Because I'm guessing that OSX, even the Intel version, has minimal to no support for most non-Apple hardware. Which is probably a big part of WHY there's no OSX for standard PCs, and why OSX has such a rep for reliability - they have a very limited set of hardware they can focus on.
I guess in order for the game itself to BE art rather than CONTAINING art, there would have to be something instrinic to the gameplay itself that defines the artistry. It's like the difference between taping a play and making a film - the cinematography, editing, lighting, and so on ADDS to the artistry of the piece, so a film is "art" whereas a tape of a play is something that contains art.
I think that you could argue that some RPGs, particularly Bioware-style games, are artistic games because the interactivity of the gaming medium plays directly into their appeal. The fact that I can CHOOSE how the characters behave and how the story develops adds a lot to the impact of the game, and that's something you can't really get in any other medium (except Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, I guess).
Most films, comics, (pulp) novels, and so on aren't "art" either.
I think he's got a kind of "Art-with-a-capital-A" concept in his head here, and that's all well and good, but you have to apply that kind of thinking evenly.
Also notice that his definition doesn't RULE OUT games as art; he's merely saying that they're not currently being treated as such. I guess games are still waiting for their Orson Wells or Claude Monet to take a "pedestrian" medium and make it transcendent.
Sounds more like a rant about Blizzard's servers. If I wanted to see that, I'd click on any random post in the WoW general forums...
Anyway, congratulations to the fine folks of Medivh. I wonder if Blizzard plans to keep adding this much content to their free patches, or if they're gonna start saving it up for the paid expansion at some point in the near future.
My dad's an immunologist working for a private firm developing cancer drugs. I asked him about the whole patent issue, and he said, "When we come out with a new product, we WILL get sued." That's just how the industry is now.
What's worse, he says, is that even straightforward research involves a lot of legal hurdles. You can't just do your research, produce your chemicals, etc. in the most straightforward way, because it might get you sued for patent infringement down the road. Everything takes longer because of these legal hurdles. And nobody working in private industry publishes in scientific journals, because they'd lose out on patents and screw over their company.
Of course, my dad has his name on a bunch of patents himself. I'm sure his company is just as anal about protecting their own patents as everyone else. So really, the only people who get a net benefit from the current situation are... the patent lawyers.
"even when it comes to something like domestic spying on a relatively small part of the population"...if Big Brother spying on American citizens illegally doesn't qualify as an important violation of civil liberties, what does?
"Sure, there haven't ever been any viruses for OSX, and there probably never will be, while there are thousands upon thousands of Windows viruses out there... but you Mac users are INDEFENSIBLE in your smugness!"
This sounds like a case of rather defensible smugness to me.
I'm guessing they changed the "PowerBook" designation for two reasons: first, because "Power" is somewhat associated with IBM (PowerPCs, etc), and second, because "PowerBook" doesn't make it clear to the non-geek that it's a Mac. Even on Slashdot, I've had people tell me that I should reboot my PowerBook more often if I don't want Windows XP to get laggy... that name confusion won't be a problem with the MacBook.
If they want to change the name of the line, now's the best time available. I can understand why they didn't change the iMac brand, though - the less geeky Mac users might be distressed if they could no longer buy an "iMac," regardless of what's under the hood. I imagine that the Intel iBook won't get a name change for the same reason.
Now, "PowerMac" does still have that IBM connotation, but it's also got the "Mac" right there in the name. I'd guess that they WILL change the designation, because (a) "power"-users are probably more likely to embrace change as a positive thing, and (b) screw IBM with their Power-whatsits.
SO, a new name. Maybe MacDesk Pro? Mac Pro, like you said? MacMac? Lucy 2? Heck, I dunno.
Actually, D&D has some fairly nifty mechanics for non-magical combat, and an infamously cumbersome magic system. A "low-magic setting" is probably what D&D could do best!
Since the link isn't working, I'll ask here: what classes are in the game?
Of the base D&D classes, only two (warriors and barbarians) have zero magic-derived abilities. A couple more (rangers, rogues, maybe monks and paladins) could be fairly easily adapted to be magic-free. But is that it? Or did Monte cook up (pun intended) some new and innovative magic-free classes for us?
Now, at the time, I was a young nooblet and probably should have let it slide but instead I snuck into her office and opened up her Macintosh's word editing software with the intent of some lil' bastardry. I found the option to replace a mistyped word with another that the user entered. After that, whenever she typed the word "the", it was replaced with "WARNING! VIRUS DETECTED! PULL PLUG FROM OUTLET AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!" Unfortunately, her son knew enough about computer to fix it so my fun didn't last very long (only one or two lunges at the wall).
You playing with Autocorrect != a "trojan or virus."
"IN MY OPINION, the largest thing Microsoft has to fear is a perfectly secure operation system they have created and distributed throughout the world. This is because they will no longer have "upgrades" or new versions of Windows to offer costumers."
Just to play devil's advocate, Apple's OS is largely bug-free and secure, and yet quite a few people pay cash money for an upgrade every year or so. This is presumably because each new release of OSX has enough cool features to give it some appeal, even without a bunch of critical security updates.
Would Apple sell enough upgrades to make a profit if they weren't making money from hardware (and iPod) sales? Maybe not, but it's worth asking.
FTA: "Here's another good question: Why is Apple turning down Intel's marketing subsidies that go to other PC manufacturers such as Dell (DELL), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), and others? There are no "Intel Inside" logos on the new Macs, save for marks on the outer packaging for which Apple isn't being paid. A slick, new TV ad will promote the new Apple-Intel collaboration. But if Apple is leaving money on the table, wouldn't shareholders want some pointed questions asked about that?"
Here's a good answer: Because Apple is one of few companies that cares enough about the appearance and packaging of its computers that it doesn't want to make them look like stock cars by covering them with the logos of third-party parts manufacturers. And because Apple itself is a more prestigious brand than Intel, and they wouldn't have anything to gain by slapping "Intel Inside" on everything. And, oh yeah, because Intel ITSELF is phasing out the "Intel Inside" logo on the new Yonahs, if I remember correctly.
Seriously, who is the guy writing this article? This question in particular seems pretty darned obvious, at least to me.
"OTOH, are you an end user who wants a simplified UI? Gnome is the way to go."
Erm... for most end-users who don't have a lot of interest in free-source debates, I'd recommend a Mac above any Linux distro. Even Windows XP is often easier to set up and use for your average Joe (aside from security concerns, that is).
Does anyone honestly think the network producers WOULDN'T pursue product placement revenue if they were making more from advertising? That they'd just say, "No thanks, we value the artistic integrity of our crappy sitcoms more than the loads and loads of cash you're paying us to stick your products in our shows"?
I like how his threshold for acceptability is right about where he is. "As #4849, I frown on plebians like #5120! Way to sign up a week later than me, jerk!"
Correct me if I'm mistaken, but I thought the basic premise of Intelligent Design was one of guided evolution. It doesn't reject evolution itself, but rather the theory of natural selection, saying that God "stepped in" at key moments to guide us as we evolved into humans.
If this is the case, then what the Catholic church is saying here doesn't conflict at all, as far as I can tell. It conflicts with Creationism, yes, but not with the moderate theory of Intelligent Design.
Of course, I still personally don't think IDT holds any water. It's basically a reformulation of old philosophical arguments that David Hume was shooting down centuries ago. And I can't for the life of me imagine why any fundamentalist Christian would want to confirm their faith through the scientific method - even if they CAN establish that there is some sort of intelligent design in the world, surely the idea of a humaniform God whose son was incarnated 2000 years ago is less probable than other available explanations.
I guess the risk is that unscrupulous students and researchers will just hit Google Book search, cite a paragraph or two, and never bother to go find the actual book (which can be a major hassle, especially if it's a rare or out-of-print book and/or the searcher doesn't have a wad of cash to spend on research material). If people do this, there's a BIG risk that they'll misinterpret the stuff they're citing. Potentially, this could become a very real scourge on academia, since it encourages shallow and incomplete readings of scholarly works.
Of course, the BEST solution for academic researchers would be for all those works to be freely available online in their entirety... but if that was the case, those expensive academic journals like Nature might not be able to afford the peer-review process, which would itself be a major blow to the quality of articles published.
So it takes an IQ of 101 or higher to understand the basic tenets of science, eh? Interesting take.
By the way, not all material that can't be empirically verified is worthless. There's this whole field called "philosophy" dedicated to questions that often go beyond testable hypotheses. You might want to familiarize yourself with it, since it was philosophy that gave birth to the concepts of formal logic and the scientific method in the first place.
"Intelligent design" is not science. It is philosophy. Of course, unless I'm misinformed on the issue, it's pretty crappy philosophy. David Hume shot down something pretty similar a couple hundred years ago.
Now, if our educational system taught us more about logic, argument, and philosophy, this would be self-evident to most Americans. But I guess memorizing the quadratic equation and phases of mitosis is more relevant to our everyday life.
It's poorly written, repetitive, and half the time the guy doesn't seem to know what he's talking about.
He calls GTA3 the first "sandbox" game? Really? How about SimCity?
Bah. I hope Rockstar didn't pay too much for this fluff piece.
Apparently ole' Denny is in a mood to distance himself from Bush. In particular, he's trying to sound like a fiscal conservative by downplaying the cost of Katrina, and he flat-out rejects Bush's pricetag and approach.
On another issue, he's not necessarily out of line with Bush, but he's still misleading (IMHO): Energy. Apparently it has finally sunk in even for Republicans that the current energy plan (i.e. laissez-faire) isn't gonna cut it. But his recommendations for "fixing" it center on increasing domestic oil production and/or refining. Not that these might not be good ideas, but notice that he doesn't mention alternative energy sources or even improved fuel-efficiency. Like a true Republican, he wants to protect our sacred right to guns and SUVs.
Still, it's good to see Republicans start to acknowledge the risks of foreign oil dependency, even if their recommended solutions aren't what I'd consider optimal. And it's REALLY nice to see such a short-and-sweet policy statement coming straight from the horse's mouth, without a half page of self-serving op-ed or twenty minutes of screaming "pundits" to gussy it up. Even if I don't like what he's saying, Hastert is at least saying SOMETHING.
"If it's legally free to use and does the same task, why wouldn't 90% of the users in the world who only use Windows *not* care? People always look for what's cheaper, sometimes even if it's not better (note how MS became the company it is today...)"
Personally, I don't think that they wouldn't not care... I think.
I doubt very many people actually pay for Office. It's either provided by their workplace or included on their PC. And most people don't seem to have a big moral issue with sharing their Office disks, illegal though it may be.
OK, let's say I'm your average computer user. I have the following options:
1. Keep using Windows and Office, which were pre-installed on my system and I don't have to pay extra for.
2. Somehow find out about Linux, have somebody tell me exactly what an OS is and why I should get a new one, download or purchase a distro, backup or lose all my current data (which is probably on a NTSF drive), install the new distro, get all the hardware working (not always as easy as many slashdotters seem to think; I STILL can't get my wireless card to work under Ubuntu), and THEN learn where everything is on my new OS and all the new programs that I have to use with it.
Bear in mind that the "average" computer user doesn't care too much about long-term stability or security; hell, a lot don't even bother to update their antivirus. What makes the Linux-on-the-desktop advocates think that a significant number of people would want to go to all that trouble?
Princess Peach/Toadstool/whatever is a kind and just ruler. Had you read the propoganda - er - manual, you would know that Bowser was an evil tyrant sorcerer with a dark lizard army who wrested power away from the benevolent royal family by turning her loyal retainers into bricks and question-mark blocks, and corrupting some into those really easy goombas.
Also, my friend told me that when you beat level 99 on Duck Hunt, it showed a credits screen with you eating a duck dinner.
Slashdot Mirror
Because I'm guessing that OSX, even the Intel version, has minimal to no support for most non-Apple hardware. Which is probably a big part of WHY there's no OSX for standard PCs, and why OSX has such a rep for reliability - they have a very limited set of hardware they can focus on.
I guess in order for the game itself to BE art rather than CONTAINING art, there would have to be something instrinic to the gameplay itself that defines the artistry. It's like the difference between taping a play and making a film - the cinematography, editing, lighting, and so on ADDS to the artistry of the piece, so a film is "art" whereas a tape of a play is something that contains art.
I think that you could argue that some RPGs, particularly Bioware-style games, are artistic games because the interactivity of the gaming medium plays directly into their appeal. The fact that I can CHOOSE how the characters behave and how the story develops adds a lot to the impact of the game, and that's something you can't really get in any other medium (except Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, I guess).
Most films, comics, (pulp) novels, and so on aren't "art" either.
I think he's got a kind of "Art-with-a-capital-A" concept in his head here, and that's all well and good, but you have to apply that kind of thinking evenly.
Also notice that his definition doesn't RULE OUT games as art; he's merely saying that they're not currently being treated as such. I guess games are still waiting for their Orson Wells or Claude Monet to take a "pedestrian" medium and make it transcendent.
Sounds more like a rant about Blizzard's servers. If I wanted to see that, I'd click on any random post in the WoW general forums...
Anyway, congratulations to the fine folks of Medivh. I wonder if Blizzard plans to keep adding this much content to their free patches, or if they're gonna start saving it up for the paid expansion at some point in the near future.
My dad's an immunologist working for a private firm developing cancer drugs. I asked him about the whole patent issue, and he said, "When we come out with a new product, we WILL get sued." That's just how the industry is now.
What's worse, he says, is that even straightforward research involves a lot of legal hurdles. You can't just do your research, produce your chemicals, etc. in the most straightforward way, because it might get you sued for patent infringement down the road. Everything takes longer because of these legal hurdles. And nobody working in private industry publishes in scientific journals, because they'd lose out on patents and screw over their company.
Of course, my dad has his name on a bunch of patents himself. I'm sure his company is just as anal about protecting their own patents as everyone else. So really, the only people who get a net benefit from the current situation are... the patent lawyers.
"even when it comes to something like domestic spying on a relatively small part of the population" ...if Big Brother spying on American citizens illegally doesn't qualify as an important violation of civil liberties, what does?
"Sure, there haven't ever been any viruses for OSX, and there probably never will be, while there are thousands upon thousands of Windows viruses out there... but you Mac users are INDEFENSIBLE in your smugness!"
This sounds like a case of rather defensible smugness to me.
I'm guessing they changed the "PowerBook" designation for two reasons: first, because "Power" is somewhat associated with IBM (PowerPCs, etc), and second, because "PowerBook" doesn't make it clear to the non-geek that it's a Mac. Even on Slashdot, I've had people tell me that I should reboot my PowerBook more often if I don't want Windows XP to get laggy... that name confusion won't be a problem with the MacBook.
If they want to change the name of the line, now's the best time available. I can understand why they didn't change the iMac brand, though - the less geeky Mac users might be distressed if they could no longer buy an "iMac," regardless of what's under the hood. I imagine that the Intel iBook won't get a name change for the same reason.
Now, "PowerMac" does still have that IBM connotation, but it's also got the "Mac" right there in the name. I'd guess that they WILL change the designation, because (a) "power"-users are probably more likely to embrace change as a positive thing, and (b) screw IBM with their Power-whatsits.
SO, a new name. Maybe MacDesk Pro? Mac Pro, like you said? MacMac? Lucy 2? Heck, I dunno.
Actually, D&D has some fairly nifty mechanics for non-magical combat, and an infamously cumbersome magic system. A "low-magic setting" is probably what D&D could do best!
Since the link isn't working, I'll ask here: what classes are in the game?
Of the base D&D classes, only two (warriors and barbarians) have zero magic-derived abilities. A couple more (rangers, rogues, maybe monks and paladins) could be fairly easily adapted to be magic-free. But is that it? Or did Monte cook up (pun intended) some new and innovative magic-free classes for us?
You playing with Autocorrect != a "trojan or virus."
"IN MY OPINION, the largest thing Microsoft has to fear is a perfectly secure operation system they have created and distributed throughout the world. This is because they will no longer have "upgrades" or new versions of Windows to offer costumers."
Just to play devil's advocate, Apple's OS is largely bug-free and secure, and yet quite a few people pay cash money for an upgrade every year or so. This is presumably because each new release of OSX has enough cool features to give it some appeal, even without a bunch of critical security updates.
Would Apple sell enough upgrades to make a profit if they weren't making money from hardware (and iPod) sales? Maybe not, but it's worth asking.
FTA:
"Here's another good question: Why is Apple turning down Intel's marketing subsidies that go to other PC manufacturers such as Dell (DELL), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), and others? There are no "Intel Inside" logos on the new Macs, save for marks on the outer packaging for which Apple isn't being paid. A slick, new TV ad will promote the new Apple-Intel collaboration. But if Apple is leaving money on the table, wouldn't shareholders want some pointed questions asked about that?"
Here's a good answer: Because Apple is one of few companies that cares enough about the appearance and packaging of its computers that it doesn't want to make them look like stock cars by covering them with the logos of third-party parts manufacturers. And because Apple itself is a more prestigious brand than Intel, and they wouldn't have anything to gain by slapping "Intel Inside" on everything. And, oh yeah, because Intel ITSELF is phasing out the "Intel Inside" logo on the new Yonahs, if I remember correctly.
Seriously, who is the guy writing this article? This question in particular seems pretty darned obvious, at least to me.
"OTOH, are you an end user who wants a simplified UI? Gnome is the way to go."
Erm... for most end-users who don't have a lot of interest in free-source debates, I'd recommend a Mac above any Linux distro. Even Windows XP is often easier to set up and use for your average Joe (aside from security concerns, that is).
Does anyone honestly think the network producers WOULDN'T pursue product placement revenue if they were making more from advertising? That they'd just say, "No thanks, we value the artistic integrity of our crappy sitcoms more than the loads and loads of cash you're paying us to stick your products in our shows"?
I like how his threshold for acceptability is right about where he is. "As #4849, I frown on plebians like #5120! Way to sign up a week later than me, jerk!"
Correct me if I'm mistaken, but I thought the basic premise of Intelligent Design was one of guided evolution. It doesn't reject evolution itself, but rather the theory of natural selection, saying that God "stepped in" at key moments to guide us as we evolved into humans.
If this is the case, then what the Catholic church is saying here doesn't conflict at all, as far as I can tell. It conflicts with Creationism, yes, but not with the moderate theory of Intelligent Design.
Of course, I still personally don't think IDT holds any water. It's basically a reformulation of old philosophical arguments that David Hume was shooting down centuries ago. And I can't for the life of me imagine why any fundamentalist Christian would want to confirm their faith through the scientific method - even if they CAN establish that there is some sort of intelligent design in the world, surely the idea of a humaniform God whose son was incarnated 2000 years ago is less probable than other available explanations.
I guess the risk is that unscrupulous students and researchers will just hit Google Book search, cite a paragraph or two, and never bother to go find the actual book (which can be a major hassle, especially if it's a rare or out-of-print book and/or the searcher doesn't have a wad of cash to spend on research material). If people do this, there's a BIG risk that they'll misinterpret the stuff they're citing. Potentially, this could become a very real scourge on academia, since it encourages shallow and incomplete readings of scholarly works.
Of course, the BEST solution for academic researchers would be for all those works to be freely available online in their entirety... but if that was the case, those expensive academic journals like Nature might not be able to afford the peer-review process, which would itself be a major blow to the quality of articles published.
So it takes an IQ of 101 or higher to understand the basic tenets of science, eh? Interesting take.
By the way, not all material that can't be empirically verified is worthless. There's this whole field called "philosophy" dedicated to questions that often go beyond testable hypotheses. You might want to familiarize yourself with it, since it was philosophy that gave birth to the concepts of formal logic and the scientific method in the first place.
"Intelligent design" is not science. It is philosophy. Of course, unless I'm misinformed on the issue, it's pretty crappy philosophy. David Hume shot down something pretty similar a couple hundred years ago.
Now, if our educational system taught us more about logic, argument, and philosophy, this would be self-evident to most Americans. But I guess memorizing the quadratic equation and phases of mitosis is more relevant to our everyday life.
It's poorly written, repetitive, and half the time the guy doesn't seem to know what he's talking about. He calls GTA3 the first "sandbox" game? Really? How about SimCity? Bah. I hope Rockstar didn't pay too much for this fluff piece.
Apparently ole' Denny is in a mood to distance himself from Bush. In particular, he's trying to sound like a fiscal conservative by downplaying the cost of Katrina, and he flat-out rejects Bush's pricetag and approach. On another issue, he's not necessarily out of line with Bush, but he's still misleading (IMHO): Energy. Apparently it has finally sunk in even for Republicans that the current energy plan (i.e. laissez-faire) isn't gonna cut it. But his recommendations for "fixing" it center on increasing domestic oil production and/or refining. Not that these might not be good ideas, but notice that he doesn't mention alternative energy sources or even improved fuel-efficiency. Like a true Republican, he wants to protect our sacred right to guns and SUVs. Still, it's good to see Republicans start to acknowledge the risks of foreign oil dependency, even if their recommended solutions aren't what I'd consider optimal. And it's REALLY nice to see such a short-and-sweet policy statement coming straight from the horse's mouth, without a half page of self-serving op-ed or twenty minutes of screaming "pundits" to gussy it up. Even if I don't like what he's saying, Hastert is at least saying SOMETHING.
This is one of those threads where people get "+5 Insightful" for criticizing the mod system.
;-)
(Know how I could tell? It says "Slashdot" up in the corner.)
"If it's legally free to use and does the same task, why wouldn't 90% of the users in the world who only use Windows *not* care? People always look for what's cheaper, sometimes even if it's not better (note how MS became the company it is today...)"
Personally, I don't think that they wouldn't not care... I think.
I doubt very many people actually pay for Office. It's either provided by their workplace or included on their PC. And most people don't seem to have a big moral issue with sharing their Office disks, illegal though it may be.
OK, let's say I'm your average computer user. I have the following options:
1. Keep using Windows and Office, which were pre-installed on my system and I don't have to pay extra for.
2. Somehow find out about Linux, have somebody tell me exactly what an OS is and why I should get a new one, download or purchase a distro, backup or lose all my current data (which is probably on a NTSF drive), install the new distro, get all the hardware working (not always as easy as many slashdotters seem to think; I STILL can't get my wireless card to work under Ubuntu), and THEN learn where everything is on my new OS and all the new programs that I have to use with it.
Bear in mind that the "average" computer user doesn't care too much about long-term stability or security; hell, a lot don't even bother to update their antivirus. What makes the Linux-on-the-desktop advocates think that a significant number of people would want to go to all that trouble?
Princess Peach/Toadstool/whatever is a kind and just ruler. Had you read the propoganda - er - manual, you would know that Bowser was an evil tyrant sorcerer with a dark lizard army who wrested power away from the benevolent royal family by turning her loyal retainers into bricks and question-mark blocks, and corrupting some into those really easy goombas.
Also, my friend told me that when you beat level 99 on Duck Hunt, it showed a credits screen with you eating a duck dinner.
I still haven't forgiven him.