The problem here, and also the problem in a lot of other cases where people tyr to ban games/movies, is that those who are demonizing these games, have no idea of what they are actually about. From what I have read about "Bully", the game is about making choices, not about murdering your classmates. The player is confronted with many common schoolyard situations and has to make the choice to either take the high road, or the low road. Furthermore, if one does take the low road and decide to harm his/her peers, bad things will follow. You are punished, people think you're a dick and don't want to be your friend, etc. Does this sound familiar? Possibly to what happens in real life? Given, the audience here at slashdot, I'm sure many of us were picked on by bullies during school. Where are we now, and where are the bullies? In my situation, I have a well paying job and a college degree from a well respected university, and one of my bullies is barely a high school graduate working at a supermarket and going nowhere. I think this game reflects this pretty well, from what I've been told. Also, Thompson claims this game is a "Columbine Simulator" yet I remember reading that there are NO GUNS featured in the game. The closest thing is a bat.
Addressing the bigger picture, we often see this with movies time and time again. Some titles that come to mind that were very controversial BEFORE being released: "Bubble Boy"(don't make fun of immune deficiacy people), "Saved" (don't let people know how self-righteous and hypocritical fund. christians are), "The Ringer" (don't make fun of the special olympics) and the list goes on. All of which were chastized for one reason or another, because they allegedly made fun of a group of one group or the other. Most of these groups were going off of previews and had not actually seen the movies, or talked to anyone involved in it like a director to find out exactly where this movie goes with the controversial topic. How can one disagree with a movie you have not seen!!!!!!!??????
A similar story I saw on Digg was that a man wants to ban "Fahrenheit 451" (yes that's right the book by Ray Bradbury about book burning) from his Texas school distric because his daughter told him that there was foul language and innappropriate material. He confirmed his daughter's claims not by reading the book himself (oh no heaven forbid), but rather by thumbing through the pages to the parts that had the innappropriate material outside of their context. Just for that reason I decided to pick up the book and start reading it. Honestly, although I'm only about halfway through, I have not found anything in the least bit offensive, in or out of context (although i'm hoping for a steamy sex scene in the second half of the book).
All I've been reading so far is how awesome Sirius is and how much Stern sucks. Now I've never been a huge fan of Stern (for some reason I don't get too much enjoyment out of him asking every woman who walks into the studio to take their top off and then listen to him ooh and awe and remark on "that broad's sweet cans"), but want to bitch about is Sirius. When I bought a new car, it came with Sirius and a trial of its service. For a good 4 months, I listened to Sirius off and on and was utterly dissapointed. Now I am fully aware that this was a limited trial and I only had about 10 stations (not including Howard) but my biggest gripe was with the QUALITY OF SERVICE! Maybe it's just me, but I found that the audio quality was much WORSE THAN FM! I had heard others describe Sirius as being "tinny", and that's exactly what I heard when I turned on my stereo for the first time. No matter how much I tweaked the stereo, it always sounded like the treble was turned all the way up. For talk this doesn't matter, but for music, I want that full range of sound that pumps your chest (not for some shitty hip hop song, but for wicked double bass drum work and kick-ass basslines). Furthermore, whenever I went through an area with a lot of trees, or under an overpass, or through a tunnel, my signal dissapeared. Sitting in traffic under an overpass? Well you won't be able to pass the time listening to Sirius. All you can do is stare at the "Linking..." message on the display. I'm sick and tired of people singing the praises of satelite when it is clear there is still a lot of progress that needs to be made as far as the technology is concerned. If I'm even going to pay for radio service, I damn well expect it to sound better then anything I've heard and it better not stop playing because I drove past a couple trees. Eventually, my trial subscription expired and it was at least a month before I noticed. I had Sirius, and I did go back to "terrestrial" (btw, I hate how Howard Stern "invented" the term just so he can make satelite "radio"[cause it's not really a radio frequency if it's sent by satelites] sound so much superiorAs long as it is free of commercials, I'd much rather go with HD Radio, something based on a technology that is not dependant on line-of-sight to reach my receiver.
Sorry that was quite a rant, but I just had to get it off my chest.
You have to LET the industry take over
on
IT and Divorce?
·
· Score: 1
I will start off by saying that I am not married, have never been married and do not have any kids. With that in mind, I have recently began my career in IT consulting. On my first project with the company, I was working with a fairly large team, majority of which were married. I also noticed a lot of them from time to time were having trouble with their spouses that seemed to be related directly to the current project. This project was on it's tail end with deadlines looming, then passing with an extension, lather, rinse, repeat (I think we've all been there). Many a day, many, if not all of us were on the client site long after 5pm (my personal record is 2am) and even coming in on weekends. Many shared that their spouses were unhappy with their hours. The thing is though, that most of them did it to themselves. When the project manager said "we need this done by monday," most of them said, "OK, i'll just go cancel my flight home and work straight through the weekend." It wasn't very often that they said, "I understand the time constraints, but I need to spend the weekend with the family, is their any way this can be pushed." The funny thing is, when a bunch of us did try to push back on the boss, we were able to at least reach a compromise that gave us more personal time.
If you don't make an effort to keep your personal life, or make the time for family, you won't have the time for the family and the family will resent this. If you push back on your supervisors, most of the time they will try to work with you to come up with a solution that works for everyone (This is what makes good managers).
With the exception of the xBox, Microsoft really doesn't know anything about consumer electronics
Actually, the XBOX still has not made any money, and probably never will because they chose to sell it at a loss. They expected to make up the difference in game sales, but that hasn't really worked out too well. This was a pretty stupid move on their part. XBOXes are NOT printers. They do not REQUIRE you to purchase supplies on a regular basis in order for it to continue to function. With a printer, you HAVE to buy cartidges when they run out, and 90% of the time, the consumer buys the cartridge made by the same company who made their printer (HP cartridges for HP printers). And furthermore, some of those printer companies also sell paper. Not everyone buys that brand, but it's out there and many do. The XBOX on the other hand, is relying on the purchase of games. Yes you do need to buy at least one game (unless one comes bundled) to use the thing, and yes most people will buy more than one game, but there is nothing forcing them to buy the games on a regular basis. When a great new game comes out, many will buy, but not everyone, and most of the games' revenue will go to the company that produced the game, NOT Microsoft.
With marketing prowess like this, it's very unlikely that they will be able to compete with Apple.
Having recently graduated from college, and having friends who have attended a multitude of other colleges, I have noticed that content blocking is very rare. The only blocking I have heard of with some schools, was to block file sharing programs. Not quite sure if they just blocked the sites to download them, or blocked the protocols, or what, but this was all roughly four years ago when Kazaa and the like were hitting peak usage. Schools were getting sued and campus networks were swamped with traffic. Another answer to the file share problem at one particular university was to implement bandwidth quotas. No individual could exceed xGb up or down within a given time frame. Recently, the girlfriends college started messing with AIM use on campus(not fully sure what they were doing), probably to prevent virus. I was lucky enough to have completely unfettered web access and am very greatful for it.
When it comes to blocking "questionable" content as seems to be the case with you, I have not heard of this practice, at least among most east coast colleges. I for one think it is a bad road for a higher education institution to walk down. Colleges and Universities are about education in all its forms. They are also for students that are usually legal adults and are mature enough to use their own discretion for what web sites they visit. Blocking P2P sites cause you don't want to get sued, or limiting bandwidth for the sake of keeping the network usable are perfectly legitimate practices in my book (as annoying as they may be). But colleges and universities should by no means censor web content and do not let them tell you that it is a common practice among the colleges and universities.
Actually, on the official SPAM web site, there is actually a link to the official Spamalot web site. I guess the people at Hormel Foods do have a sense of humor.
90% of all DVD's I viewed during my four years of college were viewed on a laptop connected to the TV. I would like to find whoever thought up this "brilliant" idea and punch him in the face. It is this kind of complete disrespect for the consumer that leads piracy. Why did I download illegal mp3's? Because the record companies were ripping me off and I couldn't afford $20 for a CD. Why will people continue to pirate movies? Because the DVD distributers want restrict when, where and on what the movie can be viewed. This is unacceptable.
You've hit the nail right on the head! First we hear that the desktop computer is doomed (not bloody likely, but significance will inevitably shrink) so now we're to believe that the datacenter (when combined with thin clinets/web services/web apps is the antithesis of the desktop) is doomed as well? The fact of the matter is, the communications infrastructure is becoming mature enough that thin clients are going to be more enticing and with that means more hosted services. And what is behind all of these hosted services? Why a DATACENTER of course! If i'm using a thin client with no hard drive and very little processing power, my files are stored remotely with a data storage company (who has a giant datacenter consisting primarily of file servers/SANS/NAS or what have you). The online applications I'm using are run by an ASP (who has a datacenter filled with application servers). Am I the only one who read this article posting and said WTF!!???
I think Ballmer is referring more to the early beginnings of the iPod, before there were widespread legit downloadable music stores (Such as iTunes). Essentially, all the iPod is, is a mini hard drive with a display on it. What makes it an iPod is the software on this hard drive that gives you the ability to play mp3's, and now video. However, since this is a current interview, Ballmer is completely behind the curve in his thinking. You are absolutely correct in that it is all about content these days. It's why iTunes is so profitable and it is what cable companies and telecom companies are fighting about with internet tv. He who controls the content controls everything.
Wal-Mart and Target and stores like them should not be too worried at this point. At the moment, not many people are purchasing their movies via download. For most, downloading an entire DVD is an extremely time consuming process even with cable or dsl. The average broadband connection will take hours to download a full movie and all of its extras. Then on top of this, there is the "last ten feet" problem. For most consumers, they want to play it in their living room. Most consumers do not have a MythTV box with an NFS share to the desktop pc in the office, so they will want to burn the movie to a DVD to play on their DVD Player. For most, this may require more than one try, resulting in more than one coaster, and let's just hope that they burned the correct DVD format (DVD+R, DVD-R, etc.) to work on their player. Most consumers will still find it much easier to go to the store and pick up the DVD with all of it's packaging and not have to worry about all of the above. Instant gratification. Furthermore, they are probably going to be at Wal-Mart to pick up other products anyway, so it's no inconvenience to get to the store in the first place.
Regardless, the brick and mortars have no right to complain about the pricing difference. $2 is not significant and is actually a pretty good deal when you consider how much cheaper it is to distribute a digital copy over the internet compared to producing disks with packaging etc, plus the stores distribution overhead.
If so close, then why even wireless?
on
HP's Memory Spot Chip
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The chip can only be read at a distance of 1 mm, so it avoids many of the privacy concerns of RFID.
If they are going to make it so that you have to be 1mm away to read the signal, then why not just make a contact point and do away with the wireless function all together. This would truly avoid the privacy concerns and would function just the same. What's 1 more milimeter of distance anyway?
It seems everything these days needs to be wireless in order to be considered a hot new item. This is like making a "contactless pen." Instead of having to press the pen against the paper to write, you can hover the pen less than 1mm away from the paper.
"More than half a million computer users have installed Vista test software, and 450,000 of the systems have sent crash data back to Microsoft."
The problem with this statistic is that it is almost meaningless without more information. No real conclusion can be drawn. This could mean a number of different things. For instance:
* Vista could have one bug (and only one) that all of the systems encountered and successfully reported
* Same as above, but the conclusion drawn is that Vista 5ux0rz cause it has a huge bug
* Vista has 450,000 different bugs, each system reporting a different bug
* One system crashed 450,000 times and reported each time and the facts were skewed into calling each report a unique system.
The possibilites are endless. Journalists really need to start providing statistics that actually add value to the article rather than adding more mud (or FUD?) to the water.
Care to elaborate on this? I don't really see how google being in discussions to buy YouTube has anything to do with MySpace or News Corp or any kind of scams. Although I may be missing something here. But for future reference, please don't make crazy claims without providing any reasoning or facts to back it up.
I agree with the parent, but the idea of MySpace being a tool and not just the latest teen social fad goes much bigger than just being a band advertisement. Now we are seeing movies and TV shows using MySpace for marketing purposes as well. And these are not independent movies or public access shows either, these are Hollywood blockbusters and network television shows. Now I don't have a MySpace account and I am not familiar with their usage agreement (if there is one), but if I understand this correctly, these movies, bands, tv shows all have FREE webspace that is practically pre-designed (so very little effort goes into the creation) and they have a vast network of people to advertise to and also measure things like buzz and hype associated with the product. How soon until we start seeing other consumer products with their own MySpace pages? Anyone else want to be Microsoft Windows Vista's "friend"?
Slashdot Mirror
unfortunately, I think Jack's got prior art :(
The problem here, and also the problem in a lot of other cases where people tyr to ban games/movies, is that those who are demonizing these games, have no idea of what they are actually about. From what I have read about "Bully", the game is about making choices, not about murdering your classmates. The player is confronted with many common schoolyard situations and has to make the choice to either take the high road, or the low road. Furthermore, if one does take the low road and decide to harm his/her peers, bad things will follow. You are punished, people think you're a dick and don't want to be your friend, etc. Does this sound familiar? Possibly to what happens in real life? Given, the audience here at slashdot, I'm sure many of us were picked on by bullies during school. Where are we now, and where are the bullies? In my situation, I have a well paying job and a college degree from a well respected university, and one of my bullies is barely a high school graduate working at a supermarket and going nowhere. I think this game reflects this pretty well, from what I've been told. Also, Thompson claims this game is a "Columbine Simulator" yet I remember reading that there are NO GUNS featured in the game. The closest thing is a bat.
Addressing the bigger picture, we often see this with movies time and time again. Some titles that come to mind that were very controversial BEFORE being released: "Bubble Boy"(don't make fun of immune deficiacy people), "Saved" (don't let people know how self-righteous and hypocritical fund. christians are), "The Ringer" (don't make fun of the special olympics) and the list goes on. All of which were chastized for one reason or another, because they allegedly made fun of a group of one group or the other. Most of these groups were going off of previews and had not actually seen the movies, or talked to anyone involved in it like a director to find out exactly where this movie goes with the controversial topic. How can one disagree with a movie you have not seen!!!!!!!??????
A similar story I saw on Digg was that a man wants to ban "Fahrenheit 451" (yes that's right the book by Ray Bradbury about book burning) from his Texas school distric because his daughter told him that there was foul language and innappropriate material. He confirmed his daughter's claims not by reading the book himself (oh no heaven forbid), but rather by thumbing through the pages to the parts that had the innappropriate material outside of their context. Just for that reason I decided to pick up the book and start reading it. Honestly, although I'm only about halfway through, I have not found anything in the least bit offensive, in or out of context (although i'm hoping for a steamy sex scene in the second half of the book).
I hate to break it to you, but the "white" distribution has already been stolen. White Box Enterprise Linux
All I've been reading so far is how awesome Sirius is and how much Stern sucks. Now I've never been a huge fan of Stern (for some reason I don't get too much enjoyment out of him asking every woman who walks into the studio to take their top off and then listen to him ooh and awe and remark on "that broad's sweet cans"), but want to bitch about is Sirius. When I bought a new car, it came with Sirius and a trial of its service. For a good 4 months, I listened to Sirius off and on and was utterly dissapointed. Now I am fully aware that this was a limited trial and I only had about 10 stations (not including Howard) but my biggest gripe was with the QUALITY OF SERVICE! Maybe it's just me, but I found that the audio quality was much WORSE THAN FM! I had heard others describe Sirius as being "tinny", and that's exactly what I heard when I turned on my stereo for the first time. No matter how much I tweaked the stereo, it always sounded like the treble was turned all the way up. For talk this doesn't matter, but for music, I want that full range of sound that pumps your chest (not for some shitty hip hop song, but for wicked double bass drum work and kick-ass basslines). Furthermore, whenever I went through an area with a lot of trees, or under an overpass, or through a tunnel, my signal dissapeared. Sitting in traffic under an overpass? Well you won't be able to pass the time listening to Sirius. All you can do is stare at the "Linking..." message on the display. I'm sick and tired of people singing the praises of satelite when it is clear there is still a lot of progress that needs to be made as far as the technology is concerned. If I'm even going to pay for radio service, I damn well expect it to sound better then anything I've heard and it better not stop playing because I drove past a couple trees. Eventually, my trial subscription expired and it was at least a month before I noticed. I had Sirius, and I did go back to "terrestrial" (btw, I hate how Howard Stern "invented" the term just so he can make satelite "radio"[cause it's not really a radio frequency if it's sent by satelites] sound so much superiorAs long as it is free of commercials, I'd much rather go with HD Radio, something based on a technology that is not dependant on line-of-sight to reach my receiver.
Sorry that was quite a rant, but I just had to get it off my chest.
I will start off by saying that I am not married, have never been married and do not have any kids. With that in mind, I have recently began my career in IT consulting. On my first project with the company, I was working with a fairly large team, majority of which were married. I also noticed a lot of them from time to time were having trouble with their spouses that seemed to be related directly to the current project. This project was on it's tail end with deadlines looming, then passing with an extension, lather, rinse, repeat (I think we've all been there). Many a day, many, if not all of us were on the client site long after 5pm (my personal record is 2am) and even coming in on weekends. Many shared that their spouses were unhappy with their hours. The thing is though, that most of them did it to themselves. When the project manager said "we need this done by monday," most of them said, "OK, i'll just go cancel my flight home and work straight through the weekend." It wasn't very often that they said, "I understand the time constraints, but I need to spend the weekend with the family, is their any way this can be pushed." The funny thing is, when a bunch of us did try to push back on the boss, we were able to at least reach a compromise that gave us more personal time.
If you don't make an effort to keep your personal life, or make the time for family, you won't have the time for the family and the family will resent this. If you push back on your supervisors, most of the time they will try to work with you to come up with a solution that works for everyone (This is what makes good managers).
With marketing prowess like this, it's very unlikely that they will be able to compete with Apple.
Having recently graduated from college, and having friends who have attended a multitude of other colleges, I have noticed that content blocking is very rare. The only blocking I have heard of with some schools, was to block file sharing programs. Not quite sure if they just blocked the sites to download them, or blocked the protocols, or what, but this was all roughly four years ago when Kazaa and the like were hitting peak usage. Schools were getting sued and campus networks were swamped with traffic. Another answer to the file share problem at one particular university was to implement bandwidth quotas. No individual could exceed xGb up or down within a given time frame. Recently, the girlfriends college started messing with AIM use on campus(not fully sure what they were doing), probably to prevent virus. I was lucky enough to have completely unfettered web access and am very greatful for it.
When it comes to blocking "questionable" content as seems to be the case with you, I have not heard of this practice, at least among most east coast colleges. I for one think it is a bad road for a higher education institution to walk down. Colleges and Universities are about education in all its forms. They are also for students that are usually legal adults and are mature enough to use their own discretion for what web sites they visit. Blocking P2P sites cause you don't want to get sued, or limiting bandwidth for the sake of keeping the network usable are perfectly legitimate practices in my book (as annoying as they may be). But colleges and universities should by no means censor web content and do not let them tell you that it is a common practice among the colleges and universities.
Actually, on the official SPAM web site, there is actually a link to the official Spamalot web site. I guess the people at Hormel Foods do have a sense of humor.
90% of all DVD's I viewed during my four years of college were viewed on a laptop connected to the TV. I would like to find whoever thought up this "brilliant" idea and punch him in the face. It is this kind of complete disrespect for the consumer that leads piracy. Why did I download illegal mp3's? Because the record companies were ripping me off and I couldn't afford $20 for a CD. Why will people continue to pirate movies? Because the DVD distributers want restrict when, where and on what the movie can be viewed. This is unacceptable.
You've hit the nail right on the head! First we hear that the desktop computer is doomed (not bloody likely, but significance will inevitably shrink) so now we're to believe that the datacenter (when combined with thin clinets/web services/web apps is the antithesis of the desktop) is doomed as well? The fact of the matter is, the communications infrastructure is becoming mature enough that thin clients are going to be more enticing and with that means more hosted services. And what is behind all of these hosted services? Why a DATACENTER of course! If i'm using a thin client with no hard drive and very little processing power, my files are stored remotely with a data storage company (who has a giant datacenter consisting primarily of file servers/SANS/NAS or what have you). The online applications I'm using are run by an ASP (who has a datacenter filled with application servers). Am I the only one who read this article posting and said WTF!!???
I think Ballmer is referring more to the early beginnings of the iPod, before there were widespread legit downloadable music stores (Such as iTunes). Essentially, all the iPod is, is a mini hard drive with a display on it. What makes it an iPod is the software on this hard drive that gives you the ability to play mp3's, and now video. However, since this is a current interview, Ballmer is completely behind the curve in his thinking. You are absolutely correct in that it is all about content these days. It's why iTunes is so profitable and it is what cable companies and telecom companies are fighting about with internet tv. He who controls the content controls everything.
Wal-Mart and Target and stores like them should not be too worried at this point. At the moment, not many people are purchasing their movies via download. For most, downloading an entire DVD is an extremely time consuming process even with cable or dsl. The average broadband connection will take hours to download a full movie and all of its extras. Then on top of this, there is the "last ten feet" problem. For most consumers, they want to play it in their living room. Most consumers do not have a MythTV box with an NFS share to the desktop pc in the office, so they will want to burn the movie to a DVD to play on their DVD Player. For most, this may require more than one try, resulting in more than one coaster, and let's just hope that they burned the correct DVD format (DVD+R, DVD-R, etc.) to work on their player. Most consumers will still find it much easier to go to the store and pick up the DVD with all of it's packaging and not have to worry about all of the above. Instant gratification. Furthermore, they are probably going to be at Wal-Mart to pick up other products anyway, so it's no inconvenience to get to the store in the first place.
Regardless, the brick and mortars have no right to complain about the pricing difference. $2 is not significant and is actually a pretty good deal when you consider how much cheaper it is to distribute a digital copy over the internet compared to producing disks with packaging etc, plus the stores distribution overhead.
If they are going to make it so that you have to be 1mm away to read the signal, then why not just make a contact point and do away with the wireless function all together. This would truly avoid the privacy concerns and would function just the same. What's 1 more milimeter of distance anyway?
It seems everything these days needs to be wireless in order to be considered a hot new item. This is like making a "contactless pen." Instead of having to press the pen against the paper to write, you can hover the pen less than 1mm away from the paper.
Come on, this is Slashdot. We don't find girlfriends, we BUILD them!
The problem with this statistic is that it is almost meaningless without more information. No real conclusion can be drawn. This could mean a number of different things. For instance:
* Vista could have one bug (and only one) that all of the systems encountered and successfully reported
* Same as above, but the conclusion drawn is that Vista 5ux0rz cause it has a huge bug
* Vista has 450,000 different bugs, each system reporting a different bug
* One system crashed 450,000 times and reported each time and the facts were skewed into calling each report a unique system.
The possibilites are endless. Journalists really need to start providing statistics that actually add value to the article rather than adding more mud (or FUD?) to the water.
Care to elaborate on this? I don't really see how google being in discussions to buy YouTube has anything to do with MySpace or News Corp or any kind of scams. Although I may be missing something here. But for future reference, please don't make crazy claims without providing any reasoning or facts to back it up.
I agree with the parent, but the idea of MySpace being a tool and not just the latest teen social fad goes much bigger than just being a band advertisement. Now we are seeing movies and TV shows using MySpace for marketing purposes as well. And these are not independent movies or public access shows either, these are Hollywood blockbusters and network television shows. Now I don't have a MySpace account and I am not familiar with their usage agreement (if there is one), but if I understand this correctly, these movies, bands, tv shows all have FREE webspace that is practically pre-designed (so very little effort goes into the creation) and they have a vast network of people to advertise to and also measure things like buzz and hype associated with the product. How soon until we start seeing other consumer products with their own MySpace pages? Anyone else want to be Microsoft Windows Vista's "friend"?