Also note that paypalsucks.com makes use of the extremely shady "WHOIS Privacy Protection Service", popular with spammers. Their contact page contains no contact details, only a CGI form. There is no "about us" page on their site.
It's a fair bet that some PayPal competitor or similar is behind it. If anything, I feel happier about using PayPal having read it.
I honestly haven't found the need for particularly sophisticated macros while I'm editing.
This is why editor-vs-editor arguments get so silly sometimes. People often fail to realise that requirements differ.
Clever use of emacs keyboard macros (and presumably vim too, I wouldn't know) makes a huge difference to a lot of the common tasks I perform. For example one common task is to take an API document and turn it into a class file (missing only the code in the method bodies). There was a time when I used to do that kind of thing manually. That can easily take half an hour. I know some people who'd knock up a quick script to do it (Perl/Python/some shell) - that takes about half as long. Or you can do the whole job with keyboard macros inside five minutes.
I see what you're saying, but that doesn't really apply to the timeline. After all, they talk about Tolkien and "European Mythology". The huge shoulder pads and art style weren't much in evidence there. Both are in fact a side effect of the fact that GW's games were designed for use with Citadel's 25mm fantasy miniature range. They featured a lot of huge weapons and armour plates because they look great at that scale.
And in fact the first Citadel miniatures to feature this style as we know it today were Chaos Warriors... so maybe we need to add Michael Moorcock's novels to the timeline too?
Interesting that the timeline in the article doesn't mention Dungeons and Dragons.
Given that Games Workshop was at one time the sole importer of D&D into the UK (prior to the design of Warhammer) I think I'd be quite confident in alleging they were influenced by it.
Whilst I mostly agree with your comments here, Civ 4 still encourages an awful lot of micromanagement if you're trying to beat the game's higher levels.
This is not necessarily bad, though. Some people like to micromanage for hours on end. It seems to me that Philip Goetz - despite writing six pages and appending weighty academic references at the end of his piece - is mostly just complaining that he doesn't like this particular style of game.
It's a good example, though. I need to use Windows for two main reasons. First, because so much software is written only to run on Windows. Second, because customers use Windows and I need to be able to test and debug in an environment matching theirs. As such, no matter how buggy or insecure Windows may be either now or in the future it will never be "futile" for me to use it. (Just infuriating on occasion.)
Javascript is not quite such a clear case. I think it's fair to say that's its use on websites has become ubiquitous (whether or not it should have done). Internet users as a group will therefore continue to use this technology widely whether we (or they) like it or not. To recognise it as broken and/or insecure is a helpful step. This does not mean we can proceed to discard the whole thing. It's simply not up to us.
I remember way back when the so called "Netscape extensions" to HTML first appeared. My naive thought was that they were pointless since HTML had to be a standard or it was no use at all. True enough in principle, but I had not yet encountered the concept of de-facto standards. These days I'm pleasantly relieved when a new site I want to read uses "only" Javascript and isn't implemented entirely in Flash.
So in response to a post saying a particular technology has security holes, the consensus "solution" is not to use that technology?
That seems weak to me. By all means propose replacement solutions that do the same job, but by saying "don't use it" all you're really doing is saying "I personally have little use for it".
Sysadmins should all disable Javascript?! Fine, go ahead, I'll move to a company with less demanding security requirements. You'll find your network's impressively secure once there are no users left.
Wait a sec - did I miss a memo somewhere ? Last time I checked, options were good.
And have you ever tried telling a Python programmer they could use PERL? I'd happily have ten copies of Python on my server just to avoid having that debate once.
Rather, what Bowen might have asked is how innately bound any emotion is to the current fabric of videogames (that is, whether it has anything to do with what the medium is trying to accomplish)
A much worse question, since insofar as gaming is a "medium" at all it is not a unified one with a single purpose or style.
As far as "emotional maturity" in games goes, we'll see more of it once the game design process becomes more about game design and less about physics and graphics and character/world modelling and all the many other things that take so much time and money at the moment.
There's some truth in what you say, but I think you're missing a key aspect.
Cellphone networks desperately need to increase their revenue per user. They need to encourage users to do things with their phones other than just make occasional voice calls and send a few texts. For a long time all sorts of people have been predicting an explosion of applications... but it hasn't happened.
The reason it hasn't happened is not because it's hard to write phone apps. It's the same reason why businesses fail to thrive in the absence of excessive regulatory costs and obstacles. The incentives are simply not there for application writers.
And this is the problem with looking to profits to motivate the networks. Yes, they want profits, but their strategy for achieving them may well be flawed. I suspect part of the reason for this is that with apps wanting to run network-wide the carriers aren't really competing to offer a viable framework for app writers. Competition is good. Competition makes things happen. Without it... well, we can see what happens.
Magic the Gathering is hardly ready to be a movie given that it has such trouble even generating readable novels.
The novels went through a brief period of being somewhat less dreadful, but unfortunately this translated predictably badly across to the actual card game.
This is not something I expect to read in a "Score:5, Insightful" post.
You are not forced to buy Sony's product. By not doing so you send exactly the right signal. However, the way things work is that each individual makes this choice for themselves. If Sony's sales drop as a result and they make huge losses, then the market has adequately expressed disapproval.
I suspect what's really annoying people round here is that we all know perfectly well Sony's going to do just fine with the PS3. Many other large corporations have proven this time and again: make products that people like or which do things they want and that's enough. End of story. Corporations don't care what you think, or even if you think, unless it impacts profits.
You may not like what Sony do, but it seems to me they do not "suck" in any relevant sense. Their console isn't out yet. When it is, we can have this discussion more constructively based on the merits of the device itself and its associated software.
Normally Microsoft's sock puppets are a little more subtle than that - is Street Fighter II embarassing you here?
Joking apart, it's quite understandable that the XBox 360 is taking quite a while to gather momentum (as will PS3). The sheer effort required to produce titles for this generation makes it inevitable.
Personally I find XBox Live Arcade very encouraging in terms of what it suggests about the future of gaming. For me there are no killer apps yet in this generation, but I wouldn't be surprised if the first one to turn up is a Live download (or Sony's equivalent).
Nice idea, but this is not going to happen. There's been a lot of debate about how the PS3 and XBox 360 compare in power, but one thing is clear: the Wii is a lot weaker.
This isn't a failing on Nintendo's part. They've made it clear the Wii's supposed to be a whole different kind of product. I very much hope it succeeds, but if it does so it won't be by carrying ports of all the PS3 titles.
Nice theory, but in fact the elite gamers of today are probably more skilled than ever. If nothing else, it's now possible for the very best to make a living as professional video game players. That feeds back into the amount of time they can afford to spend training.
and when manufacturing costs come down, we can all look forward to this edition of Sony Style
...which is obviously the way they're playing it.
Given the huge amount of anti-Sony hate when the price was announced, I did find myself wondering whether the main feeling was resentment from people who knew perfectly well they were going to buy the thing anyway.
There's no way I'd buy a Blu-Ray player if it wasn't in a PS3. In that sense, Sony may yet have made the right call.
And be warned - it's a good story, which isn't finished yet. The last episode has been coming out in sections at an incredibly slow pace for a variety of reasons...
Part of that is because their glory days were quite a long time ago. It seems bizarre to remember it now, but in the mid-to-late 80s there were dozens and dozens of commercial RPGs around. Even as a seriously hardcore roleplayer it was perfectly possible to encounter a published system you'd never heard of.
Palladium made a pretty big impact back then by taking their truly awful system but applying it to some very well chosen material. Robotech was crying out for someone to do it. TMNT was at that time an extremely cool and cutting-edge comic (forget the later animated series). And then there was Chaos Earth, which ultimately became Rifts.
These days, the kinds of people who would once have played Palladium games are more likely to download free systems on the internet or simply make their own. If small RPG studios were ever viable businesses, they certainly aren't now.
Palladium earned their place in roleplaying's hall of fame. But it doesn't surprise me that even gamers haven't heard of them these days.
I'm about halfway through a sabbatical year (away from a fairly high-end programming job). During this year, my main activities consist of looking after the house and my two four year old twins.
If you think I have time to play games during the day, you've got some serious misconceptions !
On the other hand, my wife gets home from her job as a government economist and still manages to play video games most nights.
Really I think what's going on here is that the 35% is total nonsense. They must have surveyed all the guys in a golf club lounge or something.:-/
Slashdot Mirror
Also note that paypalsucks.com makes use of the extremely shady "WHOIS Privacy Protection Service", popular with spammers. Their contact page contains no contact details, only a CGI form. There is no "about us" page on their site.
It's a fair bet that some PayPal competitor or similar is behind it. If anything, I feel happier about using PayPal having read it.
I honestly haven't found the need for particularly sophisticated macros while I'm editing.
This is why editor-vs-editor arguments get so silly sometimes. People often fail to realise that requirements differ.
Clever use of emacs keyboard macros (and presumably vim too, I wouldn't know) makes a huge difference to a lot of the common tasks I perform. For example one common task is to take an API document and turn it into a class file (missing only the code in the method bodies). There was a time when I used to do that kind of thing manually. That can easily take half an hour. I know some people who'd knock up a quick script to do it (Perl/Python/some shell) - that takes about half as long. Or you can do the whole job with keyboard macros inside five minutes.
I see what you're saying, but that doesn't really apply to the timeline. After all, they talk about Tolkien and "European Mythology". The huge shoulder pads and art style weren't much in evidence there. Both are in fact a side effect of the fact that GW's games were designed for use with Citadel's 25mm fantasy miniature range. They featured a lot of huge weapons and armour plates because they look great at that scale.
And in fact the first Citadel miniatures to feature this style as we know it today were Chaos Warriors... so maybe we need to add Michael Moorcock's novels to the timeline too?
Interesting that the timeline in the article doesn't mention Dungeons and Dragons.
Given that Games Workshop was at one time the sole importer of D&D into the UK (prior to the design of Warhammer) I think I'd be quite confident in alleging they were influenced by it.
Whilst I mostly agree with your comments here, Civ 4 still encourages an awful lot of micromanagement if you're trying to beat the game's higher levels.
This is not necessarily bad, though. Some people like to micromanage for hours on end. It seems to me that Philip Goetz - despite writing six pages and appending weighty academic references at the end of his piece - is mostly just complaining that he doesn't like this particular style of game.
Everyone likes sheep. Sheep go "baa"!
</pred>
It looked a lot like HDMI appeared in the menus too. Or did I misunderstand ? Possibly these (dev) menus don't match up with the real hardware.
Never heard of Windows, have you?
In my dreams. <sigh>
It's a good example, though. I need to use Windows for two main reasons. First, because so much software is written only to run on Windows. Second, because customers use Windows and I need to be able to test and debug in an environment matching theirs. As such, no matter how buggy or insecure Windows may be either now or in the future it will never be "futile" for me to use it. (Just infuriating on occasion.)
Javascript is not quite such a clear case. I think it's fair to say that's its use on websites has become ubiquitous (whether or not it should have done). Internet users as a group will therefore continue to use this technology widely whether we (or they) like it or not. To recognise it as broken and/or insecure is a helpful step. This does not mean we can proceed to discard the whole thing. It's simply not up to us.
I remember way back when the so called "Netscape extensions" to HTML first appeared. My naive thought was that they were pointless since HTML had to be a standard or it was no use at all. True enough in principle, but I had not yet encountered the concept of de-facto standards. These days I'm pleasantly relieved when a new site I want to read uses "only" Javascript and isn't implemented entirely in Flash.
So in response to a post saying a particular technology has security holes, the consensus "solution" is not to use that technology?
That seems weak to me. By all means propose replacement solutions that do the same job, but by saying "don't use it" all you're really doing is saying "I personally have little use for it".
Sysadmins should all disable Javascript?! Fine, go ahead, I'll move to a company with less demanding security requirements. You'll find your network's impressively secure once there are no users left.
Wait a sec - did I miss a memo somewhere ? Last time I checked, options were good.
And have you ever tried telling a Python programmer they could use PERL? I'd happily have ten copies of Python on my server just to avoid having that debate once.
Rather, what Bowen might have asked is how innately bound any emotion is to the current fabric of videogames (that is, whether it has anything to do with what the medium is trying to accomplish)
A much worse question, since insofar as gaming is a "medium" at all it is not a unified one with a single purpose or style.
As far as "emotional maturity" in games goes, we'll see more of it once the game design process becomes more about game design and less about physics and graphics and character/world modelling and all the many other things that take so much time and money at the moment.
There's some truth in what you say, but I think you're missing a key aspect.
Cellphone networks desperately need to increase their revenue per user. They need to encourage users to do things with their phones other than just make occasional voice calls and send a few texts. For a long time all sorts of people have been predicting an explosion of applications... but it hasn't happened.
The reason it hasn't happened is not because it's hard to write phone apps. It's the same reason why businesses fail to thrive in the absence of excessive regulatory costs and obstacles. The incentives are simply not there for application writers.
And this is the problem with looking to profits to motivate the networks. Yes, they want profits, but their strategy for achieving them may well be flawed. I suspect part of the reason for this is that with apps wanting to run network-wide the carriers aren't really competing to offer a viable framework for app writers. Competition is good. Competition makes things happen. Without it... well, we can see what happens.
Oh really? They have a 12 Step Plan?
Magic the Gathering is hardly ready to be a movie given that it has such trouble even generating readable novels. The novels went through a brief period of being somewhat less dreadful, but unfortunately this translated predictably badly across to the actual card game.
Face it: Sony sucks.
This is not something I expect to read in a "Score:5, Insightful" post.
You are not forced to buy Sony's product. By not doing so you send exactly the right signal. However, the way things work is that each individual makes this choice for themselves. If Sony's sales drop as a result and they make huge losses, then the market has adequately expressed disapproval.
I suspect what's really annoying people round here is that we all know perfectly well Sony's going to do just fine with the PS3. Many other large corporations have proven this time and again: make products that people like or which do things they want and that's enough. End of story. Corporations don't care what you think, or even if you think, unless it impacts profits.
You may not like what Sony do, but it seems to me they do not "suck" in any relevant sense. Their console isn't out yet. When it is, we can have this discussion more constructively based on the merits of the device itself and its associated software.
Normally Microsoft's sock puppets are a little more subtle than that - is Street Fighter II embarassing you here?
Joking apart, it's quite understandable that the XBox 360 is taking quite a while to gather momentum (as will PS3). The sheer effort required to produce titles for this generation makes it inevitable.
Personally I find XBox Live Arcade very encouraging in terms of what it suggests about the future of gaming. For me there are no killer apps yet in this generation, but I wouldn't be surprised if the first one to turn up is a Live download (or Sony's equivalent).
I hope they at least try though
Nice idea, but this is not going to happen. There's been a lot of debate about how the PS3 and XBox 360 compare in power, but one thing is clear: the Wii is a lot weaker.
This isn't a failing on Nintendo's part. They've made it clear the Wii's supposed to be a whole different kind of product. I very much hope it succeeds, but if it does so it won't be by carrying ports of all the PS3 titles.
The analyst here isn't predicting how much fun the Wii will be, he's prediciting sales.
Here's a question: How much shelf space will Wal*Mart devote to Wii games compared to the other two consoles?
Here's another question: How much money will be spent marketing each next-gen platform?
Sorry to say it, I think the analyst has it just about right.
Nice theory, but in fact the elite gamers of today are probably more skilled than ever. If nothing else, it's now possible for the very best to make a living as professional video game players. That feeds back into the amount of time they can afford to spend training.
Somehow Sony seems to make a lot of money out things people consider failures.
Universal Media Disc?
Doesn't seem likely, does it?
and when manufacturing costs come down, we can all look forward to this edition of Sony Style
...which is obviously the way they're playing it.
Given the huge amount of anti-Sony hate when the price was announced, I did find myself wondering whether the main feeling was resentment from people who knew perfectly well they were going to buy the thing anyway.
There's no way I'd buy a Blu-Ray player if it wasn't in a PS3. In that sense, Sony may yet have made the right call.
And be warned - it's a good story, which isn't finished yet. The last episode has been coming out in sections at an incredibly slow pace for a variety of reasons...
That's evolution. The market selects the most profitable approach.
Part of that is because their glory days were quite a long time ago. It seems bizarre to remember it now, but in the mid-to-late 80s there were dozens and dozens of commercial RPGs around. Even as a seriously hardcore roleplayer it was perfectly possible to encounter a published system you'd never heard of.
Palladium made a pretty big impact back then by taking their truly awful system but applying it to some very well chosen material. Robotech was crying out for someone to do it. TMNT was at that time an extremely cool and cutting-edge comic (forget the later animated series). And then there was Chaos Earth, which ultimately became Rifts.
These days, the kinds of people who would once have played Palladium games are more likely to download free systems on the internet or simply make their own. If small RPG studios were ever viable businesses, they certainly aren't now.
Palladium earned their place in roleplaying's hall of fame. But it doesn't surprise me that even gamers haven't heard of them these days.
I'm about halfway through a sabbatical year (away from a fairly high-end programming job). During this year, my main activities consist of looking after the house and my two four year old twins.
:-/
If you think I have time to play games during the day, you've got some serious misconceptions !
On the other hand, my wife gets home from her job as a government economist and still manages to play video games most nights.
Really I think what's going on here is that the 35% is total nonsense. They must have surveyed all the guys in a golf club lounge or something.