It's true! The tax is something like $0.21 a CD/DVD and I believe that portable music players like ipods are also taxed. The tax rakes in a huge amount of cash too, something in the neighborhood of $150 million a year. That's equivalent to roughly $5.00 a year per Canadian citizen. I also believe the amount they take in is quite a bit more than the estimated losses due to piracy, but I am not 100% sure on that...
The reason stores like Sam go out of business is because people aren't interested in paying insane prices for albums of mostly songs they will never listen to repeatedly. The old CD and Album model is out of date, and some stores that absolutely refuse to adapt are going to suffer as a result. The fact that in the face of competition Sam the Record Man couldn't compete has nothing to do with Piracy.
For some reason that kind of surprised me. Sony is such a huge company with their music label, movies, consumer electronics, computers, video games while Nintendo is pretty much only in the gaming market. The Wii must be really selling a huge number of consoles to climb over Sony like that...
I actually think most artists underestimate how much releasing in singles would probably HELP their sales rather than hinder it. Think about it like this, I'm Artist A and I have 12 songs I've done of which 3 are really good, 5 are so so, and 5 are filler. If you release as an album, the best you can hope for is the album does well by virtue of the 3 good songs which each get a turn at the top of the charts. Releasing as singles on iTunes over time, however, you can stagger it so when you release one of the good songs, you can follow it by 2-3 of the others due to its success. You'll get tons of more people focusing on the single and grabbing it hoping it's the same quality as the first one, and by the time they start realizing not all your work is the same quality you have the next good one ready to go...
Canada needs more land. It's just a dinky little country already. It's time it made a real stab at becoming the largest country, instead of simply settling for second!
I've had the opportunity to hire a few dozen people over the years and I have to admit grades don't mean much to me. I remember a few people I graduated CS with who were really book smart and aced all the tests with great grades. I don't know if they had photographic memories or what, but they were really capable in that aspect. When it came time to course work or projects, they could do the work but they were not the best problem solvers. In fact, I remember one guy who basically had straight A's and never realized that he could make separate directories for his projects so he didn't have to uniquely name each file across all projects. My opinion would be that you'd be smarter to get out as fast as you can and continue working on things like the Open Source project. The grades may hurt you in your first job maybe, but after that it's experience that counts and your willingness to work hard and get the job done right.
I don't see why Rockstar doesn't try to leverage GTA IV in order to get this sucker released. Just got to Sony or Microsoft and tell them which ever one lets Manhunt play on their console gets something exclusive in regards to GTA IV. These big companies treat rockstar like they have the bird flu for every other game, but when it comes to the GTA series, they are bending over backwards to accomodate them.
You confusing the poor graphics of those systems with a lack of violence, there were plenty of violent games on those old machines. River City Ransom, Double Dragon, Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem. The difference is that now the systems are actually capable of creating realistic environments, but the games are just recreating the same game play you had fun with back on the old systems. I think people should have the right to decide if they want to play manhunt or not.
I was going to say the same thing. It's pretty rare that something hits Canada before it hits the US. I see these things everywhere in downtown Toronto. I think they're really popular.
No matter how hard we want to fight against it, net neutrality will eventually fall. The big providers want it to happen and the big content providers are not making a big enough stink about it to really rally the people against it. One of these days legislation will simply slip in, and then everyone on will really regret not taking more action when we had the chance.
Kind of like the situation with Global Warming is going to be:)
I disagree. Joomla is a great package, no doubt about it, but in terms of ease of extensibility and the ability to customize every aspect, Drupal has it beat hands down. I've used both in a variety of projects, and Drupal is just much easier to work with.
The actual theater I got this from was the big Paramount in downtown Toronto across from Much Music. The same day I saw it, they had ushers stationed at every single theater door doing random bag searches of film goers. Just unbelievable, since when was going to a movie on par with going to a rage against the machine concert??
We were already subjected to random search at every movie these days. Check out this flyer that now hangs ever 2 feet and above every ticket counter at every theater I've been to lately:
This will do nothing more then make the big theater chains more afraid and implement more ridiculous policies that in the end only make non-pirates stop going !
The problem is who would decide what is "doing something" and what isn't? You'd be amazed how much effort and time goes into perfecting those advertising pages or product marketing pages to generate profits. I think the system is fine as is. If you want a domain name, figure out what you want quickly and buy it before someone else does.
I have been in the same situation before and many times I've found the best way to get your ideas across is the be authoritative and not back down when you think they are making the wrong choice. That obviously depends on the type of environment you're in, but for me I find that sometimes it just takes standing up for your ideas to convince those in charge they are worth looking into.
This is hysterical. I hope Ebay and Mozilla keep dragging their feet long enough for new users to get used to the other toolbar. Once that happens, they'll almost be forced to implement some of the features just to convince people to switch.
2. Before Halo there wasn't a single decent FPS on a console, just a whole bunch of shitty ports of PC FPS games. Why does being a decent FPS on a console count as something of merit? That's like saying that the first channel broadcast live in HDTV suddenly makes it unique and special.
There were dozens of excellent FPS games for the PC long before Halo. Quake, Quake 2, Doom, The Rainbow Six Series, Unreal Tournament, Battlefield, etc etc...
Just because Halo was the first one that made use of the new system successfully doesn't make it any kind of pioneer...
While the Order of Canada is indeed prestigious to Canadian citizens, it's sometimes hard to take it 100% seriously as a huge honor when Bob and Doug Mackenzie (Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis) also received the same reward for their "contributions to Canadian Culture"
Most web hosts offer 2 packages. A windows server with.NET support and a Linux server with Apache and PHP/CGI support. Since Java support generally requires customization of Apache at the least, but most likely an alternative web server like Tomcat, the hosting providers don't even bother.
Of course you're right, but creating a system like Drupal or Joomla yourself is not exactly a small undertaking. These systems have huge user bases and hundreds of tools built to make it easy to setup a site thats perfect for your needs. To write it yourself, you would have to implement a lost of features and security just as a start, and that's not even mentioning the robust search engine optimization, templating engines and page caching.
I think the reason you don't see many Open Source Java CMS tools is due to fairly weak Java support with most Web hosting providers. Take a look at the available webhosts, and very few over support for Servlets/JSP.
I would think, on average, the most common user of a CMS system would be someone wanting to setup a small to medium website that won't require too much customization outside of the standard package. Of course, the systems available are powerful (Drupal, Plone, Joomla, Nuke), but for the most part the people using them don't need the majority of the powerful customization tools. These are also the same people who would be using Web hosting packages, and not setting up their own servers. Therefore, you have to write it in a language that is almost universally supported by web hosting providers, like PHP.
Guaranteed Gears of War and Rainbow Six 3 have increased console sales since their respective releases. I actually think the PS3 limited quantities helped Microsoft. Many of the people I saw who went to try and buy a Wii/PS3, and couldn't get one, walked away with a Gears of War XBox 360 Bundle instead, because there were plenty.
I think what the author describes is really a problem with the entire MMORPG genre and not WoW specifically. The dilemma is, how do you create content that will push the genre in a new direction while pleasing 7 million casual to hardcore gamers and keep them paying a monthly fee? While adding interesting events is definitely a good idea, it really is not feasible. Take the AQ war effort for example, an interesting WoW event that required people to contribute to unlock a new area of the game. IMHO, this feature was a complete failure because it really only appealed to a small percentage of the community. The area being unlocked required months of preparation to even be able to tackle, so immediately any casual gamer that wasn't geared from head to toe had no shot at it. The end result? The casuals did almost no work and the hardcore teams did the lions share of the war effort, so they could unlock things for themselves...
What's the moral of that story? Simply that adding dynamic and shifting content like that sounds good on paper, but adding a new multi-tiered dungeon that never changes or improving the PvP laddering system both have much wider reach and are a better use of the developers time. Adding time sinks that are repetitive and consume a players time are a better way to keep the monthly fees flowing. Thats the bottom line...
Slashdot Mirror
It's true! The tax is something like $0.21 a CD/DVD and I believe that portable music players like ipods are also taxed. The tax rakes in a huge amount of cash too, something in the neighborhood of $150 million a year. That's equivalent to roughly $5.00 a year per Canadian citizen. I also believe the amount they take in is quite a bit more than the estimated losses due to piracy, but I am not 100% sure on that...
The reason stores like Sam go out of business is because people aren't interested in paying insane prices for albums of mostly songs they will never listen to repeatedly. The old CD and Album model is out of date, and some stores that absolutely refuse to adapt are going to suffer as a result. The fact that in the face of competition Sam the Record Man couldn't compete has nothing to do with Piracy.
For some reason that kind of surprised me. Sony is such a huge company with their music label, movies, consumer electronics, computers, video games while Nintendo is pretty much only in the gaming market. The Wii must be really selling a huge number of consoles to climb over Sony like that...
I actually think most artists underestimate how much releasing in singles would probably HELP their sales rather than hinder it. Think about it like this, I'm Artist A and I have 12 songs I've done of which 3 are really good, 5 are so so, and 5 are filler. If you release as an album, the best you can hope for is the album does well by virtue of the 3 good songs which each get a turn at the top of the charts. Releasing as singles on iTunes over time, however, you can stagger it so when you release one of the good songs, you can follow it by 2-3 of the others due to its success. You'll get tons of more people focusing on the single and grabbing it hoping it's the same quality as the first one, and by the time they start realizing not all your work is the same quality you have the next good one ready to go...
Canada needs more land. It's just a dinky little country already. It's time it made a real stab at becoming the largest country, instead of simply settling for second!
I've had the opportunity to hire a few dozen people over the years and I have to admit grades don't mean much to me. I remember a few people I graduated CS with who were really book smart and aced all the tests with great grades. I don't know if they had photographic memories or what, but they were really capable in that aspect. When it came time to course work or projects, they could do the work but they were not the best problem solvers. In fact, I remember one guy who basically had straight A's and never realized that he could make separate directories for his projects so he didn't have to uniquely name each file across all projects. My opinion would be that you'd be smarter to get out as fast as you can and continue working on things like the Open Source project. The grades may hurt you in your first job maybe, but after that it's experience that counts and your willingness to work hard and get the job done right.
I don't see why Rockstar doesn't try to leverage GTA IV in order to get this sucker released. Just got to Sony or Microsoft and tell them which ever one lets Manhunt play on their console gets something exclusive in regards to GTA IV. These big companies treat rockstar like they have the bird flu for every other game, but when it comes to the GTA series, they are bending over backwards to accomodate them.
You confusing the poor graphics of those systems with a lack of violence, there were plenty of violent games on those old machines. River City Ransom, Double Dragon, Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem. The difference is that now the systems are actually capable of creating realistic environments, but the games are just recreating the same game play you had fun with back on the old systems. I think people should have the right to decide if they want to play manhunt or not.
I was going to say the same thing. It's pretty rare that something hits Canada before it hits the US. I see these things everywhere in downtown Toronto. I think they're really popular.
No matter how hard we want to fight against it, net neutrality will eventually fall. The big providers want it to happen and the big content providers are not making a big enough stink about it to really rally the people against it. One of these days legislation will simply slip in, and then everyone on will really regret not taking more action when we had the chance. Kind of like the situation with Global Warming is going to be :)
I disagree. Joomla is a great package, no doubt about it, but in terms of ease of extensibility and the ability to customize every aspect, Drupal has it beat hands down. I've used both in a variety of projects, and Drupal is just much easier to work with.
The actual theater I got this from was the big Paramount in downtown Toronto across from Much Music. The same day I saw it, they had ushers stationed at every single theater door doing random bag searches of film goers. Just unbelievable, since when was going to a movie on par with going to a rage against the machine concert??
We were already subjected to random search at every movie these days. Check out this flyer that now hangs ever 2 feet and above every ticket counter at every theater I've been to lately:
s earchconsentwr9.jpg
http://img161.imageshack.us/my.php?image=cineplex
This will do nothing more then make the big theater chains more afraid and implement more ridiculous policies that in the end only make non-pirates stop going !
The problem is who would decide what is "doing something" and what isn't? You'd be amazed how much effort and time goes into perfecting those advertising pages or product marketing pages to generate profits. I think the system is fine as is. If you want a domain name, figure out what you want quickly and buy it before someone else does.
I have been in the same situation before and many times I've found the best way to get your ideas across is the be authoritative and not back down when you think they are making the wrong choice. That obviously depends on the type of environment you're in, but for me I find that sometimes it just takes standing up for your ideas to convince those in charge they are worth looking into.
This is hysterical. I hope Ebay and Mozilla keep dragging their feet long enough for new users to get used to the other toolbar. Once that happens, they'll almost be forced to implement some of the features just to convince people to switch.
Now that the Digg Revolt is taken care of, time for all those people to find a new cause! Rally up to fight invalid MySpace Profile Takeovers!
While the Order of Canada is indeed prestigious to Canadian citizens, it's sometimes hard to take it 100% seriously as a huge honor when Bob and Doug Mackenzie (Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis) also received the same reward for their "contributions to Canadian Culture"
I read here that Matt Damon was supposedly cast as the younger Kirk...
Most web hosts offer 2 packages. A windows server with .NET support and a Linux server with Apache and PHP/CGI support. Since Java support generally requires customization of Apache at the least, but most likely an alternative web server like Tomcat, the hosting providers don't even bother.
Of course you're right, but creating a system like Drupal or Joomla yourself is not exactly a small undertaking. These systems have huge user bases and hundreds of tools built to make it easy to setup a site thats perfect for your needs. To write it yourself, you would have to implement a lost of features and security just as a start, and that's not even mentioning the robust search engine optimization, templating engines and page caching.
I think the reason you don't see many Open Source Java CMS tools is due to fairly weak Java support with most Web hosting providers. Take a look at the available webhosts, and very few over support for Servlets/JSP. I would think, on average, the most common user of a CMS system would be someone wanting to setup a small to medium website that won't require too much customization outside of the standard package. Of course, the systems available are powerful (Drupal, Plone, Joomla, Nuke), but for the most part the people using them don't need the majority of the powerful customization tools. These are also the same people who would be using Web hosting packages, and not setting up their own servers. Therefore, you have to write it in a language that is almost universally supported by web hosting providers, like PHP.
Guaranteed Gears of War and Rainbow Six 3 have increased console sales since their respective releases. I actually think the PS3 limited quantities helped Microsoft. Many of the people I saw who went to try and buy a Wii/PS3, and couldn't get one, walked away with a Gears of War XBox 360 Bundle instead, because there were plenty.
I think what the author describes is really a problem with the entire MMORPG genre and not WoW specifically. The dilemma is, how do you create content that will push the genre in a new direction while pleasing 7 million casual to hardcore gamers and keep them paying a monthly fee? While adding interesting events is definitely a good idea, it really is not feasible. Take the AQ war effort for example, an interesting WoW event that required people to contribute to unlock a new area of the game. IMHO, this feature was a complete failure because it really only appealed to a small percentage of the community. The area being unlocked required months of preparation to even be able to tackle, so immediately any casual gamer that wasn't geared from head to toe had no shot at it. The end result? The casuals did almost no work and the hardcore teams did the lions share of the war effort, so they could unlock things for themselves... What's the moral of that story? Simply that adding dynamic and shifting content like that sounds good on paper, but adding a new multi-tiered dungeon that never changes or improving the PvP laddering system both have much wider reach and are a better use of the developers time. Adding time sinks that are repetitive and consume a players time are a better way to keep the monthly fees flowing. Thats the bottom line...