I see that maxim quoted a lot these days. I see the point it's making, of course; but I can't help wondering: what does prove causation, then?
If a phenomenon is observed only when something is present but never when it is not, a causal relationship can reasonably be construed. The other point is, at least in science, nothing is ever proven!
Problem with modern day versions of any full on "war" style games, western war methods will win so long as overkill is not a problem. Your point is well-taken. CoH clearly succeeds because it focuses on infantry-level combat, leaving things like airstrikes and artillery as expensive "call-in" options. The modern game I suggest would have to bear this in mind, keeping things at the infantry level despite our rather more diverse options for modern combat. As we're seeing in Iraq right now, even the most advanced warfighters on the planet still find themselves in tight urban terrain where overkill methods are drastically less effective. I definitely think there's a game there (although, as a veteran, I have to confess that I feel like shit mentioning a game and Iraq in the same thought) and an urban-combat modern CoH would be terrific, IMO.
I agree there's definitely a lot of potential for classical era and perhaps even revolutionary/civil war era games too. The stumbling block here would be the annoying tendency of troops to march in neat formations during those times, which rather defeats the purpose of CoH's wonderful cover system. One might also argue that the Total War series has already covered these eras rather well.
But hell, while we're dreaming, I want Vikings!
cheers.
CoH is really a very interesting rts, they took out all the boring bits (resource hunting, "upgrade after upgrade", massive tech trees) to leave you with just the strategy of how to get a bunch of grunts to do what they are best at. Indeed. Relic started this new RTS style with Dawn of War and certainly refined it with CoH. My dream is to see this sort of excellence similarly realised in a new Starcraft RTS. I'm a huge fan of CoH and will certainly be purchasing the expansion when it arrives, but the WWII era has really been done to death and I'm hungry for something new. Perhaps Relic will consider a Vietnam-era or modern-day era version of CoH, or maybe even a sci-fi version that would serve in case Blizzard's announcement is a Starcraft MMO instead of an RTS.
Just get Oblivion and The Elder Scrolls Construction Set.
You'll be posthumously awarded the best game designer of the 21st Century! (Which they will then go back in time to save you from the island and you will live your your years in luxury in the 23rd Century (Maybe even meet Capt. Picard) Yes, because maybe by then we'll be able to run the damned thing at a decent framerate.:P
No Tyranids, not diggin' it. My understanding is that they won't do Tyranids because they don't think the engine will be able to do them justice. Hopefully the next gen WH40K games will have an engine that'll do Tyranids nicely. Company of Heroes really opened my eyes as to what was possible in terms of RTS graphics and I'm looking forward to seeing that applied to the WH40K universe.
...I have a hard time seeing how people can justify regularly PAYING to play a game unless they are indeed playing it near non-stop. A habit I have unfortunately witnessed up close and found to be quite annoying. I'm just glad that Quake II actually took some skill, otherwise I might feel as if I had been wasting my time on constant deathmatch back in the day... I justify it like this: even paying on a month-by-month basis (the most expensive option), WoW costs me the price of about two movie tickets, about five cups of coffee, or one halfway decent steak. In exchange for that, I get to play in a large cartoony world with lots of good friends without having to compete every second. I can quest if I want to or screw around exploring if I want to. There is no requirement to be 1337. And, to be honest, I think it's precisely for this reason that WoW is so popular. I've been playing games since they came on cassette tapes and I've spent a hell of a lot of time playing FPS games like Quake and Enemy Territory. So, from one guy who's been at the top of FPS game rankings to another: stop assuming that just because you don't like MMO's, they don't take skill. Sure, WoW isn't a twitch game, but it is a deeply immersive game that's just plain entertaining if you can manage to relax a bit.
Also, Warcraft is hardly "the final nail in PC gaming's coffin" you suggest. WoW has a lot of people gaming who weren't gamers before. It's somewhat like the Wii in that respect, which is incidentally another system that "hardcore" gamers are bitching about. In my experience, a lot of the folks who are getting into gaming this way tend to be someone older (thirties and onward). Personally, I can't think of a better way to turn a household into a gaming household than to have one or both parents enjoy gaming themselves. So, I think WoW and its ilk will in fact bolster gaming, PC and otherwise, as we finally get multiple gamer generations. Finally, it has always been rare to see anything truly great released, so it's hardly fair to blame this on MMOs. There has always been some innovative game that comes along and then has the crap copied out of it. Arguably, Company of Heroes is an incredibly well-done and massively tweaked rip-off of Dune, but damn I've enjoyed it! And there are some awesome games on the horizon, so I'm not giving up my PC gaming rig just yet.
Most of us who have been around for a while (high UIDs due to constantly forgetting log-ins notwithstanding) know him. He responded quite pleasantly to a couple of inquiries I had concerning his writing (i.e. Just a Geek). As other posters have noted, however, I haven't seen him around lately.
I rather suspect that we have quite a few "big names" lurking on Slashdot who, for various reasons, choose not to reveal themselves. I can definitely understand it, but it'd be fantastic to have a forum where game devs for major companies can speak their minds without screaming hordes of fanbois/haters clogging the place. Hell, let's get a Relic, Blizzard, or Maxis forum up on the Opinion Center! I'd love to hear some straight talk from the game industry big names in a forum where the morons can be modded into oblivion.
Good point. I'm so often browsing with mod points though that I tend to browse at zero and in the order of posting, on the theory that I can mod more accurately if I see how things are flowing in the thread. I'll give your suggestion a shot though..it never occurred to me to try that.
First, thanks for one of the most informative posts I've ever seen on Slashdot. Getting an explanation from one of the scientists involved without the media-filter effect (oversimplification) or the dense text of a published paper is a treat. I'm only sorry that such a great post was buried below yet another futile debate on religious fundamentalism. People, we can mention radioisotopic dating without bringing up belief systems!
With that out of the way, I do have a question. You mention that this discovery lets us get a better overall view of the "elephant", specifically the ecology of the forest. However, you note that the immersion of this forest happened fairly catastrophically. I'm certainly not a botanist, but wouldn't such an event be quite destructive to forest-floor plants? While I can see trees mostly surviving, I would have thought that most of the smaller life so critical to an understanding of forest ecology would have been either destroyed or washed to different areas. Am I off-base on this assumption? If not, how do you think this will affect the scientific value of this find? Unfortunately my knowledge of geology and botany is fairly limited, so I'm not sure that I'm asking an intelligent question here.
Finally, thanks for this:
Geologic research, or in this case paleontological research, in an underground mine such as these coal mines is orthogonal to the norm above! At these mines, looking up at preserved trees and ferns in the mine ceiling, we were looking at single slice of time, a T(0) event, over a huge (relatively speaking) geographic area. I always enjoy it when someone gives me a completely different perspective about something. What a fascinating sample!
What everyone really wants is World Of Starcraft. Actually, I'd rather they didn't make World of Starcraft, because I'm extremely skeptical that they'd be able to pull it off. While the high-fantasy genre works very well because it's fairly limited in scope and "magic" supplies the necessary explanation for the really wacky stuff, I think that science fiction is a victim of its own scope. Sci-Fi tends to be really big, as evidenced by that cut-scene in Starcraft when the marine is about to get chewed up by Zerg as the massive battlecruiser flies overhead. Unless players were entirely restricted to ground and near ground-level stuff, and had some non-twitch combat system like WoW, I just don't think WoS would work.
Now, what I would like to see is all of Blizzard's creativity and energy put into Starcraft 2, utilising all of the lessons learned thus far and drawing heavily from the wonderful work that was Company of Heroes. The day I see high-resolution Protoss Zealots taking cover behind a lumbering Reaver while Dragoons skitter between the piles of wreckage in the Terran base I just destroyed will be a wonderous thing. RTS games have come a long way since Starcraft came out and I think it's a shame that we haven't seen another game in the series yet.
Here's hoping we'll be bitching about the system requirements of Starcraft 2 in the near future!
There was the dimwitted grandma who tried to sue Rockstar Games after the Hot Coffee incident because she bought GTA for her 10 year old grandson.
In conclusion, the best rating system in the world isn't going to cure the real problem here - Stupidity. Stupidity cuts both ways in this instance. That grandma's lawsuit was indeed probably an emotional overreaction, although the level of demagoguery associated with the anti-gaming groups makes such emotional posturing unsurprising. Of rather more interest, however, is the stupidity on the behalf of Rockstar. As a gamer, I'd personally like to deliver a solid kick to the nads of the person or persons responsible for the "Hot Coffee" code. The gaming community already gets enough bad press without dipshits like Rockstar giving our detractors more ammunition.
A rating system (whether ESRB or even self-imposed) is probably the gaming industry's only hope of fending off anti-gaming groups and their pet politicians. So FFS, game developers and publishers, make sure that you appropriately rate your games and take the time to make sure no unrated crap is accidentally left in your code. If that happens, the next time JT or his ilk point the finger of blame, we can say that we're doing our part and the rest is up to parental responsibility.
Part of the problem, at last least as I see it, is that parents think that trying to completely eliminate something from the sphere of perception is more noble than actually educating their kids on what's out there, and why they think it should be avoided. That's where *real* values come from- not the fake "let's all bury our heads in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist" stuff that seems to be more common than not. I agree entirely. While I can certainly understand that parents may believe that their children are not ready to be exposed to some things yet, I think any rational parent has to come to the realisation that their child will be exposed to difficult (or indeed horrifying) ideas, speech, and actions at some point. It is far better, then, to inculcate kids with the mental tools and strength to deal with these things than to send them mentally ill-equipped into the world.
I'd much rather hear a father telling his son that something is "bad" for the moment but with the promise to discuss it at some point when the child is better able to understand, than to see a parent desperately trying to pretend that something doesn't exist at all. Children, contrary to popular belief, aren't stupid and they will know that there is both something out there they don't understand and that Mum/Dad is being evasive. Couple that with a child's innate curiosity and now the kid is going to find out about it anyway, but with either no guidance or the guidance of peers.
I wonder how many pregnancies or STD infections occur because teens "discovered" sex on their own because their parents steadfastly refused to believe that their little angel would have sex before marriage?
"Think of the children" is often the cry here, on both extremes of the debate. The Jack Thompsons of the world utter the cry and then, in the same breath, demand that things start getting banned. Long-time and hardcore gamers, on the other hand, use the term with a lot of snark. In the gamer community, and indeed for many net denizens, "think of the children" is a harbinger for the loss of freedom caused by well-meaning but small-minded citizens who want to wrap the world in cotton wool for their children.
Personally, I'm at a loss as to why a rating system is considered inadequate here. Sure, it's not perfect, and both the content creators and content consumers both have valid arguments against rating systems. As a long-time gamer, I don't want to see any heavy-handed restrictions on gaming. However, I can also understand that parents are rightfully concerned about what their children are exposed to. In my mind, the crux of the problem is with those parents who want to control what their children are exposed to, but without any involvement on the part of the parent. Watchful parents can use a rating system to judge content for suitability. Again, some stuff may slip through the cracks ("Hot Coffee") but the danger of that is the price we pay for a free society. Parents, if little Johnny plays an unapproved game over at another kid's house, then your argument with the other kid's parents, not the game companies. If a retailer sells a rated-R game to your fourteen year old, again your argument is with the retailer and not the game company. And if your argument is that you cannot possibly monitor your child every moment and therefore game content should be restricted, then I must respectfully but vehemently disagree.
Now, I'm not a parent, and I note that some individuals assert that people without children should STFU, as if having a child grants the parent a special perception that is not available to others through logical reasoning. Please don't do that, as it's a flamebait tactic. Please understand that even those of us who consider ourselves "childfree" are not anti-child and even appreciate the difficulties of raising kids in an increasingly fast-paced and communicative world. Personally, I'm willing to accept a rating system on all the games that I buy because I understand that it helps parents to pick appropriate content for their kids. I also support the punishment of retailers who violate this system, because it undermines the whole point. In exchange, please don't advocate mass restrictions on the content that I want to consume because you're afraid your kid will get hold of it.
I've been suspicious of Google's "do no evil" motto from day one, Indeed. Every time I hear something like this about Google, I have a vision of an old decrepit geek sitting inside a tin shack fifty years from now. In the light of flickering screens that cut in and out as the pirate net connection goes in and out, he regards the semi-circle of small children who have come to hear him regale them with tales of how it used to be. "Tell us again, Grandfather, of the days when no-one was tracked on Googlenet and anyone could say anything," they cry in Los Angeles pidgin, a mix of English, Spanish, and Mandarin. The old man smiles but his eyes look haunted. "Oh children, once there was a time when the network wasn't even called Googlenet and the Watchers were just a company called Google! Back then, they had a motto: 'Do No Evil.' If only we'd known, little ones. If only we'd known what was coming and that they meant to stop anyone from doing 'evil'". The old man reaches up with a shaky hand and rubs his fingers over the scar where his Googlenet access chip was forcibly removed. Almost inaudibly, he whispers "Who knew that protesting the government was evil?"
And then sometimes I just get a vision of the Deathstar with a giant 'G' on it and the Imperial March playing, which is a bit more amusing.
because being Slashdot most likely they'll get flamed to hell or called retards for spending $600 on a game console etc etc. This is a fair point that I think a lot of Slashdotters should consider. I know that we have a large contingent of people who routinely proclaim to be perfectly satisfied with running games on ten-year-old hardware, but we also have a contingent of hardcore gamers too. I'm certainly guilty of having proclaimed the PS3 to be ridiculously expensive, but then two days later I've found myself trying to justify the purchase of a $600 graphics card because my 7600GT just isn't able to drive my games properly at 1600x1080 on my widescreen LCD. My hypocrisy was immediately apparent to myself and since then I've stopped commenting on the PS3's price. My point, I suppose, is that a lot of people jumping up and down about a $600 console purchase might do well to view their own tech expenditures before berating others for their spending decisions.
This is my fear. I'd already like to give a lot of people at the Microsoft gaming division a solid kick in the nads for creating an environment in which what would have been great PC games end up feeling like half-assed ports because they need to be console (360) friendly. I was already cringing when I heard that TF2 was going to be released for the 360 as well as the PC, and the announcement of cross-platform multiplayer really has me scared. I try to be pretty relaxed about gaming and don't usually engage in vitriol about consoles vs. consoles, or consoles vs. PCs, but it's starting to feel like my "home" platform is getting polluted by crap. Dammit, Valve, let the prepubescent dipshits and Madden wannabes play on their own servers, and let the PC community (replete with our own individuals fulfilling Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory) play the game without being gimped.
Of course, once I take a deep breath, other possibilities suggest themselves. Perhaps the devs will say "screw it" and just let the KB+M/controller thing ride out without trying to balance it. Maybe they'll only try to balance it on mixed servers, but leave PC gamers ungimped on PC-only servers. Maybe I should just go get a beer. Yes, that's the ticket. Mmmm, beer.
I mean I agree that the playing field *should* be level but frankly I'd rather just not have xbox360 players connected to my PC game than put up with that kind of crap! Concur. If PC players have to put up with the screaming console hordes in an FPS, the least we should be able to do is annihilate them with our 1337 twitch skills.:)
That's the only oprion I could see them actually adding to the Wii experience that may interest me. I'd think they'd do that by upgrading the Wiimote though. I don't see how the console would need to change (maybe a "real" sensor bar, but the pointing of the Wiimote seems to work pretty well.....) It will be interesting to see where Nintendo goes with this. I think they understand they've struck gold by introducing a truly novel controller and will probably want to extend that. I'm not sure how much the sensitivity of the Wiimote could be improved given technogical/weight limitations, although this is certainly possible. I'm rather hoping that ankle sensors will be available for DDR-type games, adding further to the potential of the Wii to make us look like idiots at social gatherings. I will also be interested to see whether Sony or MS make an effort to introduce similar controllers and control schemes for their games.
I for one would be pissed if I had a 360 and heard about this. I bought the DS right when it came out, and I've felt like an idiot since the DS lite came out. I think as part of the technology/gamer crowd, this is a risk that all of us take. We understand buying a product shortly after release will almost inevitably result in us seeing a faster, slimmer, or cheaper version within a year or so of our purchase. It's the price of having the toy sooner than anyone else. Interestingly, some people take perverse pride in dealing with the inevitable bugs, revisions, and other issues so common to newly released products. It's like techno-masochism.
Of course, the solution is simple: wait a while before buying. Buying a PS2 is a fantastic deal right now, with a cheap price, huge game library, and a console that's mature. Of course, you won't have the new shiny, but you also won't have to worry about a better PS2 coming out. Similarly, the DS Lite is a good buy, and for the same reasons. I bought a Wii, knowing full well that it's right at the beginning of its life and may well be superceded by an more innovative, powerful, or more accurately controlled model within a couple of years. But hell, I'm playing SSX Blur now on it, so I'm okay with that.
The thing that really killed Guild Wars for me was a feeling of isolation. Regardless of its other bad points, WoW at least had a sense of community even for the non-guilded player. Of course, my experience was on Feathermoon, the oldest and most populous RP server, which tended to have a reasonably friendly crowd. What I liked about WoW was that a player could be struggling with a quest, or getting ganked by a random mob, and another player just happening to come by could leap in to help. I made some very good friends that way and it really fostered a sense of community.
In contrast, GW felt like going into a Counterstrike server. This is fair enough, I suppose, as GW has always billed itself as not a MMORPG but rather a competitive online environment. But the often offensive names, general foulness on the chat channels, and complete isolation due to instanced everything really prevented me from feeling any kind of connection to the game or the people playing it. I enjoyed the PvP aspect of GW and made a genuine effort to enjoy the PvE storyline, but just couldn't maintain interest. I periodically load up the game to give it another shot, but the result is always the same and for the same reasons.
That said, I'm glad that GW has been successful as both a game and a revenue model, and I hope that GW2 will be similarly successful. I just hope GW2 will foster a bit more community.
That's fair enough, but the example you linked is again logic-based, as Mandrake overwrote the firmware for the drive. Similarly, it's clear that Linux could screw up a keyboard in the logical sense by interfering with how an application receives the input. In this instance, one would expect either undetected keystrokes or gobbledygook due to misinterpreted keystrokes.
The issue in TFA, however, is evidently both purely physical and observed in hardware that simply doesn't have the sort of two-way communication needed for an OS to screw it up. While physical damage might be feasible by thrashing an optical or hard-drive, I really don't see how Linux could possibly cause keys to stick.
IANAL, but I recall that products must be fit and usable for their intended purpose, as a "reasonable person" would interpret it. In my mind, unless HP or other such companies specifically state that their hardware is designed to run only certain versions of Windows, then a reasonable person would conclude that laptops are designed to run any appropriate software. Of course, this swings both ways, as the reasonable person would also not hold the hardware manufacturer accountable for damage caused by screwy software.
Thus, I don't think HP has a leg to stand on in this case, Linux install or no. If the consumer had screwed up her optical drive due to bad Ubuntu code, then HP would be fully justified in telling her to go take a running jump, but in this instance the Linux install should be irrelevant.
It's interesting to speculate as to the reason for this odd policy. The keyboard issues cited in TFA are clearly a purely hardware problem, unrelated to software. I've run some fairly iffy code, but I've yet to encounter something that would make my keyboard start sticking (some websites, however...). This policy's genesis would seem to lie in either ignorance or entanglement and I'm genuinely curious as to which one it is. Is it that HP's tech support folks are poorly adept with Linux and therefore officially eschew non-official installs? Or is there some sort of corporate pressure from Microsoft to make it less easy for Joe Blow to run Ubuntu and its ilk?
Given that HP (again, from TFA) sells laptops with Linux pre-installed, the former seems unlikely. The latter is indeed a fascinating can of worms.
Just curious, how was your experience with the Wiimote? The idea of innovative gameplay was intriguing at first, but I'm suspicious as to how refined it is in practice. All this talk about seniors and moms playing Wii Sports makes me doubtful. Is it just making simple motions that trigger a canned response on the device, or is there subtlety and accuracy that reflect true skill? It's capable of the latter, but currently many games use it only for the former. The references to seniors and parents playing sports is probably entirely accurate, as the controls for the Wii Sports games are incredibly intuitive and quite closely mimic real-world motions.
At present I only own Wii Sports and Zelda, as nothing else has really piqued my interest so far. However, these two titles are good examples. Wii Sports actually makes fairly refined use of the Wiimote, although I suspect that it is more of a harbinger of what is possible rather than the standard against which other games will be measured in terms of sophistication. The control is sufficiently sensitive (even with my less-than-optimal setup) that the bat on-screen in the baseball mini-game quite accurately reflects my stance. Other mini-games further demonstrate the ability to accurately detect motion, including twisting the Wiimote. My understanding is that golf games such as the Tiger Woods offering are subtle enough that if you have a tendency to hook or slice in a real-world game of golf, you will generally have the same tendency in the Wii game.
Conversely, the Zelda game makes poor use of the Wiimote. This is unsurprising since it is a half-port of a Gamecube game, as I understand it. Waggling the Wiimote back and forth parallel to the floor will cause Link to draw his sword and swing. Shaking the nunchuck will cause a spin attack. Fishing uses the Wiimote as one would expect (and I wouldn't be surprised to see a fishing game on the Wii at some point) but isn't terribly subtle.
In all, I'd say that the Wii control scheme has fantastic potential but isn't there yet. The large number of ports that try to tack on motion control aren't helping. However, given the unbelievable popularity of the console and the subsequent inevitable refocus from game companies, I think we'll see quite a few original skill-based games that make full use of the Wiimote's possibilities.
FWIW, for those who haven't snagged a Wii yet, I wouldn't worry too much. The console is only going to improve in the coming months and a new generation of Wii-specific games probably won't start hitting for a bit. Mine is gathering dust at the moment because I'm studying for the MCAT, but I'm looking forward to playing the new stuff later this summer!
Slashdot Mirror
I see that maxim quoted a lot these days. I see the point it's making, of course; but I can't help wondering: what does prove causation, then?
If a phenomenon is observed only when something is present but never when it is not, a causal relationship can reasonably be construed. The other point is, at least in science, nothing is ever proven!Your point is well-taken. CoH clearly succeeds because it focuses on infantry-level combat, leaving things like airstrikes and artillery as expensive "call-in" options. The modern game I suggest would have to bear this in mind, keeping things at the infantry level despite our rather more diverse options for modern combat. As we're seeing in Iraq right now, even the most advanced warfighters on the planet still find themselves in tight urban terrain where overkill methods are drastically less effective. I definitely think there's a game there (although, as a veteran, I have to confess that I feel like shit mentioning a game and Iraq in the same thought) and an urban-combat modern CoH would be terrific, IMO.
I agree there's definitely a lot of potential for classical era and perhaps even revolutionary/civil war era games too. The stumbling block here would be the annoying tendency of troops to march in neat formations during those times, which rather defeats the purpose of CoH's wonderful cover system. One might also argue that the Total War series has already covered these eras rather well.
But hell, while we're dreaming, I want Vikings! cheers.
...I have a hard time seeing how people can justify regularly PAYING to play a game unless they are indeed playing it near non-stop. A habit I have unfortunately witnessed up close and found to be quite annoying. I'm just glad that Quake II actually took some skill, otherwise I might feel as if I had been wasting my time on constant deathmatch back in the day... I justify it like this: even paying on a month-by-month basis (the most expensive option), WoW costs me the price of about two movie tickets, about five cups of coffee, or one halfway decent steak. In exchange for that, I get to play in a large cartoony world with lots of good friends without having to compete every second. I can quest if I want to or screw around exploring if I want to. There is no requirement to be 1337. And, to be honest, I think it's precisely for this reason that WoW is so popular. I've been playing games since they came on cassette tapes and I've spent a hell of a lot of time playing FPS games like Quake and Enemy Territory. So, from one guy who's been at the top of FPS game rankings to another: stop assuming that just because you don't like MMO's, they don't take skill. Sure, WoW isn't a twitch game, but it is a deeply immersive game that's just plain entertaining if you can manage to relax a bit.Also, Warcraft is hardly "the final nail in PC gaming's coffin" you suggest. WoW has a lot of people gaming who weren't gamers before. It's somewhat like the Wii in that respect, which is incidentally another system that "hardcore" gamers are bitching about. In my experience, a lot of the folks who are getting into gaming this way tend to be someone older (thirties and onward). Personally, I can't think of a better way to turn a household into a gaming household than to have one or both parents enjoy gaming themselves. So, I think WoW and its ilk will in fact bolster gaming, PC and otherwise, as we finally get multiple gamer generations. Finally, it has always been rare to see anything truly great released, so it's hardly fair to blame this on MMOs. There has always been some innovative game that comes along and then has the crap copied out of it. Arguably, Company of Heroes is an incredibly well-done and massively tweaked rip-off of Dune, but damn I've enjoyed it! And there are some awesome games on the horizon, so I'm not giving up my PC gaming rig just yet.
cheers.
Most of us who have been around for a while (high UIDs due to constantly forgetting log-ins notwithstanding) know him. He responded quite pleasantly to a couple of inquiries I had concerning his writing (i.e. Just a Geek). As other posters have noted, however, I haven't seen him around lately.
I rather suspect that we have quite a few "big names" lurking on Slashdot who, for various reasons, choose not to reveal themselves. I can definitely understand it, but it'd be fantastic to have a forum where game devs for major companies can speak their minds without screaming hordes of fanbois/haters clogging the place. Hell, let's get a Relic, Blizzard, or Maxis forum up on the Opinion Center! I'd love to hear some straight talk from the game industry big names in a forum where the morons can be modded into oblivion.
Good point. I'm so often browsing with mod points though that I tend to browse at zero and in the order of posting, on the theory that I can mod more accurately if I see how things are flowing in the thread. I'll give your suggestion a shot though..it never occurred to me to try that.
cheers.
First, thanks for one of the most informative posts I've ever seen on Slashdot. Getting an explanation from one of the scientists involved without the media-filter effect (oversimplification) or the dense text of a published paper is a treat. I'm only sorry that such a great post was buried below yet another futile debate on religious fundamentalism. People, we can mention radioisotopic dating without bringing up belief systems!
With that out of the way, I do have a question. You mention that this discovery lets us get a better overall view of the "elephant", specifically the ecology of the forest. However, you note that the immersion of this forest happened fairly catastrophically. I'm certainly not a botanist, but wouldn't such an event be quite destructive to forest-floor plants? While I can see trees mostly surviving, I would have thought that most of the smaller life so critical to an understanding of forest ecology would have been either destroyed or washed to different areas. Am I off-base on this assumption? If not, how do you think this will affect the scientific value of this find? Unfortunately my knowledge of geology and botany is fairly limited, so I'm not sure that I'm asking an intelligent question here.
Finally, thanks for this: Geologic research, or in this case paleontological research, in an underground mine such as these coal mines is orthogonal to the norm above! At these mines, looking up at preserved trees and ferns in the mine ceiling, we were looking at single slice of time, a T(0) event, over a huge (relatively speaking) geographic area. I always enjoy it when someone gives me a completely different perspective about something. What a fascinating sample!
regards,
Richard
Now, what I would like to see is all of Blizzard's creativity and energy put into Starcraft 2, utilising all of the lessons learned thus far and drawing heavily from the wonderful work that was Company of Heroes. The day I see high-resolution Protoss Zealots taking cover behind a lumbering Reaver while Dragoons skitter between the piles of wreckage in the Terran base I just destroyed will be a wonderous thing. RTS games have come a long way since Starcraft came out and I think it's a shame that we haven't seen another game in the series yet.
Here's hoping we'll be bitching about the system requirements of Starcraft 2 in the near future!
In conclusion, the best rating system in the world isn't going to cure the real problem here - Stupidity. Stupidity cuts both ways in this instance. That grandma's lawsuit was indeed probably an emotional overreaction, although the level of demagoguery associated with the anti-gaming groups makes such emotional posturing unsurprising. Of rather more interest, however, is the stupidity on the behalf of Rockstar. As a gamer, I'd personally like to deliver a solid kick to the nads of the person or persons responsible for the "Hot Coffee" code. The gaming community already gets enough bad press without dipshits like Rockstar giving our detractors more ammunition.
A rating system (whether ESRB or even self-imposed) is probably the gaming industry's only hope of fending off anti-gaming groups and their pet politicians. So FFS, game developers and publishers, make sure that you appropriately rate your games and take the time to make sure no unrated crap is accidentally left in your code. If that happens, the next time JT or his ilk point the finger of blame, we can say that we're doing our part and the rest is up to parental responsibility.
I'd much rather hear a father telling his son that something is "bad" for the moment but with the promise to discuss it at some point when the child is better able to understand, than to see a parent desperately trying to pretend that something doesn't exist at all. Children, contrary to popular belief, aren't stupid and they will know that there is both something out there they don't understand and that Mum/Dad is being evasive. Couple that with a child's innate curiosity and now the kid is going to find out about it anyway, but with either no guidance or the guidance of peers.
I wonder how many pregnancies or STD infections occur because teens "discovered" sex on their own because their parents steadfastly refused to believe that their little angel would have sex before marriage?
"Think of the children" is often the cry here, on both extremes of the debate. The Jack Thompsons of the world utter the cry and then, in the same breath, demand that things start getting banned. Long-time and hardcore gamers, on the other hand, use the term with a lot of snark. In the gamer community, and indeed for many net denizens, "think of the children" is a harbinger for the loss of freedom caused by well-meaning but small-minded citizens who want to wrap the world in cotton wool for their children.
Personally, I'm at a loss as to why a rating system is considered inadequate here. Sure, it's not perfect, and both the content creators and content consumers both have valid arguments against rating systems. As a long-time gamer, I don't want to see any heavy-handed restrictions on gaming. However, I can also understand that parents are rightfully concerned about what their children are exposed to. In my mind, the crux of the problem is with those parents who want to control what their children are exposed to, but without any involvement on the part of the parent. Watchful parents can use a rating system to judge content for suitability. Again, some stuff may slip through the cracks ("Hot Coffee") but the danger of that is the price we pay for a free society. Parents, if little Johnny plays an unapproved game over at another kid's house, then your argument with the other kid's parents, not the game companies. If a retailer sells a rated-R game to your fourteen year old, again your argument is with the retailer and not the game company. And if your argument is that you cannot possibly monitor your child every moment and therefore game content should be restricted, then I must respectfully but vehemently disagree.
Now, I'm not a parent, and I note that some individuals assert that people without children should STFU, as if having a child grants the parent a special perception that is not available to others through logical reasoning. Please don't do that, as it's a flamebait tactic. Please understand that even those of us who consider ourselves "childfree" are not anti-child and even appreciate the difficulties of raising kids in an increasingly fast-paced and communicative world. Personally, I'm willing to accept a rating system on all the games that I buy because I understand that it helps parents to pick appropriate content for their kids. I also support the punishment of retailers who violate this system, because it undermines the whole point. In exchange, please don't advocate mass restrictions on the content that I want to consume because you're afraid your kid will get hold of it.
And then sometimes I just get a vision of the Deathstar with a giant 'G' on it and the Imperial March playing, which is a bit more amusing.
Hmm, perhaps I think about this stuff too much!
This is my fear. I'd already like to give a lot of people at the Microsoft gaming division a solid kick in the nads for creating an environment in which what would have been great PC games end up feeling like half-assed ports because they need to be console (360) friendly. I was already cringing when I heard that TF2 was going to be released for the 360 as well as the PC, and the announcement of cross-platform multiplayer really has me scared. I try to be pretty relaxed about gaming and don't usually engage in vitriol about consoles vs. consoles, or consoles vs. PCs, but it's starting to feel like my "home" platform is getting polluted by crap. Dammit, Valve, let the prepubescent dipshits and Madden wannabes play on their own servers, and let the PC community (replete with our own individuals fulfilling Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory) play the game without being gimped.
Of course, once I take a deep breath, other possibilities suggest themselves. Perhaps the devs will say "screw it" and just let the KB+M/controller thing ride out without trying to balance it. Maybe they'll only try to balance it on mixed servers, but leave PC gamers ungimped on PC-only servers. Maybe I should just go get a beer. Yes, that's the ticket. Mmmm, beer.
Of course, the solution is simple: wait a while before buying. Buying a PS2 is a fantastic deal right now, with a cheap price, huge game library, and a console that's mature. Of course, you won't have the new shiny, but you also won't have to worry about a better PS2 coming out. Similarly, the DS Lite is a good buy, and for the same reasons. I bought a Wii, knowing full well that it's right at the beginning of its life and may well be superceded by an more innovative, powerful, or more accurately controlled model within a couple of years. But hell, I'm playing SSX Blur now on it, so I'm okay with that.
The thing that really killed Guild Wars for me was a feeling of isolation. Regardless of its other bad points, WoW at least had a sense of community even for the non-guilded player. Of course, my experience was on Feathermoon, the oldest and most populous RP server, which tended to have a reasonably friendly crowd. What I liked about WoW was that a player could be struggling with a quest, or getting ganked by a random mob, and another player just happening to come by could leap in to help. I made some very good friends that way and it really fostered a sense of community.
In contrast, GW felt like going into a Counterstrike server. This is fair enough, I suppose, as GW has always billed itself as not a MMORPG but rather a competitive online environment. But the often offensive names, general foulness on the chat channels, and complete isolation due to instanced everything really prevented me from feeling any kind of connection to the game or the people playing it. I enjoyed the PvP aspect of GW and made a genuine effort to enjoy the PvE storyline, but just couldn't maintain interest. I periodically load up the game to give it another shot, but the result is always the same and for the same reasons.
That said, I'm glad that GW has been successful as both a game and a revenue model, and I hope that GW2 will be similarly successful. I just hope GW2 will foster a bit more community.
That's fair enough, but the example you linked is again logic-based, as Mandrake overwrote the firmware for the drive. Similarly, it's clear that Linux could screw up a keyboard in the logical sense by interfering with how an application receives the input. In this instance, one would expect either undetected keystrokes or gobbledygook due to misinterpreted keystrokes.
The issue in TFA, however, is evidently both purely physical and observed in hardware that simply doesn't have the sort of two-way communication needed for an OS to screw it up. While physical damage might be feasible by thrashing an optical or hard-drive, I really don't see how Linux could possibly cause keys to stick.
IANAL, but I recall that products must be fit and usable for their intended purpose, as a "reasonable person" would interpret it. In my mind, unless HP or other such companies specifically state that their hardware is designed to run only certain versions of Windows, then a reasonable person would conclude that laptops are designed to run any appropriate software. Of course, this swings both ways, as the reasonable person would also not hold the hardware manufacturer accountable for damage caused by screwy software.
Thus, I don't think HP has a leg to stand on in this case, Linux install or no. If the consumer had screwed up her optical drive due to bad Ubuntu code, then HP would be fully justified in telling her to go take a running jump, but in this instance the Linux install should be irrelevant.
It's interesting to speculate as to the reason for this odd policy. The keyboard issues cited in TFA are clearly a purely hardware problem, unrelated to software. I've run some fairly iffy code, but I've yet to encounter something that would make my keyboard start sticking (some websites, however...). This policy's genesis would seem to lie in either ignorance or entanglement and I'm genuinely curious as to which one it is. Is it that HP's tech support folks are poorly adept with Linux and therefore officially eschew non-official installs? Or is there some sort of corporate pressure from Microsoft to make it less easy for Joe Blow to run Ubuntu and its ilk?
Given that HP (again, from TFA) sells laptops with Linux pre-installed, the former seems unlikely. The latter is indeed a fascinating can of worms.
At present I only own Wii Sports and Zelda, as nothing else has really piqued my interest so far. However, these two titles are good examples. Wii Sports actually makes fairly refined use of the Wiimote, although I suspect that it is more of a harbinger of what is possible rather than the standard against which other games will be measured in terms of sophistication. The control is sufficiently sensitive (even with my less-than-optimal setup) that the bat on-screen in the baseball mini-game quite accurately reflects my stance. Other mini-games further demonstrate the ability to accurately detect motion, including twisting the Wiimote. My understanding is that golf games such as the Tiger Woods offering are subtle enough that if you have a tendency to hook or slice in a real-world game of golf, you will generally have the same tendency in the Wii game.
Conversely, the Zelda game makes poor use of the Wiimote. This is unsurprising since it is a half-port of a Gamecube game, as I understand it. Waggling the Wiimote back and forth parallel to the floor will cause Link to draw his sword and swing. Shaking the nunchuck will cause a spin attack. Fishing uses the Wiimote as one would expect (and I wouldn't be surprised to see a fishing game on the Wii at some point) but isn't terribly subtle.
In all, I'd say that the Wii control scheme has fantastic potential but isn't there yet. The large number of ports that try to tack on motion control aren't helping. However, given the unbelievable popularity of the console and the subsequent inevitable refocus from game companies, I think we'll see quite a few original skill-based games that make full use of the Wiimote's possibilities.
FWIW, for those who haven't snagged a Wii yet, I wouldn't worry too much. The console is only going to improve in the coming months and a new generation of Wii-specific games probably won't start hitting for a bit. Mine is gathering dust at the moment because I'm studying for the MCAT, but I'm looking forward to playing the new stuff later this summer!