With all those points, how many of them are actually necessary for an e-book?
Meanwhile, here's a list of things which actually are required for a good e-book, and the PSP has none of them.
- Long battery life - Readable in sunlight - Doesn't strain your eyes - A large screen - Print-quality resolution (the Kindle is arguably missing this too)
Quality Sound - One of the reason some of the crappy games get good scores is due to the judicious use of sounds, a crappy silent game just sucks, a crappy game with killer sound becomes much more enjoyable.
Theme music - As with sounds a good theme can make or break an otherwise average game. Seems pretty minor. I would say putting pop music on game soundtracks had a bigger effect on games, but I wouldn't even put that ahead of any of his 50 choices.
Moving Character Animation - I recall reading in Donald Duck's Playground this was a big innovation. Sounds like you're talking about animated sprites. That's fair enough -- it was very important to games -- but it was more of an evolution than an innovation. It was always pretty obvious how to make animated sprites given the computing power, and it was always pretty obvious that it would be a nice thing to have. (There was a pretty blurry line between animated vector art and animated sprites at the time.)
Join at any time - I recall in Gauntlet players could join in at any time they didn't have to wait for the strongest player to die to rejoin the game, made it possible to get more quarters in a machine as well as allow weaker players to ride on the coattails of better ones (at least as long as they had quarters). Nice one. Another popular example from the same time period was Rampage. Although it's an interesting thing to note, I don't think it supplants any of the article's choices.
Wallpapers - I remember the controversy about Zaxxon "i's a mediocre game, it is just visual wallpaper", that visual wallpaper is just about mandatory on all games nowadays. Not sure what you mean.
Save State - Before disk drives many games had no save character option. The article mentions save games on the last page.
Level Designer - A great feature that made game like Lode Runner runaway hits. Good point; this goes hand-in-hand with mods, which was mentioned. The only difference between a mod and a level editor is in power/complexity, and the ability to distribute mods.
Copy Protection - May not be a matter of celebration for the user, but it was a game design innovation, and for some a new challenge of successfully copying the game besides shooting the bad guys. Also some of the things those crackers did to the games made some unplayable games playable (trained cracks). Another good point; if he's going to list interactive movies (ala Dragon's Lair) as an evolutionary dead-end, he may as well mention the currently very unpopular topic of copy protection. Particularly since games have such a rich history of interesting forms of copy protection (like the Infocom feelies).
Role Playing
------------
whether it's obvious or not, the whole computer gaming model for player vs enemy combat is still largely the same as the dungeons & dragons model. That's why he didn't include it in the list. It wasn't a video game innovation.
Side Scrolling Screens Similarly, on the fourth page, titled "Presentation", he says in the first paragraph:
"I take static and scrolling 2D screens for granted; they already existed in mechanical coin-ops."
Does it really matter, though? They claim Veropedia can be trusted by students and teachers, but you're not supposed to use tertiary sources (eg encyclopedias) for research anyway. For research, an encyclopedia should only really be used for its references.
Actually, this isn't like the X Prize, this is the X Prize. It's part of the Google Lunar X Prize, which, as the name implies, is in being offered by Google and the X Prize Foundation.
That's not the easiest way to draw a circle in GIMP, by the way. The 'Paths' tab has tools to let you turn any selection into a path, and to trace any path (which offers tonnes of options for how you want your path to look).
I know, that's two extra steps, and you shouldn't have to do that. However, it is far more flexible, and a circle tool is really of pretty limited usefulness. If you find yourself drawing a lot of shapes, you would do best to learn how to use paths anyway, because you'll probably get bored of circles sooner or later. Alternately, you could use another program which is more suited to drawing shapes, like Inkscape.
The thought behind adding a circle tool is usually "There's no reason not to put something so simple in your program!", but that argument doesn't hold water, otherwise it would be inexcusable not to have a tool that draws smiley faces. A very good argument against a circle tool would be "It's almost as easy to make a circle with the path tools as it would be with a circle tool, and people don't draw circles that often anyway, so there's no reason to clutter the toolbox with another tool."
Your post counters the GP that you're otherwise agreeing with. The GP claims that the jokes get modded funny by new mods who haven't heard the joke, which means it is being spread.
And it's also pretty interesting how a joke can start in one small place on the Internet, and if you pay attention, you can watch it infect more and more Internet communities.
I skimmed the posts, but didn't find anything which described very well why this isn't equivalent to the net neutrality argument.
The reason it's not equivalent, is because ISPs already do this with Internet access and nobody minds. With Internet access, you pay more if you want faster access. No matter what you pay, you can still access any site you want. In this case, you can still get your baggage delivered as well as anybody else, and at the same speed as any other sites you go to, but you pay extra for better speed overall. And honestly, I don't care if you pay more to get your luggage first and less to get it last, as long as my luggage gets there.
There's two major possibilities for how a lack of net neutrality can be abused: either the ISPs cut businesses and customers off from using parts of the Internet entirely, or they basically start charging with a la carte prices, so how much you pay for the speed of your connection depends on which parts of the Internet you use.
Keeping that in mind, here's two similes that would work:
Dropping net neutrality is like the airport refusing to deliver baggage to poor countries if you're flying coach.
-or-
Dropping net neutrality is like the airport charging extra to get your baggage on time after they open your baggage and find you're got frilly underwear.
To be clear, games have to achieve an MA15+ rating in Australia, or else the Office of Film and Literature Classification will refuse to rate it, and it's illegal to sell any game which isn't rated. The R18+ rating is only used for films. Because of this, many games have been censored to meet the MA15+ rating, or have simple been banned.
The problem is that nobody knows what these 235 patents cover. They could be invalid. They could be simple enough to easily find a workaround for. Or they could be something like the TrueType hinting patent, which took quite a while for the FreeType project to find an adequate alternative for. For all we know, they have patents that make it impossible to correctly render a Word doc without infringing on their patent.
But Microsoft won't say what the patents actually are. They're probably hoping to try to sue for all the patents they can in one fell swoop, in hopes that nobody will be able to come up with a solution in time. Because of this, Debian is the most likely to be hurt, because once Microsoft releases the details, Debian can't just let their non-free software slide until a proper alternative can be found; they'll have to pull the software. The problem isn't that Linux projects are purposefully infringing on Microsoft IP; it's that they don't even know what the Microsoft IP is.
Of course, the Open Innovation Network (IBM, NEC, Novell, Philips, Red Hat and Sony) has a substantial patent portfolio that they use to protect open source projects, and Microsoft is sure to have infringed on some of them, so there's a good possibility that Microsoft will never use these patents for anything but FUD campaigns.
But it does suggest an interesting option for patent reform. Perhaps patents should have to be actively protected, like trademarks, and if a company lets another company use their patent for too long uncontested it becomes public domain.
It might depend on the company, then. We also get them one at a time by post, but we only get the first and last four numbers, and the date and amount of purchase.
Imagine how boring it would be watching a bunch of guys standing around in the field scratching themselves and spitting. So... no more boring than baseball already is?
To be fair, that statement also supports the GP's point. Just like cold-rolled steel was two hundred years ago, this tech is too expensive to use in common applications, and probably will be for a long time. If they get some government funding, it will take less time.
I don't even think I have to comment anymore. I'll just quote things you haven't bothered to read.
I've posited that the fact that you are the only sample we have of somebody who is pissed off by this feature is a good indication that the developers did not intend the feature to be malicious.
I've also suggested that the other team required a certain level of skill if they were able to beat your team.
Slashdot Mirror
With all those points, how many of them are actually necessary for an e-book?
Meanwhile, here's a list of things which actually are required for a good e-book, and the PSP has none of them.
- Long battery life
- Readable in sunlight
- Doesn't strain your eyes
- A large screen
- Print-quality resolution (the Kindle is arguably missing this too)
Or perhaps, "But do they run Linux?"
And even more explosive if it's a Dell laptop!
Theme music - As with sounds a good theme can make or break an otherwise average game. Seems pretty minor. I would say putting pop music on game soundtracks had a bigger effect on games, but I wouldn't even put that ahead of any of his 50 choices. Moving Character Animation - I recall reading in Donald Duck's Playground this was a big innovation. Sounds like you're talking about animated sprites. That's fair enough -- it was very important to games -- but it was more of an evolution than an innovation. It was always pretty obvious how to make animated sprites given the computing power, and it was always pretty obvious that it would be a nice thing to have. (There was a pretty blurry line between animated vector art and animated sprites at the time.) Join at any time - I recall in Gauntlet players could join in at any time they didn't have to wait for the strongest player to die to rejoin the game, made it possible to get more quarters in a machine as well as allow weaker players to ride on the coattails of better ones (at least as long as they had quarters). Nice one. Another popular example from the same time period was Rampage. Although it's an interesting thing to note, I don't think it supplants any of the article's choices. Wallpapers - I remember the controversy about Zaxxon "i's a mediocre game, it is just visual wallpaper", that visual wallpaper is just about mandatory on all games nowadays. Not sure what you mean. Save State - Before disk drives many games had no save character option. The article mentions save games on the last page. Level Designer - A great feature that made game like Lode Runner runaway hits. Good point; this goes hand-in-hand with mods, which was mentioned. The only difference between a mod and a level editor is in power/complexity, and the ability to distribute mods. Copy Protection - May not be a matter of celebration for the user, but it was a game design innovation, and for some a new challenge of successfully copying the game besides shooting the bad guys. Also some of the things those crackers did to the games made some unplayable games playable (trained cracks). Another good point; if he's going to list interactive movies (ala Dragon's Lair) as an evolutionary dead-end, he may as well mention the currently very unpopular topic of copy protection. Particularly since games have such a rich history of interesting forms of copy protection (like the Infocom feelies).
------------
whether it's obvious or not, the whole computer gaming model for player vs enemy combat is still largely the same as the dungeons & dragons model. That's why he didn't include it in the list. It wasn't a video game innovation. Side Scrolling Screens Similarly, on the fourth page, titled "Presentation", he says in the first paragraph:
"I take static and scrolling 2D screens for granted; they already existed in mechanical coin-ops."
Does it really matter, though? They claim Veropedia can be trusted by students and teachers, but you're not supposed to use tertiary sources (eg encyclopedias) for research anyway. For research, an encyclopedia should only really be used for its references.
I can only assume they'll be required to carry a certain amount of weight, but the details haven't been released yet.
Actually, this isn't like the X Prize, this is the X Prize. It's part of the Google Lunar X Prize, which, as the name implies, is in being offered by Google and the X Prize Foundation.
That's not the easiest way to draw a circle in GIMP, by the way. The 'Paths' tab has tools to let you turn any selection into a path, and to trace any path (which offers tonnes of options for how you want your path to look).
I know, that's two extra steps, and you shouldn't have to do that. However, it is far more flexible, and a circle tool is really of pretty limited usefulness. If you find yourself drawing a lot of shapes, you would do best to learn how to use paths anyway, because you'll probably get bored of circles sooner or later. Alternately, you could use another program which is more suited to drawing shapes, like Inkscape.
The thought behind adding a circle tool is usually "There's no reason not to put something so simple in your program!", but that argument doesn't hold water, otherwise it would be inexcusable not to have a tool that draws smiley faces. A very good argument against a circle tool would be "It's almost as easy to make a circle with the path tools as it would be with a circle tool, and people don't draw circles that often anyway, so there's no reason to clutter the toolbox with another tool."
Your post counters the GP that you're otherwise agreeing with. The GP claims that the jokes get modded funny by new mods who haven't heard the joke, which means it is being spread.
And it's also pretty interesting how a joke can start in one small place on the Internet, and if you pay attention, you can watch it infect more and more Internet communities.
I skimmed the posts, but didn't find anything which described very well why this isn't equivalent to the net neutrality argument.
The reason it's not equivalent, is because ISPs already do this with Internet access and nobody minds. With Internet access, you pay more if you want faster access. No matter what you pay, you can still access any site you want. In this case, you can still get your baggage delivered as well as anybody else, and at the same speed as any other sites you go to, but you pay extra for better speed overall. And honestly, I don't care if you pay more to get your luggage first and less to get it last, as long as my luggage gets there.
There's two major possibilities for how a lack of net neutrality can be abused: either the ISPs cut businesses and customers off from using parts of the Internet entirely, or they basically start charging with a la carte prices, so how much you pay for the speed of your connection depends on which parts of the Internet you use.
Keeping that in mind, here's two similes that would work:
Dropping net neutrality is like the airport refusing to deliver baggage to poor countries if you're flying coach.
-or-
Dropping net neutrality is like the airport charging extra to get your baggage on time after they open your baggage and find you're got frilly underwear.
I'll never be able to enjoy the cake without my Companion Clippy.
To be clear, games have to achieve an MA15+ rating in Australia, or else the Office of Film and Literature Classification will refuse to rate it, and it's illegal to sell any game which isn't rated. The R18+ rating is only used for films. Because of this, many games have been censored to meet the MA15+ rating, or have simple been banned.
You are of course talking about Australia, the country that literally bans any game which isn't suitable for 15 year olds.
He was probably talking about patents. That's been in the news lately.
The problem is that nobody knows what these 235 patents cover. They could be invalid. They could be simple enough to easily find a workaround for. Or they could be something like the TrueType hinting patent, which took quite a while for the FreeType project to find an adequate alternative for. For all we know, they have patents that make it impossible to correctly render a Word doc without infringing on their patent.
But Microsoft won't say what the patents actually are. They're probably hoping to try to sue for all the patents they can in one fell swoop, in hopes that nobody will be able to come up with a solution in time. Because of this, Debian is the most likely to be hurt, because once Microsoft releases the details, Debian can't just let their non-free software slide until a proper alternative can be found; they'll have to pull the software. The problem isn't that Linux projects are purposefully infringing on Microsoft IP; it's that they don't even know what the Microsoft IP is.
Of course, the Open Innovation Network (IBM, NEC, Novell, Philips, Red Hat and Sony) has a substantial patent portfolio that they use to protect open source projects, and Microsoft is sure to have infringed on some of them, so there's a good possibility that Microsoft will never use these patents for anything but FUD campaigns.
But it does suggest an interesting option for patent reform. Perhaps patents should have to be actively protected, like trademarks, and if a company lets another company use their patent for too long uncontested it becomes public domain.
It might depend on the company, then. We also get them one at a time by post, but we only get the first and last four numbers, and the date and amount of purchase.
They also give you the transaction date and amount. It's more than enough to find what you need to find, unless maybe you're Amazon.
I'm fairly certain Patrick Stewart wasn't the inventor of the Frammwizle.
You can just store the first and last four digits. That's all the information credit card companies give businesses when they report fraud anyway.
To be fair, that statement also supports the GP's point. Just like cold-rolled steel was two hundred years ago, this tech is too expensive to use in common applications, and probably will be for a long time. If they get some government funding, it will take less time.
Hey now, be careful when talking about tubes on Slashdot.
Oh, they'll release a Windows version, but they need to wait until it's no longer the system-selling game for the 360.