Twilo

I really don't think it matters.

Well-deserved failure.

Beards on computer scientist is a noble and fine tradition, dating back over 40 years! I myself have a fine example cast across my manly jaw. Grrr!

because he's an ATTENTION-SEEKING asshat.

The "blurry" text is anti-aliased, and is optional. I prefer it because it looks better on high resolutions, but it can be turned off (Try your Look 'n' Feel settings if you're in KDE). Text size is a Firefox thing, you can turn it up in the options. The point with Linux is that you can change (almost) anything you want. It isn't Linux' fault that the mouse cursors are ugly, it's up to you to find one you prefer. Mandrake aren't the best at picking the pretty things, but they do provide a nice number of alternative graphics for your stuff with their KDE distro that you probably have installed As for programs looking and feeling differently, the same thing happens with Windows; viz. winamp etc. It just doesn't happen as often in windows as it does in linux, because (like it or not) most linux users are proud geeks and like to be able to do what they like. There are easy to use Linux distros, look harder. Mandrake is a half-way house between the easy-to-use-hard-to-customise and the hard-to-use-easy-to-customise distros. Try a live-cd distro for your mother, (eg Knoppix, or Morphix, which comes in a special games-focused distro full of lots of good casual games, plus some quake 3 demos and things). Don't give up on the command line just because your irritating friends think it's the best thing ever (it's not), but it is good for doing some things that are a little harder to do through the GUI. It also happens to use the same commands as the Mac operating systems (Mac OSX is a version of Unix, which Linux is based on).

Film is a fundamentally different animal to video games because one is interactive and the other isn't. Game technology is going to continue advancing because we're always going to be looking towards total immersion. This means more complexity, as we are given more and more choices within a game, and obviously the better graphics/sound etc. It's not going to stop just so people can get used to the tools.

I made the point earlier on that this isn't feasible, because there's nothing to stop one developer from running ahead of the "freeze" and releasing something new (which captures the market). The "industry" doesn't act as a single body, no group of capitalist concerns do (for example, the RIAA doesn't represent all the labels). Consoles are in a sense "frozen" because they tend these days to come out within a year of eachother, and are controlled by a single company and have 5-ish year cycles. An open standard as discussed in the article would have a counter-intuitive result; a variety of different hardwares running the same software a la windows pc's is going to work exactly like windows pcs running on a variety of hardwares. it'll be a mess.

We're already at a point where the power of the hardware is outstripping the complexity of the software we're writing for it; we're just not that good. The "next big change" in how we do stuff is most likely going to be the use of more automated content creation (much more texture generation, organic-style model generation (eg "growing" trees; this is being used already but only at the development stage). As more and more hardware is made free (Moore's law is exponential, coding complexity is probably nearer to linear) more of it is going to be used for (what was previously prohibitively wasteful) powerful world-generation stuff. More powerful processors won't be market-viable until the automation tools are at a level where you could make a top-tier "blockbuster" title with them; the killer app to sell the 10GHz processor.

I got the 3rd Edition D&D DM guide approximately 3 months before 3.5 was announced. Motherfucking Wizards of the Coast. At least they don't get any of my money from Magic the Gathering cards anymore

Cartoon Network brought us Dexter's Lab, Samurai Jack, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Space Ghost Coast to Coast and Sealab 2021. Nickelodeon brought us Sabrina the Fucking Teenage Fucking Witch Advantage : Cartoon Network

According to Virgils "Aenid", survivors of Troy made it to Italy, and their descendants founded Rome. It's just a poem though, maybe we don't take everything seriously.

7 is a bit of a mess really, 6 and 10 are wonderful though.

The Golden Sun games on the GBA allowed you to do that sort of thing too, where the second game would ask you to momentarily insert the first game, where it would read your party and stats, and copy them into the new game. This isn't new stuff by any means.

Irish language shares roots with Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Breton (from France) and an assortment of (mostly dead) regional tongues from around Europe. It's an Indo-European language derived from the same roots almost all European and Western Asia languages have (this includes Hebrew). There have been people in Ireland longer than there has been any "jewish people" Anything we have in common with arabs is parallel evolution, with very small amounts of direct influence (for example, arab pirates kidnapped the population of a crappy little irish fishing village some 300 years ago). I've never ever ever met anybody called "Solomon". Waterford slang is of a very base and poor sort, and pales to the wonderousnessness of Cork Slang . Fuck Kilkenny!

There is no way in hell that they are going to get this patent. You want prior art? How about 30 years of video games, and at least 10 years of being able to share data between games via storage media (consider Sega's Dreamcast VMU, which allowed you to carry your data from the home version of Virtua Fighter 4 into the arcades).

The winner is Bad Taste

I played a breakout game maybe 4 years ago; it was shareware and came on a PC Gamer UK CD, and it had the best music ever. It also had lovely little 2D particle effects, which were also used to do a great fireworks-laden credits screen when you finished. I wish I'd kept copies of those mod files, they were awesome.

truisms aren't arguable, truisms are "obvious truths"

This is about markets though, not science. The science is already there. I could say a lot against those "truisms" too, but that's a different matter.

Careful now...

Maybe it's a fundamental difference between games and film that drives wonderful things like Eternal Sunshine, Donnie Darko and Blair Witch to great successes, while our own darlings Grim Fandango, ICO and BG&E don't make it so far. Hopefully we'll see a return of the coding underground in the next 5 years. I'd love to see an end to games publishers as bandwidth cost converges on zero.

In the article, he's talking about the creation of the music or film, not just the media it comes on (He talks about Fender Guitars vs a fictional "SuperObo"). Film pushes hardware just as much as games do; for example: Weta Digital (of Lord of the Rings fame) constructed a massive parallel computing system which ranked as one of the bigger supercomputers for use in graphics for films. In music we've always had a plethora of hardware based tools (ProTools, hardware cubase and so on) which have only in the last 8 or so years been made fully functional in software forms for PC etc. Even in instruments (continuing with the guitar example) you have a great deal of advancement in pickup technologies, manufacturing processes, microphone design, etc. The difference might be because other fields of creation don't figure Moore's Law so centrally in their advancement of hardware. As for a common API, this would be a great thing, especially as hardware power runs so far ahead of the demands games place on it (in the next gen of consoles, and today on PC) so the overhead isn't going to be much of a problem anymore. Microsoft are working their next generation DirectX10 (I think it's got a different name now) into the XBox2, with an eye towards a common hw interface layer for a number of consoles. Whether anyone else will take to it is a different matter. How many programmer hours are lost porting games to all the consoles? You'd probably lose 4 guys to porting on a project for 3-console coverage (EA has their own way of dealing with this )

the PS2 is probably your best port of call for RPG games, as Square-Enix develops almost exclusively for it (there is a "final fantasy" game on the GC though). A number of other good asian rpgs have come out over the years too, but the majority of these are not available in Europe. As well as that, you have a wonderful back-catalogue of PSOne RPGs (Including ported versions of the Lunar Games) and a number of SNES Conversions. Three generations of RPG goodness can't be bad. Then again, a modded XBox could emulate most of that

Hail to the fellow sutrite. I think the article is a bit off, especially on: -Keeping people off PS2 projects, and having them do PSOne games while the market passes them by; -This line: "Let us imagine that Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Nvidia, Intel, and everyone else decided tomorrow that they would never develop another iota of hardware again" (If this happened, BetterStuff Inc would release some piece of kit and dazzle the punters, take the money); -Declaring music and film to be software-reliant rather than hardware focused is totally off. -"We decide not to buy into the next round until it is proved to be profitable". It can't be proven to be profitable until someone buys into it. -That Grim Fandango did well (alluded to in the same breath as Half Life), and didn't need marketting

BG&E is better with the keyboard/mouse, particularly when shooting discs in first-person view