This has already been brought up (here: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12520 ), but I think it deserves its own topic.
Today I googled BizHawk. It appears that is already the name of some kind of email marketing (spam?) firm:
http://www.bizhawk.com/
and a business convention of some sort:
http://www.facebook.com/bizhawk
Because of this, and because I don't see what "biz" has to do with emulators (it is usually short for "business"), I would ask the developers to please reconsider renaming the emulator. It would be sad to see it mixed up with some spam firm or business convention, and a unique name makes it easier for people to find. Can we agree on that much? All in favor say Aye.
If you (developers) want suggestions for a new name, I am sure that could be supplied by the community. Feel free to post below. Names ending in/related to hawks are preferred, to not change the icon and derivates such as NesHawk etc.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Why bother with such a topic? Your arguments are worthless, the developers picked a name and they're sticking with it.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
yeah, Adelikat won’t listen to anybody else’s opinion
I have no idea what “biz” was supposed to mean, but before you brought out the “business” point I didn’t feel like it was either bad nor good, but now I think it’s bad
“business” won’t get out of my mind
Not sure what you're trying to say, but, probably not, at least when it comes to emulators. "Genecyst" is arguable though. Bloodlust Software, the maker of both emulators, did have a strange sense of humor.
Why does this have to be the case? They made the emulator for the community, for us. Shouldn't our opinion matter?! Do we as users who frequent the site not matter at all to them??
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11478
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
I like EmuHawk very much. Consonant with "tomahawk" and really has much to do with emulation. But there's an objection.
An animal made of Emu & Hawk must look really crazy. So TASHawk isn't assotiated with ostriches and looks better.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Why bother with such a topic? Your arguments are worthless, the developers picked a name and they're sticking with it.
Why does this have to be the case? They made the emulator for the community, for us. Shouldn't our opinion matter?! Do we as users who frequent the site not matter at all to them??
Why are you using logic here? The authors of the emulator are not interested in your opinion or arguments on such matters.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
CoolKirby wrote:
Nach wrote:
Why are you using logic here? The authors of the emulator are not interested in your opinion or arguments on such matters.
Why are they not open to our opinion though? Why do they disregard a majority of the community's opinion??
That is a good question, one which I don't have a good answer for.
I could speculate, but I'd rather not.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
It's like they're totally disrespecting our whole community and the opinion of the majority of the users here. How many people are going to want to use an emulator named BizHawk, and how many casual gamers want to make movie files with the extension ".tas"??
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
CoolKirby wrote:
It's like they're totally disrespecting our whole community and the opinion of the majority of the users here. How many people are going to want to use an emulator named BizHawk, and how many casual gamers want to make movie files with the extension ".tas"??
All good points. But Bizhawk is by adelikat and zeromus, which is our community.
You can see zeromus's response above. It should be obvious arguing about this will get you nowhere.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
It's like they're totally disrespecting our whole community and the opinion of the majority of the users here. How many people are going to want to use an emulator named BizHawk, and how many casual gamers want to make movie files with the extension ".tas"??
They're disrespecting the community by not naming the emulator exactly what the community wants? Frankly, i would say the opposite is true. They have every right to name it anything they want, no matter how much everyone hates or, or thinks it's stupid.
I will agree on .tas, but seriously, the name is up to them.
Shouldn't our opinion matter?!
No more than you're opinion on the name of captain crunch.
I strongly vote down the name TASHawk. StarHawk is cool, EmuHawk is probably better, and BizHawk is acceptable. I will never support the name .tas, though.
It's like they're totally disrespecting our whole community and the opinion of the majority of the users here.
This post is actually quite disrespectful to the authors of the emulator. This isn't the workbench. BizHawk is NOT part of tasvideos, and should be treated as such.
CoolKirby wrote:
They made the emulator for the community, for us.
No, no they did not. They made it for themselves. I have no idea where you got this idea, but it seems fairly selfish. zeromus made the emulator to improve his knowledge about how the NES works. adelikat is working to become a better coder, to increase his job opportunities.
There are 3 major developers, zeromus, vecna, and adelikat. Only 1/3rd of them are actually 'Staff' of tasvideos. zeromus is only partially active here, never TASes, and really doesn't care for them. He helps on TASing emulators, but that isn't his main focus. We should be thankful for the time he does spend - PSXjin, for example, is a far improvement over PCSXrr, thanks in great part to him.
So, only 1/3rd has any responsibility to this community; however, just because he is staff here, doesn't mean everything he does belongs to the tasvideos community. Are you going to suggest that we get to name adelikat's next child as well? Or do we all get to vote on what jobs he is allowed to take?
CoolKirby wrote:
It's like they're totally disrespecting our whole community and the opinion of the majority of the users here. How many people are going to want to use an emulator named BizHawk, and how many casual gamers want to make movie files with the extension ".tas"??
You really would not use an emulator because of its name? It isn't sexually suggestive. Nor is it racist, offensive, or otherwise negative. I fail to see how it deeply offends you.
In short, if none of the developers were attached to TASvideos, you wouldn't be complaining about it. However, you feel that adelikat's position here makes you free to somehow inflict community control on his outside, but related, project.
Sage advice from a friend of Jim: So put your tinfoil hat back in the closet, open your eyes to the truth, and realize that the government is in fact causing austismal cancer with it's 9/11 fluoride vaccinations of your water supply.
This post is actually quite disrespectful to the authors of the emulator. This isn't the workbench. It is NOT part of tasvideos, and should be treated as such.
I voted no for the name change because they can do whatever they want. But in my opinion if that is the case that they are doing this for themselves and not for this community then, due to the very incomplete state that it is in in relation to some other emulators, I think it shouldn't be listed as the preferred emulator for so many systems and should not have its position as first emulator listed on emulators forum section. Either it is "The emulator of the community" where it should be getting preferential treatment even though it is not nearly complete and they should consider the opinions of the community, or if it is not then it shouldn't be listed as the first forum topic on emulators and listed as a preferred emulator yet.
Again, just my opinion. I would be pissed if someone tried to regulate a project I was doing for fun or myself so they don't have to change the name.
Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
(3573)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4754
Location: Tennessee
To clarify on some things DarkKobold said.
Vecna actually does have one published movie, and a mild interest in TASing, but his primary focus in Bizhawk is core accuracy and not writing GPL code.
Zeromus is a very valuable person to our community, more than most people realize. But he's not a TASer, and only has a passing interest in anything we do. He likes writing emulators. His interest in bizhawk is to not have to fix 1223235 poopy emulators with poopy code, and work on a good codebase inest.
My interest in bizHawk is my vision of it being a universial emulator for TASVideos. The community and the benefits of the emulator to the community are my priority here. As such, I'm the one who implemented rerecording, countless tools, and feautres, and focused on a UI that I felt benefited average users as well as TASers.
When it comes to the needs to the community, all three of us have actually been listening and done a lot since its release only 3 weeks ago to accommodate complaints, and fix bugs.
However, I would ask that in return for the effort we put in, that we at least due respect to name our work the way we please. Most everything about the emulator could be democratic rule, but give us that at least. No disrespect is intended by keeping the name of the emulator we wrote the same. Personally I think it is a bad move to rename an emulator at this point. And you have to understand that you've been calling it BizHawk for 3 weeks. We've been calling it that for about 21 months. Its grown on me, and I can't imagine it being called anything else!
Well, other than the name, some people object to the movie extension, .tas.
Can there be a compromise, like have the emulator accept 2 different extensions, similar to how Hourglass can recognize the extension .hgm and .wtf (.HourGlass Movie and .Windows TAS File respectively)?
I do think the name is silly, but for me not offensively so. I don't care if it's changed as long as it's top result on Google.
I also want to address some things said here.
DarkKobold wrote:
No, no they did not [make it for the community].
[...]
BizHawk is NOT part of tasvideos, and should be treated as such.
I haven't been following closely, but what were the plans for BH being the official emulator of TASVideos and gradually ousting all/most other rerecording emulators used here about? Is that still relevant? Because these ideologies don't mix well.
(Btw, "such" in your line refers to "part of TASVideos"; you probably meant to say "shouldn't be treated as such".)
Nach wrote:
Your arguments are worthless
Thanks Nach, that's exactly the reassuring thing we all wanted to hear.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
I haven't been following closely, but what were the plans for BH being the official emulator of TASVideos and gradually ousting all/most other rerecording emulators used here about? Is that still relevant? Because these ideologies don't mix well.
This is somewhat jarring to me as well. If you're pushing a product to an existing userbase, shouldn't you try to reason with said userbase? If this was "just another emulator" I don't think anyone would have objected much.
Also, silencing complaints (even when trivial) with 'not going to change, shut up' isn't really fostering a creative environment. There's also the thing with ROM databases that didn't seem very user friendly to me.
I haven't followed this closely either and anyway, I mostly just lurk.
"Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your home."
( Pratchett & Gaiman: Good Omens )
I just want to simply state: there's a community here, and if you don't work with the community, it will simply go elsewhere. Recent actions have served to alienate parts of the community, and the reactions from some staff members seem to indicate that there's no possibility of compromise. I mean, how much bickering and arguing did it take for us to relax the language version rule? There should be more room for compromise at the top here, and perhaps a little focus on the people that frequent this place wouldn't be a bad thing either.
If you want people to use this emulator, then take us gently, and not by force. Getting feedback and suggestions isn't a bad thing, however much it may irritate you at first, user input is always a good thing.
Oh, that would be a lot more simple if the community wasn't so uneven in its preferences in the first place. If you make a divisive decision it always has the potential to benefit some and fuck over the rest.
What everything seems to prefer, however, is for such decisions to be taken respectfully; i.e. with much consideration and constructive dialog on both sides. None of this "don't bother; your arguments don't matter" bullshit, have some bloody shame.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.