You just described pretty much every superhero movie.

I think he described pretty much every movie. Most of everything is crap.

The fact that there's actually been decent superhero movies in a genre with so few total films suggests that it's probably at or above average in terms of "percentage of films in genre that are worthwhile". I mean, if "will you remember it in five years" is the criteria, what percentage of romantic comedies are worthwhile films? What percentage of action movies in general? As I said elsewhere in this thread, it's easy to say "Hollywood, make good movies", but it's not like anyone is trying to do something else (well... maybe a few are). Certainly there may be genres you personally prefer, but that's not a reflector of general value - and certain niches like crowd friendly action are going to get filled by something.

And you're in pretty choppy water if you want to pick good movies based on general story ideas (like, having a superhero). I mean, if you look at the surface plot and setting, is there really much daylight between "Easy Virtue" and "The Importance of Being Earnest (2002)"? Heck, they even both have Colin Firth. And yet one is painful, unwatchable garbage and the other was a pleasant, funny gem. You have to take the good with the bad in any genre or setting.

Similarly, do you really want to disqualify "The Watchmen" (which was close to being very good) because "Spiderman III" was garbage? How many horrible space action movies are there to balance out "Empire Strikes Back"? How many crappy Crime Noir type films are there to balance out "Maltese Falcon"? Maybe there hasn't been a great superhero movie yet (I didn't think "Dark Knight" was great), but there's been several that have been perfectly fine.

There will be good and bad movies. Personally, I'm happier with comic book movies being the "normal summer fare" than some of the crap they replaced (think "Armageddon").

I think the exact opposite complaint has more merit - most good movies are based on published books, history, plays, previous movies, or something. Sure there are exceptions (and clearly some very big ones), but I'd say that in general Hollywood does better when it isn't "coming up with something original".

And if it's comic books you have a problem with, I'll partially agree with you... but also largely disagree. Sure there's been some bad ones, but if we restrict ourselves to action movies, I'd say the comic book films probably average out to "above average action movies". I'd certainly take "X-Men: First Class" over "Congo" (based on a book, with real chapters!) or "The Fast and the Furious" (which was "Hollywood doing something original"). And even outside of "action", I'd rather rub gravel into my forehead than watch, say, "Random Hearts" (based on a critically acclaimed novel by Warren Adler, I see) - one of the worst films I've ever tried to watch.

Sure I'd be happy to replace "Green Lantern" with another "The Seventh Seal" - but that's effectively saying "why doesn't Hollywood stop making bad movies and just make good ones". That is just not a helpful thing to say. Hollywood makes all kinds of movies, usually bad but sometimes good in all genres and niches. In general, I'd say there's more quality movies per year pretty much every year - and movies in most genres are getting continuously better (look at, say, kid's animated films and compare the "best list" between the 1980s and the 2000s).

And, yes, comic book movies too have stretched into "good movie" territory. "Dark Knight" was pretty watchable, and I thought "The Watchmen" (while panned in many quarters) was visually interesting and had a lot of redeeming qualities. And suppose they did quit comic book movies, what would they do for mass market summer movies? You miss "original" stuff like "Armageddon"? Sure, I'd love another "Raiders of the Lost Ark" too - but, again, it's not helpful to say you want good movies. Most people in Hollywood want to make good movies too - but whether they do so is a function of talent, effort and luck, not genre.

Every XBL Indie Games release has to have a free demo (and they give you help in the platform API to manage locked features/time-limiting/etc.. they did have some good ideas with this platform). You never have to buy a game sight unseen.

But you're right anyways.

Why? Because after a while, people aren't just unwilling to pay for a game. If the games are bad enough - and XBL Indie Games is a perfect platform for displaying how bad games can be - people will become unwilling to even browse titles. So, yes, any metric that could be used to filter out ridiculous chaff would be very helpful to the platform.

Yes - I'm sure they had a few minutes in the sun before they got pushed off by "XBox Massage Master" and "Avatar Tic-Tac-Toe: THE ADVENTURE BEGINS chapter 1 by PandaStar Studio in co-operation with JohnnyFyre".

Yes. Most everyone with an XBox and non-infinite time (at least among people I know) has given up even scrolling over to the Indie Games new releases. Anytime I've heard Indie Games discussed among developers, it has been in the context of "How can I get out of the Indie Games ghetto and into the regular Arcade games where someone might give the game a try?"

You don't have to be lazy or uninformed to get tired of checking Indie Games. I have regretted it every time I've bothered to download something. A game has to be pretty bad before I resent the 5 minutes it took to check it out... and they've been consistently that bad.

I wandered through the thread for a while to confirm someone had the right answer.

If this was a comparison between "proper" XBox arcade games and Steam, then it would mean something. But "Indie Games" is a wasteland (because of no quality control or promotion of quality games), and none of the XBox owners I know have bothered to look there for a long time.

There's a strong, justified assumption that if something is in "Indie Games", it's trash. MS need to give some attention to helping promote and discover good games, or else Indie Games will continue to wither (despite, reasonably good tools and technology).

It's not that simple. This outage also affected developers attempting to run their own code on their own development devices. That's not malware prevention (which can be served by limiting access to "App Stores" or something, like other competitors do). RIM is clearly concerned with platform control beyond any malware concerns - it's a kind of DRM.

This story made a lot more sense when it was about Silverlight. HTML5+Script does a lot of what Silverlight is meant to do, and it thus makes sense Silverlight is going to get less love.

However, HTML5+Script doesn't replace the other roles .NET has in the MS dev plan, which is basically everything else: random desktop apps, services, database-integrated software, server-side web stuff. That last one might seem like the closest, but even then it makes sense for MS to leave the server side mostly the same, but just change how it works on the client side.

MS has certainly dumped developers before - and I fully expect them to screw over Silverlight developers - but .NET is a reasonable framework, the bulk of which is not replaced by HTML5+Script. Even as someone who's fairly skeptical about MS, I find it very unlikely we'll see a major shift from .NET in the next 5 years.

Sorry everyone for wasted space - but that was a beautiful comparison, perfectly summing up my thoughts as I've listened to advocates of different methodologies over the years.

You can't write good direct x code even if they did manage to provide a JS wrapper. .net is here to stay.

You know another place you can't write good DirectX code? .NET. Well, at least ever since they killed MDX.

You're right in that there's no reason to believe MS is dumping .NET in general - but people using it to do XNA Game Studio stuff is hardly the core thing MS is going to be worried about.

Office Office is going to remain .NET

Office is not written in .NET. Unless they've made a very big change, it's written in C++, probably with a lot of MFC. ...you could still release cross platform .NET applications.

Lol, cross platform .NET applications. Also, do you remember .NET controls hosted directly in IE? Neither does MS, despite pushing them for a while. And despite the fact that they had a reasonable security model for trusted interactions (unlike Silverlight).

If anyone thinks Silverlight isn't going to be a part of IE10 in some capacity they've lost their minds

Silverlight will probably be supported for a while, but it will slowly get worse. Just like ActiveX. Just like IE-hosted .NET controls. Just like some of the "browser re-use" components (things like custom print templates, and DHTML editing). You're probably too young, but at one point, ActiveX was the egg nog that was in all MS goat milk. Then it wasn't cool. Then it started having problems. Now it's an afterthought that doesn't work and with an incomprehensible magic security model.

Silverlight will be the same. We're an MS shop, but we didn't drink any of the Silverlight Kool-aid, because it was clearly a tech that wouldn't last. It just didn't bring much to the table. Unless it finds a much better home in mobile or something, it will slowly wither away. .NET itself should remain for a good while, though. It's a decent framework.

There's quite a few people making $300k - both in the financial industry, and on the upper shelf at any big software company (MS, Google, Apple, Valve, etc..). I don't have statistics, but I've run into quite a few online or at events - certainly not nepotism types or "legacy knowledge ransom holders", just very strong programmers that have accomplished things and proven their value over time.

At my company, there's people making $75k with no significant formal education. A+ doesn't seem to have any penetration here, but we have a lot of people taking 1-2 year certificate type programs and that could certainly expect $75k after a few successful years. In fact, we quite often interview people who won't accept that little despite not having huge amounts of education or experience (and, sadly often, failing the programming exercise).

The account seems pretty clear that the intention was to crash one, to prove to the US military that they (the Russians) could cause a nation-wide UFO scare.

To cause a scare, why not, uh, let their UFO get caught flying on film (hopefully doing things that only their advanced aircraft could do). Again, if I was trying to fake this, I'd do it at night with a formation of planes (thus appearing larger than a plane could be, or - using tricks of perspective and a formation moving faster than planes could move). Crashing one proves only one thing: that they couldn't fake a crash site well enough to fool anyone. How do I know their crash evidence wouldn't be good enough to fool anyone? Because you still couldn't do a crash that would fool anyone, at least not by starting with a plane that could fly in that era and a human pilot.

Flying disk technology was considered advanced technology in that day, as flying wing technology was still being tested.

If you're trying to make a good crash site - why make it fly at all? Again, if I was doing a fake crash site, I'd leave out the human (which is an obvious, stupid tell that only a fantastic moron would think of or try) and just have a big disk with layers of odd metal. Have a bunch of magnets, glass spheres, crystals, long antennas made of strange plastic, and generally weird crap in there, all intricate and incomprehensible. Then drop the whole deal out of a plane.

Again, the starting plot doesn't make any sense, and requires a lot of commitment for something that obviously wasn't going to do anything (at least not anything more than just flying around a weather balloon would).

I'm not saying my stupid ideas would work either. But they at least aren't guaranteed not to work (as this stupid, stupid plan would be), and they have some hope of not being discovered in an embarrassing way. Give the Russians some credit - if they'd wanted to do something like this (which they, uh, wouldn't because it's a fantastically dumb goal to start with) then they could have come up with something much better.

This narrative doesn't make sense for any of the players involved. The only way you see the plastic-surgeried child pilot is if you're deliberately crashing the thing - at which point it is clear to the people picking it up it's "normal" technology and the child is clearly a clumsily mutilated (even modern plastic surgery is not going to conceal this kind of thing) human. It would have also been immediately clear who did it, why it isn't scary aliens, and it would have been reasonably hard to do (requires launching a plane deep into the US). It also wouldn't make much sense to keep secret - the message is simple: the Russians are weird douchebags who sent a over a plane with a dead kid.

Contrast that with another, significantly-less-crazy-but-still-pretty-crazy plan that could have actually worked: Have a weird formation of small planes with blinking lights. Send them around at night to New York. If you want, maybe blow up the Statue of Liberty with an unconventional mix of explosives while shining a big light on it or something. Get a whole bunch of weird coincidence stuff going too, broadcast strange radio messages and have it happen in correspondence with some astrological phenomenon. Then get out real fast before they can find your planes, and see that they have conventional propulsion systems and human pilots.

Anyways, I'm sure you or I could do better than the above stupid plan with a little time to think it out (heck, a rope and a cornfield works pretty good). Imagining that the Russians, with plenty of time to think through a plan that required significant commitment, couldn't do better than mutilated kid crashing a plane in the desert... is just so very dumb. I think the only people dumb enough to accept it would be the morons who already have an "explanation" (ie. those who believe it was aliens).

I realise that I cannot get an interference fringe by throwing cricket balls through slits at a screen

You can, it's just not probable. For small numbers of bits, the distribution is going to be 1s and 0s. As we add more bits, we're going to get a sums in the middle - and with large numbers of bits (as in our ball) we're going to get stuck at .5. I can certainly see the guy's argument that specially constructed large scale objects could create thresholds, meaning that we see the 1s and 0s again instead of the default aggregate. (My brain is very tired, hopefully that made some sense).