Gabe spilled the beans on the PA frontpage. Which was nice because I had NO idea what was going on. I thought it was all some D&D inspired 80 TV show that Tycho has decided to resurrect to feed to his offspring. But as it turns out, the show was cancelled in '83, but wasn't actually created until 2006^H5.
Podcasting A Misnomer
on
Podcasting Hacks
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
When I first heard about podcasting and podcasts, I really didn't have a clue what it meant. The name seems to make an inextricable link between the iPod and this content, which simply isn't the case. Admittedly the iPod is the leading portable mp3 players, and mp3 players are the major driver of this content.
But still. My parents here about podcasts. It's a buzzword. They don't care. I tell them they can download a radio show and listen to it on the computer; their ears pick up. They hated streaming shows almost as much as I did, but when they found out you could slurp the whole show in one go and listen to it at your leisure, they were into the technology almost as fast as they got into Google Earth.
Maybe it was the same with email way back when. I remember people asking me; "Email. What's that?". I had to explain to them that it stood for electronic mail and that you could send and recieve mail to and from other peoples "electronic postboxes". (No I'm not Korean). THEN they got it. Email was just a buzzword until then. But now the word email is ubiquitous, so perhaps the same will be true of podcasting.
Media talk about ethics in research, etc. but completely hide the main point: Cloning of human embryos. This is unethical but they try to do it, not only Korea but in the US too.
What's so unethical about it? It's not like human life is precious or anything. It is THE cheapest thing on planet Earth.
Cloning is not so much unethical as completely useless. Nature developed sexual reproduction as a superior alternative to cloning billions of years ago, but some scientist wants to turn back the clock so he can run the media circuit or something. Big TIME magazine cover in lab jacket with crossed arms and something about God's domain or some such rubbish. Meanwhile the misfortunate subject gets X years wiped off their lifespan by default that to this bozos incompetance.
It's all funny now, but the day will come when the Bill Gate's borg icon on Slashdot will be replaced by a borgified Google logo, or some kind of big brother take on the logo instead.
Mark my Words!!
Re:Let me know when it stops sucking
on
GCC 4.1 Released
·
· Score: 1
I've already heard of gcc 4 enforcing strict rules that breaks otherwise functional code. I remember how much of a headache that was when gcc 3 rolled around and started spitting out compiler errors that basically said "your code is ugly."
Being told your code is ugly is obviously difficult. It's like your childs tutor coming up to you and saying, "You child is a deliquient". In both cases you can get offended, but the simple fact of the matter is, in both cases, the professional is correct. You might see the inner beauty of your creation, but all everyone else sees is a mess in need of repair.
It's also worth noting that in both cases, the situation is largely your fault.
As a developer, I love GCC. Its great, easy, and best of all free. GCC is probably one of the most benifical open source projects around, more important even than linux.
But as a developer, you know that the intel compilers give you that extra cutting edge. Give in to the power of the dark side of the source.
But at the same time, from a socialogical perspective, the Firewall is fascinating. How selective can you make such a firewall, and in what ways are the people still happy knowing that they are being sheltered from things. Is this brainwashing (as it must certainly appear to a Western perspective) or is this simply a different view on the world that the West cannot wrap their heads around.
Well, the west hardly sems immune. Almost everyone thought that there were WMDs in Iraq for instance.
Yes of course. Half the problem is coming up with enough valid excuses and arguments to win over converts to your cause. But with patience, persistance, and above all persuasion, you can garner enough converts to your cause to make it happen.
Besides, no one pays attention to the backroom stuff anyway.
Really? REALLY? How do you know this? How can you say it "will" as though you know this to be true?
Game Theory. Look it up. When competing and cooperating species form part of an ecosystem, the removal or drastic reduction in one species has knock on effects on the rest of the ecosystem.
Fuck you and your politically correct thoughts. Mosquitos are more than an annoyance, they're a fucking plague; and so's anyone who sides with them. Go fuck yourself.
Hey man. Lay off mosquitoes OK. Grandparent is 100% correct. Killing all mosquitoes WILL cause enviornmental problems. Just because you're bitter over having been bitten too many times doesn't make this any less the case.
Remember. You moved down the the Sunbelt. The mosquitos were there first.
I'm sorry. It turns out that english is a vibrant and organic language. Your efforts to impose rigid constraints and rules are futile and meaningless. If 'effect' wants to become a verb and if 'affect' wants to become a noun then that's the way it's going to be.
If people keep spelling night as nite, then 'nite' will become the correct spelling. If people want to use "your" instead or "you're", the that will be the course of english. If people want to switch around syntax, then switched around syntax will be. If people use "u" instead of "you", then you'll "hav 2 b kewl" with that.
You can accept the world we live in and the languages we speak as dynamic or you can lament over the "decline" of english by pining over pure and uncorrupted english sentences like this one: "Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum eodcyninga rym gefrunon hu ða æelingas ellen fremedon.
Our entire business runs on one software application that has a Win2K client that communicates to a Win2K server (it used to be NT up until 2005). The web site requires IIS 6.0. The Unix guy thrashed around for a few days, then left quietly.
He tried the direct approach. You need to be more subversive.
The first steps are things like replacing the fileserver, or getting a new one, running Samba. Then you slowly work your way up to the gateway running Linux, then maybe the main webserver, perhaps an internal IM server. Slowly, oh so slowly, the Windows Server is becoming less and less relevant. Pretty soon all it will be doing is running the licencing, ADS and the exchange server.
Now you implement phase two. Begin replacing standard windows apps with their FOSS equivalents. Firefox is a no brainer. Open Office is the big one. If you can get Sunbird or some other Email+Calendar client to replace Outlook, then you are all but finished.
Without their reliance on Outlook, you are now free to replace the Exchange server with a *nix mail sever. At this point, the jig is up. It's only a matter of time before the windows machines need to be replaced, and hey! We don't need to get Vista boss! I can just setup up linux on the machines and we're good to go.
It's a slow, slow war of attrition to wean a network off Windows.
The fact of the matter is if one doesn't know enough to see the trap in that question and answer it with the correct qualifers then one is not an admin.
The trap of what? You asked him what flavour of UNIX. He mentioned BSD. Then you come out with the whole condescending; "Well, well young man. You DO know that BSD is NOT actually a flavour of UNIX, don't you." Then you go further and claim that "Real Admins" know all this stuff or whatever.
Real Admins don't give a shit. Real Admins administrate. Real Admins Hack. Real Admins practically roll their own UNIX. Real Admins are totally unconcerned with whatever certification standards checklist some industry body or group devised to check if your system is "really" UNIX. Real Admins get their hands dirty and are just too busy to visit the boys up in the ivory tower.
BSD is UNIX. Linux is UNIX. UNIX is UNIX. It's all the one. If you're arguing about certification standards and whether iptables is present or not, then you've lost your way amid all the technobabble and jargon, and have fallen by the wayside. KingOfGod will shortly be rocketing past you, unburdened by doubts over what constitutes a UNIX system.
You need to roll your own distro. You can even make it to UNIX standards if you like.
But like it or not there is a definite need for this type of software.
There's a need, but is it being met by the current software products? Are all these project managment tools really work all the effort it takes to aquire, implement and learn to use them? In a lot of cases, you may be a lot better off if you simply stick with email. See Linus and the Linux Kernel.
More importantly, should these tools be integrated? Are you then simply fitting the tool around what you already accept are broken development practices. I'm from the school of thought that says people are better off changing their methods to fit the software, rather than having the software change to fit their methods. This all does rely on the softwware's method being "better".
One of my key views here is that if a programmer is not able or willing to go out into another program and/or use a command line to version check, communicate with colleagues, and work on a project, and he/she needs to have these tools sweetly bundled together in one clickable interface in order to use them, then you have to question that programmer's professional competence and indeed their willingness to do their job.
It's OK not to like CVS, etc. But a CS graduate earning $40k per year who can't use version control or other tools without a sugary integrated IDE, is really unacceptable.
I'm a little bit frustrated, but there are a few... a very few companies who are just looking for a good 'ol UNIX systems administrator.
This is kind of a no brainer, seeing as how there are very, very few companies that are actually using UNIX systems. Most use Windows. For SMEs I'd guess that close to 95% use Windows.
Ergo, they are not looking for a UNIX admin. They need a windows admin to run their ADS, exchange server, and whatever other rubbish they need. Outlook calendar expierience required. You'll also need to know how to set up wireless routers, but security training, or indeed giving a danm about security is not required.
This isn't very hard. A lot of SME windows admins are the company accountant.
BAD sequels turn off gamers. By bad I mean sequels that offer nothing new in the terms of gameplay, just a shinier appearance.
There's really only so many sequels you can go through before this becomes inevitable. usually by number three, the dev team has either screwed it up, gone stagnant, or reached perfection. Number 4 is almost guaranteed to be stale, and it's time to move on to something else. NaughtyDog is one company that understands this. Bungie is going to have to be another.
It's all superfluous it tell you! The best collaborative development tool is the low lying cubical partition! All else pales to it's abilites to facilitate a tight dev team. Oh and emails.
All this rubbish cruft in Visual studio these days. It's from the people that broght you Visual SourceSafe-Studio integration. Windows only, MS centric, homogenous coding standards, catering to the lowest common denominator of programmer in an effort to make coding more quantifyable for management. Basically, it's all just tools for making windows developers even more lazy than they already are, and to make project managers think they're more in control of their projects because of all the shiny graphs, network tools and printed reports.
Expect coding standards to drop in line with their usage.
...who are discovering all the bugs and flaws in this new console. I don't know about others but I really appreciate your services - your willingness to queue up for the box; to pay a premium rate for a revision 1.0A piece of hardware; to choose from a paltry selection of mostly mediocre full-price games; and to gripe that the reality of your purchase might not meet up with your expectations or indeed what the hype lead you to believe.
We salute you!
Dude! I'd just like to say, on behalf of me and all my totally bodacious bros, we are, like, way cool with this. Your console is awesome. We only got, like, one game, but we played it for, like, three hours!! until the system overheated and crashed. But the crash screen was so Awesome!! We were, like, "Far Out Man!".
We, like, think you are so cool. Your console is fat. It's, like, green and white and shit. It's got like wifi, and a hard disk and like now man, its got these wicked crash screens!! We feel, like, totally privilaged. I'm like, so glad I queued for three days outside EB for this one. I was on my own most of the time, but it was totally worth it to be the first one to pay for the pimped out 360. All my bros here are totally going for the pimped out model too, once they come back in stock.
I so can't wait for Halo 3!! I finished the first two on easy, but I was playin' on "Live", with my bros, and we were, like, totally awesome! My dad's gonna hire that guy to set up the "Box" on our wifi, and then man, I am so totally back on Live. I've got, like, Windows XP "Pro" man, so i am totally down with, like, Microsoft technology. I can't wait to, like, get my music on my "Box", and play it on my games, 'cause I got a "collection", you know what I'm sayin'.
This guy I know. He's like such a loser! He was, like, "Madden 2006 is the same game on the PS2". He was trippin'!! On the "360" man, it has, like, more texture and sound and shit. I saw more, but I couln't show him 'cause of the crash, but when this thing cools down I'm gonna show him man. It's just "too Hot" to play with right now, Yeah! Wicked! He's just jealous man!
I'd have to say that the level of dupes is getting to be quite ridiculous. It's interesting that you bring up the editorless model as a contrast. In theory the editor model is supposed to avoid dupes, but Digg is apparently doing a better job. Apparently.
Perhaps given enough eyes, all dupes are obvious?
Something is up with the Slashdot editor system. A lot of good submissions are left to fall by the wayside in order to allow in dupes. I for one would like to take a look at the pile of rejected submission to see exactly what is being left out. For that matter an under the hood Slashback or Geeks in Space, giving the inside story on how Slashdot works might be in order.
The Slashdot Random Story Submission Selection system may be in need of an overhaul.
People want to see accurate facial animation now, with deforming skin and expressive eyes.
And this is why developers are finding themselves in so much trouble. They spend millions of dollars giving in game polygons eyelashes, increased polygon counts, blinking eyes and freckles. None of it is really worth a danm though.
Case in point. Characters in Half Life 2. Expressive? To be sure. But lets take another example. Characters in Crash Bandicoot. More of less expressive than those in Half Life 2? Careful now! I said expressive! The answer is of course that Crash and his pals quite simply had way more life and vitality.
But how can this be?! Half Life 2 had a higher polygon count!! Well welcome to the real world where what really counts is art design, not polygon count. You can make a dull object in a game world, quadruple its polygon count and texture resolution and it will still be a dull object. You can take an interesting object in a game world, half its polygons, give it little or no textures and still have an interesting object.
Developers are obsessed with upping the polygon and texture counts, but this is really a no brainer. You can accomplish far, far more with better art design than you will ever be able to muster with just higher resolutions and lighting effects. Art design is more than just pretty enviornments too. It's about giving the game life in the form of vibrant, interesting characters.
How many times have I seen a high resolution, high poly count, low interaction landscape inhabited by sterile, generic and boring characters? You need to entertain people, not bore them to death. Consider the Grunts in Halo, or the Elites? The grunts were riotously funny to face thanks solely to their hilarious dialouge, and when contrasted with them, the elites were far more perturbing. Bungie could have chucked that dialouge for some meaningless squeaks and grunts, and used the extra CPU time to make more lights or dust particles or whatever. But the game would have suffered. Badly.
Developers should learn to be less like car salesmen, who buf up their overpriced wares to con the consumer with superfluous chrome and cruft. They should learn to be more like travelling troups of actors, putting on performances, who relied on a splash of cheap makeup, cleverly positioned props and above all, exuberant acting to entertain their audience with a great show. It might not have been the most expensive, most bedecked or most exclusive show, but danm it, it was immersive.
Give gamers some credit. If they can get immersed in 8bit Super Mario and text based MUDs, then you don't need nth degree lighting effects and orchestral soundtracks to immerse them.
. He taught me to program when I was 8, has a PhD in (if I remember correctly) biology, pharmacology, or physics, teacheds microbiology, and is an associate dean at world-class university. For all of his smarts, he has had problems with computers ever since he was weened off of DOS and onto Windows 3.1.
Enlighten me here. Why should I buy a 360? Is there a single "Must Have" game for the console? Someone explain to me why I shouldn't just wait 6 months for a bigger selection of games and a lower price.
Slashdot Mirror
Gabe spilled the beans on the PA frontpage. Which was nice because I had NO idea what was going on. I thought it was all some D&D inspired 80 TV show that Tycho has decided to resurrect to feed to his offspring. But as it turns out, the show was cancelled in '83, but wasn't actually created until 2006^H5.
When I first heard about podcasting and podcasts, I really didn't have a clue what it meant. The name seems to make an inextricable link between the iPod and this content, which simply isn't the case. Admittedly the iPod is the leading portable mp3 players, and mp3 players are the major driver of this content.
But still. My parents here about podcasts. It's a buzzword. They don't care. I tell them they can download a radio show and listen to it on the computer; their ears pick up. They hated streaming shows almost as much as I did, but when they found out you could slurp the whole show in one go and listen to it at your leisure, they were into the technology almost as fast as they got into Google Earth.
Maybe it was the same with email way back when. I remember people asking me; "Email. What's that?". I had to explain to them that it stood for electronic mail and that you could send and recieve mail to and from other peoples "electronic postboxes". (No I'm not Korean). THEN they got it. Email was just a buzzword until then. But now the word email is ubiquitous, so perhaps the same will be true of podcasting.
Media talk about ethics in research, etc. but completely hide the main point: Cloning of human embryos. This is unethical but they try to do it, not only Korea but in the US too.
What's so unethical about it? It's not like human life is precious or anything. It is THE cheapest thing on planet Earth.
Cloning is not so much unethical as completely useless. Nature developed sexual reproduction as a superior alternative to cloning billions of years ago, but some scientist wants to turn back the clock so he can run the media circuit or something. Big TIME magazine cover in lab jacket with crossed arms and something about God's domain or some such rubbish. Meanwhile the misfortunate subject gets X years wiped off their lifespan by default that to this bozos incompetance.
And all on the taxpayers money
It's all funny now, but the day will come when the Bill Gate's borg icon on Slashdot will be replaced by a borgified Google logo, or some kind of big brother take on the logo instead.
Mark my Words!!
I've already heard of gcc 4 enforcing strict rules that breaks otherwise functional code. I remember how much of a headache that was when gcc 3 rolled around and started spitting out compiler errors that basically said "your code is ugly."
Being told your code is ugly is obviously difficult. It's like your childs tutor coming up to you and saying, "You child is a deliquient". In both cases you can get offended, but the simple fact of the matter is, in both cases, the professional is correct. You might see the inner beauty of your creation, but all everyone else sees is a mess in need of repair.
It's also worth noting that in both cases, the situation is largely your fault.
As a developer, I love GCC. Its great, easy, and best of all free. GCC is probably one of the most benifical open source projects around, more important even than linux.
But as a developer, you know that the intel compilers give you that extra cutting edge. Give in to the power of the dark side of the source.
Unless you believe that mosquitos are able to make conscious decisions in order to better themselves.
Game Theory doesn't require agents to make conscious decisions. It only requires them to react based on the state of other agents in the system.
But at the same time, from a socialogical perspective, the Firewall is fascinating. How selective can you make such a firewall, and in what ways are the people still happy knowing that they are being sheltered from things. Is this brainwashing (as it must certainly appear to a Western perspective) or is this simply a different view on the world that the West cannot wrap their heads around.
Well, the west hardly sems immune. Almost everyone thought that there were WMDs in Iraq for instance.
Yes of course. Half the problem is coming up with enough valid excuses and arguments to win over converts to your cause. But with patience, persistance, and above all persuasion, you can garner enough converts to your cause to make it happen.
Besides, no one pays attention to the backroom stuff anyway.
Really? REALLY? How do you know this? How can you say it "will" as though you know this to be true?
Game Theory. Look it up. When competing and cooperating species form part of an ecosystem, the removal or drastic reduction in one species has knock on effects on the rest of the ecosystem.
Fuck you and your politically correct thoughts.
Mosquitos are more than an annoyance, they're a fucking plague; and so's anyone who sides with them.
Go fuck yourself.
Hey man. Lay off mosquitoes OK. Grandparent is 100% correct. Killing all mosquitoes WILL cause enviornmental problems. Just because you're bitter over having been bitten too many times doesn't make this any less the case.
Remember. You moved down the the Sunbelt. The mosquitos were there first.
I'm sorry. It turns out that english is a vibrant and organic language. Your efforts to impose rigid constraints and rules are futile and meaningless. If 'effect' wants to become a verb and if 'affect' wants to become a noun then that's the way it's going to be.
If people keep spelling night as nite, then 'nite' will become the correct spelling. If people want to use "your" instead or "you're", the that will be the course of english. If people want to switch around syntax, then switched around syntax will be. If people use "u" instead of "you", then you'll "hav 2 b kewl" with that.
You can accept the world we live in and the languages we speak as dynamic or you can lament over the "decline" of english by pining over pure and uncorrupted english sentences like this one:
"Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum eodcyninga rym gefrunon hu ða æelingas ellen fremedon.
Isn't evolution interesting.
Our entire business runs on one software application that has a Win2K client that communicates to a Win2K server (it used to be NT up until 2005). The web site requires IIS 6.0. The Unix guy thrashed around for a few days, then left quietly.
He tried the direct approach. You need to be more subversive.
The first steps are things like replacing the fileserver, or getting a new one, running Samba. Then you slowly work your way up to the gateway running Linux, then maybe the main webserver, perhaps an internal IM server. Slowly, oh so slowly, the Windows Server is becoming less and less relevant. Pretty soon all it will be doing is running the licencing, ADS and the exchange server.
Now you implement phase two. Begin replacing standard windows apps with their FOSS equivalents. Firefox is a no brainer. Open Office is the big one. If you can get Sunbird or some other Email+Calendar client to replace Outlook, then you are all but finished.
Without their reliance on Outlook, you are now free to replace the Exchange server with a *nix mail sever. At this point, the jig is up. It's only a matter of time before the windows machines need to be replaced, and hey! We don't need to get Vista boss! I can just setup up linux on the machines and we're good to go.
It's a slow, slow war of attrition to wean a network off Windows.
The fact of the matter is if one doesn't know enough to see the trap in that question and answer it with the correct qualifers then one is not an admin.
The trap of what? You asked him what flavour of UNIX. He mentioned BSD. Then you come out with the whole condescending; "Well, well young man. You DO know that BSD is NOT actually a flavour of UNIX, don't you." Then you go further and claim that "Real Admins" know all this stuff or whatever.
Real Admins don't give a shit. Real Admins administrate. Real Admins Hack. Real Admins practically roll their own UNIX. Real Admins are totally unconcerned with whatever certification standards checklist some industry body or group devised to check if your system is "really" UNIX. Real Admins get their hands dirty and are just too busy to visit the boys up in the ivory tower.
BSD is UNIX. Linux is UNIX. UNIX is UNIX. It's all the one. If you're arguing about certification standards and whether iptables is present or not, then you've lost your way amid all the technobabble and jargon, and have fallen by the wayside. KingOfGod will shortly be rocketing past you, unburdened by doubts over what constitutes a UNIX system.
You need to roll your own distro. You can even make it to UNIX standards if you like.
But like it or not there is a definite need for this type of software.
There's a need, but is it being met by the current software products? Are all these project managment tools really work all the effort it takes to aquire, implement and learn to use them? In a lot of cases, you may be a lot better off if you simply stick with email. See Linus and the Linux Kernel.
More importantly, should these tools be integrated? Are you then simply fitting the tool around what you already accept are broken development practices. I'm from the school of thought that says people are better off changing their methods to fit the software, rather than having the software change to fit their methods. This all does rely on the softwware's method being "better".
One of my key views here is that if a programmer is not able or willing to go out into another program and/or use a command line to version check, communicate with colleagues, and work on a project, and he/she needs to have these tools sweetly bundled together in one clickable interface in order to use them, then you have to question that programmer's professional competence and indeed their willingness to do their job.
It's OK not to like CVS, etc. But a CS graduate earning $40k per year who can't use version control or other tools without a sugary integrated IDE, is really unacceptable.
I'm a little bit frustrated, but there are a few... a very few companies who are just looking for a good 'ol UNIX systems administrator.
This is kind of a no brainer, seeing as how there are very, very few companies that are actually using UNIX systems. Most use Windows. For SMEs I'd guess that close to 95% use Windows.
Ergo, they are not looking for a UNIX admin. They need a windows admin to run their ADS, exchange server, and whatever other rubbish they need. Outlook calendar expierience required. You'll also need to know how to set up wireless routers, but security training, or indeed giving a danm about security is not required.
This isn't very hard. A lot of SME windows admins are the company accountant.
BAD sequels turn off gamers. By bad I mean sequels that offer nothing new in the terms of gameplay, just a shinier appearance.
There's really only so many sequels you can go through before this becomes inevitable. usually by number three, the dev team has either screwed it up, gone stagnant, or reached perfection. Number 4 is almost guaranteed to be stale, and it's time to move on to something else. NaughtyDog is one company that understands this. Bungie is going to have to be another.
It's all superfluous it tell you! The best collaborative development tool is the low lying cubical partition! All else pales to it's abilites to facilitate a tight dev team. Oh and emails.
All this rubbish cruft in Visual studio these days. It's from the people that broght you Visual SourceSafe-Studio integration. Windows only, MS centric, homogenous coding standards, catering to the lowest common denominator of programmer in an effort to make coding more quantifyable for management. Basically, it's all just tools for making windows developers even more lazy than they already are, and to make project managers think they're more in control of their projects because of all the shiny graphs, network tools and printed reports.
Expect coding standards to drop in line with their usage.
Are you crazy? That might lead a temporal feedback loop that could tear the ship apart!
...who are discovering all the bugs and flaws in this new console. I don't know about others but I really appreciate your services - your willingness to queue up for the box; to pay a premium rate for a revision 1.0A piece of hardware; to choose from a paltry selection of mostly mediocre full-price games; and to gripe that the reality of your purchase might not meet up with your expectations or indeed what the hype lead you to believe.
We salute you!
Dude! I'd just like to say, on behalf of me and all my totally bodacious bros, we are, like, way cool with this. Your console is awesome. We only got, like, one game, but we played it for, like, three hours!! until the system overheated and crashed. But the crash screen was so Awesome!! We were, like, "Far Out Man!".
We, like, think you are so cool. Your console is fat. It's, like, green and white and shit. It's got like wifi, and a hard disk and like now man, its got these wicked crash screens!! We feel, like, totally privilaged. I'm like, so glad I queued for three days outside EB for this one. I was on my own most of the time, but it was totally worth it to be the first one to pay for the pimped out 360. All my bros here are totally going for the pimped out model too, once they come back in stock.
I so can't wait for Halo 3!! I finished the first two on easy, but I was playin' on "Live", with my bros, and we were, like, totally awesome! My dad's gonna hire that guy to set up the "Box" on our wifi, and then man, I am so totally back on Live. I've got, like, Windows XP "Pro" man, so i am totally down with, like, Microsoft technology. I can't wait to, like, get my music on my "Box", and play it on my games, 'cause I got a "collection", you know what I'm sayin'.
This guy I know. He's like such a loser! He was, like, "Madden 2006 is the same game on the PS2". He was trippin'!! On the "360" man, it has, like, more texture and sound and shit. I saw more, but I couln't show him 'cause of the crash, but when this thing cools down I'm gonna show him man. It's just "too Hot" to play with right now, Yeah! Wicked! He's just jealous man!
Your console is totally awesome. Respect!
I'd have to say that the level of dupes is getting to be quite ridiculous. It's interesting that you bring up the editorless model as a contrast. In theory the editor model is supposed to avoid dupes, but Digg is apparently doing a better job. Apparently.
Perhaps given enough eyes, all dupes are obvious?
Something is up with the Slashdot editor system. A lot of good submissions are left to fall by the wayside in order to allow in dupes. I for one would like to take a look at the pile of rejected submission to see exactly what is being left out. For that matter an under the hood Slashback or Geeks in Space, giving the inside story on how Slashdot works might be in order.
The Slashdot Random Story Submission Selection system may be in need of an overhaul.
Clearly then, we are not spending enough to advertise out product.
People want to see accurate facial animation now, with deforming skin and expressive eyes.
And this is why developers are finding themselves in so much trouble. They spend millions of dollars giving in game polygons eyelashes, increased polygon counts, blinking eyes and freckles. None of it is really worth a danm though.
Case in point. Characters in Half Life 2. Expressive? To be sure. But lets take another example. Characters in Crash Bandicoot. More of less expressive than those in Half Life 2? Careful now! I said expressive! The answer is of course that Crash and his pals quite simply had way more life and vitality.
But how can this be?! Half Life 2 had a higher polygon count!! Well welcome to the real world where what really counts is art design, not polygon count. You can make a dull object in a game world, quadruple its polygon count and texture resolution and it will still be a dull object. You can take an interesting object in a game world, half its polygons, give it little or no textures and still have an interesting object.
Developers are obsessed with upping the polygon and texture counts, but this is really a no brainer. You can accomplish far, far more with better art design than you will ever be able to muster with just higher resolutions and lighting effects. Art design is more than just pretty enviornments too. It's about giving the game life in the form of vibrant, interesting characters.
How many times have I seen a high resolution, high poly count, low interaction landscape inhabited by sterile, generic and boring characters? You need to entertain people, not bore them to death. Consider the Grunts in Halo, or the Elites? The grunts were riotously funny to face thanks solely to their hilarious dialouge, and when contrasted with them, the elites were far more perturbing. Bungie could have chucked that dialouge for some meaningless squeaks and grunts, and used the extra CPU time to make more lights or dust particles or whatever. But the game would have suffered. Badly.
Developers should learn to be less like car salesmen, who buf up their overpriced wares to con the consumer with superfluous chrome and cruft. They should learn to be more like travelling troups of actors, putting on performances, who relied on a splash of cheap makeup, cleverly positioned props and above all, exuberant acting to entertain their audience with a great show. It might not have been the most expensive, most bedecked or most exclusive show, but danm it, it was immersive.
Give gamers some credit. If they can get immersed in 8bit Super Mario and text based MUDs, then you don't need nth degree lighting effects and orchestral soundtracks to immerse them.
. He taught me to program when I was 8, has a PhD in (if I remember correctly) biology, pharmacology, or physics, teacheds microbiology, and is an associate dean at world-class university. For all of his smarts, he has had problems with computers ever since he was weened off of DOS and onto Windows 3.1.
We need a Knoppix Live CD over here! STAT!!!
Enlighten me here. Why should I buy a 360? Is there a single "Must Have" game for the console? Someone explain to me why I shouldn't just wait 6 months for a bigger selection of games and a lower price.