She can speculate about my character all she wants. I grew up on ever Calvin and Hobbes book made, and if that taught me anything in life, is that every moment in my life where I have had to pick myself up, dust myself off, and do something to get it done, without any external help, I've done so to/build character/.
I am a "neutral" in the Gamergate debacle, preferring to observe more than directly interact, but in one case I watched the somewhat-infamous interview between Wu and Reddit KotakuInAction mod TheHat2. In it, they discussed the points of her iOS game "Revolution 60" and game design in general. One of the questions asked there was why she decided to work with iOS first versus the popular PC platform Steam. I don't remember the exact answer, but I think it revolved around developing for a platform that more women were likely to use, being the mobile market, and maybe some development-specific answers.
My question is this: Given what you've learned about programming in iOS, would you have developed for a PC platform like Steam first and ported to mobile later? Given female trends towards mobile platforms like the Nintendo DS/3DS, would it make more sense for your studio to explore developing games there? Or was your goal all along to produce a more 3D-visual action title for mobile phones?
For context, my wife is not as big of a gamer as myself, but I find she enjoys playing a lot of mobile puzzle games. I think the mobile market has a lot of potential for bigger things, and I think having the input of the majority player base on that platform makes sense, but I often don't understand why, as a mobile developer, you would be overly concerned with "the core gamer" demographic in the console platform. It seems to me that they aren't likely to crossover into the mobile market often, so there is little reason to "attack" that demographic as we've seen a few people, including Brianna, do through the last year.
Pretty much this. Looking back at the last thirty years of Nintendo, they've weathered far worse storms than this. The crash of 83, chip shortages, Sega, the Virtual Boy, their botched alliance with Sony that created the Playstation, Microsoft, the list goes on. They're almost the perfect example of trial-and-error in video game science, they've tried everything to create a gaming universe gamers will enjoy, and I'd say their successes outweigh their failures. But Nintendo has classically always been the company that attempts to control their overhead and profit margins, from their early days of controlling what was made on their console, controlling the chips, to insisting that they stay in the hardware business to control the profits of their first-party titles. Everyone cites Sega, but Sega only ever had Sonic as a powerful first-party IP, it could not recover from shooting itself in the foot when they released the Saturn too early. The Dreamcast was a helluva system, if it had been paced properly, it might've gained more ground.
All Nintendo has to do now to survive is open its console up to more developers and make it something people want to make GAMES for. The gaming world needs more Miyamoto-like developers who look at aspects of games like gameplay, characters, and experience, not just making movies with sporadic spots of control for a few seconds. Mobile gaming is popular because there is no movie sequences, no PUSH X TO WIN, it's all gameplay, and many could argue that they're just puzzle games or whatever and they're incomparable to console games, or that they're made for "casuals", but everything you see in mobile gaming now, that's what started Nintendo off in the 80s and made them what they are today.
I second this post. I also was in Scouts from Cub Scouts to when I turned 18. I did not make Eagle, but I was Brotherhood in the Order of the Arrow, did the Northstar Leadership Training in Indiana, was either a Patrol or Senior/Asst. Senior Patrol leader for nearly most of my time in the scouts, and I was introduced to tabletop RPG's (D&D, Star Wars) while in the Scouts. The BSA gave me the mostly free oppertunity to learn a great deal about leadership and service in the community as well as have fun camping, hiking, and enjoying the outdoors as a kid. I would not trade that experience away for nearly anything and I regard it as the best years of my life.
However I am concerned with the direction the BSA has been going in recent years. I don't understand how the organization can stand for intolerance when never witnessed any intolerance of anyone or any belief when I was in the Scouts, and I lived in one of the most conservative part of the country. When different troops and different Scoutmasters can decide who they want and what their core beliefs are, why does the organization as a whole reject the notion that these people can co-exsist with everyone else? It disappoints me that the BSA has taught me to respect my fellow person and their beliefs but will not extend that to the people they do not agree with.
The icing on the cake is the fact that the organization recieves most of its funding from federal sources, such as the use of public schools and buildings for its meetings. If taxpayers are paying for this, and this country stands for equality of people regardless of race, religion, and sexual orientation, than anyone should be allowed to join so long as they meet all other criteria for normally joining. If the BSA were a private organization funded by themselves, I would not object, that is their choice.
So as far as OSS goes, I support it because this may be the step the BSA needs to take in order to understand that everyone is involved in the world we are today, wether you are gay, straight, athiest, or whatever. We need to be teaching our future generations that inequality only leads to closed doors in everything from daily life to software choice.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the fact that a lot of independent and usually self-designed software is often found in local BSA sponsered slot car derby races. I remember when I was in the Scouts we had a few IT guys in the troop write (or find) the software for timing the cars when they got to the end of the track. Wonder if anyone does this anymore.
hell yes we used to use clarisworks in my elementary school back in the early 90's on the schools then brand new lc3's. oh the memories of that and a dozen other awesome programs and games, like christmas lemmings 1993.
I agree, having grew up in Indiana and Ohio and now living in Connecticut I've seen the best and worst of both city and country life. Granted I don't miss those hour long school bus rides back in M.S and H.S and some very cliche rednecks, but having lived in rural communities all my life and then coming to Hartford and surrounding towns, it's a definite change and you can really see the difference in people. Growing up I had parents who were Republican, friends and neighbors who were Republican, and friends' parents who worked for GM/Dalco in Dayton, OH and many other industrial jobs. My father worked for DADC/Sony in Terre Haute, IN and there I had friends and people I knew who were farmers, tech workers, National Guard pilots, and more. Everyone voted red, everyone drove their pickup trucks, trains were always heard every 20 minutes, and many people's idea of a scenic drive was to drive out to some small town in the middle of nowhere and spend the day doing nothing.
Up here there is no rural life, it's city life and city mentality. People around my age (23) think of nothing more usually then wild house parties or bars and clubs. Jobs are hard to come by unless you want to work in a trade skill or food service, you pretty much HAVE to have a college education to make it higher than that in some places around here, gas is even more expensive up here than out in the midwest, and let's face it, some hospitality and modesty is lost up here.
I'm certainly sad to hear that they are allowing this to happen. As someone who is part of a family that has spent several generations in LaPorte/South Bend and frequented Lake Michigan as a kid I think it's deplorable that we should have to dump/anything/ into our lakes, no matter what the cost. Yes we need to be energy independent from the Middle East and yes we need to start conserving oil resources and using less gas, but thats where people need to start losing the gas consuming SUV's and trucks unless they really need them and start conserving resources when they dont need them. No one is asking you to cut everything you use out, they're asking you to shut your damn light off when you leave the house, turn down your A/C when it's cool outside and use some fans, and buy a smaller car that uses less gas per mile if you're only driving 5 minutes to work and back a day. Small considerations can make a huge difference and as a poor college student living in the most expensive state in America I have to pinch my pennies where I can, and electricity and car/gas eat 40% of my monthly budget.
Political boundries don't define who people are, people define political boundries. I vote moderate to both sides, because it comes down to what type of person they are and what they'll do for us, not their affiliation.
Problem is we're still under the shadow of the previous two generations whom were around while the current one grew up with video games in the 80's and 90's who either didn't understand video games, or denounced them based on their "profound psychological effects" on kids. In short, our parents and grandparents STILL don't approve of video games, and they're the ones still controlling state and social services.
The thing we need to get out of these people's heads is that video games are not "children's toys" as everyone back then labeled them. Video games have evolved as any other form of entertainment has done over their years. The problem is, entertainment and arts evolve faster than social perception of those arts. Video games are still for children to many people, and oh god if that Rabbit can't have Trix, then adults can't have video games. They're for children!
I think that parents need to start realizing that there are millions of other people out there who want and CAN enjoy these games and should be able to do so freely just as they have the right to not buy said games and not allow their children to. Parents have little to no social responsiblity anymore because they've turned it mostly over to either the TV, the previous generations, or anything else so that they don't have to be responsible for their kids' actions anymore. Frankly I find it absurd and that's one of the reasons I don't have kids yet, because when I do, I fully intend to instill upon them the responsiblity that is needed in order to make the differences of right and wrong and show them that they can still enjoy all these forms of entertainment that are out there without harming themselves or others. Obviously I can do this, and I came from a divorced family where my mother used the internet to chat with other men while my father was away.
Me and friends used to play the original d6 back in the day and it was quite fun. Especially when you can bust through a wall and shout I'M DARTH VADER! to a group of stormtroopers, roll, and ACTUALLY convince them you are indeed Darth Vader.
The thing that gets me about d20, is it really doesn't seem to be different from d6 in other than you are rolling fewer dice. I know there are mechanics changes and everything, but the WEG SWRPG did everything it needed to do, kept with the theme of the movies, and worked. Why change it? Because everything else WOTC makes is d20? They should have just left it untouched and either updated it as is or improved upon it.
Eh well. Every once and awhile I come across my old character sheets and remember that my first character I ever made was killed when my friend decided to light a bar on fire. The good days of playing SWRPG on every Boy Scout campout. Boy we pissed off the leaders.
That was my biggest problem when I lived outside of Springfield, MA years ago, the town I lived in only offered Comcast (then ATT) and dial-up. No DSL, no anything unless you wanted satalite. What makes the difference between Comcast there and Comcast I have here in CT, is that there without anyone else to compete against, they literally do not give a shit what you get or even how your service runs. I talked to probably 3 different techs and customer service once because my connection was lagging a lot and dropping, and it wasn't my equipment. Even buying a new router and using a different modem (another call in itself since they didn't seem to understand that concept) did not fix the problem, and it ended up being the worst ~50/mo I had ever gone through. Since coming back to CT I've been on COX, which I have to say has probably the best service and speed for the price in what I've used, but sadly does not control the town I live in now, which is Comcast, and while Comcast here is much better than previously in MA, the upload is pretty shallow compared to the download. The very least you'd think they could do is match COX's ~1.5mbps upload for competative sake, least then I can torrent without choking the rest of my internet. But you get what you pay for, and right now I can't afford something better like Speakeasy.. well I could if Sprint would build a freaking tower to cover this gap I'm in so I wouldn't have to pay for landline service.
Whats worse is their employees get pretty slick discounts on their in-house (read: moron squad) brand stuff, like cat5 cables. Last week I needed a couple 50 foot cables, and they want 40 bucks each for them. Lucky for us we knew a friend who worked there and was getting out in an hour, so we asked him to buy them for us, blew an hour at the mall, grabbed them from him an hour later. Cost: 12 bucks down from 80.
I'm not sure which is the lesser evil there, the fact we were able to do that, or the fact that they are making a 34 dollar profit on the measly sale of 50" of cat5. Had I been less lazy I'd have taken the half hour drive down to a local shop I know of and bought it for that price, retail
Thing that I notice is that on the current SC Bnet, the map of choice is the hacked FASTEST map that pretty much solidifies the essence of skilled gameplay. The entire purpose of the map is to build as many of everything and rush, because you're getting your resources in a snap thanks to mineral fields stacked on each other and your base right next to it. It actually to it's credit is very useful for building the fundemental skill of learning your build orders, tech trees, and basics of unit movement. But as me and my friends who play have noticed, that after awhile you do want to play with maps that are more like the game, and force you to think about what you build, how you build, and how you manage your forces and attack the opponents, which is the strategy element of the game. I think both skill and strategy have their place in the game, but when you play on Bnet, as all online games, you sadly have to deal with the people who are really there to just demolish you out of the water and not really care weither you've learned how to play or not, hell half of the time online players expect you to be an expert at the game before crossing into the online realm of gameplay. That can be hard expecially since the human element of RTS is different from the computer controlled element.
It really has to do with where your gettng Comcast in. When I lived in a small town in MA, the only broadband we had was Comcast. They sucked hard. I called their support to tell them that my modem was slow and their techs couldn't be bothered to give a damn that the infrastructure out there was crap. They knew that I could not switch to anyone else unless it meant going down to dial-up. I moved back to CT a year or two after and went back to Cox, whom I've had now for 2 years, and while I hate the port blocking and such, their support is leagues beyond Comcast (when I moved apartments somehow my router here and my friend's router in my old apartment we're trying to grab at the same IP address, because they both had the same MAC attached since they were both my accounts in my name, the techs on the phone couldn't understand but when I told them they were like "that's impossible!" it was rather funny) I want to switch to Speakeasy when I move again this spring because I'm moving to an area serviced by Comcast for cable and ATT/SBC DSL, both of whom I loathe. I'm willing to give them a fair shot even after this merger, because they still can't be as bad as Comcast or SBC, I hate SBC even more than Comcast.
Re: other (non) unix-related bacrynyms:
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Define - /etc?
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Boobies: Basic Operational Overdrive Biomechanical Infrastructure Emulating System
I would tend to agree, the problem is though that in many towns and communities, you have simply hundreds of girls just sleeping around until they get pregnant, then marry at 19, have a couple more kids, and divorce. Not to stereotype, but I've seen this is many midwest and southern places, not that it doesn't happen where I am in Connecticut, but it is less likely so here than in one place I've been to in Virginia.
A lot of that can be attributed towards public education as well as socially accepted norms. For small rural communities with small to mid-size schools and few colleges, as well as fewer jobs (read: diverse jobs, jobs other than "the local factory") you have a lot of people who settle for the status-quo, and follow what their parents did before them. They find out school is a waste of time when the factory will hire you anyway for minimum wage, drop out, work there, and when not working, party and sleep around with the girls, weither they're taken or not. Next thing you know, one of them gets pregnant, has a kid, and you're marrying her at 20 and working at the factory for the rest of your life supporting them, unless you cut and run.
Rinse, repeat.
Now of course this isn't always the case, and I am certainly not intending that every small town in America emulates this, but this is one such example of poor decisions that fosters the issue we are facing, higher populations of people with no clear plan to compensate. People out there say we have little resources, we don't, we have plenty of resources and probably more untapped, but we make poor use of them. With all of the money from taxpayers, we could be improving public schools tenfold. Why I bet we could put them on par with private schools if we wanted to, but the consensous is we shouldn't, and why? Because private schools are for the rich and influenced and public schools are for the mid-class and poor. It's all simple social norms, that is why public schools will always continue to rate second to private schools, because the rich and powerful of this country refuse to allow someone with a public school education to one-up them in the field of educational intelligence.
If public and private schools were on par with each other, there would be no need for private schools, and that would take away the social infastructure many rich families thrive on, the "My son/daughter went to X school with honors" blahblahblah. It's like those movies when you have some character who breaks the family tradition of going to X school for the past umpteen generations. There really are some families who build their entire reputation and social standing upon the private school they've attended for generations. If the neighbor kid went to a public school that matched par and did better then their private school kid, what then? That'd be sure upsetting wouldn't it?
Sounds like an idea for a movie really. Just need to toss in some old washups from Friends and maybe Ben Stein for dull comic relief. XD
I agree with this post on so many ways. Many of the "zealots" are people in the 25-35 bracket, the people who were in during the start of the computing age, people with experience in DOS, OS/2, and UNIX. They praise Linux because it works for them like a charm. For people in my age bracket, 18-24, we were around for the beginning of Windows, 3.1/95/98, we know Windows, we've made it do what it needs to do, we've gotten around Microsoft's attempts to wall us from copying and interoperability with other OS'es. Windows is in my opinion the OS that defines the new generation of computer users and geeks, because it was the big thing in the mid-90's. Linux was still very small then and none of us being what, 10-12 knew of UNIX or others. I happened to have used OS/2 Warp before thanks to my Dad, but thats another story.
Point is, Windows works, and if it works, then you don't need to change it.
Unless of course you have multiple computer at your disposal. Debian on a crappy p2-333 makes an excellent webserver for me. =)
Reminds me of a Starcraft game I played with a friend where he took out my main Terran base but forgot about the 10-12 other HQ's I was floating around. Each time he'd take out one, I'd build about 4 more. This lasted a good half hour before I ran out of resources.
The last time I heard "We're committed to Customer Service" was when I worked for a small Mom-N-Pop type grocery chain here in Connecticut. The end result was me quitting after 6 years because they treat their employees like crap because they cannot manage their inventory (partially due to their employees) and are taking considerable losses, thus each one of us there were miserable. I went over to Red Robin (a burger resturant) and there I found a place that at least treated their employees like humans as well as manage their business in order to make a profit.
Point is, Apple fans say things like this but in reality Apple is no better and no worse than any other computer company out there. Dell used to go that whole customer relationship way until they got too big for their pants and didn't care. Their tech support suffered for it. People like Apple because it's classy and innovative, something many companies lack. Their hardware and software isn't that much more revolutionary than anyone elses, my friend's high priced Mac can do just about the same as my custom built $500 PC. The iPod is really just the music device everyone wanted to make but Apple got it out first, if Microsoft or Dell put out a music player before Apple, everyone would be writing that Apple was cloning it.
But if anything this article has proved that I should switch to posting useless semi-relevent articles on Apple instead of the other mostly relevent stories I've submitted and had rejected.
Anyone remember Bill's first book? I remember reading about his grand scheme and vision of a bunch of shiny wonderful technology coming out to improve schools, businesses, and personal lives. Or has Microsoft decided that spending billions on challenging patents, entering the game console race, and continuing to release slightly more improved versions of it's OS is more important that working on the technology surrounding it?
I remember when Windows 95 came out way back when, as a kid I was stoked to finally have a real improvement over Windows 3.1, let alone DOS. I'd sit there for hours just playing with the damn OS like it was cool. I'd make it do all kinds of seemingly stupid things. Over time, with each new version of Windows came little innovation, nothing new and shiny to look at or play with. The GUI remaining largely the same, the backends were always changed, but rather than innovate and create a new look or a bunch of new features, they rehashed the same crap over and over.
Of course Bill seems to apply this logic to hardware as he does to software, he obviously doesn't seem to get that hardware is changing, getting smaller, running faster, using less power. The MIT laptop is an absolutely wonderful piece of real innovation that cannot be told otherwise. Now how it will be applied time will tell, but I don't believe Bill has the right to play down on real innovation when he has barely made any real step in software or hardware innovation since the beginning of Windows.
It's a shame too, I was kinda hoping those digital wallets he talked about would come to, but then again I doubt I'd appreciate someone coming by and hacking my digital wallet. =)
Aside from your bias and stereotype of those who play Final Fantasy games, which I hate to spoil your fun but is simply that of bias and stereotype. FF games are enjoyed by just the same number of people who play every other genre of games, Madden, Halo, or otherwise. Mod Troll.
Back to the OP and replies, Final Fantasy has been a popular title because of Square's marketing, as well as having a fanbase who backs it. I've seen people who will buy Square games no matter what, even if the game wasn't that great. It's that on top of the games themselves. FF7 and FF8 were good games for the PS. FF9 was okay, but you could tell they stretched it a bit. FFX opened up onto the PS2 doing well, but again, stretched a bit. FFXI opened up the MMO aspect to the francise which frankly has brought some new life into it. It's right up there with WoW, CoH, and other popular MMO's. Personally, I think they should revisit some of their other francises for new games, such as the Chrono series, or SaGa Frontier, little gems of Square yesteryear that are often overlooked. I'd say Xenogears, but Monolith is already on Xenosaga.
Fact is, FF sells for the same reason the PS sells, marketing. The rest is up to the consumer.
Actually "Graphic Novel" came more to the front when Japanese Manga hit the US harder (read: when Tokyopop started spamming the market) and when it came to adults and non-anime people, their classification for it was "comics" or "japanese comics" (or japanese porn as my father used to put it) Fans would always come back hot-headed insisting they were either "Graphic Novels" or "Manga" (then spinning off a debate on how to pronounce Manga)
Names mean things to certain people. Everyone calls a Q-Tip a Q-Tip, not a cotton swab. Kleenex instead of tissue, it's all about what sticks in more people's minds and what becomes accepted in the mainstream. Games are games because people see them as children's entertainment. Thus when something like GTA hits the home, parents suddenly are shocked to learn that games actually encompess more than just Sesame Street Atari games, they include blood and violence, like TV, Movies, and the 6 o'clock local news.
As a GP reader, I read stories everyday of the wonderful world of idiots that seem to confuse reality with games, and the Jack Thompsons and Hillary Clintons that seem to think banning games and stiffling creative entertainment is a solution to the problem that this society has been on a downward spiral of morals since our grandparents generation. Parents simply don't give a damn about what their kids do, until they kill someone, then they point their fingers at those who aren't even responsible for their kids. All this society knows how to do is point fingers at everyone but themselves. I know, I'm 22, I used to think there was someone else to blame for everything (and there was in some cases). However I know the difference between reality and game, and when I do have children, they will not be playing games like GTA until they are mature enough to know those differences. I shook my head when my girlfriend would tell me about parents buying violent games for their little kids, and people bringing their 5 year olds to Underworld: Evolution. What kinda parenting is that?
If anything, Hillary Clinton and the rest of the government needs to start programs for educating people, not shutting people's eyes.
Fact is, while I'm young (22) compared to probably the majority of the tech industry, I like many others in my generation, grew up on DOS, Windows, OS/2 (yes, we had a old Pentium 100 running dual boot OS/2 Warp and Win 3.1 in our house) and other non open-source software. I didn't know Linux exsisted until sometime around 1999-2000 when my dad started looking into it more for his job. Today I still use Windows because it fits my needs. Sure I could use Linux, and I do for webserver related stuff, but Windows works for me in a workstation enviroment. I have no problem paying for software if it works. I also support OSS that does a better job than commercial alternatives. It's about choice.
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She can speculate about my character all she wants. I grew up on ever Calvin and Hobbes book made, and if that taught me anything in life, is that every moment in my life where I have had to pick myself up, dust myself off, and do something to get it done, without any external help, I've done so to /build character/.
I am a "neutral" in the Gamergate debacle, preferring to observe more than directly interact, but in one case I watched the somewhat-infamous interview between Wu and Reddit KotakuInAction mod TheHat2. In it, they discussed the points of her iOS game "Revolution 60" and game design in general. One of the questions asked there was why she decided to work with iOS first versus the popular PC platform Steam. I don't remember the exact answer, but I think it revolved around developing for a platform that more women were likely to use, being the mobile market, and maybe some development-specific answers.
My question is this: Given what you've learned about programming in iOS, would you have developed for a PC platform like Steam first and ported to mobile later? Given female trends towards mobile platforms like the Nintendo DS/3DS, would it make more sense for your studio to explore developing games there? Or was your goal all along to produce a more 3D-visual action title for mobile phones?
For context, my wife is not as big of a gamer as myself, but I find she enjoys playing a lot of mobile puzzle games. I think the mobile market has a lot of potential for bigger things, and I think having the input of the majority player base on that platform makes sense, but I often don't understand why, as a mobile developer, you would be overly concerned with "the core gamer" demographic in the console platform. It seems to me that they aren't likely to crossover into the mobile market often, so there is little reason to "attack" that demographic as we've seen a few people, including Brianna, do through the last year.
Pretty much this. Looking back at the last thirty years of Nintendo, they've weathered far worse storms than this. The crash of 83, chip shortages, Sega, the Virtual Boy, their botched alliance with Sony that created the Playstation, Microsoft, the list goes on. They're almost the perfect example of trial-and-error in video game science, they've tried everything to create a gaming universe gamers will enjoy, and I'd say their successes outweigh their failures. But Nintendo has classically always been the company that attempts to control their overhead and profit margins, from their early days of controlling what was made on their console, controlling the chips, to insisting that they stay in the hardware business to control the profits of their first-party titles. Everyone cites Sega, but Sega only ever had Sonic as a powerful first-party IP, it could not recover from shooting itself in the foot when they released the Saturn too early. The Dreamcast was a helluva system, if it had been paced properly, it might've gained more ground.
All Nintendo has to do now to survive is open its console up to more developers and make it something people want to make GAMES for. The gaming world needs more Miyamoto-like developers who look at aspects of games like gameplay, characters, and experience, not just making movies with sporadic spots of control for a few seconds. Mobile gaming is popular because there is no movie sequences, no PUSH X TO WIN, it's all gameplay, and many could argue that they're just puzzle games or whatever and they're incomparable to console games, or that they're made for "casuals", but everything you see in mobile gaming now, that's what started Nintendo off in the 80s and made them what they are today.
I second this post. I also was in Scouts from Cub Scouts to when I turned 18. I did not make Eagle, but I was Brotherhood in the Order of the Arrow, did the Northstar Leadership Training in Indiana, was either a Patrol or Senior/Asst. Senior Patrol leader for nearly most of my time in the scouts, and I was introduced to tabletop RPG's (D&D, Star Wars) while in the Scouts. The BSA gave me the mostly free oppertunity to learn a great deal about leadership and service in the community as well as have fun camping, hiking, and enjoying the outdoors as a kid. I would not trade that experience away for nearly anything and I regard it as the best years of my life.
However I am concerned with the direction the BSA has been going in recent years. I don't understand how the organization can stand for intolerance when never witnessed any intolerance of anyone or any belief when I was in the Scouts, and I lived in one of the most conservative part of the country. When different troops and different Scoutmasters can decide who they want and what their core beliefs are, why does the organization as a whole reject the notion that these people can co-exsist with everyone else? It disappoints me that the BSA has taught me to respect my fellow person and their beliefs but will not extend that to the people they do not agree with.
The icing on the cake is the fact that the organization recieves most of its funding from federal sources, such as the use of public schools and buildings for its meetings. If taxpayers are paying for this, and this country stands for equality of people regardless of race, religion, and sexual orientation, than anyone should be allowed to join so long as they meet all other criteria for normally joining. If the BSA were a private organization funded by themselves, I would not object, that is their choice.
So as far as OSS goes, I support it because this may be the step the BSA needs to take in order to understand that everyone is involved in the world we are today, wether you are gay, straight, athiest, or whatever. We need to be teaching our future generations that inequality only leads to closed doors in everything from daily life to software choice.
Whoops, I did mean Pinewood. Apologies. XD
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the fact that a lot of independent and usually self-designed software is often found in local BSA sponsered slot car derby races. I remember when I was in the Scouts we had a few IT guys in the troop write (or find) the software for timing the cars when they got to the end of the track. Wonder if anyone does this anymore.
hell yes we used to use clarisworks in my elementary school back in the early 90's on the schools then brand new lc3's. oh the memories of that and a dozen other awesome programs and games, like christmas lemmings 1993.
Well damn, there goes my dream of creating little bug-eyed girls with sugar, spice, everything nice, and Chemical X.
Curse you TV and your unreal chemistry.
Curses.
I agree, having grew up in Indiana and Ohio and now living in Connecticut I've seen the best and worst of both city and country life. Granted I don't miss those hour long school bus rides back in M.S and H.S and some very cliche rednecks, but having lived in rural communities all my life and then coming to Hartford and surrounding towns, it's a definite change and you can really see the difference in people. Growing up I had parents who were Republican, friends and neighbors who were Republican, and friends' parents who worked for GM/Dalco in Dayton, OH and many other industrial jobs. My father worked for DADC/Sony in Terre Haute, IN and there I had friends and people I knew who were farmers, tech workers, National Guard pilots, and more. Everyone voted red, everyone drove their pickup trucks, trains were always heard every 20 minutes, and many people's idea of a scenic drive was to drive out to some small town in the middle of nowhere and spend the day doing nothing.
/anything/ into our lakes, no matter what the cost. Yes we need to be energy independent from the Middle East and yes we need to start conserving oil resources and using less gas, but thats where people need to start losing the gas consuming SUV's and trucks unless they really need them and start conserving resources when they dont need them. No one is asking you to cut everything you use out, they're asking you to shut your damn light off when you leave the house, turn down your A/C when it's cool outside and use some fans, and buy a smaller car that uses less gas per mile if you're only driving 5 minutes to work and back a day. Small considerations can make a huge difference and as a poor college student living in the most expensive state in America I have to pinch my pennies where I can, and electricity and car/gas eat 40% of my monthly budget.
Up here there is no rural life, it's city life and city mentality. People around my age (23) think of nothing more usually then wild house parties or bars and clubs. Jobs are hard to come by unless you want to work in a trade skill or food service, you pretty much HAVE to have a college education to make it higher than that in some places around here, gas is even more expensive up here than out in the midwest, and let's face it, some hospitality and modesty is lost up here.
I'm certainly sad to hear that they are allowing this to happen. As someone who is part of a family that has spent several generations in LaPorte/South Bend and frequented Lake Michigan as a kid I think it's deplorable that we should have to dump
Political boundries don't define who people are, people define political boundries. I vote moderate to both sides, because it comes down to what type of person they are and what they'll do for us, not their affiliation.
Problem is we're still under the shadow of the previous two generations whom were around while the current one grew up with video games in the 80's and 90's who either didn't understand video games, or denounced them based on their "profound psychological effects" on kids. In short, our parents and grandparents STILL don't approve of video games, and they're the ones still controlling state and social services.
The thing we need to get out of these people's heads is that video games are not "children's toys" as everyone back then labeled them. Video games have evolved as any other form of entertainment has done over their years. The problem is, entertainment and arts evolve faster than social perception of those arts. Video games are still for children to many people, and oh god if that Rabbit can't have Trix, then adults can't have video games. They're for children!
I think that parents need to start realizing that there are millions of other people out there who want and CAN enjoy these games and should be able to do so freely just as they have the right to not buy said games and not allow their children to. Parents have little to no social responsiblity anymore because they've turned it mostly over to either the TV, the previous generations, or anything else so that they don't have to be responsible for their kids' actions anymore. Frankly I find it absurd and that's one of the reasons I don't have kids yet, because when I do, I fully intend to instill upon them the responsiblity that is needed in order to make the differences of right and wrong and show them that they can still enjoy all these forms of entertainment that are out there without harming themselves or others. Obviously I can do this, and I came from a divorced family where my mother used the internet to chat with other men while my father was away.
Me and friends used to play the original d6 back in the day and it was quite fun. Especially when you can bust through a wall and shout I'M DARTH VADER! to a group of stormtroopers, roll, and ACTUALLY convince them you are indeed Darth Vader. The thing that gets me about d20, is it really doesn't seem to be different from d6 in other than you are rolling fewer dice. I know there are mechanics changes and everything, but the WEG SWRPG did everything it needed to do, kept with the theme of the movies, and worked. Why change it? Because everything else WOTC makes is d20? They should have just left it untouched and either updated it as is or improved upon it. Eh well. Every once and awhile I come across my old character sheets and remember that my first character I ever made was killed when my friend decided to light a bar on fire. The good days of playing SWRPG on every Boy Scout campout. Boy we pissed off the leaders.
That was my biggest problem when I lived outside of Springfield, MA years ago, the town I lived in only offered Comcast (then ATT) and dial-up. No DSL, no anything unless you wanted satalite. What makes the difference between Comcast there and Comcast I have here in CT, is that there without anyone else to compete against, they literally do not give a shit what you get or even how your service runs. I talked to probably 3 different techs and customer service once because my connection was lagging a lot and dropping, and it wasn't my equipment. Even buying a new router and using a different modem (another call in itself since they didn't seem to understand that concept) did not fix the problem, and it ended up being the worst ~50/mo I had ever gone through. Since coming back to CT I've been on COX, which I have to say has probably the best service and speed for the price in what I've used, but sadly does not control the town I live in now, which is Comcast, and while Comcast here is much better than previously in MA, the upload is pretty shallow compared to the download. The very least you'd think they could do is match COX's ~1.5mbps upload for competative sake, least then I can torrent without choking the rest of my internet. But you get what you pay for, and right now I can't afford something better like Speakeasy.. well I could if Sprint would build a freaking tower to cover this gap I'm in so I wouldn't have to pay for landline service.
Whats worse is their employees get pretty slick discounts on their in-house (read: moron squad) brand stuff, like cat5 cables. Last week I needed a couple 50 foot cables, and they want 40 bucks each for them. Lucky for us we knew a friend who worked there and was getting out in an hour, so we asked him to buy them for us, blew an hour at the mall, grabbed them from him an hour later. Cost: 12 bucks down from 80.
I'm not sure which is the lesser evil there, the fact we were able to do that, or the fact that they are making a 34 dollar profit on the measly sale of 50" of cat5. Had I been less lazy I'd have taken the half hour drive down to a local shop I know of and bought it for that price, retail
Thing that I notice is that on the current SC Bnet, the map of choice is the hacked FASTEST map that pretty much solidifies the essence of skilled gameplay. The entire purpose of the map is to build as many of everything and rush, because you're getting your resources in a snap thanks to mineral fields stacked on each other and your base right next to it. It actually to it's credit is very useful for building the fundemental skill of learning your build orders, tech trees, and basics of unit movement. But as me and my friends who play have noticed, that after awhile you do want to play with maps that are more like the game, and force you to think about what you build, how you build, and how you manage your forces and attack the opponents, which is the strategy element of the game. I think both skill and strategy have their place in the game, but when you play on Bnet, as all online games, you sadly have to deal with the people who are really there to just demolish you out of the water and not really care weither you've learned how to play or not, hell half of the time online players expect you to be an expert at the game before crossing into the online realm of gameplay. That can be hard expecially since the human element of RTS is different from the computer controlled element.
It really has to do with where your gettng Comcast in. When I lived in a small town in MA, the only broadband we had was Comcast. They sucked hard. I called their support to tell them that my modem was slow and their techs couldn't be bothered to give a damn that the infrastructure out there was crap. They knew that I could not switch to anyone else unless it meant going down to dial-up. I moved back to CT a year or two after and went back to Cox, whom I've had now for 2 years, and while I hate the port blocking and such, their support is leagues beyond Comcast (when I moved apartments somehow my router here and my friend's router in my old apartment we're trying to grab at the same IP address, because they both had the same MAC attached since they were both my accounts in my name, the techs on the phone couldn't understand but when I told them they were like "that's impossible!" it was rather funny) I want to switch to Speakeasy when I move again this spring because I'm moving to an area serviced by Comcast for cable and ATT/SBC DSL, both of whom I loathe. I'm willing to give them a fair shot even after this merger, because they still can't be as bad as Comcast or SBC, I hate SBC even more than Comcast.
Boobies: Basic Operational Overdrive Biomechanical Infrastructure Emulating System
I would tend to agree, the problem is though that in many towns and communities, you have simply hundreds of girls just sleeping around until they get pregnant, then marry at 19, have a couple more kids, and divorce. Not to stereotype, but I've seen this is many midwest and southern places, not that it doesn't happen where I am in Connecticut, but it is less likely so here than in one place I've been to in Virginia.
A lot of that can be attributed towards public education as well as socially accepted norms. For small rural communities with small to mid-size schools and few colleges, as well as fewer jobs (read: diverse jobs, jobs other than "the local factory") you have a lot of people who settle for the status-quo, and follow what their parents did before them. They find out school is a waste of time when the factory will hire you anyway for minimum wage, drop out, work there, and when not working, party and sleep around with the girls, weither they're taken or not. Next thing you know, one of them gets pregnant, has a kid, and you're marrying her at 20 and working at the factory for the rest of your life supporting them, unless you cut and run.
Rinse, repeat.
Now of course this isn't always the case, and I am certainly not intending that every small town in America emulates this, but this is one such example of poor decisions that fosters the issue we are facing, higher populations of people with no clear plan to compensate. People out there say we have little resources, we don't, we have plenty of resources and probably more untapped, but we make poor use of them. With all of the money from taxpayers, we could be improving public schools tenfold. Why I bet we could put them on par with private schools if we wanted to, but the consensous is we shouldn't, and why? Because private schools are for the rich and influenced and public schools are for the mid-class and poor. It's all simple social norms, that is why public schools will always continue to rate second to private schools, because the rich and powerful of this country refuse to allow someone with a public school education to one-up them in the field of educational intelligence.
If public and private schools were on par with each other, there would be no need for private schools, and that would take away the social infastructure many rich families thrive on, the "My son/daughter went to X school with honors" blahblahblah. It's like those movies when you have some character who breaks the family tradition of going to X school for the past umpteen generations. There really are some families who build their entire reputation and social standing upon the private school they've attended for generations. If the neighbor kid went to a public school that matched par and did better then their private school kid, what then? That'd be sure upsetting wouldn't it?
Sounds like an idea for a movie really. Just need to toss in some old washups from Friends and maybe Ben Stein for dull comic relief. XD
I agree with this post on so many ways. Many of the "zealots" are people in the 25-35 bracket, the people who were in during the start of the computing age, people with experience in DOS, OS/2, and UNIX. They praise Linux because it works for them like a charm. For people in my age bracket, 18-24, we were around for the beginning of Windows, 3.1/95/98, we know Windows, we've made it do what it needs to do, we've gotten around Microsoft's attempts to wall us from copying and interoperability with other OS'es. Windows is in my opinion the OS that defines the new generation of computer users and geeks, because it was the big thing in the mid-90's. Linux was still very small then and none of us being what, 10-12 knew of UNIX or others. I happened to have used OS/2 Warp before thanks to my Dad, but thats another story.
Point is, Windows works, and if it works, then you don't need to change it.
Unless of course you have multiple computer at your disposal. Debian on a crappy p2-333 makes an excellent webserver for me. =)
Reminds me of a Starcraft game I played with a friend where he took out my main Terran base but forgot about the 10-12 other HQ's I was floating around. Each time he'd take out one, I'd build about 4 more. This lasted a good half hour before I ran out of resources.
The last time I heard "We're committed to Customer Service" was when I worked for a small Mom-N-Pop type grocery chain here in Connecticut. The end result was me quitting after 6 years because they treat their employees like crap because they cannot manage their inventory (partially due to their employees) and are taking considerable losses, thus each one of us there were miserable. I went over to Red Robin (a burger resturant) and there I found a place that at least treated their employees like humans as well as manage their business in order to make a profit.
Point is, Apple fans say things like this but in reality Apple is no better and no worse than any other computer company out there. Dell used to go that whole customer relationship way until they got too big for their pants and didn't care. Their tech support suffered for it. People like Apple because it's classy and innovative, something many companies lack. Their hardware and software isn't that much more revolutionary than anyone elses, my friend's high priced Mac can do just about the same as my custom built $500 PC. The iPod is really just the music device everyone wanted to make but Apple got it out first, if Microsoft or Dell put out a music player before Apple, everyone would be writing that Apple was cloning it.
But if anything this article has proved that I should switch to posting useless semi-relevent articles on Apple instead of the other mostly relevent stories I've submitted and had rejected.
Anyone remember Bill's first book? I remember reading about his grand scheme and vision of a bunch of shiny wonderful technology coming out to improve schools, businesses, and personal lives. Or has Microsoft decided that spending billions on challenging patents, entering the game console race, and continuing to release slightly more improved versions of it's OS is more important that working on the technology surrounding it?
I remember when Windows 95 came out way back when, as a kid I was stoked to finally have a real improvement over Windows 3.1, let alone DOS. I'd sit there for hours just playing with the damn OS like it was cool. I'd make it do all kinds of seemingly stupid things. Over time, with each new version of Windows came little innovation, nothing new and shiny to look at or play with. The GUI remaining largely the same, the backends were always changed, but rather than innovate and create a new look or a bunch of new features, they rehashed the same crap over and over.
Of course Bill seems to apply this logic to hardware as he does to software, he obviously doesn't seem to get that hardware is changing, getting smaller, running faster, using less power. The MIT laptop is an absolutely wonderful piece of real innovation that cannot be told otherwise. Now how it will be applied time will tell, but I don't believe Bill has the right to play down on real innovation when he has barely made any real step in software or hardware innovation since the beginning of Windows.
It's a shame too, I was kinda hoping those digital wallets he talked about would come to, but then again I doubt I'd appreciate someone coming by and hacking my digital wallet. =)
Aside from your bias and stereotype of those who play Final Fantasy games, which I hate to spoil your fun but is simply that of bias and stereotype. FF games are enjoyed by just the same number of people who play every other genre of games, Madden, Halo, or otherwise. Mod Troll.
Back to the OP and replies, Final Fantasy has been a popular title because of Square's marketing, as well as having a fanbase who backs it. I've seen people who will buy Square games no matter what, even if the game wasn't that great. It's that on top of the games themselves. FF7 and FF8 were good games for the PS. FF9 was okay, but you could tell they stretched it a bit. FFX opened up onto the PS2 doing well, but again, stretched a bit. FFXI opened up the MMO aspect to the francise which frankly has brought some new life into it. It's right up there with WoW, CoH, and other popular MMO's. Personally, I think they should revisit some of their other francises for new games, such as the Chrono series, or SaGa Frontier, little gems of Square yesteryear that are often overlooked. I'd say Xenogears, but Monolith is already on Xenosaga.
Fact is, FF sells for the same reason the PS sells, marketing. The rest is up to the consumer.
Actually "Graphic Novel" came more to the front when Japanese Manga hit the US harder (read: when Tokyopop started spamming the market) and when it came to adults and non-anime people, their classification for it was "comics" or "japanese comics" (or japanese porn as my father used to put it) Fans would always come back hot-headed insisting they were either "Graphic Novels" or "Manga" (then spinning off a debate on how to pronounce Manga)
Names mean things to certain people. Everyone calls a Q-Tip a Q-Tip, not a cotton swab. Kleenex instead of tissue, it's all about what sticks in more people's minds and what becomes accepted in the mainstream. Games are games because people see them as children's entertainment. Thus when something like GTA hits the home, parents suddenly are shocked to learn that games actually encompess more than just Sesame Street Atari games, they include blood and violence, like TV, Movies, and the 6 o'clock local news.
As a GP reader, I read stories everyday of the wonderful world of idiots that seem to confuse reality with games, and the Jack Thompsons and Hillary Clintons that seem to think banning games and stiffling creative entertainment is a solution to the problem that this society has been on a downward spiral of morals since our grandparents generation. Parents simply don't give a damn about what their kids do, until they kill someone, then they point their fingers at those who aren't even responsible for their kids. All this society knows how to do is point fingers at everyone but themselves. I know, I'm 22, I used to think there was someone else to blame for everything (and there was in some cases). However I know the difference between reality and game, and when I do have children, they will not be playing games like GTA until they are mature enough to know those differences. I shook my head when my girlfriend would tell me about parents buying violent games for their little kids, and people bringing their 5 year olds to Underworld: Evolution. What kinda parenting is that?
If anything, Hillary Clinton and the rest of the government needs to start programs for educating people, not shutting people's eyes.
You speak truth sir
Fact is, while I'm young (22) compared to probably the majority of the tech industry, I like many others in my generation, grew up on DOS, Windows, OS/2 (yes, we had a old Pentium 100 running dual boot OS/2 Warp and Win 3.1 in our house) and other non open-source software. I didn't know Linux exsisted until sometime around 1999-2000 when my dad started looking into it more for his job. Today I still use Windows because it fits my needs. Sure I could use Linux, and I do for webserver related stuff, but Windows works for me in a workstation enviroment. I have no problem paying for software if it works. I also support OSS that does a better job than commercial alternatives. It's about choice.
The Little Mermaid (1989) $111
random facts from imdb, Louie's voice was Rene Auberjonois, aka Odo from DS9. Crazy. Also Nancy Cartwright of The Simpsons fame