I couldn't have put it better. You described my childhood. Although I have paid the pirates to get the tapes and later disks I don't feel guilty as they did some collateral good too by driving me towards IT. You have to get to know the environment before judging someone. Back in the early 90s there was absolutely NO software market and you got no access to any information whatsoever as from a 100$/month/household there is not much money to be made for a publisher. Now I buy games even if I don't play some but the developer strikes a chord in me and I just end up liking his/her attitude and the support I can I will give him. I buy the special games and that extends to music as well. Thanks to piracy I learned English and opened my eyes and mind and now I am happy to give back and I'm pretty sure if it wouldn't be for my savings spent on pirates I couldn't write this and couldn't have gone to see my favourite bands playing live and I feel I can give back.
Just note that paying for a single pirated Z80 game I paid high prices...but it was worth it.
You might be old but not always right...and here's why
1. If one wants to create a world per his imagination why not let him and let him share it? Why listen to the radio when you can read the book or the script and leave your imagination do the rest. Even debates are better on screen as body language tells way more than the grunts and sighs that can only be heard.
2. It adds a lot to the experience. You will be seeing someone else's imagination and that can be different than yours.
4. Yes it can. You still have radio if you experience this. Height can give you nausea too and that's why it needed a bunch of people without these "affections" to erect the first skyscrapers which you can benefit from and marvel at.
6. If no money is being made of a technological advancement then it gets forgotten and abandoned. Radio was a big business too and still is.
I'm really curious how people reacted when sound was introduced...then color.
Nowadays everyone seems to be a critic and anything you give them they see a drawback to it and sometimes this behavior feels just too forced.
It is turning into: back in the days thing...
When actors were actors not animated characters etc. Remember back in the days the frame-rate was given by the projector fellow's hand steadiness and now we can control it. It has to start from somewhere.
As for me, Sony did some cool engineering to make Avatar possible and Cameron financed this awesome project. For me that is a winner. I enjoyed the 3D experience a lot.
I am old enough to remember when our households transitioned from a B&W TV to a colour TV and I absolutely guarantee you that that the reaction was one of unalloyed joy. No "bah-it-looked-better-before" in sight.
The difference is that in B&W you have no idea if the grass is a lush green or a parched brown, whereas in real life you make that determination in an instant.. The problem with 3D is, as Roger Ebert points out, that your brain already derived the 3D based on a 2D image. So the improvement is incremental, if that.
The real issue is whether 3D has a real potential in gaming, where gameplay is frequently first-person, as opposed to movie, where the experience is almost always third-person.
Or, to put it another way, if you can't turn the camera around, you don't need a 3-D environment.
Speaking as a game dev, the current 3D still isn't good enough for games, IMHO. As you said, it's incremental.
It is the case that game design sacrificed precision control to get the 3D look+feel when it was first introduced: for example, 3D platforming essentially has not progressed beyond Mario 64, and that game is still somewhat uncomfortable to "pick up and play" despite all its refinements; the extra dimension just makes everything far more complex. Adding the glasses helps regain some of the depth cues that make complex movement difficult, but then we're dumping on even more equipment, and gaming is already more complex than it needs to be for most audiences. A full solution would need to be convenient and unobtrusive.
Yes, 2D jump-and-runs tend to work better than 3D ones. At least gameplay wise--you can have a 3D look, but still confine your gameplay to 2D (or 2+1/2D, if you have layers or so). However I feel that first person shooters really benefit from 3D.
(And I admit that controlling a first person shooter in 3D with a mouse and a keyboard is more complex than most people are comfortable with. It's a skill that I needed to learn, too.
On the other, a certain level of experience and skill is also necessary to enjoy games like soccer or chess.)
I would say giving information to Facebook is giving information to the world.
No profile means no information for anyone to refer to you which means no one can bother screwing you in any way.
Oh...and you also realize that there is a sun out there and the grass is green and actually it does have a smell.
In case you have profiles up on the internet (not just FB) share only what you are comfortable to loose. Once in different hands it is not yours anymore.
In my experience in a startup people have no labels/titles associated to them.
They are the directors and they have to take out the trash too.
Tthe author claims he has much experience in the "startup organization domain" but he misses the point of hard, smart work on turning an idea into business regardless of the labels each member has.
You couldn't be further off base. I've built two companies from scratch and I did all of the "cleaning the trash" work as did all my team members.
Nevertheless, it takes different skill types to build a technology organization. Some will be super technical while some will be more process driven. Some will be inspired to work on all of the latest technologies but hate doing garden-variety feature coding or bug fixing while some people are great utility players.
My post was silent on the issue of whether people with "titles" should do grunt work. And to imply that I said otherwise is a misrepresentation of the post.
I'll add that titles are useful in terms of making sure every essential function is covered. No reason early on that one person can't have more than one title, and as noted everyone should also have the title of "janitor", I've always put is as "No one should be too proud to sweep the floor".
