Look at all of the "rebooted" movie series.

To be fair, the American reboot of "Old Boy" was pretty great, I thought.

But generally, I agree.

However, I don't mind one bit if a game company reuses assets from a successful game. I thought Saints Row IV was one of the best games to come out that year (in fact, it was my GOTY), even though it was the same location, the same character models, the same voice talent (with a few additions) and the same textures.

Hey, I'm all for companies looking for ways to get it done cheaper and more efficiently, as long as the product gives real value for the price, which SRIV most certainly did, IMO.

I guess it's not about "reboot or not reboot" so much as it is about, "Make your goddamn products worth their price for a change".

The need to obtain venture capital to launch a decent game has created an atmosphere stagnation in the genre

The need has always been there. What's lacking today is the desire to obtain venture capital. In an atmosphere of Kickstarter, which is maybe the worst thing to happen to gaming this decade, why the hell should anyone worry about convincing people to invest when you can get people to just give you the money you want, whether or not you actually build (or finish) a game.

The phenomenon of "Early Access" games that never, ever make it to final release occurred simultaneously with Kickstarter, and not coincidentally.

Nah, the requirement to get money to make a game has always been there. But today there are too many shortcuts. And it's everywhere in the corporate world. Why do the hard work of selling an idea to investors, hiring people, getting facilities up and running, etc etc? The goal for most of the corporate world today is obfuscate your income stream so well that people don't realize they're the product. Like google or Facebook. It's one reason you have so many people unemployed and underemployed. When there's so much money to be made by NOT providing a product or service to people who think they are your customers and hiding who your end-users really are, it makes sense that they'd go this route.

The problem is this shows a deep hostility for your customers and/or users. And it's not sustainable.

I hope that whatever Romero is doing doesn't turn out to be Free-2-Play or co-op or with multiplayer focus.

The beauty of his best games was that they were single-player, with some very fun multiplayer as a bonus. The current gaming industry mode seems to be co-op or multiplayer primarily with maybe a very short single-player campaign thrown in.

I understand that this trend started primarily as a way to prevent some kid in Estonia from having a nickel in his pocket that didn't belong to the gaming industry, and I don't fault them because their nature is to be money-grubbing monsters who basically hate their customers. But somehow, the great single-player games managed to make a nice profit. Nice enough to finance a stinker like Daikatana.

Oh, and there's a new meme going around the gaming industry and the domesticated, corrupt gaming press: The notion that someone current games are too long and give players too much to do. You'll hear phrases like "shorter, more focused game experiences" which basically means they can spend less on development (and let's face it, the gaming press is mostly made up of wannabe indie game devs). If they could figure out a way to sell a $59 game that lasted 45 minutes, they'd do it in a heartbeat. Yeah, it's going around. You're hearing about how "players don't want long games" and "gamers would rather have an intensely fun one hour game than a grindy 100 hour one", as if those were the only two choices. Of course, this ignores the wild success of games like Skyrim and even current ones like Divinity: Original Sin.

Anybody who observes consumer culture knows where this is going. It's not a new concept. Give people smaller boxes of cereal for the same price as a large box and maybe they won't notice or care. Start with a subscription-only service which markets itself as "commercial free" and then start slipping in commercials, as if it were always inevitable (maybe it was).

No, I'm pretty sure the big difference between the successful game publishers of today and the old-school types like Romero is that Romero actually seemed to like gaming and gamers. The level of cynicism in F2P, co-op, Day 1 DLC, etc etc is pretty shocking really when you step back and look at it. Until people start to understand the enormous power in their consumption choices, it will only get worse, and the industry is doing everything it can to make game customers feel helpless in the face of these inexorable industry changes. When in reality, they are anything but helpless.

I hope consumers wake up at some point, but I won't hold my breath.

So, you don't believe there are external costs to things, like the cost of protecting the oil industry by fighting Middle Eastern wars?

Do you believe the cost of the Fukushima cleanup should be figured into the cost of the electricity the plant produced? Do you believe that there were any costs associated with lead being used in paint for decades?

Of course there are externalities. You are the first person I've even seen deny they exist.

Yeah, I'm not ready to buy a power company telling us how great they are as proof that they're not dumping the scrubbed pollutants into ash ponds.

I'm not sure why I put the gasoline thing in there. I was drunk. It was the first Sunday of football season and was drinking gasoline with mercury in it.

I would say the same thing. The user can currently either choose a different "sub-distro" based on their primary flavour of choice, opt for a desktop/server specific spin, or just accept the current one distro to rule them all but just install the necessary packages for what they want approach. There really shouldn't be any need to split a Linux distro (or BSD distro for that matter) in two for this (and why stop there, why not a phone/tablet optimised version, or one for embedded devices...?) - just provide a specific spin for desktop that includes a selection of GUIs and another for servers that includes a broader selection of alternative server daemons and maybe a simple GUI for those that really need it. Apply some task specific optimizations to the default configuration files for bonus points and off we go.

Where, exactly, do I state that I am putting a GUI on a server? Perhaps you got confused when I mentioned Gnome requiring SystemD as an example of how applications making SystemD a dependency was forcing distros into a Hobson's Choice of either adopting SystemD whether they want to or not, or going through a lot of pain to replace it with an alternative when it breaks major dependencies like Gnome? RHEL, like many distros, includes Gnome - but how many of those distros have adopted SystemD mostly as a result of this, not because it is better or worse than the alternatives?

Note also that I point out that the dependencies work in *both* directions; as antientropic points out Gnome requiring SystemD is absolutely an issue with the Gnome team and nothing to do with SystemD, but it does have implications in that it helps build a mess of inter-dependencies that is making it increasingly hard to strip systems down to the minimum. RHEL's insistance on NetworkManager by default, with all the baggage that brings, doesn't inspire confidence either, as this is apparently one of the next daemon in SystemD's sights - maybe SystemD can improve it, but I'm not holding my breath.

Anyway, regardless of that, we've made our choice and moved to BSD; SystemD played a significant part in that, but it definitely wasn't the only factor, as I noted in my OP. ?

Hell, I was doing hands-free driving when I was 17. Can of beer in one hand, joint in the other, steering with my knees... driving a stickshift. On the Kennedy Expressway, Monday morning 11am. If they'd invented cell phones at the time, I'd have been texting or playing Dungeon Defender, too.

All that auto-assist stuff is for wussies. I don't know why we need that stuff. You just need to be a responsible driver like me.

Improving the qualities of robusta or the hardiness of arabica, either works for me. I love the smell and taste of a well prepared coffee, but the increasing use of robusta has started to mess with my digestive system for some reason (I suspect the part that makes robusta taste bitter) making me feel like I've drunk acid. Adding sugar or salt (depending on the chain) helps a bit, but the result has been to pretty much stop me from buying coffee to drink from the usual high-street chains that are all we available here, and my attempts to offer feedback in the form of suggesting a "premium" high-arabica based brew don't seem to be getting very far.

I have three main issues with SystemD that might help you understand where some of us are coming from:

1. It effectively works as a monolithic replacement for several daemons, contra to core UNIX design tenets, and even though some of those sub-daemons can be swapped out with an alternative, often that works by running the second daemon in parallel - you can't actually disable the SystemD equivalent, let alone remove it altogether. This makes troubleshooting much more complicated when something goes wrong, especially if you have booted a system from a recovery disk to troubleshoot after a crash, compromise, or whatever and can no longer directly access several of the key sources of information necessary to do that.

2. Because of the growing number of packages that depend on SystemD, and vice-versa, it's creating a huge mess of package inter-dependencies that mean that it's getting almost impossible to build a stripped down and hardened server. Ballmer might have been right with his "Cancer" comment, he just wasn't specific enough: Gnome requires SystemD, $distro wants to bundle Gnome, therefore $distro adopts SystemD - and forces the default install of all the other package dependencies that go with it, thereby increasing the attack surface of the system. So much for hardening systems by removing all superflous code, huh?

3. All that cruft seems to be bogging the system down. We are currently migrating a large number (much larger than planned after initial results) of systems from RHEL to BSD - a decision taken due to general unhappiness with RHEL6, but SystemD pushed us towards BSD rather than another Linux distro - and in some cases are seeing throughput gains of greater than 10% on what should be equivalent Linux and BSD server builds. The re-learning curve wasn't as steep as we expected, general system stability seems to be better too, and BSD's security reputation goes without saying.

That said assuming that it "just works" a SystemD based desktop with everything from a desktop application down to the kernel talking through the same set of core services does sound like a nice idea. The problem is that most of us are not actually running Linux desktops; we're running servers and would just like the OS to mostly get the hell out of the way so we can get on with running whatever server daemons we are using. If SystemD were better architected - say a core PID1 init replacement, then a bunch of optional packages I don't even need to install if I want to use an alternative or not bother with at all, plus a massive clean up of the dependency hell that it has introduced - then I'd be a lot happier with it, but as it stands I just can't see including it on a hardened Internet facing server as being a remotely sane thing to do.

The irony of someone citing Wikipedia to show some other website is biased and inaccurate.

The difference is that Wikipedia has citations to actual sources that you can check yourself.

The people who accuse Wikipedia of bias never seem to point out what the bias is.

I like to know a little bit about where citations are coming from, you know?

From the Wikipedia entry on the website where all of your citations come from:

According to Alexa internet statistical analysis, What's Up With That? is ranked No. 9,282 in the U.S. and No. 24,144 world-wide.[17] WUWT receives more than two million visits per month.[18] Fred Pearce, environmental writer and author, described WUWT as the "world's most viewed climate website" in his 2010 publication of The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth about Global Warming.[19] Matt Ridley of The Spectator described WUWT as having "metamorphosed from a gathering place for lonely nutters to a three-million-hits-per-month online newspaper on climate full of fascinating articles by physicists, geologists, economists and statisticians".[20]

Patrick J. Michaels, climatologist and contributor to the IPCC First Assessment Report, described WUWT as part of a new "parallel universe" of emerging online publications, manned by serious scientists critical of world governments approach to climate change: "A parallel universe is assembling itself parallel to the IPCC. This universe has become very technical – very proficient at taking apart the U.N.'s findings."[21]

Watts's blog has been criticized for inaccuracy. The Guardian columnist George Monbiot described WUWT as "highly partisan and untrustworthy".[22] Leo Hickman, at The Guardian's Environment Blog, also criticized Watts's blog, stating that Watts "risks polluting his legitimate scepticism about the scientific processes and methodologies underpinning climate science with his accompanying politicised commentary."[23]"There are many credible sources of information, and they aren't blog sites run by weathermen like Anthony Watts", wrote David Suzuki.[24]

The Times named Watts Up With That? as one of the 30 best science blogs and described it as: "One of the more entertainingly sceptic blogs, written by a former TV weatherman. The ecofriendly blogger offers commentary on science, nature, climate change and technology, as well as 'puzzling things in life.'"[25] WUWT won the "Best Science Blog" award in the 2008 Weblog Awards, an internet organization that tallied 933,022 votes in 48 different categories for the 2008 awards.[26]

In February 2010, climatologist Judith Curry, as a guest contributor, published an open letter on WUWT and other climate-related blogs, "On the Credibility of Climate Change, Towards Rebuilding Trust," in which Curry commented on the benefits of blog-led debate and called for greater transparency in scientists' work.[18] Also in 2010, Christopher Monckton published on WUWT his account of his "influence on Lady Thatcher's views about climate change during the 1980s".[27] Monckton, a skeptic towards the theory of anthropogenic global warming, also published a detailed rebuttal on WUWT in response to criticism directed at him by John Abraham, associate professor of mechanical engineering at University of St. Thomas.[28]

Fox News has attributed to WUWT exclusive photographs used in FoxNews's coverage of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster.[29]

I'm not sure the blog site of a climate change denying weatherman and Fox News favorite is a solid source of information, but who knows? Anything's possible when there's money at stake.

With plenty of cheap shale gas

It's always cheap until the externalities get figured in. We thought coal was cheap until we started paying the price as a society for increased crime, increased poverty, increased health costs from mercury everywhere (also, the mercury in gasoline). Mining country won't be normal for several more generations to come thanks to King Coal. You know who never pays the cost for these "cheap" sources of energy? The people who profit the most from them.

Now, the "clean, safe, and too cheap to meter" fuel du jour is "shale" and "fracking". Until we start talking about the real cost of things, any discussion of the way we get energy will be seriously defective and we'll keep screwing up.

The neurological effects of mercury were not understood hundreds of years ago, nor did people understand that burning coal emitted it. So their behavior was out of ignorance. We know far more today, so China's emissions are not as excusable

The long term negative economic and health effects of coal have been known about in the US for at least a few decades, and besides some cosmetic changes and this public relations "scrubbers!" effort, we haven't done a thing about it. In fact , our government has done everything it can do hide the fact that people are being poisoned across generations with mercury, because so many energy execs and owners, including certain coal-country billionaire siblings are big contributors, for and against politicians.

Instead, senior Bush officials suppressed and sought to manipulate government information about mercury contained in an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report on children's health and the environment. As the EPA readied the report for completion in May 2002, the White House Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) began a lengthy review of the document. In February 2003, after nine months of delay by the White House, a frustrated EPA official leaked the draft report to the Wall Street Journal, including its finding that eight percent of women between the ages of 16 and 49 have mercury levels in the blood that could lead to reduced IQ and motor skills in their offspring.[3]

http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/abuses_of_science/mercury-emissions.html