Most of the comments on this article are astoundingly immature and disrespectful. Prostitution may not be an acceptable job for most people, but that in no way makes them less human, and if anything it makes it important for them to form organizations to support other sex workers.
Whether you condone the profession or not, that shouldn't affect their worth as a person who deserves respect.
And I do think this is bunk - just like the idea that schools are less safe because of GTA, or that 13 year olds are more violent. But the fact that the general response to this has been "Prostitutes? Hah! They're sluts anyways, who cares what they think?" is more than a little disconcerting.
I agree - Aria of Sorrows had me up at 3 AM playing it for several nights in a row (until my battery died and I couldn't find the charger:\ ).
The best part of it is the souls systems, I think. Other than the great "catalogue" of them (which, combined with the % explored is, for some pyschological reason, huge incentive for me to "find everything"), the way you acquire them was pretty cool, too; there was only a certain chance each time you killed a monster. So with intermittent reward, I was killing Aqua men left and right like an addicted lab rat until I finally got the soul (underwater breathing, I think?).
The graphics are great, too, because they're around SNES-quality, and the gameplay is similar to a lot of the old-school classic 2D action RPGs, so it's like a neo-classic without taking the dumb parts (although it did have save points which generally suck).
Ohh! I can't wait for Castlevania! I bet having the map on one screen and navigating with the other would cut my wandering time in half, at least. That was one of the frustrating parts - in Aria of Sorrows, although there were distinct sections of the castle, it didn't feel like they fit together coherently all the time. So you'd spend 5 minutes traversing the castle only to find that the water is reached through the dining room and not the dungeon (or something like that).
As for Trauma Center, I, personally, use my hand held consoles on buses and trains, though. So I'm not all that keen to play a game of steady-handedness on public transportation. And when I'm at home, I'm not much of a fan of hunching over a tiny screen for it.
I think a question like this will generate wildly different answers based on the people asked, but that those answers are unique to the group asked. As a programmer, Linux and Unix are Godsends because of the ease of editing, compiling, running and debugging with just a single terminal open. And for a group like slash dot, I wouldn't be surprised if things like the control over your own OS, and the bleeding edge appeal made it into the top answers.
But really, the question of why an average computer user would switch to Linux is less obvious. Applications being available that rival Windows is a big reason. What else are the reasons people switch?
"This does mean that they can use ODF files and *expect* everyone else to be able to open them."
That's exactly the point. I know someone who was involved in the pitch to the Massachusetts government, and it's very hard to explain that distinction to someone who just wants to write documents and send them to other people. At least now the argument of what their users have on their computers is slightly weaker (except for the fact that people still use Word 97, so it's bound to be an issue for years whether you have a new enough version). But the point isn't that this could break Microsoft's stranglehold - that's just a lovely side effect. The point is that Microsoft hedged its bets that every would use Microsoft - and they almost all do, so it was a good bet - but it could absolutely lead to some scrambling for a solution if these type of moves to Open formats takes off.
Without the politics, it's 100% the right move because everyone should share the same format and it shouldn't matter what system you're on. Unfortunately, you can't decide this without the politics because of the situation of Office products and their history in everything from homes to businesses to government.
You got me there. But a) there was no Sim Copter 2 or Streets 2, which suggests my next point that b) the games sucked really bad. A better counterpoint would have been sim island, sim farm, and sim ant. In retrospect, I should have said the "Sim City" games, becase, being in its 5th(?) iteration, it is the game with the longest track record of all of Maxis' games.
Furthermore, Sim City, etc. were macroscopic and that was the difference from GTA. Sim Copter and Streets were both nearer to the physical point of view, but nowhere near the complexity level or level of detail.
Oooh! You mentioned Shenmue. I admit it - I love that game like I love Fable, and I love Fable like I love a secret drug addiction. And Deus Ex. *sigh* The games are flawed, no doubt, but there's so much power in them. I wish more than anything that Shenmue would have given a bit more to do in the world - like more side stories that you could follow - but the grandeur of it and the feeling of being in a city looking for a person that you have only a clue as to where they are, that was really brought across in the game.
GTA is like a #1 pop song - it's never the best one, either by the artist, or certainly that the industry has to offer. For some reason, it was there at the right time, and it blows up into a phenomenon. All we can try to do is take the parts of it that worked the best and add them to what we already know to be valuable - good gameplay, solid story, and now, open-ended worlds. GTA doesn't offer non-linear play, which I can't ever pass up in a game, and that's why it never really held me. But find me a game with GTA-like open-ended play *and* non-linear stories and I'm in love. So maybe it wasn't the greatest game, but I can't complain if that means I can now go take a break from shooting everything in site and explore some barracks or something in the next big FPS.
Well, yeah, in graphics & in style maybe they were different. But zelda is still zelda when it's in 3D. If you mean that one game is better than the other, give a substantive reason - the elements of the game were totally different, the difficulty level was more reasonable - something other than "it looked different."
"Have they really added value as they have continued the franchise"
No. They've expanded, and they've introduced things like new vehicles, different scenery, etc, but it's the same game, just with new content. Hence the "franchise" aspect. As long as franchises are popular, then each successive game is just an expansion pack that doesn't require the original. Which is great - there are some games I'm dying for sequels because I just want more. But I know that I don't want them to change the things I like - so we expect a degree of permanence in the features and the feel of the game.
That's true, but for all the Sim games, it is macroscopic, whereas this is microscopic. The Sims was similar, but that was on a level of finer detail than GTA - you don't have to worry about whether you slept or ate in GTA. So in this sense, GTA is unique in that it was a day-to-day kind of open-ended game play that also happened to be a crime spree.
But even with GTA, the "open ended" aspect wasn't really all that great. The frustration of not being able to leave the island, even if you figured out how to get around the barriers set up, was one example. And it's not like the "life of crime sim" was new, Rockstar just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Same for Maxis, actually.
Very true, but it's better than nothing. In theory, what he says here doesn't have to go through party colleagues and PR agents. Perhaps we'd all be better off with politicians and authorities blogging, as you could know how the person thinks on a day to day basis, not just the month before an election. I know I'd be interested if a mayor campaignin on affordable housing has 1% of his meeting time devoted to the issue or 15%.
"The whole process of innovation on the Internet would be seriously damaged..."
That does seem a little overemphasized. I think the taps on VoIP does raise (again) the concern of what is the FCC's business. If I should at my neighbor over my fence, do I have to do it in such a way that is compliant with FCC's regulations? What if we decide to use tin cans connected with a string? When does it fall inside the FCC's four flags?
Furthermore, May 2007 isn't very far away for system-wide changes. So then it comes back to the triangle of manufacturing Quality - Price - Speed -- pick any two. If they say it's a requirement within 2 years, indrectly they may be demanding a chunk of revenues going into maintenance instead of expanding service or what have you. Either way, it doesn't seem like it will help consumers in the average case.
If only that were uncommon, then we might be getting somewhere. Unfortunately, many of the "default passwords" are completely obtainable data - like your last name plus your phone extension or something.
I spent the summer working in a college IT department, and the telephone tech guys had their office next to me, so I heard all their business. The default password for administration, admissions, and the registrar's voicemail systems? 54321. And people call those places up, leave their names and social security numbers, and expect it to be safe.
My own school's help desk password? "help". Yeah, people email their passwords and say "I can't login!" and the helpdesk archives the emails. The problem at the root of it is the idea that the people who come up with the default passwords think that no one has malicious intent, so they just come up with something just outside of what would take an effort to figure out (like telephone extension) and they use that.
In terms of accessibility, however, scanned books are absolutely the best way for the visually impaired to read books. Audiobooks are fine for casual reading, but when you need to quote for a research paper or gather statistics, you really want it in digital format. Bookshare has made a very good start in allowing access to copyrighted material for people with disabilities (which is a subsection of national copyright (or disability?) law), but it's not going to be nearly as comprehensive or as accurate as a company like Google doing the scanning and posting.
It is indeed "funny" that they completely ignore the quality of life issue, when IGDA devotes a large portion of their work to that topic.
If we were to take this story and draw it to its absurd, logical conclusion, we could just as well write an article about all the money that sex workers pull down without referencing the health issues (and no health care), the personal sacrifices and the quality of life issues.
If you don't mention quality of life, benefits, anti-discrimination considerations and job security, you might as well just pick a career based on the one with the most money and hope it isn't too bad.
Because hippy chicks do it way better than some huge fake breasted Sunset-hopping harlot
I made it all the way through and that was our closing thought. IGN dissapoints in general, but what's with the immaturity there? Funny they didn't mention that proportion of male/female programmers, yet it's clear with that sentence.
Kaminsky and others have spent years sounding alarm bells about holes in the security defenses of Microsoft's software, including the Windows operating system and the Internet Explorer browser. As a sign of how times have changed, he and other presenters were treated to a lunch with retiring Windows chief Allchin and Johnson...
A sign of changing times, indeed. It seems pretty clear that Microsoft has needed to buddy up more with the people who can break their software, because it's going to happen anyways, at least now they might have a head start. I can't really commend the decision to start now, though, as it seems to be both forced by the current politics and belated in that they should have had the foresight to do it earlier.
Ditto (until I took a class on China, of course). But it's not just history that can be learned. I knew my way around Battery park in NYC from playing Deus Ex: Conspiracy. Funny thing was, I didn't connect the two, and I found myself instinctively knowing where to turn to find the exits and the river. Video games are just as capable of teaching geography or pretty much anything else as they are capable of teaching history.
It's a bit unfortunate that "video games can be a force for good!" is a refrain among a handful of articles/teachers/schools who are trying to expand their teaching styles. Games, and, particularly serious games, are so perfect for training and simulation, yet that's not what makes it to the NY Times blurb about violent videogames targeting younger audiences or whatever.
And another example in a sense is UML (Universal Modeling Language). It's not like something else came through and stole UML's thunder, but only betwen 10 and 20% of software developers use modeling consistently at all (from Software Developer magazine, Brian Selic interview).
Standards are a strange beast in this way as sometimes there's no need for a standard in the first place...
But 58% is unusually high, as the article says. But OK, fine, so 58% absentee voters in the county with the 2nd largest absentee voting in the country. What's the average for the state? What's the national absentee rate?
My point still stands about the accessibility of absentee ballot, and the further accesssibility for some for internet ballot.
Although they don't suggest it, perhaps that 1% have mobility impairments and have never voted before, but now they get a chance. Obviously that's the best case scenario, but it seems a little ridiculous that there haven't been more efforts to expand the possibilities of voting.
And scoffing at 1%? How many people do absentee votes in the U.S. (or any democratic country)? I would guess it's not more than 10%. And yet, for many, it's the only way they can vote. And absentee voting has been around for years, so I think 1% is not fantastic, but it's a good start.
Furthermore there's the issue of all those people who will be out of a phone, possible their only one. I'm sure they won't be getting a sweet deal switching over to the patent-holding company - Shooting the competition in the back of the head is a perfect way to clear the path to raised prices for consumers forced to switch.
It's a shame that laws originally intended to protect individuals or the little guys get turned into legal feeding grounds that do nothing but hurt the consumer and the diversity of the marketplace.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the comments on this article are astoundingly immature and disrespectful. Prostitution may not be an acceptable job for most people, but that in no way makes them less human, and if anything it makes it important for them to form organizations to support other sex workers.
Whether you condone the profession or not, that shouldn't affect their worth as a person who deserves respect.
And I do think this is bunk - just like the idea that schools are less safe because of GTA, or that 13 year olds are more violent. But the fact that the general response to this has been "Prostitutes? Hah! They're sluts anyways, who cares what they think?" is more than a little disconcerting.
Cubicle light saber duel, anyone?
I agree - Aria of Sorrows had me up at 3 AM playing it for several nights in a row (until my battery died and I couldn't find the charger :\ ).
The best part of it is the souls systems, I think. Other than the great "catalogue" of them (which, combined with the % explored is, for some pyschological reason, huge incentive for me to "find everything"), the way you acquire them was pretty cool, too; there was only a certain chance each time you killed a monster. So with intermittent reward, I was killing Aqua men left and right like an addicted lab rat until I finally got the soul (underwater breathing, I think?).
The graphics are great, too, because they're around SNES-quality, and the gameplay is similar to a lot of the old-school classic 2D action RPGs, so it's like a neo-classic without taking the dumb parts (although it did have save points which generally suck).
Really? Then I'll probably look into it. By the sounds of it, it seemed like aim was a factor in success - kind of like Operation, the board(?) game.
Ohh! I can't wait for Castlevania! I bet having the map on one screen and navigating with the other would cut my wandering time in half, at least. That was one of the frustrating parts - in Aria of Sorrows, although there were distinct sections of the castle, it didn't feel like they fit together coherently all the time. So you'd spend 5 minutes traversing the castle only to find that the water is reached through the dining room and not the dungeon (or something like that).
As for Trauma Center, I, personally, use my hand held consoles on buses and trains, though. So I'm not all that keen to play a game of steady-handedness on public transportation. And when I'm at home, I'm not much of a fan of hunching over a tiny screen for it.
I think a question like this will generate wildly different answers based on the people asked, but that those answers are unique to the group asked. As a programmer, Linux and Unix are Godsends because of the ease of editing, compiling, running and debugging with just a single terminal open. And for a group like slash dot, I wouldn't be surprised if things like the control over your own OS, and the bleeding edge appeal made it into the top answers.
But really, the question of why an average computer user would switch to Linux is less obvious. Applications being available that rival Windows is a big reason. What else are the reasons people switch?
That's exactly the point. I know someone who was involved in the pitch to the Massachusetts government, and it's very hard to explain that distinction to someone who just wants to write documents and send them to other people. At least now the argument of what their users have on their computers is slightly weaker (except for the fact that people still use Word 97, so it's bound to be an issue for years whether you have a new enough version). But the point isn't that this could break Microsoft's stranglehold - that's just a lovely side effect. The point is that Microsoft hedged its bets that every would use Microsoft - and they almost all do, so it was a good bet - but it could absolutely lead to some scrambling for a solution if these type of moves to Open formats takes off.
Without the politics, it's 100% the right move because everyone should share the same format and it shouldn't matter what system you're on. Unfortunately, you can't decide this without the politics because of the situation of Office products and their history in everything from homes to businesses to government.
But that's why we love bloggers! We wouldn't expect any less.
You got me there. But a) there was no Sim Copter 2 or Streets 2, which suggests my next point that b) the games sucked really bad. A better counterpoint would have been sim island, sim farm, and sim ant. In retrospect, I should have said the "Sim City" games, becase, being in its 5th(?) iteration, it is the game with the longest track record of all of Maxis' games.
Furthermore, Sim City, etc. were macroscopic and that was the difference from GTA. Sim Copter and Streets were both nearer to the physical point of view, but nowhere near the complexity level or level of detail.
Oooh! You mentioned Shenmue. I admit it - I love that game like I love Fable, and I love Fable like I love a secret drug addiction. And Deus Ex. *sigh* The games are flawed, no doubt, but there's so much power in them. I wish more than anything that Shenmue would have given a bit more to do in the world - like more side stories that you could follow - but the grandeur of it and the feeling of being in a city looking for a person that you have only a clue as to where they are, that was really brought across in the game.
GTA is like a #1 pop song - it's never the best one, either by the artist, or certainly that the industry has to offer. For some reason, it was there at the right time, and it blows up into a phenomenon. All we can try to do is take the parts of it that worked the best and add them to what we already know to be valuable - good gameplay, solid story, and now, open-ended worlds. GTA doesn't offer non-linear play, which I can't ever pass up in a game, and that's why it never really held me. But find me a game with GTA-like open-ended play *and* non-linear stories and I'm in love. So maybe it wasn't the greatest game, but I can't complain if that means I can now go take a break from shooting everything in site and explore some barracks or something in the next big FPS.
Well, yeah, in graphics & in style maybe they were different. But zelda is still zelda when it's in 3D. If you mean that one game is better than the other, give a substantive reason - the elements of the game were totally different, the difficulty level was more reasonable - something other than "it looked different."
No. They've expanded, and they've introduced things like new vehicles, different scenery, etc, but it's the same game, just with new content. Hence the "franchise" aspect. As long as franchises are popular, then each successive game is just an expansion pack that doesn't require the original. Which is great - there are some games I'm dying for sequels because I just want more. But I know that I don't want them to change the things I like - so we expect a degree of permanence in the features and the feel of the game.
That's true, but for all the Sim games, it is macroscopic, whereas this is microscopic. The Sims was similar, but that was on a level of finer detail than GTA - you don't have to worry about whether you slept or ate in GTA. So in this sense, GTA is unique in that it was a day-to-day kind of open-ended game play that also happened to be a crime spree.
But even with GTA, the "open ended" aspect wasn't really all that great. The frustration of not being able to leave the island, even if you figured out how to get around the barriers set up, was one example. And it's not like the "life of crime sim" was new, Rockstar just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Same for Maxis, actually.
Very true, but it's better than nothing. In theory, what he says here doesn't have to go through party colleagues and PR agents. Perhaps we'd all be better off with politicians and authorities blogging, as you could know how the person thinks on a day to day basis, not just the month before an election. I know I'd be interested if a mayor campaignin on affordable housing has 1% of his meeting time devoted to the issue or 15%.
That does seem a little overemphasized. I think the taps on VoIP does raise (again) the concern of what is the FCC's business. If I should at my neighbor over my fence, do I have to do it in such a way that is compliant with FCC's regulations? What if we decide to use tin cans connected with a string? When does it fall inside the FCC's four flags?
Furthermore, May 2007 isn't very far away for system-wide changes. So then it comes back to the triangle of manufacturing Quality - Price - Speed -- pick any two. If they say it's a requirement within 2 years, indrectly they may be demanding a chunk of revenues going into maintenance instead of expanding service or what have you. Either way, it doesn't seem like it will help consumers in the average case.
If only that were uncommon, then we might be getting somewhere. Unfortunately, many of the "default passwords" are completely obtainable data - like your last name plus your phone extension or something.
I spent the summer working in a college IT department, and the telephone tech guys had their office next to me, so I heard all their business. The default password for administration, admissions, and the registrar's voicemail systems? 54321. And people call those places up, leave their names and social security numbers, and expect it to be safe.
My own school's help desk password? "help". Yeah, people email their passwords and say "I can't login!" and the helpdesk archives the emails. The problem at the root of it is the idea that the people who come up with the default passwords think that no one has malicious intent, so they just come up with something just outside of what would take an effort to figure out (like telephone extension) and they use that.
In terms of accessibility, however, scanned books are absolutely the best way for the visually impaired to read books. Audiobooks are fine for casual reading, but when you need to quote for a research paper or gather statistics, you really want it in digital format. Bookshare has made a very good start in allowing access to copyrighted material for people with disabilities (which is a subsection of national copyright (or disability?) law), but it's not going to be nearly as comprehensive or as accurate as a company like Google doing the scanning and posting.
It is indeed "funny" that they completely ignore the quality of life issue, when IGDA devotes a large portion of their work to that topic.
If we were to take this story and draw it to its absurd, logical conclusion, we could just as well write an article about all the money that sex workers pull down without referencing the health issues (and no health care), the personal sacrifices and the quality of life issues.
If you don't mention quality of life, benefits, anti-discrimination considerations and job security, you might as well just pick a career based on the one with the most money and hope it isn't too bad.
I made it all the way through and that was our closing thought. IGN dissapoints in general, but what's with the immaturity there? Funny they didn't mention that proportion of male/female programmers, yet it's clear with that sentence.
A sign of changing times, indeed. It seems pretty clear that Microsoft has needed to buddy up more with the people who can break their software, because it's going to happen anyways, at least now they might have a head start. I can't really commend the decision to start now, though, as it seems to be both forced by the current politics and belated in that they should have had the foresight to do it earlier.
Ditto (until I took a class on China, of course). But it's not just history that can be learned. I knew my way around Battery park in NYC from playing Deus Ex: Conspiracy. Funny thing was, I didn't connect the two, and I found myself instinctively knowing where to turn to find the exits and the river. Video games are just as capable of teaching geography or pretty much anything else as they are capable of teaching history.
It's a bit unfortunate that "video games can be a force for good!" is a refrain among a handful of articles/teachers/schools who are trying to expand their teaching styles. Games, and, particularly serious games, are so perfect for training and simulation, yet that's not what makes it to the NY Times blurb about violent videogames targeting younger audiences or whatever.
And another example in a sense is UML (Universal Modeling Language). It's not like something else came through and stole UML's thunder, but only betwen 10 and 20% of software developers use modeling consistently at all (from Software Developer magazine, Brian Selic interview).
Standards are a strange beast in this way as sometimes there's no need for a standard in the first place...
But 58% is unusually high, as the article says. But OK, fine, so 58% absentee voters in the county with the 2nd largest absentee voting in the country. What's the average for the state? What's the national absentee rate?
My point still stands about the accessibility of absentee ballot, and the further accesssibility for some for internet ballot.
Although they don't suggest it, perhaps that 1% have mobility impairments and have never voted before, but now they get a chance. Obviously that's the best case scenario, but it seems a little ridiculous that there haven't been more efforts to expand the possibilities of voting. And scoffing at 1%? How many people do absentee votes in the U.S. (or any democratic country)? I would guess it's not more than 10%. And yet, for many, it's the only way they can vote. And absentee voting has been around for years, so I think 1% is not fantastic, but it's a good start.
Furthermore there's the issue of all those people who will be out of a phone, possible their only one. I'm sure they won't be getting a sweet deal switching over to the patent-holding company - Shooting the competition in the back of the head is a perfect way to clear the path to raised prices for consumers forced to switch.
It's a shame that laws originally intended to protect individuals or the little guys get turned into legal feeding grounds that do nothing but hurt the consumer and the diversity of the marketplace.