While these "smart grids" and "smart phones" and "smart appliances" are getting smarter, the idiot behind the wheel or at the keyboard is getting dumber and more pampered by the minute. Yes, I'd agree and can see this coming... its exactly what I thought when I saw that ad for the Lexus that can parallel park itself. HELLO! I don't want to be driving on the same roads as people who cannot parallel park for themselves. Drivers are bad enough as it is, already...
Probably to make up for the complete lack of snow or really even cold weather. It's rather hard to get into the christmas spirit when it's 80 degrees outside, so people try to compensate by putting up ridiculously extravagant decorations. I'd agree. I'm living in the Pacific NW but have had the good fortune to spend two Holiday seasons in recent years down in Maui, Hawai'i. The first time I went there, it felt like people had simply left their Christmas decorations up until June... it was almost disorientating to have it be in the mid 80's and see Christmas trees all done up, people in Santa costumes, palm tress covered in lights, and all the other typical Christmas stuff. Being someone from a cold and rainy climate, I had always associated Christmas with the cold weather and seeing it in a tropical setting just never seemed quite "right" to me.
What worthwhile exclusive titles have appeared on the XBox 360, or PS3, over the past year? Halo 3 for the Xbox 360 is the only one I can think of.
I'd agree with this. The Xbox 360 also had Gears of War for awhile, but thats out on the PC now. As far as the Wii is concerned, it has had one Metroid game, two Mario games and an exclusive packed-in Sports title that still remains incredibly popular.
Some of the 3rd party, non-exclusive games have been well done too: Godfather and Lego Star Wars The Complete Saga come to mind.
I use to be a hardcore gamer in my youth, but now that I'm an adult with a job and all that stuff I just don't have the time. I find the Wii fits into my life well and offers a good range of game types.
From a business point it would make no sense to short your sales. From a marketing point however it's been brilliant.
No, hype without the ability to deliver is a stupid marketing tactic (full disclosure: I'm a professionally employed marketing goon).
The whole point of marketing is to increase sales. The only reason companies desire hype is that it can help sell more units (which, if their manufacturing is on target, they'll have available in semi-reasonable quantities). However, Nintendo is already selling their maximum volume produced each and every month. 'Hype' in this case just leads to frustrated consumers and lost sales. Some of these people will return at a later date to purchase a unit, but there will be a percentage that will not. If I was Nintendo, I'd be worried about this.
I cannot believe that this shortage has been engineered by Nintendo on purpose. There is no company that would short themselves THIS many units and THIS much money, especially right before the end of the year. Keeping a product this hard to find for this long is stupid, not brilliant. This type of hype and product scarcity should be maintained only in the opening weeks. What I think is going on is that Nintendo is betting the cost of opening a new plant to manufacture more Wii's would not pay off in the long run as demand drops. We'll see if this holds true.
Looking back at how the Gamecube did, I doubt Nintendo expected to sell this many Wii's and didn't plan their manufacturing accordingly... no conspiracy here IMHO, just a failure at proper planning.
I really like the idea of sending people and cargo into space on rockets... I guess it just strikes some sort of nostalgic cord with me, reminding me of the optimism that went into the cold war space race, Kennedy's famous speech, and all of that.
My favorite rocket design was the Saturn V, designed by Von Braun. It had the highest payload capacity of any spacecraft, and it was the launch vehicle for many important Apollo missions. I hope they look back to the Saturn V for design clues while making this new vehicle.
Wow, Best Buy is now on my list right next to WalMart (you should know why) and McDonalds (crap-ass disgusting food) for places that I refuse to shop at. Maybe my little contribution won't hurt their bottom line, but I'd rather spend my money someplace that doesn't pull this kind of garbage.
This kind of stuff really hurts the reputation of Wikipedia. I use it every day for work and personal interests, but this type of internal corruption is why I'll never donate money to the Wikipedia foundation and why I don't think Wikipedia will grow much more than it already has.
As much as Google gets skewered for not living it's motto of "do no evil" and some of the questionable privacy practices of the company, I LOVE what their android/spectrum bid announcements have done to the cellphone industry. The existing giants seem to be falling over themselves to show how customer-friendly, competition friendly, ect. they are. It's really laughable.
Quake 1 - the whole soundtrack. NIN also one of if not the only PC game that was designed to be put in a CD player to listen to the soundtrack.
If I remember right, I think you could do the same with the Hexen soundtrack, but I could be remembering wrong.
As far as Quote goes, that was a good soundtrack. However, I'd pop in Skinny Puppy "Last Rites", which fit the game just as well it seemed. Think they did it in CD Audio format as to not have to license some sort of alternate digital music technology?
My personal favorite recently has been the HL2 music... I enjoy the short bursts of techno.
So this is a joint reply to the two comments about my laptop.
It's a 2 year old Compaq with a 1.5 ghz Pentium M processor and 512 megs of ram. Not much of a powerhouse but the primarily use was for school work when I was completing my undergraduate degrees.
I was trying to install Feisty Fawn on it, and it would create some weird errors and hang while installing it. It could have been a corrupt disk, but I tried two different burns of it, so who knows. I tend to think the hardware on the laptop was just not up to par. I got it to actually complete the installation once, but then I found I couldn't get booted into it properly.
It was so long ago (right after the release of FF) I don't remember the errors, unfortunately. I backed up my laptop and wiped Windows off before installing it. Couldn't get it working and decided I really need my laptop again, so I reinstalled windows a few days later.
My next machine is going to be a MacBook Pro with bootcamp, so I don't know if I'll be revisiting Ubuntu again or not.
I fail to understand why this is illegal. I know that there is the argument that "you wouldn't go into their house if it the door was open and steal something!". Well no, I wouldn't. However, this being a technology issue (and a fairly recent one at that) I think it needs to be held to a different standard.
If you fail to secure your network that tells me you don't care if people access it, and I think you should be allowed to share your access if you feel like it. I'm no computer genius... I couldn't get Ubuntu to run on my laptop (I can't believe I just admitted that on Slashdot, please don't stone me), but I was able to secure down my network just fine without any problems at all.
Now, if you do something illegal WHILE accessing someones network, then yes you should be held accountable. But just accessing an open network to browse the news or check emails should be a non-issue. Don't we have drunk drivers and murderers and such to deal with instead?
Well, you have to account for the "lowest common denominator" after all.
Myself, I could never get into "The Sims" I found it horribly boring. The last Will Wright game I really enjoyed was Sim City 2000... I played that for YEARS, and even had it on a PocketPC for awhile.
Well, besides the "prestige" factor I'm sure it's because they don't want parking garage "door dings" in their fancy cars. Hell I have a $21k car and I'm mortified of parking garage dings. I usually park on the street or the farthest end of the lot as possible. All that walking helps keep me in shape.;)
Then again, a parking garage for rich folks probably has slightly large stalls...
It can also DRIVE a company to screw itself over, as Sony has done. Sony, in attempt to compete, threw in everything but the kitchen sink, which caused them to price themselves out of the market. Indeed. I think the saying goes something like "jack of all trades, master of none".
Wow.... just wow. The Wii's success is a blessing?
Yes, it is. In a business environment, multiple strong competitors are always a good thing. It DRIVES the company to do better. Nintendo knew they sucked it up last generation, and came out with something that is simply a joy to play (full disclosure, I own a Wii). Without competition we'd get something like what Microsoft has in the operating system world... not pretty.
Sony, on the other hand, thought they had this whole generation wrapped up. I'm sure their business development meetings are REALLY fun these days, what with being beat by a "kiddie console".;)
Seat belts are just a good thing all around. I have no problem with them being mandatory. To be fair, I was in a roll-over car wreck where I believe that wearing a seat belt was the only thing that saved my life. It was a roll-over wreck on a freeway bridge, and the car rolled over about 2 to 3 times before being stopped on it's side by the guard rail. The back bench seat had popped out of the frame, and the guard rail left a 1 or 2 foot deep dent that ran the entire length of the passenger side of the roof. Basically, if anyone else was in the car they would have been really messed up/dead.
Lucky for me, the driver area sustained almost no damage and because I had my seatbelt on I remained locked down while the car turned end over end. I was able to unhook myself and climb out of the back of the car. I went to the hospital and besides some soreness and a bunch of tiny broken bits of glass that were embedded in my scalp, I was fine. The car, however, was not. It was a 1983 Toyota Carolla hatchback and by the look of it after the wreck, would never, ever drive again.
At any rate, I'll go without the OnStar tracking systems and the like, but seat belts and additional tail lights are all good in my book.
There is a fun little travel DVD called the "Vice guide to travel", put out by the folks who do Vice magazine. One of their little bits is that they go to Chernobyl and try to hunt radioactive boars with large guns. (another bit on the DVD was visiting the world's largest illegal arms market in Pakistan). It's worth renting... very fun little movie.
The whole reason I haven't switched to a dual-boot system with Linux is because it's so blasted hard to make work with the hardware I have. I tried Redhat a few years ago and gave up when I couldn't get it working with my modem. And just recently, I tried Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, which gave me plenty of headaches detecting the hardware on my laptop.
Maybe it's the fact that I'm busy enough as it is, and I don't feel like tinkering with it for days to get it running. I just want my OS to work right the first time. Maybe that means Linux isn't for me, but as a marketing/advertising person in my professional life, I know that's not good for business... you want to be inclusive to as many users as possible without alienating your "core" audience. I'd LOVE to have a safer alternative to Windows for browsing the net, because thats what I do 80% of the time with my computer.
As it stands now, Windows XP works "right out of the box" so to speak when I do my yearly format/reinstall.
Last time I was in Germany I went to a really cool modern art museum in Frankfurt am Main. They had this one room, where a single wall that was probably 20' x 20' was completely covered by normal, household-style bulb lights. They were set to turn on, then turn off, probably once or twice a second. So much power was flowing through there to turn them on that you could hear it. You could also feel the heat generated by them from across the room. It was quite the sight, and would probably have given someone with epilepsy quite a seizure.
Not quite the same as little blinky LED lights, I know.. but it's German and nerdy and fun.
"Hondas prior to 2000 or so have abysmal crash ratings (I don't know about Toyotas.) Use the money saved to switch over to energy efficient bulbs, install hot water solar collectors on your house, blow in insulation, buy new windows, etc."
I survived a roll-over freeway crash in a 1983 Toyota Carolla. I was hit from behind by a semi truck in the left tail light area, which flipped my car around 180 degrees, then caused me to roll three times across the upper deck of a freeway bridge. I came to rest with my roof pressed against the guard-rail. I had my seatbelt on on walked away with a small scratch on my head (from glass I think), and some soreness in my shoulder. The car was totaled, but I was safe, thats all I can say about Toyotas. After the crash I went ahead and bought a new 07 Toyota with all the airbags and stuff.
See, thats exactly why I don't know why they chose Cingular/The New ATT (bleh) over Sprint. I worked for Sprint for 6 months awhile back, and one of the things I was most impressed with was their internet bandwidth. Using their Windows Smart Phones with EVDO was quite nice. Verizon has slick marketing that talks about their new TV feature, and their GPS feature, but Sprint has had these things for far longer, and on a better network... their marketing and advertising just sucks so no one knows. And Cinglar? They might "have more bars" but data? No thanks. I don't need data so I use T-Mobile.
At any rate, I think Apple shot themselves in the foot by going with such a slow network. It's like buying a BMW M5 for the looks and putting a 160 HP Camery engine in it.
... from interactive public forums is they really DON'T want what it's going to deliver. The company managers see how popular this trendy "web 2.0" (ugh...) stuff is, where websites are dynamic and customers can interact with each other. They want their company site to work like MySpace in that people can be social and interact. They think it'll be good for business.
But then, when opinions are posted that don't jive with the official company marketing material, they want to pull it. You can't have it both ways! Either have a fully open, free area where people can have honest discussions without censorship or don't bother.
This is exactly why I have not set up user comments or "blogging" abilities on my company's website. I know the managers wouldn't like it if negative opinions on the company or our products were posted (not like there is any real reason for that to happen, but you never know).
Slashdot Mirror
I'd agree with this. The Xbox 360 also had Gears of War for awhile, but thats out on the PC now. As far as the Wii is concerned, it has had one Metroid game, two Mario games and an exclusive packed-in Sports title that still remains incredibly popular.
Some of the 3rd party, non-exclusive games have been well done too: Godfather and Lego Star Wars The Complete Saga come to mind.
I use to be a hardcore gamer in my youth, but now that I'm an adult with a job and all that stuff I just don't have the time. I find the Wii fits into my life well and offers a good range of game types.
No, hype without the ability to deliver is a stupid marketing tactic (full disclosure: I'm a professionally employed marketing goon).
The whole point of marketing is to increase sales. The only reason companies desire hype is that it can help sell more units (which, if their manufacturing is on target, they'll have available in semi-reasonable quantities). However, Nintendo is already selling their maximum volume produced each and every month. 'Hype' in this case just leads to frustrated consumers and lost sales. Some of these people will return at a later date to purchase a unit, but there will be a percentage that will not. If I was Nintendo, I'd be worried about this.
I cannot believe that this shortage has been engineered by Nintendo on purpose. There is no company that would short themselves THIS many units and THIS much money, especially right before the end of the year. Keeping a product this hard to find for this long is stupid, not brilliant. This type of hype and product scarcity should be maintained only in the opening weeks. What I think is going on is that Nintendo is betting the cost of opening a new plant to manufacture more Wii's would not pay off in the long run as demand drops. We'll see if this holds true.
Looking back at how the Gamecube did, I doubt Nintendo expected to sell this many Wii's and didn't plan their manufacturing accordingly... no conspiracy here IMHO, just a failure at proper planning.
I really like the idea of sending people and cargo into space on rockets... I guess it just strikes some sort of nostalgic cord with me, reminding me of the optimism that went into the cold war space race, Kennedy's famous speech, and all of that. My favorite rocket design was the Saturn V, designed by Von Braun. It had the highest payload capacity of any spacecraft, and it was the launch vehicle for many important Apollo missions. I hope they look back to the Saturn V for design clues while making this new vehicle.
Wow, Best Buy is now on my list right next to WalMart (you should know why) and McDonalds (crap-ass disgusting food) for places that I refuse to shop at. Maybe my little contribution won't hurt their bottom line, but I'd rather spend my money someplace that doesn't pull this kind of garbage.
This kind of stuff really hurts the reputation of Wikipedia. I use it every day for work and personal interests, but this type of internal corruption is why I'll never donate money to the Wikipedia foundation and why I don't think Wikipedia will grow much more than it already has.
As much as Google gets skewered for not living it's motto of "do no evil" and some of the questionable privacy practices of the company, I LOVE what their android/spectrum bid announcements have done to the cellphone industry. The existing giants seem to be falling over themselves to show how customer-friendly, competition friendly, ect. they are. It's really laughable.
If I remember right, I think you could do the same with the Hexen soundtrack, but I could be remembering wrong.
As far as Quote goes, that was a good soundtrack. However, I'd pop in Skinny Puppy "Last Rites", which fit the game just as well it seemed. Think they did it in CD Audio format as to not have to license some sort of alternate digital music technology?
My personal favorite recently has been the HL2 music... I enjoy the short bursts of techno.
So this is a joint reply to the two comments about my laptop.
It's a 2 year old Compaq with a 1.5 ghz Pentium M processor and 512 megs of ram. Not much of a powerhouse but the primarily use was for school work when I was completing my undergraduate degrees.
I was trying to install Feisty Fawn on it, and it would create some weird errors and hang while installing it. It could have been a corrupt disk, but I tried two different burns of it, so who knows. I tend to think the hardware on the laptop was just not up to par. I got it to actually complete the installation once, but then I found I couldn't get booted into it properly.
It was so long ago (right after the release of FF) I don't remember the errors, unfortunately. I backed up my laptop and wiped Windows off before installing it. Couldn't get it working and decided I really need my laptop again, so I reinstalled windows a few days later.
My next machine is going to be a MacBook Pro with bootcamp, so I don't know if I'll be revisiting Ubuntu again or not.
I fail to understand why this is illegal. I know that there is the argument that "you wouldn't go into their house if it the door was open and steal something!". Well no, I wouldn't. However, this being a technology issue (and a fairly recent one at that) I think it needs to be held to a different standard.
If you fail to secure your network that tells me you don't care if people access it, and I think you should be allowed to share your access if you feel like it. I'm no computer genius... I couldn't get Ubuntu to run on my laptop (I can't believe I just admitted that on Slashdot, please don't stone me), but I was able to secure down my network just fine without any problems at all.
Now, if you do something illegal WHILE accessing someones network, then yes you should be held accountable. But just accessing an open network to browse the news or check emails should be a non-issue. Don't we have drunk drivers and murderers and such to deal with instead?
Well, you have to account for the "lowest common denominator" after all.
Myself, I could never get into "The Sims" I found it horribly boring. The last Will Wright game I really enjoyed was Sim City 2000... I played that for YEARS, and even had it on a PocketPC for awhile.
Reticulating Splines? Yes please!
Well, besides the "prestige" factor I'm sure it's because they don't want parking garage "door dings" in their fancy cars. Hell I have a $21k car and I'm mortified of parking garage dings. I usually park on the street or the farthest end of the lot as possible. All that walking helps keep me in shape. ;)
Then again, a parking garage for rich folks probably has slightly large stalls...
Yes, it is. In a business environment, multiple strong competitors are always a good thing. It DRIVES the company to do better. Nintendo knew they sucked it up last generation, and came out with something that is simply a joy to play (full disclosure, I own a Wii). Without competition we'd get something like what Microsoft has in the operating system world... not pretty.
Sony, on the other hand, thought they had this whole generation wrapped up. I'm sure their business development meetings are REALLY fun these days, what with being beat by a "kiddie console". ;)
42!
Seat belts are just a good thing all around. I have no problem with them being mandatory. To be fair, I was in a roll-over car wreck where I believe that wearing a seat belt was the only thing that saved my life. It was a roll-over wreck on a freeway bridge, and the car rolled over about 2 to 3 times before being stopped on it's side by the guard rail. The back bench seat had popped out of the frame, and the guard rail left a 1 or 2 foot deep dent that ran the entire length of the passenger side of the roof. Basically, if anyone else was in the car they would have been really messed up/dead.
Lucky for me, the driver area sustained almost no damage and because I had my seatbelt on I remained locked down while the car turned end over end. I was able to unhook myself and climb out of the back of the car. I went to the hospital and besides some soreness and a bunch of tiny broken bits of glass that were embedded in my scalp, I was fine. The car, however, was not. It was a 1983 Toyota Carolla hatchback and by the look of it after the wreck, would never, ever drive again.
At any rate, I'll go without the OnStar tracking systems and the like, but seat belts and additional tail lights are all good in my book.
There is a fun little travel DVD called the "Vice guide to travel", put out by the folks who do Vice magazine. One of their little bits is that they go to Chernobyl and try to hunt radioactive boars with large guns. (another bit on the DVD was visiting the world's largest illegal arms market in Pakistan). It's worth renting... very fun little movie.
The whole reason I haven't switched to a dual-boot system with Linux is because it's so blasted hard to make work with the hardware I have. I tried Redhat a few years ago and gave up when I couldn't get it working with my modem. And just recently, I tried Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, which gave me plenty of headaches detecting the hardware on my laptop.
Maybe it's the fact that I'm busy enough as it is, and I don't feel like tinkering with it for days to get it running. I just want my OS to work right the first time. Maybe that means Linux isn't for me, but as a marketing/advertising person in my professional life, I know that's not good for business... you want to be inclusive to as many users as possible without alienating your "core" audience. I'd LOVE to have a safer alternative to Windows for browsing the net, because thats what I do 80% of the time with my computer.
As it stands now, Windows XP works "right out of the box" so to speak when I do my yearly format/reinstall.
Last time I was in Germany I went to a really cool modern art museum in Frankfurt am Main. They had this one room, where a single wall that was probably 20' x 20' was completely covered by normal, household-style bulb lights. They were set to turn on, then turn off, probably once or twice a second. So much power was flowing through there to turn them on that you could hear it. You could also feel the heat generated by them from across the room. It was quite the sight, and would probably have given someone with epilepsy quite a seizure. Not quite the same as little blinky LED lights, I know.. but it's German and nerdy and fun.
"Hondas prior to 2000 or so have abysmal crash ratings (I don't know about Toyotas.) Use the money saved to switch over to energy efficient bulbs, install hot water solar collectors on your house, blow in insulation, buy new windows, etc."
I survived a roll-over freeway crash in a 1983 Toyota Carolla. I was hit from behind by a semi truck in the left tail light area, which flipped my car around 180 degrees, then caused me to roll three times across the upper deck of a freeway bridge. I came to rest with my roof pressed against the guard-rail. I had my seatbelt on on walked away with a small scratch on my head (from glass I think), and some soreness in my shoulder. The car was totaled, but I was safe, thats all I can say about Toyotas. After the crash I went ahead and bought a new 07 Toyota with all the airbags and stuff.
See, thats exactly why I don't know why they chose Cingular/The New ATT (bleh) over Sprint. I worked for Sprint for 6 months awhile back, and one of the things I was most impressed with was their internet bandwidth. Using their Windows Smart Phones with EVDO was quite nice. Verizon has slick marketing that talks about their new TV feature, and their GPS feature, but Sprint has had these things for far longer, and on a better network... their marketing and advertising just sucks so no one knows. And Cinglar? They might "have more bars" but data? No thanks. I don't need data so I use T-Mobile.
At any rate, I think Apple shot themselves in the foot by going with such a slow network. It's like buying a BMW M5 for the looks and putting a 160 HP Camery engine in it.
... from interactive public forums is they really DON'T want what it's going to deliver. The company managers see how popular this trendy "web 2.0" (ugh...) stuff is, where websites are dynamic and customers can interact with each other. They want their company site to work like MySpace in that people can be social and interact. They think it'll be good for business.
But then, when opinions are posted that don't jive with the official company marketing material, they want to pull it. You can't have it both ways! Either have a fully open, free area where people can have honest discussions without censorship or don't bother.
This is exactly why I have not set up user comments or "blogging" abilities on my company's website. I know the managers wouldn't like it if negative opinions on the company or our products were posted (not like there is any real reason for that to happen, but you never know).
Yeah, expect sales of Zero Halliburton (ironic name, no?) briefcases to skyrocket.
... meet gun. Gun, meet foot. Don't shoot yourself now.