Odd, it runs fine for me (30fps - 60fps) on a 2.4ghz i3 laptop with 4gb RAM and some laptop based GeForce. I suspect there's something strange going on with drivers if people are having such problems.
You pay the NSA to spy arbitrarily on civilian photos, files, and text messages in breach of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that the US has ratified into law?
No wonder things like the Boston bombings and 9/11 happened if you're more interesting in paying your security services to arbitrarily breach the right of privacy of everyone and anyone rather than you know, real actual potential threats to your country.
If you think the solution to finding those threats is, rather than making better tools for finding the needle in the haystack, to simply make the haystack bigger and the needle harder to find than ever, then you're part of the problem. You obviously really don't understand what security services are for or how they can act more efficiently, your opinion of what they should be doing is the anti-thesis of effective security services so it's not surprising that they commit transgressions internally when you openly support committing of transgressions and ineffectiveness externally.
You apparently see these as two distinct problems, naively oblivious to the fact that they're one and the same- you can't openly support illegality and ineffectiveness when it suits and then bitch and moan about it when you suddenly take issue with it.
That's not inconsistent, it's testing an untried proposition. What you're suggesting is taking a loved proposition and completely getting rid of it.
Obviously it's not me that doesn't understand about designing for HCI because I get something fundamental that you don't - I get that if you have something that works for users, and that is loved by users, then you don't throw it out the window and start all over again - minor 1mm adjustments to perfect an already great design are enough.
"Picture, instead of Clippy, we could have Microsoft Creeper."
Sneaks onto your screen when you least want it to and then gets in the way and blows everything up? Yeah, that'd make an apt replacement for Clippy certainly.
"They need to drop Java or figure out a way to compile Java to actual machine code so the game runs well."
Yeah, why has no one thought of this?
You realise the way modern Java (since like 1999) works is that you write an application in Java, that Java code gets compiled to Java bytecode, which you can think of as a cross platform version of assembly, and then that Java Virtual Machine on which you run that bytecode (i.e. the compiled Java application) does in fact convert it into actual machine code right? Not just machine code, but machine code optimised for the exact machine the JVM is executing on? This allows the JVM to reach C++ levels of performance and some cases go beyond, because C++ is generally only compiled for a specific architecture, whilst the JVM optimises for a specific machine.
This does mean slow first time execution of modules as each module is optimised to that executing machine's native machine code the first time it is used, but after that first execution of the program or library you're basically getting native performance.
For what it's worth though, the console version of Minecraft (360, PS3, PS4, Xbox One) is apparently written in C++ because some of those platforms - i.e. the Xbox - don't have a Java Virtual Machine on which the Java version could be executed on.
I have a relatively low end laptop, it cost like £300 a year ago, and it runs Minecraft absolutely fine. What spec are your machines if they can't even run Minecraft?
I doubt Microsoft cares how it does in Japan nowadays, Japan stopped being a relevant indicator of the health of a video game industry entrant about 10 years ago. Since then both the US and subsequently Europe became bigger markets by far, and even markets like Brasil and China are arguably more worth spending your time on now than Japan if you're in that industry. Japan's two decades of economic stagnation have really hit it's relevance to the industry hard in this respect - the struggling Wii U and Sony's precarious overall financials (The PS4 is doing well though thankfully) have only exacerbated the problem.
Despite their mis-steps this generation they actually did well last generation in the end in large part because they were pulling in over $1bn of pure profit from Xbox Live subscriptions alone within a few years of the launch of the 360. This couple with the highest attach rate by a decent margin coupled with higher profits-per-game than the Wii last generation allowed them to be more profitable despite not shifting anywhere near as many consoles as the Wii did.
Whether they'll keep doing well is anyone's guess, but the XBox division is currently a massively different beast compared to how it started last generation with it's RROD writeoffs and massive initial R&D expenses on the system.
There were rumours of them selling it off and such but I can't see them getting rid of it now that it's finally been a healthy net profit centre for a good few years now - it would seem odd to invest 10 years on profitably making your way into a key target area for Microsoft - the living room - only to then give up when you've achieved your goals of decent market penetration and real actual profit, still, stranger things have happened so I guess we'll see.
I've no idea because personally I'm not American and hence not affected by the IRS' actions so nor do I particularly give a shit what they have or haven't lied about.
The IRS may be a bigger threat to liberty in the US than the NSA, but it's certainly a non-entity in terms of dangers to liberty for the whole of the rest of the world compared to the NSA which is a real genuine threat for those of us not living in America yet still having our data stolen and our privacy invaded.
It's not so much the success of the franchises year on year I was referring to but ultimately the size of the demographic in question.
Ultimately these sorts of games and most PC games (educational games aside) are decide to fulfil a simple purpose - to entertain, to provide people with an avenue to relax and have fun.
So my point is, ultimately, that if franchises like CoD, BF, Halo and so forth are routinely shifting 5 - 10 million units year on year whilst PC games only ever achieve these sorts of figures with one title every 3 years then my argument is that clearly these franchises are successful in their goal - that a majority of the populace looking for such entertainment find it happily in these games.
My point therefore, is that if a majority are happy with these titles as an option for their enjoyment that one cannot realistically objectively define these titles as "rubbish" but only subjectively do so as a minority viewpoint. Fundamentally, as a large majority of gamers prefer the console medium for even their shooters it seems a bit of a stretch to say objectively that they are rubbish else if they were then people would instead just game on PCs (much like they used to in the Quake/Doom days when PCs were vastly more popular for shooters).
It was only with the advent of things like Halo on the Xbox and Goldeneye 64 on the N64 that console shooters really started to take off and I'd argue that there was a turning point there at which gamers started turning towards consoles for more than just mario-esque platformers and top down shooters and the like and started gradually to prefer these platforms for shooters in general.
I don't think there is a mutually exclusive PC or console gamer demographic, most console players I play with are also PC gamers and I myself am, but I find more and more that the games I play on my PC are games like RTS games and harder to categorise and very innovative (e.g. Minecraft) indie games more and more and shooters less and less - this despite cutting my teeth on PC shooters, and, as I say, still having the fondest memories from Quake above all else with Doom and Wolf coming in after that.
But this is a sworn declaration, and if it's a sworn declaration then it must be true because it's not like anyone has been caught lying under oath on this topic is it!
Honestly, sworn declarations on this topic and the lack of punishment for breaching their oath when swearing the truth means you might as well read "Sworn declaration" as "In a conversation with his mate Dave down the pub".
Um, I don't know if you read a different article than the one you linked but it doesn't back up your rant. You're claiming they didn't innovate and tried just adjusting the controller by 1mm. They stuck to the design because the 360 design was popular and widely praised as one of the best console controllers of all time. Why would they want to stray too far from that? even the Wii U's pro controllers and the PS4 controller has converged towards the 360's design.
As for innovation the article points out they tried smells, projectors and all sorts, how is that not innovating? If their R&D tells them people like the existing controller with only minor adjustments then that's valid R&D, why go with something completely alien just for the sake of being able to argue "Hey look guys we innovated! it's shitter than the previous design and everyone hates it, but we innovated!".
Innovation in R&D isn't about changing shit wildly for the sake of it, there has to be a product that people love at the end of it else it's pointless.
I suppose it depends what your goal is, that might be great in a country like the US where most people are living relatively comfortably (even the poorest in society aren't really suffering outright starvation and disease) but where military expenditure is high that you have a point.
But in India you have hundreds of millions living in abject poverty where starvation, lack of shelter, lack of availability of education, and widespread lack of treatment for disease are real issues.
Thus, it seems odd to suggest we should blow money to try and save some people in the future from a theoretical eventuality that may or may not happen in the next hundred, thousand, tens of thousands maybe even hundred thousand years when there are people we can spend that money on helping survive in the hear and now. Just because a statistically likely event that works on astronomic timescales is overdue doesn't mean it's going to happen tomorrow, the nature of such timescales is that it may not happen for enough generations that we can solve poverty now and still have time to head to the stars too.
Let those nations that can afford more space investment do so, whilst those that can't actually make an effort to stop suffering on their home soil before they start getting ideas about reaching for the stars.
That's because in the 1940s everyone else had basically blown each others countries to smithereens. India is competing in a stable non-war torn world. In the 1940s the US was one of the few countries whose homeland was largely unscathed by the war.
It's easy to do well when you're the least badly crippled country going than it is to when you're one of the most crippled on the world stage.
Yep, I'm skeptical of anyone who claims console shooters are rubbish. There's a reason games like CoD, Halo, Battlefield, Gears of War and so on and so forth make by far the vast majority of their sales on consoles - people enjoy them, meaning they're not rubbish.
Which isn't to say that I absolutely agree that if I was looking for ultra-competitive multiplayer (I still have fond memories of Quake 1 DM and TF that make everything since pale in comparison whether PC or console) then I'd look to the PC with a mouse and keyboard combo, but that's something different, that doesn't detract from the fact that consoles are full of great shooters (okay, I don't personally think CoD is great or at least has been since about CoD 4, but a lot of people obviously do) and even then there are some, like mass effect, that IMO were actually better on consoles (I played both versions of ME2) which feeds into your comment about more story oriented shooters. Personally I think Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 highlighted the situation well - the PC and Console versions were both shooters, but were also very different games taking advantage of the types of setup that make shooters work well on the respective platforms- the PC version was an out and out FPS, the 360 version was a 3rd person shooter.
Destiny isn't crap because it's a shooter on a console, there are plenty of great console shooters that prove that a fallacy. Destiny is crap because it's crap. People expected it to be great because "Bungie!" but the fact is that everyone that made Bungie great, either left, or stuck with 343 at Microsoft and all that was left were those living off the original glory of Halo (many of whom had fuck all to do with Halo and Halo 2's development). Those who did hang around and were actually talented like O'Donnell got pushed out by folks over stupid stuff such as being lovestruck by the grand has-been McCartney because OMG WE'RE WORKING WITH A BEATLE, SCREW YOU AND EVERYTHING YOU'VE DONE WELL AT BUNGIE OVER THE LAST DECADE O'DONNELL!
It was never going to live up to the hype, for it to do so you needed a dream team - you needed the Halo 1 / 2 era Bungie, or the Wolfenstein/Doom/Quake era id Software, or the CoD: Modern Warfare Infinity Ward- you needed that type of team. They just didn't have it, and they tried to do way more than a team of their competence can possibly get right.
People expected the current Bungie to be their father's Bungie, and it's simply not and that's why it has disappointed.
Yep, this is time and time again what's made me give up on MOOCs and I say this as someone who has done formal education online (I did an additional degree in my spare time with the UK's OU some years back).
Videos are mostly shit for learning, if I don't get something I want to be able to just re-read the paragraph, not dick around with some video player trying to get it to the right point again so I can listen to some monotonous or accented person drone on - it's not that I have a problem with accents, it's that it's an additional distraction when you're trying to take something in and learn - I want to focus on what I'm learning, not have my mind stray off about how the guy in the video just used some amusing (to me) American pronunciation of a word or something.
It strikes me as sloppy, people are doing videos so much now because it's easier to slap your webcam on and ramble on, turn it off and upload it, but learning materials need to be better than that, they need, like a book, to be edited, to be split into proper paragraphs, to be indexed.
If they are, then I can read a few paragraphs on the train, but I can't really be bothered to prat around pre-downloading videos, or trying to stream them over and unreliable 3G connection as the train goes through tunnels. I don't have time for any of that- I just want to be able to load a quick bit of text and read it at my own pace, re-reading it if need be.
This modern lazy trend towards videos is killing information, I've worked places that block video streaming in the past and if your API explanation is a video then that leaves me documentationless, of course I can probably go and get that unblocked sure, but I could also just go to one of their competitors that isn't so lazy and boneheaded. Not everyone has the capacity or even wants everything as a video which isn't to say as you point out that they have no place, sure they do, sometimes videos do work - but not for lectures, rarely for conveying large bodies of technical information.
This is why I've completed an entire degree with distance learning but have simply never finished an EdX course or similar despite many of the courses being particularly interesting. The idea of these MOOCs is absolutely great, it's fantastic. The implementation to date? shockingly bad.
"In Cuba, on the other hand, the Castro brothers managed to hang on to power despite the economic crisis caused by the disappearance of theirr USSR sugar-daddy."
That's not a problem with my reasoning, that's exactly my point. They could do this because the US had opted to still keep them completely isolated rather than open the flood gates of US money and culture onto them - something they hadn't done to Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and any others I've missed. That wouldn't solidify the Castro's grip on power - it'd do exactly what it did in all the other ex-USSR states, it'd result in the overthrow of such people.
So what's your point? That if you've got one hostile nation a few miles off your border that it doesn't hurt to have another?
That's not a rational proposition, the fewer hostile nations you have neighbouring you the better, just because you can't make one of them not hostile doesn't mean you should not take efforts to make those you can potentially make not hostile actually be not hostile.
I think you're conflating leadership with the citizens. Unfortunately not all countries are in a position whereby the leaderships actions are reflective of the will of the citizens.
1) I'm not American, nor do I live in America. Don't make assumptions that because someone is arguing for or against some country or another that they must have some vested interest in that nation. Not all of us are patriotic or nationalistic goons, some of us are capable of looking at and understanding a much broader geopolitical picture than simply the one on our doorstep. I know it may fry the brains of some people here that someone could argue in the favour of one anti-Western nation, whilst attacking a Western nations and defending a Western nation against other anti-Western nations, but please try and stick with it, it's really not that complicated, I'm sure you can step out of this binary mindset if you try hard enough.
2) I didn't say they want to wipe Americans off the face of the Earth, I said they would rather do away with American culture. Having preference for the weakening or removal of a culture is not inherently the same as removing the people. The fact Putin was able to seize Crimea was based on past Russian policy of removing ethnic Tatars and installing ethnic Russians to dilute the Tatar population and increase the level of Russian culture there with the hope of displacing the much longer standing Tatar culture in the region. Are you really so naive to believe that if Putin had the opportunity he wouldn't love to be able to do the same to the US given that he's already doing it on the peripheries of Europe (i.e. Trans-Dniester, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Chechnya, Crimea)? Thankfully he doesn't have the opportunity, and probably never will.
P.S. Learn what hyperbole is, you don't have to take everything literally.
Of course there's no evidence to support it because it's not actually ever happened (though there are similar examples showing it can happen). There is however evidence to support the contrary - that maintaining the embargo has maintained hostility and hasn't ever worked.
"As a rule, most countries with differing political and social polices tend to be hostile to us, regardless of our fiscal polices with them."
Are you sure about that? I think you may have a rather broad view of "hostile", because basically the whole of Europe, much of South and Central America, parts of Africa, and large swathes of South East Asia as well as a number of middle east countries are most definitely not generally hostile to you. They may take issue with some things that you do or say but that's not the same thing as being overtly hostile.
Compare and contrast to what happened in Europe with the fall of the USSR, Europe embraced ex-USSR states rather than punish them for once being part of "the enemy" and as such those states have become modern progressive nation, integral parts of and friends of the European Union.
Given what is happening in Ukraine now, tell me, if the US had treated Poland in the way it treats Cuba then do you think Poland would be such a pro-American nation as it is now or do you think it would've been dragged back towards Russia becoming deeply anti-American if America had shunned it like Cuba? America and Europe's embrace of ex-USSR states is an exact example of what embracing rather than isolating can achieve so your assertion that there are no examples of this happening is clearly false.
But perhaps more relevant is the fact that Europe and Canada do in fact have better relations with Cuba than the US, and whilst they're not close enough to Cuba to have much impact they do have fairly good relations for the most part. Cuba is a common holiday destination for Canadians and Europeans alike and we're welcomed there for it, at this point the US embargo is literally the only thing remaining in preventing it heading fully West and time is ticking - new links to Venezuela, renewed interest from Russia mean the opportunity to finally bring Cuba in from the cold is rapidly disappearing as you push it back towards the Russia/Venezuelan alliance.
But then, your call for nuking of the place doesn't exactly paint you as a particularly smart individual, so you probably still wont get this.
Right, but there's a massive gulf between European distaste for US culture, and say, Chinese or Russian distaste for US culture.
On one hand you have Europe, that makes a few measly complaints but on the most part doesn't care. On the other you have countries that want to whipe it off the face of the earth altogether and replace it with some kind of authoritarianism.
Having the latter a few miles off your coast is always going to be a much worse proposition than the former, yet it's one the US consistently and stupidly persists in opting for.
But Mexico is not Cuba. Mexico has a population more than 10x larger than that of Cuba, and similarly covers almost exactly 10x more area than Cuba also. But regardless you're wrong about lack of pro-US sentiment in Mexico. Last I checked Mexico wasn't hosting listening stations for the Russians to snoop on you, Mexico wasn't threatening America, and Mexico was largely backing America and providing cheap labour for many of it's businesses.
Quite how you think having an opponent nation a few miles off your coast is better for your populace than a friendly nation is beyond me, but you're obviously sold on the argument of "those damned immigrants!", even though those damned immigrants built your whole country and the prosperity you enjoy from the ground up.
I would presume that that question is an attempt to bait me into saying "freedom", "democracy" and so forth so that you can say hogwash and point to examples where American's freedoms have been curbed, or democracy has been a farce.
But I'm more pragmatic than that, American culture is imperfect, it has flaws, many of them, but there's also one thing that's clear - it's responsible for better levels of wealth, education, and freedom than you find in communist dictatorships.
So to answer your question, US culture is, simply put, not communist dictatorship culture, it's something that's objectively better for most people, it's not perfect, but it doesn't need to be - better is good enough.
If America had just allowed free trade with Cuba the inflow of US culture into the country would've long turned it into a pro-US state - it's the policy of isolation that's keeping it hostile in the first place.
There's no way a country that small, and that close to the US could hold out as a communist nation in the face of unrestricted trade with the US - it'd become so utterly dependent on the US that it'd simply have no choice but to bow down to US wishes and culture.
There are times where I do support the US (strikes against IS, stance on Ukraine) and there are times where I'll happily call it out as stupid (Iraq), this is one of those times where it's stupid, where the policy is wholly self-defeating, and where the only people that suffer from the policy are the largely innocent general populace of Cuba.
The fall of the USSR was a prime opportunity to turn Cuba around, Russia facing bankruptcy withdrew almost all funding for Cuba and left it in the shit. Had the US taken that opportunity to drop restrictions, and normalise relations then Cuba would be as ex-USSR and as pro-USA as Poland is nowadays. Instead, the US continued it's bone-headed embargos such that now that Russia is becoming a resurgent pain in the ass Cuba is more than happy to take money to facilitate the reopening of the USSR's largest external listening base right off the coast of the US on Cuban soil.
As foreign policy goes, the US' policy on Cuba is probably one of the single most stupid and short-sighted foreign policies there is.
Well yes that is a pretty centrist policy because it neither forces people to have abortions (far left in China), nor bans them from doing so (far right in places like Ireland). It leaves the choice in their hands so is very much a middle ground policy.
Wait, that's not what you wanted to hear because you're far right? Sucks to be you I guess.
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Odd, it runs fine for me (30fps - 60fps) on a 2.4ghz i3 laptop with 4gb RAM and some laptop based GeForce. I suspect there's something strange going on with drivers if people are having such problems.
You pay the NSA to spy arbitrarily on civilian photos, files, and text messages in breach of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that the US has ratified into law?
No wonder things like the Boston bombings and 9/11 happened if you're more interesting in paying your security services to arbitrarily breach the right of privacy of everyone and anyone rather than you know, real actual potential threats to your country.
If you think the solution to finding those threats is, rather than making better tools for finding the needle in the haystack, to simply make the haystack bigger and the needle harder to find than ever, then you're part of the problem. You obviously really don't understand what security services are for or how they can act more efficiently, your opinion of what they should be doing is the anti-thesis of effective security services so it's not surprising that they commit transgressions internally when you openly support committing of transgressions and ineffectiveness externally.
You apparently see these as two distinct problems, naively oblivious to the fact that they're one and the same- you can't openly support illegality and ineffectiveness when it suits and then bitch and moan about it when you suddenly take issue with it.
That's not inconsistent, it's testing an untried proposition. What you're suggesting is taking a loved proposition and completely getting rid of it.
Obviously it's not me that doesn't understand about designing for HCI because I get something fundamental that you don't - I get that if you have something that works for users, and that is loved by users, then you don't throw it out the window and start all over again - minor 1mm adjustments to perfect an already great design are enough.
"Picture, instead of Clippy, we could have Microsoft Creeper."
Sneaks onto your screen when you least want it to and then gets in the way and blows everything up? Yeah, that'd make an apt replacement for Clippy certainly.
"They need to drop Java or figure out a way to compile Java to actual machine code so the game runs well."
Yeah, why has no one thought of this?
You realise the way modern Java (since like 1999) works is that you write an application in Java, that Java code gets compiled to Java bytecode, which you can think of as a cross platform version of assembly, and then that Java Virtual Machine on which you run that bytecode (i.e. the compiled Java application) does in fact convert it into actual machine code right? Not just machine code, but machine code optimised for the exact machine the JVM is executing on? This allows the JVM to reach C++ levels of performance and some cases go beyond, because C++ is generally only compiled for a specific architecture, whilst the JVM optimises for a specific machine.
This does mean slow first time execution of modules as each module is optimised to that executing machine's native machine code the first time it is used, but after that first execution of the program or library you're basically getting native performance.
For what it's worth though, the console version of Minecraft (360, PS3, PS4, Xbox One) is apparently written in C++ because some of those platforms - i.e. the Xbox - don't have a Java Virtual Machine on which the Java version could be executed on.
I have a relatively low end laptop, it cost like £300 a year ago, and it runs Minecraft absolutely fine. What spec are your machines if they can't even run Minecraft?
I doubt Microsoft cares how it does in Japan nowadays, Japan stopped being a relevant indicator of the health of a video game industry entrant about 10 years ago. Since then both the US and subsequently Europe became bigger markets by far, and even markets like Brasil and China are arguably more worth spending your time on now than Japan if you're in that industry. Japan's two decades of economic stagnation have really hit it's relevance to the industry hard in this respect - the struggling Wii U and Sony's precarious overall financials (The PS4 is doing well though thankfully) have only exacerbated the problem.
Despite their mis-steps this generation they actually did well last generation in the end in large part because they were pulling in over $1bn of pure profit from Xbox Live subscriptions alone within a few years of the launch of the 360. This couple with the highest attach rate by a decent margin coupled with higher profits-per-game than the Wii last generation allowed them to be more profitable despite not shifting anywhere near as many consoles as the Wii did.
Whether they'll keep doing well is anyone's guess, but the XBox division is currently a massively different beast compared to how it started last generation with it's RROD writeoffs and massive initial R&D expenses on the system.
There were rumours of them selling it off and such but I can't see them getting rid of it now that it's finally been a healthy net profit centre for a good few years now - it would seem odd to invest 10 years on profitably making your way into a key target area for Microsoft - the living room - only to then give up when you've achieved your goals of decent market penetration and real actual profit, still, stranger things have happened so I guess we'll see.
I've no idea because personally I'm not American and hence not affected by the IRS' actions so nor do I particularly give a shit what they have or haven't lied about.
The IRS may be a bigger threat to liberty in the US than the NSA, but it's certainly a non-entity in terms of dangers to liberty for the whole of the rest of the world compared to the NSA which is a real genuine threat for those of us not living in America yet still having our data stolen and our privacy invaded.
It's not so much the success of the franchises year on year I was referring to but ultimately the size of the demographic in question.
Ultimately these sorts of games and most PC games (educational games aside) are decide to fulfil a simple purpose - to entertain, to provide people with an avenue to relax and have fun.
So my point is, ultimately, that if franchises like CoD, BF, Halo and so forth are routinely shifting 5 - 10 million units year on year whilst PC games only ever achieve these sorts of figures with one title every 3 years then my argument is that clearly these franchises are successful in their goal - that a majority of the populace looking for such entertainment find it happily in these games.
My point therefore, is that if a majority are happy with these titles as an option for their enjoyment that one cannot realistically objectively define these titles as "rubbish" but only subjectively do so as a minority viewpoint. Fundamentally, as a large majority of gamers prefer the console medium for even their shooters it seems a bit of a stretch to say objectively that they are rubbish else if they were then people would instead just game on PCs (much like they used to in the Quake/Doom days when PCs were vastly more popular for shooters).
It was only with the advent of things like Halo on the Xbox and Goldeneye 64 on the N64 that console shooters really started to take off and I'd argue that there was a turning point there at which gamers started turning towards consoles for more than just mario-esque platformers and top down shooters and the like and started gradually to prefer these platforms for shooters in general.
I don't think there is a mutually exclusive PC or console gamer demographic, most console players I play with are also PC gamers and I myself am, but I find more and more that the games I play on my PC are games like RTS games and harder to categorise and very innovative (e.g. Minecraft) indie games more and more and shooters less and less - this despite cutting my teeth on PC shooters, and, as I say, still having the fondest memories from Quake above all else with Doom and Wolf coming in after that.
But this is a sworn declaration, and if it's a sworn declaration then it must be true because it's not like anyone has been caught lying under oath on this topic is it!
Honestly, sworn declarations on this topic and the lack of punishment for breaching their oath when swearing the truth means you might as well read "Sworn declaration" as "In a conversation with his mate Dave down the pub".
Um, I don't know if you read a different article than the one you linked but it doesn't back up your rant. You're claiming they didn't innovate and tried just adjusting the controller by 1mm. They stuck to the design because the 360 design was popular and widely praised as one of the best console controllers of all time. Why would they want to stray too far from that? even the Wii U's pro controllers and the PS4 controller has converged towards the 360's design.
As for innovation the article points out they tried smells, projectors and all sorts, how is that not innovating? If their R&D tells them people like the existing controller with only minor adjustments then that's valid R&D, why go with something completely alien just for the sake of being able to argue "Hey look guys we innovated! it's shitter than the previous design and everyone hates it, but we innovated!".
Innovation in R&D isn't about changing shit wildly for the sake of it, there has to be a product that people love at the end of it else it's pointless.
I suppose it depends what your goal is, that might be great in a country like the US where most people are living relatively comfortably (even the poorest in society aren't really suffering outright starvation and disease) but where military expenditure is high that you have a point.
But in India you have hundreds of millions living in abject poverty where starvation, lack of shelter, lack of availability of education, and widespread lack of treatment for disease are real issues.
Thus, it seems odd to suggest we should blow money to try and save some people in the future from a theoretical eventuality that may or may not happen in the next hundred, thousand, tens of thousands maybe even hundred thousand years when there are people we can spend that money on helping survive in the hear and now. Just because a statistically likely event that works on astronomic timescales is overdue doesn't mean it's going to happen tomorrow, the nature of such timescales is that it may not happen for enough generations that we can solve poverty now and still have time to head to the stars too.
Let those nations that can afford more space investment do so, whilst those that can't actually make an effort to stop suffering on their home soil before they start getting ideas about reaching for the stars.
That's because in the 1940s everyone else had basically blown each others countries to smithereens. India is competing in a stable non-war torn world. In the 1940s the US was one of the few countries whose homeland was largely unscathed by the war.
It's easy to do well when you're the least badly crippled country going than it is to when you're one of the most crippled on the world stage.
Yep, I'm skeptical of anyone who claims console shooters are rubbish. There's a reason games like CoD, Halo, Battlefield, Gears of War and so on and so forth make by far the vast majority of their sales on consoles - people enjoy them, meaning they're not rubbish.
Which isn't to say that I absolutely agree that if I was looking for ultra-competitive multiplayer (I still have fond memories of Quake 1 DM and TF that make everything since pale in comparison whether PC or console) then I'd look to the PC with a mouse and keyboard combo, but that's something different, that doesn't detract from the fact that consoles are full of great shooters (okay, I don't personally think CoD is great or at least has been since about CoD 4, but a lot of people obviously do) and even then there are some, like mass effect, that IMO were actually better on consoles (I played both versions of ME2) which feeds into your comment about more story oriented shooters. Personally I think Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 highlighted the situation well - the PC and Console versions were both shooters, but were also very different games taking advantage of the types of setup that make shooters work well on the respective platforms- the PC version was an out and out FPS, the 360 version was a 3rd person shooter.
Destiny isn't crap because it's a shooter on a console, there are plenty of great console shooters that prove that a fallacy. Destiny is crap because it's crap. People expected it to be great because "Bungie!" but the fact is that everyone that made Bungie great, either left, or stuck with 343 at Microsoft and all that was left were those living off the original glory of Halo (many of whom had fuck all to do with Halo and Halo 2's development). Those who did hang around and were actually talented like O'Donnell got pushed out by folks over stupid stuff such as being lovestruck by the grand has-been McCartney because OMG WE'RE WORKING WITH A BEATLE, SCREW YOU AND EVERYTHING YOU'VE DONE WELL AT BUNGIE OVER THE LAST DECADE O'DONNELL!
It was never going to live up to the hype, for it to do so you needed a dream team - you needed the Halo 1 / 2 era Bungie, or the Wolfenstein/Doom/Quake era id Software, or the CoD: Modern Warfare Infinity Ward- you needed that type of team. They just didn't have it, and they tried to do way more than a team of their competence can possibly get right.
People expected the current Bungie to be their father's Bungie, and it's simply not and that's why it has disappointed.
Yep, this is time and time again what's made me give up on MOOCs and I say this as someone who has done formal education online (I did an additional degree in my spare time with the UK's OU some years back).
Videos are mostly shit for learning, if I don't get something I want to be able to just re-read the paragraph, not dick around with some video player trying to get it to the right point again so I can listen to some monotonous or accented person drone on - it's not that I have a problem with accents, it's that it's an additional distraction when you're trying to take something in and learn - I want to focus on what I'm learning, not have my mind stray off about how the guy in the video just used some amusing (to me) American pronunciation of a word or something.
It strikes me as sloppy, people are doing videos so much now because it's easier to slap your webcam on and ramble on, turn it off and upload it, but learning materials need to be better than that, they need, like a book, to be edited, to be split into proper paragraphs, to be indexed.
If they are, then I can read a few paragraphs on the train, but I can't really be bothered to prat around pre-downloading videos, or trying to stream them over and unreliable 3G connection as the train goes through tunnels. I don't have time for any of that- I just want to be able to load a quick bit of text and read it at my own pace, re-reading it if need be.
This modern lazy trend towards videos is killing information, I've worked places that block video streaming in the past and if your API explanation is a video then that leaves me documentationless, of course I can probably go and get that unblocked sure, but I could also just go to one of their competitors that isn't so lazy and boneheaded. Not everyone has the capacity or even wants everything as a video which isn't to say as you point out that they have no place, sure they do, sometimes videos do work - but not for lectures, rarely for conveying large bodies of technical information.
This is why I've completed an entire degree with distance learning but have simply never finished an EdX course or similar despite many of the courses being particularly interesting. The idea of these MOOCs is absolutely great, it's fantastic. The implementation to date? shockingly bad.
"In Cuba, on the other hand, the Castro brothers managed to hang on to power despite the economic crisis caused by the disappearance of theirr USSR sugar-daddy."
That's not a problem with my reasoning, that's exactly my point. They could do this because the US had opted to still keep them completely isolated rather than open the flood gates of US money and culture onto them - something they hadn't done to Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and any others I've missed. That wouldn't solidify the Castro's grip on power - it'd do exactly what it did in all the other ex-USSR states, it'd result in the overthrow of such people.
Let me guess, you're one of those people who thinks culture stops at films, music, food, and dance right?
So what's your point? That if you've got one hostile nation a few miles off your border that it doesn't hurt to have another?
That's not a rational proposition, the fewer hostile nations you have neighbouring you the better, just because you can't make one of them not hostile doesn't mean you should not take efforts to make those you can potentially make not hostile actually be not hostile.
I think you're conflating leadership with the citizens. Unfortunately not all countries are in a position whereby the leaderships actions are reflective of the will of the citizens.
1) I'm not American, nor do I live in America. Don't make assumptions that because someone is arguing for or against some country or another that they must have some vested interest in that nation. Not all of us are patriotic or nationalistic goons, some of us are capable of looking at and understanding a much broader geopolitical picture than simply the one on our doorstep. I know it may fry the brains of some people here that someone could argue in the favour of one anti-Western nation, whilst attacking a Western nations and defending a Western nation against other anti-Western nations, but please try and stick with it, it's really not that complicated, I'm sure you can step out of this binary mindset if you try hard enough.
2) I didn't say they want to wipe Americans off the face of the Earth, I said they would rather do away with American culture. Having preference for the weakening or removal of a culture is not inherently the same as removing the people. The fact Putin was able to seize Crimea was based on past Russian policy of removing ethnic Tatars and installing ethnic Russians to dilute the Tatar population and increase the level of Russian culture there with the hope of displacing the much longer standing Tatar culture in the region. Are you really so naive to believe that if Putin had the opportunity he wouldn't love to be able to do the same to the US given that he's already doing it on the peripheries of Europe (i.e. Trans-Dniester, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Chechnya, Crimea)? Thankfully he doesn't have the opportunity, and probably never will.
P.S. Learn what hyperbole is, you don't have to take everything literally.
Of course there's no evidence to support it because it's not actually ever happened (though there are similar examples showing it can happen). There is however evidence to support the contrary - that maintaining the embargo has maintained hostility and hasn't ever worked.
"As a rule, most countries with differing political and social polices tend to be hostile to us, regardless of our fiscal polices with them."
Are you sure about that? I think you may have a rather broad view of "hostile", because basically the whole of Europe, much of South and Central America, parts of Africa, and large swathes of South East Asia as well as a number of middle east countries are most definitely not generally hostile to you. They may take issue with some things that you do or say but that's not the same thing as being overtly hostile.
Compare and contrast to what happened in Europe with the fall of the USSR, Europe embraced ex-USSR states rather than punish them for once being part of "the enemy" and as such those states have become modern progressive nation, integral parts of and friends of the European Union.
Given what is happening in Ukraine now, tell me, if the US had treated Poland in the way it treats Cuba then do you think Poland would be such a pro-American nation as it is now or do you think it would've been dragged back towards Russia becoming deeply anti-American if America had shunned it like Cuba? America and Europe's embrace of ex-USSR states is an exact example of what embracing rather than isolating can achieve so your assertion that there are no examples of this happening is clearly false.
But perhaps more relevant is the fact that Europe and Canada do in fact have better relations with Cuba than the US, and whilst they're not close enough to Cuba to have much impact they do have fairly good relations for the most part. Cuba is a common holiday destination for Canadians and Europeans alike and we're welcomed there for it, at this point the US embargo is literally the only thing remaining in preventing it heading fully West and time is ticking - new links to Venezuela, renewed interest from Russia mean the opportunity to finally bring Cuba in from the cold is rapidly disappearing as you push it back towards the Russia/Venezuelan alliance.
But then, your call for nuking of the place doesn't exactly paint you as a particularly smart individual, so you probably still wont get this.
Right, but there's a massive gulf between European distaste for US culture, and say, Chinese or Russian distaste for US culture.
On one hand you have Europe, that makes a few measly complaints but on the most part doesn't care. On the other you have countries that want to whipe it off the face of the earth altogether and replace it with some kind of authoritarianism.
Having the latter a few miles off your coast is always going to be a much worse proposition than the former, yet it's one the US consistently and stupidly persists in opting for.
But Mexico is not Cuba. Mexico has a population more than 10x larger than that of Cuba, and similarly covers almost exactly 10x more area than Cuba also. But regardless you're wrong about lack of pro-US sentiment in Mexico. Last I checked Mexico wasn't hosting listening stations for the Russians to snoop on you, Mexico wasn't threatening America, and Mexico was largely backing America and providing cheap labour for many of it's businesses.
Quite how you think having an opponent nation a few miles off your coast is better for your populace than a friendly nation is beyond me, but you're obviously sold on the argument of "those damned immigrants!", even though those damned immigrants built your whole country and the prosperity you enjoy from the ground up.
I would presume that that question is an attempt to bait me into saying "freedom", "democracy" and so forth so that you can say hogwash and point to examples where American's freedoms have been curbed, or democracy has been a farce.
But I'm more pragmatic than that, American culture is imperfect, it has flaws, many of them, but there's also one thing that's clear - it's responsible for better levels of wealth, education, and freedom than you find in communist dictatorships.
So to answer your question, US culture is, simply put, not communist dictatorship culture, it's something that's objectively better for most people, it's not perfect, but it doesn't need to be - better is good enough.
Right, but it's still an utterly stupid policy.
If America had just allowed free trade with Cuba the inflow of US culture into the country would've long turned it into a pro-US state - it's the policy of isolation that's keeping it hostile in the first place.
There's no way a country that small, and that close to the US could hold out as a communist nation in the face of unrestricted trade with the US - it'd become so utterly dependent on the US that it'd simply have no choice but to bow down to US wishes and culture.
There are times where I do support the US (strikes against IS, stance on Ukraine) and there are times where I'll happily call it out as stupid (Iraq), this is one of those times where it's stupid, where the policy is wholly self-defeating, and where the only people that suffer from the policy are the largely innocent general populace of Cuba.
The fall of the USSR was a prime opportunity to turn Cuba around, Russia facing bankruptcy withdrew almost all funding for Cuba and left it in the shit. Had the US taken that opportunity to drop restrictions, and normalise relations then Cuba would be as ex-USSR and as pro-USA as Poland is nowadays. Instead, the US continued it's bone-headed embargos such that now that Russia is becoming a resurgent pain in the ass Cuba is more than happy to take money to facilitate the reopening of the USSR's largest external listening base right off the coast of the US on Cuban soil.
As foreign policy goes, the US' policy on Cuba is probably one of the single most stupid and short-sighted foreign policies there is.
Well yes that is a pretty centrist policy because it neither forces people to have abortions (far left in China), nor bans them from doing so (far right in places like Ireland). It leaves the choice in their hands so is very much a middle ground policy.
Wait, that's not what you wanted to hear because you're far right? Sucks to be you I guess.