So what you're saying is that Quake isn't art, but Half Life is art? How the hell can you say that one of the most imitated games of all time has no artistic value? ID defined an entire genre of video games with Doom, and then redefined it with Quake, which directly influenced the creation of Half Life in an extremely fundamental way. The gameplay and execution of Doom and Quake are some of the tightest, most responsive, and most exciting ever created in my opinion, and I definitely see plenty of artistic value in that.
I agree there. Once I saw the battery life, it was end of discussion about the device for me. 5 hours battery during full use is my absolute minimum for a portable device like this, anything else is borderline pointless.
Thinking that I (men in general) might buy your product because you add a picture of a busty model is pretty condescending. It sure isn't stupid though, because it fucking works.
I 100% disagree with you here. In my perfect world, the Transformers movie would be a 45 minute continuous cinematic of giant robots transforming and un-transforming themselves while fighting each other and smashing up scenery. It wouldn't have any storyline besides Autobots vs Decepticons, and it wouldn't even have any dialogue. That's exactly what I went to the cinema to see, and if you just ignore all the bits where people are saying stuff it's a very satisfying movie.
Donky Kong is a great game for the same reason. It's not thinking entertainment, you jump over barrels and collect stuff and have fun. It doesn't need a story, and providing one would probably only make it worse.
Now I can enjoy Donky Kong and Transformers while still enjoying Shadow of the Colossus and Dr. Strangelove. Both types of entertainment are equally valid for different reasons. Similarly, there are people out there who seriously value huge expositions and games that are basically playable movies. I think that sucks, but Metal Gear Solid 4 still broke sales records. Who am I to tell them they're wrong?
Things do not always turn out exactly to plan, for any company. I think that Apple set out to create an iPod with a phone in it, which incidentally could also run applications and games. What people wanted to buy was a machine which ran applications and games, which also had a phone and an iPod in it. Perhaps the focus of the device was not as expected. Or perhaps, like a tortured artist, the architect of the iPhone will never be happy with his own designs...
Indeed. When Tolkein set about writing LotR his specific aim was to write an english folklore of our very own, since what we had was very disjointed compared to the strength of norse and roman myths. I think he would find the idea of one company 'owning' his work to be totally against the central idea behind his work. Myths are there to be told and retold.
Unfortunately, we can't ask him as he has been dead 36 years now. The idea that anyone might own the sole rights to something written by a man long dead is definitely a strange one to get your head around.
I just navigated to thepiratebay.org successfully from my T-mobile phone in the UK. Just an FYI for anyone who has recently become interested in changing their mobile phone / internet contract.
It's worth noting however that I have my porn filter off. You have to call your service provider and have adult content switched on for this service for some unknown reason.
Example: A company has zero piracy and 100,000 sales. Along comes piracy. Now, they have 1,000,000 pirates and 10,000 sales.
Wow, thanks for that brilliant and useful example. How can you seriously expect to form a valid point using made up statistics actually wrapped over an impossible scenario?!
Firstly, computer programs are infinitely copyable by their very nature. There has never been a time in the history of disk media where software could not be pirated. So you can never point to a time when there was no piracy and compare it to a time when piracy was rampant. There are no real statistics available to support your claim, and there never will be!
Secondly, in what scenario would software sales actually go down in a way thats wholly due to piracy and nothing else? Do they all find the torrents and return the legitimate software? Or are those week 1 and week 2 sales in your example? Because you know, software sales always go down over time, and usually the first week sales are the best regardless of piracy or anything else.
Now heres a hypothetical situation for you: lets say a load of people buy the game, and a load of people download it for free. It's an inevitable consequence of software don't forget - you can copy it, so people do, and theres nothing you or I can do about it. Now, if even 1% of people who pirated the software like it enough to purchase it, hasn't piracy contributed 1% to the sale of the product? If you eliminated piracy (I need to stress again at this junction that this is IMPOSSIBLE), how do you know that even 1% of pirates would buy the product instead of never trying the software in the first place?
People need to realise that the comparison is not piracy vs no piracy, it's businesses that fight piracy vs businesses that use piracy. People will pirate Demigod. Lets wait and see what happens after that shall we?
Every games news site in town reports the selective censoring... and within hours the mysterious glitch is just as mysteriously solved.
let me ask you, what kind of glitch would cause material whose topics are at odds with conservative Christian values not to show up on the main search engine? Not just gay and lesbian titles, but 'Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica' also. Someone at Amazon has been caught with their pants down i'd say...
Anyone remember the massive public protest against the stupid Spore DRM scheme? If you look up the game on Amazon, you can still see the extremely low rating people are giving it.
Well, a couple of weeks later and Amazon had had enough. Even though the concerns about DRM and Starforce were definitely something consumers would want to know before they bought the product, one day the reviews just dissappeared. The cause? A mysterious glitch! Sound familiar? The publicity from game news sites was so bad they put the reviews back up almost instantly.
Kind of proves that Amazon haven't really learned their lesson about what kind of behaviour will and won't be tolerated by the public. How many gay and lesbian customers is this incident going to lose them, I wonder? Was is worth it to appease whoever paid them to do it?
The whole front and back sections is industry and culture stuff:). Thats actually the main reason I buy the magazine, I don't really even read the reviews, I prefer asking a friend whose personality and preferences you already know for their opinions. That way you know their biases well before you even hear the review. But each to their own eh?
That's just the way Edge magazine roll. They actually had a heavy pro-PS3 bias for a long time, things were bound to swing back the other way at some point. There is almost universally no point in reading any of their reviews, they tend to just pick a stance, write a paragraph on the way the game 'feels' to them, and possibly throw in some pretentious analogies to liven things up. Actual review scores seem randomly picked at best, from what I've gathered.
Shame really, their features are actually very good, but all in all you'll be best off reading Games(tm) as the quality of writing is much better nowadays.
Thanks, I don't get rated highly on slashdot very often, perhaps a snazzier username is whats required here.
Deer antlers are a great example because they are adaptive both for attacking predators and sexual selection via intraspecific competition for mates. But even in this context you can see different pressures shaping the antlers purpose over the generations: increased weight of the antlers gives a natural advantage when jousting, and yet causes the animal to manouver more slowly when surrounded by wolves. Increased splay allows them to lock antlers easier, and therefore control an opponent, but longer points allow more vicious gouging of flesh (which is also adaptive sexually in the short term, but in the long term fatal competition for mates is nearly non-existent).
Natural Selection is a fun theory, developments is scientific thought are ongoing and there is always more to learn.
The well-accepted name for the process is evolution
Darwin hated using 'evolution' as the shorthand for his theory. Evolution was the result. The mechanism that causes evolution was Natural Selection. He called it Evolution by the process of Natural Selection, or just Natural Selection for short. He predicted that people would misunderstand the term if the mechanism of his theory was not made the focus of discussion. How right he was.
"but sometimes it evolves to have a disadvantage. For sex reason, see."
One might say that having a lot of sex was a pretty big advantage, when success is defined as having contributed the most surviving offspring, which themselves go on to produce young.
But I think i'm finally understanding your point: why don't females always evolve to find existing adaptive characteristics the most attractive. i.e. why isn't the fastest male cheetah automatically the most attractive, and so on.
Let us take cheetahs as my example. Lets say speed was the most sexy characteristic, and fast cheetahs catch the most game. A cheetah is born that is faster than his peers, but as a consequence he is too small and weak to catch game properly. But he's still sexy, right? If he can survive long enough to carry his burden to adulthood, he will have the most sex. He doesn't need to live for years on end, just long enough to impregnate multiple females, and his life is a success. But are his offspring a success? If they can carry their most attractive characteristic through life to sexual maturity then yes, they are a success, even if they are worse hunters than their peers.
Perhaps I can rephrase the problem. A deers antlers are great for seeing off predators, but make eating bark and grass much more difficult, and cause a huge strain to the neck and back. Without them, the animals could run faster to food sources, and could devote more energy to growth and care of their young. What is more important, survival against predators or eating the best food in abundance and becoming healthy? Of course, you cannot have one without the other. Both are very important. And so, believe it or not, is reproduction; the method by which a female selects her mate is automatically going to become a disproportionally important factor that selects fit individuals, regardless of what it happens to be.
No, that's not how it goes. The titles Activision-Blizzard chose to keep for release were the safe bets - Spyro and Crash Bandicoot. Not great games by any accounts, but playable family entertainment. Games they're dropping include World in Conflict (critical gem) and Brutal Legend (developed by the Psychonauts team). The entire dev teams behind these titles now have no funding and an uncertain future.
Fallout is the right word, because what we're going to get is a few cash cows instead of a bunch of products of varying quality, including niche masterpeices.
Now I can see why A-B want to have few titles which sell in big numbers, but if every company did exactly the same thing our industry would collapse overnight under the weight of it's own mediocrity.
"People are pirating our game? We need copy protection and DRM!"
"Piracy is still high, it's not working... more DRM will fix this!"
"Piracy is going down? Obviously DRM is working!"
"Games sales are still too low? It can't be due to our unsustainable business model and crapware, those pirates must still be thieving our stuff!"
It's amazing how many people swallow their crap when there real agenda is pretty clear to see - they want to eliminate second hand sales and casual game sharing. It ain't going to work, it's not going to be particularly beneficial, and by the time they realise that consumer trust will have fallen through the floor.
In roughly that order. Anyone wanna tackle those problems first?
Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome
on
Google Chrome, Day 2
·
· Score: 1
For interested Linux users, I used this Firefox extension to spoof my browser id and download it.
Between the windows-exclusivity, secret updater installs and dodgy download rules i'd say this is my 2nd worst google release ever. The worst is still googletalk, which I need on a daily basis and *still* has no linux or mac port years after it was released. Fuck google's attitude, seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
So what you're saying is that Quake isn't art, but Half Life is art? How the hell can you say that one of the most imitated games of all time has no artistic value? ID defined an entire genre of video games with Doom, and then redefined it with Quake, which directly influenced the creation of Half Life in an extremely fundamental way. The gameplay and execution of Doom and Quake are some of the tightest, most responsive, and most exciting ever created in my opinion, and I definitely see plenty of artistic value in that.
I agree there. Once I saw the battery life, it was end of discussion about the device for me. 5 hours battery during full use is my absolute minimum for a portable device like this, anything else is borderline pointless.
Thinking that I (men in general) might buy your product because you add a picture of a busty model is pretty condescending. It sure isn't stupid though, because it fucking works.
I 100% disagree with you here. In my perfect world, the Transformers movie would be a 45 minute continuous cinematic of giant robots transforming and un-transforming themselves while fighting each other and smashing up scenery. It wouldn't have any storyline besides Autobots vs Decepticons, and it wouldn't even have any dialogue. That's exactly what I went to the cinema to see, and if you just ignore all the bits where people are saying stuff it's a very satisfying movie.
Donky Kong is a great game for the same reason. It's not thinking entertainment, you jump over barrels and collect stuff and have fun. It doesn't need a story, and providing one would probably only make it worse.
Now I can enjoy Donky Kong and Transformers while still enjoying Shadow of the Colossus and Dr. Strangelove. Both types of entertainment are equally valid for different reasons. Similarly, there are people out there who seriously value huge expositions and games that are basically playable movies. I think that sucks, but Metal Gear Solid 4 still broke sales records. Who am I to tell them they're wrong?
Things do not always turn out exactly to plan, for any company. I think that Apple set out to create an iPod with a phone in it, which incidentally could also run applications and games. What people wanted to buy was a machine which ran applications and games, which also had a phone and an iPod in it. Perhaps the focus of the device was not as expected. Or perhaps, like a tortured artist, the architect of the iPhone will never be happy with his own designs...
Indeed. When Tolkein set about writing LotR his specific aim was to write an english folklore of our very own, since what we had was very disjointed compared to the strength of norse and roman myths. I think he would find the idea of one company 'owning' his work to be totally against the central idea behind his work. Myths are there to be told and retold.
Unfortunately, we can't ask him as he has been dead 36 years now. The idea that anyone might own the sole rights to something written by a man long dead is definitely a strange one to get your head around.
*switched off. The pron filter is automatically on on purchase, and has to be switched off by calling the t-mobile call centre. L2proofread.
I just navigated to thepiratebay.org successfully from my T-mobile phone in the UK. Just an FYI for anyone who has recently become interested in changing their mobile phone / internet contract.
It's worth noting however that I have my porn filter off. You have to call your service provider and have adult content switched on for this service for some unknown reason.
Example: A company has zero piracy and 100,000 sales. Along comes piracy. Now, they have 1,000,000 pirates and 10,000 sales.
Wow, thanks for that brilliant and useful example. How can you seriously expect to form a valid point using made up statistics actually wrapped over an impossible scenario?!
Firstly, computer programs are infinitely copyable by their very nature. There has never been a time in the history of disk media where software could not be pirated. So you can never point to a time when there was no piracy and compare it to a time when piracy was rampant. There are no real statistics available to support your claim, and there never will be!
Secondly, in what scenario would software sales actually go down in a way thats wholly due to piracy and nothing else? Do they all find the torrents and return the legitimate software? Or are those week 1 and week 2 sales in your example? Because you know, software sales always go down over time, and usually the first week sales are the best regardless of piracy or anything else.
Now heres a hypothetical situation for you: lets say a load of people buy the game, and a load of people download it for free. It's an inevitable consequence of software don't forget - you can copy it, so people do, and theres nothing you or I can do about it. Now, if even 1% of people who pirated the software like it enough to purchase it, hasn't piracy contributed 1% to the sale of the product? If you eliminated piracy (I need to stress again at this junction that this is IMPOSSIBLE), how do you know that even 1% of pirates would buy the product instead of never trying the software in the first place?
People need to realise that the comparison is not piracy vs no piracy, it's businesses that fight piracy vs businesses that use piracy. People will pirate Demigod. Lets wait and see what happens after that shall we?
Yes, it's Amazons favourite excuse as of late. Remember when DRM and Starforce caused a consumer backlash which generated thousands of negative reviews for Spore? Somehow, they all got lost due to a mysterious glitch too!
Every games news site in town reports the selective censoring... and within hours the mysterious glitch is just as mysteriously solved.
let me ask you, what kind of glitch would cause material whose topics are at odds with conservative Christian values not to show up on the main search engine? Not just gay and lesbian titles, but 'Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica' also. Someone at Amazon has been caught with their pants down i'd say...
Anyone remember the massive public protest against the stupid Spore DRM scheme? If you look up the game on Amazon, you can still see the extremely low rating people are giving it.
Well, a couple of weeks later and Amazon had had enough. Even though the concerns about DRM and Starforce were definitely something consumers would want to know before they bought the product, one day the reviews just dissappeared. The cause? A mysterious glitch! Sound familiar? The publicity from game news sites was so bad they put the reviews back up almost instantly.
Kind of proves that Amazon haven't really learned their lesson about what kind of behaviour will and won't be tolerated by the public. How many gay and lesbian customers is this incident going to lose them, I wonder? Was is worth it to appease whoever paid them to do it?
The whole front and back sections is industry and culture stuff :). Thats actually the main reason I buy the magazine, I don't really even read the reviews, I prefer asking a friend whose personality and preferences you already know for their opinions. That way you know their biases well before you even hear the review. But each to their own eh?
That's just the way Edge magazine roll. They actually had a heavy pro-PS3 bias for a long time, things were bound to swing back the other way at some point. There is almost universally no point in reading any of their reviews, they tend to just pick a stance, write a paragraph on the way the game 'feels' to them, and possibly throw in some pretentious analogies to liven things up. Actual review scores seem randomly picked at best, from what I've gathered.
Shame really, their features are actually very good, but all in all you'll be best off reading Games(tm) as the quality of writing is much better nowadays.
The HTC Magic has a proprietary headphone jack, and so will not accept many standard headphones.
No thanks, i'll wait for one with proper connectors.
First date in years :). It's like the gods of unix (linus himself?) came down from the heavens and sorted it out for me.
Or maybe I just asked her out when we were drunk, one of the two.
Crocodiles.
Thanks, I don't get rated highly on slashdot very often, perhaps a snazzier username is whats required here.
Deer antlers are a great example because they are adaptive both for attacking predators and sexual selection via intraspecific competition for mates. But even in this context you can see different pressures shaping the antlers purpose over the generations: increased weight of the antlers gives a natural advantage when jousting, and yet causes the animal to manouver more slowly when surrounded by wolves. Increased splay allows them to lock antlers easier, and therefore control an opponent, but longer points allow more vicious gouging of flesh (which is also adaptive sexually in the short term, but in the long term fatal competition for mates is nearly non-existent).
Natural Selection is a fun theory, developments is scientific thought are ongoing and there is always more to learn.
The well-accepted name for the process is evolution
Darwin hated using 'evolution' as the shorthand for his theory. Evolution was the result. The mechanism that causes evolution was Natural Selection. He called it Evolution by the process of Natural Selection, or just Natural Selection for short. He predicted that people would misunderstand the term if the mechanism of his theory was not made the focus of discussion. How right he was.
Here is a picture of the front cover of his most famous work. The word 'evolution' does not even appear.
"but sometimes it evolves to have a disadvantage. For sex reason, see."
One might say that having a lot of sex was a pretty big advantage, when success is defined as having contributed the most surviving offspring, which themselves go on to produce young.
But I think i'm finally understanding your point: why don't females always evolve to find existing adaptive characteristics the most attractive. i.e. why isn't the fastest male cheetah automatically the most attractive, and so on.
Let us take cheetahs as my example. Lets say speed was the most sexy characteristic, and fast cheetahs catch the most game. A cheetah is born that is faster than his peers, but as a consequence he is too small and weak to catch game properly. But he's still sexy, right? If he can survive long enough to carry his burden to adulthood, he will have the most sex. He doesn't need to live for years on end, just long enough to impregnate multiple females, and his life is a success. But are his offspring a success? If they can carry their most attractive characteristic through life to sexual maturity then yes, they are a success, even if they are worse hunters than their peers.
Perhaps I can rephrase the problem. A deers antlers are great for seeing off predators, but make eating bark and grass much more difficult, and cause a huge strain to the neck and back. Without them, the animals could run faster to food sources, and could devote more energy to growth and care of their young. What is more important, survival against predators or eating the best food in abundance and becoming healthy? Of course, you cannot have one without the other. Both are very important. And so, believe it or not, is reproduction; the method by which a female selects her mate is automatically going to become a disproportionally important factor that selects fit individuals, regardless of what it happens to be.
I just installed silverlight 2 on my mac, so obviously someone didn't do their homework before submitting.
You might also enjoy World of Workcraft. Those machinima guys are pretty talented.
No, that's not how it goes. The titles Activision-Blizzard chose to keep for release were the safe bets - Spyro and Crash Bandicoot. Not great games by any accounts, but playable family entertainment. Games they're dropping include World in Conflict (critical gem) and Brutal Legend (developed by the Psychonauts team). The entire dev teams behind these titles now have no funding and an uncertain future.
Fallout is the right word, because what we're going to get is a few cash cows instead of a bunch of products of varying quality, including niche masterpeices.
Now I can see why A-B want to have few titles which sell in big numbers, but if every company did exactly the same thing our industry would collapse overnight under the weight of it's own mediocrity.
It's strange how these people think isn't it?
"People are pirating our game? We need copy protection and DRM!"
"Piracy is still high, it's not working... more DRM will fix this!"
"Piracy is going down? Obviously DRM is working!"
"Games sales are still too low? It can't be due to our unsustainable business model and crapware, those pirates must still be thieving our stuff!"
It's amazing how many people swallow their crap when there real agenda is pretty clear to see - they want to eliminate second hand sales and casual game sharing. It ain't going to work, it's not going to be particularly beneficial, and by the time they realise that consumer trust will have fallen through the floor.
In roughly that order. Anyone wanna tackle those problems first?
For interested Linux users, I used this Firefox extension to spoof my browser id and download it.
Between the windows-exclusivity, secret updater installs and dodgy download rules i'd say this is my 2nd worst google release ever. The worst is still googletalk, which I need on a daily basis and *still* has no linux or mac port years after it was released. Fuck google's attitude, seriously.