JonKatz wrote: "[...] the movie takes this oddly American cinematic genre [...]"
It might be true that nowadays teen movies are primarily made (and viewed) in the USA, but Israel and Germany had their jointly produced Eis am Stiel ("Lemon Popsicle" in the US) series from 1979 to 1988 starring Zachi Noy among others. They weren't afraid to show full frontal nudity - they probably had to, the movies being so bad that otherwise they would have all flopped. The US movie Porky's seems to have been inspired by these flicks.
The series portrays teens as stupid drooling sex addicts whose primary motivation is invariably getting laid. There are still a couple of teen movies made in Germany from time to time, but since the Germans like (and partially understand) US lifestyle they also import all of the US teen movies.
This goes to show that the US aren't the only nation capable of making silly teen movies.
Neverwinter Nights, Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment are D&D, yes, but they are NOT MMORPGs. Even though I believe "MMORPG" is an artificial term coined by some marketing idiot at Sony Online Entertainment, that doesn't nullify its meaning.
If you want an ORIGINAL roleplaying game, play Gothic. It should be released in the English speaking territories about now. I've been playing it for over 6 months and it's still fun:)
Yes, it wasn't hardware accelerated and maybe it would stutter when dragging a larger window, but it worked. I don't see why this is such an innovation.
What will happen now when other manufacturers release their new hard drives? Will all controller manufacturers have to keep updating their controllers to include support for everyone's proprietary ATA extensions or will they all have firmware so you can use whichever driver matches your drive?
What if your brand new 330 GB slave drive isn't from the same manufacturer as the master one? Will you there be "multi-BIOS" capable controllers or are you gonna need one card for each drive, eating up all your IRQs?
Does this call for a "next big thing" to replace the IDE/ATA standard or will we get ourselves into the same awkward situation that gave us MS-DOS' "memory management" back then, i.e. a patch to patch the patch that fixed the patch?
160 GB on one drive does sound cool, but I hope some standard is on the horizon. Something as fundamental as a hard drive shouldn't be left to conflicting proprietary standards..
Their "German" was fake and it made no sense at all, but if you speak both German and English it's twice as funny anyway:)
In one of their skits ("couple in a Bavarian restaurant") they speak genuine German, and I was very surprised because John Cleese had nearly perfect pronounciation of every single word, it's only the melody that's a little odd. I always thought the Brits couldn't do that..
A recent test in Zurich showed that as long as you have a notebook with a 802.11b wireless Ethernet card, you can freely use someone else's high speed Net connections as long as your battery lasts.
In about 2 hours of driving through central Zurich, the testers found no less than a dozen open, unrestricted corporate wireless LANs. Getting the gateway's IP was not a problem thanks to most 802.11b base station's built in DHCP server. If you live near any of these companies, all you need is an external antenna for your card and off you go at someone else's cost - and it's their own fault.
But what's even greater is that around Lake Zurich, you can use broadband 802.11b for free, legally:)
All these projects, not totally unlike DeCSS and the likes, basically anything that big stupid US corporations hate, could profit from hosting outside the USA. Well, not just hosting, but a bit more.
I'd be willing to host any of these projects on one of the machines I have access to. I'm in Switzerland, so none of the EU and definitely none of the US laws apply here. If Kenyon and Kenyon wanted to send me one of those cute legal letters, fine, they could. If they wanted it to have any legal effect at all, they'd have to spend quite some money or work their connections to Swiss law offices. I doubt that they would do that, at least not quickly. International law experts might want to give me a little more wisdom in that area, though =)
Sooo.. If you think this is a good idea and have some CueCat related stuff to host, I guess I might be able to give you some free webspace and take full responsibility for hosting should any (valid) legal action be taken against me. Wow, I almost sound like a lawyer.
The article talks about how the "micropayment wars are over" and that PayPal is oh so great and all-knowing. How come people outside the US can't sign up then? Please, if you write an article that only concerns US citizens, state that fact, too. Slashdot is international enough for that.
Gee, I thought the US had no problems at all getting DSL or cable up and running, and that WE were having a hard time. I work at an ISP that, amongst other services, has been selling DSL for about two years. In Switzerland, Swisscom's monopoly is still very much intact. Swisscom is the company that was formed when the federal telco (and the only one we had back then), Telekom, was privatized. Competition on the telco market has only been allowed since around 98, and that's why most of the copper still belongs to Swisscom.
So a client contacts us to get a line, we have Swisscom offer something and send their offer to the customer directly. The customer signs our contract as well as Swisscom's, and that's basically it. About a week or two from that moment, the line should be up and running. At least if you're not more than 8 km away from the next switch. When there are connectivity problems, you have a choice of calling us (and we will relay the problem to Swisscom if we didn't cause it) or Swisscom directly. Since every installed leased line has a serial number, and every Swisscom leased line contract includes a support number to call, the client is independent.
It would still be safer to call us, because we can check if the problem's on our side. I've seen quite a few ISPs, and most of them have a similar setup. Some (the other one I work at, for example) have their own copper and therefore won't have to contract or outsource anywhere along the way.
What's really scary is that Swisscom is thinking about offering DSL service through their own ISP, the blue window. They have the largest market share already, because they didn't play fair when they started. We pay for local calls, much more for long distance (anything above 10 km), and they were the first to get a "local rate at any distance" sort of ISP number. Figures, their mother company (Swisscom, remember) created this type of service specifically for them. Well, thousands of clients flocked to the new ISP and dozens of local ISPs died in an instant from the shock. Local ISPs couldn't even get such a super-special number until about two months later. blue window has been riding on that wave of customers since then... The world's not fair. But I digress..
Well, perhaps I didn't include enough info. I compared the first-generation PS2 games to the first-generation Dreamcast games. And, in comparison, I think the PS2 gets second place. I know that first-generation titles can never come close to what fourth or fifth-generation games look like, but all in all I think that the PS2 had one of the worst collections of launch titles so far.
When you mention quality control, I think you see that too much from the technical perspective. Sure, you won't see any (or too many) games that crash or have glaring bugs. I wasn't talking about that, because something like that exists on any system. I'm talking about the quality of gameplay, and the depth of the games. In short, it's Sega or Nintendo saying "Sorry, we won't let you release that crappy game for our system" while Sony says "Yeah, whatever, go ahead."
I think the Saturn had potential, and the price wars between Sony and Sega let a lot of this potential go unused. Well, maybe the system was just a bitch to program on, at least that's what seemed to be the general opinion amongst developers. Still, with Sega backing it and with all its in-house arcade titles, I'd love to see what the system could have grown to be if the PSX had never come along.
And yes, I do play my Dreamcast, and I do so a lot. I love Crazy Taxi for its innovation and "enjoy in 5-minute doses" style. I played MDK2 till the sun came up the weekend I got it. We had a ton of fun with DoA2. The last time I had this much fun with a console system was when Bomberman came out for the SNES. And that is precisely what the PSX (and probably PS2) is missing. It's that certain magic other consoles like the NES, SNES and Genesis had.
Yes, I said Xbox. Seems Microsoft removed the dash from the name. A few reasons why I think the PS2 is not worth buying:
No good games so far
Hardware's potential is not being used in current games library
Sony aims to create an "entertainment monopoly", and the PS2 is one of the cornerstones
Sony is a consumer electronics company, not a games company. They don't give a shit about the quality of the games. Which leads us to:
The PlayStation has a games library of over 500 titles. Roughly 20 - 30 of those were huge hits, and some of them only in niche genres (music/dance games etc.) The rest just.. Umm.. Sucked.
I'm trying not to be biased. I've loved gaming on computers and consoles since the C64, Apple ][ and NES. Like many people, I've played most of the great hits that came out on such systems ever since Wizball and Paradroid were released.
When the Playstation 1 came out, I was a Saturn owner, and naturally felt threatened by the huge company called Sony entering the games market. But after a while I got used to the new player and saw the Saturn face certain death, despite all the great and innovative titles available for the system. Sony crushed Sega. First through huge price drops, then by seducing all sorts of highly acclaimed developers to develop for the PSX. I bought a PlayStation and watched it catch dust. There were NO good games. Nothing innovative. Sure, Metal Gear Solid was nice and seeing all the transparency effects in Wipeout had something cool to it, but the games lacked substance. They were geared towards a new crowd: the "Casual Gamer".
That was the day when I started analyzing the new games. What makes a game good or bad etc. I discovered that lots of my friends, who weren't gamers before, suddenly bought PlayStations and loved games that I'd never touch (Parappa The Rapper anyone?). These games had nothing in common with what I was used to. They lacked quality and tried hiding that behind glitzy graphics. Look at Tekken. Some would argue that it's the best fighting game ever created, but in the end it's a very primitive button basher. Even Super Street Fighter II had more depth.
Since history repeats itself, I expect to see something similar on the PlayStation 2. More games for casual gamers, and less games for hardcore gamers. And slowly, without anyone noticing, you'll see the PS2 turn into a private little marketing machine for Sony. Keep in mind that Sony is not a games company. They also offer music and movies, for example. If the PS2 catches on, they'll be like the Microsoft of entertainment. They could potentially control what you view and listen to on your PS2, and they'd automatically control what you're playing.
The Dreamcast, on the other hand, is one of my favorite consoles ever created. It has style, it's innovative, and with Bleemcast you might even be able to play PlayStation games on it. The two or three of them that are interesting, at least. There have been quite a few games on it that are novel and old-school (as in: for hardcore gamers) at the same time. That's something that seems to be very hard to accomplish in this new "casual gamer" market Sony created with the PSX.
So, before you buy your PS2, take a look at the $149 Dreamcast. You might get much more entertainment from it, and you'd know that there's a games company behind it, not a media and electronics giant.
Everybody from 18-56 has both a *true* military assault weapon in his house and ammunition for same. The violence rate is much lower than in both the US and the UK.
Well, that is partially true. But one of the reasons might be that we are _forced_ to learn using this particular weapon. 18 weeks of military education is mandatory, and you get to keep the ugly assault rifle you lugged around with you, shot with and cleaned all this time. If you've used the gun for a while, it suddenly isn't as fascinating as it was when you touched it the first time. Personally I hate firearms, but judging from most of my friends' comments they liked using them. You're also taught that the weapon shall only be used to defend the country in case of a crisis blah blah blah, and maybe this turns the public image guns have into something a bit different. They're still thought of mainly for defense instead of attack, while in the US it's the other way round.
Guess we Swiss are a bit too boring to actually use the rifle once we get back home. Most of the guys I know simply store theirs somewhere in the attic and never look at it again unless they're forced to by the government (once every two years). Well, until last week. Only a few hundred yards from my place, some guy ate a few magic mushrooms and went crazy. Shot two cops with the assault rifle his own country gave him for free. They had to get snipers to take him out. Since that got published in every type of media possible, more and more people around here are discovering that the rifle can be used to attack someone.. So this weekend, some other guy got drunk and shot the hell out of an apartment 15 miles from my place, simply because the landlord didn't want to rent it to him. Luckily no one was injured.
These things usually just don't happen.. I wonder why more and more people suddenly go postal. Can't be the weapons' fault. Switzerland recently outlawed shotguns and nobody really cared. Do that in the US and you immediately have 15 different lobbies protesting on the street.
The default password to access the board's main menu is #keyghost. What if Nintendo releases trading cards under the brand KeyGhost and suddenly everyone joins #keyghost on IRC? The keyboard would spit its main menu at the input line and you'd be bankicked for flooding:)
It _would_ be possible, and something like that has been Bleem LLC's goal for a while. bleem! is only a few hundred kb. They wanted to convince PSX developers to put bleem! on their game CD's, enabling any (reasonably equipped) PC to run such a PSX game right out of the box. The same could be done on something like the Dreamcast.. But wouldn't that mean a major rewrite? I thought most of bleem!'s processor-intensive code was written in assembly. Nevertheless, I'm sure it could be done.
How the Swiss Post copes with computerized reality
on
Stamps of the 80s
·
· Score: 3
I just heard today on the radio that in a few weeks or months, you can walk into any Swiss post office with your floppy or Zip disk in hand and tell them to take all the letters you have on there, print them, package them, stamp them and mail them out for you. The cost should be significantly less than what it would take to pay your own people to do it.
I know this is quite off-topic, but I like this kind of getting lost customers back better than the "if all our ex-customers are now using e-mail, we'll just tax that" approach. After all, one significant advantage of e-mail (next to speed) is the time you save in preparing messages for delivery. With this new printing/packaging service, writing 200 letters is just as easy as writing 200 e-mails - it's just a matter of saving a digital document, and taking the disk to your local post office is akin to pressing the send button in your mail app.
I really hope the Swiss Post succeeds with this strategy. It might even help start-ups who would usually need at least eight hours to mail out invoices to 3000 customers for example..
They also offer UPAQ, a system that 128-bit encrypts sensible documents and provides authentification of both parties involved - in e-mail. You can even track your message and see exactly when the recipient opens and decrypts the file.
And you can even get stamps online - a huge collection. They really treat the electronic world well for a government-owned company. You can check out their English website here.
I didn't mean to attack you, and I apologize if it sounded that way. I'm not his lap dog or pet hedgehog though.
I do think that one of Jon's most (or only?) outstanding features is that he is willing to see the world from two or three different perspectives and analyze each as if they were his own. While I do agree that he has trouble making his points clear, I do not think that he's contradicting himself (as in "his real opinion") all that much.
Maybe the thing that causes all the misunderstandings is the fact that you never know where in the text he's changing the viewpoint.
In his eyes, moderation software might make an otherwise disgusting forum look much more useful to the average dude. A few paragraphs later he complains that discussion boards shouldn't employ that kind of software anyway, because it might prevent a few valuable posts from being seen. Still later, he sees it as the devil, although I still have to find out exactly what's his reasoning behind that.
To me, these are three valid opinions, expressed by the same person. This "multi-view" kind of style he has obviously leads to a lot of confusion, since he lacks the skills to communicate these ideas properly. This might also be the reason for the length of some of his stuff - he's just trying to explain as well as he can.
I really think he's on to something here. Presenting multiple opinions in such a chaotic way simply makes people think, or it just makes them angry as hell. Maybe they'll still think things through while they're upset though.
Not even all of his texts are written that way, I just thought I had seen some of that in this interview. When he's in "undercover reporter" mode interviewing other people, his columns read like the average magazine article. The Geeks excerpt sounded much more relaxed than the regular Katz, there was less rush, less chaos. I think it's astounding that one single person can have so many ways of writing without having formal education on the subject.
You're free to say that Katz doesn't belong here, and that he should keep his hypocritical ramblings to himself. I for one think that the diverse stuff he writes and _how_ he writes it offer quite a lot of insight into how Joe Average perceives the tech world. And Joe Average might love the moderation system, while Jon Katz will always hate it. At least he's trying to tell both sides of the story.
It's both. I'm not sure if I didn't get it or if you didn't get it, but I think he said something like: I don't believe in moderation. I personally do not use it so that I can get people's opinions (and flames, rants) unhinderedly.
Later he says: Rob's moderation systems have improved the situation for the regular reader.
You just took two of Jon's comments about the moderation system from two entirely different parts of the interview - and they're both out of context. You assume that only one of them can be true, but I think both of them are. So, what gives you a reason to attack him?
Here's what I wrote Jon, thought it could just as well go here.
After reading Please Die 2 a second time, I began seeing a pattern. I, too, see the endless streams of uneducated, unknowing, ignorant and intolerant newbies the Net has received in the last few years with disgust. When I approach a newbie that has made a "mistake", like writing in all caps or cross-posting the same off-topic thing twenty times in a row on Usenet, I try to be gentle and help them along, explaining the fundamentals and why the thing they did is "wrong". I hope they'll learn the rest on their own, or at least get on the right track and discover what the Net is all about. I'd never be hostile. Or wait, maybe I'd be hostile, but not in an offending way, and only if the newbie is really clueless.
I think the more knowledge someone has, the more hostile will his reactions to ignorant people be. Hey, you learned it the hard way, why shouldn't the newbie fall flat on his face too?
We had a techie like that where I work. It was about four years ago, when I first heard about Linux. At that time, this guy was the Linux/UNIX guru there. When I asked him how to do something (forgot what it was) on the Linux web server, all he said was "man". Not even knowing that you could use that box remotely via Telnet, let alone know about bash, I wasn't all that happy with his answer. I asked what he meant, and he just pointed at a SuSE manual.
Somehow I learned, but I didn't have to bug him anymore. Meanwhile I also learned PHP, Perl, ColdFusion, SQL and JavaScript the same way. I'm not saying that it's a huge accomplishment to go read a book or bring yourself up to date online, but learning things this way instead of asking others for help makes it easier for me to learn new stuff today. That's one of the elements a typical newbie is missing.
If I go back even further, to the time when there were no ISPs in this country, I see the same pattern. Before even thinking about buying a modem, I invested the same amount in magazines. Not specifically mags about the Net, but about computing in general. Most of them had little sections devoted to the Net, where they explained Archie, Gopher, the Netiquette, web browsers, Telnet, IRC, Usenet and all things Net-ish. When the nation's first commercial ISP finally opened for service, I immediately bought a speedy 14.4 modem and got my account - for $60 a month.
When I run into someone who signed up with a free ISP like Freesurf or Sunrise and can barely use their web browser, it's only logical that I feel offended by their ignorance. I don't value their opinion on technical discussion boards either. If they post things like "THIS CARD SUXX I WANT MONEY BACK!!!!" in the Guillemot user forum, I will most likely flame them. That's where my patience ends. I'll also tell them to upgrade from their copy of DirectX 3.0, so that they'll see it's not the card's fault. Maybe I'll point them to the part of the Netiquette that talks about caps, too:)
I'm like a grumpy old man when I switch to elitist mode. They get along pretty well with people of the same age, but just don't understand how stupid today's youth is. Think of a 75 year old retired mechanic. He knows how old engines work, he knows how new engines work. From that knowledge, he can derive whatever information he needs to work on an engine he's never seen before. If his 17 year old grandson asked him how to repair that great new TDI engine, his answer might be "It's just an engine, it can't be that hard now, can it? Just look at it for a while, for chrissakes! Geez, do I really need to take care of EVERYTHING around here?"
Yeah, I know. Bad analogy. But the 60 or so years of experience this guy has in his field are equivalent to two or three years of knowledge in IT or computing. Coupled with the high testosterone levels Jon mentions, it's no surprise there are flames everywhere, with lots of these metaphoric 75 year old retired mechanics posting at Slashdot =)
So in the end, I think Jon is right. We are breeding some of the "brightest jerks on the planet". If we manage to get our act together and be a bit more friendly to newbies, maybe those newbies turn out to be pretty bright themselves, once we put em through the Netiquette drill and show them that there's more than just the Web. To accomplish this, we should be nicer to _each other_ though, and lay off that "I'm better than you are" attitude.
Slashdot Mirror
JonKatz wrote: "[...] the movie takes this oddly American cinematic genre [...]"
It might be true that nowadays teen movies are primarily made (and viewed) in the USA, but Israel and Germany had their jointly produced Eis am Stiel ("Lemon Popsicle" in the US) series from 1979 to 1988 starring Zachi Noy among others. They weren't afraid to show full frontal nudity - they probably had to, the movies being so bad that otherwise they would have all flopped. The US movie Porky's seems to have been inspired by these flicks.
The series portrays teens as stupid drooling sex addicts whose primary motivation is invariably getting laid. There are still a couple of teen movies made in Germany from time to time, but since the Germans like (and partially understand) US lifestyle they also import all of the US teen movies.
This goes to show that the US aren't the only nation capable of making silly teen movies.
Some info about Eis am Stiel (German)
A Lemon Popsicle fanpage
Neverwinter Nights, Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment are D&D, yes, but they are NOT MMORPGs. Even though I believe "MMORPG" is an artificial term coined by some marketing idiot at Sony Online Entertainment, that doesn't nullify its meaning.
:)
If you want an ORIGINAL roleplaying game, play Gothic. It should be released in the English speaking territories about now. I've been playing it for over 6 months and it's still fun
(Oh, and a sequel should be coming soon)
My 7 year old Mac did that already, 7 years ago.
:)
Yes, it wasn't hardware accelerated and maybe it would stutter when dragging a larger window, but it worked. I don't see why this is such an innovation.
Slow news day?
What will happen now when other manufacturers release their new hard drives? Will all controller manufacturers have to keep updating their controllers to include support for everyone's proprietary ATA extensions or will they all have firmware so you can use whichever driver matches your drive?
What if your brand new 330 GB slave drive isn't from the same manufacturer as the master one? Will you there be "multi-BIOS" capable controllers or are you gonna need one card for each drive, eating up all your IRQs?
Does this call for a "next big thing" to replace the IDE/ATA standard or will we get ourselves into the same awkward situation that gave us MS-DOS' "memory management" back then, i.e. a patch to patch the patch that fixed the patch?
160 GB on one drive does sound cool, but I hope some standard is on the horizon. Something as fundamental as a hard drive shouldn't be left to conflicting proprietary standards..
Wow, I didn't know they did THAT. I know the Germans are now showing dubbed versions of Flying Circus on one of their channels.
Too bad you have to fax the order form, as soon as they add a way to order online (or I get near a fax machine..) I have to get this tape.
Playing Marathon is just like reading a good sci-fi book, only more exciting. And that's a HUGE accomplishment for an FPS.
Their "German" was fake and it made no sense at all, but if you speak both German and English it's twice as funny anyway :)
In one of their skits ("couple in a Bavarian restaurant") they speak genuine German, and I was very surprised because John Cleese had nearly perfect pronounciation of every single word, it's only the melody that's a little odd. I always thought the Brits couldn't do that..
It's a MMORPG, it's 3D and it's sci-fi. See this site for more info.
My stupid thick fleshy greasy fingers. Here's the right one:
The project's official site.
A recent test in Zurich showed that as long as you have a notebook with a 802.11b wireless Ethernet card, you can freely use someone else's high speed Net connections as long as your battery lasts.
:)
In about 2 hours of driving through central Zurich, the testers found no less than a dozen open, unrestricted corporate wireless LANs. Getting the gateway's IP was not a problem thanks to most 802.11b base station's built in DHCP server. If you live near any of these companies, all you need is an external antenna for your card and off you go at someone else's cost - and it's their own fault.
But what's even greater is that around Lake Zurich, you can use broadband 802.11b for free, legally
See the project's official site.
All these projects, not totally unlike DeCSS and the likes, basically anything that big stupid US corporations hate, could profit from hosting outside the USA. Well, not just hosting, but a bit more.
I'd be willing to host any of these projects on one of the machines I have access to. I'm in Switzerland, so none of the EU and definitely none of the US laws apply here. If Kenyon and Kenyon wanted to send me one of those cute legal letters, fine, they could. If they wanted it to have any legal effect at all, they'd have to spend quite some money or work their connections to Swiss law offices. I doubt that they would do that, at least not quickly. International law experts might want to give me a little more wisdom in that area, though =)
Sooo.. If you think this is a good idea and have some CueCat related stuff to host, I guess I might be able to give you some free webspace and take full responsibility for hosting should any (valid) legal action be taken against me. Wow, I almost sound like a lawyer.
The article talks about how the "micropayment wars are over" and that PayPal is oh so great and all-knowing. How come people outside the US can't sign up then? Please, if you write an article that only concerns US citizens, state that fact, too. Slashdot is international enough for that.
Gee, I thought the US had no problems at all getting DSL or cable up and running, and that WE were having a hard time. I work at an ISP that, amongst other services, has been selling DSL for about two years. In Switzerland, Swisscom's monopoly is still very much intact. Swisscom is the company that was formed when the federal telco (and the only one we had back then), Telekom, was privatized. Competition on the telco market has only been allowed since around 98, and that's why most of the copper still belongs to Swisscom.
So a client contacts us to get a line, we have Swisscom offer something and send their offer to the customer directly. The customer signs our contract as well as Swisscom's, and that's basically it. About a week or two from that moment, the line should be up and running. At least if you're not more than 8 km away from the next switch. When there are connectivity problems, you have a choice of calling us (and we will relay the problem to Swisscom if we didn't cause it) or Swisscom directly. Since every installed leased line has a serial number, and every Swisscom leased line contract includes a support number to call, the client is independent.
It would still be safer to call us, because we can check if the problem's on our side. I've seen quite a few ISPs, and most of them have a similar setup. Some (the other one I work at, for example) have their own copper and therefore won't have to contract or outsource anywhere along the way.
What's really scary is that Swisscom is thinking about offering DSL service through their own ISP, the blue window. They have the largest market share already, because they didn't play fair when they started. We pay for local calls, much more for long distance (anything above 10 km), and they were the first to get a "local rate at any distance" sort of ISP number. Figures, their mother company (Swisscom, remember) created this type of service specifically for them. Well, thousands of clients flocked to the new ISP and dozens of local ISPs died in an instant from the shock. Local ISPs couldn't even get such a super-special number until about two months later. blue window has been riding on that wave of customers since then... The world's not fair. But I digress..
Well, perhaps I didn't include enough info. I compared the first-generation PS2 games to the first-generation Dreamcast games. And, in comparison, I think the PS2 gets second place. I know that first-generation titles can never come close to what fourth or fifth-generation games look like, but all in all I think that the PS2 had one of the worst collections of launch titles so far.
When you mention quality control, I think you see that too much from the technical perspective. Sure, you won't see any (or too many) games that crash or have glaring bugs. I wasn't talking about that, because something like that exists on any system. I'm talking about the quality of gameplay, and the depth of the games. In short, it's Sega or Nintendo saying "Sorry, we won't let you release that crappy game for our system" while Sony says "Yeah, whatever, go ahead."
I think the Saturn had potential, and the price wars between Sony and Sega let a lot of this potential go unused. Well, maybe the system was just a bitch to program on, at least that's what seemed to be the general opinion amongst developers. Still, with Sega backing it and with all its in-house arcade titles, I'd love to see what the system could have grown to be if the PSX had never come along.
And yes, I do play my Dreamcast, and I do so a lot. I love Crazy Taxi for its innovation and "enjoy in 5-minute doses" style. I played MDK2 till the sun came up the weekend I got it. We had a ton of fun with DoA2. The last time I had this much fun with a console system was when Bomberman came out for the SNES. And that is precisely what the PSX (and probably PS2) is missing. It's that certain magic other consoles like the NES, SNES and Genesis had.
I'm trying not to be biased. I've loved gaming on computers and consoles since the C64, Apple ][ and NES. Like many people, I've played most of the great hits that came out on such systems ever since Wizball and Paradroid were released.
When the Playstation 1 came out, I was a Saturn owner, and naturally felt threatened by the huge company called Sony entering the games market. But after a while I got used to the new player and saw the Saturn face certain death, despite all the great and innovative titles available for the system. Sony crushed Sega. First through huge price drops, then by seducing all sorts of highly acclaimed developers to develop for the PSX. I bought a PlayStation and watched it catch dust. There were NO good games. Nothing innovative. Sure, Metal Gear Solid was nice and seeing all the transparency effects in Wipeout had something cool to it, but the games lacked substance. They were geared towards a new crowd: the "Casual Gamer".
That was the day when I started analyzing the new games. What makes a game good or bad etc. I discovered that lots of my friends, who weren't gamers before, suddenly bought PlayStations and loved games that I'd never touch (Parappa The Rapper anyone?). These games had nothing in common with what I was used to. They lacked quality and tried hiding that behind glitzy graphics. Look at Tekken. Some would argue that it's the best fighting game ever created, but in the end it's a very primitive button basher. Even Super Street Fighter II had more depth.
Since history repeats itself, I expect to see something similar on the PlayStation 2. More games for casual gamers, and less games for hardcore gamers. And slowly, without anyone noticing, you'll see the PS2 turn into a private little marketing machine for Sony. Keep in mind that Sony is not a games company. They also offer music and movies, for example. If the PS2 catches on, they'll be like the Microsoft of entertainment. They could potentially control what you view and listen to on your PS2, and they'd automatically control what you're playing.
The Dreamcast, on the other hand, is one of my favorite consoles ever created. It has style, it's innovative, and with Bleemcast you might even be able to play PlayStation games on it. The two or three of them that are interesting, at least. There have been quite a few games on it that are novel and old-school (as in: for hardcore gamers) at the same time. That's something that seems to be very hard to accomplish in this new "casual gamer" market Sony created with the PSX.
So, before you buy your PS2, take a look at the $149 Dreamcast. You might get much more entertainment from it, and you'd know that there's a games company behind it, not a media and electronics giant.
Well, that is partially true. But one of the reasons might be that we are _forced_ to learn using this particular weapon. 18 weeks of military education is mandatory, and you get to keep the ugly assault rifle you lugged around with you, shot with and cleaned all this time. If you've used the gun for a while, it suddenly isn't as fascinating as it was when you touched it the first time. Personally I hate firearms, but judging from most of my friends' comments they liked using them. You're also taught that the weapon shall only be used to defend the country in case of a crisis blah blah blah, and maybe this turns the public image guns have into something a bit different. They're still thought of mainly for defense instead of attack, while in the US it's the other way round.
Guess we Swiss are a bit too boring to actually use the rifle once we get back home. Most of the guys I know simply store theirs somewhere in the attic and never look at it again unless they're forced to by the government (once every two years). Well, until last week. Only a few hundred yards from my place, some guy ate a few magic mushrooms and went crazy. Shot two cops with the assault rifle his own country gave him for free. They had to get snipers to take him out. Since that got published in every type of media possible, more and more people around here are discovering that the rifle can be used to attack someone.. So this weekend, some other guy got drunk and shot the hell out of an apartment 15 miles from my place, simply because the landlord didn't want to rent it to him. Luckily no one was injured.
These things usually just don't happen.. I wonder why more and more people suddenly go postal. Can't be the weapons' fault. Switzerland recently outlawed shotguns and nobody really cared. Do that in the US and you immediately have 15 different lobbies protesting on the street.
The world's strange..
The default password to access the board's main menu is #keyghost. What if Nintendo releases trading cards under the brand KeyGhost and suddenly everyone joins #keyghost on IRC? The keyboard would spit its main menu at the input line and you'd be bankicked for flooding :)
This will be cool.
It _would_ be possible, and something like that has been Bleem LLC's goal for a while. bleem! is only a few hundred kb. They wanted to convince PSX developers to put bleem! on their game CD's, enabling any (reasonably equipped) PC to run such a PSX game right out of the box. The same could be done on something like the Dreamcast.. But wouldn't that mean a major rewrite? I thought most of bleem!'s processor-intensive code was written in assembly. Nevertheless, I'm sure it could be done.
I just heard today on the radio that in a few weeks or months, you can walk into any Swiss post office with your floppy or Zip disk in hand and tell them to take all the letters you have on there, print them, package them, stamp them and mail them out for you. The cost should be significantly less than what it would take to pay your own people to do it.
I know this is quite off-topic, but I like this kind of getting lost customers back better than the "if all our ex-customers are now using e-mail, we'll just tax that" approach. After all, one significant advantage of e-mail (next to speed) is the time you save in preparing messages for delivery. With this new printing/packaging service, writing 200 letters is just as easy as writing 200 e-mails - it's just a matter of saving a digital document, and taking the disk to your local post office is akin to pressing the send button in your mail app.
I really hope the Swiss Post succeeds with this strategy. It might even help start-ups who would usually need at least eight hours to mail out invoices to 3000 customers for example..
They also offer UPAQ, a system that 128-bit encrypts sensible documents and provides authentification of both parties involved - in e-mail. You can even track your message and see exactly when the recipient opens and decrypts the file.
And you can even get stamps online - a huge collection. They really treat the electronic world well for a government-owned company. You can check out their English website here.
> What gives you a reason to attack me?
I didn't mean to attack you, and I apologize if it sounded that way. I'm not his lap dog or pet hedgehog though.
I do think that one of Jon's most (or only?) outstanding features is that he is willing to see the world from two or three different perspectives and analyze each as if they were his own. While I do agree that he has trouble making his points clear, I do not think that he's contradicting himself (as in "his real opinion") all that much.
Maybe the thing that causes all the misunderstandings is the fact that you never know where in the text he's changing the viewpoint.
In his eyes, moderation software might make an otherwise disgusting forum look much more useful to the average dude. A few paragraphs later he complains that discussion boards shouldn't employ that kind of software anyway, because it might prevent a few valuable posts from being seen. Still later, he sees it as the devil, although I still have to find out exactly what's his reasoning behind that.
To me, these are three valid opinions, expressed by the same person. This "multi-view" kind of style he has obviously leads to a lot of confusion, since he lacks the skills to communicate these ideas properly. This might also be the reason for the length of some of his stuff - he's just trying to explain as well as he can.
I really think he's on to something here. Presenting multiple opinions in such a chaotic way simply makes people think, or it just makes them angry as hell. Maybe they'll still think things through while they're upset though.
Not even all of his texts are written that way, I just thought I had seen some of that in this interview. When he's in "undercover reporter" mode interviewing other people, his columns read like the average magazine article. The Geeks excerpt sounded much more relaxed than the regular Katz, there was less rush, less chaos. I think it's astounding that one single person can have so many ways of writing without having formal education on the subject.
You're free to say that Katz doesn't belong here, and that he should keep his hypocritical ramblings to himself. I for one think that the diverse stuff he writes and _how_ he writes it offer quite a lot of insight into how Joe Average perceives the tech world. And Joe Average might love the moderation system, while Jon Katz will always hate it. At least he's trying to tell both sides of the story.
> Which is it, man? Make up your mind.
It's both. I'm not sure if I didn't get it or if you didn't get it, but I think he said something like: I don't believe in moderation. I personally do not use it so that I can get people's opinions (and flames, rants) unhinderedly.
Later he says: Rob's moderation systems have improved the situation for the regular reader.
You just took two of Jon's comments about the moderation system from two entirely different parts of the interview - and they're both out of context. You assume that only one of them can be true, but I think both of them are. So, what gives you a reason to attack him?
Here's what I wrote Jon, thought it could just as well go here.
After reading Please Die 2 a second time, I began seeing a pattern. I, too, see the endless streams of uneducated, unknowing, ignorant and intolerant newbies the Net has received in the last few years with disgust. When I approach a newbie that has made a "mistake", like writing in all caps or cross-posting the same off-topic thing twenty times in a row on Usenet, I try to be gentle and help them along, explaining the fundamentals and why the thing they did is "wrong". I hope they'll learn the rest on their own, or at least get on the right track and discover what the Net is all about. I'd never be hostile. Or wait, maybe I'd be hostile, but not in an offending way, and only if the newbie is really clueless.
I think the more knowledge someone has, the more hostile will his reactions to ignorant people be. Hey, you learned it the hard way, why shouldn't the newbie fall flat on his face too?
We had a techie like that where I work. It was about four years ago, when I first heard about Linux. At that time, this guy was the Linux/UNIX guru there. When I asked him how to do something (forgot what it was) on the Linux web server, all he said was "man". Not even knowing that you could use that box remotely via Telnet, let alone know about bash, I wasn't all that happy with his answer. I asked what he meant, and he just pointed at a SuSE manual.
Somehow I learned, but I didn't have to bug him anymore. Meanwhile I also learned PHP, Perl, ColdFusion, SQL and JavaScript the same way. I'm not saying that it's a huge accomplishment to go read a book or bring yourself up to date online, but learning things this way instead of asking others for help makes it easier for me to learn new stuff today. That's one of the elements a typical newbie is missing.
If I go back even further, to the time when there were no ISPs in this country, I see the same pattern. Before even thinking about buying a modem, I invested the same amount in magazines. Not specifically mags about the Net, but about computing in general. Most of them had little sections devoted to the Net, where they explained Archie, Gopher, the Netiquette, web browsers, Telnet, IRC, Usenet and all things Net-ish. When the nation's first commercial ISP finally opened for service, I immediately bought a speedy 14.4 modem and got my account - for $60 a month.
When I run into someone who signed up with a free ISP like Freesurf or Sunrise and can barely use their web browser, it's only logical that I feel offended by their ignorance. I don't value their opinion on technical discussion boards either. If they post things like "THIS CARD SUXX I WANT MONEY BACK!!!!" in the Guillemot user forum, I will most likely flame them. That's where my patience ends. I'll also tell them to upgrade from their copy of DirectX 3.0, so that they'll see it's not the card's fault. Maybe I'll point them to the part of the Netiquette that talks about caps, too
I'm like a grumpy old man when I switch to elitist mode. They get along pretty well with people of the same age, but just don't understand how stupid today's youth is. Think of a 75 year old retired mechanic. He knows how old engines work, he knows how new engines work. From that knowledge, he can derive whatever information he needs to work on an engine he's never seen before. If his 17 year old grandson asked him how to repair that great new TDI engine, his answer might be "It's just an engine, it can't be that hard now, can it? Just look at it for a while, for chrissakes! Geez, do I really need to take care of EVERYTHING around here?"
Yeah, I know. Bad analogy. But the 60 or so years of experience this guy has in his field are equivalent to two or three years of knowledge in IT or computing. Coupled with the high testosterone levels Jon mentions, it's no surprise there are flames everywhere, with lots of these metaphoric 75 year old retired mechanics posting at Slashdot =)
So in the end, I think Jon is right. We are breeding some of the "brightest jerks on the planet". If we manage to get our act together and be a bit more friendly to newbies, maybe those newbies turn out to be pretty bright themselves, once we put em through the Netiquette drill and show them that there's more than just the Web. To accomplish this, we should be nicer to _each other_ though, and lay off that "I'm better than you are" attitude.