C'mon now that's easy enough. You don't recharge, you exchange. For a fee you exchange your spent fuel cell for a fully charged cell from a station. These stations, instead of importing fuel and selling it at a premium like gas stations, generate free fuel and sell it to you in the form of a charged fuel cell. They would have to cover a fairly large area to generate that energy, but we are talking about long trips here not so much intra-city driving so these places would probably be out in the middle of nowhere (if there is such a thing in our overcrowded future). Now that I think about it, it's kind of nice to imagine a future where I don't have gas stations littering my city.
What flamebait! Willem Dafoe is clearly having the time of his life. It's a campy role and he's just having fun with it. After tackling such high calibre fare throughout your career, you'd beg for such a ridiculous scene. Hell it only works because it's Willem Dafoe! Besides, if he was okay playing that hideous drag-queen detective in Boondock Saints then how can you ever feel sorry for the man. That shit with him in the dress at the end was excruciating to watch.
I'm far too lazy to read the article, fanboys have all but ruined Halo for me, but does it mention anything about what happens on the edges of the Halo world? Would be really cool if they had a level in Halo near the edge. It's funny how they just kinda ignore that the game takes place on a world that actually has the pre-Columbus world-with-edges setup going on. What happens to the atmosphere (atmocylinder?) at the edge? If you're flying in an aircraft can you fly over the edge given enough momentum? How are the seas held back, etc?
I've not gone to a lot of concerts in my life, but one of my favorite bands, Meat Beat Manifesto, came to a local venue last year so I went to see this band I've been listening to for years. If you're not familiar with it, it's triphop/jungle/drum 'n' bass/whatever genre cliche you want to call it, electronica basically, but a very underrated band I've always thought. Jack Dangers, the frontman, is apparently a hoarder of old/obscure media and samples a lot of bizarre stuff like old television and movies and old live performances from all kinds of random places. Anyway in his show he had a guy playing electric drums and he and 2 other guys with like 4+ Apple laptops performing the music but the cool thing was the video accompaniment. Basically every strange little noise in these songs I had been listening to for years had come from some video recording and when they came up in the song the clip of video, sometimes only a fraction of a second, would play on the screen. It could have all be pre-sequenced, but I'm pretty sure they were actually playing these video clips like instruments. I remember thinking they had to have some decent specs on those laptops to be shifting around all that high quality video like that. One song has a high-pitched squeak that I figured was some kind of synthesizer but it turned out it was like a 1/4 second clip of Mariah Carey doing her outrageous soprano thing. I would have never guessed it was a human voice in the song. It was a pretty great show, even my friends who never heard the band enjoyed themselves. This could be pretty tame fair, but like I said I don't go to many shows.
Games: cost $50 (or $60 for next gen) Movies: cost $10 Are you going by ticket prices? If so even that is a little high for alot of places. I can see first-runs here for $6.50. But you are forgetting DVDs which typically cost $20 and many times make up much more than the theatrical run if a movie later turns cult. And then there are movie rentals, which I'm sure generate more revenue than game rentals, both through regular stores and online. Not to mention there are a number of gamers who buy their games used and don't pay that $50-60, and the money they do pay doesn't go to the publisher it goes to Gamestop etc. There is also all that money people spend on game peripherals, whereas movies typically require just one player every 4-5 years. Home theatre equipment specifically is something used both for games and movies, although it's arguably games that are driving adoption of things like HD moreso than movies which don't even have a standard format settled upon. Games typically also have a healthier downloadable offering, whereas Hollywood is still trying to find their ass on that one. As someone else mentioned there is that whole mobile phone market that the industry has been burning our ears about for years now as the next big thing. They are both pretty complicated industries, but I think games are more significant than people think. Movies just have tenure and respect as an art form. I think it will just have to be time that decides when we're ready to admit that everyone plays games, time that kills off those old timers whose narrow vision just sees kid's toys making all those goddamned flashes and beeps.
Yeah but an unfinished movie is usually just lacking some tweaking to pacing, maybe you clarify something about the plot or maybe you drop a scene here or there. It's largely the same product when it's given a wide release. An unfinished game can have its core gameplay or engine radically changed and wind up something completely different. Apples and oranges.
A large part of DDR is the music, moreso than in most games. Hell they could probably get sponsorship from Sony to jump at the chance to incessantly indoctrinate students with their latest shill artists. If the school board is smart, they'll treat DDR as an engine and do regular updates for content. If they make sure the music is the latest annoying pop-shit and maintain the characters' cartoonishly gay images consistently, it may well remain relevant. Then again public schools have a way of sucking all the novelty and fun out of anything they touch...
Microsoft says the drop in sales came primarily because of decreases in the sale of Xbox 360s...
I thought MS (and Sony) always take a loss when they sell a console. If that's true, then less 360s sold this year would mean less loss wouldn't it? Do they actually turn a profit on the systems, and if so, were they always turning a profit (however minute), even last year?
The Internet is a communication tool used the world over where people can come together to bitch about movies and share pornography with one another. - Ben Affleck - Dogma (1999)
The whirlpools theory was actually linked to in the comments for the original article on slashdot about a month ago. I guess one way to get new stories is to harvest from the comments on old stories.
But Iran only works as a threat and nothing more. What would happen if they did attack us - say with a nuke or a dirty bomb or whatever? After the initial fallout, we'd go in there (with the hearts and minds of the American people for a change) and wipe them the fuck out. The exit strategy would be shitty as always, but we'd definitely fuck up their infrastructure at the very least. Hell the current (and probably most future) administrations are so in bed with the idea of a military-industrial complex that they're always looking for a solid but inferiorly equipped enemy at which to throw bombs. Iran knows that. They don't want that. All Ahmadinejad wants to do is stir up the shit. It's a rallying call for a war that will never really happen, just politics really. As for a bigger threat, uh China? That huge country that hasn't been a problem up until now only because they've stayed isolationist all this time. Or how about Russia, that other large country that now has a (arguably) mounting dictator running it. The situation with their free press should really be more of a concern in our own (also broken) media. These are the real causes for concern. The middle east countries happen to lie on the good sources of oil and that is where their relevance begins and ends. We would just leave them to stew in their third world ideologies if we didn't have things for which we could exploit them. There is also the tacit religious connection we have with Israel which I can't even understand and only hope can be broken when sheeple stop needing these silly religions to get by day to day (c'mon enlightenment 2.0). And there are plenty of reasons to believe oil won't always be our main source of energy (if we wise up, or if the stuff just plain runs out). Not unlike the war on drugs before it, this whole thing with the middle-east, us vs. them ideological faux-war is going to seem really childish and quaint when the big boys wake up and start kicking off real wars for the remaining resources in the world. They are the ones looking to move into the first world while the middle eastern countries are content to outlaw mathematics and impose ridiculous restrictions on the lives of their women. Fuck Iran and North Korea, if they didn't have us focusing attention on them in the first place they might even eventually have internal revolts to replace their backwards governments. We shouldn't even acknowledge them, we'll very soon have much bigger things to worry about. I'm a naive twerp and I'm probably way of base on alot of this stuff, but I still don't think Iran is more than evil strawman material. If anything we should in principle impeach the Dick Cheneys in gov for wasting time/energy on such ultimately trivial things, but fuck all good it's going to do anyway.
When I first saw the headline I read "Saudi" and thought, well there goes all western dominance in the world for the next few centuries. Oh, and the now obligatory 20 years away! Egad!
Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness, Earthquakes, volcanoes! The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria!
flaming - the act of sending or posting messages that are deliberately hostile and insulting, usually in the social context of a discussion board on the Internet
Term officially jumped the shark Friday April 20, @02:43PM.
N certainly earned its share of negative karma. You're dead on about the SNES CD with Sony, but they also broke the cardinal rule of Japanese business and partnered with Phillips (a non-Japanese company) as a 2nd try to not be caught with their pants down on the transition to CD games.
This is more of a cultural thing. I couldn't care less about Japanese ethnocentricity. Doesn't affect my games negatively at the end of the day.
Also in the day, Nintendo didn't let 3rd party companies release too many games per year to avoid them from overshadowing 1st party title release volume so you find things like Konami releasing games until the Ultra label and other oddities.
From what I understand, Nintendo did this to prevent people from publishing garbage. The kind of stuff that poisoned the Atari library and crashed the industry which Nintendo was actually rebuilding. This is both a good business decision and good for the consumer if you ask me. I appreciate the filter for the most part. Too bad EA doesn't have someone telling them they can't just shovel redundant tripe onto the marketplace every year.
Then you have stock-fixing at stores where they'd be denied the newest most-in-demand SNES games unless they also stocked a bunch of tepid Game Boy items that simply weren't selling.
That's more of what I was asking about. That's pretty abusive.
It's easy to jump to that conclusion but is there really any precedent from Nintendo specifically for something like that? IIRC, the only sort of consumer-physological maneuvering from Nintendo in the past would be the vaporware SNES-CDrom addon that was announced supposedly just to screw with Sega. I've heard that actually became Sony's PS1 and the big N didn't release it b/c Sony wanted more action than they were prepared to give them. I could be getting this wrong. Other than that the only evil corporation type nonsense from Nintendo with which I've had a problem would be their attitude towards emulation (outright calling it illegal), a relatively benign thing in itself. Sony with its rumored strong-arming of vendors concerning their support for the Dreamcast around the launch of the PS2, amoung other things more recently, and MS's countless trespasses over the years are another story.
I'm not a Nintendo fanboy (Wii is my first system from them in like a decade), but they seem relatively honest to me, even to the point of hurting themselves competition-wise. I can remember the president of Nintendo actually kind of whining at one point about people's lack of interest in the gamecube in favor of the more "realistic" games of the xbox/ps2. That was an honest statement embarrassingly devoid of spin. At the end of the day, I would think they would simply want to sell as many systems as they can. Don't believe the Gamestop FUD. Besides, if I hadn't just happened upon a Wii a few weeks ago on a random visit to Blockbuster of all places, I might never have gotten one. My interest was, as I think many people's has been, waning rather than building, what with the difficulty of procuring one of the damn things. I just don't think the shortage is really helping sales, especially if it is going to last for months more into the future. I don't think it's intentional.
The problem with a light sabre game is that it would be the first 2-person-1player game. Let me explain. A light sabre can cut through anything from the limbs of a punk young Vader to a big ass re-enforced steel door on a trade federation ship. But even the strongest of jedi will experience a bit of resistance to that which he finds himself mercilessly sabring. The sabre itself is easy enough to recreate with a mock-up peripheral that could attach to the Wiimote, but the effect of resistance can only be faithfully approximated with the help of a human bystander voluntarily taking the whipping of a wannabe-jedi's feverish dispatching of his virtual foes, and who wants to be that guy?
China first government to recognize what a complete waste of time MMORPGs are.
I play games like mad but I find any game you can't get out of in at most 5 mins is more of a chore than anything. Apparently the Chinese government also favors quick action games you can jump in and out of. WoW is the type of game where a 3-hour time limit is actually a considerable roadblock. I've watched my friend play it obsessively. Don't you have to kill ostriches for at least 2 hours before anything happens? That only leaves 1 hour for "productive" play. Too bad.
He said he'd use his Xbox Media Center less and less, which is to say his modded Xbox Classic running XBMC. You know XBMC, the free-open source software that still outdoes the 360's media playing capabilities by a gap which MS is only now seeing fit to close (no I don't have HD, I'm poor). I still want the ability to IMDB some meta-data for my movie collection before I jump ship to the 360. Mmmmmmh meta-data, glrlrlrllrrl...
Slashdot Mirror
Only traditional spelling is dying. New spellings are born every day!
C'mon now that's easy enough. You don't recharge, you exchange. For a fee you exchange your spent fuel cell for a fully charged cell from a station. These stations, instead of importing fuel and selling it at a premium like gas stations, generate free fuel and sell it to you in the form of a charged fuel cell. They would have to cover a fairly large area to generate that energy, but we are talking about long trips here not so much intra-city driving so these places would probably be out in the middle of nowhere (if there is such a thing in our overcrowded future). Now that I think about it, it's kind of nice to imagine a future where I don't have gas stations littering my city.
What flamebait! Willem Dafoe is clearly having the time of his life. It's a campy role and he's just having fun with it. After tackling such high calibre fare throughout your career, you'd beg for such a ridiculous scene. Hell it only works because it's Willem Dafoe! Besides, if he was okay playing that hideous drag-queen detective in Boondock Saints then how can you ever feel sorry for the man. That shit with him in the dress at the end was excruciating to watch.
I'm far too lazy to read the article, fanboys have all but ruined Halo for me, but does it mention anything about what happens on the edges of the Halo world? Would be really cool if they had a level in Halo near the edge. It's funny how they just kinda ignore that the game takes place on a world that actually has the pre-Columbus world-with-edges setup going on. What happens to the atmosphere (atmocylinder?) at the edge? If you're flying in an aircraft can you fly over the edge given enough momentum? How are the seas held back, etc?
I've not gone to a lot of concerts in my life, but one of my favorite bands, Meat Beat Manifesto, came to a local venue last year so I went to see this band I've been listening to for years. If you're not familiar with it, it's triphop/jungle/drum 'n' bass/whatever genre cliche you want to call it, electronica basically, but a very underrated band I've always thought. Jack Dangers, the frontman, is apparently a hoarder of old/obscure media and samples a lot of bizarre stuff like old television and movies and old live performances from all kinds of random places. Anyway in his show he had a guy playing electric drums and he and 2 other guys with like 4+ Apple laptops performing the music but the cool thing was the video accompaniment. Basically every strange little noise in these songs I had been listening to for years had come from some video recording and when they came up in the song the clip of video, sometimes only a fraction of a second, would play on the screen. It could have all be pre-sequenced, but I'm pretty sure they were actually playing these video clips like instruments. I remember thinking they had to have some decent specs on those laptops to be shifting around all that high quality video like that. One song has a high-pitched squeak that I figured was some kind of synthesizer but it turned out it was like a 1/4 second clip of Mariah Carey doing her outrageous soprano thing. I would have never guessed it was a human voice in the song. It was a pretty great show, even my friends who never heard the band enjoyed themselves. This could be pretty tame fair, but like I said I don't go to many shows.
When you say "three year old," do you mean a human child or are you raising a bouncing baby cenobite? Hey, I'm not judging anyone here.
Are you going by ticket prices? If so even that is a little high for alot of places. I can see first-runs here for $6.50. But you are forgetting DVDs which typically cost $20 and many times make up much more than the theatrical run if a movie later turns cult. And then there are movie rentals, which I'm sure generate more revenue than game rentals, both through regular stores and online. Not to mention there are a number of gamers who buy their games used and don't pay that $50-60, and the money they do pay doesn't go to the publisher it goes to Gamestop etc. There is also all that money people spend on game peripherals, whereas movies typically require just one player every 4-5 years. Home theatre equipment specifically is something used both for games and movies, although it's arguably games that are driving adoption of things like HD moreso than movies which don't even have a standard format settled upon. Games typically also have a healthier downloadable offering, whereas Hollywood is still trying to find their ass on that one. As someone else mentioned there is that whole mobile phone market that the industry has been burning our ears about for years now as the next big thing. They are both pretty complicated industries, but I think games are more significant than people think. Movies just have tenure and respect as an art form. I think it will just have to be time that decides when we're ready to admit that everyone plays games, time that kills off those old timers whose narrow vision just sees kid's toys making all those goddamned flashes and beeps.
Yeah but an unfinished movie is usually just lacking some tweaking to pacing, maybe you clarify something about the plot or maybe you drop a scene here or there. It's largely the same product when it's given a wide release. An unfinished game can have its core gameplay or engine radically changed and wind up something completely different. Apples and oranges.
A large part of DDR is the music, moreso than in most games. Hell they could probably get sponsorship from Sony to jump at the chance to incessantly indoctrinate students with their latest shill artists. If the school board is smart, they'll treat DDR as an engine and do regular updates for content. If they make sure the music is the latest annoying pop-shit and maintain the characters' cartoonishly gay images consistently, it may well remain relevant. Then again public schools have a way of sucking all the novelty and fun out of anything they touch...
I thought MS (and Sony) always take a loss when they sell a console. If that's true, then less 360s sold this year would mean less loss wouldn't it? Do they actually turn a profit on the systems, and if so, were they always turning a profit (however minute), even last year?
The whirlpools theory was actually linked to in the comments for the original article on slashdot about a month ago. I guess one way to get new stories is to harvest from the comments on old stories.
But Iran only works as a threat and nothing more. What would happen if they did attack us - say with a nuke or a dirty bomb or whatever? After the initial fallout, we'd go in there (with the hearts and minds of the American people for a change) and wipe them the fuck out. The exit strategy would be shitty as always, but we'd definitely fuck up their infrastructure at the very least. Hell the current (and probably most future) administrations are so in bed with the idea of a military-industrial complex that they're always looking for a solid but inferiorly equipped enemy at which to throw bombs. Iran knows that. They don't want that. All Ahmadinejad wants to do is stir up the shit. It's a rallying call for a war that will never really happen, just politics really. As for a bigger threat, uh China? That huge country that hasn't been a problem up until now only because they've stayed isolationist all this time. Or how about Russia, that other large country that now has a (arguably) mounting dictator running it. The situation with their free press should really be more of a concern in our own (also broken) media. These are the real causes for concern. The middle east countries happen to lie on the good sources of oil and that is where their relevance begins and ends. We would just leave them to stew in their third world ideologies if we didn't have things for which we could exploit them. There is also the tacit religious connection we have with Israel which I can't even understand and only hope can be broken when sheeple stop needing these silly religions to get by day to day (c'mon enlightenment 2.0). And there are plenty of reasons to believe oil won't always be our main source of energy (if we wise up, or if the stuff just plain runs out). Not unlike the war on drugs before it, this whole thing with the middle-east, us vs. them ideological faux-war is going to seem really childish and quaint when the big boys wake up and start kicking off real wars for the remaining resources in the world. They are the ones looking to move into the first world while the middle eastern countries are content to outlaw mathematics and impose ridiculous restrictions on the lives of their women. Fuck Iran and North Korea, if they didn't have us focusing attention on them in the first place they might even eventually have internal revolts to replace their backwards governments. We shouldn't even acknowledge them, we'll very soon have much bigger things to worry about. I'm a naive twerp and I'm probably way of base on alot of this stuff, but I still don't think Iran is more than evil strawman material. If anything we should in principle impeach the Dick Cheneys in gov for wasting time/energy on such ultimately trivial things, but fuck all good it's going to do anyway.
When I first saw the headline I read "Saudi" and thought, well there goes all western dominance in the world for the next few centuries. Oh, and the now obligatory 20 years away! Egad!
Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness, Earthquakes, volcanoes! The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria!
flaming - the act of sending or posting messages that are deliberately hostile and insulting, usually in the social context of a discussion board on the Internet
Term officially jumped the shark Friday April 20, @02:43PM.
Another menacing blow to the psyche of cutoff-loving never-nudes everywhere. Time to buy plastic underwear.
The Nintendo dev kit is ~$2000 which is like an order of magnitude cheaper than the competition AFAIK. And to the parent, I paid $270 for my Wii...
This is more of a cultural thing. I couldn't care less about Japanese ethnocentricity. Doesn't affect my games negatively at the end of the day. Also in the day, Nintendo didn't let 3rd party companies release too many games per year to avoid them from overshadowing 1st party title release volume so you find things like Konami releasing games until the Ultra label and other oddities.
From what I understand, Nintendo did this to prevent people from publishing garbage. The kind of stuff that poisoned the Atari library and crashed the industry which Nintendo was actually rebuilding. This is both a good business decision and good for the consumer if you ask me. I appreciate the filter for the most part. Too bad EA doesn't have someone telling them they can't just shovel redundant tripe onto the marketplace every year. Then you have stock-fixing at stores where they'd be denied the newest most-in-demand SNES games unless they also stocked a bunch of tepid Game Boy items that simply weren't selling.
That's more of what I was asking about. That's pretty abusive.
It's easy to jump to that conclusion but is there really any precedent from Nintendo specifically for something like that? IIRC, the only sort of consumer-physological maneuvering from Nintendo in the past would be the vaporware SNES-CDrom addon that was announced supposedly just to screw with Sega. I've heard that actually became Sony's PS1 and the big N didn't release it b/c Sony wanted more action than they were prepared to give them. I could be getting this wrong. Other than that the only evil corporation type nonsense from Nintendo with which I've had a problem would be their attitude towards emulation (outright calling it illegal), a relatively benign thing in itself. Sony with its rumored strong-arming of vendors concerning their support for the Dreamcast around the launch of the PS2, amoung other things more recently, and MS's countless trespasses over the years are another story.
I'm not a Nintendo fanboy (Wii is my first system from them in like a decade), but they seem relatively honest to me, even to the point of hurting themselves competition-wise. I can remember the president of Nintendo actually kind of whining at one point about people's lack of interest in the gamecube in favor of the more "realistic" games of the xbox/ps2. That was an honest statement embarrassingly devoid of spin. At the end of the day, I would think they would simply want to sell as many systems as they can. Don't believe the Gamestop FUD. Besides, if I hadn't just happened upon a Wii a few weeks ago on a random visit to Blockbuster of all places, I might never have gotten one. My interest was, as I think many people's has been, waning rather than building, what with the difficulty of procuring one of the damn things. I just don't think the shortage is really helping sales, especially if it is going to last for months more into the future. I don't think it's intentional.
The problem with a light sabre game is that it would be the first 2-person-1player game. Let me explain. A light sabre can cut through anything from the limbs of a punk young Vader to a big ass re-enforced steel door on a trade federation ship. But even the strongest of jedi will experience a bit of resistance to that which he finds himself mercilessly sabring. The sabre itself is easy enough to recreate with a mock-up peripheral that could attach to the Wiimote, but the effect of resistance can only be faithfully approximated with the help of a human bystander voluntarily taking the whipping of a wannabe-jedi's feverish dispatching of his virtual foes, and who wants to be that guy?
China first government to recognize what a complete waste of time MMORPGs are.
I play games like mad but I find any game you can't get out of in at most 5 mins is more of a chore than anything. Apparently the Chinese government also favors quick action games you can jump in and out of. WoW is the type of game where a 3-hour time limit is actually a considerable roadblock. I've watched my friend play it obsessively. Don't you have to kill ostriches for at least 2 hours before anything happens? That only leaves 1 hour for "productive" play. Too bad.
He said he'd use his Xbox Media Center less and less, which is to say his modded Xbox Classic running XBMC. You know XBMC, the free-open source software that still outdoes the 360's media playing capabilities by a gap which MS is only now seeing fit to close (no I don't have HD, I'm poor). I still want the ability to IMDB some meta-data for my movie collection before I jump ship to the 360. Mmmmmmh meta-data, glrlrlrllrrl...
Fuck you microsoft. I'll buy your fucking system now. You (and dumbass Sony) leave me no choice. Shit!
William Gibson wrote Johnny Mneumonic?! Is the book better than the movie?