This whole "horseless carriage" thing sounds like a great idea, but the hand crank requires a lot of muscle power to get the engine started, when it even starts, and, what with all the ruts and bumps in our dirt roads, I still prefer my horse. No sir, this so-called "automobile" is going nowhere!
Okay, so it's not simultaneous mulitplayer, but there ought to be more shouts out for pinball on Slashdot anyway. I used to play Bally's Cyclone a lot.
Even if you buy into the ridiculous notion that a Mac isn't a "serious" computer, it's a great machine for anybody's parents to get. What do they do? Email, the Web, balance their checkbook maybe? I'm the help desk in my family and it's a relative breeze compared to what it would be if they had Windows machines and, most importantly, I don't have to worry about any of the sneakier security stuff. I still have to remind them not to send their bank account numbers to that Nigerian guy, but, hey, whaddaya gonna do?
I'm not a huge DRM fan or anything, but isn't this kind of a false analogy when you talk about ancient scrolls or Dutch masters? The "D" in DRM is for digital and it is an important aspect of understanding why this is such a big deal now. Before digital information, there was no way to make an infinite number of *exact* copies of a work of art or literature. Copyright became more of an issue as the technology for copying things improved, but even with the advent of the printing press, it wasn't like everybody had one and, even if everybody did have one, it would be a lot of work to take a paper copy of a book you owned legally and make plates for your printing press so that you could run off copies on you own. Pre-digital copies were always distinguishable from the original as well.
It seems like a lot of people in this conversation and the one last month are taking this very personally. Last month there was widespread backlash against all things "highbrow". While some of the comments were valid, it seemed to get so emotional that I can only imagine that some people felt insulted by the implication that the games they liked were "lowbrow". I suppose I understand the feeling, but it seemed to lead away from discussing some of the more interesting aspects of the topic.
Highbrow can certainly be defined in different ways and I can think of two that, in their definitions, suggest why they might be seen frequently in *modern* video games:
First, looking at highbrow as needing a certain degree of intellect or education to be able to play successfully, I think that this is a problem that sophisticated technology just isn't needed, and possibly isn't even suited, to solve. Look at a very difficult crossword puzzle or Sudoku or some other number puzzle. For a certain kind of problem-solving, these can be some of the most challenging games out there. Could faster processors or better 3D rendering make this kind of game more challenging? I don't think so. Chess is probably another example, after a chess computer that was built that could beat the best human player (even if it is just by "brute force" and without finesse, there really isn't anywhere to go. For the most part, in fact, the application of newer and faster technologies to computer games has allowed them to become more and more immersive in way that seems to stimulate our "animal brains" much more than our intellects. Mind you, I love a good animal-brain game, but I don't kid myself about what it is. When such games do have an element of puzzle-solving or strategy to them, that's usually not dependent on the most technologically-advanced part of the game.
Second is the notion of winning, which is such an important part of game playing. Even for ongoing RPGs, there is an accumulation of some kind of status, whether it is points or gold or something else. "Highbrow" entertainment, whether it is literature or film or some other genre (I'm sure I could make some analogy with music if I thought about it long enough, involving dischord and polyrhythm or some such...), at its best, involves a degree of moral and emotional complexity where the happy ending (in the traditional, or in the massage sense of the term) is not the goal and there may not be clearly identifiable "good guys" and "bad guys". I'm not saying that a great "highbrow" film can't have a happy ending or good guys, but they often don't. I think this is a direct contradiction to how games motivate players to succeed at them. An exception, though some might argue that the very aspect that makes it an exception shows that it is not a "game", would be something like Second Life. Because there is no official goal of the Second Life environment it is not subject to the simplification of the human condition that a winning-oriented game might be.
So, that's what I think. Dis away!
I'm a little disappointed in the grammar police. Everybody caught "more funner" but "us modders" (should be "we modders") went completely unnoticed! Admittedly, I'm only reading this story because I couldn't wait to see what slashdotters said about the grammar... god, I need a life!
A lot of slashdotters refer to the "fair use laws" in their posts. IANAL, I'm a librarian in fact, but I'm pretty sure there are no such things. "Fair Use" is a defense, it's not really a law or a set of laws. There are a set of loose guidelines that are used to determine whether a particular use of copyrighted material is "fair", but there are no hard and fast rules. Different judges will frequently reach different outcomes given the same case.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
I second this. Isn't it sad that basic ethical stances require justification, not based on whether they are truly ethical, but instead based on whether ethics are truly good for business? All hail the free market!
Umm... we're fanboys. Duh. You sort of answered your own question there, didn't you?
See also: the various legitimate reasons people have posted for why it's not the same issue with Apple anyway. But I'm a fanboy, what do I care about "legitimate" reasons.
All along, the answer was right under their noses: "love."
Too bad no encoding methods, disc formats, screen resolutions or anything else could fix the incredible cheesiness of that movie. I suppose you could edit out the God-awful theme song, that would be a step in the right direction.
And, just to piggyback on that (pun intended, sorry), I've been wondering why wireless technology seems to be improving so slowly. I'm not phrasing that very well, but the first really mainstream wireless implementation for computer networking (for average consumers, I'm sure there are several Slashdotters who can name some other standard that only a bunch of other Slashdotters have heard of) was 11Mbps and it was only a little while after its widespread adoption that we saw a 5x speed increase. Now it seems 54Mbps has been the consumer standard for quite a while and while some people are selling equipment, the 108Mbps standard still isn't finalized. And that's only a 2x increase, hardly worth upgrading one's equipment for, IMO. I've seen enterprise solutions out there that claim wireless gigabit performance, but I can't help but wonder why the technology seems somewhat stagnant on the consumer end.
Disclaimer: I don't really have a tech background, so I probably don't know what I'm talking about.
Wow, this has been out for hours and nobody has made a joke about you and your wife and your self-erecting tent? Well, I'm not going to lower myself to that. I'm leaving that one alone. Yes Sir. No boner jokes here.
Those two words, to me represent the biggest tragedy for the Mac gaming world. Games like Myth and Marathon and their sequels were like Doom and Warcraft for people with brains. These guys always had stuff that was way ahead of other game makers and they always developed for the Mac first. Halo was even announced when they were still a Mac-developing company (based in Chicago, I think) if I remember correctly. When I heard the news that Bungie had been bought by none other than MS, moved HQ to Redmond and was going to release Halo as the flagship Xbox game I... well, I really can't even talk about my reaction, I still get a little too choked up. The last brilliant gasp as a Mac-developing company was Oni, which was very late and lacked the mult-player features that it was supposed to have, but it was still an excellent game.
Does anybody know what happened exactly? That is, did MS just have so much money that the Bungie guys couldn't say "no" or were they in financial trouble already? As I mentioned above, they seemed to be getting way behind schedule in their development, so it seems plausible that they were having money problems.
Has anybody else ever noticed... okay, I'm relatively new to Slashdot (this is my first post) and I'm sure Star Trek has been discussed here A LOT, so it probably has been brounght up... that the "entire human race" portrayed on ST is not even as ethnically diverse as the current US population? I don't even think it matches the gender makeup of the modern American workplace. Of course, so many of the early, scientist-type SF writers who are praised later on in this thread tend to write about futures that extrapolate based on the scientific trends of their time but entirely ignore the sociological trends.
Slashdot Mirror
This whole "horseless carriage" thing sounds like a great idea, but the hand crank requires a lot of muscle power to get the engine started, when it even starts, and, what with all the ruts and bumps in our dirt roads, I still prefer my horse. No sir, this so-called "automobile" is going nowhere!
Okay, so it's not simultaneous mulitplayer, but there ought to be more shouts out for pinball on Slashdot anyway. I used to play Bally's Cyclone a lot.
Right on!!! I used to play it on my Atari 130XE. My sister and I used to call it "Ballbusters" and thought that was hilarious. I loved the music.
...shouldn't that read "lunalogically active"?
Even if you buy into the ridiculous notion that a Mac isn't a "serious" computer, it's a great machine for anybody's parents to get. What do they do? Email, the Web, balance their checkbook maybe? I'm the help desk in my family and it's a relative breeze compared to what it would be if they had Windows machines and, most importantly, I don't have to worry about any of the sneakier security stuff. I still have to remind them not to send their bank account numbers to that Nigerian guy, but, hey, whaddaya gonna do?
I'm not a huge DRM fan or anything, but isn't this kind of a false analogy when you talk about ancient scrolls or Dutch masters? The "D" in DRM is for digital and it is an important aspect of understanding why this is such a big deal now. Before digital information, there was no way to make an infinite number of *exact* copies of a work of art or literature. Copyright became more of an issue as the technology for copying things improved, but even with the advent of the printing press, it wasn't like everybody had one and, even if everybody did have one, it would be a lot of work to take a paper copy of a book you owned legally and make plates for your printing press so that you could run off copies on you own. Pre-digital copies were always distinguishable from the original as well.
Oops. I meant to put some paragraph breaks in there, sorry.
It seems like a lot of people in this conversation and the one last month are taking this very personally. Last month there was widespread backlash against all things "highbrow". While some of the comments were valid, it seemed to get so emotional that I can only imagine that some people felt insulted by the implication that the games they liked were "lowbrow". I suppose I understand the feeling, but it seemed to lead away from discussing some of the more interesting aspects of the topic. Highbrow can certainly be defined in different ways and I can think of two that, in their definitions, suggest why they might be seen frequently in *modern* video games: First, looking at highbrow as needing a certain degree of intellect or education to be able to play successfully, I think that this is a problem that sophisticated technology just isn't needed, and possibly isn't even suited, to solve. Look at a very difficult crossword puzzle or Sudoku or some other number puzzle. For a certain kind of problem-solving, these can be some of the most challenging games out there. Could faster processors or better 3D rendering make this kind of game more challenging? I don't think so. Chess is probably another example, after a chess computer that was built that could beat the best human player (even if it is just by "brute force" and without finesse, there really isn't anywhere to go. For the most part, in fact, the application of newer and faster technologies to computer games has allowed them to become more and more immersive in way that seems to stimulate our "animal brains" much more than our intellects. Mind you, I love a good animal-brain game, but I don't kid myself about what it is. When such games do have an element of puzzle-solving or strategy to them, that's usually not dependent on the most technologically-advanced part of the game. Second is the notion of winning, which is such an important part of game playing. Even for ongoing RPGs, there is an accumulation of some kind of status, whether it is points or gold or something else. "Highbrow" entertainment, whether it is literature or film or some other genre (I'm sure I could make some analogy with music if I thought about it long enough, involving dischord and polyrhythm or some such...), at its best, involves a degree of moral and emotional complexity where the happy ending (in the traditional, or in the massage sense of the term) is not the goal and there may not be clearly identifiable "good guys" and "bad guys". I'm not saying that a great "highbrow" film can't have a happy ending or good guys, but they often don't. I think this is a direct contradiction to how games motivate players to succeed at them. An exception, though some might argue that the very aspect that makes it an exception shows that it is not a "game", would be something like Second Life. Because there is no official goal of the Second Life environment it is not subject to the simplification of the human condition that a winning-oriented game might be. So, that's what I think. Dis away!
I'm a little disappointed in the grammar police. Everybody caught "more funner" but "us modders" (should be "we modders") went completely unnoticed! Admittedly, I'm only reading this story because I couldn't wait to see what slashdotters said about the grammar... god, I need a life!
A lot of slashdotters refer to the "fair use laws" in their posts. IANAL, I'm a librarian in fact, but I'm pretty sure there are no such things. "Fair Use" is a defense, it's not really a law or a set of laws. There are a set of loose guidelines that are used to determine whether a particular use of copyrighted material is "fair", but there are no hard and fast rules. Different judges will frequently reach different outcomes given the same case. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
Librarians have been doing that for decades if not centuries. What world did you start out in?
I second this. Isn't it sad that basic ethical stances require justification, not based on whether they are truly ethical, but instead based on whether ethics are truly good for business? All hail the free market!
Umm... we're fanboys. Duh. You sort of answered your own question there, didn't you? See also: the various legitimate reasons people have posted for why it's not the same issue with Apple anyway. But I'm a fanboy, what do I care about "legitimate" reasons.
So, what you're saying is that this guy should use his hard drive to light a cigarette and shut up about the supposed "malfunction"?
So, that's real money, now what do "ultimate", "business", "home premium" and "home basic" mean in plain English?
All along, the answer was right under their noses: "love." Too bad no encoding methods, disc formats, screen resolutions or anything else could fix the incredible cheesiness of that movie. I suppose you could edit out the God-awful theme song, that would be a step in the right direction.
And, just to piggyback on that (pun intended, sorry), I've been wondering why wireless technology seems to be improving so slowly. I'm not phrasing that very well, but the first really mainstream wireless implementation for computer networking (for average consumers, I'm sure there are several Slashdotters who can name some other standard that only a bunch of other Slashdotters have heard of) was 11Mbps and it was only a little while after its widespread adoption that we saw a 5x speed increase. Now it seems 54Mbps has been the consumer standard for quite a while and while some people are selling equipment, the 108Mbps standard still isn't finalized. And that's only a 2x increase, hardly worth upgrading one's equipment for, IMO. I've seen enterprise solutions out there that claim wireless gigabit performance, but I can't help but wonder why the technology seems somewhat stagnant on the consumer end. Disclaimer: I don't really have a tech background, so I probably don't know what I'm talking about.
Wow, this has been out for hours and nobody has made a joke about you and your wife and your self-erecting tent? Well, I'm not going to lower myself to that. I'm leaving that one alone. Yes Sir. No boner jokes here.
Semprini?
Those two words, to me represent the biggest tragedy for the Mac gaming world. Games like Myth and Marathon and their sequels were like Doom and Warcraft for people with brains. These guys always had stuff that was way ahead of other game makers and they always developed for the Mac first. Halo was even announced when they were still a Mac-developing company (based in Chicago, I think) if I remember correctly. When I heard the news that Bungie had been bought by none other than MS, moved HQ to Redmond and was going to release Halo as the flagship Xbox game I... well, I really can't even talk about my reaction, I still get a little too choked up. The last brilliant gasp as a Mac-developing company was Oni, which was very late and lacked the mult-player features that it was supposed to have, but it was still an excellent game. Does anybody know what happened exactly? That is, did MS just have so much money that the Bungie guys couldn't say "no" or were they in financial trouble already? As I mentioned above, they seemed to be getting way behind schedule in their development, so it seems plausible that they were having money problems.
OMG! 35? Do women get that old? Yuck!
Has anybody else ever noticed... okay, I'm relatively new to Slashdot (this is my first post) and I'm sure Star Trek has been discussed here A LOT, so it probably has been brounght up... that the "entire human race" portrayed on ST is not even as ethnically diverse as the current US population? I don't even think it matches the gender makeup of the modern American workplace. Of course, so many of the early, scientist-type SF writers who are praised later on in this thread tend to write about futures that extrapolate based on the scientific trends of their time but entirely ignore the sociological trends.