Sure, I've got AnyDVD on my computer too, and I love it. But I don't have a Blu-Ray drive on my computer. The only Blu-Ray drive I have is my PS3, and while most DVD's I pop in to it have automatic ads, I've yet to see it with Blu-Ray.
Actually, on all the Blu-Ray movies I've watched (Iron Man, Ratatouille, Baron Munchausen, The Thing, The Orphanage) I have yet to see previews AT ALL. They're probably there, but popping the discs in my PS3 just loads up the menu screen. I'd be surprised if this lasts for very long, but I'm really enjoying the lack of ads on Blu-Ray movies so far.
At least for mathematics publishing, LaTeX is still the first choice. It is more robust, and gives the user more control over appearance, than anything else I've seen. Kinda like the original post says, if it's not relevant anymore, what's the alternative?
I can't help but question the complaints on the complexity. I generally have a repertoire of packages that I use frequently like the ams packages, pstricks for image drawing, beamer for powerpoint-like presentations, and the external program image magic to make pictures the correct format.
Using other packages periodically tends to not have too many conflicts, except when trying to conform to required document classes of certain journals. But the workarounds generally don't take too much time.
I have yet to find something as robust as LaTeX, yet relatively user-friendly. Then again, I've never tried to create my own document class, merely modified what is already there. That always seemed to be the domain of the nuts-and-bolts programmers rather than the people who just want a typsetting language. So my idea of "user-friendly" may be a little skewed.
I've got a paper in the works that deals with something like what you've got. It's more theoretical than numerical, but it basically lays down a theoretical framework justifying and proving convergence of the finite element method for general coefficients, including discontinuous coefficients. It is based on the work of Lions and Magenes that was published in their PDE book back in the 50's, but isn't terribly widely known. My boss also has a lot of experience on the more strictly numerical side. If you see this and want to know more, email me at my username at Rice University.
A similar story. I have a couple of friends in Seattle who are Indian. The man once was talking to a customer service person. He managed to recognize the (somewhat hidden) accent of the person on the other end of the line and started speaking Indian (not sure which language in particular). The call center person got really nervous and asked him to stop, because they weren't supposed to let on that they were Indian, and speaking their native language kinda blows it out of the water.
I wasn't complaining about the price cut, but the language. It seemed to be exaggerating something that isn't really that impressive. And I'm curious how many 360 games are $30. Most of them come out at $60. That might have been a nicer price drop.
This is pure speculation on my part. But I think a big part of the answer is yes, American stores are very neglectful of PC games, except for a lot of the big ones. For example, at all the Gamestops/EBs I've been to in the last few months (maybe years), most of the PC games they have are just shoved into shelves with nothing but the spines of the box showing. However, console games, especially when they are first released tend to be displayed more prominently, with the front of the case facing out. Much more visible. I think people also try to make judgment calls on these things because there are few (none since Myst?) blockbuster adventure games. No blockbusters=genre is dead, perhaps?
I think we also need to keep in mind that people like to profess doom and gloom constantly. I've lost track of how many times I've heard people declare that PC gaming is dead, the Xbox, PS3, PSP, or DS is doomed, RTS games are dead, and so on at various times to various degree. It doesn't really matter. I hold on to hope that as long as there is a market for adventure games (and I'm part of that market), they will keep coming out. Maybe slowly, maybe not too many of them, but they will come. I am one of the people that is hoping that the exposure these games may get on consoles with give the genre a boost. It's up to you whether it's a boost to life from death, or just to more recognition.
I agree, to a certain extent. When I was young I remember being stuck at a certain spot in King's Quest III for months before finally figuring out what to do, and finishing the game shortly thereafter. (Admittedly, it was only played in short bursts when I went to visit someone, but still.) So I agree in the sense that I would never expect these types of adventure games to really compete with larger genres like sports, fps, rpgs, and so on.
There may not be many gamers who are willing to deal with these show-stopping puzzles. However, the makers of these games don't necessarily need to try to compete with the sales numbers seen by the likes of Halo, World of Warcraft, and Final Fantasy. All they need to do is sell enough to be profitable. And there are so many more gamers total than there were ten or fifteen years ago, that that may not be too unlikely.
When people say "adventure gaming is dead," what they're probably talking about is "point-and-click" adventure gaming is dead. The adventure games you're talking about are classified more as "action adventure" games.
I'm not terribly fond of pigeonholing everything into miniscule subgenres, but here I think it's relevant.
Action adventure games do involve a fair amount of item collecting and puzzle solving. But they also involve a lot of fighting, frequently repetitive fighting. The point-and-click style of adventure gaming (unless you want to go real old school and talk about text adventures, but it's a similar thing) is more cerebral. There is little to no direct violence. Virtually everything must be done by puzzle solving, and there is a much lower emphasis on things like reaction time. It's part of the reasons people have been referring to the new Phoenix Wright game as being almost a visual novel.
So the difference is not 3D vs. 2D (many adventure games went for at least pseudo-3D), nor is it sprites vs. rendered graphics. It's all about action with some puzzles vs. all puzzles, all the time. It drastically changes the tone and feel of the game. Zelda, Okami, and the like, while good games, do not have the "feel" of pure adventure games. Hence "action adventure."
Oh sure. I'm not saying it's rational. Just that I've actually heard people make this argument. I know people that refuse to be organ donors based on this paranoia alone.
I think the problem most Christians have with stem cells is not using them, but where they came from. So using stem cells from someone's bone marrow is okay, but using them from an aborted child is not. The big problem is the same that people have with organ donation. Not that what can be done with them is bad, but people become afraid that if someone's life is on the line, a doctor may not be as inclined to save them if their organs can be harvested. It's similar with stem cells, why not just encourage abortion and harvest the cells? It can be a little to close to Soylent Green for most people's taste.
Statements like these give me hope for the success of Nintendo. From what I've heard, it is far easier and cheaper to code for the Wii (and similarly the DS/GBA) than for the "true" next-gen systems. Perhaps while the large companies are making the blockbuster big-budget games, Nintendo will attract the more indy, affordable games. Then when people get more accustomed to the PS3 and 360, (perhaps) costs will come down enough to make it more reasonable.
Or maybe Xbox Live and the equivalent for the PS3 will just get an explosion of smaller games, and there will be just a small number of blockbusters coming out on the system proper.
Sure, I know this is abnormal. I know not everyone is like me. The point is instead that over the life of the PS2, which has been around six or seven years, if you buy about five games a year, you'll have over thirty. Say you've just got a PS2, and buy a little less than a game a month. If you've had a PS2 since launch (a big assumption, I know), you'll have at least sixty games. I know that is still probably well above average. But it's not unreasonable.
Then again, a number of people in this thread have said that they mostly buy used or bargain games, which screws that up a bit. But it also could allow someone to buy more games in a year.
Over the life of a system, thirty really isn't that bad. I mean, I recently counted that I have just a tad under one hundred ps2 games (not a single one of them a sports game). That's more than any other console I've owned, though I easily have more than half that number in PS1 games as well as Game Boy Advance games. My DS library is moving up too.
My point is, thirty games does seem like a hell of a lot when a console first launches, but over the life of a system it's a lot easier to do that than you may think. If the PS3 lasts about as long as the PS2, then this might be fine. Of course, I'm also one of the people that won't even think about buying one at $600, so who knows.
Third, Ph.D. is awarded for discovering something new in a field. Try discovering something new in Math... And without a Ph.D., you can't teach in a university. This limits the number of university teachers in technical disciplines.
Speaking as someone who is a month away from getting a PhD in math, it's not THAT hard to discover something new in math. Just look at all the math journals, or any technical journals, for that matter. There is pleny to research and discover. It's just little of it filters down to common knowledge.
Like most fields, there are more PhDs who graduate than there are jobs for them. I'm not trying to argue that opening new schools is trivial. I am saying that when new schools appear, there are more likely than not PhDs who would be more happy to apply their training to something relevant to their field.
Um, I just installed 1.5 and the scrollbar on the right hand side is now gone. Anyone know why it's gone, or how I can get it back? I use it all the time (especially since the mouse I use at school doesn't have a scroll wheel). Sorry for asking this here, but I've always had a hard time finding answers to stuff like this on the mozilla website. In fact, anyone with good places to go for technical troubleshooting would be welcome to reply.
I have to say this is one of the reasons I'm glad that the Xbox and PS2 had somewhat different markets where they excelled: there are different kinds of gamers with different tastes. It's great that there's a console that had what you wanted. As for me, since I dig those Japanese games, the PS2 is what I have and I've never touched the XBox. All my American RPGs are on the PC.
Though I will let you know, I've always thought that people who played J-RPGs for the story or characters are nuts. I agree with you, so much of the time they're all the same. There are exceptions (SMT from Atlus, arguably Xenogears, some NIS games), but even those are debatable. To me, the whole point of playing these games is all about the battle system and the progression systems. FFVII had a confused and meandering plot that eventually just drops itself and finishes, but what made it fun was the materia system. What keeps me playing Final Fantasy games are the different systems in place like materia, sphere grids, or a job system. The battle system was pretty simple, but the character progression was fun.
On the other hand, Shin Megami Tensei and Digital Devil Saga from Atlus both had very fast-paced battles, yet even still most average battles required some thought, care, and strategy. Games like that are nice, the only older RPG I can think of where you could get your butt kicked no matter how powerful you thought you were was Chrono Trigger.
So just so you know, even people who love J-RPGs have the same complaints as you. Heck, that's what makes the list of role-playing cliches funny. But in spite of their shortcomings, they can be a lot of fun.
Sure sign that someone's crazy: they liked the Intellivision controller. I mean, I spent a fair amount of my youth on that system, had a couple of the "talking" games, but that evil controller sucked. Those side buttons that every game used so frequently were murder on my thumbs. That, and if you lost the stupid plastic insert for the controllers some games became almost unplayable. Finally moving to the Nintendo controller was wonderful. It almost makes my thumbs ache all over again to think about the Intellivision.
I had a different experience. To me, the school system is a place where the teachers are the ones who hold themselves as the highest authority, and it is utterly absurd to think that any sort of religion could possibly be valid. Anything that is not held by the current scientific or literary community to be the truth is insulted and laughed at. Christians are treated as idiots, regardless of the extent that they proclaim their beliefs, and regardless of their actual intelligence.
I am not saying that you haven't seen what you have. It's just that when you're in an environment where almost everyone believes something opposed to what you do, it's very uncomfortable and hostile. I'm grateful that I'm in a department and around people that for the most part do not use their intellect to push their opinions forcefully on others.
Believing the truth of the Bible and curiosity are not mutually exclusive. Unfortunately, you sound like so many people who have a vendetta against Christianity just because some Christians are anti-intellectuals. And that attitude pervading higher education only increases the hostilities both ways.
To a certain extent Katamari Damacy was sufficient. But at the same time, for me playing that as well as the new one just increases a desire to roll up new and stranger things.
They make me think of things like rolling up microscopic objects. Sure, the game is awesome when you get huge. But wouldn't it also be cool if you could roll up the whole world after starting at the subatomic level? Or perhaps setting stages in other times and settings. Like rolling up the battle of Waterloo. Or maybe a haunted house or something. The joy of rolling up new stuff in different places to me seems like it could just keep going in so many different ways.
I was actually hoping that We Love Katamari would have been developed by a separate team. This way the original group could continue doing innovative things, but then all of us who really liked the first team and wanted more could have that too.
Though from the sound of it, the sequel was much better for the presence of Takahashi. Sad that he was pushed into it.
It always gives me hope to hear about teams like the group working on Shadow of the Colossus. A group that has apparently been allowed to work on their project with no outside involvement. Being able to make basically whatever they want and take as much time as they needed on it. That sort of artistic freedom has me sold. That and the sheer beauty of their style.
My point was really that trig is not such a simple subject. There's more to it than just those simple formulas. Even if most everything can be broken down to those simple formulas. That's what I meant by my analogy. It's also like the people I've known who took honors calculus classes and learned all the hard theory, but couldn't actually compute very many integrals or derivatives they were given.
To a certain extent it frustrates me to see people claiming a subject is easy because it's easy for them or they mastered it years ago. But that's the teacher in me speaking.
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Sure, I've got AnyDVD on my computer too, and I love it. But I don't have a Blu-Ray drive on my computer. The only Blu-Ray drive I have is my PS3, and while most DVD's I pop in to it have automatic ads, I've yet to see it with Blu-Ray.
Actually, on all the Blu-Ray movies I've watched (Iron Man, Ratatouille, Baron Munchausen, The Thing, The Orphanage) I have yet to see previews AT ALL. They're probably there, but popping the discs in my PS3 just loads up the menu screen. I'd be surprised if this lasts for very long, but I'm really enjoying the lack of ads on Blu-Ray movies so far.
At least for mathematics publishing, LaTeX is still the first choice. It is more robust, and gives the user more control over appearance, than anything else I've seen. Kinda like the original post says, if it's not relevant anymore, what's the alternative?
I can't help but question the complaints on the complexity. I generally have a repertoire of packages that I use frequently like the ams packages, pstricks for image drawing, beamer for powerpoint-like presentations, and the external program image magic to make pictures the correct format.
Using other packages periodically tends to not have too many conflicts, except when trying to conform to required document classes of certain journals. But the workarounds generally don't take too much time.
I have yet to find something as robust as LaTeX, yet relatively user-friendly. Then again, I've never tried to create my own document class, merely modified what is already there. That always seemed to be the domain of the nuts-and-bolts programmers rather than the people who just want a typsetting language. So my idea of "user-friendly" may be a little skewed.
I've got a paper in the works that deals with something like what you've got. It's more theoretical than numerical, but it basically lays down a theoretical framework justifying and proving convergence of the finite element method for general coefficients, including discontinuous coefficients. It is based on the work of Lions and Magenes that was published in their PDE book back in the 50's, but isn't terribly widely known. My boss also has a lot of experience on the more strictly numerical side. If you see this and want to know more, email me at my username at Rice University.
A similar story. I have a couple of friends in Seattle who are Indian. The man once was talking to a customer service person. He managed to recognize the (somewhat hidden) accent of the person on the other end of the line and started speaking Indian (not sure which language in particular). The call center person got really nervous and asked him to stop, because they weren't supposed to let on that they were Indian, and speaking their native language kinda blows it out of the water.
I wasn't complaining about the price cut, but the language. It seemed to be exaggerating something that isn't really that impressive. And I'm curious how many 360 games are $30. Most of them come out at $60. That might have been a nicer price drop.
I like how a price drop of 6.25%, or $30 on the elite version, counts as "slashed" prices.
This is pure speculation on my part. But I think a big part of the answer is yes, American stores are very neglectful of PC games, except for a lot of the big ones. For example, at all the Gamestops/EBs I've been to in the last few months (maybe years), most of the PC games they have are just shoved into shelves with nothing but the spines of the box showing. However, console games, especially when they are first released tend to be displayed more prominently, with the front of the case facing out. Much more visible. I think people also try to make judgment calls on these things because there are few (none since Myst?) blockbuster adventure games. No blockbusters=genre is dead, perhaps?
I think we also need to keep in mind that people like to profess doom and gloom constantly. I've lost track of how many times I've heard people declare that PC gaming is dead, the Xbox, PS3, PSP, or DS is doomed, RTS games are dead, and so on at various times to various degree. It doesn't really matter. I hold on to hope that as long as there is a market for adventure games (and I'm part of that market), they will keep coming out. Maybe slowly, maybe not too many of them, but they will come. I am one of the people that is hoping that the exposure these games may get on consoles with give the genre a boost. It's up to you whether it's a boost to life from death, or just to more recognition.
I agree, to a certain extent. When I was young I remember being stuck at a certain spot in King's Quest III for months before finally figuring out what to do, and finishing the game shortly thereafter. (Admittedly, it was only played in short bursts when I went to visit someone, but still.) So I agree in the sense that I would never expect these types of adventure games to really compete with larger genres like sports, fps, rpgs, and so on.
There may not be many gamers who are willing to deal with these show-stopping puzzles. However, the makers of these games don't necessarily need to try to compete with the sales numbers seen by the likes of Halo, World of Warcraft, and Final Fantasy. All they need to do is sell enough to be profitable. And there are so many more gamers total than there were ten or fifteen years ago, that that may not be too unlikely.
When people say "adventure gaming is dead," what they're probably talking about is "point-and-click" adventure gaming is dead. The adventure games you're talking about are classified more as "action adventure" games.
I'm not terribly fond of pigeonholing everything into miniscule subgenres, but here I think it's relevant.
Action adventure games do involve a fair amount of item collecting and puzzle solving. But they also involve a lot of fighting, frequently repetitive fighting. The point-and-click style of adventure gaming (unless you want to go real old school and talk about text adventures, but it's a similar thing) is more cerebral. There is little to no direct violence. Virtually everything must be done by puzzle solving, and there is a much lower emphasis on things like reaction time. It's part of the reasons people have been referring to the new Phoenix Wright game as being almost a visual novel.
So the difference is not 3D vs. 2D (many adventure games went for at least pseudo-3D), nor is it sprites vs. rendered graphics. It's all about action with some puzzles vs. all puzzles, all the time. It drastically changes the tone and feel of the game. Zelda, Okami, and the like, while good games, do not have the "feel" of pure adventure games. Hence "action adventure."
Oh sure. I'm not saying it's rational. Just that I've actually heard people make this argument. I know people that refuse to be organ donors based on this paranoia alone.
I think the problem most Christians have with stem cells is not using them, but where they came from. So using stem cells from someone's bone marrow is okay, but using them from an aborted child is not. The big problem is the same that people have with organ donation. Not that what can be done with them is bad, but people become afraid that if someone's life is on the line, a doctor may not be as inclined to save them if their organs can be harvested. It's similar with stem cells, why not just encourage abortion and harvest the cells? It can be a little to close to Soylent Green for most people's taste.
Statements like these give me hope for the success of Nintendo. From what I've heard, it is far easier and cheaper to code for the Wii (and similarly the DS/GBA) than for the "true" next-gen systems. Perhaps while the large companies are making the blockbuster big-budget games, Nintendo will attract the more indy, affordable games. Then when people get more accustomed to the PS3 and 360, (perhaps) costs will come down enough to make it more reasonable.
Or maybe Xbox Live and the equivalent for the PS3 will just get an explosion of smaller games, and there will be just a small number of blockbusters coming out on the system proper.
Sure, I know this is abnormal. I know not everyone is like me. The point is instead that over the life of the PS2, which has been around six or seven years, if you buy about five games a year, you'll have over thirty. Say you've just got a PS2, and buy a little less than a game a month. If you've had a PS2 since launch (a big assumption, I know), you'll have at least sixty games. I know that is still probably well above average. But it's not unreasonable.
Then again, a number of people in this thread have said that they mostly buy used or bargain games, which screws that up a bit. But it also could allow someone to buy more games in a year.
Over the life of a system, thirty really isn't that bad. I mean, I recently counted that I have just a tad under one hundred ps2 games (not a single one of them a sports game). That's more than any other console I've owned, though I easily have more than half that number in PS1 games as well as Game Boy Advance games. My DS library is moving up too.
My point is, thirty games does seem like a hell of a lot when a console first launches, but over the life of a system it's a lot easier to do that than you may think. If the PS3 lasts about as long as the PS2, then this might be fine. Of course, I'm also one of the people that won't even think about buying one at $600, so who knows.
Maybe I'm the only one, but when I saw the headline, I thought of the line in Robocop: "You idiot! His memory is admissible as evidence!"
Speaking as someone who is a month away from getting a PhD in math, it's not THAT hard to discover something new in math. Just look at all the math journals, or any technical journals, for that matter. There is pleny to research and discover. It's just little of it filters down to common knowledge.
Like most fields, there are more PhDs who graduate than there are jobs for them. I'm not trying to argue that opening new schools is trivial. I am saying that when new schools appear, there are more likely than not PhDs who would be more happy to apply their training to something relevant to their field.
Um, I just installed 1.5 and the scrollbar on the right hand side is now gone. Anyone know why it's gone, or how I can get it back? I use it all the time (especially since the mouse I use at school doesn't have a scroll wheel). Sorry for asking this here, but I've always had a hard time finding answers to stuff like this on the mozilla website. In fact, anyone with good places to go for technical troubleshooting would be welcome to reply.
I have to say this is one of the reasons I'm glad that the Xbox and PS2 had somewhat different markets where they excelled: there are different kinds of gamers with different tastes. It's great that there's a console that had what you wanted. As for me, since I dig those Japanese games, the PS2 is what I have and I've never touched the XBox. All my American RPGs are on the PC.
Though I will let you know, I've always thought that people who played J-RPGs for the story or characters are nuts. I agree with you, so much of the time they're all the same. There are exceptions (SMT from Atlus, arguably Xenogears, some NIS games), but even those are debatable. To me, the whole point of playing these games is all about the battle system and the progression systems. FFVII had a confused and meandering plot that eventually just drops itself and finishes, but what made it fun was the materia system. What keeps me playing Final Fantasy games are the different systems in place like materia, sphere grids, or a job system. The battle system was pretty simple, but the character progression was fun.
On the other hand, Shin Megami Tensei and Digital Devil Saga from Atlus both had very fast-paced battles, yet even still most average battles required some thought, care, and strategy. Games like that are nice, the only older RPG I can think of where you could get your butt kicked no matter how powerful you thought you were was Chrono Trigger.
So just so you know, even people who love J-RPGs have the same complaints as you. Heck, that's what makes the list of role-playing cliches funny. But in spite of their shortcomings, they can be a lot of fun.
Sure sign that someone's crazy: they liked the Intellivision controller. I mean, I spent a fair amount of my youth on that system, had a couple of the "talking" games, but that evil controller sucked. Those side buttons that every game used so frequently were murder on my thumbs. That, and if you lost the stupid plastic insert for the controllers some games became almost unplayable. Finally moving to the Nintendo controller was wonderful. It almost makes my thumbs ache all over again to think about the Intellivision.
I had a different experience. To me, the school system is a place where the teachers are the ones who hold themselves as the highest authority, and it is utterly absurd to think that any sort of religion could possibly be valid. Anything that is not held by the current scientific or literary community to be the truth is insulted and laughed at. Christians are treated as idiots, regardless of the extent that they proclaim their beliefs, and regardless of their actual intelligence.
I am not saying that you haven't seen what you have. It's just that when you're in an environment where almost everyone believes something opposed to what you do, it's very uncomfortable and hostile. I'm grateful that I'm in a department and around people that for the most part do not use their intellect to push their opinions forcefully on others.
Believing the truth of the Bible and curiosity are not mutually exclusive. Unfortunately, you sound like so many people who have a vendetta against Christianity just because some Christians are anti-intellectuals. And that attitude pervading higher education only increases the hostilities both ways.
To a certain extent Katamari Damacy was sufficient. But at the same time, for me playing that as well as the new one just increases a desire to roll up new and stranger things.
They make me think of things like rolling up microscopic objects. Sure, the game is awesome when you get huge. But wouldn't it also be cool if you could roll up the whole world after starting at the subatomic level? Or perhaps setting stages in other times and settings. Like rolling up the battle of Waterloo. Or maybe a haunted house or something. The joy of rolling up new stuff in different places to me seems like it could just keep going in so many different ways.
I was actually hoping that We Love Katamari would have been developed by a separate team. This way the original group could continue doing innovative things, but then all of us who really liked the first team and wanted more could have that too.
Though from the sound of it, the sequel was much better for the presence of Takahashi. Sad that he was pushed into it.
It always gives me hope to hear about teams like the group working on Shadow of the Colossus. A group that has apparently been allowed to work on their project with no outside involvement. Being able to make basically whatever they want and take as much time as they needed on it. That sort of artistic freedom has me sold. That and the sheer beauty of their style.
My point was really that trig is not such a simple subject. There's more to it than just those simple formulas. Even if most everything can be broken down to those simple formulas. That's what I meant by my analogy. It's also like the people I've known who took honors calculus classes and learned all the hard theory, but couldn't actually compute very many integrals or derivatives they were given.
To a certain extent it frustrates me to see people claiming a subject is easy because it's easy for them or they mastered it years ago. But that's the teacher in me speaking.