To me this is simple short sightedness. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall when this was decided. If a 15 year old can't play it, then no one can? Unless the group who made the decision were all 15, I just can't fathom the logic behind this.
It was mainly done as a vote gaining gesture a few years back, when the conservative government of
the day needed the vote of an extreme christian, protect the family, senator, who held the balance of power for a short time. They saw gaming censorship as a cheap way to buy off said senator.
From their point of view it worked, the sort of
people who were pissed off by their decision generally didn't vote for them anyway.
Although my 65 year-old father has been using newsgroups for years for his cancer support contacts the mainstream media still doesn't have a clue about them. It's kind of amazing since these weenies don't have anything else to do other than dig up things to try and scare the public with.
Usenet has already had one go around with the press, but the net was a lot smaller then, so it didn't get as far.
In the early 90's, a reporter called Joe Abernathy 'discovered' alt.sex, and wrote up an expose on taxpayers dollars being abused for porn chat lines. (There should be stuff on this if you google, I'm at work, so I can't use 'alt.sex' in a search term right now.:-)
There was a reasonable amount of fallout, the university I attended at the time tried to ban Usenet altogether, and finally settled for blocking any newsgroup with sex or drugs in the name. (The same University also dropped Usenet support last year, telling people to buy accounts with a web based usenet service if they need it.) I expect that some day another 'reporter' will discover Usenet, and repeat the whole Abernathy thing.
I don't remember seeing a 'green blood' game here in Australia. I'd expect it to be more 'beer' coloured anyway.:-)
The first SNES game I worked on though, we had to do a 'green blood' version for the European release, so it could be sold in Germany. It was just a case of making the absolute minimum change that would get around the law. But we were allowed to keep the guy bursting into flames when hit with a flame thrower.
When a friend was taking a prac class a few years ago, he had the following happen.
A student came up and said "I've written all of the assignment, but the compiler is broken." My friend looked at the error output from the toy teaching language compiler.
"Unknown keyword 'From:' in line 1 'From: student2@cs.university.edu'"
"Unknown keyword 'Subject:' in line 2 'Subject: Assignment 2 answers'"
...and so on.
The student tried to insist that it was all his own work.
A Roger Zelazny story (One of his more esoteric titles) about a guy who was one of the development team for the national identity database. He left a hole in the system so that he could assume any identity at will and made his living as a sort of glorified private eye.
So, in terms of performance, is it worth the several hundred $ extra per hard disk? No. Purchasing a 25% faster CPU for several hundred extra dollars is the better long-term solution, because each time you need to add a new HD or replace an aging one you save the $$$ overhead you'd be paying for the additional SCSI drives.
Not nearly long ago enough, my work machine was upgraded from a P133 with 4G SCSI, to a P233MMX with 4 Gig EIDE. My compile times for the game I was finishing up under VC5 were longer on the new machine. One afternoon, I added up the extra time on a full rebuild, and guesstimated I was spending about an extra half an hour a day, due to the 'faster' machine. On my salary, paying for that wasted time probably chewed up the 'savings' on the cheaper disk in about 2-3 months.
(And yes, I did mess with various settings to improve performance, this was after tuning the machine.)
More is better, right? So unless you want to serve pages from that pathetic 2GB SCSI disk all your life, because you can't afford to add more SCSI drives, just ride the ATA66 revolution. If you can afford mondo SCSI disk space anyway--go with IDE and get yourself some more bandwidth or throw in more RAM.
Size isn't everything.:-) For some of us, time is important too.
Thing is, with a computer there are always trade-offs,
Exactly. My home machine has IDE drives because cost was the main factor. But at work, there are other factors in the equation.
I think you are right. Flame does create a "chilling effect" on people speaking online. However, I don't think its a problem. In fact, its probably the only thing that keeps the online communities from spiraling down into pure demagoguery.
In my experience, having been on the net off and on since 1989, flaming is the preferred weapon of the demagogue. Flaming the hell out of someone because they're asking for it, heaping abuse on someone because they "made" the flamers do it, works really well to gain followers in the social groups of the net that I've been on. The worst case I saw was where someone came out to us about having been sexually abused as a kid, and the resident demagogue flamed the hell out of him and those of us who tried to help him until he attempted suicide. (Only survived because his roommate left work early that day.) That sure as hell had a "chilling effect" on us, to the extent that 12 months later, none of us could be bothered saying anything the demagogue disagreed with. Game over, he won, we left him and his sycophants to it.
My take on the trouble with flaming, is that too many people see it as a bullshit filter, when it's actually a disagreement filter. Just like the keyword filter that certain senators insist I should have on my link right now to protect good little Aussie kiddies, it's too broad, while still letting too much crap through anyway.
People who are not willing to take the heat for their opinions probably don't have opinions worth hearing.
I suppose I've spent too much time talking to various minorities, who get constantly flamed solely for being in a minority that someone has declared to be "wrong". I'm usually interested in seeing opinions that differ from mine, after all, I might even be the one who's wrong!
maybe someday we can all have our own virtual personalities! chat rooms would kick ass!
And with a bit more work, it could even say all the things I say on-line, so I wouldn't have to log in at all. Then maybe I'd have time to get a life!:-)
Resp to several posts of it takes too many people, game-making not for the masses, hobbyist anymore.
One of the recurring debates on one of our internal mailing lists (at *mutter* games house) is how essential the technology is to the game-play. The fancier the tech, the more resources you need to develop for it though.
I wonder how many games projects fizzle out because they're attempting to produce Quake 4.9 with half a dozen people on weekends, instead of looking into something like an RPG with a real background. (I've worked on a pre-alpha version of an adventure style game with scanned pencil sketches and stick figures for graphics, and had it quite playable before we started putting in real, filmed graphics.)
My opinion on this is that the tech gives you more choices for the game-play, but you don't need to use all of it, to have a fun game. Maybe a dev kit for a small device like this will get a lot more use, just because there will be far less work involved in trying out a game idea.
Then again, I've been known to have the reflection of the dawn light stop me from playing NetHack on a vt220 so I guess that shows my minimum spec for having fun.:-)
I came to the conclusion that this article is not about geeks.
I came to the conclusion that this article is confused.:-)
The big difference is that most other subcultures, men join them because they want to get laid. because of the way that people percieve users, I don't think I ve ever run into a teenager that's said 'I got into computers to attract women'
That can be a real pain. In my early 20's I used to ride horses. Do you want to know just how sick I got of the words, "That's a great way to meet chicks".
I think the article has the same predjudice that I've run into many, many times. That men are primarily interested in getting laid, and anything else they do is either a subtle way of getting laid, or something to fill in the time between roots. It seems to be nearly as pervasive (and as untrue in my experience) as the idea that all women really want to be blond and wear size 8 dresses, like in the fashion magazines.
Perhaps the idea that some of us want to achieve in areas other than social dominance games is completely alien to those who do play the social game.
Now this guy, apparently having smoked a little too much dope, decided that it would be really cool to go surfing in the City Loop (the underground section of the Melbourne train system, running under the city centre). He did not count on the height of the tunnel abruptly decreasing ahead of him. He hit a wall of concrete face first at something like 60km/h. Apparently he died some hours later in hospital.
Actually, a few days after that happened I ended up sitting behind some of his friends on a city-bound train, while they were discussing it. He, and most of the ones I overheard discussing it, had gone 'over the top' in the loop several times before. This time, however, he'd been wearing a jacket, the jacket snagged on the 1500V overhead line, and the train raced out from under him, bashing him on the roof before dropping him on the tracks.
That, at least, is what his friends thought had happened to him. It puts some of my stupid teenage exploits into perspective. Especially since they were talking about picking up a few others to go trainsurfing *again*!
There were memorial aerosol-art murals to him all over the Melbourne train system for several years. Guess they didn't have Darwin Awards back then...
What amazed me was that they seemed to consider him a hero...
I seem to recall a mare giving birth to a live zebra....
As has already been said, with more details than I could recall, that's true.
However, from what I can remember (I'm at work so I can't look up my horse books) the various equines are fairly closely related genetically. I recall reading an article some years ago that said they were interesting because some of them haven't quite finished splitting into different species yet.
What I'd like to know is how close is the domestic cat to the wildcat? Are they more different than the mare/zebra birth?
Unfortunately, since my cat was spayed after her first litter, I won't be doing any experiments myself.:-)
Unless its illegal to try to fool these cameras then let's have fun.
When I was about 12 or so (20 years ago, ack!) some friends and I used to, on very boring Friday nights, wander into the big dept stores, and see how many store detectives we could get to trail us out the doors when we left. So 20 years ago, they were already profiling our behaviour, which we made as much like a shoplifter as possible. On the other hand, we were checking a profile of the shoppers, to spot the store detectives!
It wasn't illegal then, though we were usually told "Piss off and don't come back". We were never arrested, either, so no chance of sueing.
I would say that setting off as many alarms as possible will become another prank for bored teens, in just the same way we used to bait the detectives. The additional tech will just make it easier for them to sit in their office instead of prowling around the area.
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It was mainly done as a vote gaining gesture a few years back, when the conservative government of the day needed the vote of an extreme christian, protect the family, senator, who held the balance of power for a short time. They saw gaming censorship as a cheap way to buy off said senator. From their point of view it worked, the sort of people who were pissed off by their decision generally didn't vote for them anyway.
Although my 65 year-old father has been using newsgroups for years for his cancer support contacts the mainstream media still doesn't have a clue about them. It's kind of amazing since these weenies don't have anything else to do other than dig up things to try and scare the public with.
Usenet has already had one go around with the press, but the net was a lot smaller then, so it didn't get as far. In the early 90's, a reporter called Joe Abernathy 'discovered' alt.sex, and wrote up an expose on taxpayers dollars being abused for porn chat lines. (There should be stuff on this if you google, I'm at work, so I can't use 'alt.sex' in a search term right now. :-)
There was a reasonable amount of fallout, the university I attended at the time tried to ban Usenet altogether, and finally settled for blocking any newsgroup with sex or drugs in the name. (The same University also dropped Usenet support last year, telling people to buy accounts with a web based usenet service if they need it.) I expect that some day another 'reporter' will discover Usenet, and repeat the whole Abernathy thing.
The first SNES game I worked on though, we had to do a 'green blood' version for the European release, so it could be sold in Germany. It was just a case of making the absolute minimum change that would get around the law. But we were allowed to keep the guy bursting into flames when hit with a flame thrower.
A student came up and said "I've written all of the assignment, but the compiler is broken." My friend looked at the error output from the toy teaching language compiler.
"Unknown keyword 'From:' in line 1 'From: student2@cs.university.edu'"
"Unknown keyword 'Subject:' in line 2 'Subject: Assignment 2 answers'"
The student tried to insist that it was all his own work.
A Roger Zelazny story (One of his more esoteric titles) about a guy who was one of the development team for the national identity database. He left a hole in the system so that he could assume any identity at will and made his living as a sort of glorified private eye.
Well that the story I think of, anyway.
Upon hearing this, AOL lawyers also filed a complaint saying "ME TOO!!!"
Not nearly long ago enough, my work machine was upgraded from a P133 with 4G SCSI, to a P233MMX with 4 Gig EIDE. My compile times for the game I was finishing up under VC5 were longer on the new machine. One afternoon, I added up the extra time on a full rebuild, and guesstimated I was spending about an extra half an hour a day, due to the 'faster' machine. On my salary, paying for that wasted time probably chewed up the 'savings' on the cheaper disk in about 2-3 months.
(And yes, I did mess with various settings to improve performance, this was after tuning the machine.)
More is better, right? So unless you want to serve pages from that pathetic 2GB SCSI disk all your life, because you can't afford to add more SCSI drives, just ride the ATA66 revolution. If you can afford mondo SCSI disk space anyway--go with IDE and get yourself some more bandwidth or throw in more RAM.
Size isn't everything. :-) For some of us, time is important too.
Thing is, with a computer there are always trade-offs,
Exactly. My home machine has IDE drives because cost was the main factor. But at work, there are other factors in the equation.
In my experience, having been on the net off and on since 1989, flaming is the preferred weapon of the demagogue. Flaming the hell out of someone because they're asking for it, heaping abuse on someone because they "made" the flamers do it, works really well to gain followers in the social groups of the net that I've been on. The worst case I saw was where someone came out to us about having been sexually abused as a kid, and the resident demagogue flamed the hell out of him and those of us who tried to help him until he attempted suicide. (Only survived because his roommate left work early that day.) That sure as hell had a "chilling effect" on us, to the extent that 12 months later, none of us could be bothered saying anything the demagogue disagreed with. Game over, he won, we left him and his sycophants to it.
My take on the trouble with flaming, is that too many people see it as a bullshit filter, when it's actually a disagreement filter. Just like the keyword filter that certain senators insist I should have on my link right now to protect good little Aussie kiddies, it's too broad, while still letting too much crap through anyway.
People who are not willing to take the heat for their opinions probably don't have opinions worth hearing.
I suppose I've spent too much time talking to various minorities, who get constantly flamed solely for being in a minority that someone has declared to be "wrong". I'm usually interested in seeing opinions that differ from mine, after all, I might even be the one who's wrong!
Now there's a frightening concept....
And with a bit more work, it could even say all the things I say on-line, so I wouldn't have to log in at all. Then maybe I'd have time to get a life! :-)
One of the recurring debates on one of our internal mailing lists (at *mutter* games house) is how essential the technology is to the game-play. The fancier the tech, the more resources you need to develop for it though.
I wonder how many games projects fizzle out because they're attempting to produce Quake 4.9 with half a dozen people on weekends, instead of looking into something like an RPG with a real background. (I've worked on a pre-alpha version of an adventure style game with scanned pencil sketches and stick figures for graphics, and had it quite playable before we started putting in real, filmed graphics.)
My opinion on this is that the tech gives you more choices for the game-play, but you don't need to use all of it, to have a fun game. Maybe a dev kit for a small device like this will get a lot more use, just because there will be far less work involved in trying out a game idea.
Then again, I've been known to have the reflection of the dawn light stop me from playing NetHack on a vt220 so I guess that shows my minimum spec for having fun. :-)
I came to the conclusion that this article is confused. :-)
The big difference is that most other subcultures, men join them because they want to get laid. because of the way that people percieve users, I don't think I ve ever run into a teenager that's said 'I got into computers to attract women'
That can be a real pain. In my early 20's I used to ride horses. Do you want to know just how sick I got of the words, "That's a great way to meet chicks".
I think the article has the same predjudice that I've run into many, many times. That men are primarily interested in getting laid, and anything else they do is either a subtle way of getting laid, or something to fill in the time between roots. It seems to be nearly as pervasive (and as untrue in my experience) as the idea that all women really want to be blond and wear size 8 dresses, like in the fashion magazines.
Perhaps the idea that some of us want to achieve in areas other than social dominance games is completely alien to those who do play the social game.
By accident (hey, using a condom is a really hard thing to remember, ya know)?
Hey, both of my kids were conceived despite the pill for one, and a condom for the other. Those things aren't 100% effective you know.
Actually, the most effective contraceptive I've found thus far is having small children in the house. :-) YMMV.
Actually, a few days after that happened I ended up sitting behind some of his friends on a city-bound train, while they were discussing it. He, and most of the ones I overheard discussing it, had gone 'over the top' in the loop several times before. This time, however, he'd been wearing a jacket, the jacket snagged on the 1500V overhead line, and the train raced out from under him, bashing him on the roof before dropping him on the tracks.
That, at least, is what his friends thought had happened to him. It puts some of my stupid teenage exploits into perspective. Especially since they were talking about picking up a few others to go trainsurfing *again*!
There were memorial aerosol-art murals to him all over the Melbourne train system for several years. Guess they didn't have Darwin Awards back then...
What amazed me was that they seemed to consider him a hero...
Well, no, it didn't, but it might raise the average IQ of the human race by a fraction of a point, and we need all we can get!
As has already been said, with more details than I could recall, that's true.
However, from what I can remember (I'm at work so I can't look up my horse books) the various equines are fairly closely related genetically. I recall reading an article some years ago that said they were interesting because some of them haven't quite finished splitting into different species yet.
What I'd like to know is how close is the domestic cat to the wildcat? Are they more different than the mare/zebra birth?
Unfortunately, since my cat was spayed after her first litter, I won't be doing any experiments myself. :-)
When I was about 12 or so (20 years ago, ack!) some friends and I used to, on very boring Friday nights, wander into the big dept stores, and see how many store detectives we could get to trail us out the doors when we left. So 20 years ago, they were already profiling our behaviour, which we made as much like a shoplifter as possible. On the other hand, we were checking a profile of the shoppers, to spot the store detectives!
It wasn't illegal then, though we were usually told "Piss off and don't come back". We were never arrested, either, so no chance of sueing.
I would say that setting off as many alarms as possible will become another prank for bored teens, in just the same way we used to bait the detectives. The additional tech will just make it easier for them to sit in their office instead of prowling around the area.