I agree. Every time one of his posts goes up, you can scroll down past its thousand or so words and, within a handful of responses, see someone explain precisely why his argument is completely out to lunch.
When I first heard about Haselton about fifteen years ago, I had a lot of respect for him-- he provided a lot of useful information about the state of censorware, which was a serious bugbear at the time. These days it's embarrassing, because it's obvious that he only has the vaguest idea of the things he expounds upon.
I'm glad someone said it before I did, because while I love the idea behind crowdfunding and would certainly like to see a new Elite, Braben and his company have had serious, serious trouble producing anything worthwhile in the last decade. A million bucks isn't going to magically make that malaise go away.
I wouldn't hold my breath about Star Citizen, either: Roberts has been out of the business for a while, and most of his promises have ranged from the bizarre to the truly unlikely.
Dark Age of Camelot managed to survive for years and multiple expansions, despite Mythic's relentless inability to tune the game's main draw, massive realm-vs-realm PVP conflict. Warhammer Online's population more than halved in less than a year for the exact same reason. EA kept them on to develop content for Ultima Online, which has become what the Sims Online wishes it could have been, and virtually nothing came of that either. Seeing them attached to a big, risky project like this makes me wince.
How many of these claims Mcaffee corporation's professional prognosticators have actually been remotely true? Tabloid psychics run the same routine every year too.
Please, yes. The man's a scummy asshat who hasn't been involved in the tech industry for years. It isn't like that ghastly business with Hans Reiser, where there was at least the excuse of handwringing over the fate of the file system he was developing.
...but the site consistently threw an error when I tried to vote 'no, fuck off' to the changes. I'm not going to say it was coded to do that (because come on) but I thought it was a funny sign.
The only thing Valve does with other people's games is make sure the code gets from their servers to your box. That's all. They don't port, and they don't patch until and unless the publisher provides them with a patch to download from Steam's servers too.
Publishers are not going to bite at something that demands they keep specific-distributor-only builds around just so Valve can build some clunky hypervisor. The only segment of PC gaming that might be worth the effort are sports titles, and EA pretty much has those sewn up tighter than a drum.
No, because Iran has been caught doctoring and outright stealing images for propaganda purposes on multiple occasions. Occam's razor indicates that, as usual, they're full of shit.
What's with the assumption that with Steam coming to Linux, games will automatically follow? It certainly hasn't worked that way for their Mac library.
And it's probably one of the first places that comes to mind, shows up on a cursory search, or is suggested by someone in passing. Given that the site maintainers are fine with the state of things, the issue would seem to lie with the assumption that all code there is OSS licensed, rather than its use as a catch-all repository.
A few years back, someone ordered a book for me from Amazon. The package arrived as normal, but it was a completely different book inside, and one that I already had. So the sender got in touch with Amazon, the order was double-checked, and after some back and forth they sent a new package out.
The second package had the same book in it.
So did the third.
It turns out that for some reason, possibly because they were part of the same product line, these two books were assigned the same Amazon-internal barcode. Because of this I never got the book that was ordered, but instead ended with two copies of the book that was mistakenly sent, and a credit for the cost of the original order.
What might have been an easily remedied issue, had storage followed a logical pattern and the fulfillment person given enough autonomy to detect and solve the problem, ended up taking months to get to the bottom of.
Don't tell me no-one else remembers the doctored artillery rocket photos the Iranians released back in 2008? They sparked a lot of (intentionally, this time) funny copycats.
The last I checked, which admittedly was when I graduated half a decade ago, anthropology was about observation. A certain amount of contact and interaction is of course necessary, but immersion (and marching as a sociopolitical gesture is certainly a sign of cultural immersion) is an obvious indication that the anthropologist has become a participant and not an observer and can no longer be considered unbiased.
Honestly, I mean that. Just because the platform is being ported, doesn't mean the games or applications will. Valve unveiled the Steamplay scheme a long while back, which lets people with Win and Mac hardware buy a title once and play it on both platforms, but that's based both on there being a Mac version and probably the publisher wanting to play ball. Regardless, Steamplay titles are a tiny, tiny minority compared to Windows-only titles.
Just because Valve is creating a Linux-compatible client doesn't mean that developers and publishers are going to fall over themselves porting their wares to Linux, any more than they did to OSX. Some people may get rid of their Windows partitions because of it, through enticement or relief, but for the vast majority it will be irrelevant.
Seriously, it's a rare episode where there isn't some sort of chase or flight scene. That's only part of the issue I have with the new series, though.
Honestly, I think the 45 minute episode is a terrible fit for Who. Assuming four episodes per serial in the old series, you'd have five minutes out of one episode devoted to plot setup, with thirty seconds or so of cliffhanger recap at the beginning of each following episode. I realize that there are reasons why they use the one hour story format now, but it's really narratively confining. Someone in a rubber suit pops up, says 'Hi, I'll be your monster of the week", and the opening credits roll. Then there's a lot of running, the Doctor waves his sonic screwdriver around like a magic wand (ironically, the reason they wrote the thing out of the original series) to magic some exposition up, there's some more running, and finally a denouement. There are episodes that break that mould, but they've sadly been few and far between.
M. Bunten's family tried to do this on Kickstarter a few months ago. They offered no mockups, a truly terrible logo image, and asked for $400,000 USD. I think they got maybe a quarter of that. Apparently they're trying again, though I can't be assed to look up the project's name.
Between this guy, David Crane (who wanted $900,000 for what amounts to a Pitfall reboot), and the Quest for Glory creators asking $400,000 to start a new RPG franchise while lashing out at Bethesda and RPGs vs adventure games as if this were still the Nineties, it looks like a bunch of industry has-beens trying to use Kickstarter to fund their retirement.
This. This is basically everyone setting their router to shout 'I'm Spartacus!' into the ether. Only this time, instead of a warm feeling of defying your Roman overlords, they just shrug and crucify the whole lot of you in batches.
Slashdot Mirror
It'd also prevent it from going the way of that Mars orbiter back in '99...
When I first heard about Haselton about fifteen years ago, I had a lot of respect for him-- he provided a lot of useful information about the state of censorware, which was a serious bugbear at the time. These days it's embarrassing, because it's obvious that he only has the vaguest idea of the things he expounds upon.
I wouldn't hold my breath about Star Citizen, either: Roberts has been out of the business for a while, and most of his promises have ranged from the bizarre to the truly unlikely.
Dark Age of Camelot managed to survive for years and multiple expansions, despite Mythic's relentless inability to tune the game's main draw, massive realm-vs-realm PVP conflict. Warhammer Online's population more than halved in less than a year for the exact same reason. EA kept them on to develop content for Ultima Online, which has become what the Sims Online wishes it could have been, and virtually nothing came of that either. Seeing them attached to a big, risky project like this makes me wince.
'Secret' base in a large city and themed vehicles.
The same question has been asked generation after generation, only with other behaviors like drinking and slacking off.
How many of these claims Mcaffee corporation's professional prognosticators have actually been remotely true? Tabloid psychics run the same routine every year too.
Please, yes. The man's a scummy asshat who hasn't been involved in the tech industry for years. It isn't like that ghastly business with Hans Reiser, where there was at least the excuse of handwringing over the fate of the file system he was developing.
...but the site consistently threw an error when I tried to vote 'no, fuck off' to the changes. I'm not going to say it was coded to do that (because come on) but I thought it was a funny sign.
Thirty? Oh fuck, I'm eight years late for Carousel!
Publishers are not going to bite at something that demands they keep specific-distributor-only builds around just so Valve can build some clunky hypervisor. The only segment of PC gaming that might be worth the effort are sports titles, and EA pretty much has those sewn up tighter than a drum.
Fortunately there's been a bit of lag, and we're only fifteen minutes into the future so far.
No, because Iran has been caught doctoring and outright stealing images for propaganda purposes on multiple occasions. Occam's razor indicates that, as usual, they're full of shit.
This is a common trait in Haselton's screeds. I am continually baffled as to why they keep giving him a soapbox to flaunt his ignorance.
What's with the assumption that with Steam coming to Linux, games will automatically follow? It certainly hasn't worked that way for their Mac library.
And it's probably one of the first places that comes to mind, shows up on a cursory search, or is suggested by someone in passing. Given that the site maintainers are fine with the state of things, the issue would seem to lie with the assumption that all code there is OSS licensed, rather than its use as a catch-all repository.
The second package had the same book in it.
So did the third.
It turns out that for some reason, possibly because they were part of the same product line, these two books were assigned the same Amazon-internal barcode. Because of this I never got the book that was ordered, but instead ended with two copies of the book that was mistakenly sent, and a credit for the cost of the original order.
What might have been an easily remedied issue, had storage followed a logical pattern and the fulfillment person given enough autonomy to detect and solve the problem, ended up taking months to get to the bottom of.
Don't tell me no-one else remembers the doctored artillery rocket photos the Iranians released back in 2008? They sparked a lot of (intentionally, this time) funny copycats.
The last I checked, which admittedly was when I graduated half a decade ago, anthropology was about observation. A certain amount of contact and interaction is of course necessary, but immersion (and marching as a sociopolitical gesture is certainly a sign of cultural immersion) is an obvious indication that the anthropologist has become a participant and not an observer and can no longer be considered unbiased.
Just because Valve is creating a Linux-compatible client doesn't mean that developers and publishers are going to fall over themselves porting their wares to Linux, any more than they did to OSX. Some people may get rid of their Windows partitions because of it, through enticement or relief, but for the vast majority it will be irrelevant.
This is unfortunately typical of Haselton's meanderings. God knows why they keep giving him a soapbox here.
Honestly, I think the 45 minute episode is a terrible fit for Who. Assuming four episodes per serial in the old series, you'd have five minutes out of one episode devoted to plot setup, with thirty seconds or so of cliffhanger recap at the beginning of each following episode. I realize that there are reasons why they use the one hour story format now, but it's really narratively confining. Someone in a rubber suit pops up, says 'Hi, I'll be your monster of the week", and the opening credits roll. Then there's a lot of running, the Doctor waves his sonic screwdriver around like a magic wand (ironically, the reason they wrote the thing out of the original series) to magic some exposition up, there's some more running, and finally a denouement. There are episodes that break that mould, but they've sadly been few and far between.
Between this guy, David Crane (who wanted $900,000 for what amounts to a Pitfall reboot), and the Quest for Glory creators asking $400,000 to start a new RPG franchise while lashing out at Bethesda and RPGs vs adventure games as if this were still the Nineties, it looks like a bunch of industry has-beens trying to use Kickstarter to fund their retirement.
As a corollary, I really wish we could mod posts like yours 'stupid' as well.
This. This is basically everyone setting their router to shout 'I'm Spartacus!' into the ether. Only this time, instead of a warm feeling of defying your Roman overlords, they just shrug and crucify the whole lot of you in batches.