Perhaps it's meant to emphasise that a group has emerged from ad-hoc, NETBUEI based, immaturity, and has ventured into the more dignified and professional, TCP/IP based middle age cycle.
Which completely ignore the fact that as you get older, things may not work as expected and certain things may stop working altogether!
PR took a bit of a hurt when americans almost realized that their country's armed forces might actually be able to do wrong. To reaffirm the infallibility of all US actions in the eyes of the public, the Pentagon has instigated these little PR stunts. And to avoid future embarresements, all the dirty work will be done by iraqis from now on.
Considering that a load of Wikipedia articles are ripped from the encyclopedia Brittanica, and the fact that sooners or later Wikipedia will begin to encroach on Brittanicas businees, how long before Wikipedia gets sued for copyright theft. Either that of get battered by hoards of Brittanica salesmen hauling around fifty volumes and cheap plywood bookshelves.
You'd never know, maybe Encyclopedia Brittannica hold a copyright on 'A method of assembling articles containing information about concepts, entites and persons in an indexed linked form, using a computer'.
Remember no matter how obvious it is, if it uses a computer, you've got yourself a patent pal!
Re:The Linus / Linux connection
on
Who Wrote Linux?
·
· Score: 1
OK they wanted myths not outright fantasies.
No-one could ever believe such a fanatastic story!!:E
Big Brick Walls
on
Hacking Quartz
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
With the old home computers one could get instant gratification by writing a program which drew a space-ship on the screen in 10 lines of BASIC. Nowadays you'd have to learn COM + Win32 + DirectX just to get a black rectangle.
Amen.
It required at least 300+ lines of Visual C++ to get a black screen and almost 150 lines of C++ to get SDL to throw up a black screen.
What the hell is going on here?!?! I know a lot of things need to be set up, resolution, sound, etc. But most people were happy with the default options they were given on those old computers. They made Elitle out of it for christs sake.
So how come I can't start a gaming project with a simple
Sir, it is with deepest regret I inform you that Linux is in fact the result of a 20 year KGB plot to subvert US dominance of the computer software industry.
Exerpt from Kremlin Communica
Translation Begins......
Back in the early 1980s, with the cold war still on and the STI system under construction, the Kremlin knew that its long term hopes of victory could only be secured by subverting capitalist industry and sepecifically, its new dependance on IT. To do this they needed a Soviet Operating System of surpassing power, that could, at will, ping Allied machines to death while simulatiously monitoring and controlling every aspect of the lives of Soviet citizens.
To this end the KGB were tasked with stealing the source code to the superior UNIX operating system. Already expierienced with pilfering designs for CPUs and 3.5'' floppies from the offices of IBM, the KGB were well up to the task. They set to work on slowly gaining access to AT&T labs across the globe, while superior soviet software engineers began the thankless task of reverse engineering UNIX binaries.
But constructing this OS would require expertiese that the Union, due totally to capitalist interference of course, currently lacked. In order to bring all of the pieces together, and compile the piece they had found, they needed an agent trained in the west in the ways of capitalist programming, but still loyal to the revolution! Despite the best efforts of agents planted in every major computer lab available, they found decadent western programmers were only interested in money, 'code buzz' and vile capitalist pornography on USENET. USENET itself had eluded all efforts at subversion by the revolutionary divisions net.agents. It was felt that as a mass, the USENET hoards had collective intelligence somewhat less than was needed to rise up against tyranny.
In short, Moscow needed to plant an agent, still young enough to learn, but old enough to remain loyal to the motherland. Enter, Linov Tolvachuk, AKA Linus Torvalds. Ala Kevin Cosner in 'Nowhere to Run' Linov was planted in nearby Finland, close to Moscow, yet near enough to the teaching methods of the west. For ten years under guidance of KGB handlers, he learned the ways of Object Orientation, Procedural programming and the secrets of IBM compatability.
Despite setbacks, notibly suspisions of Linov's handlers being communists and what looked like a takeover of american computer industries by apple OSes, the project continued. Even pasted the fall of the Berlin wall and the ending of communism in Russia, the KGB continuded the operation, hoping once again for victory over the west and the revival of the revolution. Linov produced many works during this time, even suppling the comms software for the tank that Yelstin got drunk on.
Finally by the early 90's the main objective of the project was underway. With a single USENET post and just over 10,000 lines of code, Linov published project KREMNIX, the muscovite OS to defeat the west. Heavily leaning on the UNIX code smuggled out by other agents in the MINIX project the used his training in charisima and psychology to influence and convert a learge number of western programmers, inciting a minor revolution in programming circles. Over the years Linux, as the project became known, grew to an OS that would challenge the west, yet would remain firmly in Moscow's hands.
After Valdmir Putin, one of the agents behinf the project, came to power in Russia, the budget increased. By financing the companies they had set up to promote the project, notibly the rather obviously named RedHat, the Kremlin managed to increase the proliferation of of system.
Simultanious to this, another plot had been brewing. To complement the expected increase in communist computer power, a corressponding sabotage of western OS quality was planned. The KGB successfully gained acces to, and altered, the code to the then infant MS-
FC2's up2date utility is vastly improved from prior versions, and no extra configuration is required to begin using it.
Well he's right about one thing. Up2date dosen't need any extra configuration as it does not in fact work, at all. It just connects and crashes. Bad Newbie!! It's back to the command prompt for you!
Considering that the manual discloses methods of operating and controlling Cisco products, as well as the interfaces used by them, could Cisco sue under the DMCA for copyright theft of its instructions on how to use its equipment.
If the instructions were generated by a computer algorithim then the answer to this is a resounding yes as then Cisco would have patented 'a method by which Cisco,(us), uses a PC to and printer to generate the instructions to operate our hardware', and could then sue the good doctor as presumably he used a PC and printer too.
A much better solution would be to turn the computer into a spam zombie that only spams itself. After a few thousand spam messages from themselves cloud their inbox, they might actually realise, "Oh, This IS annoying!"
It seems the Military Industrial complex FUD budject is a little healthier this year, and considering this thread has decended way off topic, Perhaps it should be cut Here are the^H^H^Hsome facts
How on earth are they going to cope with the wind forces, the jetstream, gravity, the earths spin, earpopping, in transit entertainment, lightning, costs, kids, aliens, terrorism and the fact that their's nothing in space to go up to yet.
Yum...there's no graphical front-end to it, forcing users to use a text-only, command-line interface. To judge from comments I've read in online forums, I'm not the only person bugged by that. That, in turn, means that a friendlier interface can't be long in coming.
Hahahaha!! HAHAHA!!! HA HA HA HAAAA!!!!
It'll be a cld day in hell before yum gets a decent GUI. And an even colder one when software installation in Linux become truely point and click.
Here, give us your exact location so we know where you are and what your doing at every moment of the day
It's FUN!!!!!
Also if you want to read the NY Times, get a passport, bank, shop, buy things or in fact breath, you will need to give someone complete access at all times to every facet of your live so that you may be served better. Remember it's not data rape if you consent.
By trillion I meant a thousand billions or a million millions. 1,000,000,000,000
Now I just gleaned the information from the article, that there was a $1.1 trillion dollar hole in the DOD finances. I found the ticker rather coll, and unnerving.
In any case the federal governments total revenue is of the order of $2 trillion dollars. However this says nothing of state and 'other' revenues. Also the military-industrial complex, as is well know, accounts for ~40% of all US government expenditure, most of which appears to be going on coke can seisure, surveillence on US citizens, high tech space research and certain things I can't mention as I will be blasted as a troll but suffice to say involve a level of tech and sophistication ancient neolithicians would not have found difficult to come by. Also a fair amount of this budget is probobly spent covering up just how big it is in case anyone starts to notice.
It's not that I don't care about optimisation when I choose an rpm over a.tar.gz source. It's just that compiling, at the best of times, is not as straightforward as rpm.
Make, frequently fails, so much so that it's frequently faster to compile each file one by one. Not that rpm doesn't have its own problems. I'm always running across dependencies or bad headers.
Overall, whenever possible, I choose yum over both. It's slow, frequently times out, and downloads whoap loads of headers it never needs, but it finds dependencies, auto installs, and sets up programs on the system tray.
The military is really protective about their own privacy, but when it comes to snooping in on the regular communications of you and me, why, what is this privacy you speak of?!
The facts are hard to look at, yet we all know that Linux, despite opinions to the contrary, has suffered from system holes. And to be quite frank, the fact that Mac OSX is leaking like a swiss cheeze should not come as a surprise to anyone.
Linux is fallaible, but at least with open source we can find bugs and get rid of them quick, without waiting for patches. Windows is not as bad as OS X in this regard either. I find the statement Linux suppliers took longer to release patches. Is that true? I know security consious admins will patch themselves but is it true that vendors will igorne minoe bugs?
Perhaps this is what the MS reps meant when they said Linux was becoming morew like windows.
I half expected that MS would dump IE, but I think this article somewhat validates my thoughts.
The very fact that this was published on MSN must hit at deep rumbling in the MS camp. IE users are, quite frankly, sick of IE. The recent warning from the US government must have been the last nail in IE's PR coffin. People now know other browsers are out there, and have begun to download them. MS issued a hasty patch after Homelland security recommendations for another browser, but it seems they won't upgrade IE functionality until Longhorn, 3 years away! That will mean IE will have spent 6 years in development limbo. Or then again this could be a lone cowboy at MSN, eager to leave for the fresh pastures of The Register.
I reckon MS will soon dump IE in favour of a new browsers, or maybe a new 'kind' of browser(.NEt based, XAML interface anyone?). Maybe MSN client? Tellingly IE still runs off version numbers IE5, IE6, whereas most MS apps run off the 98,2000,XP versioning scheme. These are my crackpot prediction for a rumour hungry world.
Happily however, windows XP searches for and installs the latest updates without any user input whatsoever, a situation I agree with completely.I know that most home users will rarely go into control panel and almost never run windows update. I don't expect them too, neither does MS.However, I'm not sure if automatic updating applies to service packs. I sure hope it does.
Your right about the websites though. If the SP 'breaks' web sites, people will turn the security off. I've also seen people who've tried firefox recently, go back to IE as javascript,PDF and flash either don't work or don't work 'properly'. They liked tabbed browsing, but that wasn't enough to wean them off IE's integrated plugins unfortunatly. Couldn't mozilla offer a complete install with all the plugins as standard?
We should be OK. The virus requires people to open the attachement on the mail in order for it to work. So unless people are stupid enough to open attachements after we've been telling them for years and years and after countless virus plauges not to we should all be fine..........
I find it more likely that the Kerry organisation chose OSS simply to lower their running costs. The Bush camp has more cash to burn ($200m) and so can afford to go for a more user friendly OS(I'm not trolling,Windows IS more user friendly). I wouldn't have put it past MS to have 'donated' serveral hundred licences and server software to the current administartion.
Though the situation in the Bush camp does seem to compliment their politics, I doubt Kerry and his followers give a danm about the OSS/CLSS debate. They just went with the cheapest option.
Of course they will benefit from ability to handle higher email loads and site requests. If the bush site is an aspx, then.NET will probobly crumble at the first YRO slashdot headline.
I'll agree with this statement. Although I will add that the signal to noise ratio on gamestore shelves has gone down in recent years.
The retro gaming phenomenon is more than just simple nostalgia though. The truth of the matter is, today, a random sample of 20 NES/MS/SNES/MegaDrive games, would probobly fare better than a random sample of 20 PS2/GC/XBox titles. It turns out that just 'having' better graphics, more buttons and more music does not a better game make. A lot of recent titles would not hold a candle to the best of 8/16 bit gaming. But that's to be expected. Dispite whatever era a game is made in, the fact that it's good won't change.
Retro gaming is really picking up recently. Perhaps it's due to the availability of emulators, or a ready supply of old SNES cartridges. However I think it sends out a signal that people aren't very impressed with the current lineup of games out there. If customers are willing to seek out 10/15/20 year old titles in preference to your spanking new one, I think that should get some people thinking. Were these game actually better? What made them so? Are people dissatisfied with games whose primary selling point is a Hollywood atmosphere of better graphics and music?
Games in the 80s and early 90s could offer only poor 2D and pretty awful 3D graphics. Their music was shackled to the limitations of MIDI tunes, and even the controllers offered little enough buttons for control. Without having the cushion of cinematography to fall back on, there really was only one place developers could engage the player. In the gameplay. Add most of them made a fair stab at it. Contrast this with *shudder* Gran Turismo or FIFA, whose sole selling point is graphics and snazz.
There will always be great games that shine out through the layers, but I feel the percentage of such games has decreased, simply due to the fact that there are more games being made. The quota of quaility games does not increase linearly with the amount of developers, alas. I just wonder how this will affect the outlook game players have on the industry and games in general.
I suppose it's like the evolution of cinema really. Initially you needed a danm good story and actors for a play/movie to be successful. Although these still help, and the best movies by definition have these, they are not a requirement for movies to make it big time. So I guess it's the same for games in a way.
As space travel become privitised and travel cheaper, inevitably old treaties will be revised by corperate interests, in favour of the private ownership of other planets.
Titan _Will_ eventually become privatly owned by some rich tycoons/corperations/religions looking to make money off it, and whatever life is there will be subject to their bulldozing mercy.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps it's meant to emphasise that a group has emerged from ad-hoc, NETBUEI based, immaturity, and has ventured into the more dignified and professional, TCP/IP based middle age cycle.
Which completely ignore the fact that as you get older, things may not work as expected and certain things may stop working altogether!
Why is no comment on slashdot ever taken the way the author intended it to be taken?
DoD wants to be nice to Iraqis now.
PR took a bit of a hurt when americans almost realized that their country's armed forces might actually be able to do wrong.
To reaffirm the infallibility of all US actions in the eyes of the public, the Pentagon has instigated these little PR stunts. And to avoid future embarresements, all the dirty work will be done by iraqis from now on.
Everybody wins, except the guy at the bottom.
Considering that a load of Wikipedia articles are ripped from the encyclopedia Brittanica, and the fact that sooners or later Wikipedia will begin to encroach on Brittanicas businees, how long before Wikipedia gets sued for copyright theft. Either that of get battered by hoards of Brittanica salesmen hauling around fifty volumes and cheap plywood bookshelves.
You'd never know, maybe Encyclopedia Brittannica hold a copyright on 'A method of assembling articles containing information about concepts, entites and persons in an indexed linked form, using a computer'.
Remember no matter how obvious it is, if it uses a computer, you've got yourself a patent pal!
OK they wanted myths not outright fantasies.
:E
No-one could ever believe such a fanatastic story!!
With the old home computers one could get instant gratification by writing a program which drew a space-ship on the screen in 10 lines of BASIC. Nowadays you'd have to learn COM + Win32 + DirectX just to get a black rectangle.
Amen.
It required at least 300+ lines of Visual C++ to get a black screen and almost 150 lines of C++ to get SDL to throw up a black screen.
What the hell is going on here?!?! I know a lot of things need to be set up, resolution, sound, etc. But most people were happy with the default options they were given on those old computers. They made Elitle out of it for christs sake.
So how come I can't start a gaming project with a simple
Setup_SDL(SDL_STANDARD_OPTIONS);
Is it too much to ask?
[[[BEGIN FETCHMAIL -RED : FEED GRABBED : STARTING YUM -RED | CAT UNPACK]]]
Sir, it is with deepest regret I inform you that Linux is in fact the result of a 20 year KGB plot to subvert US dominance of the computer software industry.
Exerpt from Kremlin Communica
Translation Begins......
Back in the early 1980s, with the cold war still on and the STI system under construction, the Kremlin knew that its long term hopes of victory could only be secured by subverting capitalist industry and sepecifically, its new dependance on IT. To do this they needed a Soviet Operating System of surpassing power, that could, at will, ping Allied machines to death while simulatiously monitoring and controlling every aspect of the lives of Soviet citizens.
To this end the KGB were tasked with stealing the source code to the superior UNIX operating system. Already expierienced with pilfering designs for CPUs and 3.5'' floppies from the offices of IBM, the KGB were well up to the task. They set to work on slowly gaining access to AT&T labs across the globe, while superior soviet software engineers began the thankless task of reverse engineering UNIX binaries.
But constructing this OS would require expertiese that the Union, due totally to capitalist interference of course, currently lacked. In order to bring all of the pieces together, and compile the piece they had found, they needed an agent trained in the west in the ways of capitalist programming, but still loyal to the revolution! Despite the best efforts of agents planted in every major computer lab available, they found decadent western programmers were only interested in money, 'code buzz' and vile capitalist pornography on USENET. USENET itself had eluded all efforts at subversion by the revolutionary divisions net.agents. It was felt that as a mass, the USENET hoards had collective intelligence somewhat less than was needed to rise up against tyranny.
In short, Moscow needed to plant an agent, still young enough to learn, but old enough to remain loyal to the motherland. Enter, Linov Tolvachuk, AKA Linus Torvalds. Ala Kevin Cosner in 'Nowhere to Run' Linov was planted in nearby Finland, close to Moscow, yet near enough to the teaching methods of the west. For ten years under guidance of KGB handlers, he learned the ways of Object Orientation, Procedural programming and the secrets of IBM compatability.
Despite setbacks, notibly suspisions of Linov's handlers being communists and what looked like a takeover of american computer industries by apple OSes, the project continued. Even pasted the fall of the Berlin wall and the ending of communism in Russia, the KGB continuded the operation, hoping once again for victory over the west and the revival of the revolution. Linov produced many works during this time, even suppling the comms software for the tank that Yelstin got drunk on.
Finally by the early 90's the main objective of the project was underway. With a single USENET post and just over 10,000 lines of code, Linov published project KREMNIX, the muscovite OS to defeat the west. Heavily leaning on the UNIX code smuggled out by other agents in the MINIX project the used his training in charisima and psychology to influence and convert a learge number of western programmers, inciting a minor revolution in programming circles. Over the years Linux, as the project became known, grew to an OS that would challenge the west, yet would remain firmly in Moscow's hands.
After Valdmir Putin, one of the agents behinf the project, came to power in Russia, the budget increased. By financing the companies they had set up to promote the project, notibly the rather obviously named RedHat, the Kremlin managed to increase the proliferation of of system.
Simultanious to this, another plot had been brewing. To complement the expected increase in communist computer power, a corressponding sabotage of western OS quality was planned. The KGB successfully gained acces to, and altered, the code to the then infant MS-
Checks Irish Site...
No Linux option...
This bugs me especially considering they make the danm things right outside my back door. And yet I will always be the last customer to get bargins.
FC2's up2date utility is vastly improved from prior versions, and no extra configuration is required to begin using it.
Well he's right about one thing. Up2date dosen't need any extra configuration as it does not in fact work, at all. It just connects and crashes. Bad Newbie!! It's back to the command prompt for you!
Considering that the manual discloses methods of operating and controlling Cisco products, as well as the interfaces used by them, could Cisco sue under the DMCA for copyright theft of its instructions on how to use its equipment.
If the instructions were generated by a computer algorithim then the answer to this is a resounding yes as then Cisco would have patented 'a method by which Cisco,(us), uses a PC to and printer to generate the instructions to operate our hardware', and could then sue the good doctor as presumably he used a PC and printer too.
A much better solution would be to turn the computer into a spam zombie that only spams itself. After a few thousand spam messages from themselves cloud their inbox, they might actually realise, "Oh, This IS annoying!"
It seems the Military Industrial complex FUD budject is a little healthier this year, and considering this thread has decended way off topic, Perhaps it should be cut Here are the^H^H^Hsome facts
How on earth are they going to cope with the wind forces, the jetstream, gravity, the earths spin, earpopping, in transit entertainment, lightning, costs, kids, aliens, terrorism and the fact that their's nothing in space to go up to yet.
P.S.
EMACS already does this.
Yum...there's no graphical front-end to it, forcing users to use a text-only, command-line interface.
To judge from comments I've read in online forums, I'm not the only person bugged by that. That, in turn, means that a friendlier interface can't be long in coming.
Hahahaha!! HAHAHA!!! HA HA HA HAAAA!!!!
It'll be a cld day in hell before yum gets a decent GUI. And an even colder one when software installation in Linux become truely point and click.
The cabal will not allow it.
Here, give us your exact location so we know where you are and what your doing at every moment of the day
It's FUN!!!!!
Also if you want to read the NY Times, get a passport, bank, shop, buy things or in fact breath, you will need to give someone complete access at all times to every facet of your live so that you may be served better. Remember it's not data rape if you consent.
By trillion I meant a thousand billions or a million millions. 1,000,000,000,000
Now I just gleaned the information from the article, that there was a $1.1 trillion dollar hole in the DOD finances. I found the ticker rather coll, and unnerving.
In any case the federal governments total revenue is of the order of $2 trillion dollars. However this says nothing of state and 'other' revenues. Also the military-industrial complex, as is well know, accounts for ~40% of all US government expenditure, most of which appears to be going on coke can seisure, surveillence on US citizens, high tech space research and certain things I can't mention as I will be blasted as a troll but suffice to say involve a level of tech and sophistication ancient neolithicians would not have found difficult to come by. Also a fair amount of this budget is probobly spent covering up just how big it is in case anyone starts to notice.
It's not that I don't care about optimisation when I choose an rpm over a .tar.gz source. It's just that compiling, at the best of times, is not as straightforward as rpm.
Make, frequently fails, so much so that it's frequently faster to compile each file one by one.
Not that rpm doesn't have its own problems. I'm always running across dependencies or bad headers.
Overall, whenever possible, I choose yum over both. It's slow, frequently times out, and downloads whoap loads of headers it never needs, but it finds dependencies, auto installs, and sets up programs on the system tray.
The military is really protective about their own privacy, but when it comes to snooping in on the regular communications of you and me, why, what is this privacy you speak of?!
Maybe they just don't want people to listen in on how many screw ups they keep making or how many trillions they've blown on torturing iraqis
The facts are hard to look at, yet we all know that Linux, despite opinions to the contrary, has suffered from system holes. And to be quite frank, the fact that Mac OSX is leaking like a swiss cheeze should not come as a surprise to anyone.
Linux is fallaible, but at least with open source we can find bugs and get rid of them quick, without waiting for patches. Windows is not as bad as OS X in this regard either.
I find the statement Linux suppliers took longer to release patches. Is that true? I know security consious admins will patch themselves but is it true that vendors will igorne minoe bugs?
Perhaps this is what the MS reps meant when they said Linux was becoming morew like windows.
I half expected that MS would dump IE, but I think this article somewhat validates my thoughts.
The very fact that this was published on MSN must hit at deep rumbling in the MS camp. IE users are, quite frankly, sick of IE. The recent warning from the US government must have been the last nail in IE's PR coffin. People now know other browsers are out there, and have begun to download them. MS issued a hasty patch after Homelland security recommendations for another browser, but it seems they won't upgrade IE functionality until Longhorn, 3 years away! That will mean IE will have spent 6 years in development limbo.
Or then again this could be a lone cowboy at MSN, eager to leave for the fresh pastures of The Register.
I reckon MS will soon dump IE in favour of a new browsers, or maybe a new 'kind' of browser(.NEt based, XAML interface anyone?). Maybe MSN client?
Tellingly IE still runs off version numbers IE5, IE6, whereas most MS apps run off the 98,2000,XP versioning scheme. These are my crackpot prediction for a rumour hungry world.
Happily however, windows XP searches for and installs the latest updates without any user input whatsoever, a situation I agree with completely.I know that most home users will rarely go into control panel and almost never run windows update. I don't expect them too, neither does MS.However, I'm not sure if automatic updating applies to service packs. I sure hope it does.
Your right about the websites though. If the SP 'breaks' web sites, people will turn the security off. I've also seen people who've tried firefox recently, go back to IE as javascript,PDF and flash either don't work or don't work 'properly'. They liked tabbed browsing, but that wasn't enough to wean them off IE's integrated plugins unfortunatly. Couldn't mozilla offer a complete install with all the plugins as standard?
We should be OK. The virus requires people to open the attachement on the mail in order for it to work. So unless people are stupid enough to open attachements after we've been telling them for years and years and after countless virus plauges not to we should all be fine... .......
Oh God!! We're all DOOOOOMED!!!!!
I find it more likely that the Kerry organisation chose OSS simply to lower their running costs. The Bush camp has more cash to burn ($200m) and so can afford to go for a more user friendly OS(I'm not trolling,Windows IS more user friendly). I wouldn't have put it past MS to have 'donated' serveral hundred licences and server software to the current administartion.
.NET will probobly crumble at the first YRO slashdot headline.
Though the situation in the Bush camp does seem to compliment their politics, I doubt Kerry and his followers give a danm about the OSS/CLSS debate. They just went with the cheapest option.
Of course they will benefit from ability to handle higher email loads and site requests. If the bush site is an aspx, then
90% of all games are mediocre or crap.
I'll agree with this statement. Although I will add that the signal to noise ratio on gamestore shelves has gone down in recent years.
The retro gaming phenomenon is more than just simple nostalgia though. The truth of the matter is, today, a random sample of 20 NES/MS/SNES/MegaDrive games, would probobly fare better than a random sample of 20 PS2/GC/XBox titles. It turns out that just 'having' better graphics, more buttons and more music does not a better game make. A lot of recent titles would not hold a candle to the best of 8/16 bit gaming. But that's to be expected. Dispite whatever era a game is made in, the fact that it's good won't change.
Retro gaming is really picking up recently. Perhaps it's due to the availability of emulators, or a ready supply of old SNES cartridges. However I think it sends out a signal that people aren't very impressed with the current lineup of games out there. If customers are willing to seek out 10/15/20 year old titles in preference to your spanking new one, I think that should get some people thinking. Were these game actually better? What made them so? Are people dissatisfied with games whose primary selling point is a Hollywood atmosphere of better graphics and music?
Games in the 80s and early 90s could offer only poor 2D and pretty awful 3D graphics. Their music was shackled to the limitations of MIDI tunes, and even the controllers offered little enough buttons for control. Without having the cushion of cinematography to fall back on, there really was only one place developers could engage the player. In the gameplay. Add most of them made a fair stab at it. Contrast this with *shudder* Gran Turismo or FIFA, whose sole selling point is graphics and snazz.
There will always be great games that shine out through the layers, but I feel the percentage of such games has decreased, simply due to the fact that there are more games being made. The quota of quaility games does not increase linearly with the amount of developers, alas. I just wonder how this will affect the outlook game players have on the industry and games in general.
I suppose it's like the evolution of cinema really. Initially you needed a danm good story and actors for a play/movie to be successful. Although these still help, and the best movies by definition have these, they are not a requirement for movies to make it big time. So I guess it's the same for games in a way.
As space travel become privitised and travel cheaper, inevitably old treaties will be revised by corperate interests, in favour of the private ownership of other planets.
Titan _Will_ eventually become privatly owned by some rich tycoons/corperations/religions looking to make money off it, and whatever life is there will be subject to their bulldozing mercy.
Might be far fetched, but remember you can buy plots of land on mars here