Given what Rick Berman had managed to do with the franchise between Voyager, Enterprise, and the last several movies, it would be pretty hard for Star Trek to get any worse. Unless Abrams goes completely insane and makes it into a soft-core porn flick about Matt Damon and space unicorns, this will probably be better than anything we'd be getting if the same old crew kept cranking out movies.
"When you take the cost of living and consider the net pay adjusted for that cost, places like Montgomery, Ala., Idaho Falls, Idaho, and Fort Worth, Ark. suddenly seem quite attractive."
Not if you consider the costs of therapy that go along with leaving civilization to live in backwaters lik Alabama, Idaho, or Arkansas.
Red Hat isn't popular with corporate customers because the sysadmins like it and want to use it - if the sysadmins were choosing the operating systems, Red Hat would have been steamrolled out of existence by all of the Red Hat killer distros that have come and gone. Red Hat survives because they sell something that makes managers happy - not the guys in the trenches. Red Hat survives in the server room because it's a great compromise - you get to Run Linux, but still have all the commercial goodness that makes management happy.
"'If Redmond locks out 3rd party security and utility vendors from full ring 0 access they become the only ones able to provide the most powerful utilities and security products.'
"But how can it be done? From the Agnitum story I for one understood that it's not possible to achieve this."
DRM. Once the CPU vendor and OS vendor are the only people with total control over computers, the computer s will only do what said vendors allow them to. Or at least that's the way they think it should be.
That's a very interesting concept, but right now there aren't many people who could program it, much less people who could program it and work in the games industry. Of course, in a decade almost every programmer out there will know how to code for multi-core systems, and it might just happen.
"The record companies have all the power; They have nothing to lose and will tell you that they'll 'just sign someone else'."
The record companies DON'T have all the power. They only have power over artists who don't want to do the hard work, who don't want to promote themselves, who don't want to produce their own music, and who just want someone else to do all the hard stuff so that they can try to get lucky and make it big. Ani DiFranco proved this when she decided to do some hard work, not deal with the record companies, and do everything herself. It took her nearly a decade and several album releases to pick up steam, but she's become tremendously successful, and outlasted a lot of the record industry's big artists who have come and gone in the same time period. If more musicians were like her, and weren't willing to gamble everything away on the chance that a record company might be able to make them rich and famous overnight, those heinous record deals would go away pretty quickly.
"Douglas Adams comes to mind. But his sort of game is kind of anachronistic."
Not to mention that his games were custom-written for his fanbase. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing - it made a lot of sense in the 1980s when his books were explosively popular in english-speaking nations - but at the same time, neither of his games really had any appeal to anyone who wasn't already into his work.
"Supposing some day a great writer, like a Neil Gaiman, wrote a story centric game that (a) demonstrated that there is serious creative potential in the medium..."
It could happen, and I would like to see it happen, but I don't think the industry has been in a position to do so for a long time. I think that stories in games died after Planescape:Torment and System Shock 2 both flopped commercially, despite being two of the most critically acclaimed games ever. Now publishers are just too damned risk averse to try and do a great game by a great writer.
Maybe it could happen in Japan, but the rest of the world would just get a bad translation:( I shudder to think about the game we could get if Mistwalker studios teamed up with Gaiman for a big multi-national uber-RPG, but that probably won't happen...
Hey Microsoft, call me when you guys spend billions of dollars on a web browser and actually implement CSS2. In the meanwhile, all your shitty, half-assed browsers do is push more web developers to use Flash, because developing for Flash is a hell of a lot easier than debugging XHTML/CSS to work in IE5/6/7.
"Wouldn't they hire great known writers to create game-friendly stories..."
Call me crazy, but I doubt that too many great known writers would want to write for video games. Maybe game companies could get people who churn out pulp gaming fiction or horror novels to come on board, but that would likely churn out the same derivative crap we get now, although the dialogue might be a little better.
"...Apple should be giving more back to OSS - it owes much of its comeback to OSS..."
Apple doesn't owe anything to OSS! OSS authors give their code away, and in the case of BSD licensed works, aren't asking for, or expecting, anything back in return. If they wanted to get something back, they would have (or should have) been selling the code for profit in the first place. The point of releasing software under free or OSS licenses is to better civilization in one form or another - not to expect other people to help one with the code, or hope corporate users will rain funding and other laurels on the coders in a display of thanks.
"In france and other countries, people get insane connections (like the one listed in TFA)"
The people getting this service in the France are a subset of people living in the Parisian suburbs, not all of France. Most people in France are in the same situation Americans are - waiting for the telco to roll out something decent. Or at least the lucky ones are - when I was in France earlier this year, I couldn't actually get power for my electronic devices in some small Provincial towns because their electrical systems can't even churn out a good enough stream of AC to power the devices I wanted to use. How's that for crappy?
This is one hell of a pointless project. Aside from bored weirdos with too many QFE NICs sitting around the house, who really needs to turn old PCs into routers anymore? This sort of project was interesting five years ago, when there were no good cheap home firewalls, but now anyone can go to Wal-Mart and get a router for under $50 US.
Have a link? I've been poking around news archives, and while I can find countless articles about the thousands of RIAA suits against individuals, this is the only case of the MPAA suing an individual for something other than being the originator of a bootleg movie or running a pirate movie site.
When did the MPAA start actually suing individuals over P2P transfers? I once read that the MPAA was considering doing so, but I thought that it was the MPAA's standing policy to not sue individual downloaders - mostly to avoid all the horrible press that the RIAA has received for doing so.
"I really wonder sometimes whether in the long run it might be cheaper for broadband ISP's to install a small firewall box between the customers computer and the internet for EVERY connection..."
I concur - the need for a good hardware firewall is not new, it seems like it would be simple for every cable/DSL internet device provided to a consumer to include an easily managed firewall - it's not like most ISPs don't pass that cost along to the consumer, if not rent them the device outright. Of course, it could also end up generating a high volume of tech support calls for every dumb kid out there who demands help to configure the modem to allow him to run a CS server.
At first I was looking at the numbers and wondering if Americans just have so many more Windows machines than the rest of the big relays out there, but once the numbers get into the single digits (everything after the US and China) I quickly realized that most of the people in those nations are probably using the same OS - Windows - as people in the US. So is it simply that the US comes out on top because we have so damned many computers - as opposed to other nations where they're sometimes uncommon in households and people use internet cafes? Or is it not a PCs-per-capita issue, but an issue of people in the USA simply being to stupid/lazy/etc. to secure their Windows machines? If the former is the case, we're in for some nasty spam as PCs per capita increase, and there are ever more systems begging to be infected. If the latter case is true, what will it take to finally get Windows users to start securing their Windows boxes?
"On the Tesla, I'd like to see more of those as well. Especially discussion on turbine/electric hybrids. Why are we still using rubegoldberg-styled piston-based engines, with so many moving parts?"
We're using piston based engines for the same reason that cars are still being made with steel instead of lighter, and in some cases more durable materials - it breaks down well. Unless one happens to be obsessive about caring for a car, the steel parts eventually wear down and rust out, generally leading to replacement within a decade, not to mention regular part replacements along the way. If cars were made with less complicated engine designs, or parts that last longer, the manufacturers would lose billions of dollars every year in new car sales and part replacements.
I've stopped buying PC games, but not because of WoW - I stopped playing WoW almost a year ago. PC games just don't appeal to me anymore because most of them aren't any good. PC games have devolved into just a bunch of "sequels," however, many of them are not so much sequels as they are blatant knockoffs of games that were hits in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I still own most of the originals, and I can just go play those again - no need to pay extra just to see some more polygons.
It doesn't help that the cost of a high-end video card has become absurd - I used to get a nice midrange card for $250-$300, with prices in the $400-$500 range, I'd be better off to buy an Xbox and not go through the hassle of upgrading my mainboard, video card, RAM, and CPU just to be able to play games that are just going to give me deja vu.
If PC game developers want to woo back gamers, they need to start making games that are worth the costs. Right now I just don't think they're doing that.
"Solution: Start telling MSIE users to upgrade when they show up at your website, and if they don't, tell them to shove off."
I tried that. I installed Explorer destroyer, in hopes that people would catch on. About one person did - the rest just started sending me complaints, or worse, calling to complain, about how rude it is to tell them what to use, or how they don't use Firebox because of this-bug or that-bug. In the end it wasn't worth the hassle, so I pulled the script out and just let IE users see a broken site, because I just can't figure out how to fix a positioning problem in IE.
"Anyway, if you don't like one standards organization it doesn't mean you should bundle yourself up in a proprietary binary format. Write a new incredible standard and people will support it."
You're missing my point. Designers who use Flash to avoid the hassles of XHTML/CSS aren't likely to develop new standards of their own. And why do so many people expect designers to care about open standards? Many, if the the majority, of design applications - Quark, Illustrator, Indesign, Maya, and so on - use proprietary standards. Aside from simple printed products, much of the world's digital creative output ends up on proprietary standards - CD, DVD, AAC, WMV. Openness is the exception, not the rules, and to many people, there is little, if anything, sinister about proprietary standards. Given that, if the web standards crowd expects people to give a damn about open standards, much less use them, they need to do a better job of putting on a big happy face and getting along with the rest of the world.
When I go to the Macromedia/Adobe web site, I'm greeted with a lot of well-written information for designers and technical people. The applications come with great documentation built-in. It's all happy, and pretty, and user-friendly. At the W3C site I get buggy validation tools and a bunch of not-too-useful, esoteric documentation that rarely covers practical aspects of web design. That's not the kind of stuff that wins people over - especially when developing for open standards tends to require more knowledge and effort than the alternative.
This sort of crap is why more and more web development is going to be heading to Flash. It's bad enough that the two major browser developers can't get it together and give us full implementations of the W3C standards, but the W3C itself is a nightmarish group of technocrats arguing over what crazed esoteric implementation path the next versions of XHTML and CSS will follow.
As a designer, why should I give a damn about the W3C and its standards when the W3C can't even get it together? Why should I spend my days debugging issues caused by convoluted standards piecemealed together by a bunch of wacky nerds when I can just fire up Flash and just lay out websites however I want to? I'm sure that people can give me the usual speeches about open standards, accessibility, etc., but I don't see that kind of rational thought in the work of the W3C. What I see when I look at the standards they churn out reminds me of Stallman and HURD - well intentioned, but unlikely to ever produce something that most people want to deal with.
If the W3C can't get it together, XHTML/CSS are going to fade away as more and more developers get sick of esoteric markup languages and Flash will conquer the web.
But hey, at least Adobe seems like a better overlord than Microsoft...
Anybody else remember the story about the young man who had the Department of Homeland security show up, demanding to know why he was trying to get Chairman Mao's "Red Book" from the library? And how it turned out that something so unbelievable was, in fact, made up by a bored young guy who wanted attention?
It's pretty obvious that the same thing is happening here.
Slashdot Mirror
Given what Rick Berman had managed to do with the franchise between Voyager, Enterprise, and the last several movies, it would be pretty hard for Star Trek to get any worse. Unless Abrams goes completely insane and makes it into a soft-core porn flick about Matt Damon and space unicorns, this will probably be better than anything we'd be getting if the same old crew kept cranking out movies.
"When you take the cost of living and consider the net pay adjusted for that cost, places like Montgomery, Ala., Idaho Falls, Idaho, and Fort Worth, Ark. suddenly seem quite attractive."
Not if you consider the costs of therapy that go along with leaving civilization to live in backwaters lik Alabama, Idaho, or Arkansas.
Red Hat isn't popular with corporate customers because the sysadmins like it and want to use it - if the sysadmins were choosing the operating systems, Red Hat would have been steamrolled out of existence by all of the Red Hat killer distros that have come and gone. Red Hat survives because they sell something that makes managers happy - not the guys in the trenches. Red Hat survives in the server room because it's a great compromise - you get to Run Linux, but still have all the commercial goodness that makes management happy.
"'If Redmond locks out 3rd party security and utility vendors from full ring 0 access they become the only ones able to provide the most powerful utilities and security products.'
"But how can it be done? From the Agnitum story I for one understood that it's not possible to achieve this."
DRM. Once the CPU vendor and OS vendor are the only people with total control over computers, the computer s will only do what said vendors allow them to. Or at least that's the way they think it should be.
That's a very interesting concept, but right now there aren't many people who could program it, much less people who could program it and work in the games industry. Of course, in a decade almost every programmer out there will know how to code for multi-core systems, and it might just happen.
"The record companies have all the power; They have nothing to lose and will tell you that they'll 'just sign someone else'."
The record companies DON'T have all the power. They only have power over artists who don't want to do the hard work, who don't want to promote themselves, who don't want to produce their own music, and who just want someone else to do all the hard stuff so that they can try to get lucky and make it big. Ani DiFranco proved this when she decided to do some hard work, not deal with the record companies, and do everything herself. It took her nearly a decade and several album releases to pick up steam, but she's become tremendously successful, and outlasted a lot of the record industry's big artists who have come and gone in the same time period. If more musicians were like her, and weren't willing to gamble everything away on the chance that a record company might be able to make them rich and famous overnight, those heinous record deals would go away pretty quickly.
Ouch! You know, I never even thought of it that way!
"Douglas Adams comes to mind. But his sort of game is kind of anachronistic."
:( I shudder to think about the game we could get if Mistwalker studios teamed up with Gaiman for a big multi-national uber-RPG, but that probably won't happen...
Not to mention that his games were custom-written for his fanbase. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing - it made a lot of sense in the 1980s when his books were explosively popular in english-speaking nations - but at the same time, neither of his games really had any appeal to anyone who wasn't already into his work.
"Supposing some day a great writer, like a Neil Gaiman, wrote a story centric game that (a) demonstrated that there is serious creative potential in the medium..."
It could happen, and I would like to see it happen, but I don't think the industry has been in a position to do so for a long time. I think that stories in games died after Planescape:Torment and System Shock 2 both flopped commercially, despite being two of the most critically acclaimed games ever. Now publishers are just too damned risk averse to try and do a great game by a great writer.
Maybe it could happen in Japan, but the rest of the world would just get a bad translation
Hey Microsoft, call me when you guys spend billions of dollars on a web browser and actually implement CSS2. In the meanwhile, all your shitty, half-assed browsers do is push more web developers to use Flash, because developing for Flash is a hell of a lot easier than debugging XHTML/CSS to work in IE5/6/7.
"Wouldn't they hire great known writers to create game-friendly stories..."
Call me crazy, but I doubt that too many great known writers would want to write for video games. Maybe game companies could get people who churn out pulp gaming fiction or horror novels to come on board, but that would likely churn out the same derivative crap we get now, although the dialogue might be a little better.
"...Apple should be giving more back to OSS - it owes much of its comeback to OSS..."
Apple doesn't owe anything to OSS! OSS authors give their code away, and in the case of BSD licensed works, aren't asking for, or expecting, anything back in return. If they wanted to get something back, they would have (or should have) been selling the code for profit in the first place. The point of releasing software under free or OSS licenses is to better civilization in one form or another - not to expect other people to help one with the code, or hope corporate users will rain funding and other laurels on the coders in a display of thanks.
"In france and other countries, people get insane connections (like the one listed in TFA)"
The people getting this service in the France are a subset of people living in the Parisian suburbs, not all of France. Most people in France are in the same situation Americans are - waiting for the telco to roll out something decent. Or at least the lucky ones are - when I was in France earlier this year, I couldn't actually get power for my electronic devices in some small Provincial towns because their electrical systems can't even churn out a good enough stream of AC to power the devices I wanted to use. How's that for crappy?
This is one hell of a pointless project. Aside from bored weirdos with too many QFE NICs sitting around the house, who really needs to turn old PCs into routers anymore? This sort of project was interesting five years ago, when there were no good cheap home firewalls, but now anyone can go to Wal-Mart and get a router for under $50 US.
Have a link? I've been poking around news archives, and while I can find countless articles about the thousands of RIAA suits against individuals, this is the only case of the MPAA suing an individual for something other than being the originator of a bootleg movie or running a pirate movie site.
For anyone who wants to keep up with the story, Shawn Hogan is blogging the story at http://www.digitalpoint.com/~shawn/category/law/.
When did the MPAA start actually suing individuals over P2P transfers? I once read that the MPAA was considering doing so, but I thought that it was the MPAA's standing policy to not sue individual downloaders - mostly to avoid all the horrible press that the RIAA has received for doing so.
"I really wonder sometimes whether in the long run it might be cheaper for broadband ISP's to install a small firewall box between the customers computer and the internet for EVERY connection..."
I concur - the need for a good hardware firewall is not new, it seems like it would be simple for every cable/DSL internet device provided to a consumer to include an easily managed firewall - it's not like most ISPs don't pass that cost along to the consumer, if not rent them the device outright. Of course, it could also end up generating a high volume of tech support calls for every dumb kid out there who demands help to configure the modem to allow him to run a CS server.
At first I was looking at the numbers and wondering if Americans just have so many more Windows machines than the rest of the big relays out there, but once the numbers get into the single digits (everything after the US and China) I quickly realized that most of the people in those nations are probably using the same OS - Windows - as people in the US. So is it simply that the US comes out on top because we have so damned many computers - as opposed to other nations where they're sometimes uncommon in households and people use internet cafes? Or is it not a PCs-per-capita issue, but an issue of people in the USA simply being to stupid/lazy/etc. to secure their Windows machines? If the former is the case, we're in for some nasty spam as PCs per capita increase, and there are ever more systems begging to be infected. If the latter case is true, what will it take to finally get Windows users to start securing their Windows boxes?
"On the Tesla, I'd like to see more of those as well. Especially discussion on turbine/electric hybrids. Why are we still using rubegoldberg-styled piston-based engines, with so many moving parts?"
We're using piston based engines for the same reason that cars are still being made with steel instead of lighter, and in some cases more durable materials - it breaks down well. Unless one happens to be obsessive about caring for a car, the steel parts eventually wear down and rust out, generally leading to replacement within a decade, not to mention regular part replacements along the way. If cars were made with less complicated engine designs, or parts that last longer, the manufacturers would lose billions of dollars every year in new car sales and part replacements.
I've stopped buying PC games, but not because of WoW - I stopped playing WoW almost a year ago. PC games just don't appeal to me anymore because most of them aren't any good. PC games have devolved into just a bunch of "sequels," however, many of them are not so much sequels as they are blatant knockoffs of games that were hits in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I still own most of the originals, and I can just go play those again - no need to pay extra just to see some more polygons.
It doesn't help that the cost of a high-end video card has become absurd - I used to get a nice midrange card for $250-$300, with prices in the $400-$500 range, I'd be better off to buy an Xbox and not go through the hassle of upgrading my mainboard, video card, RAM, and CPU just to be able to play games that are just going to give me deja vu.
If PC game developers want to woo back gamers, they need to start making games that are worth the costs. Right now I just don't think they're doing that.
"Solution: Start telling MSIE users to upgrade when they show up at your website, and if they don't, tell them to shove off."
I tried that. I installed Explorer destroyer, in hopes that people would catch on. About one person did - the rest just started sending me complaints, or worse, calling to complain, about how rude it is to tell them what to use, or how they don't use Firebox because of this-bug or that-bug. In the end it wasn't worth the hassle, so I pulled the script out and just let IE users see a broken site, because I just can't figure out how to fix a positioning problem in IE.
"XHTML and CSS aren't esoteric. They are widely understood and widely used."
That's A very good point. I probably should have used something along the lines of "obtuse" instead.
"Anyway, if you don't like one standards organization it doesn't mean you should bundle yourself up in a proprietary binary format. Write a new incredible standard and people will support it."
You're missing my point. Designers who use Flash to avoid the hassles of XHTML/CSS aren't likely to develop new standards of their own. And why do so many people expect designers to care about open standards? Many, if the the majority, of design applications - Quark, Illustrator, Indesign, Maya, and so on - use proprietary standards. Aside from simple printed products, much of the world's digital creative output ends up on proprietary standards - CD, DVD, AAC, WMV. Openness is the exception, not the rules, and to many people, there is little, if anything, sinister about proprietary standards. Given that, if the web standards crowd expects people to give a damn about open standards, much less use them, they need to do a better job of putting on a big happy face and getting along with the rest of the world.
When I go to the Macromedia/Adobe web site, I'm greeted with a lot of well-written information for designers and technical people. The applications come with great documentation built-in. It's all happy, and pretty, and user-friendly. At the W3C site I get buggy validation tools and a bunch of not-too-useful, esoteric documentation that rarely covers practical aspects of web design. That's not the kind of stuff that wins people over - especially when developing for open standards tends to require more knowledge and effort than the alternative.
This sort of crap is why more and more web development is going to be heading to Flash. It's bad enough that the two major browser developers can't get it together and give us full implementations of the W3C standards, but the W3C itself is a nightmarish group of technocrats arguing over what crazed esoteric implementation path the next versions of XHTML and CSS will follow.
As a designer, why should I give a damn about the W3C and its standards when the W3C can't even get it together? Why should I spend my days debugging issues caused by convoluted standards piecemealed together by a bunch of wacky nerds when I can just fire up Flash and just lay out websites however I want to? I'm sure that people can give me the usual speeches about open standards, accessibility, etc., but I don't see that kind of rational thought in the work of the W3C. What I see when I look at the standards they churn out reminds me of Stallman and HURD - well intentioned, but unlikely to ever produce something that most people want to deal with.
If the W3C can't get it together, XHTML/CSS are going to fade away as more and more developers get sick of esoteric markup languages and Flash will conquer the web.
But hey, at least Adobe seems like a better overlord than Microsoft...
Anybody else remember the story about the young man who had the Department of Homeland security show up, demanding to know why he was trying to get Chairman Mao's "Red Book" from the library? And how it turned out that something so unbelievable was, in fact, made up by a bored young guy who wanted attention?
It's pretty obvious that the same thing is happening here.