I got confused about my various Mozilla animals (the names just keep changing too fast); but the comments I made about Thunderbird also apply to Firefox.
It already does. It's called XUL. There is no reason to replace that with a Microsoft-proprietary technology. If it's going to be replaced with anything, it's going to be replaced with a general-purpose XUL-based toolkit (XUL itself isn't quite there yet).
OSS will offer XAML interoperability probably only if it looks likely that Microsoft won't be able to sue over it. Given Microsoft's rash of patents and intellectual property claims over the last couple of years, that doesn't look likely to me. But the ball there is in Microsoft's court: if they want interoperability, they need to make ironclad legal guarantees to the OSS community that their standards are open.
WinFS
WinFS is just a marketing construct, not new technology. It is some combination of user-mode indexing technologies and databases with some kernel support. Guess what, other systems have had that for years, including Linux.
Microsoft is trying to shove their particular combination and APIs down the throats of developers, but there are reasons people haven't settled on a single standard for this sort of thing: it doesn't make sense for anybody other than the OS vendor.
In the case of mailers, the standard database formats needed are mbox, maildir, and/or mh. The database format Thunderbird has chosen for mail is mbox, which is perfectly reasonable, and it's open and non-proprietary. (Maildir and MH support would be nice, too; I don't think it has that yet.)
instead of making it only within GNOME/Mozilla coalition.
Thunderbird works fine on Windows (arguably, better than on Linux) and MacOS, in addition to Linux. It just happens not to incorporate every single poorly thought out API that Microsoft keeps coming up with. And that's just fine, as far as I'm concerned. Anybody who wants that sort of thing can use Outlook.
However, I'm sure that Thunderbird will eventually incorporate some platform-specific code to make its messages indexable by WinFS, just like it does some platform-specific things on each platform.
Intel will never make the pentium virtualizable. That would require that they break backwards compatibility and produce a processor spec that is not a kludge wrapped within a kludge stuck in a 200 stage pipeline.
I don't see why it requires breaking backwards compatibility. It may be a lot of work, given what a mess the Pentium is, but Intel can do it.
I suspect they don't want to--better to sell more real processors--but eventually, they won't have a choice.
your card# is already not a secret
on
RFID MasterCard
·
· Score: 1
I don't see why people are so worried about their card numbers being read from a distance--it's not like your card number is a secret anyway.
The act of swiping your credit card number is proof to the merchant that you possess a physical token, nothing more; it is the merchant's good name with the credit card company that then lets them get the money that was promised to them.
What matters from the consumer's point of view is how hard it is to duplicate the token. If they picked the right RFID (something with a zero knowledge proof), it would be very hard to duplicate. Even if they picked the simplest RFID tag possible (something that just transmits a fixed number in the clear), it will still be better than magnetic stripes.
In different words, the problem right now is not the lack of secrecy of the CC#, it's the ease with which the physical token is duplicated.
Maybe they should first optimize other aspects of the transaction, like uselessly asking me "credit or debit" every time I use my ATM card (it's not linked to a credit card).
My company has been selling word processing, spreadsheet, typefaces, and database software in Germany since 1987. It's not like we just entered this business yesterday.
Well, your other ventures (e.g., handheld word processors, fonts) may make sense and keep you in business, as may the fact that you are in a different market. Or maybe not--the business has changed a great deal over the last few years.
But I think you are miscalculating when you think that Linux users will buy an Excel clone for Linux in large numbers. The reason is not that they may be opposed to commercial software, it is that "we are a more Excel compatible than the other guys" does not seem like a strong selling point, since you can't guarantee full Microsoft compatibility either.
One problem is that any user who doesn't run Microsoft Office but touches data will be accused, rightly or wrongly, of having mangled the data when something goes wrong, and there is nothing you or anybody else can do about that fear. Better compatibility doesn't help.
I never complain to anyone about failed business ventures
Well, good. I just got the impression that you were not entirely happy about the remarks people made about your license.
Virtualizing the Pentium is a lot of tedious work because the Pentium just wasn't designed for it. You won't be learning much about virtualization in general, just a lot of Pentium-specific tricks. Why bother with that?
Sooner or later, Intel is going to make the Pentium virtualizable in a more straightforward way. Until then, I'd just stick with one of the available solutions (including Plex86).
Actually, almost every library I know of goes to great lengths to buy books from reputeable sources (I.E. Random House as opposed to FlyByNight Publishing.). They are quite aware that people depend on the accuracy of their collection.
Well, if it comes from Random House, then it must be true! After all, the company is really big and we all know that big companies put truth above all else. A big company would never, ever put money ahead of truth, right?
Dern few websites are checked and reviewed by anyone other than their author for completeness and accuracy.
So? Who cares? All that matters is that there are enough web sites that you can trust. And there are plenty of them.
On the other hand, almost every book in the library is so checked.
I guess there must be an army of little library gnomes that does this after hours?
(Who modded the original poster insightful? He should be -7 Clueless.)
You should be modded "completely gullible", a posterboy for ignorance. And you also tell us the way you moderate: you just mod down anything you disagree with in your ignorance.
Gee, that's funny, I didn't realize that Microsoft and Open Source software had an Excel-compatible spreadsheet available for Linux
Oh, they don't.
Gnumeric and OpenOffice both offer Excel compatibility. And CrossOver lets people run the real thing.
This is a good business plan. Excel is very important to businesses, and this product will only make it easier for users to migrate to Linux on the desktop.
This product will be a failure, like all the other commercial attempts at making clones of Office components.
Idiot.
Apparently, you are not only uninformed, but also rude.
It's commercial software, I need to make payroll every month.
So why do you pick a business plan as bad as creating an Excel clone? There are zillions of interesting software products you could make. But you pick a product that competes head-on with Microsoft and with open source software. Do what you like, but don't come around bellyaching later when your product fails; you will have neither Microsoft to blame, nor OSS, only yourself.
I don't see the learning curve as a measure of difficulty.
I don't either, because the learning curve is not difficulty per se, it is a representation of difficulty over time.
Civ is better than most recent commercial games, but even it has a lot of rote memorization followed by gameplay that is not all that interesting or challenging.
Mostly because even if I manage to get past the insanely hard level, the next one will be just as hard or harder.
Having ever harder challenges available is actually a mark of a good game. The problem you're having is not that the game keeps getting harder, the problem is that you are trapped in a level structure.
Actually, the blending of personal life and work is probably the traditional way of working: farming, shepherding, crafts, etc.
The notion of having to go to a separate, specially designed building to do your work became the standard and norm with the industrial revolution and with businesses that weren't owned by the people who worked there anymore.
I don't see either way as being necessarily better or worse. In the past, the choice was driven by economic necessity and infrastructure. We may have a little more choice in the matter today, and that's probably good.
Some [games] are so freakishly, spoon-bendingly difficult that they take 10 hours of solid play before you've even begun to master the basics
True. But that isn't necessarily a problem: it takes longer than that to master the basics of classic games like chess or Go, games that have deservedly survived for a long time.
The problem with many computer games lies in the specifics that makes them difficult. For many games, the difficulty is just in poorly designed menu structures and other non-gameplay related issues.
And there is no point in learning a difficult games if it's not replayable and doesn't look like it's going to become a classic.
Effort in games should be small compared to the expected life of the game for you, and users should be able to feel that it is an intellectual challenge that they can work out, not just memorization of arbitrary decisions made by the game designers.
No, people are insisting that I panic now on only slightly more then hearsay and conjecture.
Nobody insists that you "panic". Frankly, I don't care what you think or do as long as you reduce your use of fossil fuel.
People like you who lecture are on the wrong side of rationality, whether you like it or not.
You seem to be under the misconception that the right way to act is to act rationally. Of course, taking precautions to prevent climate change isn't rational. The rational thing for each individual to do is to screw future generations. But many rational actions aren't ethical (or legal, for that matter).
I make no apologies for refusing to be manipulated by the current "in" trend, to the exclusion of using my sense.
You are being manipulated like a puppet by people who want to deny that current levels of fossil fuel use are dangerous because admitting that would cut into their bottom line. The danger requires very little scientific sophistication to recognize, but obviously, you lack even that much.
Manufacturers should be able to conspire to tell Rambus to go take a hike if they like. I mean, manufacturers have "conspired" for decades to keep good technology out of the market (e.g., UNIX), by choosing inferior but cheaper technology. Why shouldn't the same be allowed to happen to Rambus's technology even if it were better?
If memory makers also conspired to keep memory prices high, that's, of course, bad and should be prosecuted by the FTC. But that is none of Rambus's business.
So, you end up with an expensive bulky contraption with a weird and useless sliding mechanism.
I have a better idea: just get a less power-hungry PDA and save some money. Even Palm makes them. The T3 has other strengths, but it's a niche product until Palm improves the batter life and other aspects of the design.
The thing is, we can also be certain that even if every last human keels over dead, taking all technology with them, that the climate will change significantly over the next century.
That's a bad argument. If you have two factors, they may cancel out, but they may also combine. Altogether adding the manmade factors to the natural ones makes bigger climate change more likely, and that is bad.
Maybe we are doomed as a species to be killed off by climate change anyway. But emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases into the air greatly increases the probability of that.
Worth panicking over? I'm inclined to wait until something actually bad happens before panicking.
Yes, you are obviously so inclined. And like other people who panic, it's a sign of poor preparation. Furthermore, by the time you panic, it is often too late.
And that's the case with climate change induced by greenhouse gases: by the time any serious consequences are observable, it is far too late to do anything about it even if we had the will to stop burning fossil fuels completely at that point--it just takes far too long to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
And, in fact, even if we were willing to tough it out for a couple of centuries, there is no guarantee the CO2 would get removed again from the atmosphere, or that even if it were, the climate would return to anything suitable for human survival.
People who are concerned about this thing now aren't panicking, they are just telling you the cold, hard facts. People like you prefer procrastinating followed by panicking. I think you know which of the two behaviors is the better one.
That doesn't fix the battery life problems with the T3. My laptop gets a longer battery life than the T3 (and it has a nicer screen, too). For use as a PIM, that may not matter as much, but it makes the T3 a poor choice for reading.
The earth is a chaotic system, and chaotic systems for the most part are unpredictable. A variation of a few hundredths of a degree in one place in the world can be responsible for a hurricane in another.
Just because some aspects of weather are chaotic doesn't mean nothing can be predicted. Global average temperatures don't go up or down independent of any contributing factors: ice coverage, atmospheric composition, humidity and other factors all have well-defined effects. There are some relationships we don't understand yet, but that doesn't make those relationships chaotic.
We can be certain that if we continue on our current path, growing emissions of greenhouse gases, we will change the climate dramatically some time this century. That's simple physics: changing the earth's energy balance significantly must lead to changes in something on earth. What we don't know yet is whether it will kick in a new ice age (which would be negative feedback), lead to gradual warming (no feedback), or runaway greenhouse effects (positive feedback). Even if negative feedback would magically keep the temperature constant, something (vegetation, ice cover, etc.) would have to make up for change in energy balance. But no matter what the change, it will end up being costly.
1 minute 37 seconds to find the answer, plus 23 minute drive, 17 minute parking, 11 minutes walking over to the library, 7 minutes to find the shelf, 11 minutes to walk back, 6 minutes to leave the parking garage, and 43 minutes to drive back in rush hour traffic. Total amount of time: basically an afternoon gone.
There's a reason regular people don't like to go libraries. Consider yourself lucky if you happen to live close enough to one.
Gameplay is relatively simple compared to art. Try an Unreal Tournament map
You don't even know what good gameplay is. It certainly isn't about maps and scattering a few enemies here and there. I don't think it is even possible to construct a games with good gameplay using the Unreal engine. At best, you can recreate a FPS with slightly different graphics, not much different from any of the other FPS.
Who really cares about gameplay if your surroundings are so boring?
Lots of people: there are lots of visually boring games that have survived for thousands of years.
OTOH, Doom isn't visually any more boring today than when it came out, yet it wouldn't stand a chance today because people would laugh at the graphics. Were you blind when you bought it? Were you stupid to like it back then?
Uninteresting in your mind. Clearly, strong sales for each of these games proves that not everyone shares your mindset, fortunately.
Of course, not everyone shares my mindset. People also get completely drunk or stoned for fun, but that doesn't make that a desirable form of entertainment.
But the news item raised the question of why game programmers burn out and whether there was another way. My response was simple, and whether you like it or not, you haven't actually argued that it is incorrect. I said that the pressure on current game programming comes from a focus on graphics and performance features. Is there another way? Sure: you focus on good gameplay.
But coming up with a genuinely new and interesting game requires deep insight and a lot of trial-and-error. Commercial companies can't afford to do that. So, they do what they can: hire large numbers of "artists" to repaint the dungeons and hire large numbers of programmers to write new engines that, ultimately, just play the same game as the old ones.
Battery life sucks on the T3 and I found it to be unusable for any real reading. Furthermore, very little software actually supports the T3's 320x480 mode; most annoyingly, the Plucker ebook reader doesn't.
- Anti-aliasing is mediocre at best. Resoltion does make up for it somewhat...
As far as I can tell, PalmOS doesn't have support for anti-aliasing. If you are seeing it, it's an application specific hack.
Of the projecs you mention the majority have little or no graphical complexity.
Neither do chess or go. Graphical complexity is not necessary for a good game. In fact, a focus on graphical complexity during development seems to hinder good game play development.
As for FreeCiv, despite its laughably simple graphics (compared to modern productions) it still fails by far to be a "very successful game".
The games I mentioned have been around for many years and have large, active player communities (and note that the commercial version of Civilization really was also an imitation of free games anyway). That's more than can be said for most commercial games.
One big reason for that seems to be that very few artists are willing to make "open art", probably because having to draw 50 versions of the same monster from different angles for free doesn't appeal to all those artists who can do it well - because they can do the same thing and actually get paid for it.
Yes, and this focus on art instead of gameplay is why so many commercial games suck and aren't replayable. Games like Halo, Splinter Cell, Deus Ex, Enter the Matrix, Star Wars, and all look great, but they have simplistic, uninteresting gameplay (even as far as FPS go).
And that also explains why people developing them keep burning out: the only thing those "games" have going for them is their graphics, and those get old fast. So, a game must get pushed out the door while its graphics are still fresh, hence deathmarches and burnout.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Holmium is much less useful.
I got confused about my various Mozilla animals (the names just keep changing too fast); but the comments I made about Thunderbird also apply to Firefox.
XAML, Avalon
It already does. It's called XUL. There is no reason to replace that with a Microsoft-proprietary technology. If it's going to be replaced with anything, it's going to be replaced with a general-purpose XUL-based toolkit (XUL itself isn't quite there yet).
OSS will offer XAML interoperability probably only if it looks likely that Microsoft won't be able to sue over it. Given Microsoft's rash of patents and intellectual property claims over the last couple of years, that doesn't look likely to me. But the ball there is in Microsoft's court: if they want interoperability, they need to make ironclad legal guarantees to the OSS community that their standards are open.
WinFS
WinFS is just a marketing construct, not new technology. It is some combination of user-mode indexing technologies and databases with some kernel support. Guess what, other systems have had that for years, including Linux.
Microsoft is trying to shove their particular combination and APIs down the throats of developers, but there are reasons people haven't settled on a single standard for this sort of thing: it doesn't make sense for anybody other than the OS vendor.
In the case of mailers, the standard database formats needed are mbox, maildir, and/or mh. The database format Thunderbird has chosen for mail is mbox, which is perfectly reasonable, and it's open and non-proprietary. (Maildir and MH support would be nice, too; I don't think it has that yet.)
instead of making it only within GNOME/Mozilla coalition.
Thunderbird works fine on Windows (arguably, better than on Linux) and MacOS, in addition to Linux. It just happens not to incorporate every single poorly thought out API that Microsoft keeps coming up with. And that's just fine, as far as I'm concerned. Anybody who wants that sort of thing can use Outlook.
However, I'm sure that Thunderbird will eventually incorporate some platform-specific code to make its messages indexable by WinFS, just like it does some platform-specific things on each platform.
Intel will never make the pentium virtualizable. That would require that they break backwards compatibility and produce a processor spec that is not a kludge wrapped within a kludge stuck in a 200 stage pipeline.
I don't see why it requires breaking backwards compatibility. It may be a lot of work, given what a mess the Pentium is, but Intel can do it.
I suspect they don't want to--better to sell more real processors--but eventually, they won't have a choice.
I don't see why people are so worried about their card numbers being read from a distance--it's not like your card number is a secret anyway.
The act of swiping your credit card number is proof to the merchant that you possess a physical token, nothing more; it is the merchant's good name with the credit card company that then lets them get the money that was promised to them.
What matters from the consumer's point of view is how hard it is to duplicate the token. If they picked the right RFID (something with a zero knowledge proof), it would be very hard to duplicate. Even if they picked the simplest RFID tag possible (something that just transmits a fixed number in the clear), it will still be better than magnetic stripes.
In different words, the problem right now is not the lack of secrecy of the CC#, it's the ease with which the physical token is duplicated.
Maybe they should first optimize other aspects of the transaction, like uselessly asking me "credit or debit" every time I use my ATM card (it's not linked to a credit card).
My company has been selling word processing, spreadsheet, typefaces, and database software in Germany since 1987. It's not like we just entered this business yesterday.
Well, your other ventures (e.g., handheld word processors, fonts) may make sense and keep you in business, as may the fact that you are in a different market. Or maybe not--the business has changed a great deal over the last few years.
But I think you are miscalculating when you think that Linux users will buy an Excel clone for Linux in large numbers. The reason is not that they may be opposed to commercial software, it is that "we are a more Excel compatible than the other guys" does not seem like a strong selling point, since you can't guarantee full Microsoft compatibility either.
One problem is that any user who doesn't run Microsoft Office but touches data will be accused, rightly or wrongly, of having mangled the data when something goes wrong, and there is nothing you or anybody else can do about that fear. Better compatibility doesn't help.
I never complain to anyone about failed business ventures
Well, good. I just got the impression that you were not entirely happy about the remarks people made about your license.
Virtualizing the Pentium is a lot of tedious work because the Pentium just wasn't designed for it. You won't be learning much about virtualization in general, just a lot of Pentium-specific tricks. Why bother with that?
Sooner or later, Intel is going to make the Pentium virtualizable in a more straightforward way. Until then, I'd just stick with one of the available solutions (including Plex86).
Actually, almost every library I know of goes to great lengths to buy books from reputeable sources (I.E. Random House as opposed to FlyByNight Publishing.). They are quite aware that people depend on the accuracy of their collection.
Well, if it comes from Random House, then it must be true! After all, the company is really big and we all know that big companies put truth above all else. A big company would never, ever put money ahead of truth, right?
Dern few websites are checked and reviewed by anyone other than their author for completeness and accuracy.
So? Who cares? All that matters is that there are enough web sites that you can trust. And there are plenty of them.
On the other hand, almost every book in the library is so checked.
I guess there must be an army of little library gnomes that does this after hours?
(Who modded the original poster insightful? He should be -7 Clueless.)
You should be modded "completely gullible", a posterboy for ignorance. And you also tell us the way you moderate: you just mod down anything you disagree with in your ignorance.
Gee, that's funny, I didn't realize that Microsoft and Open Source software had an Excel-compatible spreadsheet available for Linux
Oh, they don't.
Gnumeric and OpenOffice both offer Excel compatibility. And CrossOver lets people run the real thing.
This is a good business plan. Excel is very important to businesses, and this product will only make it easier for users to migrate to Linux on the desktop.
This product will be a failure, like all the other commercial attempts at making clones of Office components.
Idiot.
Apparently, you are not only uninformed, but also rude.
It's commercial software, I need to make payroll every month.
So why do you pick a business plan as bad as creating an Excel clone? There are zillions of interesting software products you could make. But you pick a product that competes head-on with Microsoft and with open source software. Do what you like, but don't come around bellyaching later when your product fails; you will have neither Microsoft to blame, nor OSS, only yourself.
I don't see the learning curve as a measure of difficulty.
I don't either, because the learning curve is not difficulty per se, it is a representation of difficulty over time.
Civ is better than most recent commercial games, but even it has a lot of rote memorization followed by gameplay that is not all that interesting or challenging.
Mostly because even if I manage to get past the insanely hard level, the next one will be just as hard or harder.
Having ever harder challenges available is actually a mark of a good game. The problem you're having is not that the game keeps getting harder, the problem is that you are trapped in a level structure.
Actually, the blending of personal life and work is probably the traditional way of working: farming, shepherding, crafts, etc.
The notion of having to go to a separate, specially designed building to do your work became the standard and norm with the industrial revolution and with businesses that weren't owned by the people who worked there anymore.
I don't see either way as being necessarily better or worse. In the past, the choice was driven by economic necessity and infrastructure. We may have a little more choice in the matter today, and that's probably good.
Some [games] are so freakishly, spoon-bendingly difficult that they take 10 hours of solid play before you've even begun to master the basics
True. But that isn't necessarily a problem: it takes longer than that to master the basics of classic games like chess or Go, games that have deservedly survived for a long time.
The problem with many computer games lies in the specifics that makes them difficult. For many games, the difficulty is just in poorly designed menu structures and other non-gameplay related issues.
And there is no point in learning a difficult games if it's not replayable and doesn't look like it's going to become a classic.
Effort in games should be small compared to the expected life of the game for you, and users should be able to feel that it is an intellectual challenge that they can work out, not just memorization of arbitrary decisions made by the game designers.
No, people are insisting that I panic now on only slightly more then hearsay and conjecture.
Nobody insists that you "panic". Frankly, I don't care what you think or do as long as you reduce your use of fossil fuel.
People like you who lecture are on the wrong side of rationality, whether you like it or not.
You seem to be under the misconception that the right way to act is to act rationally. Of course, taking precautions to prevent climate change isn't rational. The rational thing for each individual to do is to screw future generations. But many rational actions aren't ethical (or legal, for that matter).
I make no apologies for refusing to be manipulated by the current "in" trend, to the exclusion of using my sense.
You are being manipulated like a puppet by people who want to deny that current levels of fossil fuel use are dangerous because admitting that would cut into their bottom line. The danger requires very little scientific sophistication to recognize, but obviously, you lack even that much.
Manufacturers should be able to conspire to tell Rambus to go take a hike if they like. I mean, manufacturers have "conspired" for decades to keep good technology out of the market (e.g., UNIX), by choosing inferior but cheaper technology. Why shouldn't the same be allowed to happen to Rambus's technology even if it were better?
If memory makers also conspired to keep memory prices high, that's, of course, bad and should be prosecuted by the FTC. But that is none of Rambus's business.
So, you end up with an expensive bulky contraption with a weird and useless sliding mechanism.
I have a better idea: just get a less power-hungry PDA and save some money. Even Palm makes them. The T3 has other strengths, but it's a niche product until Palm improves the batter life and other aspects of the design.
The thing is, we can also be certain that even if every last human keels over dead, taking all technology with them, that the climate will change significantly over the next century.
That's a bad argument. If you have two factors, they may cancel out, but they may also combine. Altogether adding the manmade factors to the natural ones makes bigger climate change more likely, and that is bad.
Maybe we are doomed as a species to be killed off by climate change anyway. But emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases into the air greatly increases the probability of that.
Worth panicking over? I'm inclined to wait until something actually bad happens before panicking.
Yes, you are obviously so inclined. And like other people who panic, it's a sign of poor preparation. Furthermore, by the time you panic, it is often too late.
And that's the case with climate change induced by greenhouse gases: by the time any serious consequences are observable, it is far too late to do anything about it even if we had the will to stop burning fossil fuels completely at that point--it just takes far too long to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
And, in fact, even if we were willing to tough it out for a couple of centuries, there is no guarantee the CO2 would get removed again from the atmosphere, or that even if it were, the climate would return to anything suitable for human survival.
People who are concerned about this thing now aren't panicking, they are just telling you the cold, hard facts. People like you prefer procrastinating followed by panicking. I think you know which of the two behaviors is the better one.
That doesn't fix the battery life problems with the T3. My laptop gets a longer battery life than the T3 (and it has a nicer screen, too). For use as a PIM, that may not matter as much, but it makes the T3 a poor choice for reading.
The earth is a chaotic system, and chaotic systems for the most part are unpredictable. A variation of a few hundredths of a degree in one place in the world can be responsible for a hurricane in another.
Just because some aspects of weather are chaotic doesn't mean nothing can be predicted. Global average temperatures don't go up or down independent of any contributing factors: ice coverage, atmospheric composition, humidity and other factors all have well-defined effects. There are some relationships we don't understand yet, but that doesn't make those relationships chaotic.
We can be certain that if we continue on our current path, growing emissions of greenhouse gases, we will change the climate dramatically some time this century. That's simple physics: changing the earth's energy balance significantly must lead to changes in something on earth. What we don't know yet is whether it will kick in a new ice age (which would be negative feedback), lead to gradual warming (no feedback), or runaway greenhouse effects (positive feedback). Even if negative feedback would magically keep the temperature constant, something (vegetation, ice cover, etc.) would have to make up for change in energy balance. But no matter what the change, it will end up being costly.
It also doesn't account for the fact that Google is not responsible for the accuracy of the content,
Neither is your library.
Books in the library tend to be checked and reviewed for accuracy of thier content. Websites generally are not.
Many websites are. And many materials at the library aren't. Either way, you have to figure out who can be trusted yourself.
1 minute 37 seconds to find the answer, plus 23 minute drive, 17 minute parking, 11 minutes walking over to the library, 7 minutes to find the shelf, 11 minutes to walk back, 6 minutes to leave the parking garage, and 43 minutes to drive back in rush hour traffic. Total amount of time: basically an afternoon gone.
There's a reason regular people don't like to go libraries. Consider yourself lucky if you happen to live close enough to one.
Gameplay is relatively simple compared to art. Try an Unreal Tournament map
You don't even know what good gameplay is. It certainly isn't about maps and scattering a few enemies here and there. I don't think it is even possible to construct a games with good gameplay using the Unreal engine. At best, you can recreate a FPS with slightly different graphics, not much different from any of the other FPS.
Who really cares about gameplay if your surroundings are so boring?
Lots of people: there are lots of visually boring games that have survived for thousands of years.
OTOH, Doom isn't visually any more boring today than when it came out, yet it wouldn't stand a chance today because people would laugh at the graphics. Were you blind when you bought it? Were you stupid to like it back then?
Uninteresting in your mind. Clearly, strong sales for each of these games proves that not everyone shares your mindset, fortunately.
Of course, not everyone shares my mindset. People also get completely drunk or stoned for fun, but that doesn't make that a desirable form of entertainment.
But the news item raised the question of why game programmers burn out and whether there was another way. My response was simple, and whether you like it or not, you haven't actually argued that it is incorrect. I said that the pressure on current game programming comes from a focus on graphics and performance features. Is there another way? Sure: you focus on good gameplay.
But coming up with a genuinely new and interesting game requires deep insight and a lot of trial-and-error. Commercial companies can't afford to do that. So, they do what they can: hire large numbers of "artists" to repaint the dungeons and hire large numbers of programmers to write new engines that, ultimately, just play the same game as the old ones.
Battery life sucks on the T3 and I found it to be unusable for any real reading. Furthermore, very little software actually supports the T3's 320x480 mode; most annoyingly, the Plucker ebook reader doesn't.
- Anti-aliasing is mediocre at best. Resoltion does make up for it somewhat...
As far as I can tell, PalmOS doesn't have support for anti-aliasing. If you are seeing it, it's an application specific hack.
The T3 was a huge disappointment.
Of the projecs you mention the majority have little or no graphical complexity.
Neither do chess or go. Graphical complexity is not necessary for a good game. In fact, a focus on graphical complexity during development seems to hinder good game play development.
As for FreeCiv, despite its laughably simple graphics (compared to modern productions) it still fails by far to be a "very successful game".
The games I mentioned have been around for many years and have large, active player communities (and note that the commercial version of Civilization really was also an imitation of free games anyway). That's more than can be said for most commercial games.
One big reason for that seems to be that very few artists are willing to make "open art", probably because having to draw 50 versions of the same monster from different angles for free doesn't appeal to all those artists who can do it well - because they can do the same thing and actually get paid for it.
Yes, and this focus on art instead of gameplay is why so many commercial games suck and aren't replayable. Games like Halo, Splinter Cell, Deus Ex, Enter the Matrix, Star Wars, and all look great, but they have simplistic, uninteresting gameplay (even as far as FPS go).
And that also explains why people developing them keep burning out: the only thing those "games" have going for them is their graphics, and those get old fast. So, a game must get pushed out the door while its graphics are still fresh, hence deathmarches and burnout.