If everybody keeps bunging their output full of really shoddy-looking CGI, like you've been doing, nobody'll ever have to spend huge amounts on production again. Bring back models and motion-control and stuff, say I, it looks loads better.
Thing is, even if his predicted apocalypse came and suddenly everybody was knocking out low-budget stuff, they'd all immediately start trying to outdo each other again, and soon enough we'd be back where we started.
The fact that Napster's business model means that as soon as you stop subscribing, all the music you've acquired is rendered inactive via a DRM timebomb, and just like that, it's as if you never had it at all. It's hardly surprising that people don't really see this as a compelling use of their disposable income.
A light sprinkling of non-interactivity here and there is fine. It strings the game together and provides you with a quick breather before you get back into the action. The Grand Theft Auto games do it well, for instance.
However, crap like the Metal Gear Solid "games" get it all wrong. When MGS2 came out, it was being hyped to the skies, so I rented it to see what all the fuss was about. I was a bit baffled to find that it was a series of incredibly stilted dialogues with two-minute interactive portions in between. There seemed to be about two hours of actual gameplay in the whole thing, strung together by an abysmal story acted out by planks. It was like Dragon's Lair without the wow factor, or the humour. Really, folks, if I want to watch a movie, I'll watch a movie. And it'll have proper actors and storylines and stuff in. Don't waste my time with this nonsense.
I recently had a choice between two jobs, and chose the one that paid me 75% what the higher-paid one would have. I did this because I figured it was going to be a more enjoyable job, and it was enough money. Sure, I'ld like more money. Who wouldn't? But I'm not prepared to compromise my health or happiness for the sake of an extra few grand. Double or treble my wages and I might think about it, but otherwise, it's not worth it.
It's been in the works for a long time
on
iCell in the Works?
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· Score: 2, Funny
I know someone who's seen the prototypes over a year ago now - other people in the same company were working on it. When I said "they're taking us back to a dial interface, aren't they?" This person said nothing, but their face said it all...
Hmm. Yeah. I was in Tallinn, Estonia in March. It was minus Idunnohowmany with a howling wind blowing off the (frozen solid) Baltic. I took my phone out of my pocket to take a snapshot with it and within about a minute it had died of cold. It was never quite the same again, and a few weeks later it packed in altogether.
Somehow I don't imagine you get these problems with Nokias, given that Helsinki's a short helicopter trip across the water.
Which could mean that crime has indeed fallen, or that people have become so disillusioned with how it is dealt with that they don't even bother calling the police. If you're ever unlucky enough to have your house broken into or your car stolen, you'll soon see why.
...Or maybe biology just doesn't lend itself to being neatly classified in the way we'd like, and that exceptions to rules aren't really exceptions to rules, it's just that there are no rules, just more or less broad patterns which look like rules.
There are various criteria by which you can judge what constitutes a species, and to be honest it does get slightly woolly round the edges, but one good rule of thumb is that if two animals can mate to produce fertile offspring, they're both of the same species. A horse and a donkey can produce a mule, which is infertile. Likewise, these two squirrels cannot produce fertile offspring. Therefore it could be argued that by this measure, they are two different species, even though at first glance they look exactly the same. Come back in, I dunno, fifty thousand years, and they might look or behave very different from one another, which presumably would make it easier for the more simple-minded to claim that they're two different species (and doubtless that they always were).
Of course, if they've no reason to chance appearance, why should they? on the other hand, things can happen the other way - some external factor puts enough pressure on a local group of animals to cause a significant change in a short space of time. I remember seeing in a documentary some mice who lived in and around freezers, and had developed shaggy coats and stronger teeth to bite through the frozen food. Natural selection in action, baby. Now, this has to have happened very quickly indeed, and it may follow that they will eventually become a separate species. Who knows?
Anyway, point is, this stuff happens in different ways, the definition of a species is sometimes a slightly subjective thing, and idiot creationists will use this fuzziness to try to claim that it what they call macroevolution doesn't happen at all, and that science has got it all wrong, and so on. It's just sophistry aimed at simpletons.
I dunno. I think he raises an interesting point - even with pretty limited surveillance technology, this guy's been able to find what he was looking for, because he wanted to find it badly enough.
Which is probably not something you could say of the US's attitude to old Osama bin Goldstein.
Actually, that's a good thing in many ways, strange as that may sound. It means that there are people around who aren't bothered about keeping their seat, and can vote according to their conscience without worrying about the implications for their political career. If it wasn't for the House of Lords facing down the government over "Control Orders", the Home Secretary would have the power to indefinitely detain terrorist suspects without trial and without running it past a judge. They just wouldn't stand for it and kept sending the Bill back to the Commons during a marathon debate that went right through to the next morning. Andrew Marr, the BBC's political correspondent, spoke about these old duffers sitting in the canteen stuffing huge fried breakfasts down their throats to give them the strength to see it off. It seems profoundly undemocratic, but sometimes their not being elected works out in the best interests of the nation.
We've got a government which was elected to power by 22% of the electorate, and even a large proportion of that 22% seem to hate them, and felt that to vote for them was the least worst option, faced with the alternative of a Tory party fixated on petty-minded immigration and taxation policies, or the opportunist Liberal Democrats, whose sole guiding principle seems to be "we disagree with any contentious policy anybody else announces".
But worse than that, all the main political parties focused their election campaigns on a small number of seats which they expected to decide the election, assuming that it wasn't worth fighting tooth and nail for areas which could be expected to conform to type. Within those constituencies, they were interested only in wooing a small number of swing voters, meaning that they all had broadly similar manifestos, differing only in fairly minor details. The total number of votes they were chasing was estimated by one respectable source which I can't remember right now to be in the region of 7,000. Yes, that's right, the 2005 UK General Election was all about getting 7,000 people to vote the right way, and to hell with everybody else. Political ideologies? Old hat nowadays. It's all about the acquisition and retention of power and absolutely nothing else.
The parliamentary majority secured by Labour through this hollow victory has until very recently been sufficient for them to do force through just about any legislation they want, very little of which seems to be in the public interest. Endless "anti-terror" legislation is forced through without many people noticing, under the cover of smokesceens like the foxhunting "debate" which they kept rolling for years because it was emotive and contentious enough to distract people without actually mattering a damn in the grand scheme of things.
So we're fucked on three counts: Most people's votes don't matter in terms of deciding who gets into power, all the main parties are essentially the same anyway, and the Government does whatever the hell it pleases once it gets in through weight of numbers and a spineless opposition.
Maybe I'm all alone here, but I don't think I've ever clicked on a Coral cache link that worked. It times out every single time, no matter what the content is.
Find me empirical evidence indicating that everyone's fingerprints are actually unique?
Thought not.
Whole thing's based on supposition and received wisdom, and is an utterly stupid basis for a security system. And I don't think much of the degree to which fingerprint evidence is relied on in court, either. Still, you try convincing a jury that every cop show and courtroom drama they've ever seen has misled them.
Re:How many of you have it on the carpet.
on
Xbox 360 Very Unstable
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Maybe, but it won't be. It'll be on kids' bedroom floors, or buried under a pile of DVDs and stinky T-shirts in some student's dorm room, because those sort of people make up a large part of its market. To design the product without taking into account the conditions in which it will typically be used, whether it's advisable to use it like that or not, would be very silly, and I'm sure the product designers had more sense than to overlook something so obvious in testing.
Is that why those seven million people are so irritable and miserable-looking all the time? It's one of the most hostile environments I've ever encountered, full of self-important pricks who think they're Really Busy and In A Hurry and woe betide you if you get in their way. The mayor's transport policy seems to be to make it so annoying to drive your car that you'll give it up and use the inadequate, unreliable, overpriced public transport system lest you go on a killing spree. There can't be anywhere in the world that gives so little for so much money. Those people are mostly there either because the jobs are, or because they've been conned into thinking it's where it's at. Like the man says, if more companies set up somewhere pleasant, we could start getting away from this silly London-centric view of things and maybe London would be less of a dump.
It's not concern about explosions that's the problem, it's more that it will instantly freeze anything it touches, which they reckon would be much harder to deal with than a normal accident, which actually very rarely result in fires or anything like that. I dread to think what sort of a mess any passengers would be in if they came into contact with liquid hydroogen - I'm guessing you'd shatter like you were made of porcelain.
Slashdot Mirror
Er, smaller audiences. Economies of scale. It's not exactly a mystery.
If everybody keeps bunging their output full of really shoddy-looking CGI, like you've been doing, nobody'll ever have to spend huge amounts on production again. Bring back models and motion-control and stuff, say I, it looks loads better.
Thing is, even if his predicted apocalypse came and suddenly everybody was knocking out low-budget stuff, they'd all immediately start trying to outdo each other again, and soon enough we'd be back where we started.
Would be more than a bit annoying if you had to wait a whole day to get into your house because you got stuck in traffic.
The fact that Napster's business model means that as soon as you stop subscribing, all the music you've acquired is rendered inactive via a DRM timebomb, and just like that, it's as if you never had it at all. It's hardly surprising that people don't really see this as a compelling use of their disposable income.
A light sprinkling of non-interactivity here and there is fine. It strings the game together and provides you with a quick breather before you get back into the action. The Grand Theft Auto games do it well, for instance.
However, crap like the Metal Gear Solid "games" get it all wrong. When MGS2 came out, it was being hyped to the skies, so I rented it to see what all the fuss was about. I was a bit baffled to find that it was a series of incredibly stilted dialogues with two-minute interactive portions in between. There seemed to be about two hours of actual gameplay in the whole thing, strung together by an abysmal story acted out by planks. It was like Dragon's Lair without the wow factor, or the humour. Really, folks, if I want to watch a movie, I'll watch a movie. And it'll have proper actors and storylines and stuff in. Don't waste my time with this nonsense.
Actually, the Honda Jazz, and now the new Honda Civic, has the tank under the front passenger seats, to liberate more luggage space.
Anyway, when was the last time you saw a car blow up by the roadside, Hollywood-style? It doesn't really happen.
I recently had a choice between two jobs, and chose the one that paid me 75% what the higher-paid one would have. I did this because I figured it was going to be a more enjoyable job, and it was enough money. Sure, I'ld like more money. Who wouldn't? But I'm not prepared to compromise my health or happiness for the sake of an extra few grand. Double or treble my wages and I might think about it, but otherwise, it's not worth it.
I know someone who's seen the prototypes over a year ago now - other people in the same company were working on it. When I said "they're taking us back to a dial interface, aren't they?" This person said nothing, but their face said it all...
I found her more than adequately accomodating myself.
Hmm. Yeah. I was in Tallinn, Estonia in March. It was minus Idunnohowmany with a howling wind blowing off the (frozen solid) Baltic. I took my phone out of my pocket to take a snapshot with it and within about a minute it had died of cold. It was never quite the same again, and a few weeks later it packed in altogether.
Somehow I don't imagine you get these problems with Nokias, given that Helsinki's a short helicopter trip across the water.
Reported crime.
Which could mean that crime has indeed fallen, or that people have become so disillusioned with how it is dealt with that they don't even bother calling the police. If you're ever unlucky enough to have your house broken into or your car stolen, you'll soon see why.
...Or maybe biology just doesn't lend itself to being neatly classified in the way we'd like, and that exceptions to rules aren't really exceptions to rules, it's just that there are no rules, just more or less broad patterns which look like rules.
Erm, right.
There are various criteria by which you can judge what constitutes a species, and to be honest it does get slightly woolly round the edges, but one good rule of thumb is that if two animals can mate to produce fertile offspring, they're both of the same species. A horse and a donkey can produce a mule, which is infertile. Likewise, these two squirrels cannot produce fertile offspring. Therefore it could be argued that by this measure, they are two different species, even though at first glance they look exactly the same. Come back in, I dunno, fifty thousand years, and they might look or behave very different from one another, which presumably would make it easier for the more simple-minded to claim that they're two different species (and doubtless that they always were).
Of course, if they've no reason to chance appearance, why should they? on the other hand, things can happen the other way - some external factor puts enough pressure on a local group of animals to cause a significant change in a short space of time. I remember seeing in a documentary some mice who lived in and around freezers, and had developed shaggy coats and stronger teeth to bite through the frozen food. Natural selection in action, baby. Now, this has to have happened very quickly indeed, and it may follow that they will eventually become a separate species. Who knows?
Anyway, point is, this stuff happens in different ways, the definition of a species is sometimes a slightly subjective thing, and idiot creationists will use this fuzziness to try to claim that it what they call macroevolution doesn't happen at all, and that science has got it all wrong, and so on. It's just sophistry aimed at simpletons.
I dunno. I think he raises an interesting point - even with pretty limited surveillance technology, this guy's been able to find what he was looking for, because he wanted to find it badly enough.
Which is probably not something you could say of the US's attitude to old Osama bin Goldstein.
Actually, that's a good thing in many ways, strange as that may sound. It means that there are people around who aren't bothered about keeping their seat, and can vote according to their conscience without worrying about the implications for their political career. If it wasn't for the House of Lords facing down the government over "Control Orders", the Home Secretary would have the power to indefinitely detain terrorist suspects without trial and without running it past a judge. They just wouldn't stand for it and kept sending the Bill back to the Commons during a marathon debate that went right through to the next morning. Andrew Marr, the BBC's political correspondent, spoke about these old duffers sitting in the canteen stuffing huge fried breakfasts down their throats to give them the strength to see it off. It seems profoundly undemocratic, but sometimes their not being elected works out in the best interests of the nation.
Oh, you live in West Belfast? :)
The UK, democratic? That's pretty funny.
We've got a government which was elected to power by 22% of the electorate, and even a large proportion of that 22% seem to hate them, and felt that to vote for them was the least worst option, faced with the alternative of a Tory party fixated on petty-minded immigration and taxation policies, or the opportunist Liberal Democrats, whose sole guiding principle seems to be "we disagree with any contentious policy anybody else announces".
But worse than that, all the main political parties focused their election campaigns on a small number of seats which they expected to decide the election, assuming that it wasn't worth fighting tooth and nail for areas which could be expected to conform to type. Within those constituencies, they were interested only in wooing a small number of swing voters, meaning that they all had broadly similar manifestos, differing only in fairly minor details. The total number of votes they were chasing was estimated by one respectable source which I can't remember right now to be in the region of 7,000. Yes, that's right, the 2005 UK General Election was all about getting 7,000 people to vote the right way, and to hell with everybody else. Political ideologies? Old hat nowadays. It's all about the acquisition and retention of power and absolutely nothing else.
The parliamentary majority secured by Labour through this hollow victory has until very recently been sufficient for them to do force through just about any legislation they want, very little of which seems to be in the public interest. Endless "anti-terror" legislation is forced through without many people noticing, under the cover of smokesceens like the foxhunting "debate" which they kept rolling for years because it was emotive and contentious enough to distract people without actually mattering a damn in the grand scheme of things.
So we're fucked on three counts: Most people's votes don't matter in terms of deciding who gets into power, all the main parties are essentially the same anyway, and the Government does whatever the hell it pleases once it gets in through weight of numbers and a spineless opposition.
As Gil Scott-Heron said, "Mandate my ass".
Maybe I'm all alone here, but I don't think I've ever clicked on a Coral cache link that worked. It times out every single time, no matter what the content is.
Nah. Even they can see through that.
And I don't know very much about the relative technological merits of either product. It's just got a cooler, more memorable name.
Find me empirical evidence indicating that everyone's fingerprints are actually unique?
Thought not.
Whole thing's based on supposition and received wisdom, and is an utterly stupid basis for a security system. And I don't think much of the degree to which fingerprint evidence is relied on in court, either. Still, you try convincing a jury that every cop show and courtroom drama they've ever seen has misled them.
Maybe, but it won't be. It'll be on kids' bedroom floors, or buried under a pile of DVDs and stinky T-shirts in some student's dorm room, because those sort of people make up a large part of its market. To design the product without taking into account the conditions in which it will typically be used, whether it's advisable to use it like that or not, would be very silly, and I'm sure the product designers had more sense than to overlook something so obvious in testing.
He's not stupid, he's JUST JETLAGGED, OK?
Now, who moved the exit?
Is that why those seven million people are so irritable and miserable-looking all the time? It's one of the most hostile environments I've ever encountered, full of self-important pricks who think they're Really Busy and In A Hurry and woe betide you if you get in their way. The mayor's transport policy seems to be to make it so annoying to drive your car that you'll give it up and use the inadequate, unreliable, overpriced public transport system lest you go on a killing spree. There can't be anywhere in the world that gives so little for so much money. Those people are mostly there either because the jobs are, or because they've been conned into thinking it's where it's at. Like the man says, if more companies set up somewhere pleasant, we could start getting away from this silly London-centric view of things and maybe London would be less of a dump.
It's not concern about explosions that's the problem, it's more that it will instantly freeze anything it touches, which they reckon would be much harder to deal with than a normal accident, which actually very rarely result in fires or anything like that. I dread to think what sort of a mess any passengers would be in if they came into contact with liquid hydroogen - I'm guessing you'd shatter like you were made of porcelain.