What makes you think they don't already have that problem? Last time I was in Panera I saw someone sitting there typing on an external keyboard with his laptop hooked up to a 15" monitor!
He was there when we got there, and was still typing away when we left, half an hour later. He didn't have any food near him; he couldn't because his setup took up too much space.
I can't believe how shameless people can be in abusing a system other people put up in good faith.
Here is a decent comparison of mobile phone broswers. But the conclusion they reach is basically that everything out there has some critical issues. It's understandable considering the problems: constrained inputs (and different means of input depending on the device), trying to render pages designed for 19" monitors at 800x600 resolution on 4" screens at 320x320 resolution on hardware and operating systems that are primitive by modern standards.
Things will get better of course (anything is better than Mobile IE), but in the meantime, it means the Web in your pocket isn't quite the same as it is at your desk.
The big unresolved plot point in KOTOR 2 was the looming menace of a Sith army outside of known space that the main character of the first KOTOR game went out to stop. It could be that this is the Sith Empire in the new MMO. (End spoilers)
It probably is intentional to set this after the main characters of the previous games are dead, if only to make it feel like the players, and not the characters from previous games, are the heroes, and to stay away from the bits in Galaxies where you just felt like a tourist.
As far as Bioware's stories go, I would agree with you. They haven't been anything more than just really good genre stories (especially Baldur's Gate and Knights of the Old Republic). And while their characters are occasionally memorable, they just as often fall flat or (even worse) annoy the crap out of me (Carth, I'm looking at you).
One of the books that got fueled my love of scifi when I was a kid was the Ear, the Eye and the Arm, by Nancy Farmer. It's not exactly hard scifi, but it manages to pull off a cyberpunk-ish detective story without being too dark or cynical. I think I read it when I was 10, too, so it's definitely aimed at the right age group.
It was also a runner-up for the Newberry Award, which is given to writers of long fiction for preteens. You might check the list of winners: I know there's some good scifi on there, like The Giver.
I think you do modern kids a disservice by thinking that they aren't up to the task of understanding Asimov or Bradbury. True, they might not grasp all the nuances, but I doubt you did when you were ten, either.
I'm several years older than the kids mentioned in the summary, but I'm still young enough to be part of the generation raised on video games and MTV. I ate up everything sf I could find at that age and would have loved to have known about the golden age sf writers then. Plus, we're not exactly talking about James Joyce here. Most of the stuff that's been mentioned here isn't too hard to get through.
Don't lower your expectations of your kids; they might surprise you.
Bioshock's activation is much freer than Steam's. It only needs to be done once, and there is an alternate version that involves you emailing your CD key and a text string to the DRM company. They then email you back another text string to input into the box. It took about an hour to get a reply, but after that I was good to go. I haven't tested it yet, but I would presume that this code they gave me would work on another machine, so it's basically like having another CD key.
I'm curious as to what EA Sports games you play. Most of the series I am familiar with, EA adds as much as it can to convince people to actually buy the yearly updates. It's a popular meme on here that all they do is update the rosters, but most new versions I've seen are a significant improvement over their predecessors, both in gameplay and front office options. This is especially true as they move development over to the newer platforms. NHL 2007, for example, completely revamped the control scheme, and ended up making the game both more fun and true to the sport. This year's version promises a ton of new improvements, including an overhaul of the skating system.
There are franchises that haven't seen quite the significant improvement (I haven't played them, but from what I've read the NCAA Football series on Xbox 360 has been mediocre at best), but those aren't the overwhelming majority. The reason is pure economics: there might be people that will buy it just for the roster updates, but they'll get more repeat customers if they fix the issues in the previous games and add new features.
Anyway, advertising in this context makes perfect sense. The studios broadcasting the games on television announce the "Old Spice Performance Player of the Game" at the end of every game. Making this an achievement is just a reference to that. In fact, rather than see it as a callous grab for a quick buck by a large publisher, I think it's pretty clever. If they make some extra money from it, good for them.
Islam is raw religion, and its popularity among the backward (not an insult-an observation-note the countries involved) is no accident.
For hundreds of years the Islamic world was one of the major centers of learning in the world. Many writings of the Ancient Greeks, and mathematical theory from further East all made their way to the Western world through them. They produced amazing works of art, and showed a religious tolerance that is still noteworthy by today's standards. All of these things are hallmarks of what we would call a culturally developed nation. Anything but "backward." The countries today with the highest percentage of Muslims do tend to be less developed than most, but it hasn't always been this way.
As for religion being inherently anti-democratic, you seem to be confusing the concept of democracy with "a secular republic." Last time I checked, democracy is democracy, independent of whether the government is religious or not. It's immaterial anyway, because the concept of separation of church and state has been upheld in the U.S. for years by a population that believed the world was ruled by an omnipotent God.
And as far Fascism coming from "militant Christians," I see more danger coming from the secular neo-conservatives who control the Bush administration. Remember, just because Bush claims to be a Christian to garner votes doesn't mean his administration is sympathetic towards the Evangelical agenda any more than it benefits them. In fact, it seems to be hostile towards Christianity when it doesn't suit their purposes. I remember the head of Bush's faith-based initiatives program quitting out of protest because the whole thing was basically a sham to placate the Evangelicals who voted for Bush.
Which well never happen. It makes people feel very uncomfortable to have to think about the ethical choices they make before they buy (this counts for things like clothing and coffee as well). They would rather not hurt their brains that much. Those are the ones that even cared enough to find out that buying some products are bad, which the majority won't, unless some celebrity happens to take a stance. Have you noticed the shift to more and more brain-dead celebrities these days?
Oh, please. I'm as against excessive copy-protection as much as the next slashdotter, but your post is so arrogant it's disgusting. You're right that people aren't going to stop buying HD disks, and you're right that it's because they don't care, but it's not because they don't want to "hurt their brains." It's because they've got better things to do than worry about the ethical implications of buying movies. People just don't have time to care about everything, and most people don't see an HD format war as something worth caring about. Heck, most people don't care enough about the environment to do something about it, which most would agree is a more important issue. But that's not because they don't want to be uncomfortable, or think too hard, but because they're busy using that brainpower on other things, like working, or taking care of their family.
Sure, a lot of people seem to have messed up priorities, and I for one have no idea why certain celebrities are so popular. But I don't think lesser of the people who do pay attention, just as I expect them to not look down on me for my geeky obsessions. I mean, couldn't others say the same thing about us? You're getting indignant about people not being ethically sensitive to what entertainment they buy, and here I am taking the time to reply. We could be out finding a cure for cancer, or saving the environment or something.
People care about different things, some of which are probably more or less worthy. But really, it's hard to say objectively which is more or less worthy. Something one man devotes his life to might be something another just could care less about. Certainly a cause like fighting poverty is probably more important than, say, trying to get the world's highest score in Pac-Man, but the less clear-cut cases, the ones where you can make a case for both sides, are more difficult. And above-all, don't think less of others just because they could care less about your pet passion. Because then you'd have to give them the same courtesy and, to be honest, I could care less about knitting.
Demos don't really have an effect on my game purchasing. If I'm on the fence enough that the demo could swing it one way or the other, it's usually not a good enough game to merit dropping $40.
Usually when I download a demo it's either to tide me over until a game I'll definitely buy releases (as happened recently with Dawn of War: Dark Crusade), or because I'm bored and want to play something new without having to spend any money. In the first case, I'm already sold on the game anyway. If I'm not excited about the game to begin with, I'm probably not going to blow the money on it to begin with.
Of course, this is most because of my buying habits: I don't buy something unless I need it or seriously want it. There's not much room for something that could potentially suck, unless it's dirt cheap.
Nintendo is really trying to emphasize the ease with which one can do just about everything with a Wii: input is intuitive, online play is free and wifi is automatically enabled, etc.
However, all this ease of use can be a bad thing if it limits how we can use the system. The DS' online play, for example, was designed to be easy and straightforward, but in doing so it severely restricts the experience. In-game chat is nonexistant, friend codes are a pain in actual practice and it doesn't support WPA encryption. I see the same problems potentially popping up for the Wii. What if I don't want my box connected to the Internet when I'm not playing games? What if I want to be able to play online with random people, and not have to use a site for swapping friend codes? What if I want to use something stronger than WEP encryption?
Don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to the Wii, because I trust Nintendo to deliver straightforward, fun games that Just Work. They have a good track record on that. What they don't have is a good record on online gaming.
I just hope they don't go so far in trying to make online gaming cheap, easy, and safe that it ends up being a royal pain to play. Then again, I suppose there are far worse things to be afraid of.
Remember that most things that get deleted from books/movies/CDs, etc. were deleted for a reason. If a band gave away crappy b-sides for free on their Web site, would that make you want to be the actual CD? Have you seen the deleted scenes on most DVDs? The vast majority of them are not very good at all, even when viewed in context.
The only case I can think of where this is a valid option is if you have too much decent material, as is the case here. Giving away the cast offs can be good, but it can also work the other way if the deleted bits aren't that good.
Whenever commercials come on TV, I SWITCH TO ANOTHER CHANNEL without commercials.
My dad and I both do this. It drives my mom nuts, because she's afraid that we won't turn it back in time and we'll end up missing most of what we were watching in the first place. The thing is, we both have a pretty good sense of how long a commercial break is going to be on a given show, so we always end up turing the channel back right as the commercials end. I think that annoys my mom even more.
Come to think of it, that's probably why we do it in the first place.
I had a failing hard drive last year that would destroy my Windows partition every so often, and I was too poor to buy a new one, so I reinstalled Windows several times (when I couldn't use my Linux install on a separate drive). I ended up burning a CD of useful programs (Firefox, WinRAR, numerous codecs, etc.) so I didn't have to keep downloading them. You could also put the Firefox executable on a USB thumb drive or something of that sort. It's not a terribly huge program, hard drive space-wise.
Do you already have Steam installed? If so, then you should be able to put in the cd key you got for Episode 1 and download and install it directly from Steam. It might take a bit longer to download, but it should work. If you don't have Steam installed, download and install it and follow the above.
I think it's interesting that the Wii isn't included, especially because the current best guess is that it will be launching before the PS3. I wonder if it's because the writer recognizes that it's truly something unique and different, or if he's just discounting it because of Nintendo's image problems in the previous generation.
One time I was watching a movie on my roommate's PS2. It was setting up for the big romantic climax; the characters were slowly moving into each others arms to tell each other how in love they were and...I hit the controller accidentally and the language changes to Spanish.
I just hope that if the Wii comes with a DVD player, that the controls won't require you to move the remote.
The problem with your Data as a Service idea is that you fail to take into account one of the main problems people have been having with SaaS: reliability.
When any downtime at all is going to end up with lost customers and/or wasted time, you want as few weak links in the chain as possible. With your DaaS idea, you're requiring not only the Software provider, but also the Data provider to be up 24/7. In that situation, the odds are greater that something is going to go wrong than having your data stored with the software provider.
Not having access to your own data is a huge problem, but going to another outside company is probably not the best solution.
If everyone's just staring at the TV, then it's probably not too worthwhile, but if it inspires some interesting discussion (and with my family, anything can provoke that), then it's going to be worth more than spending an hour in complete silence playing chess.
Both can be used productively or unproductively. It all depends on how you use it.
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What makes you think they don't already have that problem? Last time I was in Panera I saw someone sitting there typing on an external keyboard with his laptop hooked up to a 15" monitor!
He was there when we got there, and was still typing away when we left, half an hour later. He didn't have any food near him; he couldn't because his setup took up too much space.
I can't believe how shameless people can be in abusing a system other people put up in good faith.
Here is a decent comparison of mobile phone broswers. But the conclusion they reach is basically that everything out there has some critical issues. It's understandable considering the problems: constrained inputs (and different means of input depending on the device), trying to render pages designed for 19" monitors at 800x600 resolution on 4" screens at 320x320 resolution on hardware and operating systems that are primitive by modern standards.
Things will get better of course (anything is better than Mobile IE), but in the meantime, it means the Web in your pocket isn't quite the same as it is at your desk.
(KOTOR 2 Spoilers)
The big unresolved plot point in KOTOR 2 was the looming menace of a Sith army outside of known space that the main character of the first KOTOR game went out to stop. It could be that this is the Sith Empire in the new MMO. (End spoilers)
It probably is intentional to set this after the main characters of the previous games are dead, if only to make it feel like the players, and not the characters from previous games, are the heroes, and to stay away from the bits in Galaxies where you just felt like a tourist.
Bioware didn't develop Planescape: Torment, Black Isle Studios did. It used the Infinity Engine developed for Baldur's Gate, but that's it.
Wikipedia link, if you need it.
As far as Bioware's stories go, I would agree with you. They haven't been anything more than just really good genre stories (especially Baldur's Gate and Knights of the Old Republic). And while their characters are occasionally memorable, they just as often fall flat or (even worse) annoy the crap out of me (Carth, I'm looking at you).
One of the books that got fueled my love of scifi when I was a kid was the Ear, the Eye and the Arm, by Nancy Farmer. It's not exactly hard scifi, but it manages to pull off a cyberpunk-ish detective story without being too dark or cynical. I think I read it when I was 10, too, so it's definitely aimed at the right age group.
It was also a runner-up for the Newberry Award, which is given to writers of long fiction for preteens. You might check the list of winners: I know there's some good scifi on there, like The Giver.
I think you do modern kids a disservice by thinking that they aren't up to the task of understanding Asimov or Bradbury. True, they might not grasp all the nuances, but I doubt you did when you were ten, either.
I'm several years older than the kids mentioned in the summary, but I'm still young enough to be part of the generation raised on video games and MTV. I ate up everything sf I could find at that age and would have loved to have known about the golden age sf writers then. Plus, we're not exactly talking about James Joyce here. Most of the stuff that's been mentioned here isn't too hard to get through.
Don't lower your expectations of your kids; they might surprise you.
Bioshock's activation is much freer than Steam's. It only needs to be done once, and there is an alternate version that involves you emailing your CD key and a text string to the DRM company. They then email you back another text string to input into the box. It took about an hour to get a reply, but after that I was good to go. I haven't tested it yet, but I would presume that this code they gave me would work on another machine, so it's basically like having another CD key.
I'm curious as to what EA Sports games you play. Most of the series I am familiar with, EA adds as much as it can to convince people to actually buy the yearly updates. It's a popular meme on here that all they do is update the rosters, but most new versions I've seen are a significant improvement over their predecessors, both in gameplay and front office options. This is especially true as they move development over to the newer platforms. NHL 2007, for example, completely revamped the control scheme, and ended up making the game both more fun and true to the sport. This year's version promises a ton of new improvements, including an overhaul of the skating system.
There are franchises that haven't seen quite the significant improvement (I haven't played them, but from what I've read the NCAA Football series on Xbox 360 has been mediocre at best), but those aren't the overwhelming majority. The reason is pure economics: there might be people that will buy it just for the roster updates, but they'll get more repeat customers if they fix the issues in the previous games and add new features.
Anyway, advertising in this context makes perfect sense. The studios broadcasting the games on television announce the "Old Spice Performance Player of the Game" at the end of every game. Making this an achievement is just a reference to that. In fact, rather than see it as a callous grab for a quick buck by a large publisher, I think it's pretty clever. If they make some extra money from it, good for them.
For hundreds of years the Islamic world was one of the major centers of learning in the world. Many writings of the Ancient Greeks, and mathematical theory from further East all made their way to the Western world through them. They produced amazing works of art, and showed a religious tolerance that is still noteworthy by today's standards. All of these things are hallmarks of what we would call a culturally developed nation. Anything but "backward." The countries today with the highest percentage of Muslims do tend to be less developed than most, but it hasn't always been this way.
As for religion being inherently anti-democratic, you seem to be confusing the concept of democracy with "a secular republic." Last time I checked, democracy is democracy, independent of whether the government is religious or not. It's immaterial anyway, because the concept of separation of church and state has been upheld in the U.S. for years by a population that believed the world was ruled by an omnipotent God.
And as far Fascism coming from "militant Christians," I see more danger coming from the secular neo-conservatives who control the Bush administration. Remember, just because Bush claims to be a Christian to garner votes doesn't mean his administration is sympathetic towards the Evangelical agenda any more than it benefits them. In fact, it seems to be hostile towards Christianity when it doesn't suit their purposes. I remember the head of Bush's faith-based initiatives program quitting out of protest because the whole thing was basically a sham to placate the Evangelicals who voted for Bush.
Oh, please. I'm as against excessive copy-protection as much as the next slashdotter, but your post is so arrogant it's disgusting. You're right that people aren't going to stop buying HD disks, and you're right that it's because they don't care, but it's not because they don't want to "hurt their brains." It's because they've got better things to do than worry about the ethical implications of buying movies. People just don't have time to care about everything, and most people don't see an HD format war as something worth caring about. Heck, most people don't care enough about the environment to do something about it, which most would agree is a more important issue. But that's not because they don't want to be uncomfortable, or think too hard, but because they're busy using that brainpower on other things, like working, or taking care of their family.
Sure, a lot of people seem to have messed up priorities, and I for one have no idea why certain celebrities are so popular. But I don't think lesser of the people who do pay attention, just as I expect them to not look down on me for my geeky obsessions. I mean, couldn't others say the same thing about us? You're getting indignant about people not being ethically sensitive to what entertainment they buy, and here I am taking the time to reply. We could be out finding a cure for cancer, or saving the environment or something.
People care about different things, some of which are probably more or less worthy. But really, it's hard to say objectively which is more or less worthy. Something one man devotes his life to might be something another just could care less about. Certainly a cause like fighting poverty is probably more important than, say, trying to get the world's highest score in Pac-Man, but the less clear-cut cases, the ones where you can make a case for both sides, are more difficult. And above-all, don't think less of others just because they could care less about your pet passion. Because then you'd have to give them the same courtesy and, to be honest, I could care less about knitting.
Demos don't really have an effect on my game purchasing. If I'm on the fence enough that the demo could swing it one way or the other, it's usually not a good enough game to merit dropping $40.
Usually when I download a demo it's either to tide me over until a game I'll definitely buy releases (as happened recently with Dawn of War: Dark Crusade), or because I'm bored and want to play something new without having to spend any money. In the first case, I'm already sold on the game anyway. If I'm not excited about the game to begin with, I'm probably not going to blow the money on it to begin with.
Of course, this is most because of my buying habits: I don't buy something unless I need it or seriously want it. There's not much room for something that could potentially suck, unless it's dirt cheap.
Nintendo is really trying to emphasize the ease with which one can do just about everything with a Wii: input is intuitive, online play is free and wifi is automatically enabled, etc.
However, all this ease of use can be a bad thing if it limits how we can use the system. The DS' online play, for example, was designed to be easy and straightforward, but in doing so it severely restricts the experience. In-game chat is nonexistant, friend codes are a pain in actual practice and it doesn't support WPA encryption. I see the same problems potentially popping up for the Wii. What if I don't want my box connected to the Internet when I'm not playing games? What if I want to be able to play online with random people, and not have to use a site for swapping friend codes? What if I want to use something stronger than WEP encryption?
Don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to the Wii, because I trust Nintendo to deliver straightforward, fun games that Just Work. They have a good track record on that. What they don't have is a good record on online gaming.
I just hope they don't go so far in trying to make online gaming cheap, easy, and safe that it ends up being a royal pain to play. Then again, I suppose there are far worse things to be afraid of.
You, sir, are one atypical reverend.
Remember that most things that get deleted from books/movies/CDs, etc. were deleted for a reason. If a band gave away crappy b-sides for free on their Web site, would that make you want to be the actual CD? Have you seen the deleted scenes on most DVDs? The vast majority of them are not very good at all, even when viewed in context.
The only case I can think of where this is a valid option is if you have too much decent material, as is the case here. Giving away the cast offs can be good, but it can also work the other way if the deleted bits aren't that good.
1991 called. They want their game back.
My dad and I both do this. It drives my mom nuts, because she's afraid that we won't turn it back in time and we'll end up missing most of what we were watching in the first place. The thing is, we both have a pretty good sense of how long a commercial break is going to be on a given show, so we always end up turing the channel back right as the commercials end. I think that annoys my mom even more.
Come to think of it, that's probably why we do it in the first place.
I had a failing hard drive last year that would destroy my Windows partition every so often, and I was too poor to buy a new one, so I reinstalled Windows several times (when I couldn't use my Linux install on a separate drive). I ended up burning a CD of useful programs (Firefox, WinRAR, numerous codecs, etc.) so I didn't have to keep downloading them. You could also put the Firefox executable on a USB thumb drive or something of that sort. It's not a terribly huge program, hard drive space-wise.
Or Shenmue II. Granted, I don't think that's ever going to happen.
Do you already have Steam installed? If so, then you should be able to put in the cd key you got for Episode 1 and download and install it directly from Steam. It might take a bit longer to download, but it should work. If you don't have Steam installed, download and install it and follow the above.
And it only takes one. That's the problem!
I'm going with c) None of the above.
I think it's interesting that the Wii isn't included, especially because the current best guess is that it will be launching before the PS3. I wonder if it's because the writer recognizes that it's truly something unique and different, or if he's just discounting it because of Nintendo's image problems in the previous generation.
One time I was watching a movie on my roommate's PS2. It was setting up for the big romantic climax; the characters were slowly moving into each others arms to tell each other how in love they were and...I hit the controller accidentally and the language changes to Spanish.
I just hope that if the Wii comes with a DVD player, that the controls won't require you to move the remote.
The problem with your Data as a Service idea is that you fail to take into account one of the main problems people have been having with SaaS: reliability. When any downtime at all is going to end up with lost customers and/or wasted time, you want as few weak links in the chain as possible. With your DaaS idea, you're requiring not only the Software provider, but also the Data provider to be up 24/7. In that situation, the odds are greater that something is going to go wrong than having your data stored with the software provider. Not having access to your own data is a huge problem, but going to another outside company is probably not the best solution.
But is it fun to play?
If everyone's just staring at the TV, then it's probably not too worthwhile, but if it inspires some interesting discussion (and with my family, anything can provoke that), then it's going to be worth more than spending an hour in complete silence playing chess. Both can be used productively or unproductively. It all depends on how you use it.