Why do you say that? Not all parents are hysterical idiots who want to teach their children to be stupid. If you were a parent and you tried this game, you would want to keep your child far away from it. I'd rather have my kids play an "adult" game that doesn't treat them like moron, and doesn't teach them that they can't use the English language.
By the way, based on your other posts about Lego Universe and this one, I'm not surprised you were censored on the Lego forums. You have an extremely derogatory and insulting writing style.
Except I don't write the same way on the Lego forums. This is slashdot. We're supposedly adults here. Nothing I could say could be as insulting or as offensive as what the Lego MMO people are doing. They can go fuck themselves for this perversion.
Seriously, it's not cool to treat kids this way. We should be trying to raise an intelligent generation who can lead us into the future, not a bunch of coddled accomplishment grinders.
I should add that the game has very little to do with "having fun with Lego." It's actually more of an indoctrination into the MMO genre. It's more about pointless quests, farming, status symbols, and raising your level than it is about building with Lego.
It's absolutely not something you would want to expose a young child to.
The interview attached to this story really says it all. The "creative director" for Lego Universe is obsessed with polygon counts because he is not creative at all. The game just follows so many gaming cliches. Why does it even have to be a 3D world built from polygons? It could have been so many different things. Instead, it is tired formulae that are poorly executed. There is almost nothing creative there.
You can talk to your friends about it - in exactly the same way you could talk about lego back when you were kids, and didn't have none of this fancy interwebs.
But you can't, not in the same context of "talking" with the same people you are "playing" with. With physical Lego in the pre-interweb ages, yeah, you pretty much needed to be in the same place with your friends. But now, your friends might not be in the same room, they might be in another country. And this game actively tries to stop you from interacting with your friends.
If you were to reverse your analogy, it would be like if you had your friends over to build Lego with you, but your mother prevented any of you saying the words "red brick" or "build another one" under threat of a beating.
I'm not sure what to conclude from your comments - do you think that children should be restricted from having friends who don't live in the same neighborhood as one another?
It stops you talking about your Lego. It stops you from building things with your Lego. You can only build with your Lego under very constrained circumstances.
Again, I ask, have you actually payed the game? If you had, I wouldn't have to explain this to you.
People also forever underestimate the desire of many people to play in environments free from jerks. Let alone keep them away from their kids.
The problem is that the Lego MMO's system is much more inclined to create jerks than to dissuade them. It's extremely fucked up. You're probably imagining it as some kind of utopian system that makes everybody nice. But in reality, the restrictions cause so much trouble that it's basically asking to take griefing to a whole new level.
Bottom line is: if you are so worried about your child's social interactions online or otherwise, why would you even let them near an MMO, even if it is dumbed-down to be supposedly "kid friendly"? It's a recipe for disaster, whichever way you look at it.
You're either going to create kids who are so devious that they can torture other kids in even the most controlled settings, or you're going to create kids who are so hypersensitive that they can't survive life outside of a Fisher-Price world.
Actually, I think the "Chat is limited to a pre-defined dictionary list" will be the most obvious and annoying restriction. Because each typo means you have technically entered a word that is not in the dictionary and your message will be blocked.
I've found the opposite. Words that are in an English dictionary are usually banned. Words that are misspelled or not in the dictionary have a much higher chance of passing the filter.
I got the feeling playing it that the developers just aren't competent. Sure, it was a Beta, but it was horrifically bad.
As I noted up-thread, the "child friendly" measures are so out of control that they offend the intelligence of even the most stupid people. It's almost an insult to humanity and the wonderful vehicle of verbal communication we have evolved. It's absolutely an insult to the spirit of Lego. I wonder if the upper levels of management have any idea how this game is dragging the good name of Lego through the sewer. It is absolutely antithetical to what Lego represents to many of us: creativity, fun, ingenuity and quality.
You can actually type improperly-spelled gibberish into the chat system, and it will allow this through, before it allows a properly spelled polite sentence. And it gets crazier. You can't even give this feedback and register your objection on the game's forums, because they have a ridiculous character limit, and anything meaningful that is said will be censored. Absolutely horrific.
It's hyper-censored in the sense that everything is checked before it's let loose on the general public. But it's not meant to be extremely restrictive.
Except that it is. The chat system is so restricted that it's almost impossible to communicate. It's actually forbidden to say phrases in chat that actually appear in chat generated by the game itself! It's so bad that I feel it's dangerous to children's development. I'd rather have it uncensored, than have children think that this kind of out-of-control censorship is an acceptable model.
If you know anything about professional photography, you immediately know this is a failed "solution". In many cases when you light a scene for photography, it's the DIRECTION that the light comes from that is important together with the amount of light. That's why you rarely see camera-mounted flash used in the studio,
Well, if you knew anything about professional photography, you'd know that on-camera flash definitely has a useful place. That's why you often see a ring-flash (the light actually surrounds the lens, so it comes from directly front-on) employed for fashion, macro and scientific photography. Flash coming from the direction of the lens is actually very useful as a fill-light, when used in moderation.
With the proposed "invention", the direction light comes from will always be the same, close to the lens. It doesn't matter that it's only lighting a part of the scene.
Actually, it would matter. One of the biggest problem with on-camera flash is that it lights the entire scene the same way, leading to highly over-exposed and under-exposed areas. If you can control where that light goes, then you will get a much better result than an on-camera flash that just blasts the scene indiscriminately.
After all, you don't always have access to off-camera lighting, particularly with a compact unit. Of course it's not going to be the same a a set of studio lights (which people don;t carry around with their phones). But it's a step up from non-controllable on-camera flash.
Imagine that the cable company and the phone company decide to protect their private networks by requiring home users to run approved antivirus software. But in order to make sure that the approved antivirus software is running, the customer will have to use a dialer that uses the Trusted Platform Module to make sure that an approved and unmodified operating system kernel is running. No approved kernel, no IP address.
OK, I'm imagining it. If that ever happened, those companies would be out of business within a few weeks if they didn't ditch that policy.
I also don't see how it's similar to anything Apple or Microsoft are doing.
This has nothing to do with Moore's law and everything to do with economies of scale. If it's more profitable to crank out lots of low end chips for mobile devices, they'll do so.
But mobile devices will eventually be as powerful as current desktop machines, so you could just use those chips. Even if desktop PC sales decline, there will still be laptops. And even if both desktops and laptops decline, it's highly unlikely that economies of scale would cause the $1,000 difference you claim.
There's also this thing called competition, which helps keep prices in check.
And how many of them are anywhere near as open as your desktop PC?
As opposed to all the open mobile phone platforms that existed before iPhone and Android? Oh, that's right - they were locked down even tighter back then.
No doubt they desire to push this back upwards in the stack, and I suspect that they will be trying very hard in the next 10 years to do so.
Which must explain why Apple's current desktop OS offering is so much more open than "classic" Mac OS, and comes with a UNIX command line, and contributes to Open Source projects, etc.
Again, competition. If Apple were to close down the desktop OS, they would lose a lot of customers. And there's always Linux - or is there some nefarious scheme in your worldview where Apple and Microsoft will somehow erase Linux from existence?
And if you don't believe me, I suggest taking a close look at processors from both ARM and Intel that are coming in the next few years. They're -very- geared to delivering performance in mobile, low power situations.
That's great. What's so bad about making energy-efficient processors? Sure as hell beats some of the machines from back in the day, which sucked down the kilowatts, yet weren't much more powerful than a pocket calculator.
By all means, feel free to believe that we are facing some kind of technological doomsday scenario on the horizon. The rest of us will just get on with using our tools effectively and enjoying the marvels of technology and human innovation.
P.S: People outside of the UK haven't paid the license fee. Also, thinking that the license fee completely pays for the content is untrue. It is also paid for by income such as licensing. Which was part of my point. By eliminating this source of income, the license fee will have to go up, or programming will have to be cut.
so anyone wishing to profit would have to pay; normal people, however could do as they liked with the content
So, if "normal people"(i.e: customers) didn't have to pay, then who would buy the rights to distribute if their potential customers could just get it for free anyway?
Yes Nokia/Symbian is still huge and prosperous, except for the US market. Many statistics you see around showing Apple or RIM or Google at half the market are simply not taking into consideration other markets as well.
What does that have to do with whether what Nokia sells are considered smartphones or not? I never said Nokia didn't have a large marketshare. But if you look at the vast majority of those phones, they are pretty dumb.
Because, the majority will drag the minority with them. You can have your open machine, but it'll cost you a thousand or so more than it does today
Why? Do you have an argument based on evidence, or are you just declaring this? The evidence shows that Moore's law is still in effect. It's not likely we'll have a sudden transistor shortage.
And on the mobile end, you won't have any open options at all.
Oh right, like the ever-declining mobile options we have today? Oh, that's right, we have more choices, and more power than ever before.
It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing, but Apple and MS certainly want it to be that way.
Again, where is your evidence of this? Back in the real world, both Apple and Microsoft have been offering more options in terms of OS and software than they ever have before.
Well, don't go thinking you're somehow exempt from this. You get the ball and chain too...
Why? Is it not possible to have locked-down devices for the people who don't know what they are doing, and more powerful, open machines for those who do?
I don't see why this would have to be an all-or-nothing deal. Mom and Grandpa have their iPad, I have my desktop workstation.
You don't need all that functionality, only a tiny niche of geeks do. Let us lock that down for you...
Hell yes! To stop all the idiots out there from randomly executing applications would be a huge benefit, might just shut down spam and malware overnight.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't have kids. Simple as that.
Why do you say that? Not all parents are hysterical idiots who want to teach their children to be stupid. If you were a parent and you tried this game, you would want to keep your child far away from it. I'd rather have my kids play an "adult" game that doesn't treat them like moron, and doesn't teach them that they can't use the English language.
By the way, based on your other posts about Lego Universe and this one, I'm not surprised you were censored on the Lego forums. You have an extremely derogatory and insulting writing style.
Except I don't write the same way on the Lego forums. This is slashdot. We're supposedly adults here. Nothing I could say could be as insulting or as offensive as what the Lego MMO people are doing. They can go fuck themselves for this perversion.
Seriously, it's not cool to treat kids this way. We should be trying to raise an intelligent generation who can lead us into the future, not a bunch of coddled accomplishment grinders.
Surely you'd do the logo (and any surface texture) with a bumpmap?
A bump-map is just another type of texture-map.
P.S:
I should add that the game has very little to do with "having fun with Lego." It's actually more of an indoctrination into the MMO genre. It's more about pointless quests, farming, status symbols, and raising your level than it is about building with Lego.
It's absolutely not something you would want to expose a young child to.
The interview attached to this story really says it all. The "creative director" for Lego Universe is obsessed with polygon counts because he is not creative at all. The game just follows so many gaming cliches. Why does it even have to be a 3D world built from polygons? It could have been so many different things. Instead, it is tired formulae that are poorly executed. There is almost nothing creative there.
You can talk to your friends about it - in exactly the same way you could talk about lego back when you were kids, and didn't have none of this fancy interwebs.
But you can't, not in the same context of "talking" with the same people you are "playing" with. With physical Lego in the pre-interweb ages, yeah, you pretty much needed to be in the same place with your friends. But now, your friends might not be in the same room, they might be in another country. And this game actively tries to stop you from interacting with your friends.
If you were to reverse your analogy, it would be like if you had your friends over to build Lego with you, but your mother prevented any of you saying the words "red brick" or "build another one" under threat of a beating.
I'm not sure what to conclude from your comments - do you think that children should be restricted from having friends who don't live in the same neighborhood as one another?
It stops you talking about your Lego. It stops you from building things with your Lego. You can only build with your Lego under very constrained circumstances.
Again, I ask, have you actually payed the game? If you had, I wouldn't have to explain this to you.
People also forever underestimate the desire of many people to play in environments free from jerks. Let alone keep them away from their kids.
The problem is that the Lego MMO's system is much more inclined to create jerks than to dissuade them. It's extremely fucked up. You're probably imagining it as some kind of utopian system that makes everybody nice. But in reality, the restrictions cause so much trouble that it's basically asking to take griefing to a whole new level.
Bottom line is: if you are so worried about your child's social interactions online or otherwise, why would you even let them near an MMO, even if it is dumbed-down to be supposedly "kid friendly"? It's a recipe for disaster, whichever way you look at it.
You're either going to create kids who are so devious that they can torture other kids in even the most controlled settings, or you're going to create kids who are so hypersensitive that they can't survive life outside of a Fisher-Price world.
Actually, I think the "Chat is limited to a pre-defined dictionary list" will be the most obvious and annoying restriction. Because each typo means you have technically entered a word that is not in the dictionary and your message will be blocked.
I've found the opposite. Words that are in an English dictionary are usually banned. Words that are misspelled or not in the dictionary have a much higher chance of passing the filter.
This game is not stopping you doing anything you could normally do with physical lego (in terms of sharing/talking about it, of course).
Say what? Have you actually played the game? It absolutely does stop you from doing many things you can do with physical Lego.
Aren't they missing out Android in the Linux numbers?
No, because Android is not the same OS as Linux. Should Mac OS X share be included in BSD's figures?
I got the feeling playing it that the developers just aren't competent. Sure, it was a Beta, but it was horrifically bad.
As I noted up-thread, the "child friendly" measures are so out of control that they offend the intelligence of even the most stupid people. It's almost an insult to humanity and the wonderful vehicle of verbal communication we have evolved. It's absolutely an insult to the spirit of Lego. I wonder if the upper levels of management have any idea how this game is dragging the good name of Lego through the sewer. It is absolutely antithetical to what Lego represents to many of us: creativity, fun, ingenuity and quality.
You can actually type improperly-spelled gibberish into the chat system, and it will allow this through, before it allows a properly spelled polite sentence. And it gets crazier. You can't even give this feedback and register your objection on the game's forums, because they have a ridiculous character limit, and anything meaningful that is said will be censored. Absolutely horrific.
It's hyper-censored in the sense that everything is checked before it's let loose on the general public. But it's not meant to be extremely restrictive.
Except that it is. The chat system is so restricted that it's almost impossible to communicate. It's actually forbidden to say phrases in chat that actually appear in chat generated by the game itself! It's so bad that I feel it's dangerous to children's development. I'd rather have it uncensored, than have children think that this kind of out-of-control censorship is an acceptable model.
If you know anything about professional photography, you immediately know this is a failed "solution". In many cases when you light a scene for photography, it's the DIRECTION that the light comes from that is important together with the amount of light. That's why you rarely see camera-mounted flash used in the studio,
Well, if you knew anything about professional photography, you'd know that on-camera flash definitely has a useful place. That's why you often see a ring-flash (the light actually surrounds the lens, so it comes from directly front-on) employed for fashion, macro and scientific photography. Flash coming from the direction of the lens is actually very useful as a fill-light, when used in moderation.
With the proposed "invention", the direction light comes from will always be the same, close to the lens. It doesn't matter that it's only lighting a part of the scene.
Actually, it would matter. One of the biggest problem with on-camera flash is that it lights the entire scene the same way, leading to highly over-exposed and under-exposed areas. If you can control where that light goes, then you will get a much better result than an on-camera flash that just blasts the scene indiscriminately.
After all, you don't always have access to off-camera lighting, particularly with a compact unit. Of course it's not going to be the same a a set of studio lights (which people don;t carry around with their phones). But it's a step up from non-controllable on-camera flash.
Imagine that the cable company and the phone company decide to protect their private networks by requiring home users to run approved antivirus software. But in order to make sure that the approved antivirus software is running, the customer will have to use a dialer that uses the Trusted Platform Module to make sure that an approved and unmodified operating system kernel is running. No approved kernel, no IP address.
OK, I'm imagining it. If that ever happened, those companies would be out of business within a few weeks if they didn't ditch that policy.
I also don't see how it's similar to anything Apple or Microsoft are doing.
Ok, so what can your android/iOS device do that a symbian phone cant?
Be user friendly?
This has nothing to do with Moore's law and everything to do with economies of scale. If it's more profitable to crank out lots of low end chips for mobile devices, they'll do so.
But mobile devices will eventually be as powerful as current desktop machines, so you could just use those chips. Even if desktop PC sales decline, there will still be laptops. And even if both desktops and laptops decline, it's highly unlikely that economies of scale would cause the $1,000 difference you claim.
There's also this thing called competition, which helps keep prices in check.
And how many of them are anywhere near as open as your desktop PC?
As opposed to all the open mobile phone platforms that existed before iPhone and Android? Oh, that's right - they were locked down even tighter back then.
No doubt they desire to push this back upwards in the stack, and I suspect that they will be trying very hard in the next 10 years to do so.
Which must explain why Apple's current desktop OS offering is so much more open than "classic" Mac OS, and comes with a UNIX command line, and contributes to Open Source projects, etc.
Again, competition. If Apple were to close down the desktop OS, they would lose a lot of customers. And there's always Linux - or is there some nefarious scheme in your worldview where Apple and Microsoft will somehow erase Linux from existence?
And if you don't believe me, I suggest taking a close look at processors from both ARM and Intel that are coming in the next few years. They're -very- geared to delivering performance in mobile, low power situations.
That's great. What's so bad about making energy-efficient processors? Sure as hell beats some of the machines from back in the day, which sucked down the kilowatts, yet weren't much more powerful than a pocket calculator.
By all means, feel free to believe that we are facing some kind of technological doomsday scenario on the horizon. The rest of us will just get on with using our tools effectively and enjoying the marvels of technology and human innovation.
P.S: People outside of the UK haven't paid the license fee. Also, thinking that the license fee completely pays for the content is untrue. It is also paid for by income such as licensing. Which was part of my point. By eliminating this source of income, the license fee will have to go up, or programming will have to be cut.
so anyone wishing to profit would have to pay; normal people, however could do as they liked with the content
So, if "normal people"(i.e: customers) didn't have to pay, then who would buy the rights to distribute if their potential customers could just get it for free anyway?
Yes Nokia/Symbian is still huge and prosperous, except for the US market. Many statistics you see around showing Apple or RIM or Google at half the market are simply not taking into consideration other markets as well.
What does that have to do with whether what Nokia sells are considered smartphones or not? I never said Nokia didn't have a large marketshare. But if you look at the vast majority of those phones, they are pretty dumb.
Because, the majority will drag the minority with them. You can have your open machine, but it'll cost you a thousand or so more than it does today
Why? Do you have an argument based on evidence, or are you just declaring this? The evidence shows that Moore's law is still in effect. It's not likely we'll have a sudden transistor shortage.
And on the mobile end, you won't have any open options at all.
Oh right, like the ever-declining mobile options we have today? Oh, that's right, we have more choices, and more power than ever before.
It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing, but Apple and MS certainly want it to be that way.
Again, where is your evidence of this? Back in the real world, both Apple and Microsoft have been offering more options in terms of OS and software than they ever have before.
Well, don't go thinking you're somehow exempt from this. You get the ball and chain too...
Why? Is it not possible to have locked-down devices for the people who don't know what they are doing, and more powerful, open machines for those who do?
I don't see why this would have to be an all-or-nothing deal. Mom and Grandpa have their iPad, I have my desktop workstation.
Seeing that the smartphone as a term originated from Nokia.
Irrelevant. Meanings change, and what Nokia mostly sells would not be considered a "smartphone" by contemporary definition.
BMP?? I'm sorry, did I time-warp back to 1995?
Symbian has always been the OS for smartphones.
If that's the case, then why are the phones running Symbian not too smart?
You don't need all that functionality, only a tiny niche of geeks do. Let us lock that down for you...
Hell yes! To stop all the idiots out there from randomly executing applications would be a huge benefit, might just shut down spam and malware overnight.