I'm not sure of the details, but just because they overestimated the amount of fissionable material needed to initiate the reaction, it doesn't necessarily follow that they'd underestimate its destructive power.
Although the idea of Hitler and his gang accidentally nuking themselves while testing their masterstroke against the Allies does have a certain je ne sais quoi...
Good points all, and though we disagree in specifics I think we agree generally that both types of game have something to offer.
FWIW you make a good point about the reactivity (if that's even a word) of SF2, but I think you underestimate Civ - those tiny little choices you disparage as write off as logistics (touché on the link;-) can make a huge difference in the game, it's just that (like tactics in SF2) they only start to really matter when you're playing someone really, really good.
My (badly-expressed) point was that (even if many of the game-states are similar, which I contest), you also have much more information to retain and process within each state, not just between them - you have the economic level and disposition of every one of your cities (even ignoring units) on the Civ map to plan for, versus one fighter who can be in one of only a few states (stance x, y or z, stage x, y or z of a jump, finishing move x, y or z, etc).
Apologies if I came off as elitist - I wasn't trying to say "this is right", or even "this system is better than this one". I was only trying to say "systems are predominantly designed for, better for and marketed for particular genres of game".
"Example: Street Fighter 2. A simple game, you say?"
I also didn't intend to imply console games were simplistic, only that they were comparatively "simple" - to flee into the jargon of game theory for a minute, the state space (number of all possible states the game can be in) of something like SF2 is orders of magnitude of smaller than Civilisation, or even chess. I know how comparatively deep and complex the tactics in a good beat-em-up can get, but you can't seriously suggest that that the split-second (if clever) tactics you consider in the midst of a SF2 round compare to the hours-long strategies involved in a well-played game of Civilisation, can you?
"(SF2 is) One of the most complex games ever, It is not a twitch game."
Ummm, yes, it is. Almost by definition. Just because you can hatch complex tactics when you're very, very good at the game doesn't mean it doesn't rely on twitch reflexes for you to be any good at the game at all.
I'm not classifying everything into "twitch or not-twitch" - it's a spectrum, with Civilisation on one end, and SF2/Wipeout/whatever at the other.
"You still need hand eye coordination, but you also need it for Starcraft, don't you? Tactics and mind games in high level Street Fighter players is more important."
Of course you need hand-eye co-ordination for Starcraft, but it isn't nearly as important as in SF2, is it? Yes, Starcraft can get pretty hectic in a large battle, but the majority of the game in any RTS is base-building, mining resources and consolidating your territory - you can often even survive a strong attack simply by having a sufficiently large pool of resources that you can keep churning out troops to defend yourself.
You seem to be interpreting "twitch-game" as a term of disparagement, but I never implied that. Reactions-based games can be much deeper (when played well) than they appear, it's just that you can't seriously compare tactical decisions like those to the deepness you get from a turn-based (or often even RT) strategy. No value judgement implied, and one isn't better than the other (I regularly play games of both genres) - they're just different.
"In other news, season 2 will be shown first in the US... starting July 15, with UK's Sky One following in October."
I think I speak for all UK Slashdotters when I say... bollocks.
But seriously (and no doubt unpopularly), why? Like the US doesn't get enough of the good stuff first, now Sky's giving away one of the few programs we get to premier? Bastards.
Hey, it worked for TNG, didn't it? I must admit when I first encountered TNG I was very skeptical - they essentially changed the cast, the writers, the sets, the time-period and even the whole style of the show (much more thoughtful and considered), but crucially they still kept it interesting, and kept it feeling like Star Trek.
Although it'll be hard to make you invest any emotion in the new characters inside 2 hours (unlike the TV series, where you have tens or hundreds of hours to get to know them), it should be possible. With Berman at the tiller, however, I know what outcome my money's on...
Re:On point 2: games are all the same
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A Gamer's Manifesto
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· Score: 2, Interesting
"As I pointed out in the prior post, I bought it (in 2001) because those games did exit for the PS1. Why should I have assumed, at the time, that such games wouldn't have been written for the PS2 as well?"
Fair play if you didn't know that then, but I thought everyone understood consoles were for "arcade" gamers, PCs were for "thinking" games.
Of course, I'm overgeneralising here, but the very platforms are designed with the different games in mind - the PC has always been geared for stateful, number-crunching simulation and "deep" games (witness the years and years it took for the PC to get decent sound and graphics capabilities compared to consoles). Consoles, on the other hand, have been designed from the get-go to have pretty graphics and pick-up-and-put-down gameplay (lack of storage capability, limited input capability of controllers vs. keyboard/mouse, etc).
That's not to say that you can't now get decent strategy games for the console and "arcade" games for the PC, but the general culture of the platform has solidified around those two positions, so decent games in the "other" genre tend to be the exception, rather than the norm.
"I will not buy a PC just so I can play a game."
I understand your frustration, but you obviously made the wrong choice and them's the breaks - for "deep" games the PC is the platform of choice, for "arcade" games choose a console, and no matter how inconvenient it might be, that's just the way it is. Perhaps a little more research might be in order before spending hundreds of dollars on technology next time?
"IMO, that's what "game machines" or "consoles" are intended for."
ObSlashdot Car Analogy:
You can drive places in a Formula 1 car or a 4x4 beach buggy, but don't expect the F1 car to be any good on the beach. And always check what you want to use the car for before parting with your hard-earned cash.
"But, no doubt, I appear to be mistaken - as such games were not aggressively marketed on my platform."
Well there you go - it was never historically a big "strategy" platform, and they never advertised it as a big "strategy" platform, so you can't really blame them for not producing many strategy games, can you? Not to sound sarcastic, but the problem is obviously an incorrect purchase, rather than anything inherently wrong with the product or marketing, right?
Apologies if you were just sounding off and I'm inadvertantly pissing on your bonfire, but it honestly sounded like you didn't understand why it had happened...
Re:On point 2: games are all the same
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A Gamer's Manifesto
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· Score: 3, Interesting
With all due respect, that does seem rather like buying a hammer so you can bang screws in more efficiently.
The reson for your complaints? That would be because all the strategic, intellectual, clever, thoughtful games for the PS2 are... on PC.
Seriously, dude - you buy a console, aimed squarely at fast-paced arcadey twitch-gaming (the occasional good strategy/RPG notwithstanding), then slate it because it doesn't do well what it patently isn't designed for?
Like I said, there's a market segment catering to the very areas you identify - it's called PC gaming. You even list your "ideal" games in the post - C&C, Allied General, Civilisation - see any connection? They're PC games.
Buying a PS2 for lobotomised knock-off PC strategy titles is like buying a hammer to install screws. You might be able to do it, but it's patently obviously The Wrong Choice.
The console marheteers know their audience - you've just bought the wrong product, is all.
Presumably they could indeed use different encryption schemes. That would, however, quite emphatically miss the point of the whole exercise, which is to ease the creation of a UK-US composite database, wherein anyone unfortunate enough to own an ID card can be tracked from their door in the UK/US to their holiday in the US/UK and back again, seamlessly and invisibly, by whatever warrant-less USian government agency (because let's face it, the UK government won't get shit out of this) decides it wants to know.
"Why? Oh, no reason... Move along, nothing to see here. By the way, your library books are overdue. What? Nothing. Honest."
"Any game that is fun can be marketed because people will buy any game that is fun. The primary virtue of a game is it's level of fun. So unless your original concept was not fun, that assertion is false."
With the greatest respect, that's the biggest load of idealistic Utopian horse-pucky I've ever read.
"Build it and they will come" works when you only need a tiny fraction of the whole audience to make an endeavour worthwhile. Nobody, but nobody sinks millions of dollars into a game and relies on word-of-mouth to spread it.
Word of mouth might get you many things (respect, a hard core of gamers who passionately love your game, and lots of blog-coverage), but it won't get the game in stores, it won't push the game to Joe Sixpack who's too busy drinking beer to read gaming blogs (but who nevertheless represents 50%-99% of your market, depending on the platform), and it certainly won't allow the game to break even.
It is possible, I'll grant you, for tiny cult games, movies or books to achieve mainstream success, but this is a mixture of 5% excellence and 95% pure, dumb luck. For every one you see, there are literally hundreds of thousands that die cold and lonely deaths, unmissed by anyone.
I long for the day when this is true - when you can just produce something great and it'll automatically translate into wealth, fame and success - but even with the advent of the internet, that day is years (if not decades) away.
Fantastic idea, but what about a game explicitely based in Iain M. banks' Culture universe? (Aside from Halo, which unofficially "borrowed" quite heavily from it). The Culture novels sketch out an immensely complex and textured universe with wonderful characters, story-lines and set-pieces. They'd lend themselves to almost any game, but something cinematic, involving and immersive like a good FPS (less Doom, more Halo/Half Life 2/Deus Ex) would show it off to best effect.
I'd want something comparatively similar to Halo - at least some missions on an Orbital (just for the awe-inspiring location), but you could also have plenty on planets, GSVs or even AirSpheres (how cool would that be? And technically *easy* since it's almsot entirely enpty air).
Antoher cool thing would be streaming level geometry, so you can have effectively unbounded levels.
One thing I remember reading about Halo when it was first mooted was the idea that there wouldn't be "levels" as such - instead the engine would stream landscape off the hard disk, bump-mapping and abstracting it to reduce level of detail (and so processor time) as it got further away (like GTA3, with a further-away horizon, or Black & White's "whole island zooms in to worm in apple" engine).
You could (I believe) relatively easily generate such a system using algorithmic modeling (like Spore) for terrain, with geometry and bitmapped textures only explicitely specified for set-piece areas and buildings dotted around the map. The feeling of freedom would immerse you more in the game than any number of in-engine cutscenes, even if you spent 90+% of your time moving between planned-out set-piece locations.
You could break the monotony by requiring the player to change location at points in the game (eg, to other Orbitals/planets/etc), but once on one you could travel anywhere within it without waiting for loading screens or encountering impassable barriers (except on the outer edges of Orbitals/Plates, obviously).
Of course, an bump-mapping engine that good would also allow you to fly diametrically across Orbitals, or land on planets from orbit, so it should then be relatively trivial to even allow for flight-based missions (using true physics, please - none of this "spaceships handle like atmospheric planes" crap).
Imagine foot-based missions on an Orbital, which end with you getting into a shuttle, flying up to an orbiting GSV and flying/dogfighting (a la Consider Phlebas) within its interior structure, all without stopping to load...
(Ok, GSVs would probably also have to have their geometry explicitely (rather than algorithmically) defined, but with the huge memory capacities of today's desktop PCs, I still can't see any show-stopping problems as long as the "transit from orbital-to-GSV" time was long enough to stream the GSV into memory first. Hell, spice it up with a dogfight or two on the way, and the user won't even notice the time).
Are you joking? I don't even know where to start. Let's start with this. You are at a BBQ somewhere in the world. If fire were to vanish tomorrow, wherever you are, your government would collapse, the balance of power in the world would be thoroughly shaken from head to foot, and millions, if not billions of people would die within a year.
Take the same number of people in New York, drop them in a lake the same size as New York, and watch how quickly society implodes upon itself without the the capability for dry-kindling-ignition to support it.
Does this mean you can always fix social problems with fire?
Just because "technology allows X", doesn't mean "technology can cure Y". Sure, it allows us to live our lives a certain way (and that's great), but to confuse an empowering trend with the cure for all the world's ills is just naive.
"I know some times when we bang things out on the keyboard they sound really insightful and intelligent, but some times we need to respect the preview button, read what we read, and decide if it really is insightful, or a load of thoughtless crap."
Don't get me wrong - the majority of UK companies (IMO) are quite good. It's only this particular one I'm working for Just Doesn't Get It.
Not sure what the UK job market's currently like, but a year ago (when I started working here) it was starting to pick up a bit after a couple of years of downturn. Either way, with a solid year here under my belt (well, banging my head against the wall, but...) it could well be time to move on. Guess I'd better re-immerse myself in the job market then, and see what the temperature's like - anyone our there in Slashdotland know?
It's not a big deal, until you go away on business for a couple of days and forget your charger. Or go on holiday and find the plugs are different. Or go to a music festival (where there are no chargers, at least none without a two-hour wait).
For me, it's a convenience thing. I want to be able to go stay overnight at my girlfriend's on a whim, and not have to pack a small suitcase full of chargers for the gadgets I habitually carry. I don't want to be forced to choose between carrying around a charger (which effectively doubles the weight/bulk of the phone) or being shackled to my bedroom/study desk each night.
I just can't wait for a simple ubiquitous induction-based charging system. Or even better, environmental options like flip-out solar panels or thermal charging. Or even just fuel cells or (well-shielded) nuclear micropiles. Anything that lets me Stop Worrying About It and get on with whatever I want to do.
Yeah, same where I work, too (no link, because I still have to work here for a while). We're a Microsoft Gold Partner, but The MD has taken this to mean we aren't even allowed to run a single Linux server or FLOSS app, in case MS (somehow) find out and decide to withdraw our MSGP status in a fit of pique. Not, of course, that they've ever even vaguely indicated they would do so, but there you go....
So, here I am, forced to develop dynamic web content in (hackcoughspit) ASP.NET, re-inventing the wheel each time because you Just Don't Get the equivalent of CPAN for proprietary MS-culture languages, on my local machine, to be deployed on servers currently too old to run the.NET platform until they get a hardware upgrade, which was scheduled for six months ago but still won't happen for at least the next six months because we simply don't have the budget for it, doing nothing that couldn't be done in a fraction of the time, with a fraction of the resources and a fraction of the fucking about in Perl or PHP.
Typical Quote: Our "Director of Innovation" (that's "innovation" in the Microsoft sense, too) once noticed FileZilla on my machine. His reaction? "Get that dirty free software off my machines right now". Oh yes, and every project anyone undertakes has to be done in a language he can speak, just in case they ever decide to leave and he decides to start managing it directly himself.
He only can only code in VB.
Apparently he once tried to learn C for three weeks, but gave up "because it was too hard".
"A nice survey article from Infoworld interviews Javascript creator, Brendan Eich, who says that this is what he and Marc Andreessen planned from the beginning."
Well yeah, that's what I'd say, too.
Ok, Frist P05t candidate away - time to RTFA now;-p
Wow - it's like "Hackers"... only ten years after the idea even made the mainstream. And much more low-rent. And without the cool graphics and computer-generated voice. And with less supertankers. And without Angelina Jolie with her nips out.
How lame is that?
(And that's leaving aside the huge number of social and technical ways this scam could be improved...)
"Sadly this is Europe, and whilst Microsoft may be able to buy out various organisations in the USA to get what it wants, over here we have something known as tradition, and a hell of a lot of it."
Sadly? Hardly, if it insulates us from the kind of corporate state America is becoming. However, I'd dispute that it will insulate us perfectly - we also have something of a tradition of following the US culturally in recent times (well, more the UK than Europe as a whole, but it still has influence, even in France).
"Changing how Europe deals with issues takes a lot more time, effort, money and public support than Microsoft has at its disposal."
Indeed, but look how narrow a squeak the issue of Software Patents was - had Poland (alone!) not stood up and said "This is fucking undemocratic" we'd likely have SW patents enshrined in EU law by now.
The trouble is that the Euopean Union has a lot of power held by unelected bureaucrats - in the US corporations had to effectively merge with the GOP and still had to get elected to secure power - they had to take over the entire government system. In the EU, they'll only have to buy out a few, key, unelected officials and there'll be no way for "the public" to meaningfully and forcefully oppose decisions, short of armed insurrection.
"One person may be able to be bought out (See Ireland), but it takes a lot of effort to change the opinion of the entire system."
Microsoft (AFAIAA) didn't do anything as crass as pay off the EU president directly - the most they would have done was suggest to him gently that if he steered things their way, Ireland would benefit hugely from their investment. And it did.
The problem is that, while the US is one monolithic entity, the EU is composed of smaller member states. Bring all the US influence to bear on almost any single (or even few) member states, and they'll fold pretty much instantly.
Again (with SW Patents), had Poland (alone, without anything really to lose) not stood up, they would have succeeded. Where were the UK, Germany, etc? Even France, with their notorious unnecessary bloody-mindedness?
The only way for the EU to stand up to this kind of US pressure is for all the member states to pull together and resist corporatisation. However, the current EU government structure (as I understand it) is less accountable and even more easily corrupted than the US one (which has already fallen).
They won't need to corporatise the system of government if they can just buy a few well-placed bureaucrats and get the same level of control with even less exposure or accountability.
"Europe held most of the world at their disposal for quite a large chunk of human history. You can't do that if you're easily swayed by money and opinion."
Hmmm. As I recall, we had all the money and opinion - that's why we had most of the world. These days, I'd say that role's more fulfilled by the US (at least for the next few years, until the decline becomes irreversible).
Why do you think Gates and MS are so happy to give the finger so often and so liberally? Because no-one will ever dare to call them out on it - the worst that happens is sanctions against MS that then get argued down on appeal, creatively "misunderstood" or just blatantly ignored.
Actually, even shagging a student won't always get you fired, as long as the university authorities know about it and you aren't responsible for directly marking their work. (If you are, they just give their work to some one else to mark).
It might be different in other universities/countries, but when I was at university (UK) a couple of years ago one or two of the lecturers there were proverbial for fucking their way through as much of the female undergrad population as possible.
They do have similar meanings, granted, but "perverse" means more "bloody minded/against good", whereas "perverted" means "deviant/sexually deviant".
And yeah, dictionaries (generally American) often offer perverse as a synonym for some senses of perverted, but that doesn't mean (for example) that a guy covered in trifle with his dick in a chicken is perverse. He's perverted.
"My opinion is that Quantum Mechanics has the best going explaination for how the world is working. But that's because we don't properly understand how the world *is* working.
I unlike Einstein will conceed that QM explains phenomena that we have experienced and documented. But like Einstein, I still refuse to accept it."
Aaaaah! I understand your position now - in fact, I agree with you almost completely. The only difference is that I "believe" in QM until something better comes along, whereas you seem to have withdrawn your belief in it before finding a better (more complete/supported) theory - correct?
"Do not mistake my floundering attempts to explain away features of QM as a failure to understand QM. I *do* understand it. Hell, you've explained the double-slit experiement to me like 15 times by now. I *UNDERSTAND* how QM works. I just refuse to believe that this is how things actually are working."
Ok, fair enough. Apologies for my misunderstanding, but it appeared to me you didn't have a good grasp of it and were dismissing it out of hand. I have no problems with people disagreeing with a theory or idea, as long as they understand what they're disagreeing with, and can propose a better solution.
I misunderstood you to be arguing from ignorance (a "that just sounds silly" rejection), rather than advancing an alternative theory. My apologies, and do keep working on your theory until it is complete.
"And for the record, there have been two times in math, where a formal proof has been disproven just because it was wrong. The disproving mathematicians at the times had not evidence or support to their statement. They simply said, "This must be wrong." And low and behold, they were right."
Fair play (and I think it's probably happened a lot more than twice), but I think that's slightly different. QM is a theory, and is merely "the best one we have", so minor errors don't necessarily disprove the whole thing. Mathematical proofs are supposed to be a single chain of logical reasoning, and objectively True, so a single fault with any part of it generally can makes the entire "proof" incorrect.
"Just no one has been able to prove QM wrong, or inaccurate yet, because everyone is so busy trying to understand it, that no one is attempting to really question it."
Again, not to spark another argument, but I'd dispute that heavily. The entire process of scientific research is basically a prolonged attempt to poke holes in a theory (not just to understand it - that's what undergrad work is for), and QM has survived almost entirely unscathed so far.
Are you really suggesting that the scientific establishment, having produced quantum mechanics, is only really engauged in trying to understand the theory they themselves advanced? This doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and reduces scientific research to a kind of intellectual archaeology.
"You speak of critical analysis and yet you yourself do not critically analize QM. You preach it to me as Truth. As if there's no other reasonable explaination for the universe but by means of QM."
Again, apologies - this was an artifact of my not understanding your position. If you don't understand QM but (ignorantly) dismiss it out of hand, of course I'm going to play up its reliability and/or Truth, in an attempt to get you to reassess your opinion. If you understand it perfectly then yes, I'd be less concerned with correcting an "ignorant" assumption and more concerned with presenting an accurate example of its weaknesses and strengths.
"So who died and let the science that you're quoting say that inside the singularity is infinite gravity?"
As I understand it, Special Relativity says that, at the singularity, spacetime curvature (and so "gravity") is infinite. However, Relativity breaks down in the presence of infinite quantities, so it predicts the situation, but refuses to say anything about its implications.
"For years practitioners used the Web and its language, HTML, as a free format and layout platform for forms and documents (often as paint for software applications)."
You can use a drinking-well as a urinal, but that doesn't make it a good idea. And it certainly doesn't mean you'll get anything worth having out of it later.
The fact that HTML (and browsers) allowed such horrible, buggy, quirky markup has done more to retard content aggregation and the further development of the web than practically any other force in computing.
Sure, in the early days it made sense to keep the barrier to entry low, to get people on-board. It fuelled the growth of the web, and allowed any idiot with five minutes and Frontpage to put up a page announcing to the world what a L33T h4xx0R they were in bright clashing colours on an unreadable patterned background.
This is akin to offering people a blank sheet of paper instead of a form with distinct questions and answer-boxes - useful, because they can write whatever they want and don't have to think about it, but much, much harder to do anything with later.
There's a reason we have paper forms, and a reason all non-trivial data is stored in some form of database[1] - unstructured information is useless. It only becomes useful when it's structured - when it stops being just information and becomes data
Why is XML/RSS/ATOM more tightly-structured than HTML? Why can't we straight aggregate HTML instead of having to invent a new file format? Because HTML is now fundamentally broken for automatic syntactic parsing of data.
"Then along comes the W3C to proclaim to those practicing this craft: "HTML is not a format and layout language"."
It isn't. Or, at least, wasn't intended to be - HTML was originally envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee as a semantic markup language - it's only later development and the commercialisation of the web that lead to it being almost exclusively presentational. A new effort (the Semantic Web) is now being made on this front - old, broken, misused HTML is being retired in favour of semantic XHTML, CSS for presentation, javascript/ECMAScript for interactive behaviour and XML for interoperability/data representation. All open languages and standards, you'll note.
"They then proceed to break all the existing code that's out there in the name of that proclamation."
What's broken? Show me a mainstream browser that doesn't passably support all the way back to HTML 1.0. Sure, it entails some extra work for the browser manufacturers, but I find it hard to feel bad for them, since they (with lax enforcement of HTML grammar, proprietary extensions and the like) contributed so hugely to the mess in the first place.
"It may be coincidence that the W3C is filled with representatives of companies who make billions of dollars selling what are essentially formatting and layout platforms for forms and documents... "
Oh please - this is the worst tinfoil hat argument I've ever heard. Oooh, oooh, the companies who benefit from breaking interoperability, introducing proprietary extensions and generally grabbing the fast buck are pushing more interoperability, stricter standardisation and long-term game-plans that drastically improve the entire architecture of the net. Sorry - not following you on that one.
If it was really an industry cartel dictating the future of the web for their own ends, XHTML would have been replaced with an unreadable binary format, with unlimited proprietary vendor- and platform-specific extensions. It would be incredibly difficult to learn, rather than basically identical to HTML but ever-so-slightly stricter. They certainly wouldn't be publishing and pushing the standards for free - they'd be charging for them, attaching licence conditions to them. And they wouldn't be providing on-line validators for free - you'd be expected
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure of the details, but just because they overestimated the amount of fissionable material needed to initiate the reaction, it doesn't necessarily follow that they'd underestimate its destructive power.
Although the idea of Hitler and his gang accidentally nuking themselves while testing their masterstroke against the Allies does have a certain je ne sais quoi...
What, you mean in five years' time they'll release a "new" version of IE with all these current features in?
Good points all, and though we disagree in specifics I think we agree generally that both types of game have something to offer.
;-) can make a huge difference in the game, it's just that (like tactics in SF2) they only start to really matter when you're playing someone really, really good.
FWIW you make a good point about the reactivity (if that's even a word) of SF2, but I think you underestimate Civ - those tiny little choices you disparage as write off as logistics (touché on the link
My (badly-expressed) point was that (even if many of the game-states are similar, which I contest), you also have much more information to retain and process within each state, not just between them - you have the economic level and disposition of every one of your cities (even ignoring units) on the Civ map to plan for, versus one fighter who can be in one of only a few states (stance x, y or z, stage x, y or z of a jump, finishing move x, y or z, etc).
Apologies if I came off as elitist - I wasn't trying to say "this is right", or even "this system is better than this one". I was only trying to say "systems are predominantly designed for, better for and marketed for particular genres of game".
"Example: Street Fighter 2. A simple game, you say?"
I also didn't intend to imply console games were simplistic, only that they were comparatively "simple" - to flee into the jargon of game theory for a minute, the state space (number of all possible states the game can be in) of something like SF2 is orders of magnitude of smaller than Civilisation, or even chess. I know how comparatively deep and complex the tactics in a good beat-em-up can get, but you can't seriously suggest that that the split-second (if clever) tactics you consider in the midst of a SF2 round compare to the hours-long strategies involved in a well-played game of Civilisation, can you?
"(SF2 is) One of the most complex games ever, It is not a twitch game."
Ummm, yes, it is. Almost by definition. Just because you can hatch complex tactics when you're very, very good at the game doesn't mean it doesn't rely on twitch reflexes for you to be any good at the game at all.
I'm not classifying everything into "twitch or not-twitch" - it's a spectrum, with Civilisation on one end, and SF2/Wipeout/whatever at the other.
"You still need hand eye coordination, but you also need it for Starcraft, don't you? Tactics and mind games in high level Street Fighter players is more important."
Of course you need hand-eye co-ordination for Starcraft, but it isn't nearly as important as in SF2, is it? Yes, Starcraft can get pretty hectic in a large battle, but the majority of the game in any RTS is base-building, mining resources and consolidating your territory - you can often even survive a strong attack simply by having a sufficiently large pool of resources that you can keep churning out troops to defend yourself.
You seem to be interpreting "twitch-game" as a term of disparagement, but I never implied that. Reactions-based games can be much deeper (when played well) than they appear, it's just that you can't seriously compare tactical decisions like those to the deepness you get from a turn-based (or often even RT) strategy. No value judgement implied, and one isn't better than the other (I regularly play games of both genres) - they're just different.
"In other news, season 2 will be shown first in the US... starting July 15, with UK's Sky One following in October."
I think I speak for all UK Slashdotters when I say... bollocks.
But seriously (and no doubt unpopularly), why? Like the US doesn't get enough of the good stuff first, now Sky's giving away one of the few programs we get to premier? Bastards.
Hey, it worked for TNG, didn't it? I must admit when I first encountered TNG I was very skeptical - they essentially changed the cast, the writers, the sets, the time-period and even the whole style of the show (much more thoughtful and considered), but crucially they still kept it interesting, and kept it feeling like Star Trek.
Although it'll be hard to make you invest any emotion in the new characters inside 2 hours (unlike the TV series, where you have tens or hundreds of hours to get to know them), it should be possible. With Berman at the tiller, however, I know what outcome my money's on...
"As I pointed out in the prior post, I bought it (in 2001) because those games did exit for the PS1. Why should I have assumed, at the time, that such games wouldn't have been written for the PS2 as well?"
Fair play if you didn't know that then, but I thought everyone understood consoles were for "arcade" gamers, PCs were for "thinking" games.
Of course, I'm overgeneralising here, but the very platforms are designed with the different games in mind - the PC has always been geared for stateful, number-crunching simulation and "deep" games (witness the years and years it took for the PC to get decent sound and graphics capabilities compared to consoles). Consoles, on the other hand, have been designed from the get-go to have pretty graphics and pick-up-and-put-down gameplay (lack of storage capability, limited input capability of controllers vs. keyboard/mouse, etc).
That's not to say that you can't now get decent strategy games for the console and "arcade" games for the PC, but the general culture of the platform has solidified around those two positions, so decent games in the "other" genre tend to be the exception, rather than the norm.
"I will not buy a PC just so I can play a game."
I understand your frustration, but you obviously made the wrong choice and them's the breaks - for "deep" games the PC is the platform of choice, for "arcade" games choose a console, and no matter how inconvenient it might be, that's just the way it is. Perhaps a little more research might be in order before spending hundreds of dollars on technology next time?
"IMO, that's what "game machines" or "consoles" are intended for."
ObSlashdot Car Analogy:
You can drive places in a Formula 1 car or a 4x4 beach buggy, but don't expect the F1 car to be any good on the beach. And always check what you want to use the car for before parting with your hard-earned cash.
"But, no doubt, I appear to be mistaken - as such games were not aggressively marketed on my platform."
Well there you go - it was never historically a big "strategy" platform, and they never advertised it as a big "strategy" platform, so you can't really blame them for not producing many strategy games, can you? Not to sound sarcastic, but the problem is obviously an incorrect purchase, rather than anything inherently wrong with the product or marketing, right?
Apologies if you were just sounding off and I'm inadvertantly pissing on your bonfire, but it honestly sounded like you didn't understand why it had happened...
With all due respect, that does seem rather like buying a hammer so you can bang screws in more efficiently.
The reson for your complaints? That would be because all the strategic, intellectual, clever, thoughtful games for the PS2 are... on PC.
Seriously, dude - you buy a console, aimed squarely at fast-paced arcadey twitch-gaming (the occasional good strategy/RPG notwithstanding), then slate it because it doesn't do well what it patently isn't designed for?
Like I said, there's a market segment catering to the very areas you identify - it's called PC gaming. You even list your "ideal" games in the post - C&C, Allied General, Civilisation - see any connection? They're PC games.
Buying a PS2 for lobotomised knock-off PC strategy titles is like buying a hammer to install screws. You might be able to do it, but it's patently obviously The Wrong Choice.
The console marheteers know their audience - you've just bought the wrong product, is all.
Presumably they could indeed use different encryption schemes. That would, however, quite emphatically miss the point of the whole exercise, which is to ease the creation of a UK-US composite database, wherein anyone unfortunate enough to own an ID card can be tracked from their door in the UK/US to their holiday in the US/UK and back again, seamlessly and invisibly, by whatever warrant-less USian government agency (because let's face it, the UK government won't get shit out of this) decides it wants to know.
"Why? Oh, no reason... Move along, nothing to see here. By the way, your library books are overdue. What? Nothing. Honest."
"Any game that is fun can be marketed because people will buy any game that is fun. The primary virtue of a game is it's level of fun. So unless your original concept was not fun, that assertion is false."
With the greatest respect, that's the biggest load of idealistic Utopian horse-pucky I've ever read.
"Build it and they will come" works when you only need a tiny fraction of the whole audience to make an endeavour worthwhile. Nobody, but nobody sinks millions of dollars into a game and relies on word-of-mouth to spread it.
Word of mouth might get you many things (respect, a hard core of gamers who passionately love your game, and lots of blog-coverage), but it won't get the game in stores, it won't push the game to Joe Sixpack who's too busy drinking beer to read gaming blogs (but who nevertheless represents 50%-99% of your market, depending on the platform), and it certainly won't allow the game to break even.
It is possible, I'll grant you, for tiny cult games, movies or books to achieve mainstream success, but this is a mixture of 5% excellence and 95% pure, dumb luck. For every one you see, there are literally hundreds of thousands that die cold and lonely deaths, unmissed by anyone.
I long for the day when this is true - when you can just produce something great and it'll automatically translate into wealth, fame and success - but even with the advent of the internet, that day is years (if not decades) away.
And still relies on luck, even when it arrives.
Fantastic idea, but what about a game explicitely based in Iain M. banks' Culture universe? (Aside from Halo, which unofficially "borrowed" quite heavily from it). The Culture novels sketch out an immensely complex and textured universe with wonderful characters, story-lines and set-pieces. They'd lend themselves to almost any game, but something cinematic, involving and immersive like a good FPS (less Doom, more Halo/Half Life 2/Deus Ex) would show it off to best effect.
I'd want something comparatively similar to Halo - at least some missions on an Orbital (just for the awe-inspiring location), but you could also have plenty on planets, GSVs or even AirSpheres (how cool would that be? And technically *easy* since it's almsot entirely enpty air).
Antoher cool thing would be streaming level geometry, so you can have effectively unbounded levels.
One thing I remember reading about Halo when it was first mooted was the idea that there wouldn't be "levels" as such - instead the engine would stream landscape off the hard disk, bump-mapping and abstracting it to reduce level of detail (and so processor time) as it got further away (like GTA3, with a further-away horizon, or Black & White's "whole island zooms in to worm in apple" engine).
You could (I believe) relatively easily generate such a system using algorithmic modeling (like Spore) for terrain, with geometry and bitmapped textures only explicitely specified for set-piece areas and buildings dotted around the map. The feeling of freedom would immerse you more in the game than any number of in-engine cutscenes, even if you spent 90+% of your time moving between planned-out set-piece locations.
You could break the monotony by requiring the player to change location at points in the game (eg, to other Orbitals/planets/etc), but once on one you could travel anywhere within it without waiting for loading screens or encountering impassable barriers (except on the outer edges of Orbitals/Plates, obviously).
Of course, an bump-mapping engine that good would also allow you to fly diametrically across Orbitals, or land on planets from orbit, so it should then be relatively trivial to even allow for flight-based missions (using true physics, please - none of this "spaceships handle like atmospheric planes" crap).
Imagine foot-based missions on an Orbital, which end with you getting into a shuttle, flying up to an orbiting GSV and flying/dogfighting (a la Consider Phlebas) within its interior structure, all without stopping to load...
(Ok, GSVs would probably also have to have their geometry explicitely (rather than algorithmically) defined, but with the huge memory capacities of today's desktop PCs, I still can't see any show-stopping problems as long as the "transit from orbital-to-GSV" time was long enough to stream the GSV into memory first. Hell, spice it up with a dogfight or two on the way, and the user won't even notice the time).
Are you joking? I don't even know where to start. Let's start with this. You are at a BBQ somewhere in the world. If fire were to vanish tomorrow, wherever you are, your government would collapse, the balance of power in the world would be thoroughly shaken from head to foot, and millions, if not billions of people would die within a year.
Take the same number of people in New York, drop them in a lake the same size as New York, and watch how quickly society implodes upon itself without the the capability for dry-kindling-ignition to support it.
Does this mean you can always fix social problems with fire?
Just because "technology allows X", doesn't mean "technology can cure Y". Sure, it allows us to live our lives a certain way (and that's great), but to confuse an empowering trend with the cure for all the world's ills is just naive.
"I know some times when we bang things out on the keyboard they sound really insightful and intelligent, but some times we need to respect the preview button, read what we read, and decide if it really is insightful, or a load of thoughtless crap."
Sagelike advice indeed.
How in the living fuck did the parent get modded Funny? Insightful? Interesting? Depressing and angry-making beyond belief? All yes. Fucking funny?
/rant
Some points to consider:
1) It's true, sheeple - IIRC, the majority of (all?) examples given are actually real.
2) Given it's true, it's a fucking disgrace. It's cause for armed rebellion in the streets, not a few confortable chuckles.
I always avoid content-free posts from people carping about the moderation system, but Jesus Fucking Christ on a crutch.
Don't get me wrong - the majority of UK companies (IMO) are quite good. It's only this particular one I'm working for Just Doesn't Get It.
Not sure what the UK job market's currently like, but a year ago (when I started working here) it was starting to pick up a bit after a couple of years of downturn. Either way, with a solid year here under my belt (well, banging my head against the wall, but...) it could well be time to move on. Guess I'd better re-immerse myself in the job market then, and see what the temperature's like - anyone our there in Slashdotland know?
It's not a big deal, until you go away on business for a couple of days and forget your charger. Or go on holiday and find the plugs are different. Or go to a music festival (where there are no chargers, at least none without a two-hour wait).
For me, it's a convenience thing. I want to be able to go stay overnight at my girlfriend's on a whim, and not have to pack a small suitcase full of chargers for the gadgets I habitually carry. I don't want to be forced to choose between carrying around a charger (which effectively doubles the weight/bulk of the phone) or being shackled to my bedroom/study desk each night.
I just can't wait for a simple ubiquitous induction-based charging system. Or even better, environmental options like flip-out solar panels or thermal charging. Or even just fuel cells or (well-shielded) nuclear micropiles. Anything that lets me Stop Worrying About It and get on with whatever I want to do.
Yeah, same where I work, too (no link, because I still have to work here for a while). We're a Microsoft Gold Partner, but The MD has taken this to mean we aren't even allowed to run a single Linux server or FLOSS app, in case MS (somehow) find out and decide to withdraw our MSGP status in a fit of pique. Not, of course, that they've ever even vaguely indicated they would do so, but there you go....
.NET platform until they get a hardware upgrade, which was scheduled for six months ago but still won't happen for at least the next six months because we simply don't have the budget for it, doing nothing that couldn't be done in a fraction of the time, with a fraction of the resources and a fraction of the fucking about in Perl or PHP.
So, here I am, forced to develop dynamic web content in (hackcoughspit) ASP.NET, re-inventing the wheel each time because you Just Don't Get the equivalent of CPAN for proprietary MS-culture languages, on my local machine, to be deployed on servers currently too old to run the
Typical Quote: Our "Director of Innovation" (that's "innovation" in the Microsoft sense, too) once noticed FileZilla on my machine. His reaction? "Get that dirty free software off my machines right now". Oh yes, and every project anyone undertakes has to be done in a language he can speak, just in case they ever decide to leave and he decides to start managing it directly himself.
He only can only code in VB.
Apparently he once tried to learn C for three weeks, but gave up "because it was too hard".
Oh yeah, and this is a multi-million-GPB company.
Hmmm... Film out in 1995... Ms Jolie born in 1975... I make that 20, so not underage, no.
Now, whether she looked underage... that's an entirely different matter <grin>
Well yeah, that's what I'd say, too.
Ok, Frist P05t candidate away - time to RTFA now
Wow - it's like "Hackers"... only ten years after the idea even made the mainstream. And much more low-rent. And without the cool graphics and computer-generated voice. And with less supertankers. And without Angelina Jolie with her nips out.
How lame is that?
(And that's leaving aside the huge number of social and technical ways this scam could be improved...)
"Sadly this is Europe, and whilst Microsoft may be able to buy out various organisations in the USA to get what it wants, over here we have something known as tradition, and a hell of a lot of it."
Sadly? Hardly, if it insulates us from the kind of corporate state America is becoming. However, I'd dispute that it will insulate us perfectly - we also have something of a tradition of following the US culturally in recent times (well, more the UK than Europe as a whole, but it still has influence, even in France).
"Changing how Europe deals with issues takes a lot more time, effort, money and public support than Microsoft has at its disposal."
Indeed, but look how narrow a squeak the issue of Software Patents was - had Poland (alone!) not stood up and said "This is fucking undemocratic" we'd likely have SW patents enshrined in EU law by now.
The trouble is that the Euopean Union has a lot of power held by unelected bureaucrats - in the US corporations had to effectively merge with the GOP and still had to get elected to secure power - they had to take over the entire government system. In the EU, they'll only have to buy out a few, key, unelected officials and there'll be no way for "the public" to meaningfully and forcefully oppose decisions, short of armed insurrection.
"One person may be able to be bought out (See Ireland), but it takes a lot of effort to change the opinion of the entire system."
Microsoft (AFAIAA) didn't do anything as crass as pay off the EU president directly - the most they would have done was suggest to him gently that if he steered things their way, Ireland would benefit hugely from their investment. And it did.
The problem is that, while the US is one monolithic entity, the EU is composed of smaller member states. Bring all the US influence to bear on almost any single (or even few) member states, and they'll fold pretty much instantly.
Again (with SW Patents), had Poland (alone, without anything really to lose) not stood up, they would have succeeded. Where were the UK, Germany, etc? Even France, with their notorious unnecessary bloody-mindedness?
The only way for the EU to stand up to this kind of US pressure is for all the member states to pull together and resist corporatisation. However, the current EU government structure (as I understand it) is less accountable and even more easily corrupted than the US one (which has already fallen).
They won't need to corporatise the system of government if they can just buy a few well-placed bureaucrats and get the same level of control with even less exposure or accountability.
"Europe held most of the world at their disposal for quite a large chunk of human history. You can't do that if you're easily swayed by money and opinion."
Hmmm. As I recall, we had all the money and opinion - that's why we had most of the world. These days, I'd say that role's more fulfilled by the US (at least for the next few years, until the decline becomes irreversible).
Especially rich and powerful graffiti artists, as long as they're rich enough to buy whole countries.
And judges tend to be wary of slapping someone too hard when that person pretty much owns their boss.
Why do you think Gates and MS are so happy to give the finger so often and so liberally? Because no-one will ever dare to call them out on it - the worst that happens is sanctions against MS that then get argued down on appeal, creatively "misunderstood" or just blatantly ignored.
Actually, even shagging a student won't always get you fired, as long as the university authorities know about it and you aren't responsible for directly marking their work. (If you are, they just give their work to some one else to mark).
It might be different in other universities/countries, but when I was at university (UK) a couple of years ago one or two of the lecturers there were proverbial for fucking their way through as much of the female undergrad population as possible.
Sorry to nitpick, but it's a pet hate.
Perverse != Perverted
They do have similar meanings, granted, but "perverse" means more "bloody minded/against good", whereas "perverted" means "deviant/sexually deviant".
And yeah, dictionaries (generally American) often offer perverse as a synonym for some senses of perverted, but that doesn't mean (for example) that a guy covered in trifle with his dick in a chicken is perverse. He's perverted.
</pedant>
"My opinion is that Quantum Mechanics has the best going explaination for how the world is working. But that's because we don't properly understand how the world *is* working.
I unlike Einstein will conceed that QM explains phenomena that we have experienced and documented. But like Einstein, I still refuse to accept it."
Aaaaah! I understand your position now - in fact, I agree with you almost completely. The only difference is that I "believe" in QM until something better comes along, whereas you seem to have withdrawn your belief in it before finding a better (more complete/supported) theory - correct?
"Do not mistake my floundering attempts to explain away features of QM as a failure to understand QM. I *do* understand it. Hell, you've explained the double-slit experiement to me like 15 times by now. I *UNDERSTAND* how QM works. I just refuse to believe that this is how things actually are working."
Ok, fair enough. Apologies for my misunderstanding, but it appeared to me you didn't have a good grasp of it and were dismissing it out of hand. I have no problems with people disagreeing with a theory or idea, as long as they understand what they're disagreeing with, and can propose a better solution.
I misunderstood you to be arguing from ignorance (a "that just sounds silly" rejection), rather than advancing an alternative theory. My apologies, and do keep working on your theory until it is complete.
"And for the record, there have been two times in math, where a formal proof has been disproven just because it was wrong. The disproving mathematicians at the times had not evidence or support to their statement. They simply said, "This must be wrong." And low and behold, they were right."
Fair play (and I think it's probably happened a lot more than twice), but I think that's slightly different. QM is a theory, and is merely "the best one we have", so minor errors don't necessarily disprove the whole thing. Mathematical proofs are supposed to be a single chain of logical reasoning, and objectively True, so a single fault with any part of it generally can makes the entire "proof" incorrect.
"Just no one has been able to prove QM wrong, or inaccurate yet, because everyone is so busy trying to understand it, that no one is attempting to really question it."
Again, not to spark another argument, but I'd dispute that heavily. The entire process of scientific research is basically a prolonged attempt to poke holes in a theory (not just to understand it - that's what undergrad work is for), and QM has survived almost entirely unscathed so far.
Are you really suggesting that the scientific establishment, having produced quantum mechanics, is only really engauged in trying to understand the theory they themselves advanced? This doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and reduces scientific research to a kind of intellectual archaeology.
"You speak of critical analysis and yet you yourself do not critically analize QM. You preach it to me as Truth. As if there's no other reasonable explaination for the universe but by means of QM."
Again, apologies - this was an artifact of my not understanding your position. If you don't understand QM but (ignorantly) dismiss it out of hand, of course I'm going to play up its reliability and/or Truth, in an attempt to get you to reassess your opinion. If you understand it perfectly then yes, I'd be less concerned with correcting an "ignorant" assumption and more concerned with presenting an accurate example of its weaknesses and strengths.
"So who died and let the science that you're quoting say that inside the singularity is infinite gravity?"
As I understand it, Special Relativity says that, at the singularity, spacetime curvature (and so "gravity") is infinite. However, Relativity breaks down in the presence of infinite quantities, so it predicts the situation, but refuses to say anything about its implications.
"For years practitioners used the Web and its language, HTML, as a free format and layout platform for forms and documents (often as paint for software applications)."
You can use a drinking-well as a urinal, but that doesn't make it a good idea. And it certainly doesn't mean you'll get anything worth having out of it later.
The fact that HTML (and browsers) allowed such horrible, buggy, quirky markup has done more to retard content aggregation and the further development of the web than practically any other force in computing.
Sure, in the early days it made sense to keep the barrier to entry low, to get people on-board. It fuelled the growth of the web, and allowed any idiot with five minutes and Frontpage to put up a page announcing to the world what a L33T h4xx0R they were in bright clashing colours on an unreadable patterned background.
This is akin to offering people a blank sheet of paper instead of a form with distinct questions and answer-boxes - useful, because they can write whatever they want and don't have to think about it, but much, much harder to do anything with later.
There's a reason we have paper forms, and a reason all non-trivial data is stored in some form of database[1] - unstructured information is useless. It only becomes useful when it's structured - when it stops being just information and becomes data
Why is XML/RSS/ATOM more tightly-structured than HTML? Why can't we straight aggregate HTML instead of having to invent a new file format? Because HTML is now fundamentally broken for automatic syntactic parsing of data.
"Then along comes the W3C to proclaim to those practicing this craft: "HTML is not a format and layout language"."
It isn't. Or, at least, wasn't intended to be - HTML was originally envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee as a semantic markup language - it's only later development and the commercialisation of the web that lead to it being almost exclusively presentational. A new effort (the Semantic Web) is now being made on this front - old, broken, misused HTML is being retired in favour of semantic XHTML, CSS for presentation, javascript/ECMAScript for interactive behaviour and XML for interoperability/data representation. All open languages and standards, you'll note.
"They then proceed to break all the existing code that's out there in the name of that proclamation."
What's broken? Show me a mainstream browser that doesn't passably support all the way back to HTML 1.0. Sure, it entails some extra work for the browser manufacturers, but I find it hard to feel bad for them, since they (with lax enforcement of HTML grammar, proprietary extensions and the like) contributed so hugely to the mess in the first place.
"It may be coincidence that the W3C is filled with representatives of companies who make billions of dollars selling what are essentially formatting and layout platforms for forms and documents... "
Oh please - this is the worst tinfoil hat argument I've ever heard. Oooh, oooh, the companies who benefit from breaking interoperability, introducing proprietary extensions and generally grabbing the fast buck are pushing more interoperability, stricter standardisation and long-term game-plans that drastically improve the entire architecture of the net. Sorry - not following you on that one.
If it was really an industry cartel dictating the future of the web for their own ends, XHTML would have been replaced with an unreadable binary format, with unlimited proprietary vendor- and platform-specific extensions. It would be incredibly difficult to learn, rather than basically identical to HTML but ever-so-slightly stricter. They certainly wouldn't be publishing and pushing the standards for free - they'd be charging for them, attaching licence conditions to them. And they wouldn't be providing on-line validators for free - you'd be expected