The heart of the neocon philisophy is to create myths of good and evil to unite and heard the American people, American's always being good and everything they oppose being evil, hence the terms "Evil empire" and "Axis of Evil". This whole philosophy falls apart if you don't have something clearly defined, and clearly named to play the evil role, its Bin Laden on the global stage and its Al-Zarqawi in Iraq.
You sound ripe for Gore Vidal, particularly "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace"
You know, I have a theory that even the Bush-bashers don't have the balls to voice in public: al Qaida works for Bush. He signs their paychecks personally. And the 9/11 attacks were his idea.
I mean, come on, without all that, you have to say Bush/Cheney,inc. just got fantastically, unusually, cosmicly, freakishly lucky. Nobody in History is *that* lucky: To have the exact shadowy enemy that you can use to freak the people to give up their liberties. To do the exact heinous crime you can shock and rally everyone with, at the exact right time of a year after the beginning of your new administration, when you've had ample time to seat yourself at the reins and will still have years guaranteed in which to milk the opportunity. From the appropriately Middle-Eastern country, close to the oil you need. From the appropriately demonizable religion. With perfect timing for idiots to still be shaken when election time rolls around again, but not so soon after that they remmember the facts and blame you.
Nobody could possibly get that lucky in a billion, trillion years. They BOUGHT!
It had to be the one who's usually too pickled to trust with a golf cart.
Well, no matter, we can guarantee that he'll never use it, and furthermore, should other countries decide to use this kind of attack against us, we can be guaranteed that we'll all have ample opportunity to be radiated to ashes before he wanders off the putting green to see what all the noise is about.
Like I've been saying for five years now, the only thing that saves us from their evil is their incompetence.
Wondering what the heck good all the extra processing power is good for? Because you may play games, compile apps, or even brute-force-crack your favorite target server, but there's one place where you're *guaranteed* to want faster hardware: generating 3D ray-traced graphics!
Yes, I played the Sims, compiled gcc, ran Python chatterbots, had KDE in maximum eye-candy-mode and ran multiple processes in desktops 1-10, but the day I began trying to render a scene with transparent height-fields and looped ISOsurfaces and detailed meshes with fog media and twin area lamps is the day I discovered a new definition of "hardware performance"!
Y'know, now that I've gotten replies to this, I can no longer say it's unanswered.
PS We got where we are today by people stretching the boundaries by asking "stupid" questions. And by the way, you might want to dump your "programming is nothing but a tape going through a Turing-machine" metaphor and re-investigate computer science; a couple of things have happened in that field since the 1950's.
The epigenome is more like a factory that produces according to information from the environment combined with its genetic capabilities than any sort of computer running a program.
Hmmm...yessss...and maybe this reflects that nature knows how to design better programming systems than we do. Ones which are free of the mundane constraints of compiling and interrupting.
Is DNA the programming language and RNA the compiler? Or is it the other way around? Or is RNA more the operating system sending a set of 'priority interupt' flags to the currently running DNA process? Or perhaps RNA is the #includes and #defines to be preprocessed before the body of the code DNA gets run?
Do we have to answer this same question over and over on Slashdot? Yes, as far as technical vocations are concerned, college is as dead as Victrolas, hula hoops, and wolly mammoths. Can we include that in the site status bar for next week's question?
*tweet!* Literary reference on Slashdot! Ten minutes penalty for talking over everybody's head!
Folks, Vonnegut is "Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.", the referenced work is "The Sirens of Titan", and the "ice-nine" reference is from another book: "Cat's Cradle".
In "The Sirens of Titan" (been years since I read it, so I'll try my best), one of Vonnegut's earliest works, much is made of the notion that Titan enjoyed conditions similar to Earth's as the article states, and so some of the action takes place on Titan, which is predicted to be where the book's protagonist, Rumford, is going to die. If I'm not hallucinating, quite a bit takes place on Mars, as well, involving a massive militray operation and some of the most insanely infectious rhyming ditties ever written. And I remember something about a wild party with a piano pushed into a swimming pool, beautiful creatures called harmoniums, flying saucers, chrono-synclastic infundibulum, and the repeated theme-invoking line "Somebody up there must like you!" Vonnegut students will recognise many of the elements of his life's work born in this novel.
Sheesh, I miss that book, now. I'm going to have to dig it up again.
I prefer my tutorials briefer and pithier. I don't want to be in mid-nested-block and have to flip through 10 pages of the print-out looking for that one line I need amidst the author going on at length convincing me how folksy and friendly he can sound.
But I like how Python comes up yet again. It's nice, for once in my life, to learn a language and *then* see it catch on in a big way, instead of finishing learning a language on the very last day before it dies. I'm predicting that Python is going to soon be as ubiquitous as BASIC was back in the Stone Age.
Because of articles like these, pointing to content-free airhead blathering sites that are the internet's equivalent of Fox "news" and the "National Inquirer", which exist solely to smack a bunch of ads and pop-ups in your face when you click on anything.
Viewing it in lynx is barely worth the bother, even.
Some people complain about the dupes. I complain about these sites.
Do not confuse popular culture with actual culture.
No, I don't. Although I *can* see media from other countries and cultures, and I *have* seen that bag-o-sticks famine-victim models have some popularity outside the US as well.
Your horror story sounds chillingly real. I don't know how many times I've gone to download a file online, only to find it's a Linux file compressed with Microsoft tools, etc. Just those kinds of things where it was clear that there was no thought going into it at all.
I've dealt with sites which balked at standard browsers such as Mozilla, and displayed an error message requiring the alternative browser Internet Exploder to view it, but then I came back to it with the standard Firefox browser and it worked fine.
I know damn well that there is no functionality extended to IE that is unavailable to Any Other Browser. (Microsoft Trolls and Flamers, give it a break this post and keep your stupidity to yourself, no one falls for it anymore!) So we might as well call this what it is: techno-harassment! The unreasonable and gratuitious bigotry and stigma perpetrated against users for not using the "mainstream" choices, i.e. requiring Microsoft Word to submit a resume, requiring one brand of browser, etc.
We need to launch a full-scale counter-offensive, in which we hack code into our systems that fools the world into thinking it's whatever it is "supposed" to be. I would be interested in a "cloaking device" for Firefox that tells the nosey, busybody web server that it *is* Internet Exploiter, a "Moronizer" mode on Emacs (friendly companion to this: http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/demoroniser/ ) which inserts the garbage ASCII characters necessary to fool the recieving party into believing it's a Microslop We^|d document, and generally the equivalent hacks for every application that could be affected.
Like with my internet provider who sternly insisted that they support only Microsoft and Macintosh, so I hacked a script file in and *voila*, best internet connection to a Linux box ever, and I offered to share my "secret" for getting their service to work with Linux so they could start supporting that platform too, and was ignored. Maybe because my sentences are too long?
Anyway, we already have emulators to run Windows-only software in Linux. It's time we took that idea all the way through, and also made some Very Noisy Protests against Government and Corporate techno-harassment!
They can make it in cool colors and re-design it, but can't work fundamental changes that have been needed for a long time. Like removing the Num, Scroll, and Caps Lock keys completely. Two of them are never used by anybody anymore and the third just lets idiots scream louder.
I had a suspicion that the human brain was still evolving the whole time...when I noticed that it was obviously considered by nature to be optional equipment on some people.
But seriously, we have room to grow for a reason that we never had before: Caesarean births. Now that we have the technology, the circumference of the human skull is no longer constrained to the diameter of the birth canal. Note how earlier people valued wide-hipped women for their child-producing ability, and how today, popular culture values only women with skeletal stork's bodies...a subconcious acknowledgement that natural birth is no longer a factor in evolutionary development.
as people migrate to non-Microsoft server software
And which fairy tale universe does this happen in? LOL, neat post, good points, but sometimes I get the feeling that everybody who gives a thin damn about quality at all, already left Microsoft years ago, and the rest will continue to pay for MS products even if the disks come out of the box blank.
Re:Why don't you prove us wrong then?
on
Cyan Worlds Closes
·
· Score: 1
It's clear to me that the images are different the first I saw them
Hey, I googled "Myst" in images and one came up. Not my fault if somebody's posting decoys!
OK, we'll use the image you call real. It's still produced with polygons and textures and height fields, et cetera, like all computer graphic images are! Nit-pick all you want. But Myst-classic's artwork was still substandard to Riven's, Riven's artwork was still substandard to Exile's, etc. I would hope it were so! You're supposed to get better at your thing as you go along, after all. This is why they came out with "Real Myst" later - they looked at their earlier work and said, "We need to re-do this so it fits in with the rest of the series better." That's how far computer graphics came in the ten-year span of the Myst series. What was miraculous to produce in it's day is now, as that tired quote I've posted numerous times from Quandary has it, within reach of hobbyists and people on shoe-string budgets. It would be reasonable to expect that our current state of the art will likewise be as common-place ten years from now. I haven't even brought up the work of various online artists using Poser and Lightwave - in many cases, their "hobbyist" work is even superior to the quality of *some* games being sold today! But those programs still cost money - watch for their free software equivalents to come out in the next ten years, and then I'll be right back saying we can now do Riven and Exile on our desktops!
What you neglect to realize though is that Myst is as much a work of art as it is a game
What you fail to realize is that I said (for, what the hundredth time in this thread?) nothing about art. I was saying that the game could be produced in the time alotted with the materials provided. Similar to saying "any one of us has access to the same canvass and paints that da Vinci used to paint the Mona Lisa." And I would have been sandbagged instantly by a swarm of (I have a new name for you:) Slash-gnatters buzzing, "Listen to him! He thinks the Mona Lisa would be as simple as painting a house!", "What an ignoramous! He knows nothing about art!", "He's trying to say da Vinci had no talent, and that anybody could paint like him!", and so on ad infinitum to the infinity-th power.
Lemme turn it back around on all of you, since it is now clear to me what the problem actually is: It is the flamers to this post who know nothing about art, and most especially have no understanding of the creative process. Because creating is building stuff inside your head, and there's never a limitation to when you can do that. Creative people tend to have a part of their brain that searches for new ideas working all the time, waking and yes, even sleeping! For every picture by Leonardo that survives today, you may be sure he had 100 more ideas that never got outside his own head - he saw a flaw in them or didn't find the time in between other projects. Thus, when you have the occasion to produce a creative work, you don't just stand there and go "OK, lemme have my creative idea....UUUU-UUU-UHHH! OK, got one." You instead say (for example), "You want a scrolling platform game? I have six sketches for them kicking around my desk somewhere...let's have a look at one of them and see if one of them will fit." or, "You want me to tattoo a dragon on your back? OK, here's my sketch-book, which dragon design do you want?" or "I just got the bid to do five new songs for the new play - I can use those three other songs I had that didn't fit into the other production and see what else comes up before deadline - maybe I can stitch those lyrics I wrote on the cocktail napkin last night together with that tune I made up in the shower this morning and that will be the fourth song. I'll have to change things, of course, but we'll see how it fits together."
Ask any creative person (particulary those who work in a narrative medium, such as novelists or directors). They don't just pull a concept out of their ass, the way you do a Slashdot flame. Ask to see their studio, and you'll find a flotsam of half-finished ideas, scrawled notes, quick sketches, bits and pieces. They don't put on white robes and chant the Art Prayer. Ideas come to them in mundane places like standing in line at the bank or when taking a shit and squeezing blackheads. It is this fertile field out of which a new creation is born.
So, yes, the inspiration and ideas behind the creation of Myst were probably already concieved by some members of the team months and possibly even years before they ever actually sat down to produce the game. Doubtless, along the way, they tried a few things that didn't work, or came up with new things along the way. You don't count "idea time" as part of the time-scale, because it would be impossible to figure how to bill the hours during which imagination is working!
I feel sorry for some people in here, if their posts reflect the way they actually see the world. Must be very grim, grey, and dark.
Never saw the wage yet that was enough to be worth hustling over. Until I started to work for myself, and discovered that when you do so, you only need to work half as hard to earn your former wage, because you don't have the overhead of all the idiots on the job (anybody here ever have a job where they weren't surrounded by idiots? Show of hands?), plus the tower of managers pocketing 99 cents for every dollar you profit the company. But the converse is, I can no longer goof off and feel justified about it. Hell, if I *sleep* longer than six hours, I wake up mumbling curses at my sloth...you are always your own worst boss!
My advice to "bosses" who are concerned that their employees aren't slaving like diamond-miners every single second on the clock: compared to what you contribute, be glad they just SHOW UP!
With Big Business, money stopped being a concern. It's now about control for the sake of the sheer monomaniacal, sadistic power-trip of it.
Control just for control's sake! To micromanage your every thought! Control over when you can pee! Control of your dreams! Control of your DNA! Control of the bacteria in your colon! Puppet Masters don't begin to approach it - this is more like possession of your bar-coded, serial-numbered, shrink-wrapped soul. This is the only thing that gives CEOs a woody anymore. Money is just a tool towards that end.
Reminds of the time I saw a "PETA" slogan sticker on a simply HUGE tank of an SUV. I wanted to leave them a note: "What, those animals you love so much don't need a clean environment?"
Re:We could re-do "real artists"...better, even!
on
Cyan Worlds Closes
·
· Score: 1
sorry, but your 3d renders are a far cry from pro level artwork
Nor do I make any such grandiose claim. I'm saying the *tool* would be capable of producing Myst-level-artwork, *in* *the* *right* *hands*.
Re:We could re-do Myst...better, even!
on
Cyan Worlds Closes
·
· Score: 1
Well, that's why. It's hard to do.
Books are hard to write, but we have more than five titles to choose from when we walk into a bookstore.
No, on the contrary, you need to go back and read my point. I do not say that we are all TALENTED enough to "write a bestseller". Only that we have the EQUIPMENT to write a best-seller. 15 years ago, only big-shots like Cyan had the EQUIPMENT to render the images of Myst. Today, each of us has the EQUIPMENT to do the same on our home desktops. That says nothing about TALENT.
Just how big a sledgehammer do I need to pound this into your brain? Tell me I missed the point. I WROTE the point!!!
Slashdot Mirror
You sound ripe for Gore Vidal, particularly "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace"
You know, I have a theory that even the Bush-bashers don't have the balls to voice in public: al Qaida works for Bush. He signs their paychecks personally. And the 9/11 attacks were his idea.
I mean, come on, without all that, you have to say Bush/Cheney,inc. just got fantastically, unusually, cosmicly, freakishly lucky. Nobody in History is *that* lucky: To have the exact shadowy enemy that you can use to freak the people to give up their liberties. To do the exact heinous crime you can shock and rally everyone with, at the exact right time of a year after the beginning of your new administration, when you've had ample time to seat yourself at the reins and will still have years guaranteed in which to milk the opportunity. From the appropriately Middle-Eastern country, close to the oil you need. From the appropriately demonizable religion. With perfect timing for idiots to still be shaken when election time rolls around again, but not so soon after that they remmember the facts and blame you.
Nobody could possibly get that lucky in a billion, trillion years. They BOUGHT!
Well, no matter, we can guarantee that he'll never use it, and furthermore, should other countries decide to use this kind of attack against us, we can be guaranteed that we'll all have ample opportunity to be radiated to ashes before he wanders off the putting green to see what all the noise is about.
Like I've been saying for five years now, the only thing that saves us from their evil is their incompetence.
Yes, I played the Sims, compiled gcc, ran Python chatterbots, had KDE in maximum eye-candy-mode and ran multiple processes in desktops 1-10, but the day I began trying to render a scene with transparent height-fields and looped ISOsurfaces and detailed meshes with fog media and twin area lamps is the day I discovered a new definition of "hardware performance"!
PS We got where we are today by people stretching the boundaries by asking "stupid" questions. And by the way, you might want to dump your "programming is nothing but a tape going through a Turing-machine" metaphor and re-investigate computer science; a couple of things have happened in that field since the 1950's.
Hmmm...yessss...and maybe this reflects that nature knows how to design better programming systems than we do. Ones which are free of the mundane constraints of compiling and interrupting.
Is DNA the programming language and RNA the compiler? Or is it the other way around? Or is RNA more the operating system sending a set of 'priority interupt' flags to the currently running DNA process? Or perhaps RNA is the #includes and #defines to be preprocessed before the body of the code DNA gets run?
Do we have to answer this same question over and over on Slashdot? Yes, as far as technical vocations are concerned, college is as dead as Victrolas, hula hoops, and wolly mammoths. Can we include that in the site status bar for next week's question?
Folks, Vonnegut is "Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.", the referenced work is "The Sirens of Titan", and the "ice-nine" reference is from another book: "Cat's Cradle".
In "The Sirens of Titan" (been years since I read it, so I'll try my best), one of Vonnegut's earliest works, much is made of the notion that Titan enjoyed conditions similar to Earth's as the article states, and so some of the action takes place on Titan, which is predicted to be where the book's protagonist, Rumford, is going to die. If I'm not hallucinating, quite a bit takes place on Mars, as well, involving a massive militray operation and some of the most insanely infectious rhyming ditties ever written. And I remember something about a wild party with a piano pushed into a swimming pool, beautiful creatures called harmoniums, flying saucers, chrono-synclastic infundibulum, and the repeated theme-invoking line "Somebody up there must like you!" Vonnegut students will recognise many of the elements of his life's work born in this novel.
Sheesh, I miss that book, now. I'm going to have to dig it up again.
But I like how Python comes up yet again. It's nice, for once in my life, to learn a language and *then* see it catch on in a big way, instead of finishing learning a language on the very last day before it dies. I'm predicting that Python is going to soon be as ubiquitous as BASIC was back in the Stone Age.
Viewing it in lynx is barely worth the bother, even. Some people complain about the dupes. I complain about these sites.
Parent is overrated.
No, I don't. Although I *can* see media from other countries and cultures, and I *have* seen that bag-o-sticks famine-victim models have some popularity outside the US as well.
Your horror story sounds chillingly real. I don't know how many times I've gone to download a file online, only to find it's a Linux file compressed with Microsoft tools, etc. Just those kinds of things where it was clear that there was no thought going into it at all.
I know damn well that there is no functionality extended to IE that is unavailable to Any Other Browser. (Microsoft Trolls and Flamers, give it a break this post and keep your stupidity to yourself, no one falls for it anymore!) So we might as well call this what it is: techno-harassment! The unreasonable and gratuitious bigotry and stigma perpetrated against users for not using the "mainstream" choices, i.e. requiring Microsoft Word to submit a resume, requiring one brand of browser, etc.
We need to launch a full-scale counter-offensive, in which we hack code into our systems that fools the world into thinking it's whatever it is "supposed" to be. I would be interested in a "cloaking device" for Firefox that tells the nosey, busybody web server that it *is* Internet Exploiter, a "Moronizer" mode on Emacs (friendly companion to this: http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/demoroniser/ ) which inserts the garbage ASCII characters necessary to fool the recieving party into believing it's a Microslop We^|d document, and generally the equivalent hacks for every application that could be affected.
Like with my internet provider who sternly insisted that they support only Microsoft and Macintosh, so I hacked a script file in and *voila*, best internet connection to a Linux box ever, and I offered to share my "secret" for getting their service to work with Linux so they could start supporting that platform too, and was ignored. Maybe because my sentences are too long?
Anyway, we already have emulators to run Windows-only software in Linux. It's time we took that idea all the way through, and also made some Very Noisy Protests against Government and Corporate techno-harassment!
They can make it in cool colors and re-design it, but can't work fundamental changes that have been needed for a long time. Like removing the Num, Scroll, and Caps Lock keys completely. Two of them are never used by anybody anymore and the third just lets idiots scream louder.
But seriously, we have room to grow for a reason that we never had before: Caesarean births. Now that we have the technology, the circumference of the human skull is no longer constrained to the diameter of the birth canal. Note how earlier people valued wide-hipped women for their child-producing ability, and how today, popular culture values only women with skeletal stork's bodies...a subconcious acknowledgement that natural birth is no longer a factor in evolutionary development.
And which fairy tale universe does this happen in? LOL, neat post, good points, but sometimes I get the feeling that everybody who gives a thin damn about quality at all, already left Microsoft years ago, and the rest will continue to pay for MS products even if the disks come out of the box blank.
Hey, I googled "Myst" in images and one came up. Not my fault if somebody's posting decoys!
OK, we'll use the image you call real. It's still produced with polygons and textures and height fields, et cetera, like all computer graphic images are! Nit-pick all you want. But Myst-classic's artwork was still substandard to Riven's, Riven's artwork was still substandard to Exile's, etc. I would hope it were so! You're supposed to get better at your thing as you go along, after all. This is why they came out with "Real Myst" later - they looked at their earlier work and said, "We need to re-do this so it fits in with the rest of the series better." That's how far computer graphics came in the ten-year span of the Myst series. What was miraculous to produce in it's day is now, as that tired quote I've posted numerous times from Quandary has it, within reach of hobbyists and people on shoe-string budgets. It would be reasonable to expect that our current state of the art will likewise be as common-place ten years from now. I haven't even brought up the work of various online artists using Poser and Lightwave - in many cases, their "hobbyist" work is even superior to the quality of *some* games being sold today! But those programs still cost money - watch for their free software equivalents to come out in the next ten years, and then I'll be right back saying we can now do Riven and Exile on our desktops!
What you fail to realize is that I said (for, what the hundredth time in this thread?) nothing about art. I was saying that the game could be produced in the time alotted with the materials provided. Similar to saying "any one of us has access to the same canvass and paints that da Vinci used to paint the Mona Lisa." And I would have been sandbagged instantly by a swarm of (I have a new name for you:) Slash-gnatters buzzing, "Listen to him! He thinks the Mona Lisa would be as simple as painting a house!", "What an ignoramous! He knows nothing about art!", "He's trying to say da Vinci had no talent, and that anybody could paint like him!", and so on ad infinitum to the infinity-th power.
Lemme turn it back around on all of you, since it is now clear to me what the problem actually is: It is the flamers to this post who know nothing about art, and most especially have no understanding of the creative process. Because creating is building stuff inside your head, and there's never a limitation to when you can do that. Creative people tend to have a part of their brain that searches for new ideas working all the time, waking and yes, even sleeping! For every picture by Leonardo that survives today, you may be sure he had 100 more ideas that never got outside his own head - he saw a flaw in them or didn't find the time in between other projects. Thus, when you have the occasion to produce a creative work, you don't just stand there and go "OK, lemme have my creative idea....UUUU-UUU-UHHH! OK, got one." You instead say (for example), "You want a scrolling platform game? I have six sketches for them kicking around my desk somewhere...let's have a look at one of them and see if one of them will fit." or, "You want me to tattoo a dragon on your back? OK, here's my sketch-book, which dragon design do you want?" or "I just got the bid to do five new songs for the new play - I can use those three other songs I had that didn't fit into the other production and see what else comes up before deadline - maybe I can stitch those lyrics I wrote on the cocktail napkin last night together with that tune I made up in the shower this morning and that will be the fourth song. I'll have to change things, of course, but we'll see how it fits together."
Ask any creative person (particulary those who work in a narrative medium, such as novelists or directors). They don't just pull a concept out of their ass, the way you do a Slashdot flame. Ask to see their studio, and you'll find a flotsam of half-finished ideas, scrawled notes, quick sketches, bits and pieces. They don't put on white robes and chant the Art Prayer. Ideas come to them in mundane places like standing in line at the bank or when taking a shit and squeezing blackheads. It is this fertile field out of which a new creation is born.
So, yes, the inspiration and ideas behind the creation of Myst were probably already concieved by some members of the team months and possibly even years before they ever actually sat down to produce the game. Doubtless, along the way, they tried a few things that didn't work, or came up with new things along the way. You don't count "idea time" as part of the time-scale, because it would be impossible to figure how to bill the hours during which imagination is working!
I feel sorry for some people in here, if their posts reflect the way they actually see the world. Must be very grim, grey, and dark.
My advice to "bosses" who are concerned that their employees aren't slaving like diamond-miners every single second on the clock: compared to what you contribute, be glad they just SHOW UP!
Control just for control's sake! To micromanage your every thought! Control over when you can pee! Control of your dreams! Control of your DNA! Control of the bacteria in your colon! Puppet Masters don't begin to approach it - this is more like possession of your bar-coded, serial-numbered, shrink-wrapped soul. This is the only thing that gives CEOs a woody anymore. Money is just a tool towards that end.
Reminds of the time I saw a "PETA" slogan sticker on a simply HUGE tank of an SUV. I wanted to leave them a note: "What, those animals you love so much don't need a clean environment?"
Nor do I make any such grandiose claim. I'm saying the *tool* would be capable of producing Myst-level-artwork, *in* *the* *right* *hands*.
Books are hard to write, but we have more than five titles to choose from when we walk into a bookstore.
No, on the contrary, you need to go back and read my point. I do not say that we are all TALENTED enough to "write a bestseller". Only that we have the EQUIPMENT to write a best-seller. 15 years ago, only big-shots like Cyan had the EQUIPMENT to render the images of Myst. Today, each of us has the EQUIPMENT to do the same on our home desktops. That says nothing about TALENT.
Just how big a sledgehammer do I need to pound this into your brain? Tell me I missed the point. I WROTE the point!!!