with zelda for too long. You always find link and Zelda are always dumbed down to 6 year old level, they could do a heck of a lot with Zelda but I think the japanese designers like Miyamoto are too conservative and out of touch with north american gamers.
I remember hearing about the fallout between Miyamoto and the developer of Starfox, the developer basically said that the fans want starfox ala the original, where you are flying the arwing, and he told miyamoto thats what they expect and miyamoto wanted to do other crap with it. And I agree with the starfox dev 100%.
The truth is if it ain't broke don't fix it.
Nintendo has broken franchises before and Starfox is a case in point, starfox adventures and starfox assault were the most miserable in the series.
I was really disappointed with both as the focus was on 3D platforming and not what made starfox famous to begin with. I'd love to see a reboot of the original starfox personally, the original designers of the first one had everything right on all they needed for a sequel was to tweak it a bit.
What you are talking about is thinking about thinking or metacognition, the ability to see and pull back from a process, to estimate it's usefulness/fruitlessness and move onto another task.
I think you're missing the benefit of people going into space:
Really smart people the best of humanity no longer have to answer to the politics of the earth and therefore can have new moralities based on secular science that don't have to cow to the stupids, a civilization on another planet is not within reach of the crazy fundies here on earth.
When the earth was less populated it was possible to create new traditions and moralities by moving away and setting up your own shop, now imagine you can do that in a less hostile atmosphere with technology where people are smarter and better then the average human being.
"I am required to use a bound book. That means that pages cannot be added or removed without making it obvious."
This doesn't mean you can't use a printer, in fact it would be a good idea to invent a printer that is able to write to bound books (I would guess they already exist?) and then have some hidden encoding printed onto the page so that you'd know if pages were modified or something along those lines.
It's not about ethical challenges it's about a religious worship and reverence of what is "natural", morality is ultimately arbitrary and based on the situation, if we all were going and the best option was to use stem cells or else... we'd make those sacrifices because it was forced upon us by nature herself. People get comfortable with that "if they found it like this, or it has been this way for x time, then it is good or sacred". This is fundamentally the problem with immature human thinking of those who don't think too much or aren't long lived enough to see where principles break down.
By definition everytime a woman has a period she's killing a human who *could have been*.
The truth is nature sucks and that's the whole point we have science to begin with, we're being slowly eaten alive by natures destructive forces against our own will.
We could make the argument that many of the worlds problems come from death itself in that human beings never live long enough to mature nad grow out of their more immature ideas of morality, religion, and ignorance about the universe.
A long lived human being has time on his hands to figure out much more then a short live human being.
Many of our problems come from the fact that there is way too much stuff to learn and only around ~30,000 days of life.
~30K days is roughly years of life... I'm going to assume statistically the average most people will live to is around 80 until technology catches up and makes life extension/enhancement/being young work out.
Imagine of Einstein didn't have to die, or plato, or socrates, imagine how much shit they would have learned and been able to add to humanity.
Anyone who opposes science is opposing the great things human beings given more time could accomplish, and that goes for everybody. Now someone with a more average intelligence could accomplish great things as well as someone who is a genius by sheer nature of him having more time to accomplish it.
"Even if it does, it may consider human beings beneath notice, as worthy of consideration as bacteria are to us."
But bacteria aren't self aware like we are, and since AI is being designed by us and not a random process we can certainly test AI's safely in black box environments (i.e. AI's without bodies, etc).
... is the fact that eventually we have to get off earth and learn how to survive in the hostile universe anyway.
... they provide original english and japanese voices AND subtitles.
It also helps that SF4 was designed from the start for both japanese and english speaking markets.
Even though I have quibles with the voice over work since I've seen so many SF anime movies with different voice actors (the ones who did the anime that came with the collectors edition of the game in english sucked pretty bad).
Capcom and Sony usually have done pretty alright voice work, it's finally good to see original japanese + subtitle options.
I really wished over PS2 RPG's went that route, although if you want to see OUTSTANDING localization check out level 5's rogue galaxy, that game is effin amazing in terms of what they did.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_Galaxy
But that's a human way of looking at things, we will have a hand in designing how AI's function and also if AI's are SMARTER then humans then they will know that we are self aware like themselves, the idea of 'smarter then a human' and 'looking at humans as cockroaches' doesn't mix. If we take the greek philosophical view that evil is the result of ignorance and human beings commit acts of evil out of ignorance then by definition an AI would be even less ignorant then man and hence less evil.
We're smarter then animals but we know animals feel things and attempt to treat them humanely and we also know they are slaves to their instincts and can't help being that way, a AI genuinely smarter then US would look at us the way we look at a developmentally disabled person someone who needs to be looked after and whos rights need to be protected.
... anything that is super intelligent is likely not to act as dumb as unethical as a human, with great power comes great responsibility. Human beings are way too paranoid, we already have nukes with smart people (technically dumb in another sense) developing even more destructive weapons.... I'm sure the higher intelligence you have the more ethical you are and the lack of ethics in human beings has more to do with biological egoism and hyper individualistic deritous we've inherited that machines won't have.
Let's also not forget machines will have the option to not feel anything and exist totally neutrally whereas human beings can't just shut off their nervous system, they get tired, sick, lonely, need love, etc, AI's largely won't need any of that because they will lack all those biological feelings that give rise to war in the first place.
Also anything that is truly intelligent and is capable of ethical reasoning and not a mere automaton would quickly realize it's lack of concern for others.
"Why? I don't get this. Since you're so interested in cars -- if I build a car, does my neighbor have a right to use it whenever he wants without my permission "
Your analogy doesn't fit, we're comparing the
model of how a product is sold to a customer and the customers rights to the product *he/she paid for*.
Your customer BUYS the software PRODUCT from you, hence he should be able to get legal access to the source code at some time in the future should he/she want it, especially so others can work on it and fix the software as hardware advances and not be dependent on draconian copyright laws that were allowed to exist by default, that allows hte original developers or corporation that developed it to browbeat society by sucking up the advancements made from commons itself. Since the public was too ignorant to understand anything about their rights to software products.
The whole purpose of patents expiring is so that people can use advancements and incorporate those advancements and knowledge into other products, with software a company can sit on anything learned or advancements into oblivion.
It should have never been allowed to begin with, their should have been a government repository required for the source code and assets of all software so that legal customers who paid for it should have access to it should it need to be repaired/updated/whatever.
And yes I do believe that society has partial ownership of anything someone else 'makes' because you are technically only re-organizing information that already exists in nature, you're not creating anything *new* in nature just re-arranging matter and energy.
And also your SUCCESS depends on your customers your wealth was derived from the mass of society, so society definitely should have a say especially if you are abusing society for your economic benefit.
I don't think any sane person can argue with that, that there have to be some kind of limits.
Contracts are a way for men to hide their evil immorral actions and wrap it in market rhetoric.
The whole point is that the majority of the population is not interested and not technically minded enough to defend their rights in this area.
The fact that software can be sold like that at all is part of the reason we have so many problems to begin with.
This allows software companies to forcibly obsolete software, imagine if your car company remotely disable your car whenever it made a new model, and your old car would be purposely made defective so that you aren't able to use it as society progresses. There is no reason for software to break at all given that the society has co-ownership rights to all software, so that the source can be released to legimate owners of software.
It's this kind of BS that makes the softwarei industry who support that model the worst kinds of people on the planet regardless of whether or not they are aware of their lack of intelligence in the matter.
I know software developers have to make a living but seriously the only reason they are able to get away with it is because of ignorance, lack of interest and lack of intellgience in the population at large.
"(*). Just because copyright ends, doesn't mean you have the right to have someone else's work on your own terms"
You do if you pay for it, since you've paid for the work + given the guy a profit. Imagine if your car dealer could tell you couldn't have someone else repair your car, software industry is tyrannical, you can't hire other programmers to fix or modify things about windows for instance that you don't like.
This is exactly the problem with modern "liscensing". It's bullshit.
"you get to play continuously for an hour with three buddies on the sofa"
Thanks for your worthless argument...
Three Buddies on the sofa who can see where you are is bullshit, I'd hate to try playing Q3 CTF on a console, it would suck without each person having their own screen. Consoles now also have their own screens because of internet multiplay so the "sofa argument" is used by those who are denial, I play CoD4 online via xbox live and I certainly don't think "the sofa" versus playing with my buds over xbox live is so different, especially given the time constraints on those of us with jobs and a life.